This is an interesting idea, do you find it has more interesting properties than doing cosine similarly by reviewers? Have you found things adjacent to games you enjoyed that were also fun to play?

Yes, I’ve actually found a few interesting games I had never heard of before! So the project has been a success for me already.

But there’s still plenty of places where games are placed strangely on the map, and I like to investigate why that’s happening (it’s usually because Steam reviews are pretty noisy signal).

The first version of this idea was actually based on cosine similarity. The user would enter arbitrary text or an existing steam app id, and would get a list of games back.

The arbitrary text results were never very good because to get related results you needed to write a fake review of the kind of game you were looking for, which is a difficult concept to explain to users. Most users just entered text like "beautiful game", and that lead to bad results.

The results based on steam app id were much better, because it was comparing like-for-like. That lead to me considering different ways of presenting the games based on their review similarity. And so this map was made.

The umap projection does introduce a fair amount of distortion, so it's not a 100% better result than direct cosine similarity of a specific steam game. I'm still playing with the umap parameters to try and find something which causes the least problems.