"Letterboxd for games" has been a search query for years. Reddit asks it every few months, ResetEra has a whole thread on it, and Pocket-lint has rounded up game-tracking apps with the same comparison in mind. A question that keeps getting asked hasn't been answered to anyone's satisfaction yet. We spent a long time on this one before we built Perthro, so here is our reading of what people want when they type it.
What Letterboxd actually does
Letterboxd is a film diary that started in New Zealand and, over the last few years, became one of the few social networks people use because they like it. Every film has a page. You mark what you watched and when, give it a star rating (half stars allowed), write a review of whatever length, make lists and follow people. The site keeps all of it.
The star rating isn't what people are after when they ask for the games version. Steam has user reviews and Metacritic has scores. What they want is the diary: a dated record of what they played, the note they wrote the night they finished it, and a feed of friends whose taste they've learned to read. After a few years, a Letterboxd profile says something about the person who keeps it. A Steam profile mostly says what they bought.
Why games are harder to log than films
A film is a fixed object that lasts about two hours. You watch it, form an opinion and log it. Games rarely behave that way.
You might play something for 40 hours, or 400, or quit after 20 minutes. You might stop halfway through the second act, come back two years later on a sick day and finish it on a Sunday morning. You might play it on a couch with three friends or on a handheld on a flight. And the game you finished in 2024 can be a different game after an expansion lands in 2026.
Then there are the platforms. A film is the same film whether you streamed it or rented it. Your games are split across Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, GOG, itch.io, Epic giveaways and Game Pass, and none of those accounts know about each other.
So "watched, not watched, stars" doesn't cover it. A games diary needs statuses for the unfinished stuff (playing, played, plan to play, shelved). It needs to know you played on a Steam Deck and not a PS5. And it has to accept that "finished" is sometimes a judgement call.
What a Letterboxd for games needs
Here's our list, roughly in the order we cared about it:
- Statuses that allow for quitting. Shelving a game should be as ordinary as finishing one.
- Reviews with no length rules. Some games get one line ("slow start, worth it by hour three"). Some get six paragraphs because the ending won't leave you alone. A review should also hold the context: whether you finished, how many hours, which platform.
- Lists with no fixed categories. Letterboxd lists are good because they're odd. The games equivalent is games I played the year I lived in Vancouver, or RPGs I bounced off but respect.
- Your library, already imported. Nobody rebuilds ten years of history by hand. If an app can't pull in Steam, PlayStation and Xbox, most people give up around the twelfth entry.
- Friends rather than an audience. Letterboxd works because you follow people whose taste you know. A games version should be a feed of people, without follower counts or a trending tab pushing the same five releases.
- A catalogue that includes the small stuff. Every game needs a page, including the odd indie from a solo developer, which means leaning on a broad database rather than one storefront's shelf.
Why we started on iPhone
Most opinions about games form away from the machine. You beat a boss, put the controller down, and the thought is there for maybe 20 minutes. A friend texts a recommendation while you're in line for coffee. You catch a trailer on the bus. The phone is in your hand at all of those moments, so that's where the first sentence of a review gets written, if it gets written at all.
A bigger screen is nice for long reviews and browsing old lists. But the entry that exists is usually the one typed on a phone the night it happened.
What we built
Perthro is our attempt at an answer. It's free on the App Store for iPhone (iOS 17 or later). You track games as playing, played, plan to play or shelved, rate them out of five stars with half-steps, and write reviews that record whether you finished, your hours and your platform. Connect Steam, PlayStation Network or Xbox and it imports your library, then picks up new play sessions for you to confirm with "Log it". Game data comes from IGDB, which covers the indie tail as well as the big releases. Your profile shows a histogram of your ratings, which is a very Letterboxd thing to want. There's a full rundown of everything it tracks on our game tracker app page.
If you're starting a games diary from scratch, our guide on how to keep a game journal covers the habit side.
We're not claiming Perthro settles the question. People will keep typing "Letterboxd for games" until something does. What we can say is that we took the diary part seriously, because it's the part we wanted for ourselves.
