When we started Sprites and Dice, one of the main goals was to try and bring a little joy back to gaming. It seems like a strange statement: why would someone need to bring joy back to a hobby that was made to well… bring joy?
The 21st century brought hundreds of blessings and curses to those who grew up begging their parents to bring them to the arcade. Video games became easier to play at home as processing power skyrocketed; suddenly you could not only try and save the princess with a few quarters, but explore entire worlds. As the industry ballooned however, so did the complications. The ability to have better graphics cards turned into an arms race between developers and players to own $1,000 dollar bits of hardware. The creation of Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs led to “Games As A Service” as a business model. The list goes on and on.
That moment when you've done a week of daily quests and find out you need to buy in-game currency anyway for a shiny hat.
Sometimes, it’s important to pull back from the complications of the giant hype machine that modern gaming has become and return to the simple joys. For the next month, we’re going to try and let go of previews and the anxiety of waiting for whatever games are coming out next month. We’ll try and ignore perfectionist urges and achievement lists. We won’t care about competitive ranked lists and how many concurrent players there are on steam for our favorite games.
It’s time to Finish The Damn Games we already have.
The 2026 Finish The Damn Game Month Challenge
In previous years, we’ve tried to dedicate a month to games already in our library to finish and write about. Sometimes we do really well and write great reflections about the experience, while other times we make lists of hopeful games to finish and still have only beaten one of those five titles in five years. Whether successful or not, we’ve found tackling this exercise as a team really helpful. It reorients us away from looking at the next big releases and back at the games we already own. In a culture of always feeling the need to buy the-next-best-thing, taking a little time to work backwards can help bring a little appreciation back to the hobby.
Why do this? Why focus on the past instead of the new shiny future? Well, a few reasons. The main reason you might say is money: how many games have you bought and never even opened? You bought them originally for a reason, and without even trying the game, it feels like wasted money just… lingering there. Like that aspirational bowl of berries that’s been slowly becoming moldy in the back of your fridge.
You can choose long or short games for the month's challenge! For example, in 2023? One of my games was Chex Quest. Yes, the CD-ROM game you could find in a cereal box as a kid.
Finally beating this game healed me.
Playing games you already own does save you money, but there’s also a sense of accomplishment and closure that comes with it too. Games offer players a rare opportunity to actually start a story and play it through to its conclusion, whether it's exploring an open world, shooting hundreds of aliens, or just building a farm. As the real world has gotten busier, that sense of finishing a game has gotten sometimes even harder to find. More games released today are built like Fortnite; there is no start or end, but always more content, always more daily quests and goals to keep you playing. I’m not denying that they can be fun experiences, but let's be honest – the last time you loaded into an MMO or battle royale game, did you do it with excitement or a sense of obligation?
Finish The Damn Game Month is an attempt to return to the simpler pleasures of the genre. The biggest new releases and the daily quests can wait a few weeks. For now, September is a chance to enjoy what we already have.
The Contest: Game Giveaways and Good Times
This year, we are upping the stakes by putting money where our mouth: we're hosting a contest with some money behind it this time around.
On our discord, we’ve set up a channel called “Finish The Damn Game Month”. During September 2025, we’ll be encouraging people to talk about what games they REALLY want to finish. Maybe it's to vent about why you never finished that last Final Fantasy you’ve always meant to, or maybe it's to get some advice on how to finally beat a Baldur's Gate game. However, we’ll also be using that channel to orchestrate a giveaway of some of the money we’ve saved up from our patreon.
Rules of the “Finish The Damn Game 2026” Giveaway:
- You can’t have beaten the game before.
- The game has to be from 2024 or earlier.
- You must take a screenshot of the game in your library (or gaming collection of your choice) showing it as unbeaten/unplayed and post it in our discord chat during September 2026.
- Once beaten, take a screenshot of the ‘Congratulations!’ screen or achievement showing you beat the game, and post it in our discord chat during September 2025. It will count as one entry into the giveaway.
- You can enter up to four games as 'finished' for the contest. If you want to beat more, go ahead!
- After running a poll in our community, you CAN choose an early access game from when it was first released, as long as the game has hit 1.0 (For example: Palworld technically counts, barely. You might have to remind the judges (me) of the contest of the game's actual age.
