Eddie

One year since the end of the Humble Purge, my backlog slaying endeavour of 2024. I have chronicled this project in two previous articles (Clearing the backlog: Humble Purge Act II & Cleared the backlog?: Humble Purge Act II) as well as a bonus article (The Humble Purge Awards). In those, I said I would keep posting about the games I play in 2025 in the form of a journal. Today as I write these word it's December 31st 2025, and I need to haul ass. Just like last year, I recorded all the info about the games I played in a google sheet, which you can peruse at your leisure. Note that I finished my backlog project last year around the end of November, so the 2025 Journal encompasses all the games played between Nov 23rd 2024 and Dec 31st 2025.

What the backlog was this year

As stated in my previous articles, this year the “backlog” was more of a gaming journal. I didn't have any set games to play, or any amount of games to play, I was free to pick whatever. That is a very different vibe from last year, where I just had a list of games to complete by the end of the year. I was kinda lost at the beginning, so I just ended up playing the cheapest games of my steam wishlist. This was still not the way to go, as I would still feel a bit disconnected from the games I played, and couldn't get in the right mindset to enjoy myself. I was more going through the motion than actively participating in the games.

Choosing games from my wishlist was not the Humble Purge, but it was still not an organic way to go about having fun. It still felt like a work project. Thankfully, it took me less than a month to realise this, and I went for a completely vibes based approach to playing games after. Instead of picking games that had been on my wishlist for god knows how long, I let myself be influenced.

I played the hip games of the moments, or whatever my friends were playing. Throughout December and January I played Inscryption, Balatro, replayed Dark Souls III, my favourite game ever. I also played a shit ton of Street Fighter 6, my very first* fighting game. I was planning to make an article about it and stuff, but while I did write 5500 word, I lost interest in the game in May and didn't want to edit all that. If you are really interested, please find my unedited and unfinished article here: *link.

So this is what the backlog was this year, a journal of games I play on the fly. Sure, there's some stuff that I picked up from my wishlist, and some from the rejected games of the Humble purge, but overall, it was just stuff that caught my eye in the moment. It was still the same process to play them, I log everything into a google sheet, and play each game for a minimum of an hour before giving up if they are not to my taste.

_{my steam wishlist, there's like 55 games on there}

The games

The final tally for the Humble Purge, or the games I played last year, was 110 games played for a total duration of 758h. This year, I played 55 games for a total of 805h. _{this is a stream of consciousness-ish article because I have not time to write anything else} 805h?! How the fuck is that possible! I mean sure, this time around I logged games that I played throughout the end of November and December 2024 but that's only an extra 1.25 month. 805h! What the hell?! I wasn't even trying hard this year! Am I a no-life? There's no way I played dozens of more hours of video games this year than last year, when my whole year last year was dedicated to the backlog. 805h! When did I have time to play all these games?

Let's look at the data to figure it out:

November and December do add about 110 hours, but still. It looks like February — which is not yet busy at work — and July — when I was on vacation — were the months I played the most, accounting for about 30% of my playtime. Honestly, apart from those, I don't feel like I spent that much time on video games this year. And I played so little games, how is it that I played half as many games, but ended up playing for longer than last year?

Alrighty, my 5 most played games account for ~50% of all my playtime last year, and my top 10 for over two thirds. I did get a bit obsessed with Street Fighter 6 at the beginning of the year, and then I got Slay the Spire on my phone and played on the can, and then you do need about 90h to get a proper playthrough of Elden Ring with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, and then well, you need to take your time with Silksong, and the new hard mode came out for Ready or Not so I had to play as well... I do start to get how I got to 805h this year. So did I really play games for for that long?

This graph shows for how long I've played each games. Every duration past 7h has grown compared to last year. This year I played almost half of all games for more than 7h and a third for more than 10h. I spent so much more time on each game in general, so that must mean I had more fun. I also introduced a new rating system this year, where instead of rating everything out of 10, some games are rated out of their scope. This is because making a flawless game is more impressive for a massive game of the proportions of Elden Ring, than one of the scale of King of the Bridges. Therefore the bigger games are rated out of 10, and the smaller ones out of less than 10. A flawless big game will be a 10/10, a flawless small game a 4/4 for example. This makes it super annoying to make graphs, so I have to put everything back to 10/10 to do it 🙃.

I was expecting way stronger results here. While the average is 7.26/10, which is higher than last year's 6.92/10, it's nowhere near high enough as this year I replayed some of my favourite games, and only picked games I thought I would enjoy. More on that in the The Journal is in need of improvements. Hype is not really super relevant this year, as I had not set games to play, and I just picked stuff based on a whim. But now the question is, did the game genre distribution change from last year since I could pickup whatever I wanted?

Some games were counted twice because they fit in two categories, like Balatro and Slay the Spire, which both fit in “Card” and “Roguelike” equally. Since I had half as many games this year, I have a bit less categories, and they are all represented on the graph. I merged “Action” into “Shooter” and “RPG” because all the action games I played this year actually fit either categories. No adventure games this year, which is a more generic genre. I consolidated the more thinking games that aren't puzzles into “Strategy”, and voilà. Overall, the top genres are pretty similar, except for “Point-and-clicks” which I just didn't play as I discovered I really hated them last year. Proportionally, way more Fighting games this year, more RPGs, Roguelikes, Puzzles and Platformers, the first being a genre I discovered this year, and the the last for genres I love. There was only one Metroidvania in 2025, which is something I'll have to remediate as it is one of my favourite genre.

I don't think it really matters that much if I finished games or not this year, but in any case, here's the breakdown: Of all 55 games I played, 35 could be finished (e.g. you can't “finish” a purely multiplayer game). Of those, I completed 24, played 8 for more than an hour before giving up, and abandoned 3 after only 1h. I finished about 69% (nice) of the games I set out to play this year, which is more than last year, but that's not surprising.

The Journal is in need of improvements

I already talked about what went sort of askew at the beginning of the year, but the way I corrected it was not satisfactory to me. First, choosing games on a whim led me to buy games on sale that I wanted to play, but then not playing them because by the time I got to them, there was something else that caught my eye. I have now created another backlog. Second, there is something I lost by not having a list of games to play, I'm just not challenging my tastes or being very adventurous. There are many games from the backlog last year that I would never in a million year have picked but that ended up being amazing experiences. With the way I chose my games this year, I was only playing stuff I expected to enjoy, and therefore set myself up for disappointment. Last year, there were not high expectations for a lot of games, and that lead the good surprise to become greater. I did play a couple of games from the rejected list of last year's backlog, and came out with a great surprise, which was Basement. With an original hype of 5/10 and a steam score of 77%, I would not have played this game, and yet it garnered a 7/8 rating after I played it.

Going back to Daryl Talks Games videos, which inspired the Humble Purge, I think I should do something similar to what he did — have a mini list of game to play throughout the year, like one a month or so, and then continue playing things on a whim.

_{thumbnails of Daryl's four backlog videos}

Guess I need another backlog project

As I've said above, I have acquired some games during steam sales that I haven't touched, an unforgivable offense that will need to be addressed. Therefore, my mini list of games that I have to play next year is gonna be those 12 games. One per month is honestly not that bad. I had done a Games Backlog project, followed by a Games Journal project, and I now realise that the optimal way to go about this is to have a bit of both, a Backlog Journal Fusion. And as usual, if I had just listened to Daryl's videos more carefully I would have seen that earlier. So that's what I'm gonna do next year if I have time. (Let's not kid ourselves, I will have time). See you next year,

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author