Every Game Is Connected — I Built the Graph That Proves It
Every Game Is Connected — I Built the Graph That Proves It Recommendation engines are great at telling you what is similar to the game you just played. They are terrible at telling you why two games are connected — especially when the connection runs across studios, decades, and genres. That "why" bothered me, because it isn't really a fact about either game. Elden Ring and Stardew Valley share…
Every Game Is Connected — I Built the Graph That Proves It
Recommendation engines excel at suggesting games similar to the one you recently played, but they fail to explain the connection between games, particularly when the relationship spans studios, time periods, and genres. This bothered the author, as such connections are not merely a matter of database rows. However, there are genuine pathways between seemingly unrelated games—through other games, the creators and companies that developed them, and the lineages of remakes and expansions.
The connection is derived from these paths, making graphs the perfect tool for visualizing these relationships.
For his project (Graph Hacks by WeMakeDevs × FalkorDB), the author developed the Gaming Multiverse Reasoner, which, given any two to four games, traverses a graph of 50,217 games, 84,296 nodes, and 1,023,292 relationships to uncover hidden connections. The AI then narrates the result, with every claim verifiable by clicking on it.
For instance, asking about Elden Ring, Hades, Stardew Valley, and Baldur's Gate III yields 24 paths in just a couple of seconds, organized into five categories: direct lineage (remakes, remasters, DLCs, expansions, versions, shared collection/franchise parents), company bridges (a studio or publisher whose other games connect the pair), similar-game chains (the shortest paths over IGDB's similarity graph), common neighbors (games IGDB lists as similar to both), and shared threads (a genre, theme, or engine genuinely shared by both games).
Clicking any path card, sentence of the narration, or node in the graph illuminates the specific path. Additionally, there's a "Surprise me" feature that randomly selects four games. Since the system was tuned to a specific demo set, it's more of a gimmick than a product. The reasoning behind this decision lies in the fact that a system tailored to one set of games is more of a magic trick than a useful tool.
The core Cypher used for the graph traversal is relatively simple. The shortest path query matches two games, a and b, then finds the shortest path between them using up to four intermediate nodes. The resulting nodes are returned along with their IDs and names. The UI displays the actual query that produced each path card, allowing users to see the work behind the results.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
