Method
Our testing bench, plank by plank
A mark on Souffle Douleur is the last thing to grow, never the first impression. This page lays out each stage a game passes through, and the faults that get it weeded out.
Where the seeds come from
Candidates arrive from three places: the CrazyGames catalogue, readers’ letters and the games our friends quietly keep returning to. Huge play counts earn nothing on their own; a title with millions of sessions faces exactly the trial a newcomer does.
A typical season starts with fifteen to twenty seedlings. Four or five make it to the shortlist.
What sits on the bench
Our devices are the sort found in an ordinary kitchen drawer, and deliberately skip anything built for gaming.
- A Windows laptop from 2021 with built-in graphics, running Chrome, Edge and Firefox
- A 2020 MacBook Air with Safari and Firefox
- An Android phone bought mid-range in 2023 and an iPhone 12, tried on home Wi-Fi and on cellular data
- A ten-inch Android tablet and a Chromebook handed down from a school
One week, three visits
Day one is a cold start: new browser profile, no account, connection throttled. We time the first screen, check whether controls are explained and note how quickly the point of the game becomes clear.
On day four two testers play for as long as they feel like it, then jot down when they stopped and what made them stop.
Day seven is the homecoming. Did the progress survive? Is there anything fresh to discover? Has some small habit of the game begun to irritate?
Six measures and what each is worth
Both testers give every measure a number from one to ten. We combine them with the weights below and round to a single decimal place for the published mark.
- Stability, a quarter of the mark: smooth loading, steady frame rate, saves that last
- Clarity, a fifth: you grasp the aim and controls unaided
- Depth, a fifth: the game still surprises after seven days
- Device comfort, 15 per cent: it feels natural on the screens it claims
- Interruptions, a tenth: advertising breaks and pop-ups kept modest
- Calm, a tenth: no clocks or prompts engineered to stretch your stay
What gets a game weeded out
A pair of crashes within the trial week, a lost save, controls that fail on a device the platform says it supports, or heavy pressure to spend inside the game. Any single one is enough.
We also pull titles whose content wanders somewhere we could not suggest to a general audience, however well they run.
Who pays for what
Placement is not for sale, and neither is a better number. Referral fees may exist on some outbound links, but testers never learn which, and every mark is settled before a single link goes in.