Monthly Summary: May 2023

Welcome to another Monthly Summary, as per usual! I seem to have spent a lot of time working through larger games this month so I haven’t got an awful lot to show for it yet (and I spent far too much time playing Smite). I have played a small section of amazing games though that I’m looking forward to sharing in this post, as well as some awesome songs at the end as this month’s music has been fantastic too! Let’s take a closer look!

Top 10 Anime OP/ED Songs #AniMay 2023

Welcome to the yearly tradition of anime song sharing here at gamergal.exe! During May, I always like to do some kind of anime themed content on the blog and since I’m a huge music lover, sharing my favourite theme songs from the anime I’ve seen over the past 12 months is a bit of a highlight for me. This is the 4th year I’ve done this now and you can find my posts from 2020, 2021 and 2022 by following the links if you’re interesting in hearing what other songs are on my playlist!

But first, let’s take a look at what 2023 has to offer (and a few older ones too!):

Monthly Summary: April 2023

Welcome to another Monthly Summary here at gamergal.exe! I’m expecting this to be a much shorter post than usual as I don’t have a great deal to report… I don’t know about you, but April just seems to have vanished completely. I haven’t played many games this month as I’ve found myself doing a lot more reading and I’ve also been getting back into playing guitar again. I’ve still played a small amount of excellent games though, so let’s get to the summary!

The Storyteller’s Festival: March 2023

I’m all for getting involved in Steam Games Festivals, and the Storyteller’s Festival was no exception! Hosted by Two and a Half Studios from Saturday the 25th of March to Saturday the 1st April, this festival was dedicated to games with great stories and included over 170 games in its showcase. This festival also provided Steam users the chance to download a selection of demos to try for free – so obviously, I had to get involved! These demos are still available for download on Steam even since the event ended, so go give them a go if any take your fancy!

Let’s play some demos!

Monthly Summary: March 2023

I’m not quite sure where March went, but here we are again with another Monthly Summary! I’ve had an up and down kind of month in many ways which is also reflected in my gaming too as there were a few games I played that I didn’t particularly enjoy, but also some that I loved. This past week has also been a bit of a non-event on backlog progress as I’ve been playing more demos as part of Steam’s Storyteller’s Festival! This has been super fun and I’ve played some really promising titles which I will be writing about very soon. I also published a few different posts this month to what I normally write which has been quite exciting, and March has also been a pretty decent month for music too!

So, let’s take a closer look at what I got up to in March:

American McGee’s Alice: Review (#MaybeInMarch 2023)

I only just about made it in time! #MaybeInMarch is an event hosted by Kim over at Later Levels that follows on from #LoveYouBacklogMonth. As part of the event last month, Kim asked us which game has been sat on our backlogs the longest and then challenged us (with no pressure) to get this title checked off the list during March.

5 Shoujo Manga Favourites

Over the past few years, I’ve gained a rising interest in manga which also includes a fast-growing physical collection. I’ve not written a post specifically about this hobby before on the blog, but now I’ve read my fair share of different series, I feel invested enough to be able to recommend some of my favourites – and on this occasion, it’s specifically about shoujo!

Alphabetical Backlog Challenge

Today marks 6 years since I first started this little blog here on WordPress! I was unsure how I was going to celebrate this milestone until I read Gaming Dairies’ Plati-Alphabet challenge last week where I was inspired to do something similar. It was then that the A.B.C. (Alphabetical Backlog Challenge) was born! As my backlog is my biggest focus for this year, I thought this would be a fun way to cross some titles off the list and allow me to look back and review my progress later on. Since I play primarily on Steam and across other platforms occasionally too, the Platinum part of the challenge didn’t fully work for me, so I’ve altered a few things from GD’s version of the challenge to fit my personal backlog goals – the biggest difference being that I’m not aiming for 100% completion on every single game. As long as I finish the main story, that’s good enough for me!

Monthly Summary: February 2023

It’s the end of another month which means it’s time for another Monthly Summary! I don’t feel like I’ve achieved a great deal on the gaming front this month, but I have started a handful of larger games all around the same sort of time which is incredibly unusual for me. I did dedicate a whole weekend to playing Steam Next Fest demos though so that’s taken up quite a lot of my gaming time anyway. Aside from that, I’ve mainly been catching up on anime, practicing my Japanese reading and working on a lot of blog content for March, as well preparing for my blog’s anniversary next week. Actually, now I’ve summed it all up, it’s been a busier month than I thought…

Steam Next Fest: February 2023

It seems like forever since we participated in a Steam Next Fest! It was actually last June that we took part as we decided to skip October’s festival as nothing seemed to take our fancy. For those of you that don’t know about Steam Next Fest, Steam holds a week long event where developers can share demos for their upcoming games for anyone with a Steam account to download and play for free! This is the best opportunity to discover some new games and support the developers throughout their projects. These events usually run 3 times a year in February, June and October. February 2023’s event ran from Monday the 6th to the Monday the 13th.

This time, we decided to do things a little differently. Although we played our usual 20 demos, we chose to report on our favourite 10 demos rather than trying to write about all the titles we played. This has resulted in a higher quality, more positive and shorter post which should be a lot easier to digest than out previous summaries. We once again tried to play a selection of different genres so hopefully there will be something that everyone can enjoy here. As per usual, these games are listed in the order we played them and not by favouritism. If you would like to see our favourites though, and the titles of the demos we played but didn’t include in the post, then you can view these at the end of the post.

We used our previous format for ease of reading and we also included our brief thoughts individually as to whether we’d be interested in the full game or not. Please take note that we use 3/5 as our average score, but everything else should be pretty self explanatory.