There always has to be a game. When you go to sleep, you think about it: tomorrow, maybe I’ll play the game a bit. If you get bored, or you’re doing something important and you start to feel frustrated, it’s there as a fallback. “I know, I’ll just play the game a bit.” Sometimes it demands all of your attention, and the game is all you can think about. There just has to be a game.

Sometimes the game just doesn’t click, though. Maybe it’s bad, or maybe you’re just not in the mood, or maybe the game is great and you’re bad. Who knows? Whatever the case, it sometimes doesn’t fill the void. That’s usually not a problem – you just give up and start a new game – but if that new game still doesn’t click, you begin approaching the dangerous slide into madness that comes from going too long without a game.

For me, this is a Gaming Dread Spiral.

1. THE SINKING CITY

I don’t remember when I started The Sinking City. Was it a month ago, or a year? What I do remember was that it was the beginning, a harbinger of things to come. The game was full of Lovecraftian mystery – more put together than I expected, honestly – but almost immediately upon arriving at the docks of Innsmouth, or Fishston, or The Isle of Racism, or whatever it was, I realized that I didn’t really want to solve a mystery. All I wanted was to hit stuff and grind out stats like an idiot. I wanted some kind of thoughtless gamer slop to Videodrome itself on to me.

2. LOST RUINS

To that end, I was intrigued by the look of Lost Ruins. It billed itself as a Soulslike, which traditionally has worked on me every time. On top of that, it had an egregious anime aesthetic, which made me think it may be overflowing with incomprehensible stats and gibberish upgrades. That’s exactly the kind of thing that makes all my synapses fire.

On some level, that was what I got, but I found myself fighting the controls. It felt almost like a platformer, not in that there was really any platforming, but in how it seemed to demand slow, patient, precise movements to accomplish anything. The line between platformer-style pixel precision and the usual Soulslike demand for precise pattern recognition is fairly thin, but still I seem to draw it. I wanted to romp, joyous and carefree, but instead I was crawling methodically. I got stressed out. That was not how it was supposed to go.

3. STRANDED DEEP

“Try to remember a time you were happy,” I thought. Then it came to me in a flash: Subnautica. I used to build so many lockers in my little submarine. My undersea house was a delight. Every time a giant fish murdered me, I felt joy. Those were halcyon days, a year ago, or ten years ago, or whenever that was. You can’t just play Subnautica forever, though. You run the risk of relaxing too deeply, drowning in your own comfort like so many gravity-entranced bladder fish.

Instead, I turned to Stranded Deep. It looked like kind of the same thing. You’re on an island and you slap coconuts together to make a raft, or something. I gave it a try, but it didn’t feel right. Again, the controls felt stiff, all my movements uncomfortable. One of the first things I did was climb a tree, accidentally jump, and instantly break my leg with no way to fix it. Then I started over, kept my leg intact, and everything went better. I was slapping coconuts together, making knives out of rocks, drinking water regularly.

I didn’t want to explore, though. The drive wasn’t there. I just wanted a plane to come pick me up. I didn’t want to see another island.

4. DARK DEVOTION

“No,” I thought, “you were right before, Soulslike is the answer.” I tried again, but the second time, I didn’t allow myself to be deceived by an anime aesthetic. I found something fully grimdark – the word “dark” was in the title, so it had to be – and I even read some reviews, which were a little bit mixed, but mostly sounded like something I would enjoy. It had stats, and it would let me hit something, and I liked the look of it, and it was even a rogue-lite, which seemed pleasantly casual. It presented itself as a grimdark Soulslike, and that’s exactly what it was.

Maybe it was me. There were all kinds of swords. There were bosses with names like “Hezek the Baptized.” There was an improbably large blacksmith. The game had it all, but still I couldn’t find my way in. Maybe I let the game down. Maybe it’s always been me.

5. SUPERHOT & 6. CRYPTARK

As despair began to take me, I started flailing. I wondered if perhaps I needed to return to something familiar, something simple, something that had to work. Superhot was something familiar. I played it on a VR headset once and it was pretty fun, and it doesn’t get much simpler than that: hit red guys with stuff, chuck things around, shoot guns, sounds great.

As soon as I loaded it, I realized it wasn’t the same outside of VR. That was an experience, a novelty, but was it a way I wanted to spend time? No, it seemed. I already had another game ready to go – Cryptark, a twin-stick shooter where you loot busted-up space hulks or some such thing – and again I was thinking that it sounded simple, a clean way to graft some sense of progression onto my life, but it wasn’t working. It was punishing, and asking me to do careful money management. My crew was mad at me because I was wasting resources. No. That wasn’t it, no. I didn’t want to make a budget. I didn’t want to fail my crew.

