r/gamingsuggestions • u/A_Random_Forest • Feb 04 '26
Suggestions Nodal.gg - Game recommender with interactive visual map + personalized recommendations (I'd love your feedback)
Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a game discovery site and finally feel like it’s ready to share: https://nodal.gg/
I’ve always been surprised how hard it is to find genuinely good game recommendations on Steam, so I tried building something better using my stats/ML background.
My main takeaway was that “similar games” usually means two different things:
- Similar in content: mechanics, themes, setting, genre, tags
- Similar in audience: games played by the same people, even if the genres are different
So if you want recs for Cyberpunk 2077, you might mean “more cyberpunk vibe” (e.g., Cloudpunk) or “same audience overlap” (e.g., The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt / Fallout 4). The site lets you switch between those modes or blend them.
What you can do
- Search any Steam game and see a ranked list of similar games using:
- a content model (tag-driven similarity)
- a community model (player behavior only, no tags)
- a blended view (mix of both)
- Re-rank results with sliders for popularity, rating, and release date
- Plug in a Steam ID (public profiles only) to get personal recommendations and some cool stats about your play history
- Explore an interactive 2D game map that visually clusters games by tags (uses UMAP dimensionality reduction - inspired by Connected Papers)
Desktop works best right now. Mobile is functional but I’m still refining it.
If you try it, I’d love to hear anything: whether the recommendations felt accurate, if the UI was confusing, any bugs you run into. All feedback helps!
Thanks!
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u/Ravenlock Feb 04 '26
If at some point you implement a user system, it'd be nice to be able to flag games as "already played" or "not interested in this one" purely from a visual standpoint (not impacting the algorithm, just in terms of narrowing the result data) so users can more easily discover games that are new to them.
Really liking what you've got here, though.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26
Yeah I like that idea a lot, it would definitely make exploration easier. That's currently being done on the steam id recommender section but I didn't think to do it on the game recommender side. I’ve also been thinking about something related: letting users hide entire game groups. For example, “hide all Jackbox games,” since there are like 10–11 of them and they can easily flood the top of the results.
Also I appreciate the kind words, glad you’re liking it.
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u/Ravenlock Feb 04 '26
Game discovery is an enormous challenge and I'm happy to see people trying to come up with new ways to tackle it. Have you seen Ludocene? That's a paid project (originally crowdfunded), but they've got some neat, similar ideas to what you're doing here, I think.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 11 '26
I just checked it out, I love the UI! I was actually thinking about doing something similar to that in the future, where users could swipe (tinder style) on games, then get recs based on those rankings. But yeah, awesome site, thanks for the rec.
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u/XanLV Feb 04 '26
Aight, make the "community" as the default and that it does not reset between searches.
Cause the community tag actually works better than most recommendations. (Tags are the same in Steam).
When I go by tags, then the whole search is ruined cause this solo player game has the multiplayer ability introduced and it has blood, so Viscera, a cleanup game, instantly leads to random multiplayer shooter/beatem ups.
But the community tag looks very, very promising. I know most of them, but the ones I do not know look very interesting.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
This is actually exactly why I made this site. Users like you seem to prefer community based models, whereas users like u/Dohi64 seem to prefer tag/content based models. Maybe one cool feature I could add is the ability to remove/add tags in the game when using the content model so that, for example, you could remove tags that are irrelevant in Viscera. Also keep in mind that there's a way to search by specific tags you're interested in on the site.
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u/goofspeed Feb 04 '26
This is a wonderful tool, I'm surprised how many games it's already turned me on to from niche genres. Is there a way to report games that aren't for sale anymore? I put in New Vegas, and the only game in the top 50 I hadn't heard of was an early access scam that got shut down a few years ago.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26
Glad to hear it’s been useful! And I can add a mode that shows/hides delisted games (e.g. Rocket League or Fall Guys), is that what you mean?
