Earlier today I saw a post by Naithin of Time to Loot about giving some love for the backlog. His post is actually part of a Love your Backlog Week event hosted by Kim of Later Levels. The basic idea of it is to try to change the idea of the backlog from being a pile of shame to something to be celebrated, like a treasure chest.
My feelings towards my backlog isn’t so much shame for its quantity as much as for regret of all the games I started and never finished. Even more so if they are very popular games that everybody and their pet have already played, talked about and moved on. At least with a blog I have the advantage that even if the game is almost as old as the dinosaurs (by internet standards) I have a platform to discuss it. Then if I am really lucky someone might read it and we might have an interesting discussion about it.
One of the strategies that seems to be working for me to deal a little better with this feeling is playing at least one console game and a PC game every week. This way I am at least making some progress in a game I want to play, that may be new to me. I am considering tweaking this strategy and maybe make it a game for PC, one for PS4 and one for the Switch every week. This way I cover all my major game platforms and maybe even lessen my guilty a little. Not sure if it will work because if a game hooks me I have a tendency of playing it to the exclusion of everything else…
Anyway, there is more to this event than just writing a few paragraphs about your backlog, there are also some topics to give people a glimpse into our backlogs:
- A game you’re eager to play, but haven’t yet started
Oh, there are so many of those. SO. MANY. But just to pick one, Catherine Full Body. The original Catherine is one of those games I heard a lot of good things about in the past but didn’t play back then because I didn’t have a console. So when the Full Body version was announced I made it a priority to buy it… and then I never played the game.
My plan was to start playing it last month but then I decided to play Monster Hunter World and pretty much got so much into it that I didn’t play much of anything else. Maybe this month I will finally start on Catherine Full Body! Or maybe the next one. We’ll see.
- A game you’ve started several times but haven’t yet finished
This will probably not be any news to anyone who reads this blog regularly, but it would be The Witcher. It has some very clunky mechanics that always put me off. Yet the story and world building are interesting enough that I keep returning to it like a moth to flame. Plus there are the 2nd and 3rd games that from what I hear do everything better but I want to finish the first one before playing those.
The Witcher is actually one of the games I am playing this month. I think I am getting close to the end of Chapter 4 and then there should be just one more chapter and an epilogue. As long as the ADD does not hit me (*knocks on wood*) I should be able to finish it this month and then I can finally say I finished it!
- The most recent addition to your library
That would be the Yakuza Remastered Collection which I just bought last night. But since it will take a long time for it to arrive here, much less for me to actually start playing it let me choose something else.
I think the last games I bought were the Iceborne expansion for Monster Hunter World and the Uncharted collection, both for the Playstation 4. I got them in December 2019 with a gift card from my brother.
I did start playing those games though, so if we are counting in terms of games acquired but not played then I will pick Life is Strange Before the Storm, which I also bought last December, among other games, during the Steam Christmas sale.
- The game which has spent the most time on your backlog
This is a hard one since I couldn’t find an easy way to sort games by “Date Added” on Steam. Same thing with GOG Galaxy. The closest thing I could find was “Sort by Release Date” which has its own complications. Going by that the oldest, unplayed game, in my backlog would be Portal 2.
If I recall correctly I bought Portal 2 back when it was new. The only reason I haven’t played it yet is because I want to finish the first Portal game. And the only reason I never finished the first Portal is because ADD keeps happening. I know, I know, this is all heresy and I should hand in my gamer card. Look, I will finish these two games. One day. They are on my list of games I really want to play and finish.
- The person responsible for adding the most entries to your backlog
If I discount myself, my impulsiveness and other silly reasons to buy games, it would probably be my friend Sushi Geisha, back when she streamed at Twitch.
Thanks to her I got introduced to a lot of pretty good games. Some of those games even end up being my favorites, like the Yakuza franchise. In other occasions she changed my mind about certain games, like Final Fantasy XV. Even if she doesn’t stream anymore, I still hang around in her Discord channel, where she and other people make me consider certain games I’d probably skip due to our discussions in there.
There is more to this event than just answering questions. Next month there will be the #MaybeInMarch where they suggest to play the game that we picked for “The most time in the backlog” and blog about it. I will skip this part though because as much as I love Portal it is not a game I am in the mood to play right now. As I said earlier I’d have to finish it first before even contemplating playing Portal 2!
