Over Christmas, I tried to catch up on my huge backlog of games to play. I'm generally fairly ruthless these days about not building up enormous backlogged lists of anything -- or, more accurately, ruthless about flushing them when they become too much.
(I think I talked about one approach to this -- the Pareto Principle -- back in The best 20% and Replacing weekend magazines last year.)
I had a list of some 30-or-so games that I wanted to play (and, crucially, at least temporary access to many of them through shared Steam libraries), but also didn't want to get bogged down by not finishing even one.
So I made a spreadsheet. Obviously.
I set out to play about an hour of a bunch of these games, scribble down some notes, and rate them based not on how good I thought they were, but on how keen I was to keep playing them. (You'd assume that that would track somewhat with how good I think they are, but it's a slightly different -- and more appropriate -- measure.)
This has left me with four or five games that I'm really eager to keep going with. (Which I have mostly been ignoring because I accidentally started playing Satisfactory.)
An hour isn't long to spend with most games, particularly those that can span 60+ hours of time. But, for me at least, it was certainly enough to give me a sense of the game. I wouldn't use that to argue in broad, sweeping terms about them, but it did give me a wider survey of how a bunch of games were doing things.
(I think also that it heightens similarities and differences between design choices. This 'thin slicing' approach feels like it would be a good exercise for exploring what design elements resonate with you vs what don't.)
Basically everything that floated on the top of my list were narrative-heavy games, which is less obvious than it may appear. I actually tend to not play that many of them year-round. Not because I don't want or intend to, but just because that collapses leisure so much into my already overstimulated work brain.