Video Game Wrap Up | June 2019

Welcome, friends, to my first video game wrap up on my blog!

Although I’ve been blogging a lot more about video games on my blog recently, it never occurred to me to do a separate wrap up for them. However, in my last wrap up I had a lot of books to wrap up and personal news to share and didn’t want to make the post even longer, so decided it was finally time to give video games a wrap up of their own!

As I mentioned in my general wrap up a couple of days ago, June ended up being quite a stressful month for me in terms of personal life stuff so I found myself turning increasingly to books and video games as a way to have fun/escape from real world stuff. It was nice to actually get to play so many games for a change, instead of struggling to find time for them.

LudoNarraCon 2019

LudoNarraCon was an amazing digital convention which happened via live-stream on Steam on May 10th 2019. Hosted by indie game studio Fellow Traveller, LudoNarraCon aimed to celebrate narrative games and the people who make them through a convention that was able to be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, anywhere, for free. It offered fans of narrative games the opportunity to get together for one day online to “hear news about exciting upcoming games, play demos, and hear from creators”.

Although LudoNarraCon happened almost a month ago, I wanted to do a write-up of the event and share with you all some of my favourite narrative games that I discovered through it. I’m a huge fan of narrative video games so there was a lot to be excited about and, as someone who also loves attending conventions, the entire idea of LudoNarraCon really intrigued me. It was an enjoyable event and I’m happy to hear that the organizers are thinking of hosting another one in the future, so if you like the sound of LudoNarraCon then make sure you sign up for updates on their website.

Wrap Up | May 2019 + the unintended hiatus

Hey friends!

Some of you may (or may not) have noticed that I’ve been absent for pretty much the entirety of May. I had planned to take a little step back from blogging anyway as this summer is going to be really busy for me on my Master’s degree, but then I managed to catch/develop gastroenteritis – a nasty contagious stomach bug – which completely knocked me out for almost 2 weeks. Then I had to return to work, start planning my long summer of uni work, and celebrate my partner’s birthday on Sunday. Before I knew it, I found myself at the end of May? I feel like I blinked and missed it.

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted about my concerns around being able to manage book blogging alongside starting my PhD in September (not to mention squeezing it in amongst all my Master’s work this summer) and I’m still not sure what the outcome of my ponderings will be. It’s definitely something I’m planning on writing a discussion post about so that I can talk about it more in-depth and speak to other book bloggers who manage their blog alongside busy lives. What I do know though, from having my unintended break this month, is that I feel a lot less happy when I’m not blogging and I felt so isolated from my book blog friends. Writing this post is already beginning to lift my low mood but I’m also anxious about how much work I have to do. Anyway, that’s not a decision to be made right now – instead, I want to share with you all what I did manage to get up to during Moody May ❤

#Sidequest Challenge: 20 Games to Play Before 2020 | Sign-Up

For those who don’t know, I’m part of the amazing team over at Sidequest. We’re a collection of writers of marginalized genders who embrace the strange and the unconventional in video games. If like us you love a good challenge, Sidequest is here with the ‘20 games to play before 2020‘ challenge to help you get through all of those games that you’ve been meaning to play. To make things a little bit more fun (and a little bit difficult) Sidequest have provided 20 prompts to diversify your 2019 gaming TBR.

As Soco points out, this isn’t a “spend all my money” challenge. Any games including mobile, tabletop and free-to-play games count and you can use one game for a combination of the prompts. I’m aiming to play one game for each prompt but the majority of mine will be backlist games that I want to get through before the end of the year!