Tackling the Backlog, Issue 10 - January 2026

In some strange twist of fate (I'm lazy), it's been an entire year since the last Tackling the Backlog.

Recently, it's been fun to start breaking my life into little arcs when I have to recall a memory. Not only does it amplify the rose-tint on my glasses, but it allows me to keep a better mental map when I have to think about when and where things happened. I can say that 2025 was a year where the bulk of my writing was just placed elsewhere. I made my debut on Stop Caring and had the pleasure to work with Artemis to put out some of my most personal pieces yet. I started grad school, further pursuing writing as a career and having most of my work take form in workshop pieces and research papers; I actually have one that I'd like to make available to the public at some point, I was really proud of it!

I was more of a community man, attending open mics hosted by a buddy, trying to spend more time with friends, and drinking coffee exclusively from two local joints. A lot of the gaming I did last year was with/for other people too. Lots of family time gathered around the TV for Mario Kart World, showing my nephew my collection of Pokémon in Legends: Z-A, and enough Valorant and Overwatch with my friends to last me a lifetime.

January, however, is always different. It's the time where I get really introspective because I'm getting older. I think about the big changes from yesteryear to now, and my choice in games reflects that... sort of. Towards the end of January, Unwinnable published an interview with Austin Walker, and he had this to say that's been quoted to hell and back already.

 I mean you can’t tell what it tastes like on your tongue anymore, you just know what the ingredients are and you know how to talk about the ingredients. And you can make a convincing, clear argument about what’s happening. You can describe something that is happening. And it’s not wrong, but it isn’t driven by the thing that I think marked my criticism in the mid-2010s, which was, first step, How does it hit your tongue? What is it doing to me? How am I engaged in that way? 

This stuck with me in my recollection of what I played last month. This is what I'm trying to set my sights on this year, what I really want to home in on with my words in general, regardless of the turbulent landscape that is games journalism.

So, let's dive into the stuff I played last month. Rather than my usual chronological order that I go in, I've decided that I'm going to go from least - most playtime. Let's get to it!

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Oh, and all images in this piece are screenshots taken by the author.

Gaming for Others

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk took me a while to really sink my teeth into. When it originally debuted in 2020, I had no clue that it had even been in development, let alone been delayed for as long as it had been, and the significantly buggy eighth generation console release kept it well below my radar. It would be a few years later where I'd pick it up after a series of patches, and even then, nothing in that initial experience really grabbed my attention. It felt like any other first-person open world action shooter. You kill, you loot, you invest in a skill tree, and that was all. It didn't taste like anything.

Then the Phantom Liberty update dropped, and I finally understood what people had seen in Cyberpunk and what new there was to see now.

The melee combat is some of the best in the genre, the revised skill trees are awesome, customization from top to bottom is massive. There's a degree of freedom in Cyberpunk that other first-person RPGs have yet to catch up to.

Night City is a marvel to exist in down to the last brick. I walk the streets and see a paintbrush splattered across concrete. I see people who have wholly abandoned their flesh for steel, augmenting themselves to no end. I get caught up in the fantasy that opportunity is lurking around every corner. I couldn't care less about the rock star screaming in my head, I want to gun down the random gang members under the bridge.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, can't stand Cyberpunk 2077.

Last year, her family got a PS5 Pro to keep in the living room, and after she rolled credits on GTAV, her next stop was going to be in Night City. Despite her still being relatively new to gaming, there are a lot of issues she has with Cyberpunk that I think resonate with longtime players (although PC mods have solved most of these by now). She doesn't like first-person cameras as she doesn't know how to gauge distances in games in first person, and she gets a little motion sick. There's also the gripe that comes with spending so much time customizing a character only to never be able to see them until the game allows you. She tried Cyberpunk and put it down, opting for me to pick it up for her whenever we were bored at her house.

