The internet is very good at telling you what to play next. It is much worse at remembering why you wanted to play something in the first place.
That gap gets louder during weeks like this. July release roundups are everywhere, and the Steam Summer Sale chatter is still spilling across YouTube. gameranx has a new games of July list, IGN is looking at the biggest releases still coming this year, and channels like Mortismal Gaming and Fextralife are digging through the sale pile. Even with social data patchy today, the shape is obvious. Everyone is trying to make sense of too many games at once.
I like that abundance. I really do. A healthy game year should feel a little impossible. There should be strange little indies you only hear about from one friend, old RPGs suddenly cheap enough to take a chance on, a huge release that eats the group chat for a week, and some quiet thing you meant to try before life moved on. The problem is not that there are too many games. The problem is that most of our tools treat wanting a game, buying a game, playing a game, and remembering a game as the same action.
They are not the same action. They are not even close.
A library is not a journal
Steam is excellent at being Steam. PlayStation and Xbox are good at being themselves. Each platform knows what you bought there, what you installed there, and in some cases what trophies or achievements you earned there. That is useful, but it is not a complete picture of your life with games.
A game library answers a narrow question: what is attached to this account?
A journal asks something softer and more interesting: what did this game mean to you when you played it?
That sounds sentimental until you try to remember your own history. The co-op game you only played for three nights may matter more than the hundred-hour RPG you finished out of stubbornness. A short indie you beat on a Sunday afternoon might stay with you longer than the giant launch everyone argued about. The game you shelved after two hours still has a story attached to it. Maybe you were not in the mood. Maybe it was the wrong season of your life. Maybe you loved the idea and hated the controls. That is still worth recording.
This is where the common phrase "Letterboxd for games" is useful, even if it is imperfect. People are not usually asking for a clone of a movie app. They are asking for permission to treat games as lived experiences, not just owned products. They want a place to rate, review, list, shelve, revisit, and compare notes with friends without turning the whole thing into homework.
The best version of that idea is not a productivity system. It is a memory system.
The backlog problem is really a context problem
Backlog guilt is boring. I do not say that to be smug. I have felt it plenty. There is a particular shame in looking at a pile of games you chose yourself and somehow feeling accused by it. Sales make that worse because every discount arrives with a tiny moral argument. This is cheaper now. This might not be cheaper later. You said you liked this genre. You said you wanted to support smaller studios. You said you would finally play that classic.
Fine. Maybe all of that is true. Still, a backlog without context is just a stack of old intentions.
The useful question is not "how do I clear this?" The useful question is "why is this here?" If you added a game because a friend loved it, that matters. If you added it because you wanted a short palate cleanser after a massive open-world game, that matters too. If you added it because it looked perfect for winter, or because it reminded you of something you played as a kid, or because the soundtrack got under your skin, that is the information you will want later.
Most platform libraries cannot hold that kind of note. They can tell you what you own. They can tell you what you launched. They cannot tell you what you were hoping for.
A good video game tracker should make room for those small reasons. Not in a fussy way. Nobody needs a form with twelve mandatory fields just to say "this looks like a good rainy weekend game." But there should be somewhere for the thought to live before it evaporates.
Reviews do not have to be verdicts
One of the odder habits games inherited from the wider internet is the idea that every opinion needs to be final. A review becomes a verdict. A score becomes a position. You liked it or you did not. Five stars or one star. Masterpiece or disaster. Everyone picks a side and then spends the next week defending it.
That can be fun, in the way shouting about games can be fun. But it is not how memory works.
Some games change shape after you finish them. Some feel better in hindsight because the annoying parts fade and one scene stays sharp. Some feel worse because the spell breaks the second you stop playing. Some games are easier to admire than love. Some are impossible to recommend cleanly because the thing that makes them special is also the thing that makes them exhausting.
A gaming journal should leave room for all of that. Rate the game if a score helps you. Write three sentences if that is enough. Write a long, messy review if the game keeps bothering you. Change your mind later. The point is not to produce a clean consumer guide for strangers. The point is to leave a record that still sounds like you when you come back to it.
That is a small thing, but small things are where game memory usually lives. The boss you beat too late at night. The friend who carried the whole squad. The puzzle you solved by accident. The game you thought would be a ten and quietly dropped by Thursday.
Cross-platform tracking should feel normal now
The old platform boundaries make less sense every year. A single player might have a Steam backlog, a few PlayStation exclusives, an Xbox library through years of Game Pass experiments, and a handful of games remembered only because an achievement list exists somewhere. The platforms are separate, but the player is one person.
So a modern game tracking app has to start from the player, not the storefront.
Perthro is built around that premise. It is an iPhone-first social gaming journal in TestFlight beta. You can track games you are playing, have played, plan to play, or shelved. You can rate games on a 5-star scale, write reviews of any length, keep a backlog and wishlist with reordering and a next up view, make custom lists, follow friends, react and reply in the feed, and import libraries from Steam, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live, with achievements or trophies where supported. Game metadata comes from IGDB.
That list matters because the boring plumbing matters. A journal is only useful if it is easy to keep current. If tracking your games requires rebuilding your life by hand across three platforms, most people will quit before the habit starts. Importing the library does not write the memory for you, but it does bring the raw material into one place.
From there, the interesting part is human. Which games did you actually finish? Which ones are still calling to you? Which ones belong on a list called "quiet winter games" or "co-op nights that went wrong" or "RPGs I bounced off but respect"? That is the part a storefront will never understand because it is not trying to be your diary.
Social should mean nearby, not noisy
A social gaming journal does not need to become another feed that eats the afternoon. Games already have enough noise around them. Trailer reactions, score arguments, patch discourse, platform fights, endless ranking. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is just weather.
The better social layer is smaller. Friends nearby. A feed of what people you chose to follow are playing, rating, reviewing, shelving, or adding to lists. Reactions and replies when there is something to say. Less performance, more recognition. Oh, you finally tried that one. Oh, you bounced off it too. Oh, I did not expect you to love that.
That kind of social design fits games because games are already conversational. Half the pleasure of finishing something is handing it to another person and saying, carefully, "I need to know what you think about this." The app should help that moment happen. It should not bury it under a popularity contest.
This is also why custom lists feel more personal than they look on paper. A list can be a recommendation, but it can also be a self-portrait. Favorite detective games. Games I played after midnight. Games with towns I wanted to live in. Unfinished things I still think about. A list does not need to solve anything. Sometimes it just gives a shape to taste.
The real job is remembering the player
The next month of games will bring more release calendars, more sale picks, more launch trailers, more debates over what deserves your time. That is good. The medium is alive when nobody can keep up.
But the player needs a counterweight to the flood. Not a stricter system. Not a guilt machine. Something quieter. A place to say: I wanted this, I tried this, I loved this, I bounced off this, I might come back later.
That is what a Letterboxd for games should be aiming at. Not just a database of titles and scores, but a record of attention. The games matter, obviously. The person moving through them matters too.
If Perthro gets that right, it will not be because it has the loudest feature list. It will be because opening it feels like returning to your own trail through the medium: the plans, the detours, the finished credits, the shelved experiments, the friends who left a note along the way.
That is the part I want more tools to respect. Not the backlog as a debt. Not the library as a receipt drawer. The journey. The slightly uneven, very personal, hard-to-sort trail of games you meant to play, did play, half-played, forgot, remembered, and carried with you anyway.