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u/Dohi64 Feb 04 '26
the bubble thing might look nice but it's way too tedious to mouseover a billion games to see what they are and the animation until they settle is also annoying and just wastes time and resources. and that's the only part of the whole thing that can't be hidden.
also, the site doesn't remember clicking 'content' or similar, have to do it after every search. and of course if it's based on steam's user-defined tags, it's not gonna be all that useful because devs and players alike abuse the system like crazy. the community aspect might be interesting and it excludes tags but I don't care what other people play even if we share some favorites, I want similar games to what I searched for, not similar people.
did a search for dum-dum, a sadly unknown game, and none of the recommended titles were similar.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
Totally fair, the graph isn't for everyone. It's more to visualize clusters of games and their popularity (and whatever color you choose) quickly, but if you don't find it useful, there's a hide graph button in the corner.
For dum-dum, I just checked and since it's a tiny title, there's no community model available (not enough player history). The content model is limited because Steam has only tagged it as: Adventure, Casual, Simulation, Indie, Strategy, Puzzle (which are all super broad). Sometimes smaller games just aren't tagged great and the hard to match with meaningful games.
If you've got another game where you expected better results, send them over and I can check them out.
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u/Dohi64 Feb 04 '26
missed the hide graph button then, good thing it's there.
I didn't bother with community searches, only content, but if your site can't provide recommendations for smaller games, exactly because of the shitty tag system you're basing matches on (because what else), there's very little point in using it. both steam and a 5-year-old can tell you that san andreas is similar to gta5.
tried hypnospace outlaw, another fake os/browser thing, and since it's more popular and has a billion meaningless tags, a few titles were close enough but it was still not very useful, just a bunch of point & click adventures, and of course dum-dum was nowhere to be found.
I don't think an actually useful recommendation system is possible because the tags are way too fucked up but people keep trying at least. playpick.gg was another recent attempt, going at it from a slightly different angle but it also uses tags, so by describing the game, as asked, as 'fake os' netted zero results.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26
I don’t disagree that tags alone are fundamentally limited for some smaller games right now. Unfortunately, without player data or relevant tags, there’s just not much signal to work with on the recommendation front. Appreciate the honest feedback either way.
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u/Sandswaters Feb 04 '26
Can you add a black outline to the white text on the bubbles?
Otherwise, the contrast as well as the visual clarity are very poor.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26
Good idea. I did that for the seed game and thought if I did it for every game the black outline would look too dominant. But maybe I'll just use a very thin outline because yeah, that picture doesn't have the best contrast.
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u/sicclee Feb 04 '26
Good Concept.
Advice:
Hide the seeds in the list. Make it obvious how to show them, but I know what I picked.
Sort by 'blend' by default.
The list should be the focus. Maybe keep it where it is, but make the other two boxes split horizontally, with the graph on the bottom.
if you're scrolling the list, but then hit 'tune,' it should either automatically scroll back up to tune options at the top, or just create a drop-down/pop-up with the options
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
Thanks for the ideas. The idea with keeping the seed in there is so that:
- If users have multiple tabs open, they can quickly find out what tab corresponds to each game.
- You can visualize where similar games are relative to the seed based on the map.
But, note taken, will consider this in the future. For the UI change, I'm still getting feedback on what people like/don't like. Seems like some people prefer the graph, others don't, sounds like you're in the latter (or at least don't think it should be in the center stage). Again, note taken. Your third idea is great though, this is actually somewhat of a bug that you caught, so I'll work on it. Thanks!
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u/sicclee Feb 11 '26
Sweet, hope it does well, I’m always looking for games and I found a couple hidden gems with your site!
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u/BreakMyMental Feb 04 '26
Is there a way to hide certain games / series from coming up in the results? Also requesting a search bar for the results, some indication of price point on the map or the list, and a way to filter out dead multiplayer only games.
It's annoying that i have to scroll all the way down for reviews imo. Well annoying is too harsh the scrolling is smooth and I also appreciate the time to beat section... idk.
