April

Dear Esther: Landmark Edition

On the apropos of its new Landmark edition (with achievements!), I replayed Dear Esther. I have to say I enjoyed it more the second time, I was less confused by its intentionally confusing plot, and the director’s commentary was quite interesting. (Review)

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Time Mysteries 2: The Ancient Spectres

In April I got two more achievements for this game, but just today I decided to drop it. I love the hidden object/puzzle/adventure genre, but playing this game feels like a chore. Pretty telling that I’ve been trying to bring myself to finish it since February, and I just can’t… So I’m shamefully dropping it, and looking for something to play that’s actually enjoyable. (Review)

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Tengami

A short, and mostly easy puzzle game, good for a few easy achievements. (Review)

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Mirrored - Chapter 1

It has an interesting premise and enjoyable gameplay, but it’s unfinished (the plot has barely started), and one of the achievements is very buggy. (Review)

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MechaNika

Yet another “edgy” “lulz” adventure game, that, while having extremely positive reviews, I didn’t find particularly enjoyable (other examples have been Deponia and Runaway). It’s too shallow, and mistakes humour for crassness. (Review)

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The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne

Short and cute adventure game about social anxiety. It was okay. (Review)

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Forgotten, Not Lost - A Kinetic Novel

A short kinetic novel about aging/dementia. It was kinda okay too, nothing to write home about. (Review)

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So that has been my April :)

Notes

In case someone finds them useful, these are the tools I use for managing my game collection, and deciding what to play next:

AStats

One of the achievement tracker sites, but prefer it to others because you can sort your own collection by approximate easiness to complete all achievements on. (Here’s mine as an example.)

SteamSpy

When picking games specifically to work through my backlog I prefer short games, as it’s easier to achieve a sense of progression with those before I tackle the “monsters” :D SteamSpy helps one see the average and median playtime of each game, thus gives a rough guess how much time one is likely to spend with it.

And finally…

Steam Depressurizer

A godsend for managing huge collections. It scrapes the data from the Steam store pages, and automatically categorises games in your Steam client based on customisable categories. (genre / tags / release year / user ratings / etc.) It also has handy filtering options for manual collection tweaking.

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Do you use any tools (aside of this site ;) ) that you find particularly helpful for backlog clearing? Tell me in the comments :D

I guess I can use this space to make some kind of monthly report of new achievements and finished games.

March

In March I wasn’t too active on Steam, and only got 8 new achievements for Civilization V. My April is already better than that, I will make a post about it when it’s over ;)

Outside of Steam I played 78 hours of Guild Wars 2 over the month.

(Psst, folks, how do you include those game completion cards in your posts?)

Introduction

Thank you for the add! I applied as I have a shameful size of backlog. Apparently I’ve never played 84% of the 700+ games I own on Steam. (Though a handful of them I had played and finished before I got them on Steam as well, but for the most part it’s true.)

I spend most of my gaming time with Guild Wars 2 (800+ hours and counting!), but I regularly make conscious effort to pick up and finish yet unplayed titles from my Steam collection :)

I’m somewhat of a completionist, so I usually strive to get all achievements from a game before putting it down. (80% avg. game completion rate currently)
Also I like to leave a review for games I’ve played a meaningful amount of time with. So far I’ve left review for 91% of the games I’ve played :)