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.

While 31 posts in August is not my goal it’s an aspiration and something I might be able to do one of these days. Looking back, my most “successful” Blaugust was in 2022 where I eked out 26 posts. That’s successful in the sense that it was the year with the most posts, but really more than 0 posts in August is a success in my book. More realistically, I see myself in the 10-15 range this year and would be very happy with that.

I joined Blaugust this year to give me some extra motivation to start writing regularly again. I already feel like that’s working. It may only be day two but I’ve already doubled this year’s post count. I even have two more posts scheduled out this weekend!

You never know though, my future self might find pleasantly surprise me at the end of the month. No pressure on you future self!

To get to that 10-15 post range I will need to spend more time playing games than I have been. I’m not sure if that will come in the form of trying lots of things from my library I haven’t played before or finding a game to sink some time into all month. I’ve been eyeing No Man’s Sky since it just had a graphical update and I haven’t played it in years. I also have a horde of games I, inexplicably, picked up in this years Steam Summer Sale that I really should should play…I’m suspecting it will be a mix of both.Either way, I’m hoping to find something that re-capture my interest and give me some posts to write.

And if not, well, I’ll just have to find something else to write about this month. That could be fun too.

It’s always hard for me to figure out what to say when there’s a large gap in between posts. Do I talk about where I’ve been? It’s been like 6 months after all. Do I start back up like nothing happened?

I was  going to do the whole ‘This is why I haven’t written in a while’ thing. More for myself, really, than any one else’s beneift. Then I got to the end of it and it all seemed very familiar. It turns out, I basically wrote  the same thing earlier this year. So I scrapped that and started thinking about another angle.

I didn’t actually need to do much thinking after all. In the Blaugust kick off post this year, Bel has suggested using the first post of Blaugust as an introduction post. What better way to end a long hiatus than talk about my blog and participate in a month long event with a great community!

I’m Kluwes, this is my blog Many Welps. I write about video games and sometimes fiction podcasts/audio dramas. What you’ll find here are mostly accounts of play sessions either on my own or with my friends (like this). They’re my favorite blog posts to read and also my favorite to write! You’ll also find summaries of games that I finish in my Backlogged posts which I don’t like to call reviews but kind of end up being them anyways.

I started blogging in 2016 during the Newbie Blogger Initiative event with the idea that I would write mostly about MMOs. I also had this, frankly, naive idea that I would play through all of my games in my backlog at the time and write about that. I had only had a Steam account for 2 years at that point, but still 79 games is a lot to go through.

Over the years the blog has changed quite a bit. I found that forcing myself to play games in my backlog was not fun and abandoned that idea after a while. I did get a nice re-occuring post format out of it though so it wasn’t all bad. Over time I had less time to play MMOs and now mostly write about single player or co-op games. I changed the name of my blog from I’m Not Squishy to Many Welps 4 years ago to better align with what I was writing about at the time. I still play games every weekend with my friend group who we’ve deemed the Welp Squad so the name still fits today.

Over the last few years I’ve been spending less and less time playing games and instead focusing on other things. I may try branching out and trying to write about other things. One of my goals for Blaugust is to see if I can’t rekindle that love of games over the next month. Or I might try writing about some other topics and see if I enjoy it. Either way, I want to write more than I have been.

I’m very excited to get back to blogging this month. Bear with me here as I find my footing again. I am so out of practice.