Let's Talk About the Future

Hey, everyone.

If you've been following this blog of mostly game reviews and console retrospectives written by yours truly, you may have noticed that, well, it's been a while since I've posted anything here. In fact, the last thing I posted was my Xbox Series X review, and that was over a year ago now. Granted, not a lot of people read the things I write and post here outside of my circle of friends, but I figured I should at least give an update as to why I've been on a sort of extended hiatus.

Truth be told I did have ideas for game reviews throughout 2023. When I was about to finish my Sonic Frontiers review, I created a Twitter poll (I am not calling it X thank you) where I listed a few options of what I should review next - Deltarune Chapters 1 and 2, Freedom Planet 2, Roblox and Paladins. Of course, Deltarune won, and I did write and post my review of that a couple months after Sonic Frontiers. However, the other games were all ones that I was intending to review by the end of the year, and as you can guess… that just didn't happen.

So why is that? First of all, towards the end of 2022 I decided to go back to college starting with the Spring Semester of 2023 so that I could work towards my Bachelor's Degree. In addition to that, I was also planning to start work on a sort of graphic novel styled webcomic based off of a Wattpad series I was writing while still doing other projects I had been working on like my 'individual' comics, my Thomas Wooden Railway series, and of course, my game reviews. And I was doing all this while working at my job.

Suffice to say, I overestimated my ability to manage my time around all this and underestimated how long certain things would take me to work on (particularly with the graphic novel styled webcomic). And to only add to this perfect storm, I was also having major spurts of anxiety throughout the year that only really made me less inclined to work on the stuff I had in mind. In layman’s terms, I was just burned out - too much on my plate, and not enough time to deal with it all.

Granted, however, I did still manage to get work done on those other projects. I got a couple chapters out for the graphic novel series, plus the highest amount of individual comics I’ve made for any year I’ve done them, and also got a few episodes of my Thomas Wooden Railway series out throughout the year, all while doing well in college and working. But, after April my game review series just… disappeared, so what gives?

Well, again, I was burned out, but in a more… specific way, so to speak. While I did have topics in mind for game reviews, at the same time I didn’t really know where to go after my Xbox Series X review. Every time I attempted to write a new game or console review, I would get sidetracked for one reason or another. Sometimes I got a few paragraphs in, didn’t really know what to say, and/or just left it on the backburner and forgot about it while I went on to do other things. Other times I would just not be happy with how the review was going and would just leave it where it was before making an attempt to rewrite it entirely. Regardless, every attempt at writing a game review would just be a cycle of coming up with an idea, writing my thoughts, not being happy or forgetting about it, and just… resetting again from there.

I will say though that this is something I’ve ran into multiple times before. I was thinking about this not too long ago, but back when I was doing reviews of not just games but also cartoons on a certain pony forum site, I felt this same way around late 2015 and early 2016 where I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with my writings going forwards. I admittedly kinda stopped doing cartoon reviews entirely after that save for my review of the Animaniacs reboot and a couple MLP-related writings, but I did return to doing game reviews on my Tumblr blog throughout 2017. I can’t even really deny that I’ve had similar moments of burnout when doing reviews on my blog here in the past - especially throughout my Sonic retrospective. But I guess with that at least, I had an idea of where to go, even if it was just playing and reviewing the next Sonic game, whereas now it’s more notable in that I’m just not sure what the next step I want to take is.

That begs the question - am I done with game reviews? And to that I say… sort of? Maybe? I will say I have been doing game reviews on Backloggd that aren’t generally quite as in-depth or lengthy as the ones I’ve posted here, but I think it’s definitely offered a nice platform for just giving my general thoughts on the latest video games I’ve played through. That’s pretty much the ‘main’ platform I’m using for game reviews now if you want to go check that out. But again, as far as the kind of reviews here go… honestly, I don’t want to say I’m done with this blog or whatever as this could just be a period of a lack of motivation I have and maybe at some point in the future (perhaps even right after I post this lol) I’ll have a random surge of motivation that’ll get me writing stuff here again. But I don’t want to make any promises either. I will also say that I have one console retrospective I’ve been sort of planning in my head over the past few weeks, and will likely get around to that at some point, but after that… well, I’m probably going to continue focusing on my webcomic and stuff for the foreseeable future. Maybe it’ll be my last ‘big’ review, maybe it won’t, perhaps I won’t even finish it at all, but ultimately, as Calypso said in ‘The Sign’ episode of the hit kid’s show Bluey, “We’ll see.” It might come off as a copout but that’s really the best way I can put it right now.