7. WEIRD WEST

Perhaps the problem was that I’d strayed from narrative, I thought. That’s what I usually want from a game, after all: a story. I’d been glancing suspiciously at Weird West for a while. “What’s so weird about this west?” I kept thinking. Werewolves and vampires, I assumed? Probably a zombie or two? Maybe some kind of steampunk stuff? Whatever the case, It was a narrative RPG, so it seemed safe to try it. It seemed like a reliable bet.

For a while, it was going okay, but I quickly started to feel a kind of pressure from the narrative. It was a “your choices matter” kind of situation, and while there’s a time and place for that, I sometimes find it kind of frustrating. I didn’t really want to change the world. I didn’t want to throw a lantern at some dastardly cowboy in a moment of “approaching combat my own way,” only to find that I accidentally burned a horse to death and had to reload out of idiot guilt. I wanted to passively experience something, it was asking too much, the Spiral, I saw it!

8. DEATHLOOP

Finally I concluded that I had to apply real force to handle the issue. No more indie games I’d never heard of, no more beloved AA titles, no more experiments. I decided to listen to my betters and allow Sony to choose for me, to finally play what they’re always telling me to play. It seemed to me that what they wanted me to play was Deathloop.

It was a real game. It had graphics, and voice acting, and there were ads for it, and people had heard of it. All the dialogue had a slightly “epic bacon” quality, anachronistic and weirdly counter to the alternate mid-century aesthetic they seem to be aiming for, but that just meant it was a AAA game. I quickly began to feel lost in the loop, though. The central mystery was engaging, but yet again I was concerned with doing things right. It wasn’t long ago that I wrote a whole thing about how Dishonored stressed me out, so why would this be any different? Once more, I had dug my own grave, I had filled it with games, I had crawled in to die.

9. DARK ROSE VALKYRIE

At that point, I began gasping for relief like a fish washed up on the beach. I needed to dismiss everything and find something made of pure gaming energy, saccharine emptiness, and pump it directly into my veins. Maybe an egregious anime aesthetic was a step in the right direction, I thought, just not as a Soulslike. I’ll never make that Code Vein mistake again, after all. Egregious anime, but with incomprehensible stats and gibberish upgrades. The good stuff.

Then I saw Dark Rose Valkyrie, and I thought I had an answer. What does Dark Rose Valkyrie mean? All three of those words scream anime – they mean nothing at all – and you just know that there’s going to be something in the game called a “valkyrie,” and it’s going to be some kind of sword with a gun on it, or a gun with a sword on it, and you’re going to learn all about it at whatever War Crimes High School you attend with the various spikey-haired devil-may-care ruffians and color-coded tough girls with hearts of gold who join your party.

It still didn’t work, though. The stats were incomprehensible. The upgrades were gibberish.

10. LIVELOCK

The curious thing about the Gaming Dread Spiral is that you can’t force your way out of it. Every time you think you’ve found an answer, you exponentially inflate your hopes and expectations, which only increases the disappointment you inevitably feel. That’s why the Spiral is broken, more often than not, by a game that makes you expect nothing.

I’d never heard of Livelock. I don’t remember buying it, but it was in my library. If I were to guess, I’d say I probably saw it for under five dollars and thought “who cares, I’m going to die someday” before tossing it randomly into my cart. If you asked me what the game is about, I couldn’t tell you. Robots, I guess? Cyborgs, actually. If you asked me why it’s called “Livelock,” I’d have even less of an answer. I don’t know anything about it. I beat it three times.

Despite all these caveats, it was what I needed. I shot lasers at robots without thinking too hard about it. Sometimes it was difficult and I died a lot, but it never seemed to matter, because I kept moving forward. I earned some kind of currency, or scrap, or sci-fi points, or whatever, and I used it to level up all the various guns I could strap to my cyborg hands. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I was shooting, and spinning, and upgrading, and I was finally free.

UNBURDENED

The last flickering threat of this Gaming Dread Spiral was months ago. It’s behind me now. My backlog is growing in such a grotesque manner that I can’t imagine how I could end up experiencing such a thing again, but I know I will. And when I do, I’d like to imagine I’ll be prepared, full of wisdom from the last time and ready to move forward without struggle or uncertainty. That’s never the case, though. The Spiral always finds you.

Months from now, I’ll scroll through an online store, eyes glazed over, staring at something with a name like Sakura Militärschule: Crystallus Atelier Chronicles and trying to convince myself that it really might be the greatest JRPG ever made. Maybe it will be, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter either way, because there’s no predicting what will appease the Spiral.

There’s probably a summer sale, though. That might work.