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.

Top 11 Games of 2022

It’s time to share my favourite games of 2022 (I know it’s late, but better late than never)! Much like last year, I chose my favourite 11 releases from the past 12 months to talk about in this post. Overall, I don’t think the list is as strong as it was last year, but I did still find a selection of excellent games across multiple genres that I would highly recommend! Without wasting any more time, let’s take a look at my Top 11 Games of 2022!

#LoveYourBacklog Month: February 2023

With a backlog growing faster than I can manage, it’s time to show it some love this month for #LoveYourBacklog Month! Kim over at Later Levels has dedicated February especially to some backlog appreciation which is a fantastic idea and also the perfect opportunity to take the time to think about those games we’ve left in line for many years. Kim has provided a small list of prompts for anyone to answer and join in the fun, as well as supplying badges for us all to feature in our posts!

Valentine’s Day: Otome Challenge 2023

What better way to spend Valentine’s Day than by showing some love and appreciation for otome games! For the past couple of years, these Valentine’s otome themed questions have been circulating around Twitter which I previously made into posts for 2021 and 2022. Despite not seeing these questions appear on Twitter again this year, I still wanted to write another post focusing on all my otome experiences from the past year!