Well, I don’t have great news. Despite every effort imaginable and all hopes to do so, my data loss from last month is fatal: an external HDD managed to save a bunch of the site’s reviews and such I wrote up to November, and I quickly backed up the site via wordpress and stuffed that on a cloud platform, but a lot of in-progress reviews, retrospectives, and writings were lost, and I had hope a data recovery place could recover something from my SSD, but with two of them determining the controller is completely wrecked, there’s literally no way to access the data. So yes, my valuable photos of the last moments I spent with my grandfather are gone forever, and I’m still a mental wreck.

That being said, I’ve slowly been rebuilding the pieces. A tiny bit of work on the PMD Eternal Memories retrospectives here, (since i have to redo those scripts now too), a bit of work on a secret gigaton interview project there, I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things in a faster timeframe than my other post-tragedy hiatuses. I got a pretty productive week out in late Feb I’d like to repeat more often, and I think I may be able to do that by making more top games lists with the impending closure of the 3DS/Wii U eShops to mix with some reviews I’ve been working on catching up with.

Speaking of which, might as well go over the reviews lost in the data crash, that were nearly final and thus, I’m basically having to rewrite these from zero:

Valthian School Arc (PS4)
Omensight: Definitive Edition (PS4)
Tokyo School Life (Switch eShop)
Qbyte Classics: The Immortal (Xbox)
Radio Hammer Station (Switch eShop)

The bottom two have already gone through the process of a slow rewrite and I’m hoping for them to be out in a batch late next week. Valthian should also be pretty simple to review, since it stayed on the backburner for a reason I quickly realized upon returning to it for coverage (it’s pretty shallow). However, Omensight and Tokyo School Life need a lot, LOT more time for me to actually play them properly and rewrite my in-depth thoughts on the former, so those will be a little while.

I hate to yet again have another shitty life event throw a wrench in my review queue plans (and is why I pretty much got even more selective with asking for any review copy until I finish what I owe, unless it’s a retro/shorter game or I finished a company’s backlog recently and they’re willing to give me another shot), but I’ll have to ask you bear with me a little longer. Being a 100% solo website has this as a pretty huge setback, unfortunately… That and if I got in another crisis, things would get delayed yet again. Here’s hoping the world doesn’t lead to that.