Gaming With A Healthy Mindset: "Stepping Away"

Content originally posted to Instagram on June 13, 2021.

(I wasn't entirely sure what to call this post, so I came up with a tentative "Gaming With A Healthy Mindset" header for similar posts in the future)

It’s important to recognize when to temporarily step away from something.

I’ve expressed this before: the original Persona 5 is a very special game to me. If it weren’t for that game, I would *actually* not be playing video games again or posting about them. And yet, even if Persona 5 Royal is that game but just “bigger and better”…..I’m going to stop for a while. For various reasons, it’s been taking me waaay longer than I expected, and I’ve been getting progressively less enjoyment out of it.

I still have a bit of this fear that I won’t finish a game if I take a break from it. I suppose that stems from all the games I played growing up that I never finished. It felt wasteful, and I told myself I’d never do that again…but in hindsight, maybe that meant those games couldn’t provide me long-term enjoyment?

Whatever the case, I love Persona 5 enough to see Royal to the end with all its new endgame content. Might even come back to it by the end of the year! Until then, I’m eager for some newer experiences first — I’m planning to dive deeper into fighting games and try a few single-player games that’ve been on my “to-play” list.