Greetings! The good folks of Later Levels set a February challenge about gaming backlogs. So, we’re here to discuss that. Yes, we are. 

Also just a shoutout to Later Levels, as they’re doing GameBlast 21 later this month.

This is an awesome charity fundraiser for SpecialEffect, who create modified technology to help people with disabilities enjoy video games.

Most excellent! Donate if you wish. Or support the cause by watching LL’s Twitch livestream 27th Feb from 8:00am—a 24-hour gaming marathon 

What’s a “Gaming Backlog”?

In the way a reader can have books on their shelves they never get round to, so gamers have games they never get round to.

This can be frustrating as you really want to play the game, but for various reasons you never do. 

Eventually your brain stultifies and you kind of abandon ever playing the thing ever, cursing existence itself for lack of time integrity. 

Five Gaming Backlog Questions!

Later Levels set five questions to the blogging community. Five! And we answered each and every one of them. Here we go!

The effect that the 2020 apocalypse had on your backlog

Being indoors more in lockdown, we wanted a big old epic open-world title to sink into. Thusly, Red Dead Redemption II fit the bill.

We got an Xbox One S in March 2020, so on Game Pass also experimented around with plenty of indie games. 

And we tried the Halo series after completing Red Dead II. We didn’t enjoy the Halo series (horror!), so we spent the rest of the year faffing around on various Game Pass titles. 

In other words, we got to do more gaming than normals thanks to the lack of commuting. Huzzah!

The oldest game in terms of release date

Erm… dunno. This’ll be something on our Steam library. Probably Playdead’s Limbo, which we never did get round to playing. 

After loving INSIDE so much, we wanted to give it a go. But we’ve heard INSIDE is far superior to Limbo. That means we may never play the latter!

A game you bought on day one, only to not play it

We can’t say this has ever happened. If we’re buying a game on day one, we’re eager and going to play the thing. 

Ori and the Will of the Wisps launched on an awkward work night and we still got four hours in on the glorious bastard. 

The game which has spent the most time on your backlog

Technically Super Mario RPG, because we read about it in the official Nintendo magazine in 1996. But it didn’t come out in Europe.

This meant a 20+ year wait until we finally did play it in 2019 on the SNES Classic Mini. 

More recently, we’ve had to lay off Steam as our laptop just isn’t up to the task. So a whole bunch of games are sitting about waiting to be played. 

The most recent addition to your library

We got ourselves a discounted Luigi’s Mansion 3 for the Nintendo Switch. 

The person responsible for adding the most entries to your backlog, due to their good recommendation

Not a person, but a games publisher—Devolver Digital. The business is responsible for taking on so many incredible indie game studios and getting their work out there. 

Many thanks to Devolver, they really don’t get enough credit for what they do. An example? Gato Roboto. Awesome! 

Why are you such a stupid poopy pants? 

That’s highly inappropriate and preposterous that you’d dare suggest such a thing to us! 

Only ever do we take the highest care of our pants and everything associated with that area. End of!