Left my ass cooked and crooked. Easy to let complaints of the rigidity of RPGmaker ATB combat and exploration fall to the wayside when the game's narrative doesn't miss a beat. OFF has a lot of unique ideas, and it tells them confidently with fantastic dialogue, surreal environments and an all around sense of style. For a game that paddles in the abstract so obscenely, the conclusion still manages to expertly close the book and leave the player with exactly what they need. Thanks for the stone in the gut.

If you want to know what this game is like, go to the Beat Saber page and choose a random review to read. (https://www.backloggd.com/reviews/everyone/eternity/recent/beat-saber/)

Did you get a good one? Maybe you did, but you may have gotten one that’s not even a complete sentence, or maybe it was just a complaint that makes no sense to you. This is the experience of wading through user-generated content in a nutshell, whether that be something like Backloggd, Reddit, or Beat Saber itself, a rhythm game that coyly skirts around the problems associated with music distribution by having players create their own charts and share them unofficially. This is where the majority of the game’s content comes from, and why a link to other people’s stuff really is the best way to summarize the experience. It’s a loop of going to where the loosely sorted pile of user-created material is, hopefully digging out something good, trying it, and deleting it afterwards if it didn’t meet expectations. On top of that, you have to hope that the artists you like are among the few with good charts, that the genres you’re into are well-represented, and that the difficulty of the highly rated ones isn’t too extreme. If not, the entire appeal has been crippled, especially when the score-attack aspect that’s core to rhythm games is implemented with a bizarre system that rewards how widely you swing arms instead of actual rhythm.

So, with all that in mind, it’s almost impossible for me to give Beat Saber a rating. Its quality rests upon its effectiveness as a platform for content that is not its own, and even the sharing functionality itself is coordinated by fans. The best I can say is that it’s a great skeleton for a game, and the few amazing charts I found proved how fun the concept can be, but that means “it’s potentially fun” is the highest evaluation it could earn, and that’s not a metric that’s hard to beat.