#whilst something attracting pet hair is a dealbreaker for others

[awkward-teabag]

It may not even be that they're cynical or anything, just that they're overworked, underpaid, and expected to keep a certain output no matter how many co-workers get fired. That or there's a "content pivot" which means much of what they review are things they have little to no interest in and may actively dislike.

It's particularly bad with professional video game reviews given all the firings, the sheer breadth of video games in terms of content and gameplay, and how it can take a dozen or more hours to form the framework for a proper review.

It's hard to do that if you're the only one doing reviews now and expected to put 1-2 reviews out a week... of brand new games so you don't even have a backlog to pull from.

(There's also a massive issue where publishers will blacklist a company if a review isn't glowing enough and fans who can get vitriolic and violent if a game gets a 7/10 or lower.)

It's hard to not get jaded when you're pressured to do things you don't enjoy and doing the work of several people while also having to deal with the fallout if you phrase things "wrong" or don't outright lie to keep your sanity, safety, or because you were told to do so.

But it applies to reviews in other industries, too. What may be a negative for one person may be fine (or a positive) to someone else. They're not wrong for pointing it out, though, and just because something is a review doesn't mean you can turn off your critical thinking.

And please read multiple reviews to get a better understanding of something rather than reading one review and taking it as gospel. One person complaining about something may just be it wasn't for them or they were having a bad day, if multiple people complain about the same thing, it may be a sign of a larger issue.

And by the gods, a stranger pointing out a negative or under-developed part of something you like in a review is not a personal attack against you.

Sometimes you encounter negative critique that you disagree with where you have to recognize that nothing the critic said was technically wrong, but they just have a far more cynical and low-patience lens through which they are reviewing the work that highlights all flaws and prevents them from experiencing the more lighthearted joy in the little things about a piece of media that do work really well.

Unfortunately, professional reviewers are particularly prone to this as they are forced to mechanically grind through every new major release in their medium to get paid, regardless of whether it's their type of thing or if they have any patience for its genre expectations or particular approach, and are often primed to have a bad time with anything that can't push past that hump by being an unexpectedly moving piece of art. Which arguably makes them some of the worst people to qualitatively review the experience of engaging with a piece of media for entertainment, but there you are. The system might be flawed somewhat.