Sixty-One Games in a Halloween Sale, and You're Going to Buy One

The eShop page loads and it's sixty-one rows. Prices in euros, discount percentages in red, a little clock counting down to the first of November. You scroll. You scroll again. You've been on this page for eleven minutes, you've bought nothing, and that's the honest problem with a guide like this — not that it's wrong, but that sixty-one is a number the brain cannot shop with.

I'm not retyping the list. Go read it. The 9/10 filter is doing real work, and somebody else did the boring part so you don't have to.

My position, plainly: a sale list is not a shopping list. It's a syllabus. You are not meant to complete it. You are meant to get one thing out of it and spend forty hours finding out why it's there.

The 9/10 threshold matters for a reason that has nothing to do with quality. A 9/10 is a game a person couldn't find a way to be lukewarm about. There are hundreds of 7/10 games in any given eShop sale, and most of them are fine, and you will never think about them again. A 9 is somebody's whole chest. That's the filter, and it's a good one.

But the "personal pick" is the line item I care about. Every one of these roundups has one or two — a game the writer slipped in that didn't clear the threshold, or did but doesn't fit the theme, and they put it in anyway because they wanted to. That entry is the only part of the page that isn't consensus. Scores are a committee. A personal pick is a person. If you buy exactly one thing off that list, buy the one somebody broke their own rules to include.

Here's the connection I keep coming back to: the cover-mounted demo disc.

I mean the ones taped to the front of magazines. Eight demos, a couple of videos, a menu that took a full minute to load, a disc that lived in the console tray for a month. You played what you were given. There was no shelf to browse, no trailer, no aggregate score. And because of that you played things you'd never have chosen, and one of them got you — the weird one, the third demo in the list, the one with the bad box art. That's how I ended up caring about games I had no business caring about at ten years old. The accident was built into the format.

A sixty-one-game sale list is that disc. The difference is nobody hands it to you. You have to be your own accident. Which means scrolling past the thing you already knew you wanted — you'll buy it later at full price and you know it — and reading the three lines about the game you've never heard of, whose title is two nouns and a colon.

And a word about the Halloween framing, because the sale is themed and most of it isn't horror at all. Some of the genuinely frightening games in my library have no monsters in them. Outer Wilds: Dark Bramble. The seed, the fog, the sound starting up before you can see anything, the anglerfish you can hear coming and cannot outrun. That's a game about a solar system and it scared me worse than anything with a chainsaw on the cover. If you're shopping this sale for dread, don't shop the tag. Shop the thing that scored a 9 because somebody couldn't stop thinking about it.

Who is this for? Not the person who owns everything on the list. The person who's going to buy three games, play forty minutes of each, and feel vaguely bad about it in March. I've done that. My library is full of games I respected and set down, and I'm not going to pretend that's a failure. You don't owe a game your completion. But you do owe yourself one honest attempt, on one game, chosen deliberately instead of in a bundle panic at eleven at night on the 31st.

So read the list once. Mark one. Ignore the percentage. The sale runs until the first of November — plenty of time to decide once, and nowhere near enough time to decide sixty-one times.