Judging games is a matter of taste, and our taste is impeccable.

When the Steam Curator features were first implemented, you could only recommend titles. With that in mind, we set out to make a whole bunch of recommendations from our large Steam libraries. We see this as a hobby, since we're not getting paid, so sometimes the recommendations are informal or humorous.

Recently Valve implemented the ability for developers to send games to curators. A couple weeks later, we noticed people had actually sent us stuff. So we snapped up those games right away and tried them out.

We could write positive reviews for two of the games right away. They were straightforward and fun, and easy to write positive recommendations for. the third game is a hardcore combination of Boulderdash and Rocky's Boots and needs serious time investment before a proper writeup, even though it's quite good so far. And then there was the fourth one.

We've never been given a game (either by Curator Connect or via Steam Friends) that made us so frustrated. It is a PvZ clone which, like all the other PvZ clones we've played, is fundamentally flawed in it's economic model. We wanted to like it and recommend it, but we couldn't. This resulted in a very rant-y negative review that we've since deleted.

Anything we buy ourselves is fair game to rip apart if necessary. That hasn't changed. But we've established a lighthearted tone for this group's reviews, and we certainly don't want to discourage anyone from sending us stuff. It's not about "Yay free stuff", it's because keeping track of all of the Indie games released on Steam every week is not humanly possible anymore, and if someone wants us to check out their game, we're going to do it. We really don't want to discourage devs sending us their games.

So we're not going to write negative reviews for games that have been submitted to us as long as the game isn't "fake". If you've actually put work into the game, and it's not good enough to recommend, we'll just quietly not-review it. If you have obviously merely completed a tutorial*, slapped bought or stolen assets on it, and have the gall to send it to a group called Game Gourmets, you might get the review you deserve. But short of that, we won't be thrashing bad games we haven't bought. Only recommending good ones. And sometimes interesting-but-flawed ones.

*We hope you at least completed a tutorial and didn't slap assets on a stupid pre-made template without altering it, because that's so lazy it physically hurts to think about it. Please don't send us any games that are that bad, even as a joke.