How to Use Filters on Acclaimed Video Games

Acclaimed Video Games lets you narrow its ranked list of 1,400 games using filters for game status, release year, platform, genre, series, and playtime, plus sorting by rank, year, alphabetical order, or playtime. To use them, open the Filters panel above the list, set the criteria you want, and the ranking updates to show only matching games. This is most useful when you already know roughly what you want to play — a specific console, a decade, or a time budget — and want the site's critic-list ranking to do the shortlisting for you.

What the filters cover

The site's filter panel groups criteria into these categories:

A Clear All Filters control resets everything at once.

Step-by-step: filtering the list

1. Open the Filters panel. It sits above the ranked list, next to the "Most Acclaimed Video Games of All Time" heading.
2. Set Game Status if you want to track your own play. The three states are ☆ Untracked, ★+ Want, and ★ Played. This is a personal tracking layer, not a quality filter — it doesn't change a game's rank.
3. Narrow by Release Year. You can pick a decade, set a From/To year range (the selector covers 1970 through 2025), or use the Last 5 years / Last 10 years presets for a quick recent-games view.
4. Add Platform, Genre, or Series to cut the list down to what you can actually play or what you're in the mood for.
5. Set Playtime using the Short / Medium / Long presets, or enter a custom minimum and maximum in hours under Completion Range.
6. Choose a sort order. The list can be sorted by Rank, Year, A–Z, or Playtime. Sorting by Playtime is the fastest way to find something that fits a specific time budget.
7. Check the result count. The list header shows how many games match — for example, "Showing 100 of 1,400" — so you can tell whether your filters are too narrow.
8. Reset with Clear All Filters when you want to start over.

How playtime filtering works

Playtime values come from HowLongToBeat and are shown per game in the list — for example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is listed at ~50h, Tetris at ~3h, and Half-Life 2 at ~13h. The Short / Medium / Long presets map onto that data, and the custom range lets you set your own minimum and maximum. Use the presets when you just want "something short tonight"; use the custom range when you have a hard limit, like 20 hours before a trip.

Reading the ranked results

Each entry shows its rank, title, release year, developer, platforms, genre, approximate playtime, and how many critic lists included it. For example, the #1 entry is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017, Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 3, WiiU/SW, Action-Adventure, ~50h, 109 lists), and #2 is Tetris (1985, Alexey Pajitnov, Puzzle, ~3h, 99 lists). The "lists" count tells you how widely recommended a game is across the source publications — a game with 119 lists, like The Last of Us, appears on more critic lists than one with 87, like Ocarina of Time, even though both sit in the top five.

Common snags

• Too few results. Stacking platform + genre + series + a narrow year range can empty the list. Drop the least important filter first.
• Playtime is an estimate. HowLongToBeat figures are community averages, so treat ~50h as a ballpark, not a promise.
• Status filters don't affect ranking. Marking a game as Played or Want only changes your own tracking view.
• The data has an update date. The list shown here is marked "Updated: March 25, 2026," so ranks and list counts can shift between visits.