Bird Game 3’s top-rated Steam review contains zero compliments. It has profanity — censored by Steam into cheerful rows of hearts — aimed at a character named Hassan who “does not work half the damn time.” It closes with “♥♥♥♥ you and your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ass game.”

Thumbs up. Positive.

The game, a $2.99 multiplayer “peck and slash” from developer Crashout Games that launched April 3, currently sits at 100% positive across three user reviews. Two of those reviews are genuine endorsements — “w game birb game” and a heartfelt plea for more players to discover the title. The third is what can only be described as a declaration of war that wandered into the recommendation column.

Bird Game 3 is not an isolated case.

The Feces Review

Unhinged Pet Store Simulator, another April 3 release from BH Studios priced at $11.99, carries the same pristine 100% positive rating on three reviews. One of them, posted after exactly six minutes of playtime, reads: “i forgot to buy a cash register and couldn’t afford one, so my customers threw actual long dookie* logs into my store as protest.”

The rating: 10/10. Glowing endorsement. The player spent 0.1 hours in-game, watched customers hurl feces in retaliation for missing retail infrastructure, and decided this was worth recommending to other human beings.

Another Unhinged Pet Store reviewer logged 7.5 hours before delivering a measured critique — immovable shelves, no keybind options, a desperate need for seagull repellent — and marked it positive anyway. The third called it exactly the pet store simulator they’d been searching for. All three positive. All technically accurate in very different ways.

The 80% Problem

This is not a quirk. It is Steam’s review architecture working exactly as designed — which is to say, reductively.

An NLP analysis of 277,479 Dead by Daylight Steam reviews conducted by But Honestly found that 80.3% of reviews in that dataset were marked positive. The actual text inside those reviews paints a messier picture. The study, which ran DistilRoBERTa emotion detection across the full dataset, found anger appearing routinely inside reviews classified as recommendations.

“The model hears anger, Steam sees a thumbs up, and the text is just oscillating,” the researchers wrote — a concise diagnosis of a platform where emotional tone and recommendation label frequently diverge.

Steam forces a binary choice — thumbs up or thumbs down — with no nuance, no mixed rating, no middle ground. The median review runs just 36 characters. Quick emotional hits, with the occasional wall of text when someone finally snaps. The study documented reviews that read like “I hate this game, I love this game, send help,” all filed neatly under positive.

The data also reveals a clear pattern: new players under 100 hours are overwhelmingly positive, while veterans with thousands of hours barely tip the scale above a coin flip. The more time invested, the more complicated the relationship. Steam’s system has no setting for complicated.

Comedy as Critique

Players have turned this limitation into a comedy format, and the results are arguably more honest than any five-star scale could produce. The censored rage directed at Bird Game 3’s Hassan — rows of love hearts masking genuine fury about a broken character in a three-dollar bird fighting game — functions as marketing no polished testimonial could. Someone cared enough to play nearly two hours before logging on to unload about it. That’s commitment. That’s also a positive review.

Steam reviews aren’t really a recommendation system at this point. They’re a performance platform running on a binary toggle. The positive rage review is its own genre: furious enough to write paragraphs, not furious enough to tell anyone else to stay away. The thumbs-up is the deadpan delivery that makes the whole bit work.

Both Bird Game 3 and Unhinged Pet Store Simulator currently sit at zero concurrent players. Their 100% positive ratings are technically accurate, emotionally incoherent, and somehow the most honest thing on the platform.

Hassan still doesn’t work, presumably. The thumbs stay up.

Sources