I watched a lot of SpongeBob as a kid. After several years of marveling at that little sponge's floor-to-ceiling library, when I finally got a place of my own I immediately turned my bedroom into a library. I'm still working on the giant metal slide, but two bookshelves adorn my walls, threatening to one day squish me in an earthquake. It's the only death I'll accept. One shelf is seven feet tall and four feet wide, and the other is seven feet tall and six feet wide. They're mostly filled with Japanese manga, Korean comics, and light novels – not because I'm a big ol' weeb who's afraid of Western books, but because almost all of my Western books are digital since 95% of physical Western books have covers only a mother could love, and they don't have mothers so they're just eternally hideous.
A good chunk of the – oh, let's see – 1,200 books on my shelves haven't been read yet, but my Library Completion Percentage increases almost every night. I've come to enjoy having a well of variety at arm's reach, comfortable re-reads flanked by tantalizing new adventures. Spending years literally surrounded by a backlog – my bedroom is also the office where I'm writing this right now, my shelves watching me like Easter Island heads – is also what finally cured me of gaming backlog anxiety, most especially Steam anxiety.
For anyone with a collector's bone in their body, Steam is less of a storefront and more of a shelf. Oftentimes you aren't buying a game to play immediately, but rather buying a figure to put behind the display glass. (Mercifully, I never got into collecting figures.) Behold, the games I will play once I have fewer responsibilities, by which I mean after I die in that earthquake.
My library of over 280 games may as well scroll to infinity; my wishlist, a slightly larger infinity at 464 games. "Demos, previews, and Humble Bundles have artificially inflated my library," I cry, as convincing as a wolf pleading innocence with slivers of sheep hanging from its teeth. "I play and investigate a ton of indie games for my job," I insist, clicking the wishlist button as easily as I breathe. And that is genuinely part of it – Steam is part of my job, and in some ways my wishlist is a tool for tracking games. But no, this happened because of me, and I've learned to embrace that.
Swimming in the Steam Summer Sale
Enjoy the variety, which is real. Ignore the anxiety, which is not. There is no need to play something, only what you want to play right now. And having a well of variety at arm's reach makes deciding what to play right now so much more fun. So, for the first time in a long while – I swear, with no sheep in my teeth this time – I'm hitting the best Steam Summer Sale games. I'm giving myself $100 to go hog-wild.
The evergreen joke with Steam sales is that we'll all turn up like sharks to chummed waters, wallets eagerly opened and rapidly lightening, to worship at the church of Valve boss Gabe Newell with "90% off" branded on our foreheads. And that is hyperbole, but unbelievably, only a little bit. I've been a PC-first gamer for about 15 years, and it still boggles my mind how much patience is worth in this hobby. You can currently get Disco Elysium, one of the best RPGs ever made, for $4. I've paid $4 for one donut at an airport and it didn't even have a skill tree.
A glance at my own cart – currently over budget at $113, but I'm working on it – reveals Card Hog for just $2.03. Two dollars and three cents! $2.03 for a lovely looking "pig-based dungeon crawler with roguelike and deck building elements." That's three things I love – dungeons, roguelikes, and deck builders – plus pigs, and I've never turned down a free pig. Further afield, Little Noah: Scion of Paradise, an oddball roguelike Metroidvania from Cygames, is $4.99. That's the real magic number. I'll try almost anything for $4.99 or less. Any higher and I get more selective, but the five buck rule is sacred. If I was adrift at sea, baking in the sun, I'd pay $4.99 for a bottle of sea water just to see if it might be slightly different.
Paper Trail? That looks like a cute little puzzle game. Take my $4.99. Planet of Lana? I've been wanting to play that. Take my $4.99. Roundguard? A cute pinball roguelike to join the pachinko roguelikes Ballionaire and Peglin? A bargain at just $3.99. A quick aside: big fan of these roguelikes turning physical boards into draftable toys that you can almost feel in your hands as you tinker, often un-gambling gambling machines in the process.
I generally try to stay under $10 a game in Steam sales. Spending any more feels like a crime. I can't explain it. This is the season of absurd math, and it just warps my brain. I normally don't hesitate to spend $40, $60, $70, or now even $80 on a big new game that I really want. But Steam Sale Brain is an affliction. It's seasonal, like allergies. Getting 20 games for $100 sounds dreamy, yet 21 games for $130 somehow sounds sacrilegious. Ask me in two weeks and I'll gladly pay $30 for that 21st game, but right now I've got to get to gettin' while the gettin' is good. Art must be supported, the wishlist must shrink, the library must grow, and the backlog must become more varied.
