The Trouble With Playing Games “Buffet Style”
Earlier this year, I wrote about gaming burnout through my experience playing Neon White. Though easily one of the strongest indies of 2022, I had trouble finishing Neon White, which caused me to doubt my passion for video games as a whole. I finished Neon White by August, making it the 27th game I finished in 2022. But considering that, in past years, I’ve easily cleared through 50 games, something has recently gone wrong with my interest in gaming.
Finish What You Started
The biggest culprit for my troubled relationship to video games, I believe, is that I have found difficulty in finishing games after starting them. For instance, at the time of this writing, I am in the final area of Bloodborne, which I abruptly fell off after recording a podcast on the game. I tell myself I plan to return to finish Bloodborne, as I overcame my issues with the game. Furthermore, it would be the first FromSoftware game that I’d be finishing without actively cheating, but for a number of reasons, I haven’t found the motivation to pick the game back up. It still sits stationary in my PS5 disc drive, waiting to be completed.
Readers of Epilogue will know about my experience with Yakuza 0 and its unwieldy completionist run, so I won’t repeat those points in detail here. But giving up on a game when you are so incredibly close to finishing it completely is a demoralizing decision to make, and no doubt further dampened my enthusiasm to play games as a whole, since I felt guilt every time I considered finishing Yakuza 0’s achievements.
Another bugbear in my gaming library is Rollerdrome, a stylish indie game that brilliantly blends together the fluid, trick-based environments of the Tony Hawk series and precise, tactical shooting reminiscent of games like Severed Steel. I genuinely like Rollerdrome, but I’d be remiss not to address my main issue with it: Rollerdrome is far more difficult than it ought to be. This difficulty isn’t the result of poor design, but rather, the requisite challenges in each rollerblading stage become increasingly demanding and complex. The game escalates from simple collectibles in earlier levels to taking out entire squadrons of enemies while maintaining combos, managing ammo, targeting enemy types with the right weapons – all under a time limit. Some mid-to-late game levels became so intense that I retried them half a dozen times before losing steam. As with Bloodborne, I intend to return to Rollerdrome, I’m just not convinced that the effort to complete this rollerblading game will be deeply satisfying.
Abandoning My Most Anticipated Game of 2022
Then there’s my personal elephant in the room: A Plague Tale: Requiem. Serving as the much anticipated sequel to one of my favorite third-person action games in recent memory, I had high expectations for Requiem. And while Asobo Studios certainly cranked up the technical prowess, expanding the world and story rapidly, the changes between games didn’t ultimately cause me to enjoy the sequel more. In fact, the “perfect pacing” of A Plague Tale: Innocence that I have written about previously was sacrificed in exchange for a “bigger + more = better” design philosophy that has become exhausting when approaching new AAA sized releases.
I feel sheepish and guilty when thinking of how little progress – about 14 hours – I’ve made in A Plague Tale: Requiem. When people spoke earnestly about Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West as game of the year contenders this spring, I was haughtily predicting that A Plague Tale: Requiem would be the sleeper hit answer to those massive titles. Considering I often tell people that A Plague Tale: Innocence is like if The Last of Us was good, I knew before playing it that A Plague Tale: Requiem would be my game of the year. Alas, I was wrong.
A Plague Tale: Requiem stings more than these other unfinished titles, and more than any other, I fully intend to complete the story before the end of the year. But the game has been out for well over a month at this point, and I haven’t touched it since the weekend after its release. Hell, I even took a day off work to play Requiem on day one. Having spoken with other early adopters of the game, however, I know I am not alone in losing momentum with Requiem. The game contains simply too many stealth, puzzle, and combat sections strewn together, and that formula becomes both repetitive and exhausting quite quickly. I’m hoping that, when I return to Requiem, that burnout evaporates and the game feels fresh once more.
Abandoning The Critical Darling of Fall 2022
My list continues with God of War Ragnarök, arguably the primary contender with Elden Ring for most critical praise and awards for 2022. As with A Plague Tale: Requiem, I picked up Ragnarök on release day and instantly clicked with it. I’m not a die-hard fan of the God of War series, but I enjoyed 2018’s God of War so much that I completed all the Valkyrie battles. So it was a no-brainer to become an early adopter of Ragnarök.
All of the critical praise I have seen aimed at Ragnarök checks out with my experience thus far. But here’s the thing: the entirety of my experience amounts to about six total hours of playtime in Ragnarök. Weekend after weekend, I keep telling myself that I’m going to make some substantial progress, and weekend after weekend, I blow it off somehow – making plans with friends, reading books, watching TV series, and so on.
