Summer showcase weekend has a strange aftertaste. For an hour or two, everything feels possible. A trailer lands, the chat flies by, a game you had never heard of suddenly looks like the exact thing you want to play this winter. Then the stream ends. Tabs close. The group chat moves on. By Monday, half of it is already gone from memory.
That happened again this weekend. Summer Game Fest ran on June 6, and IGN's recap video of the announcements was already doing huge numbers by the next day. Wholesome Direct also landed on June 6, full of smaller games with softer edges, odd little premises, and the kind of screenshots that make you open a store page before you can explain why. The problem is not that there are too few games. The problem is that there are too many tiny first impressions, and most of them evaporate before they become useful.
So this is a guide, but a gentle one. No spreadsheet religion. No demand that you turn your hobby into a queue management system. Just a way to come out of showcase season with a list that still feels like yours.
Start with the feeling, not the title
The normal way to track games after a showcase is to grab the name, add it to a wishlist, and assume the store page will do the remembering for you. It usually will not. A title alone is a bad memory hook, especially when you saw twenty trailers in a row and three of them had neon swords, lonely robots, and a cat somewhere in the frame.
Write down the first thing that actually caught you. Not the genre. Not the publisher. The feeling.
Maybe it was "looks like a rainy Sunday game." Maybe it was "the combat looked too fast for me, but I want to watch reviews." Maybe it was "that village looked like the place in my grandmother's old photos." These notes sound useless until six months later, when the game comes out and the store description is all systems and bullet points. Your first note will tell you why you cared.
That is especially true for smaller games. Wholesome Direct has become good at surfacing games that do not always sell themselves with a single clean hook. A fishing game, a mail game, a shopkeeping game, a walk through a painted world. Sometimes the reason you want one is not because it is mechanically new. Sometimes you just want to sit inside its mood.
A useful list makes room for that. If your only categories are "buy," "wait," and "ignore," you lose the softer middle, which is where a lot of interesting games live.
Give every game a job
A wishlist becomes noisy when every item means the same thing. One game is there because you will buy it day one. Another is there because a friend mentioned it. Another is there because the trailer had one good shot and you do not trust it yet. If they all sit in one pile, the pile stops being a plan and becomes another inbox.
A better question is: what job is this game doing on the list?
Here is the one list I actually like after a showcase:
- Play soon: games you would start within the next month if they were available today.
- Watch closely: games that need reviews, a demo, or a clearer explanation before you decide.
- Remember the mood: games you might forget unless you save the feeling now.
- Friend picks: games you mainly care about because someone you trust got excited.
- Not for me, still interesting: games you will not play, but want to understand because people will talk about them.
That last category matters. We treat wishlists like shopping carts, but games are also part of culture. You can be curious about something without wanting to own it. You can follow a survival horror game because the art direction is sharp, even if you know you will never make it past the first basement. You can keep an eye on a strategy game because your friend will disappear into it for two months and you want to know what happened.
This is where a plain backlog can fail you. It asks, "Will you play this?" A better gaming journal also lets you answer, "Maybe not, but I want to remember that it existed."
Do not trust the trailer version of yourself
Trailer-you is extremely optimistic. Trailer-you has free evenings. Trailer-you thinks this is finally the year for a dense tactical RPG, a 90-hour open world, and a roguelike that requires actual concentration after 10 p.m. Trailer-you is charming, but not always honest.
That does not mean you should be cynical. Cynicism is just another way to flatten the list. The trick is to add a small amount of friction while the excitement is still warm.
Ask the boring questions kindly. When would I play this? What would I stop playing to make room? Do I want to play it, or do I want to be the kind of person who plays it? Is this a game for me, or a game for a long video essay I will watch while making dinner?
Those questions sound harsh on paper. In practice, they are generous. They keep your future self from opening a bloated wishlist in October and feeling faintly accused by it. Games should not glare at you from a list. They should invite you back.
I like adding a "why now" note for anything that feels urgent. If the answer is only "everyone is talking about it," that is fine. Sometimes that is the real answer. Playing alongside the conversation can be fun. But if the answer is "I loved the art" or "the demo looked strange in a way I miss," that is worth saving too. It will age better than hype.
Let friends bend the list
One of the quiet pleasures of showcase season is finding out what your friends noticed. It is rarely the same thing you noticed. You might come away thinking about a moody adventure game, while someone else is obsessed with a tactics trailer you barely registered. That difference is useful. It makes the list less algorithmic.
A store wishlist is private by default. That is good for buying things, less good for remembering why games moved through your life. The better version is a little more social. Not public in the performance sense, where every rating becomes a take. Social in the older sense: here is what caught my eye, what caught yours?
Perthro is built around that calmer version of sharing. You can follow friends, see activity in the feed, react and reply, and make custom lists for the games you want to group together. After a weekend like Summer Game Fest, that matters more than it sounds. A list called "June showcase maybes" can hold games you are not ready to commit to. A friend reply can remind you why one of them looked special before the wider internet sorted everything into winners and losers.
That is the part I distrust about big event recaps. They move quickly toward consensus. Best trailer. Biggest surprise. Most disappointing absence. Fair enough. We all like a headline. But your actual taste often lives in the leftovers, in the fourth or fifth game you mention when someone asks what looked good.
Keep those. They are usually more yours.
Separate backlog from appetite
The word backlog has picked up a little moral weight, which is unfortunate. It makes unplayed games sound like debt. Some people like that framing, and if it works for them, fine. For me, it turns a shelf of possibilities into a list of chores.
After a showcase, try separating your backlog from your appetite. The backlog is what you already intend to play. Appetite is what you are curious about. It can be loose, seasonal, and a bit contradictory. You can have appetite for three farming games and still know you only have room for one. You can be curious about a boss-rush game while admitting you are in no condition to play it this month.
Perthro's backlog and wishlist can be reordered, and the "next up" view is useful precisely because it forces a smaller question. Not "what are all the games I might someday play?" but "what is actually next?" That shift saves you from the giant undifferentiated pile. It also lets the rest of the list breathe. A game can wait without being forgotten.
This is the small mercy I want from any tracking system. It should not pretend I have infinite time. It also should not punish me for being curious.
Revisit the list after the noise fades
The best time to make the first note is during or right after the showcase. The best time to decide is later.
Give yourself a second pass. A week is enough. Look at the games you saved and see which ones still have a pulse. Some will already feel like somebody else's enthusiasm. That is normal. Remove them or move them to a colder list. Others will still tug at you, even without the music and editing and chat scroll. Those are the ones worth keeping close.
If a demo appears, treat it like evidence, not an obligation. Ten minutes can tell you plenty. So can bouncing off it. Write that down too. "Looked beautiful, hated the movement" is a perfectly good game memory. So is "not for me, but I get it now."
That is the larger point hiding under all of this. Tracking games is not only about making sure you buy the right things. It is about keeping a record of your taste while it changes. Showcase season makes that visible because it compresses so many little wants into one weekend. You see the player you are, the player you used to be, and the player you keep imagining you will become when life gets quieter.
Life may not get quieter. The list can.
So after the recaps and reaction videos, keep the handful of games that still mean something. Save the reason, not just the name. Let friends complicate it. Let some games be maybes. Let some be memories before they are purchases.
That is enough. More than enough, honestly.