How to Find Your Next Favourite Game

With more games available than anyone could ever play, finding your next favourite can feel daunting. How do you discover, among countless options, the games you will truly love? The good news is that finding great games is a skill you can develop, with a few reliable approaches that cut through the overwhelming choice. Here is a practical guide to discovering your next favourite game, helping you spend less time searching and more time playing something you genuinely love.

Know what you enjoy

The first step to finding great games is knowing what you enjoy, understanding the kinds of experiences that delight you. Reflecting on the games you have loved and why reveals patterns in your taste. That self-knowledge guides you toward games likely to suit you. By understanding what you genuinely enjoy, whether certain genres, moods or kinds of challenge, you can seek out games that match your taste, and that clarity about your own preferences is the foundation of finding games you will truly love.

Explore beyond your comfort zone

While knowing your taste helps, finding new favourites also means exploring beyond your comfort zone, trying genres and styles you usually skip. Some of your future favourites may lie in unexpected places. Venturing outside your usual choices opens up new possibilities. By occasionally stepping beyond the familiar and giving unfamiliar genres a chance, you may discover experiences you never expected to love, and that willingness to explore, balancing comfort with curiosity, is often how players stumble onto surprising new favourites.

Follow recommendations wisely

Recommendations are valuable, but follow them wisely, weighing them against your own taste. A game beloved by others may not suit you, while one they dismiss might be perfect. Learning whose recommendations match your taste is especially useful. By treating recommendations as helpful guides rather than commands, and paying attention to which sources tend to match your preferences, you can draw on others' experiences while still trusting your own judgement, making recommendations a powerful tool for discovery rather than a source of disappointment.

Try demos and samples

A great way to find games you will love is trying demos and samples, testing a game before committing. A short sample reveals whether a game clicks with you far better than any description. Trying before you invest saves disappointment. By taking advantage of demos and samples wherever they are available, you can experience a game firsthand and judge whether it suits you, and that direct trial, letting you feel a game rather than just read about it, is one of the most reliable ways to find a genuine favourite.

Read and watch before buying

Before committing to a game, read and watch to learn what it is really like. Reviews, gameplay footage and impressions reveal a game's true nature far better than marketing. Doing a little research prevents disappointment. By reading about a game and watching it in action before buying, you gain a realistic sense of what it offers and whether it matches your taste, and that small investment of research, seeing a game as it really is, helps you avoid disappointments and home in on games you will love.

Look to the past

Finding great games is not only about the new; look to the past, where countless excellent older games await. The back catalogue of gaming is full of treasures, often overlooked and inexpensive. Exploring older games opens a vast world of quality. By looking beyond the latest releases to the rich history of great games already made, you gain access to an enormous wealth of quality experiences, and that exploration of the past, mining gaming's back catalogue for overlooked gems, is a wonderful and often rewarding way to find new favourites.

Trust your instincts

When a game catches your interest, trust your instincts, because that spark of curiosity often points toward something you will enjoy. If a game appeals to you for reasons you cannot quite explain, it is worth exploring. Your instincts reflect your taste. By paying attention to the games that genuinely spark your curiosity and trusting that pull, you often find your way to experiences that suit you, and that instinct, the quiet sense that a particular game is for you, is a surprisingly reliable guide worth heeding.

Give games a fair chance

Some great games take time to reveal themselves, so give them a fair chance before judging. A slow start can give way to something wonderful, and abandoning a game too quickly may mean missing a favourite. Patience in the early hours can pay off. By giving a promising game enough time to show what it offers, rather than dismissing it at the first sign of friction, you allow experiences that start slowly to blossom, and that patience sometimes reveals a favourite you would otherwise have missed.

Enjoy the search

Finally, enjoy the search itself, treating the hunt for great games as part of the fun. Discovering, trying and exploring games is a pleasure in its own right. Approaching the search with curiosity makes it rewarding rather than daunting. By embracing the search for new games as an enjoyable adventure rather than a chore, you turn the overwhelming abundance of choice into an exciting world to explore, and that spirit of curiosity and enjoyment makes finding your next favourite a pleasure in itself.

Finding games you will love

Finding your next favourite game comes down to knowing your taste, exploring wisely, and giving promising games a fair chance. Discovering great games is a skill anyone can develop. For readers who enjoy getting the most from gaming, these approaches help you spend more time playing what you love. See our questions or how we write for more.