While this year has seen a decrease in overall game time, it’s hasn’t been without gaming entirely. While I haven’t played many games on my own this year, I still get together with the squad every weekend to play something.

I was curious to see what games I logged playtime for this year. Steam makes this easy by sorting the library by recent. Still, I wish I would have re-installed ActivityWatch when I set up my new PC to have some more stats to dig in to. Unfortunately, Steam only records the last time you launched a game and doesn’t provide much more info than that but we’ll work with what we’ve got.

January

Space Engine

Not really a game, more of an interactive planetarium. I picked this up coming off of playing Elite Dangerous at the end of 2023. In Elite, I was mostly exploring system to system, so I thought this might be a good way to do the same thing without all the down time. I spent an hour with it, mostly going through the tutorial, but it was as advertised. It didn’t quite scratch that itch of Elite but that’s to be expected. It also works in VR, which I have not tried but I’m sure would be fantastic. Sadly, I didn’t take any screenshots for this one.

Orc Must Die 3

Every time I look back in my Steam library like this I’m always asking “Did I really play this that long ago?”. Orcs Must Die is a series I’ve been playing with my friend Blades for years now. We get absorbed in it for a month or two a year and then move on to something else. Looks like January was this year’s month of Orcs. I’m looking forward to the new Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap coming out next year with 4 player co-op. We’ve always wanted to get our other friends involved in the series but the games have only been 2 player co-op thus far.

February

Automobilista 2

In the beginning of the year I got very in to Sim Racing. I went home for Christmas to visit family and friends and ended up playing Gran Turismo 3 with Blades. He had the whole wheel and pedal set up and I was hooked. When I got home, I ordered my own wheel and pedals and was heavily playing this game and Asseto Corsa every chance I got. It’s weird because I’ve never been a car guy or even like driving all that much. I found learning tracks and getting better times had me hooked!

Game Dev Tycoon

In tandem with Sim Racing I was also very into Tycoon games earlier this year. Game Dev Tycoon is a simple tycoon game where you start out as a one man shop in your garage and work your way up to becoming a best selling studio. The game has relatively simple mechanics but they work very well to form a story in your head while your playing. I actually kept notes of my play through thinking I’d write about it here sometime. So those might make their way to the blog at some point.

March

Surviving Mars

Another tycoon game, this one I was playing together with Blades via Parsec. You start out with a few unmanned drones on Mars and attempt to create a long lasting colony. Over the course of a few play sessions we were able to go from a barren wasteland to a thriving colony with hundreds of colonsits. It was a lot of fun to plan, design, and execute building a colony. It was a lot less interesting once we got the people there and every thing was established.

Timberborne

Another colony builder except with beavers! I only played 2 hours of this, not because it wasn’t enjoyable but because I was at the end of my management game phase. Unlike Surviving Mars I lost many, many beavers to famine and drought. I don’t think I got to the point with a successful and sustainable colony.

Jedi Fallen Order/ Lego Star Wars

We went on a family trip/ reunion in southern California in February. One of the things we did was go to Disneyland/ Galaxies Edge. I’ve always liked Star Wars but have never been in to Star Wars. So after coming back from the trip, I went through a bit of a Star Wars phase. Lucky for me, both of these games were super cheap thanks to whatever Steam sale was going.

April

Assetto Corsa

Apparently April is when I stopped playing racing sims. Assetto Corsa is the racing sim. It’s usually cheap in sale, it has thousands of mods, it runs really well on modern hardware, and it’s easy to set up a server to race with friends. There’s an awesome third party tool called Content Manager that greatly improves navigating the game menus and adding mods. The paid version,, which is as cheap as $2 makes setting up servers a breeze. I spent the driving time on this one and had many hours of fun racing with the squad.