going to start logging all the games i play this year!!! i want to try and experience more games i have in my backlog (at least until hades 2 likely causes me to black out all other earthly desires again). i neglected to do that for so long. one major reason was my steam list was sooooo messy - i constantly opened steam and felt immediate decision fatigue becuase i couldnt really pick out what i was looking at
recently i learned you could categorize games on steam. this made all the difference to me! i made categories for favorite games (so i could look at them fondly at any time), played games, want to play games, and games that i'm personally ambivalent about but somehow still ended up in my library. i also made a separate selection for co-op games so i can keep track of games my partner/friends and i can play together.
with all that out of the way, below are the games i finished and some thoughts (or not! it's all freeform babey)
recently played: Crypt of the Necrodancer and Cyberpunk 2077
CRYPT OF THE NECRODANCER
It's very easy for me to DNF games these days, and after playing about 20 mintues of COTN I knew I wasn't going to finish this game. I am a pretty decent rhythm games player, so I really liked the idea of a rhythm-based dungeon crawler, but... man. I truly underestimated just how much I didn't want to be hitting a button every single second of the time I spend in a game without any rest. I didn't spend enough time figuring out the fighting mechanics either, and each time I did and it spit me back to an earlier location, I could feel myself getting impossibly exhausted. It's a shame, though, because the game has a great gameplay premise and of course... the music does fucking slap.
CYBERPUNK 2077
I have spent 84 hours in this game stretched over the course of a year and some change, so it's a little disingenuous to say that I played it this year. However, I did just finish the 2 hour's worth of cutscenes that it takes to get the ending, so that's... something. At the end of it all, I'd have to call this the World's Most Expansive, Detailed Okay Game. While the characters (and the romance routes!) were pretty good, I just ultimately didn't feel moved by anything in the story enough for it to be considered a favorite of mine. It was just... okay to good--which is not exactly how I want to feel having played two business weeks' worth of a game. I didn't feel attached to a particular ending, most of which I think I chalk up to Keanu Reeves'... well. I respect him as a person too much to finish that sentence. I also never felt very attached to my character, which I'm learning is a preference of mine for seeing my character's face & thus interactions within-world--seeing her face a total of like 3 times just doesn't cut it. It appears as though I chose the bad end, which I literally chose just because it sounded the most interesting given the three, especially given that I had already played one in a dreamscape flashback, and I really did not want PanAm in danger. (Also, let women romance PanAm you fucking cowards.)
The final death knell to me was the shocking oversight on customization, which to me is an absolute pillar of open-world RPGs. The lack of a garage to store or customize cars still shocks me (& not even touching on how wildly fucking garbage the car mechanics were... holy fuck the hydroplaning in that game is abysmal. I'm pretty sure they just released a 10gb patch to finally fix this a day after I stopped playing it, but why did it take this long???? and yet I still loved driving through the environments sooo much despite all that lol). I really soured on how much more I liked the NPC's clothing selection over my own too. Everything available was just so ugly... T_T As a petty person who loves cosmetics, those exclusions are essentially inexcusable. While I know mods certainly exist, this is not a game in which I would expect to have to rely on that.
(ETA: My god they really did fix the car mechanics lmfao. They also finally added full mapping for the PS4 controller I think??? I would have loved that a year ago!!!)