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.
