Ugh, I can't believe I used that word. I appall myself.

After playing through recent Xbox Live Arcade games Kriss X (a word puzzle game) and Encleverment Experiment (a kid-friendly Brain Training clone), both from the Blitz Arcade development house,  I feel the need to speak up for games that do come under the ‘edutainment' banner. Both those games did not review especially well – or get reviewed by that many publications – yet both are kid-friendly, very charming pieces of software.

They both have excellent interfaces with well thought-out tutorials that provide plenty of hand-holding for younger players. Yet both games accommodate adult players with ranges of difficulty (to an extent). Encleverment Experiment, in particular, offers a lot of fun in its multiplayer modes, aping the simple yet frantic rivalry you get with Buzz and Scene It! games.

Yet some reviewers only approached the games from brain-testing perspectives, as if they were purely aimed at adult players, calling them out for not really providing a test or for being too simplistic. Sure, because the friendly bespectacled owl in KrissX and the little, beady-eyed professor who goes whizzing around on a flying podium in Encleverment Experiment don't lead you to think this game might just be for someone a bit younger. Definitely not.

I'm aware that reviews of kids games with only adults in mind has long been a problem in this business, but I suppose with Metacritic now providing this metric of scores, it's a problem which I think is becoming more significant. It needs to be called out again. Not every game is made with adult males in mind, and the ones that aren't shouldn't' get shot down just because they aren't.