Funnily enough, with Ragnarök, I loaned out my now-unused PS4 to a dear friend, who was able to download the included digital PS4 copy of Ragnarök to play at release. This friend has now completed all of Ragnarök, passed me on a second playthrough, and completed the original God of War as well. It’s obviously a bad idea to compare yourself to other people, but I can’t help but look around at everyone raving endlessly about how compelling Ragnarök is and wonder why I haven’t given it even a dozen hours yet.
Other Distractions & Rabbit Holes
There are other games that are sitting somewhere in an “in progress” state in my mind currently, the biggest being Vampire Survivors, which, paradoxically, I have dumped about 25 hours into since purchasing a Steam Deck. I’ve played more Vampire Survivors than the game I was most anticipating as well as the most critically acclaimed release of the fall season combined. I can’t say with any certainty if there is a proper credits roll of completion in Vampire Survivors, but I have completed every stage and the majority of achievements – so I’m approaching a point where I feel comfortable saying I might have “finished” it. I’m sure I will one day unpack why Vampire Survivors is so addicting and why it feels like the perfect Steam Deck game, but that discussion would be best served in a separate article.
I haven’t even considered ongoing multiplayer games like Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, which is now on its third free-to-play season. I’ve long felt above cosmetic microtransactions, but I recently splurged some real currency on purchasing a Dalek costume from the Doctor Who series, of which I am a longtime fan. The guilt in making such a purchase caused me to earnestly work through Fall Guys’ season pass (also paid), logging in for about one hour every few days to add to my overall progress. I have long since completed all of the Fall Guys achievements, but it is still easily my favorite way to idly spend gaming time with friends or listening to podcasts, amounting to nearly 350 hours in-game. For whatever reason, even Fall Guys, with its promise of endless challenges to complete, has taken precedence over games I’ve paid full price for and abandoned within a few weeks.
Keeping A List of Completion
For the past few years since working in games writing, I have kept an ongoing list of games that I have completed in that calendar year. This list contains both older games that I am playing for the first time and more contemporary releases. I typically post some of my favorite screenshots from the game and a brief evaluative summary of my experience with it. I enjoy creating these lists, primarily because they facilitate conversation with other games writers, as well as developers who chime in, responding to my feedback about their game.
I opened up the thread of my completed games for 2022 and felt rather deflated when I noticed that I hadn’t been able to add any new games since Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! nearly two months prior. I looked at the list of ongoing, uncompleted games – Rollerdrome, Requiem, Ragnarök, and the rest – and could not convince myself to finish any of them in a reasonable span of hours. But despairing over my stalled list finally motivated me to play something so I could revive it. Scouring some indie dev promotions and friend recommendations, I compiled a shortlist aimed at making me feel like I would finally be able to complete a game once more. And I did – three, in fact, in one weekend.
The first game I was able to work all the way through is called Secret Little Haven, a short indie reminiscent of a visual novel. The premise of the game involves rewinding to 1999 instant messenger clients on PC, chatting under screen names with people you’ve met in forum communities online. As the game develops, you start to put together some signs that later become explicit: Alex, the protagonist who you are responding as, is a newly gender exploring trans woman. Though I thought I would be put off by the aesthetic of the game, I was sucked in quite quickly. I was reminded of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and GaiaOnline back in middle school, digital places where I could safely talk to friends in a way that adults wouldn’t actively monitor. It made me yearn for what my life could have been like if I was as brave as Alex in Secret Little Haven. No doubt, a full article will be dedicated to this game sometime in the near future.
Morph Girl is arguably a stranger game than Secret Little Haven, or any of the above games in this article. Billed as a J-horror FMV title, Morph Girl presents itself like a silent film, with an ominous score, non-verbal scenes, and an overall cloud of dread permeating the experience. The premise involves making some choices regarding someone who seems to have been the main character’s partner at some point, but who has either disappeared or died. The game is short enough that pursuing the six endings was reasonable in a single sitting, and I would have gone through the final two achievements, but they seemed to be bugged out as I pried through the Steam Community looking for advice on how to unlock them. These two achievements require the player to watch the entirety of two black-and-white films. I tried watching “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” twice all the way through, amounting to three hours of additional “playtime,” but nothing I tried caused the achievements to pop, so I gave up, a little deflated when 100% was so close.
