Ranking Kickstarter Games I Backed but Never Finished Or Ended Up Playing At All – quailblog

Ranking Kickstarter Games I Backed but Never Finished Or Ended Up Playing At All

15 Aug, 2026

This one should be more fun than yesterday's Blaugust post

You know those moments where you're going about your day, brushing a cat and they're like, leaning into it and purring and then suddenly you're hit with an intrusive thought about the existence of Might No. 9? And how you once foolishly gave money to it?

This morning after giving the diabetic cats their daily insulin I sat down to think about like, the wild west gamedev days of Kickstarter. I don't think I really even need to go into that much history but it's bonkers how much that platform was a lifeline for indie developers and artists of all kinds (hell, our band raised over 10k to fund After the Lights Failed in 2013), completely full of projects that either sounded too good to be true (because they were) or were smaller and more reasonable in scope and actually came to fruition.

I decided to look through my list of backed projects and was surprised to see a mix of a bunch of different games in the following categories:

Released and I enjoyed immensely

Released and I did not enjoy

Released and I played but did not finish

Released and I still haven't installed / played

Never released / Cancelled / etc

For the sake of fun, we're gonna look exclusively at a selection of categories 2-5.

A fair amount of the games from category 1 I've already highlighted on the blog previously so I wanna focus attention to the stuff that either has yet to materialize, materialized and I bounced off, or....I just never even installed / forgot about lmfao

Given the ad-hoc nature of this post I'm not really sure what my "ranking" scale will be other than pure vibes. Something that's garbage might rank "higher" than something I legitimately like or are interested in and we're just gonna see what happens.

Shall we?

13. Cartomancy

Category - 3: Released and I played but did not finish

Backed - 11/2021

Released - 08/09/2022

Ok so maybe it feels unfair to attribute a "did not finish" on this one because of the nature of the anthology; it's a series of different small games all based around Tarot as the core conceit and is actually really fucking cool!!

A lot of fantastic people worked on this (which is how I heard about it to back it in the first place) and I even spent a fair amount of time with it so I'm actually glad I did this blog post because it's a reminder to go back and reinstall.

12. Boyfriend Dungeon

Category - 2: Released and I did not enjoy

Backed - 8/2018

Released - 8/11/2021

The only reason I backed this at the time was that I was enjoying Kitfox Game's social media antics on Twitter and I was really into dungeon crawlers. I have like, zeeeerrrooo interest in dating sims and so it was kind of inevitable that I'd not like this game to begin with but I was hoping that they'd somehow turn it around and the dungeon crawling would be good. It wasn't, and the narrative was too creepy and yea, lots of regret.

11. Lunark

Category - 4: Released and I still haven't installed / played

Backed - 02/2019

Released - 03/30/2023

Fuck, I really love the idea of reviving the Another World / Out of This World games, which is why I backed this almost instantly (plus the dev had worked on Flinthook which I absolutely loved) but when it came out I had a buuuuunch of other things going on and it slipped through the cracks. Soundtrack slaps! I'm adding it to my to-play list.

10. NESmaker

Category - 4: Released and I still haven't installed / played

Backed - 1/2018

Released - 2/22/2019

Does this one even count? I was heavy into messing around with projects in Unity and Pico 8 around the time this showed up and I thought sure, fuck it I'll make a small project for the NES.

Clearly, I did not!! But being a backer on this Kickstarter has meant that my email address has been stalked endlessly by this team's other projects and no amount of unsubscribe or "not interested" has given me freedom from them. Alas!

09. Knuckle Sandwich

Category - 4: Released and I still haven't installed / played

Backed - 4/2018

Released - 11/22/2023

I'll be honest with you - I legitimately did not remember this being released.

Going through this list there are two "Hey, remember EarthBound?" games that I backed while waiting to see if that fan-made Mother 4 project was ever gonna get legs (I don't think it did, please correct me if wrong), and I could have sworn neither of these actually released...but apparently I was wrong?? This is in my goddamn steam library!! Which means not only did it release but I was sent a code and I activated it! I need to give it a shot!

08. GLITCHED

Category - 5: Never released / Cancelled / etc

Backed - 7/2016

Released - TBD

Ok so this is our second "Hey, remember EarthBound?" game from the list. It's been in development hell pretty much since the...