Steam’s latest feature will try to help you answer the eternal question: what the heck you should play next? Play Next appeared in Steam Labs back in February, but it has evolved from an experimental feature to a system every Steam user can enjoy.
Play Next, much like the regular recommendation feature, analyses your collection of games so it can make suggestions based on what you seem to like. Instead of trawling the store for recommendations, however, it plucks them from the games you already own.
I’ve got close to 1,000 games on Steam, so picking a new game usually takes so long that I eventually forget what I was looking for and have a wee existential crisis. Play Next is just what I need, but after browsing its suggestions I’m not entirely convinced.
There are some things it can’t account for, like people owning multiple editions or copies of the same game. My first recommendation was Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition, but I’ve already finished the original and played the Enhanced Edition on another platform. Nearly half of my recommendations fell into that category—apparently I own too many definitive editions.
Really, though, the problem is that I play a lot of stuff on Steam for work, so the algorithm must think I like just about anything. The result is that it coughs up an incredibly broad selection of games. Despite that, I did find at least one thing that I’d completely forgotten about and should definitely play: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Maybe the algorithm does know me after all. Terrifying.
You’ll find it in your library now, but if you don’t want Steam to pester you with recommendations, you can disable Play Next and dedicate that row to another Steam function.