Isn't really that good. The search function that is used to search for games is quite lacking and frustrating to use. My number one complaint is that you cant use it to search for a specific game genre e.g. if you type in "horror" it will return with a list of games with the word "horror" in it and not the "horror" genre. You can tick specific genres and tags but those are woefully inadequate. There are a total of 18 choices that are very broad. Unfortunately its (the search function) is not like a search engine which fills in the gaps and accounts for many hits that are vastly more nuanced than just finding the literal word that is in the search. All of this makes finding new games difficult and having to randomly slog through pages upon pages of games to find something interesting. I hope one day they enlarge the "genre" list and add choices like roguelike, horror, tactical or specific ratings teen, mature etc. That's all I love GOG, its the first place I go for games and only buy elsewhere if they literally don't have the title.

The Genres and Tags sections are strangely barebones. You can work around this by finding a game in the genre you're interested in, then clicking the Genre link that interests you. For example, go to Darkwood and click the Horror link in the list of genres.

As for the rest, I don't know what you mean. A way to search games by description might be useful, but otherwise the search seems pretty okay. Searching looks up not only titles, but developers and publishers as well. And there's some leeway with the keywords; for instance, searching for OST yields Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector - Soundtrack as the top result even though that search string isn't part of the title, developer, or publisher.

If you are willing to run user scripts, you can add another search option.

https://github.com/ghorint2t/scripts

You can search for every game tagged as horror by selecting Genre -> Include -> Horror. You can also exclude genres, for example if you never buy Visual Novels or Hidden Object games..


Other activities include searching for games with a discount > 75%, and blacklisting games that you never want to see in search results.

Neither the forum search nor the games search work properly. The forum search is an abomination. The worst forum search I have ever used, no contest, since there is no competition.

What I mean is that you cannot fine tune a search to cut out things you dont want to see and make your search super specific. For instance there is a site I visit with a search function that has 12 pages of tags. Examples of this are

Top Down, Narrative, Funny, Dark, Female Protagonist, Multiplayer, Space, Roguelike, Point and Click and on and on.

You can really drill down and get to what your looking for with a search engine like that cut out all the chaff and save time.
I mean even if they added Third Person Perspective it would weed out a lot of games since I prefer Third to First.

I suppose I should say this, the search function is fine if your looking for a title like say Cyber Punk 2077 or something like that. What I am talking about is browsing games like window shopping. Sometimes I come here with the idea of buying a game but not a specific title. I want to try something new or find something new. That is when the search function does not help very much. For instance how do I find a list of text based games? I cant.

https://www.gog.com/games?genres=tpp

Another thing, GOG seems to struggle with high unicode support. Anything that exists outside of the basic ASCII and their XML database throws a fit. A real 🔧 in the works, since you can't directly copy emoticons or such.

There was supposed to be a second wrench, but it, and everything after it got erased because I used the actual unicode instead of an XML entry.

Exclusion filters and a games blacklist would be very useful additions to the store. Like I said, the Genres and Tags sections are barebones. We're in agreement that they should be expanded. Yes, judging by The Zork Anthology, there doesn't appear to be a genre defined for that. Notably, the search link for Kaigan Games OÜ is broken, and replacing the u with ü in the link doesn't work either. I expected that to be the sort of thing that's quickly noticed and fixed, but Simulacra was added to the store back in 2019.

Which is stupid, given that as a Polish company, extended unicode support is a minimal mandate, given the language.

hey....forum search isnt great either....
i hope, given the recent updates to the store page, that the forum will get a revamp soon...but i could be very...very wrong.

It still sucks looking for games on GOG.