Can’t find your game? We’ve tried to include all games that make it into the top 200 on the App Store charts.
This appears to only cover mobile games. I’d love to see something similar for PC/console releases…
Anecdotally Fifa (EA FC or whatever they’re calling it now) would have to be up there. Hadn’t played it in years but gave it a go last season as it was free on Game Pass.
They’ve combined the addictiveness of card collecting with loot box mechanics, FOMO and moving the goalposts (pun intended) to get the best players. The gameplay also seemed pretty rigged to prevent grinding rewards out.
Then when the new game is out, rather than dishing out all the rewards to those still playing it instead becomes infeasible to unlock any more decent players so you’re pretty much stuck with what you have.
Even if you pay full price for the next game you’ll have to use low stat players as they only seem to start releasing decent ones half way through the season.
From the site:
DarkPattern.Games is a brand new website. We are starting with iOS and Android games because this is where most dark patterns appear, but we will be adding other platforms soon. Because we are new, we have a lot of games that don’t have any reviews yet. This will improve over time and we are working hard to get games reviewed. Please help us by finding a familiar game and submitting a review.
Brand new is definitely a stretch, their legal page seems to date back to 2019.