Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for !videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
Interesting. How far in did you get? I think maybe if you looked up a getting started guide you might be able to assuage that trapped feeling, because Dark Souls and Elden Ring manage to feel like some of the most “free” games in my experience. But there’s definitely a crushing learning curve.