Just poking away at videogames

Life is way to short to focus on playing a single game from start to finish, or at least that’s how I often act, from time to time. ¹

Last year, I shared a list of ongoing games that I started and did’t finish in 2025, and guess what? That list just keeps growing and growing after less than two months have gone by, while the list of completed titles has only gone up by one, total.²

Can’t quite pinpoint why, but at this point, I have no issue starting games one after another, leaving them for days or weeks or months—even years—without worrying, I just know that I’ll eventually return to those that are worthy.

Very early on my blogging days I wrote about almost completing games, at the time I lamented and complained about the fact that I didn’t even finish games that I actually liked.

However, finishing games stopped being an issue by this point, if I’m honest, now I simply start games that I find interesting and add them to my rotation whenever I feel up for the task. In most cases, I don’t really need to care about the last time I played it, I can keep quite a bit of my memory fresh, I still know where I need to go in most games I have left even months ago, such as Dragon Quest XI or Breath of the Wild, and if that’s not the case, starting a new game doesn’t make me feel guilty anyway.

The start of this year has been quite wild. Silksong has been a joy to poke at ever since I got my first ending. Whenever I pick it up I choose a random direction and do something, even though my map is pretty much complete and only a few tasks are pending to unlock Act 3, I don’t need to run, I just enjoy the ride.

Then I went for Outer Wilds, uncovered a lot of incredibly mind-bending mysteries from space, proceeded to play more of it, got a bit stuck, and even though I could return to it, I simply haven’t. The game features a great log that makes things easy to know where I left off, and even without it, there’s plenty left for me to wander around and explore.

I also returned to Terranigma, kind of inspired by some enthusiasm I saw for it on the TWG Discord server, I did a few of the starting Towers, and then moved on and forgot about it. I still feel completely capable of returning to it sometime soon, it’s a great game and it entertains me, it’s just that other things called to me.

Such is the case with The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, which continues to be fantastic every time I return to it, almost on a bi-weekly basis at this point. It’s been cozy to see how the stories continue to develop as I play it slowly and surely progressing through all the plotlines.

Of course, CrossCode proved itself to me recently when I got stuck on it six hours staight, all to catch up with my friends who are playing along—and who are patiently waiting for me to make progress, I hope—and since there is lots of help within the game itself, I don’t feel bad when I leave it be.

Then completely out of nowhere, something like Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero, a game I hadn’t played for years, gets poked for like a day, I enjoy completing a level of it, and proceed to not play any further again. Maybe I’ll check it out some other time soon, but there’s no pressure, and no guilt.

Sometimes I just allow myself to enjoy peak, with games like Final Fantasy VI, which never fails to get me engaged and complete a dungeon or progress on the plot. I don’t mind using a guide every once in a while for this one, as I do want to find most of its secrets and get good gear to not get into any unnecessary hiccups. In any case, returning has never been an issue, it always gets to me in the end.

Even Ninja Five-O, a game I hadn’t touched since 2023, has proved to be no problem! It is a platformer though, so it was a matter of remembering its mechanics and it really proved to be no match. I actually completed it on Easy Mode already, but I want to at least finish it in normal to see more levels.

And despite all of those games, some of them literally considered a masterpiece of their respective genres or the medium as a whole, I still suddenly decided to play Resident Evil 2, just because it was chosen by the Low Key Gaming Club I’m on, and boy is it so incredibly fun! I may leave it for a bit, I may stick to it, but the point is that I’ll keep playing it across an unknown span of time, because it’s fun! I’ll make progress and eventually finish it, like all the others…

Either way, maybe I’m just blindly optimistsic. I do love seeing how crazy my gaming journal looks though.

This is day 16 of #100DaysToOffload.