Gold-Plated Games

After nearly a year’s absence from reviews (not to mention about six months without Weeklong Deals), I’ve decided I’m ready to return. Normally I would have some kind of poetic preamble to that announcement, but we’re still in the re-acclimation phase and I just want to get it out there. I am back. It has been…not a difficult road to return, but something I’ve had to navigate in terms of motivation and focus. I’m definitely not the same person who took a break in 2020, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either.

When the pandemic really started going in spring of last year, the sense of isolation hit me harder than I expected. To compensate, I decided to expand my streaming to six nights a week. Streaming has been a huge boon for my mental health since I started in 2018, and it did wonders for keeping me upbeat and motivated through quarantine. Of course, with more stresses and more time spent alleviating them with streams, something had to give, and that something was reviews. And while it was a necessary decision when weighed against streaming, I think it was part of a shift that was bound to happen anyway.

I’ve never been shy about wanting these endeavors to lead to something greater. I put time and effort into reviews in part because I wanted to be known for them, and possibly make a career out of them. I approached streaming with the same hopes, and after balancing both for a few years, the difference between them became clear. Streaming quickly evolved into something I loved doing and benefitted greatly from, much moreso than reviewing. I may have started as a reviewer who occasionally streamed, but I know what I want is to be a streamer who occasionally reviews.

And I do want to review things! So many of the games I’ve tried and completed over the last year deserve the attention of a full review, and since returning I’ve found such writing to be just as gratifying as before. I even have a dozen or so drafts of reviews I started over the last year, hoping that each would be my chance to return earlier than I did. But even now that I have had the motivation to crest that hill, there’s still something greater in my life, which also brings with it more potential. I don’t ever want to give up doing reviews entirely, but the balance must be something that suits me.

All of this is to say that yes, we’re back to reviews, but they’re not going to come as swiftly or as frequently as before. My goal now is one review a week, posted every Friday, on a game that I have completed. This means I probably won’t review many bad games (as I don’t tend to bother finishing them), and the games I do review will tend to be ones I started or completed on stream. Case in point, our first review tomorrow will be on The Ascent, a lovely cyberpunk ARPG that I started for a variety stream and excitedly finished on my own time. Weeklong Deals are also back, and those will be every Monday or Tuesday, depending on my schedule.

I’m sure there will be more shifts and adjustments in the future, as I ease back into the habit of writing again. I mean, I make tons of changes to my Twitch channel from month to month, so change should come as no surprise around here. But what will never change is my appreciation for you, coming by to read my thoughts on games and such. I know this website is not destined to be a cornerstone of the gaming world, and it may never return even to the heights I had built it to before. That’s fine, because it does what I need it to do now, and that’s connect me with you, whoever you might be. So yeah, thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you again real soon.