The Plan for 2026

The end of the year approaches once again.  The game awards have crawled out of the sewer to suck the dick of industry shareholders and to affirm the undercooked opinions of the gaming masses.  The end of year sales are churning so that idiots like me can buy stuff 50 to 90% off and then have it rot in the backlog for 2 to 30 years.  Various platforms give us our end of year snapshots to fill our email inboxes with redundant information that serves no purpose to anyone.  A sort of irritating time of year but it’s cozy. 

My plan for 2025 was, at first, to try and finish 365 games within the year.  The idea being I would recreate the October 31 game horror challenge but for every month.  This was then instantly scuppered by finding out my wife was pregnant in mid January and instead of picking games that I could finish quickly, I just played whatever.  Not all bad since I played some cool shit but my best and worst is best kept for another post.  So now I’m thinking how I’m going to approach my 2026 in gaming and I think it’s about high time I tackled something that’s been looming over me for a long time. 

A while ago indie game repository and storefront Itch.io gave away 2 absolutely huge packs of games.  One was around the time of the George Floyd incident and the other when the war in Ukraine started with money raised from these packs used for charitable causes related to these events.  I forget what the exact number of titles were in these packs but it was north of 500 both times and in an instant my already quad digit backlog of games ballooned even harder.   I picked them up because each pack had one game that I wanted and then all the others were a nice bonus. 

These packs have gone mostly untouched since I bought them so I have decided that 2026 will be the year that I rectify that.  Not all of the titles in these packs are video games with some of the entries being table top things or resources for game devs but even with that in mind how many I’ll be able to actually get through is up in the air.  There are many short experiences in there but there’s also some more involved titles too that may eat up decent chunks of my time. 

That said though I think if the only thing I played all year was pc indie games I might go mental so as a secondary goal I think I also want to explore the library of the GBA.  A system I adored in my younger days, a system that has a ton of great games and yet I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface with it.  Plenty of curios on my radar, plenty of titles I’m sure I’ll discover as I dig, I’m excited to revisit this absolute powerhouse of a handheld in the coming year

Of course, not 100% set in stone.  I want to leave myself open to try the new games that come out in the year and maybe pepper in titles from other systems that tickle my fancy in a given month but in terms of a general focus, Itch and the GBA will be dominating my to do lists.  If I can beat my 2025 clear count of around 150 that would be an extra bonus

Here to a good year of good gaming!