"Decay"

What's left to decay? It's dust now. Remember when Eidos used a PR firm to strongarm websites into not publishing reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld if they were less than an 8/10 till after launch?

"That's right. We're trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos." When asked why, the spokesperson said: "Just that we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that's handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don't put people off buying the game, basically."

That was 15 years ago, and despite the fact that Barrington Harvey went on to lie and pretend they never said that, everybody knew that kind of thing was old hat back then too. Mainstream gaming journalism is a captured industry.