It’s the second week of January and I’m playing Suikoden II, which turns 20 this year. That’s not completely absurd in the lull between the holiday season and the next glut of big new releases that demand my immediate attention. If there was ever a time for me to play a game from 1998, it’s now.

But then I remember that Destiny 2 came out last September—and its first expansion just a few weeks ago. And then some old, familiar jaws are chewing at the back of my mind, reminding me that, by all rights, I should be filling my temporarily free hours by tooling around Mercury and The Leviathan. I want to give myself over to the same satisfying, mechanical repetition that Destiny gave me for hundreds of hours over two years—more time than just about any other game I’ve played.

But I can’t.