Tackling Your Gaming Backlog; Finding a Method That Works for You

Let me start by saying that the method of backlog tackling I’ll be explaining in this article has worked for me after experimenting over the course of 3 years. It’s not the best for everyone, however, I hope this helps you develop your own system so you can break down and beat your backlog build-up.

Why might you want to tackle a video game backlog?

The answer is going to be different for everybody, for me I can say that there are many games that I want to experience but I’ve got far too many options. Also with new games being more expensive than ever, tackling a backlog might be the most affordable option for the time being. Another reason is that a lot of the time friends will want to talk about games that I haven’t yet played that they know I would enjoy, so I want to experience these titles and then talk about how awesome they are!

Other reasons could be:

Trophy and achievement hunting
Nothing new coming out
Genre burnout

With our self-stated reasons in place we now need to look at how to tackle this mountain we have created for ourselves.

What Didn’t Work and Why

Usually, the first thing we tend to do is go and create big, huge lists and then tick off the games we’ve finished as and when they are complete. Whilst this allows us to see the games we want to beat, it doesn’t solve the issue of what to start first. Do we go alphabetically? Do we finish with shorter games first? Do we start with something somebody has recommended?

It also doesn’t allow us to see much progress being made and makes the task far too big for us to comprehend. If we put 100 games on a list and it takes on average 20–30 hours (call it a week with a healthy work-life balance) to beat a single game, then we’ll see one per cent of progress every week which for most people is far too slow and is downright demoralising to see.

By doing it this way we structure the task as a chore rather than a challenge or an activity. It looks like a shopping list or a task sheet from work, so we’ve already put ourselves on the back foot and demotivated ourselves which isn’t the goal here. And yet, this is exactly what I did and stuck with for the whole year of 2023.

I found that when new games would be released, I would add them to my list which only increased the size of the task. This would also defeat the purpose of tackling my backlog in the first place. I found that on a long enough time scale, I would get very bored and bounce between multiple games, therefore slowing progress and hindering myself further as I was looking at the backlog as busy work rather than an opportunity to play new experiences. I was mega unhappy with the way this plan had backfired on me in 2023. I found I had made next to zero progress and on top of all that, I was demotivated looking at the list and not being able to tick things off. I had to change my approach otherwise I would be burnt out.

So here’s what I did instead:

What Worked and Why

I completely got rid of the list. Now you may think that seems dumb or even pointless as we are just going to end up rewriting that list, or making several smaller versions of that same list. But no, I unburdened myself of that daunting monstrosity completely.

Doing this allowed me to implement a vastly different approach. For 2024 I decided to write the games that I had beaten down. So instead of looking at a list of things to accomplish, I was looking at a list of things I had accomplished.

Here are the games and DLC I beat in 2024:

Nier: Replicant
Remnant 2 (Which I beat with two friends, love those guys!)
Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon
Final Fantasy 7: Remake Intergrade (DLC)
Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (Still can’t believe we did cosplay in work for this, I loved it though.)
Final Fantasy 14: Heavensward (DLC)
Final Fantasy 14: Stormblood (DLC)
Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers (DLC)
The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan
Like a Dragon: Gaiden
Dragon Age Inquisition: Trespasser (DLC)
Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker (DLC) (Yes FF14 was a big one this year, beating all the expansions took it out of me.)
Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall (DLC)
WET (A random Xbox 360 game)
Kingdom Heart: 0.2 A Fragmentary Passage (The dumbest name for a game. Ever.)
Army of Two: The 40th Day
Forza Horizon 2: Fast and Furious
Like a Dragon 8: Infinite Wealth
Tales From the Borderlands
The Walking Dead: Season 2
The Walking Dead: Michonne
The Walking Dead: Season 3 (Yes, I went full zombie mode at the end of the year.)

This made the task a lot more freeing and gave me a clearer head space going into games. I don’t need to list the games I want to play because I want to play them. I was also able to appreciate the progress I had made a lot more. Adding to a list of accomplishments rather than ticking off something from a list is far more rewarding.

New “non-backlog games” also count as we are trying to count every accomplishment we can. I also added the idea of counting DLC as something to complete on the backlog and therefore acknowledged them my accomplishments when beaten. The reason for this is that a small win is still a win, so why not write it down?

Naturally, because I didn’t have a list to work from anymore I needed to look at how I was going to stick to games as that was still a small problem. This can be done in a variety of different ways however I found that once again, being as non-restrictive as possible was the best option.

I keep to a list of 5 games at a time. This isn’t including the games we play on stream (*Ahem* https://www.twitch.tv/underlevelleduk) or games I might play with friends; however if we beat those games, we still add them to the list. As an example, at the time of writing I am currently trying to beat:

Final Fantasy XIII
Dot hack gu// Volume 3 (I might do an article on the GU games, stay tuned!)
Pokemon Shield
Dragon Age: Veilguard
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

I keep a mental note of the games I play and this one-in, one-out system allows me to keep focus whilst not getting bored. I don’t think about genre or game length during the selection process. If I am more into JRPGs at the moment, that’s fine. Or if I find there are many games that are smaller in length on the list at one time, that’s fine too. We aren’t trying to restrict ourselves here. That leads to stagnation and games not being played.

To Conclude

Do not let your backlog become a chore, gaming is fundamentally a hobby and anything that gets in the way of fun and entertainment isn’t worth the hassle. If you find that you’ve become bogged down in any way because your backlog is too big, you might need to rethink how to tackle it. I hope this article helped in some small way in doing just that.