Finally, I picked up the full game release from a demo that I streamed and loved earlier this year: Kaichu – A Kaiju Dating Simulator. The absurdity of this game’s premise cannot be exaggerated, as it spins an already hokey concept – the dating simulator – and inverts it by introducing kaiju monsters to each other. In Kaichu, your “dates” take the form of romancing another kaiju by destroying a monument known to the world, like the pyramids of Giza or the Eiffel tower. If your date is successful, you completely reduce the monument to rubble, earning a kiss with your kaiju companion; unsuccessful dates will leave the building somewhat intact, perhaps souring the relationship to the point of splitting up. It’s a short enough game to play through an entire kaiju’s route in about half an hour, with plenty more kaiju to romance, but I found that, after my second character, each one felt very similar – with little variety to speak of. While worth it for the gimmick and the laugh, I wouldn’t strongly recommend Kaichu to anyone outside of dating sim and visual novel aficionados.
The momentum that each game’s credits roll gave me compounded, and while I was not expecting to get through all three games in a weekend, the fact that I could start adding back to my ongoing completed games list inspired me with hope. There was finally a chance that I might dip back into Bloodborne, Requiem, Ragnarök, and so on. Heck, there might even be the chance that I might squeeze in some last minute 2022 games that I had purchased but left unplayed, Horizon Forbidden West being the major outlier. But I won’t get ahead of myself yet.
Playing Games ‘Buffet Style’
There’s obviously no harm in taking a break from a hobby, especially if engaging in it is causing you undue burden or stress. However, I wanted to overcome my deep-seated feelings of guilt and lack of accomplishment, and this weekend of indies managed to accomplish that, reminding me of something I learned about my own psychology long ago – namely, that my brain responds positively to checklists. Not that checklists need to be overly detailed, but ticking off little boxes from a list and externally visualizing my progress is encouraging to feel capable of and confident to achieve some of the more involved, tedious aspects of disciplined living.
But rather than burnout, as I suggested in my article about Neon White, I feel as though my issue with gaming in 2022 has been the unconscious decision to play video games “buffet style,” where I put a little of everything on my plate and am surprised when I don’t have an appetite for second helpings right away. The buffet style gaming approach is far different than how I’ve typically played games in the past. Rather, especially when I was actively Twitch streaming, my previous approach to playing games involved playing one game through to completion before moving onto the next temptation on my list. This year, I have given into the temptations all at once, spreading myself thin over a number of massive games, many of which are quite similar in their third-person action adventure design.
Are You Obligated to Finish the Games You Start?
I wouldn’t say I have enjoyed gaming less in 2022 either, since, when I review my list of completed games from this year, I fondly reminisce on favorites like We Are OFK, Immortality, Ikenfell, Returnal, Elden Ring, and many others that have wandered their way into my top 100 games. With each of these games, I have devoted all of my gaming time to them without interruption, finishing them before opening up anything else. And I think that dedication and the familiarity that comes with getting used to one game’s systems contributes to that sense of momentum that my more recent buffet style approach has been lacking.
Perhaps I’m also simply becoming more intimately acquainted with the comforts of just “trying” games rather than feeling obligated to finish them. I don’t want to look at Bloodborne or Requiem that way, for instance, but I am reminded of an adage about reading books: as soon as you lose interest, put the book down and find something else to read. I find this ethos hard to live by, as I become easily attached to the media I browse through, select, and purchase. But I think it’s worth taking seriously when games often consume far more hours than books to complete.
I also wonder if I owe it to myself as a critic, and as a consumer, to find the additional value in each of these sometimes $70 experiences. It’s a sort of sunk cost fallacy where I feel like the monetary investment must justify itself by me finishing the game – even if it’s a game I end up disliking like The Last of Us Part II. I am still developing convincing, rational ways that I can give myself permission to be at peace with putting games down more deliberately, uninstalling them even if unfinished.
There is also the possibility that there is some kind of failing in the choices I am making when choosing games. As a terminally online person, there are plenty of games that cross my radar that I feel I “ought” to play, whether a shiny new release or a cult classic. There’s a likely chance that I’m simply choosing the big, lustrous AAA games that, these days, are notorious for bloat and endless lists of chores therein. That being said, this theory doesn’t account for Rollerdrome, a tight and respectably paced indie experience. All of this to say, I am still attempting to justify the buffet style decisions I have made this year, even as I recognize the frustrations and issues with that approach.
Though uncertainties remain in my relationship to gaming, I am proud of myself for forcing myself back into my niche of short indie games like Secret Little Haven, which greatly impacted me. There is now a spark of hope instead of despair as I close out the calendar year. I will not feel fully dialed in for games industry events like The Game Awards and the BAFTAs, but there is also some relief in giving myself permission to simply play what I want rather than play what’s perceivably relevant. Whatever the case, I am determined to clear my plate before New Year’s, after which I will be returning to single meals on the plate for the near future.
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