I'm not sinking my teeth into this playthrough by any means. While I still get enthralled by the trappings of cyberpsychosis, it's turned mostly into a session game. When she doesn't have a preference on what to watch, I boot up Cyberpunk and run around doing side quests and wreaking havoc. Admittedly, it's been an awkward experience. Hearing that many F-bombs while your girlfriend's mom is a few yards away will always feel strange no matter how accustomed to it you might be. That said, I've been using the experience to mentally build my character for my own playthrough whenever that happens. I want to invest in the melee combat, ignoring Johnny Silverhand in exchange for becoming a flesh and blood pugilist in a world of steel. I want to see what lengths the world will push me to until I break my bones and flood myself with metal pipes. In the meantime, however, I'll continue taking down Tyger Claws with an over-the-top pistol until then.

Dokapon! Sword of Fury

In January, I went to the World of Coca-Cola with a few friends. It was a surprise for a friend who I had never met until that day, and plans had been in motion for a couple of weeks. At the same time, the friend that was organizing this trip also wanted to surprise me for my birthday. With what I can only assume are crossed wires, he attempted to surprise me with that same trip to the World of Coca-Cola, forgetting that I already knew the plan.

If you've never been, the two main attractions for most people are the Beverage Lab, an exhibit where people can mix flavors to make new sodas (and taste the discontinued ones. I miss you, New Coke, the people weren't ready for you), and Taste It! a big room full of drink flavors from around the world. In this room is Beverly, an Italian apéritif that hasn't been sold in almost two decades. When I was a kid, Beverly was heralded as the worst drink known to man. To taste it was a rite of passage, a symbol of worldly experience. And here I was at the overdue age of 25 finally tasting it for the first time.

Beverly sucks. It's nasty, and bitter, and attacks the back of your tongue in such an invasive way that you have to drink it at the end of the tour. And yet, as I sit here reflecting on what was only weeks ago, I can't help but want a bottle to keep in the house, an uncomfortable palette cleanser for me to pull out for all my friends to taste after we break bread. It haunts me in a curious way.

Why do I mention this? You know how earlier I quoted Walker and his statement about tasting things? Dokapon: Sword of Fury! tastes like the same bullshit Beverly is made of.

Somewhere out there, someone had the idea to combine a traditional JRPG with Monopoly. And you know what? Whatever feeling you think that would invoke in you, that's exactly how it feels.

Dokapon! is a mainstay for our weekly game nights. For a short while, it became an after-work tradition, gathering around the TV and engaging with whatever nonsense was happening on the map. In short, you go around investing in towns and earning money passively from them while fighting enemies in turn-based combat. Every interaction, however, is random. Battles against enemies are rock-paper-scissors. Battles against other players are rock-paper-scissors. If you land on an item space, you select your item through what I can only describe as a randomized high-speed game of roulette. It's long, annoying, and we can't get enough of it.

The worst part? I absolutely adore the visuals in this game. I love that the backgrounds look painted and textured, that the enemy designs are so of-their-time, that every character looks distinctly different from one another. Losing all my money in one turn be damned, at least it looked good when it happened.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

The term "session game" entered my lexicon sometime last summer, I think. The whole idea is that instead of treating games like some sort of monumental task to be challenged and beaten, you should take a more mellow approach. Have fun and coast by, doing what you can when you can, and getting rid of the pressure and shame that the backlog comes fully equipped with. One of my session games for January was Animal Crossing New Horizons.

If you'd like to read my more intimate thoughts on Animal Crossing: New Horizons, feel free to check them out here.

That said, I can't very much say that my thoughts have changed much since that last essay. I haven't touched New Horizons since then, but I still have it up here as an important aspect of this month because of the mindset I had going into it. I miss what this game felt like. I miss the slow, steady stream of fun that New Horizons was coated with all those years ago, and I hate to think that the only reason it felt this way was because of quarantine. The pacing just throws me off with this new experience; it's hard to want to come back every day when there are so many pieces of the game's design that are meant to stop the player temporarily. Even just seeing it on my Switch 2's main menu hits me with an itch of desire to go back to the island I just recently abandoned. But I just can't invest myself into island living. Something about New Horizons turns me off.

Mario Kart World

To my surprise, Mario Kart World ended being a pretty integral part of my routine to start the year. I had the luxury of being able to attend Southbound, a Mario Kart regional tournament, to help my friend run their merch booth. People hauled in CRTs for Double Dash and Mario Kart Wii, and it will never not impress me how people show their love and dedication to their scene.

