Gaming Habits in 2026

24 Jul, 2026

Joel is always coming up with great ideas for his blog, and I was most recently intrigued by his Gaming Updates post. So here I am, stealing yet another idea from Joel for my own blog!

I thought it would be a lot of fun, and maybe a little insightful, to write about my own gaming habits this year. Joel focused on goals he set for himself on his blog, and I've set my own personal gaming goals but haven't previously posted about them. At the beginning of the year, I made a list of games I'd like to play or complete in 2026. I'll list them below, with the ones I've completed checked off and those that I've started and are in progress noted with a green dot.

That's not including a bunch of games I've completed that weren't on my initial list. Here are those:

• Air Zonk
• Alice in Wonderland (Game Boy Color)
• Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
• Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken
• Donut County
• Frog Holm
• Hades (technically finished this, but I'm still playing to get all the achievements and complete the epilogue)
• Mail Time
• Perfume Atelier
• That Which Gave Chase

...along with several smaller indies that only took a few minutes to complete and interactive fiction, which I'm logging here on my site.

I still have a long way to go to complete my list! Whatever I don't finish, I'll just carry over to next year.

I'm playing some ongoing games as well, which are games that don't really have an end state and that I can keep jumping back into whenever I feel like it. Those are:

• Balatro
• Bobby's Beautiful Bugs
• Cast n Chill (link to a related blog post)
• Lord of the Rings Online (currently taking a break, but I have played it some this year)
• Windrose (kind of stopped playing this, but I played for a while and would like to go back to it at some point)
• Flock Around (multiplayer)
• Left 4 Dead 2 (multiplayer)
• RV There Yet? (multiplayer)

As far as my purchasing habits go, I've been trying to limit my purchasing in general this year, not just with games, and stick to a strict budget while saving as much money as possible. I've mostly failed at this, to be honest, but it's something I want to be better about for the remainder of the year.

I won't list everything I've bought this year on Steam here, but it's quite a few games. I will say that most of them were indies that I bought on sale for less than $5, but there were a few big purchases too, like Resident Evil Requiem and the Fatal Frame II remake. I'm looking at buying Monster Hunter World while it's on sale to play it with my husband, and I'll buy Silent Hill Townfall because it's a new Silent Hill game 😮, but I'd like for that to be it.

Lately, I've been trying to focus on retro games on my old consoles. I started Resident Evil Code Veronica on my PlayStation 2, and I'm doing a play-along with Joel for Ocarina of Time on my Nintendo 3DS. I'm also not neglecting my Switch, although I mainly use it for YouTube. I've been playing the Spyro Reignited Trilogy on there, and I just bought a narrative game called Dear Me, I Was.

For the rest of year, my goals are:

• Finish my list of games for 2026
• Purchase only two new games (Monster Hunter World and Silent Hill Townfall)
• Go through my retro game backlog on my old consoles
• Master two more classic games on RetroAchievements (I'm looking at Dino Crisis and Silent Hill 4 for this, although also considering Twilight Princess)

And I think that's it for now! I'll do another big update at the end of the year to see how things went and if I accomplished my goals.

#video games