Let’s make a graph. The horizontal axis is player skill. On the far left is no skill - just random button-pushing. On the far right is perfect video game godhood, always doing exactly the correct thing at the correct time in the correct way. The first time you play a game, you’ll probably be somewhere in the middle - farther right if you’re a veteran gamer, farther left if you’re a novice. As you play the game, and learn its mechanics, you’ll trend right as you get better.

The vertical axis is performance level. At the very bottom is complete failure - game over as quickly as possible, not achieving any of the game’s goals. Farther up is the passing line, separating failure below from success above. The line itself is a performance level of just barely passing a challenge - surviving the boss fight with one hit point left, clearing the race course just before the clock runs out, and so on. And at the very top of the axis is absolute perfect performance - winning by the largest margin possible.

Now we can chart the performance levels achievable with a particular amount of player skill: the “skill curve” for a given challenge.

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Mirror’s Edge is a Bad Good Game. The foundation is solid: players take the role of Faith, a genuinely badass woman with a non-exploitative, unconventionally beautiful design whose motivations revolve around survival and protecting her sister. Faith parkours her way around an unnamed city of bright colors and austere beauty, and is trained in a variety of disarm techniques should she encounter armed attackers she can’t simply outrun. Sounds good, right?

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Reviewing games is harder than it looks. Particularly when the reviewer is tasked with summing up a twenty, forty, or even eighty hour experience into a single number.

The problem is that games are multidimensional. Rarely is a game simply good or bad - most are more complicated than that. An RPG might have a weak plot, but excellent characterization. A platformer might have ugly graphics, but compelling gameplay.

Every so often you’ll encounter a game that stubbornly straddles the line and defies binary judgment. It has solid reasons to be considered both good and bad. Reviews of such games tend not to score them very well, but of course that only tells part of the story. Depending on which side of the fence they fall on, they may be a Bad Good Game or a Good Bad Game.

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