Ali Rees Explores The Joy of Accepting Your Backlog | Winter Spectacular 2024

As gamers, we are frequently faced with backlog shame. It’s something I am sure a lot of other hobbyists can relate to - there are hundreds of thousands of posts on Instagram tagged #ToBeRead featuring stacks and shelves of books; film fanatics keep sorted lists on Letterboxd; Lego, Gundam, and god knows what else fans have boxes and boxes of unopened projects, and of course, gamers’ Steam libraries are bursting with unplayed gems.

The world we live in is so fast-paced, with new media coming out at a truly inconceivable rate, that this state of affairs is pretty much inevitable. Games are marketed with limited-time events and exclusives, there’s always a sale happening somewhere, and the pressure to just get the new games and participate in the conversation (for the fifteen minutes it lasts on social media) has never been higher.

Especially as a games journalist, the expectation is that you’ll know about and play new games as they are released. My inbox is full of publishers telling me about new games or content releases, while my BlueSky feed and community spaces are all stuffed with people enjoying whatever came out this week. You have to be a generalist who knows about all the latest releases and enough of an expert to speak about new games authoritatively. So of course the pile of classics I should “Really get around to” hardly ever gets chipped away at.

I have never been able to keep up, and for a long time, this was a source of shame greater than my backlog itself. How the heck do I expect to be a respected games journalist whose opinions others trust if I can’t even play every new game that comes out? I spent a long time, years and years, buying games speculatively. Every Steam sale, I’d fill my cart and check out with reduced-priced games that I should play. It became a self-perpetuating cycle of shame, both about not having played the games I felt I should have played, and about how much money I’d spent on games that I’d never even installed.

It was something I was particularly worried about when I started Quick Play, my website dedicated to reviewing games that take ten hours or less to play. So many new games come out every month, how can I possibly keep up?

But then something quite curious happened. While I have covered new things both for QP and startmenu this year, some of the most engagement I’ve seen has been around older games, with people telling me frequently that I have encouraged them to finally go and check out certain games. Whether it’s games that came out fairly recently like Stray or games that are years old like Titanfall 2, whatever I covered, someone wanted to play it as a result

This made me realise something - clearly, I am not the only person with a huge Steam library and limited time. Comment after comment reiterated that others out there bought games with good intentions only to let them gather proverbial dust. Little by little, I felt my shame lift. It also reinforced that video game reviews don’t have to be strictly limited to the newest releases. Shining a light on games of the past might not be ‘newsworthy’ but it does seem to be useful to a bunch of folks, particularly those who aren’t super tapped into the hype schedule.

There are loads of games that have come out in 2024 that I really do want to play. I haven’t finished the Elden Ring DLC. Dragon’s Dogma 2 seems like a rollicking good time. Animal Well’s layered mysteries sound like they were made for me. But I have resisted the shame that previously had me buy games on release despite knowing that I wasn’t going to get to them for weeks or months. I will buy them when I think I am going to play them, and it’s fine. As a result of taking the pressure off, I’ve discovered so many incredible games from my backlog.

I took the time to dig into Cyberpunk 2077, discovering the dystopia of Night City and its compelling sights, sounds, and stories. I played Bloodborne for the first time, an incredible game that shot into my top ten of all time unimpeded. I played (and in some cases, replayed purely for enjoyment) a ton of indie games that friends have been telling me about for years, from Her Story to Firewatch. I stopped putting pressure on myself to keep up with everyone else. When Helldivers 2 came out, I was neck-deep in university assignments, so instead of buying it because of my fear of missing out, playing it once or twice, then going back to my work, I made an active choice to sit it out, and it was that agency in the decision making that was empowering.

So, as we all start thinking about New Year’s resolutions and ‘New Year New Me’ plans, I would encourage you to take a step back and figure out what motivates your gaming. Are you grabbing all the new releases because you want to? If so, please keep doing what makes you happy. If you’re starting to think there might be something else to it, step back and regroup. Nobody will think any less of you if you take some time to play the games in your backlog. Who knows, you might find a new (old) favourite.