As any adult who loves video games knows, there are simply too many of them – 19,000 games were released in 2024 on PC games storefront Steam alone, not counting all the playable delights on consoles and smartphones. Most of us have backlogs of unplayed classics that make us feel guilty about buying newer games. Finding things that are actually good, meanwhile, can feel totally impossible. At least 50% of the questions people send in for this newsletter are a variant of “Help, what should I play?”
We do our best to help, but even though it’s my job to know about games, I still don’t have infinite time to play them. Streamers play games all day, but even they usually specialise in particular games or genres and rarely stray outside them. Trying to Google recommendations these days leads you down a rabbit hole of hard-to-parse Reddit threads and misleading AI slop.
Enter Ludocene, a new app launching on Kickstarter this week that hopes to solve this problem. It is described as Tinder for video games. When you load it up you’ll see a bunch of cards with game names, details and screenshots on them, as well as links to trailers, and you can sort them into yes/no piles. Based on what you say you like, it’ll show you new cards for games you may like to play. If you like the look of a game you can add it to your deck, so you remember to check it out later. You can easily see which games connect to each other, so it’s transparent where the recommendations come from.
You can also select a particular expert – quite a few streamers, critics and other games media people have signed up already – to see their recommendations. Experts have their own cards too, showing a photo and a brief description of their background. The app’s recommendation engine is powered only by human recommendations, not by an algorithm that relies on player data, genre tags or AI. It’s based on a dataset put together over five years by the team behind Family Gaming Database, a recommendation site for parents.
“Amazing games are so often buried in the mass,” says longtime games writer Andy Robertson, who’s leading the project. “I wanted a way to follow experts with similar tastes to mine so I could find the games I’m missing. The system needed to be flexible and simple, and not take itself too seriously … The combination of matching with games like you do on a dating app, and building a hand of favourite games like in a deck builder, was perfect. My hope is that this makes game discovery fun and effective again, and pays experts for their expertise.”
If it hits its Kickstarter goal, Ludocene will be free to use in its basic form, with no ads – there’ll be a cheap subscription model down the line to unlock extra features, for no more than £3 a month.
“We don’t make any assumptions about how much knowledge you have,” Robertson says. “If you’ve only played Mario Kart and Minecraft you can dive in and start picking games. The system learns your tastes as you go and presents you with appropriate options. It really comes into its own when you pick more specific games for your deck. Whether that’s Elden Ring, Balatro, A Short Hike or Shadow of the Colossus, the system learns your taste and throws up ever more specific and niche suggestions.”
I’m someone who loves a specific and niche suggestion. The current “if you like this, you might like that” game recommendation engines that you see on Steam and other storefronts are deeply lacking in the human touch that makes a recommendation meaningful. Ludocene caters to people who want a recommendation from an expert rather than a robot.
Another splendid resource for discovering games I’ve recently come across is the Thinky Games website – a database and reviews site for puzzle lovers. It has a huge selection of games that you can search for by genre and platform, from phones to Nintendo Switch. Each game’s description is written by an actual human who has played the game rather than scraped from store data.
I guess I would say this, as a games critic of nearly 20 years, but I truly believe in the value of person-to-person game recommendations, especially in this era of AI-driven outsourcing of the soul. (I haven’t signed up as a Ludocene expert, by the way, but I may well do so in future.) If you like the look of it, you can check out its Kickstarter page.
What to play
Remember The Oregon Trail, that classic educational game where you had to ride your wagon across 19th century North America while avoiding the ultimate end-of-level boss: dysentery? Well, Keep Driving is that, but set in the early 2000s and with fewer intestinal infections. You’ve just bought your first car and now you’re driving it across the country to a music festival. As you cruise, procedurally generated pixel landscapes drift by and hitchhikers thumb lifts, then tell you stories. It’s effectively a management role-playing game where you repair and feed your gas guzzler while managing your own need for food and sleep. You can finish in four hours, but there are multiple endings to discover on subsequent playthroughs. A fun concept, beautifully realised.
Available on: PC
Estimated playtime: eight hours plus
What to read
“For years, Maciej ‘Groobo’ Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning.” Thus begins Ars Technica’s intriguing story of possible corruption in the shadowy world of the speed run – i.e. finishing games really quickly. A squad of modern-day speedrunning sleuths have been unable to replicate Grobo’s success even with state-of-the-art software tools. Expect a Netflix exposé soon.
Grapefuit Games, the independent studio co-founded by artist and game creator Robert Yang, has written A Sports-Like Manifesto, which you can read on its website. It defines a sports-like game as one that features elements of a sport without attempting to simulate the whole universe around it in intricate detail. Frankly, mainstream sports sims are beginning to resemble humourless chimera, more concerned with licensing deals and player likenesses than gameplay, so I hope more developers take Yang’s approach.
Keith is writing about this soon, but just a heads-up: a new memoir by veteran games writer Julian “Jaz” Rignall has just launched via Bitmap Books. The Games of A Lifetime is a look back at Rignall’s long career writing for magazines such as Zzap! 64, Computer & Video Games and Mean Machines, focusing on the games that stuck with him through the years. A fascinating read for veteran games mag aficionados.
What to click
‘Less Star Wars – more Blade Runner’: the making of Mass Effect 2’s Bafta-nominated soundtrack
I made the worst role-playing game of all time – and loved every minute of it
‘There’s no stress’: gamers go offline in retro console revival
Question Block
This one comes from JohnnyBiscuits on BlueSky who asked:
“Nightreign looks like a huge departure in format from Elden Ring and for FromSoft in general too – [I’m] interested in other examples where developers have got out on a limb like this, particularly with a well loved IP.”
Ooh, good question, and it’s got me searching through my memory banks. As a Sega fan the first thoughts I had were of Virtua Fighter Kids, a strange comedy spin-off from Virtua Fighter 2 where all the combatants are children but with adult characteristics like facial hair, and Typing of the Dead, which turns horror shooter House of the Dead 2 into a typing sim. Or there’s Namco’s 16bit console title Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, which reimagines the arcade maze game as a point-and-click adventure. I think, however, that the grandest about-turn in games history was Conker’s Bad Fur Day from Rare, which took the visual style of harmless family games such as Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country, and applied them to a wildly scatological, adult-orientated booze-n-swears fest. Surely the biggest image change since John Travolta’s machine gun-wielding assassin in Pulp Fiction.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
