I’ve been playing a lot of relaxing and comfy games for the past couple of months, for reasons you can probably guess. I’m still on the Animal Crossing train, and then I was playing a bunch of Pokémon romhacks (Pokémon Prism is VERY well-done if you haven’t played it). There were a couple weeks of Minecraft in there as well when the Nether update happened. But I’ve been feeling kind of… burnt out? about the games I’m playing to relax, because they’re not super enriching, if that makes sense. Last week I mixed it up and cracked open the original Half Life which was INCREDIBLY refreshing, and it made me realize I should really expand my horizons. So, I’ve decided to try to burn through my video game backlog.
Most games are the classic “I bought this during a Steam Sale and then never played it”. The other games are from itch.io’s recent Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. In order to actually get through all of these, I plan to play each game for at least four hours, or until I beat the game, whichever is shorter. The thought behind this is that, A) I don’t want to spend too much time on each game but also, B) most of these games are considered classics, so I want to play them long enough to know what their deal is before bailing because they feel old or take a while to get into. In all probability I’ll dislike some of these enough to bail early, so I guess we’ll see. Another caveat is that, in the worst case, this computes out to over six entire days of my life. So it’ll be a while. Really though, the point is to make a guide for myself to consume media in a more thoughtful way, rather than just mindlessly cracking open Pokémon Emerald for the 30th playthrough of my life. Finally, I want to write a little microreview of each of these games in order to force myself to think critical thoughts about these games and synthesize how I feel about them. I’ve added links to all the posts I’ve done below, for your perusal:
Update: 09/16/21
The index now lives here