I love games. I love good games. I love immersive games. I love both big and small games.

But god help me, I’ve never played a game as long as The Witcher 3 before and I’m still nowhere near the end. It’s so massive I sometimes forget that real live people programmed this experience and that it didn’t just spring up from some video game geyser like the cyber version of Old Faithful.

I’m over 110 hours in, and I’m only now in Act II. I struggle to process how that’s possible. Yet it’s all true.

In the past couple of weeks, three games released that I’m getting more and more impatient to play (Firewatch, Unravel, and Dying Light’s DLC: The Following), and a week from tomorrow brings Far Cry Primal. I thought this was the year, month, etc. that I was finally going to stay current without issue. Yet here I am, a zillion hours into The Witcher with no end in sight.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. I’m consistently having an excellent time (with the exception of anything Dandelion related). I just am starting to grow weary of never quite making the progress I thought I would have by now.

Oh! But I did finally get the hang of Gwent and now I’m mostly undefeated. It’s actually quite fun! Or at least, I think it’s fun because I continue to win about 90% of the time.

This coming weekend, I will be out of town which means all witching progress will be grinding to a halt, but I can still game on the go with my Vita as well as my 3DS. It will be fun to finally dive back in to Danganronpa and Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon.

Or, realistically, I will play a bunch of Mii Plaza as I continue to StreetPass people while out and about.

This past weekend, I thought I would be making crazy progress in The Witcher, but I also opted to take on some massive organizing projects which took a significant amount of time. I have no regrets on this.

Saturday night I literally stayed up all night long playing The Witcher. Every time I saw how late (early?) it was getting, I kept telling myself, just one more mission. One more. And every time, I meant it. Alas, the clock finally said something silly like 8:00am and I finally had to concede that I was getting tired. My eyes were watering so badly that I had a hard time seeing the screen (now that’s how you know you need to sleep), yet I kept playing until around 10:00am. I can’t remember the last game I did that for.

The funniest part (to me, at any rate) is that while I’m getting impatient for the game to be over, I’m still having an amazing time every time I’m playing it. It’s an odd juxtaposition.

So I will keep chipping away at the game in large chunks of time and hope that I can finish it before too terribly long. But, even as I type that, I know it’s a silly statement. I could easily be playing for another 60 hours before I see the credits roll. And that’s a bit daunting.

It’s a good thing I’m enjoying myself in the meantime.

Cheers, friends!