One of my yearly goals for 2022 was to reach at least 65% of my Steam games played. In particular, I wanted to finish up my CLEAR game list. I buckled down over the weekend and I’m happy to say that the CLEAR game list is no more, and that carried me to 66% of games played!

What exactly was the CLEAR game list? These are games that:

• Came in a bundle, but wasn’t a game I was really interested in (I gave a lot of these away on Steam Gifts, too) – I’ve since stopped buying bundles
• Was the original version of a game that got a Game of the Year re-release, which means it was a duplicate – I’d rather play the GOTY version
• Was a game that is no longer supported or developed – basically, abandonware – but wasn’t that way when I first picked it up
• Was a spin-off game from the original that tried to be some MOBA Esports game or whatever – I’m looking at you ARK: Survival of the Fittest

Most of the ones left on the list were huge downloads of 20 Gigs or more – which is why I’d held off on messing with them. It’s daunting when you have about 5 games that all tell you it’ll take 8 or so hours to download.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and they all went a lot faster than that.

I fired them up and gave their intros a watch and piddled about in the opening areas/levels to see if it was a game I really wanted to to mark off my list without further inspection. Most of them were.

The only games that I spent any significant time with were Life is Feudal – Your Own and Dark and Light. The LiF I could have gotten into – but it was just such a ponderous system that every time I wanted to do something in the game that seemed interesting it was blocked by needing to figure out how to do a handful of other things first. Also, it’s not being developed anymore.

Same with Dark and Light. It was interesting, but felt kinda janky (using a sword on trees to harvest?). It’s also been abandoned in terms of development, so, sadly, I put it aside.

I also spent some time organizing all the games that had not been put in a category. I created a new Category called Give It A Try – these are for games that are a step above CLEAR. I might enjoy them, but I’m not fully sure how much time I want to put into them or if they’ll capture me or not.

So the easy part of cleaning up my Steam backlog is done. From here on out, any ground I make will be from playing games that I own. Scary! 😉