The phrase "Letterboxd for games" is, by now, its own genre of search. Type it into Google and you'll get years of forum threads, app store recommendations, opinion pieces, and TikTok videos. Reddit asks the question every few months. ResetEra has its own megathread. Pocket-lint and The Gamer have written about it. People keep asking, which means the question hasn't been settled. We took that seriously when we set out to build Perthro, and the more we sat with it, the more it shaped almost every choice we made.
This post is partly a pitch for Perthro, which is the honest framing. It is also an attempt to answer what the search term is actually asking for, why it has been so hard to satisfy, and what a good answer might look like in 2026.
Why the phrase keeps coming back
Letterboxd, for the small handful of you who have somehow not encountered it, is a film tracking and review site that grew quietly out of New Zealand for over a decade and then, in the last few years, became one of the most genuinely used social networks on the internet. The premise is simple and load-bearing: every film has a page, you mark what you've watched, you give it a star rating, you write a review of any length you like, and you follow other people who do the same. You build lists. You log a film with a date. The site keeps that record forever.
What people are reaching for when they say "Letterboxd for games" is not primarily the rating mechanic, which they could already get on Steam or Metacritic. It is the journal part. The fact that on Letterboxd, a person's account is, over time, a portrait of who they are as a viewer. The diary of dates and notes. The feed of friends with taste close to yours. The list of weird obscurities someone made because they felt like it. The sense that the platform is on the side of the people watching, not on the side of the studios trying to sell tickets.
That is the thing that doesn't quite exist for games yet. You can rate a game on Steam. You can earn an achievement on Xbox. None of those are a portrait of you as a player. They are pieces of a marketing funnel.
What games make harder than films
It would be tidy to say the only reason a Letterboxd for games doesn't already exist is that nobody has built it yet. The truer answer is that games are structurally messier than films, and any honest answer has to deal with that.
A film is, give or take, a fixed object that takes two hours. You watch it once, sometimes twice, you have a take, you log it. A game is rarely any of those things. You play it for forty hours. Or four hundred. Or you bounce after twenty minutes and never come back. You play it across years, across moves, across breakups. You play it with three friends on a couch. You play it on a handheld on a flight. You quit halfway through Act 2 and pick it up two years later in a different mood and finish it on a Sunday morning. You finish the version of it that existed in 2024, and then the developer ships an expansion in 2026 that meaningfully changes what the game is.
Then there are the platforms. The film you watched is the same film whether you streamed it on Criterion or rented it on Apple TV. The game you played was on Steam, or PSN, or Xbox, or Switch, or GOG, or Itch, or Game Pass, or Epic, and each of those keeps its own walled garden of records and refuses to talk to the others. The library you actually own is fragmented across half a dozen accounts, none of which know about each other.
A good answer to the search term has to deal with all of this. Some of it can be solved with imports. Some of it has to be solved with a journal model that is more flexible than "watched / unwatched / star rating."
What's already out there
If you go searching today, you'll find a few honest attempts. Backloggd is the one most people land on first; it has the cleanest community feel and a Letterboxd-shaped UI. GG is a serious iOS-native attempt that a lot of people genuinely love. Games by Ali Dinç is a delightful free app that focuses on the personal collection side. IGN's Playlist app exists and does some of this. There are smaller indie attempts, and a long tail of abandoned ones.
We don't think those are bad. Some of them are very good. We started Perthro because, as players, we wanted something specific and we didn't quite see it in any of the existing options: an iPhone-first journal that took the diary half of Letterboxd seriously, treated reviews as a thing you write at length when you want to, gave lists first-class status the way Letterboxd does, pulled your library together from the major platforms automatically, and stayed quietly on your side rather than trying to monetize the discovery surface.
What we built differently
Perthro is in TestFlight on iPhone right now, free, iOS 16 and up. The current build does the things we think a good answer to the search term has to do, and only those things.
You can track what you're playing, what you've finished, what's in your backlog, what's on your wishlist, what you've shelved. Star ratings go from one to five. Reviews can be a sentence or a short essay; we are deliberately uninterested in capping the length, and we don't make you write one. Lists are first-class objects: make a list called games I played the year I lived in Vancouver, share it, edit it five years later, fold it into another list when you decide that the year really started in March. The friends and feed are there for the people who want them, and easy to ignore for the people who don't.
Library import is the part we put the most effort into early. Connect your Steam account, your PlayStation Network, your Xbox Live, and Perthro pulls in what it can, including achievements and trophies where the platforms support it. The metadata for every game comes from IGDB, which is community-maintained and broad enough to cover the indie tail, not just the AAA front shelf. If a title is missing, you request it on IGDB, and a day or so later it shows up in Perthro.
Custom themes are in. The app is small enough that a small choice like that matters; it should feel like your journal, not a brand experience.
A few things are deliberately not in the build. There are no public web profiles yet; if you want to share a list, you share it inside the app or by screenshot. There is no Android client and no iPad client and no macOS client, because the team is small and we want one platform to be excellent before we widen the surface.
Why iPhone first
The honest answer is that the iPhone is where most people read books on transit, write a quick note about the show they just watched, and fire off a message to a friend about a game. It is the natural home for a journal. A web app is great for archives and long writing sessions, but the entry that actually gets written is the one you write on your phone the night you finish the boss fight, before the feeling goes away.
The question we kept asking ourselves was: where does the first sentence get written? On a phone, on a couch, twenty minutes after you put the controller down, while the feeling is still warm enough to put words around. That is the moment we wanted to be ready for. So that is the platform we built for first.
What the answer might look like
A Letterboxd for games doesn't really mean a clone of Letterboxd with the film posters swapped for box art. The phrase is a stand-in for something specific: a calm, honest, durable record of what you played and what you thought, that respects the way games actually arrive in your life across platforms and decades, that treats your friends as friends rather than an engagement metric, and that stays out of the way the rest of the time.
That is what we are trying to build. The TestFlight is open if you want to try it, and the team in Alberta reads every piece of feedback that comes back through the in-app channel. The invite is at testflight.apple.com/join/XVxCdRcK. It is free during the beta, iOS 16 and up.
The phrase "Letterboxd for games" is going to keep being a search query for as long as the answer hasn't shown up. We are not promising we are the answer. We are promising that we took the question seriously, and that the build in front of you is what we have so far.