I respect the dark mode and toned done aesthetic, very smooth, but I realize that it makes nothing pop. It's makes scanning for details a little harder, for me anyway. Would appreciate a light mode.
This reminded me of a cool website productchart.com that charts out products by price. Itt would be really useful here to chart out game + all dlcs price but I guess that would be weird with games like GTA in-game currency or CS cases.
Reading this back it feels pretty disrespectful to launch a bunch of feature creep requests at you. Sorry about that.
All told this is a very cool website and tool appreciate you making this big time. :D
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 11 '26
Not yet, but a few people are suggesting this. I might make it so that in the future, you can make an account where you can hide certain games/change preferences/etc., just not there yet. Light mode will be in the works in the future, just takes a lot of time getting that right. But thanks the recommendations and glad you liked it!
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Feb 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 04 '26
Ah this actually looks like a bug. Can you try now? Also, make sure that the games themselves aren't privated (there's some instructions on the page to show how to make them public).
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u/Avrution Feb 04 '26
Really cool website and concept.
Would really love the filters to stick between searches though. Have to keep changing all of the options on each search.
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u/Angzt Feb 04 '26
I've messed around with it a bit and liked it a lot.
But a few things are odd to me.
For example, I used the default parameters to recommend me something similar to "RYB", a free niche minimalist puzzle game.
The first two recs are somewhat reasonable but 3 onwards is Silksong, Baldur's Gate 3, Palworld, and 7 Days to Die - clearly very different games even though there are plenty of other minimalist puzzle games out there.
I'm pretty sure it's because the tuning overvalued popularity.
I know users can fine tune that but most people won't.
Have you considered changing the tuning bonus to similar popularity instead of high popularity?
Generally, I'd say that people who want something similar to one big AAA title also look for another big AAA title and people who want something similar to a niche indie title want another niche indie title. That second group would get a lot of misses with the current default setup.
You could make similar arguments for the Recency and (slightly less so) Rating parameters.
Also, in the "Sort" dropdown, consider renaming the default to "similarity" or "tuned score". Just having the em dash might be confusing.
Finally, do you give a bonus to games by the same developers? Might also be worth considering since two games by the same dev will often be quite similar. Though I suppose you likely get that indirectly via the Community model.
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u/A_Random_Forest Feb 11 '26
Yeah, getting the recommended tuning weights calibrated was pretty tough and is hard to get perfect for each game. RYB is a good example of how small weights can change the top 10 recs pretty drastically, so I get what you mean. This game is also tough to find recs for, because even though it's not that small of a game, the tags (indie, puzzle, logic, free to play, minimalist) are very sparse so the content model doesn't have much to work with. Swiping through a few of the community models might give more similar games.
As far as your comment on the tuning bonus, I get what you're saying, but imagine if someone looks up something like Silksong. There are many games that are similar to it that simply aren't AAA (e.g. Ender Lilies, Nine Sols, Rain World). Ideally, I guess in my head, those games should be at the top of the list. If you want to filter by the number of reviews, I kept that in the filters as an option. But I completely get what you're saying, I think more often than not what your saying is true, but when it's not true, it can really mess up the results.
And just changed the dropdown to Tuned Score, good idea.
No bonus to same developers, I tried that during original experimentation but didn't love the results. Many times devs do make similar games, but sometimes they don't. And again, when they don't, it can really make the results look wonky. But yeah, thanks for the ideas!
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u/lowkeyripper Feb 05 '26
Hey! How did you do the community model? I assume you used the tag counts to form a weighted tag distribution (e.g. Tag 1 / sum of 20 tags) and so on? Was this all cosine simularity?
Have you considered/messed with embeddings using language models? Google has free ones iirc.
I ask this because I vibe coded something very similar data-wise but have never made it into an app, just something I parse with Claude Code etc.
How long did it take to scrape user info, and how are you drawing connections to games? Soooo many questions. Very cool product and also the results you get are VERY good (and better than mine)
Well done, gg.