Mario Kart World was the main event, however, so when the dust settled and the booth got slow, I turned my attention to the stream. Truth be told, there was a part of me that thought I'd be able to enter this if I ended up not helping with the booth. I bought World when I got my Switch 2, so I figured I'd have a little skin in the game if I signed up. I was very, very wrong.

Where I was still struggling to get three stars on each grand prix, the competitors demonstrated a level of mastery I had never seen in this game. Shortcuts across tracks that I couldn't have even imagined, purposefully sandbagging item boxes to gain an advantage for later in the race, characters I didn't even know were in game. When I got home, I decided that I would look into this community and do some actual research on the game to see how people even figure stuff like this out.

Was this a longstanding endeavor? No, not at all. I found a video that went over some of the basics of competitive Mario Kart World and quickly found that I didn't have the drive to maintain any interest. But I did learn how much I love Knockout Tour.

Two weeks out of the month saw me booting up my Switch 2, playing a couple bouts of Knockout Tour to start or finish my day. It's wild how such a simple iteration on the rules makes for such a compelling game mode. It's tense and bothersome in all the right ways, I have to think on my feet the entire time, and I love that the straightaways have some sort of utility outside of intermission tracks in regular races.

I've only got one Tour win under my belt so far, but honestly, that's all I need.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Truth be told, I have yet to roll credits on Like a Dragon. I'm about 30 hours in at this point, and I've taken a break from the main story to indulge in more of the side stories and minigames. I spent a good while getting to 'King of Cans' on Can Quest.

I kicked my year off with Yakuza: Like a Dragon for one reason – the main character and I share the same birthday. To me, this is a significant enough reason to invest time in any game or character. When I wanted to give Street Fighter VI a try, Juri was right at the top of my interest list for the same reason. The New Year also carries a lot of significance in the game's story, marking the turn of the century, and the day everything changes for Ichiban Kasuga.

It's easy for me to get caught up in the fantasy of Like a Dragon because it reaches well past my rose-tinted glasses and brings out a teen spirit I haven't felt in years. When I was younger, I had dreamed of being a hero and getting "stronger." Was this because I watched too much shonen anime and played too many video games? Yes. Did I know what I meant by those words when I'd tell my high school girlfriend that those were my goals? Not at all. But now, about eight years later, I feel that I can put some meaning behind those ideals thanks to Ichiban.

Early on, there's a section of the game where Ichiban reveals the tattoo on his back. It's a dragonfish and not a regular dragon because of where he ranks amongst the other yakuza in the Arakawa Family. What I like about this is that aside from the game's title, it's a fun, in your face representation of how he contrasts from the other yakuza members in the game. He views his work as being a community leader in order to keep the reputation of the Arakawa Family on the up and up. He carries himself with an unwavering sense of kindness, compassion, and just a general desire to do what's right. In a world where the rest of the men in his line of work could be boiled down to violent thugs who abuse their power to get what they want, Ichiban stands out.

If I could go back in time, I would tell 16-year-old me that this is the way he should define those words he keeps spouting off because he really likes Goku. He needs to be unrelentingly kind even if he doesn't completely understand someone. He needs to find a purpose in what he does and think just a bit more critically about why he's doing it instead of going with the motions. I won't say that I regret any of the choices that I've made before – I believe that I still ended up being a kind enough person before Ichiban and I crossed paths – but I can't help but wonder how different things would be if I had been carried myself with a little more empathy along the way.

Highlights

As always, I want to include a couple of highlights from some of the games I played for this issue:

• While it isn't related to any of these games, I did subscribe to Mothership and wanted to give them a special shoutout. They've been putting out some really good writing over short time that they've been around so far. Despite not having played a Dragon Age game yet, this piece caught my intrigue and stands to be my favorite they've published so far.
• I got my first Knockout Tour win in Mario Kart World. At this point in the race, I was far enough ahead that it was pretty set in stone, but I still clipped it so that I could celebrate.
• Like a Dragon has Breaker as a class. You breakdance, and for all of your special attacks you not only deal high amounts of damage, but there's a chance that you gain a stat buff of some sort. This is probably my favorite RPG class since Red Mage.

I'll see you all next month to reflect on the bits of gaming I've done in February.