- We’ll be starting a hashtag #FinishTheDamnGame for any games the writers work on or beat this month on Bluesky, and encourage everyone else to do the same! Doing it with one of the games you’ve beaten will get you an extra entry into the giveaway. Don’t worry though, this is an optional extra raffle option, not a requirement.
Editor's Note: We've run this friendly competition for five years now. We always love doing it, and we have great conversations on the discord about the experience. It would be amazing if this was the year that this project broke containment and spread further. If you've participated in the past and liked it, it would mean the world to the community if you helped spread the word and get more people involved. It does cost us more money in terms of prizes, but we honestly just like seeing people enjoy games, and also enjoy that feeling you get when you finally roll credits too. If we can get up to 25 participants and 50 games beaten, that would be a great start!
How Prizes Work:
- We’ll be giving away $10 gift cards for Steam or any other major console.
- We are giving away one gift card to start, plus one more for every 10 games completed by the community! The more games completed, the more we give away.
- If at least 30 games are beaten in 2026, we’ll make one of the gift cards a $25 dollar give away!
- There will also be some game code giveaways for fun indie titles we enjoy during the month! These will be held at random in our discord - all you need to do to get one of these is have entered the contest with at least one game.
And that’s it! We’d love it if you liked our social media and stuck around to talk with our community in discord too, but right now, we just want to encourage people to open their backlogs and feel like they’ve enjoyed games that have already been purchased. In 2022, we gave away two gift cards. By 2025, we were giving away three and seeing over 40+ games entered. Our goal for 2026? Give away at least four. Can we get to 40 games beaten in a month?!
If you need the discord link to join our community, here: https://discord.gg/zzZqRFXRnE!
It’s About The Games You Beat Along The Way
On a personal note, the last few years have been… well, difficult. It’s hit everyone a little differently, but everyone I know has had to deal with some level of hardship. I wrote four years ago about how having a kid right as COVID kicked off nearly broke me, and how gaming helped. It did, of course, but once my baby Jonah started being able to walk, the sleepless nights also turned into no calm moments of gaming with an immobile baby in my lap. My ability to find stress relief in gaming tanked. To compensate, I did a lot of window shopping. My steam backlog of wishful thinking grew and grew. I spent money I didn’t have on impulse purchases I still haven’t gotten around to.
In 2022, I made a resolution to beat 10 games before I bought any more. It really did wonders for refocusing my limited time on what I already had, and running this event helped get me to that goal. In a world that feels like it's constantly having an anxiety attack, the simple pleasure of knowing I finished something, however small, can be a great joy.
Baldur’s Gate 1 came out in 1998, and I was not ready for it at only 13. 26 years later, I finally have a save file, and have level 4 characters! Only a little late… Maybe this month will finally fix my track record. 2026 article update: I failed last year. Maybe this year, I can make it happen.
In the end, that’s why we are hosting this contest. To get ourselves excited to play games we’ve gotten in the last few years, maybe write some long overdue articles and reviews about them, and to invite others to find some real enjoyment in a hobby that's become bloated with micro-transactions and a feeling of having to keep up with everyone else. Putting my money where my mouth is, here's the first four games I'm declaring:
- Halo: ODST - The one Halo (besides 5) that I've never beaten. The one that got away.
- Baldur's Gate 1 - played this in high school, liked it, was too dumb for it then. Now, I want to play Baldur's Gate 3 so I can understand all the memes, but can't until I finally fix this!
- Witcher 3 - I've started this game twice and gotten bogged down. Last year, I managed to make it to the halfway point according to friends; now to finally finish it. Just in time for a new expansion, somehow?
- Shadowgate - A point and click adventure game from... 1987? It's a long story, and one I want to write about. I bought the remake/remaster a decade ago, and hope to close this circle.
So there you have it from me! A good mix of short games, strange ones, and ones that might take me another few years. Do you have games you've been meaning to beat for years... even decades? Have you ever wanted to challenge yourself to a game that's gotten away? Well, now's your chance! Now is the time to finally get that game you've been saying "I'll play it one day". Now IS the time to finally tackle a Dark Souls... or a Stardew Valley, I don't judge.
Happy gaming everyone, and may your backlogs feel lighter in just a few weeks.