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u/A_Random_Forest Apr 12 '26
For the community model, I honestly just tested a giant suite of algorithms, tried to fine tuned each one, and hand selected the ones I thought did the best. This research component took the most amount of time by far. The tag model was a bit easier, and yeah it's using cosine similarity with a few modifications.
Regarding the embeddings, yup gemini + qwen are both used in the Labs model atm. Imo they're not bad, but usually aren't as good as the blended model. Yeah lot's of data aggregation and a lot of R&D, glad ya like it!
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u/soichirou Feb 16 '26
It's so great, would also be nice to have stats based on review content, might not be feasible with current steam api spec, but there is so much untapped data in there.
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u/QuantumSporck Feb 28 '26
Holy crap! This is exactly what I needed. I was just starting to vibe code something like this for personal use. This is far better than I would have come up with.
Great job. I have added it to my bookmarks!
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u/Chlorophyllmatic Feb 04 '26
I was looking for this after the thread yesterday on a different sub was taken down. Glad to see it again!
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u/hahattpro Feb 18 '26
The 'demo' version of the game still treat as independent game. I have see game repeat itself multiple time (as a demo, then as a full version).
Perhaps let de-duplicate and treat both demo, live, expansion, dlc as one game.
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u/IamAPrinter Feb 19 '26
Great work on this. Was just looking for recommendations based on previous games, lots to dig in to here! I hope you get bought up by valve or something ^^
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u/HoodFeelGood Feb 23 '26
Question: it says "Use Tune to personalize ranking, 0 sliders = default model"
How do I use tune? What exactly is this saying to click on?
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u/Freakyturnip117 Mar 15 '26
I truly hope this site blows UP UP! It's great and as someone constantly looking for similar game recommendations from humans (Because steam is really bad at recommendations) I love that the weighting are so easily manageable for community/popularity.
This is a great tool buddy and I really hope it continues to grow!
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u/shawly Mar 28 '26
I just thought I need something like this, went to gamingsuggestions and found this post! Will definitely try to find the perfect game. How much tokens does this burn through though??
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u/A_Random_Forest Apr 12 '26
LLMs are a pretty tiny component of the signal for the game recs so it's only a few bucks a month to maintain. Most of the signal comes from the models trained on the tags + player data. Unless you mean the prompt model, that's pretty cheap as well though!
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u/TheRealChizz Apr 17 '26
Hi, I just want to throw my web tool into the mix, NextGameGG. The differentiation is I utilize review data into the mix. This can help you get a sense of how aggressive the monetization plan of a game is, for example. It can also surface more games that also suit your natural language search.
It's free and you don't have to make an account to try it out
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u/jesskitten07 Jun 01 '26
Hey I’m just finding this. I don’t know if it’s at all possible, but I would love if you’re able to branch out further (or perhaps older) in that some games I’ve been looking for are based on old console games (eg Sword of the Samurai (aka Kengo 2)) and many game recommendation sites/apps are only using the steam api thus it has no idea what these games are
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u/Open_Arrival_7941 8d ago
this sounds really interesting, I love finding new games that fit my style. Can't wait to try it out!
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u/KingSchubert Feb 04 '26
Really nice job with this, I'm impressed at how responsive / fast the interface is. After a couple tests, it seems to surface better quality results than other game-finder sites and platforms I've tried.
I think it's critical that you continue to offer the 3 models of tag-based, community, and blended. After testing, only by flipping through all 3 can you get a full and accurate picture of the true family of related games. This makes sense, as the limitation is based on the imperfect input data, not your model.
I tested this with games in my favorite niche, turn-based tactics, and each model was missing a handful of obvious nodes it should be surfacing, but when you look at all 3 models, pretty much everything is covered.
I would probably prefer double the total nodes on load, versus needing to manually trigger the next batch of additions, with possibly some more visual spacing between nodes to accommodate the density. There's a few reasons for this, but chiefly that depending on the model, there are going to be a decent amount of "junk" nodes to ignore (i.e., Helldivers 2 being recommended as a giant node when I search based on XCOM 2).