Before the, um, "popular" backlash, Depression Quest was actually well received by critics.
In my opinion, looking at metacritic user reviews now is not a good metric in this case: Depression Quest is one of the games that was a big part of the whole GamerGate debacle (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy). Tensions ran high, people made unfortunate comments and personal attacks, and things quickly ran out of control; a lot of gamers simply set out to punish some games and authors with negative reviews. Unfortunately this means many reviews are suspect and not entirely about whether the game is scientific or not, or about the game itself or its quality for that matter.
As I'm sure you're aware of.
In fact, getting too hung up about this particular entry in the list is (to me) suspect.