Back in February we told you about Ludocene, a forthcoming project that was setting out to become the perfect game recommendation machine. Or, to use the catchy pitch, a dating app for games and players. And crucially, it was aiming to do this via human curation, rather than any ghastly AI. Well, following a successful Kickstarter and the gathering of a wide selection of gaming experts, it’s out today.
Combining a dating app with a deckbuilder card game, Ludocene asks you to pick a bunch of games you already like, and then matches you with real-life experts with similar tastes–the games those experts have curated will then be suggested to you. When Kotaku spoke to the project’s lead Andy Robertson earlier this year, he explained the idea behind the app is to allow ideal games that people might otherwise never have heard of to rise to the surface of their feeds. “We wanted to have a system where it could be much more eclectic,” Robertson said, “and there’ll be a much greater chance that you’ll encounter games that you probably would never encounter if you just looked at what was popular on Steam or Xbox.”
Ludocene is built on the back of the Family Gaming Database, which has details on thousands of games, then combined with the games suggested and curated by its dozens of experts across various fields involved in gaming. As a very handsome expert, I should declare that I’m in there, along with far more exciting names like My Perfect Console‘s Simon Parkin and industry legend Rami Ismail. Other names include Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator‘s Xalavier Nelson Jr., former EDGE editor and Hitman writer Jen Simpkins, and games critics like Chris Plante, Brian Crecente and Rachel Watts.
To use it, you visit the site (and it’s a site rather than an app, which is odd, but in a large part due to how the game links to the sites from which you can buy the games, and runs like an app on your mobile browser anyway) and start a “Run.” Here you’re suggested games from a pile of cards, and you can choose to drag them up to dislike, down to add to either your set of games you already love or ones you’re interested in playing, or just tap the deck to dismiss something you’re not fussed about either way. As you go, the site starts to learn your tastes and tries to find you games that match what you’ve liked so far, as well as match you up with experts who share your predilections. And it works! As someone who spends a vast amount of my time looking through indie games, I’m really impressed that it’s finding intriguing-looking games I’ve not heard of, or ones that I’ve always meant to get around to playing.
Selecting cards feels a bit fiddly just now, although talking to Robertson I know that these things are being worked on to smooth them out. Once you’ve completed a run, your profile is then updated with rows of cards for the games you’ve pinned, and then the site’s recommendations based on what it’s learned about you. It’s very quickly picked up my love for indie adventure games, and is recommending Detective Dotson which I’ve absolutely been meaning to play for weeks. It’s also recommended Tux and Fanny, one of my favorite games of 2021, so I’ve quickly added that to Loved and am now hankering to play it all over again. You can also see the games getting pinned to play next by most other users, allowing a bit of old-fashioned popularity curation.
Oh, and to check this isn’t all highfalutin indie obscurities, I tried another run in which I pretended to love Call of Duty Warzone, and it absolutely focused on other big-budget online shooters, and some splendid options like Star Wars: Republic Commando.
If you click on cards they’ll open up a YouTube trailer for the game. Flip the card over and it gives you a very short description, some keywords, and which devices it can be bought for. Click on that and it pops up a window with links to the various online stores from which it can be bought. It’ll also list if the game is “free” via any subscriptions like Game Pass, etc. It all seems to work pretty well.
Clearly everyone should immediately select me as an expert, since my taste is so impeccable. But I suppose other people are available too.
