A high Steam rating makes an appealing shortcut for finding overlooked games, but this selection quickly demonstrates how many different things that percentage can represent. The eight games range from surviving multiplayer communities and nostalgic holdouts to a polished free experiment, an unusual social space, and titles whose positive reviews seem difficult to reconcile with what is actually shown. That variety gives the video a stronger purpose than simply hunting for obscure curiosities: it repeatedly tests whether impressive user scores remain meaningful when the audience behind them is tiny, aging, or otherwise unusual.
War of Rights provides the messiest opening case. The large server creates an overwhelming mixture of charges, gunfire, historical flavor, helpful players, disruptive behavior, and repeated offensive comments that the video says were substantially edited down. Importantly, the episode does not reduce the entire game to that experience. It distinguishes the chaotic public server from private games and smaller communities where such conduct is reportedly less tolerated, while still making clear how badly the public environment can shape a newcomer’s impression. The historical narration after matches and moments of organized cooperation also show why the underlying game remains appealing despite the community problems encountered here.
Grimhook and Meadow then demonstrate two very different ways a tiny game can justify enthusiastic reviews. Grimhook lasts only about half an hour, but its hand-painted presentation, grappling movement, aerial combat, and momentum-based traversal produce an immediate enthusiasm that feels grounded in the mechanics being played rather than the review score being advertised. Meadow is less mechanically dramatic but produces the video’s most memorable interaction: with almost nobody online, another player silently guides the newcomer around the world, points out essence, waits when separated, and eventually says goodbye entirely through emotes. The resulting first-place ranking is openly subjective, but the episode does a good job showing the specific experience that earned it.
Soldat and Teeworlds are especially useful examples of what happens when an old multiplayer game survives through experienced regulars. Soldat initially becomes a brutal introduction to veteran movement and ricocheting gunfire before a small PvE group accommodates the newcomer and teaches basic mechanics. Teeworlds offers an even stranger discovery when the apparent population turns out to belong largely to DDNet rather than vanilla Teeworlds itself. After recruiting players through Discord, the host gets an actual vanilla lobby running and finds a fast, simple multiplayer game that remains enjoyable. These segments capture both sides of low-population multiplayer: an intimidating skill gap and an unusually welcoming reaction when someone new appears.
Different Strokes broadens the definition of multiplayer further. Its galleries of collaborative paintings can remain interesting even without directly encountering another player because the shared creations themselves provide the social component. Touring current work and the Hall of Fame gives the segment a natural visual payoff, while making a deliberately crude contribution supplies some participation instead of treating the game as a virtual museum. The host wishes the interaction were more conventionally live, but also recognizes that asynchronous collaboration is part of what makes the concept function with so few concurrent users.
The final pair provides the clearest warning against treating review percentages as straightforward measures of quality. Lizards Must Die receives an 87% positive score yet produces little enthusiasm beyond disbelief, while Fox Soldier’s 98% rating is questioned after the host notices oddly enthusiastic review language and multiple reviews sharing the same date. The footage then shows confusing mechanics, freezes, bizarre death behavior, unexplained teleportation, and an eventual crash. Those observations reasonably justify skepticism about whether the rating reflects the experience shown, but they do not establish why the reviews are positive or prove manipulation. The video is strongest when the mismatch itself is allowed to be the finding.
The ranking device gives the episode structure, although its methodology is deliberately loose. The games are being judged after dramatically different amounts and types of play, from a complete 31-minute game to multiplayer sessions dependent on whichever community happened to be available. Player counts, review totals, personal enjoyment, price, community behavior, nostalgia, and technical quality all influence placements without becoming a consistent scoring system. That weakens the promised comparison between ratings and population as anything rigorous, but it works well as entertainment because the real discovery is that neither metric explains much on its own. Small communities can preserve excellent experiences, near-perfect ratings can conceal questionable value, and a nearly empty server can occasionally create the most memorable encounter of the entire experiment.
Pros
- The selection covers genuinely different reasons highly rated games can have tiny populations, including age, brevity, niche mechanics, asynchronous play, and questionable rating signals.
- Meadow’s spontaneous interaction provides a particularly effective demonstration of how a nearly empty community can still create a memorable experience.
- Grimhook’s movement and combat are shown clearly enough to explain the host’s enthusiasm despite its extremely short length.
- The Teeworlds segment carefully distinguishes vanilla player numbers from the much larger DDNet population rather than treating them as equivalent.
- War of Rights receives a more balanced treatment than its chaotic public-server behavior initially suggests, with acknowledgment of friendlier players and different community environments.
- The episode becomes appropriately skeptical when high review percentages conflict sharply with the games being experienced, without actually proving a cause it cannot establish.
Cons
- The final ranking mixes enjoyment, price, population, community behavior, technical quality, and review credibility without a consistent standard.
- Several games receive relatively brief exposure, making the rankings better reflections of first impressions than comprehensive evaluations.
- The lengthy War of Rights section gives offensive player behavior substantial attention despite the host explicitly not wanting it to define the game.
- Fox Soldier’s suspicious review patterns warrant scrutiny, but the evidence shown is insufficient to determine why its rating is so unusually positive.
- The sponsorship interrupts the opening game before the broader eight-game premise has developed much momentum.
The strongest discovery here is not whether ratings or player counts are more trustworthy, but how poorly either number captures the experience waiting inside a forgotten game. Uneven evaluation prevents the ranking from becoming a serious test of Steam’s metrics, yet the varied selection, spontaneous community encounters, mechanical discoveries, and justified skepticism toward anomalous ratings make the journey consistently entertaining and surprisingly revealing.
