simpleek

Getting a brand new video game feels a little like Christmas morning. You’re excited and can’t wait to get started. The very idea of it being new is enough to entice you to take a peek at the game, even if you’re already in the middle of playing something else.

I have been guilty in the past for starting games and getting pretty far with some of them, only to stop just as I’m so close to the end. Now, I’m trying to go back and finish some of the games that have been outstanding for a while.

After finishing Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy a few weeks ago, the same conundrum of what to play next returned in full force. I, like so many other gamers, don’t have the issue of having nothing to play. The real problem is having too much to play that you don’t know which game you should stick with for the next few months.

A huge deciding factor in figuring out what to play is time and length of the game. How long is the game and in how many hours can this be beaten? HowLongToBeat.com has been a really useful website in determining how long you can expect to stick with a game, whether you’re interested in only finishing the main story, doing the main + extras, or going full completionist. Most of the time I’m only interested in doing the main story and maybe the main + optional side quests, depending on how the game is structured or how much I’m in love with the story and characters to spend the extra hours with it.

I’m all about maximizing my time and if I only have time for a shorter game, I’m going to choose the one that won’t take so long to finish in about a month and a half. Most of us are adults with busy lives and personal responsibilities we have to attend to. It gets much harder to do a marathon session when you have a lot going on.

As I took the time to decide my next great gaming adventure, I spotted two games I realized I was almost done playing with but never bothered to finish—Little Briar Rose on the Nintendo Switch and LEGO Marvel’s Avengers on the Xbox One.

Little Briar Rose is a cute and simple adventure puzzle game released in 2016 from indie developers Elf Games Works. I had downloaded it a while back from the the Nintendo eshop to my Nintendo Switch. The game is a reimagining of Sleeping Beauty where you play as a prince who has to solve a number of puzzles in the game in order to rescue Briar Rose from her slumber. The game is gorgeous with its stain glass window graphics and storybook atmosphere. It’s really the main reason I decided to buy the game. The puzzles are pretty straightforward and aren’t frustratingly hard if you’re someone like me who is terrible at solving them.

I played the game fairly consistently for about a year until I got swept away by other games and completely forgot about it. When I was going through my small digital library on my Switch, I spotted Little Briar Rose and decided to see how much left of the game I still needed to play. After looking online and matching it up with where I last left off, it was almost laughable how I had maybe about an hour left of the game before I could mark it as done. I spent one day during a weekend to go through what remained and watched the short cutscene before the credits rolled. Really now, why didn’t I beat the game sooner? More recently, that same train of thought happened when I picked up LEGO Marvel’s Avengers.

I vaguely recalled receiving LEGO Marvel’s Avengers as a gift a long time ago. I played it for a while, a relatively easy Legofied game of the MCU’s Avengers film. This was another game I got pretty far with until, again, life and newer games pulled me away. While I still wasn’t committed to any one game yet, I decided it was time to finish the LEGO game as well. I knew I was also close to the end of this one, but I didn’t remember how close.

When I loaded up the game on my Xbox One, I was surprised to find that the year of the save file was 2017. Really? It was that long ago when I last played this game?! Time really does go by fast when you’re not looking. There were three sections in total I had left to finish of the main story. It took about two hours on another weekend to get through them all, but get through them all I did to get to the end credits of the game.

I know there are other little extras and unlockables still left to go through, making this game hardly a one and done deal, but I’ve only been interested in doing the main story. Now that I’ve finished it, I’m happy to cross this game off of my list.

I don’t know if I’ll continue finishing more games that are still left undone. I know I have as many of those as I have of unplayed games. It might be the smart thing to do, but I’ve decided I’ll go where my mood takes me. If I manage to wrap up more partially played games for the rest of the year, I might be in good standing to truly concentrate on the “newer” games I haven’t opened or started yet.

Are there any outstanding games you decided to finally finish playing? What were they and how did you feel about it afterwards?