There are more good games out in a normal week than anyone can play. I Dream of Indie Games once put out a single video covering 45 new indie games from one week, and one summer Polygon counted more than 100 release dates announced out of Summer Game Fest alone. Add the games already sitting unplayed in your library and a wishlist full of things you saved at midnight, and finding something to play stops being the hard part. Picking one is. This is the method we use for how to choose what game to play next, written down so you can steal it.
Start with the session you have, not the game
Most backlog advice starts by sorting games: by score, by release date, by price. We start with the time. Before you open a store or a launcher, answer three questions:
- How long is the session? Forty minutes before bed and a free Sunday afternoon are different jobs.
- How much learning can you take on? A strategy game with a long tutorial asks more of you than a farming loop or a deckbuilder whose rules you already know.
- Alone or with people? A co-op game can be perfect when your friends are online and oddly empty when you log in by yourself.
If all you have is scraps, a big story game tends to turn into loading a save, finding the quest marker, checking the inventory and getting interrupted. A roguelike run, a few fighting game matches or one mission in something with tidy structure gives you more actual play in the same forty minutes. The long evening is when the dense RPG, or the survival game everyone says needs a few hours to click, gets a fair shot.
This is also why the newest release is often a bad default. One late May, the obvious headline was 007: First Light, while Paralives early access and a handful of small indies from the weekly roundups were a better fit for a tired Tuesday. A good game at the wrong time plays like a mediocre one.
Keep your wishlist and your backlog separate
A wishlist should mean "I want to remember this." A backlog should mean "I own this, or I've committed to it." When the two live in one pile, a game you saw once in a trailer carries the same weight as a 70-hour RPG you paid for last winter, and both start to feel like debts.
When something catches your eye, write down why in a single line. You haven't played it yet, so keep it to the hook, in your own words:
- "Looks like a Sunday morning game."
- "Friend says the writing is the whole point."
- "Mortal Shell II: only if I'm in the mood to be punished."
- "Wait for performance notes on Switch 2."
Store wishlists remember the product. They don't remember that it was the bassline in the trailer that got you. Two months later, that one line is the difference between a title you recognise and a game you still want.
Prefer notes that change what you'll do. "Maybe" changes nothing. "Friend game" tells you not to buy it alone on a weeknight. "Wait for reviews" tells you to check back after launch. A useful rule: if you can't remember why you added a game, it doesn't go near the top.
Once a week, remove something. A wishlist with no exit only grows, and deleting a game whose appeal has faded means the note did its job: it held the thought until you could see whether it lasted.
Showcases and demo festivals: how not to drown your wishlist
The two biggest wishlist floods of the year are showcase season and Steam Next Fest. A summer of showcases can put a hundred-plus release dates in front of you in a week, and a Next Fest can leave you with a dozen half-played demos. Two weeks later, most people remember one mechanic and none of the titles.
The same rules apply, just faster:
- During a showcase, write the hook, not the title. "The one with the paper-cutout city" is what you'll actually remember. Add the name later.
- Play a demo properly or not at all. Pick three or four demos, give each a real session, and write one line straight after: "Loved the movement, menus are a mess." Seven distracted minutes tells you nothing.
- Wishlist the ones that survive a day. If you still think about a game the next morning, keep it. If you need the store page to remember why, let it go.
- Prune a week later. Showcase excitement fades fast; the games that are still interesting after a week are the ones worth tracking to launch.
Cut the shortlist to three games
This is the step that does most of the work. When you're choosing what to play next, pull exactly three candidates:
- Something new from this week or month, with a hook you can name.
- Something you already own and still think about.
- A comfort pick you know will work when the day has used up your ability to make decisions.
Now write one sentence for each that starts "I want to play this because...". Pick the sentence that sounds least like you're negotiating with yourself. "I want Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core because the group wants something tense and co-op" is a reason. "I should probably start the big one because I bought it last month, but the new one reviewed better, and I never finished the old one..." is a committee meeting, and committees don't pick games.
Move the winner to the top. Put the two runners-up somewhere you'll actually see them, so choosing one doesn't feel like giving up on the others. And if a big release is dominating the conversation that week, it's fine to name it as the game you're skipping on purpose. Deciding not to play something is easier to live with than forgetting it in a pile of open tabs.
Three is small enough to remember and big enough to give an older game a chance against the new ones. For the bigger version of this (what to do with a backlog of hundreds), see how to play your backlog without burning out.
Give your pick one honest hour
Starting a game costs more than it looks: downloads, patches, settings, an intro you can't skip. That friction is why so many evenings end with a familiar game you didn't choose. Two ways to lower it:
- Install your three candidates before you need them, so a 40 GB update doesn't make the decision for you.
- If you've downloaded a demo, play it properly or delete it. Seven distracted minutes tells you nothing, and the half-tried demo is where good intentions sit for years.
Then give the pick a proper hour. Phone down, no review video on a second screen. The first hour isn't a verdict: tutorials over-explain, some games open with their weakest section, others have a dazzling opening and not much after it. At the end of the hour, ask one question: do I want another hour?
- Yes: keep going.
- No: shelve it, without a speech.
- Not sure: stop and see whether you think about it tomorrow. Games that stay in your head tend to win.
Write one sentence before you move on. "Great movement, too tired to judge the story." "Loved the town, hated the combat timing." "Right game, wrong month." A five-star rating is tidy after the fact; the sentence is what tells you in three months whether the problem was the game or your week.
Use reviews, friends and sales to judge fit
Review scores tell you a game worked for someone else. They can't tell you whether you slept badly or whether your friends are around. Read reviews for the verbs instead of the number: does the game ask you to grind, explore, memorise, manage, decorate or endure? Rock Paper Shotgun's early look at Rogue Core described it as a tougher, faster spin on Deep Rock Galactic, with team-wide upgrade choices and a rising threat level that pushes the group forward. That tells you more than a score would: this is a focused night with friends, and a poor pick for winding down after work.
Friends are the best filter because they show you what people did: someone actually started the game, finished it, or bounced off at chapter four. PC Gamer once pitched a July as a good month for co-op horror Discord groups, and that's how a lot of games arrive now, as invitations. Before you accept, decide whether you want the game or the hangout. Both are good reasons, but they lead to different purchases.
Sales make the maths worse. A game at 75 percent off only has to ask "why not?", but a five-dollar game can still want thirty hours of your time, and time is the expensive part. A discount is a price, not a plan. We wrote a whole post on what to buy in a Steam sale if that's where you're stuck.
Shelve games on purpose, and keep one going
There's a difference between drifting away from a game and choosing to stop. Drifting leaves the icon on your home screen and a save file you're vaguely afraid to reopen. Marking it shelved is an honest "not now" that leaves the door open. Sometimes it means wrong month. Sometimes it means you loved it for six hours and then work got busy.
The opposite habit is worth building too: protect one game you're already playing. A game in a trailer has no rough edges yet, no tedious middle chapter, no boss you're stuck on, which is why the next release always looks better than the one you're halfway through. Give the current game a few more nights before chasing the new one. If you still bounce off after that, shelve it and move on.
We built Perthro around this exact routine. The wishlist and backlog are separate lists you can reorder, Next Up holds your shortlist of three, and a game can sit in playing, played, plan to play or shelved without any of those sounding like a failure. If you connect Steam, PlayStation Network or Xbox Live, your library comes in automatically, so the "something you already own" slot has real options in it instead of whatever you happen to remember.
