Steam Challenge: Short Plays

Posted on September 27, 2022 by Aywren

Even though I’m pretty content with my Steam backlog at this point, there’s always room for improvement. Earlier this year, I worked through the last of the games that I had on my CLEAR list. These were games that somehow ended up in my library (or were duplicates in some way) that I had a pretty good idea I wasn’t going to invest much time into.

That helped knock a solid chunk out of my backlog and get me to 70% played. However, even since then, I’ve somehow managed to reach 71% played, which was a surprise to me. Lately, all I’ve really been doing is playing the games I buy, if I pick anything new up.

Encouraged by this, I started thinking of ways to not just clear but complete games that are in my backlog. Some games, by their nature, just can’t be completed. I have a lot of those – things like sims or survival games that go on and on until you just consider yourself done.

But I also have a number of games that do have endings. In fact, I sat down with How Long to Beat to determine what were the shortest games in my backlog. Turns out, I have quite a few that clock under 5 hours to beat, and even more if you extend “short” to include games 10 hours or less.

It only makes sense to tackle the shorter games first if I want to keep making progress on my Steam Challenge. While it’s not as all-important as it used to feel, I’d be even happier if I saw my backlog get to 75% played.

So far, highlighting the shorter games has worked. I finished The First Tree last night, which clocked in a little under two hours. I figure if I can put one or two hours towards short games throughout the week, I’d be making great progress.

Seeing that the Short Plays list is about 23 games long, if I were able to play through most of these, I should be doing quite well!

In fact, I’ve also organized a folder on my Switch with the same idea behind it – if a game was 10 hours or less to beat, I added it to that folder so I could put my attention on making progress in the shorter games.

We’ll see how it all shakes out at the end of this year when it comes time to look at goals!

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