A few months ago, I was published for the first time - thanks @unwinnable.com! I'm still very proud of this piece that touches on the portrayal of faith, deification, technological "progress", solidarity, and music found in this charming masterpiece of a game.

I'm still committed to updating the lists we spent so long crafting and if you are curious to check them and those shorter reviews out, you can find them through the link in my bio.

After a year of working within those constraints - and probably taking it a little too seriously, as I often do - I thought it was worth trying to take the next step in pursuing my passion for writing.

2000 characters is a pretty austere limit, but Sarah's surgical and frequently-painful edits helped me create what I think is some decent short-form writing, even if sharing my thoughts often left me feeling vulnerable.

What was an occasional hobby became an expanding project of tracking and cataloguing releases through various playlists, and eventually evolved into trying my hand at writing user reviews for some of my favourite games.

So, in 2023, we created an IGN Playlist account, intending to maintain an updated list of indie game recommendations that our friends (and anybody else) could check in on whenever they were looking for something new.

We tried our best to find a balance between being informative and enticing in hopes of sharing our passion with the people around us. Having repeated this gesture so many times we thought, hey, maybe there's a tool we could use to keep track of the things we recommend.

We originally made slide decks in powerpoint detailing games we thought would appeal to people who were much less involved in the hobby than us, tailoring our recommendations to each person's specific interests.

After the Nintendo Switch's release, my partner and I began creating game recommendation lists for everyone we knew who was fresh into the ecosystem.