Nine Genres, One Year: The Aussie Gaming Challenge That Could Change How You Play Forever
The Problem With Playing It Safe
Most of us have a type. You know the one — that familiar genre you return to whenever decision fatigue kicks in and the backlog starts feeling like homework. For plenty of Aussie gamers, it's open-world action games, or maybe a cosy farming sim, or an endless loop of the same first-person shooter they've been playing since high school.
There's nothing wrong with having a favourite. But here's the thing: if you're only ever playing inside your comfort zone, you're probably leaving some of the best gaming experiences of your life on the table — or worse, in a Steam library you haven't opened since 2021.
That's the idea behind the 9-Game Gauntlet, a community challenge that's been quietly picking up momentum across Australian gaming circles heading into 2025. The premise is dead simple: pick one game from nine distinct genres and actually finish it before the year is out. No skipping cutscenes, no rage-quitting after an hour. One game, one genre, see it through.
Simple to explain. Surprisingly hard to do. And according to the Aussies who've already started, completely worth it.
What Are the Nine Genres?
The challenge doesn't have a rigid official list — part of the fun is that players can customise it to suit their own gaps — but the most popular version circulating in local Discord servers and Reddit threads includes these nine categories:
- Roguelike / Roguelite (e.g., Hades, Dead Cells)
- Narrative Adventure (e.g., Disco Elysium, Oxenfree)
- Fighting Game (e.g., Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8)
- Turn-Based Strategy (e.g., Into the Breach, Civilization VII)
- Platformer (e.g., Hollow Knight, Astro Bot)
- Puzzle Game (e.g., Portal 2, Baba Is You)
- Sports / Racing (e.g., EA FC 25, Trackmania)
- Survival / Crafting (e.g., Valheim, Grounded)
- Visual Novel / RPG (e.g., Persona 5 Royal, Unpacking)
The idea is that between these nine, you're covering almost every major style of play — different skill sets, different emotional registers, different time commitments. Some will feel instantly comfortable. Others will feel like you're learning to walk again.
That discomfort, it turns out, is kind of the point.
What Happens When You Step Outside the Loop
Melbourne-based gamer Priya, 27, describes herself as a "narrative game person through and through." She'll happily sink 40 hours into a story-driven RPG but had never seriously touched a fighting game in her life. She picked up Street Fighter 6 for the gauntlet in January with zero expectations.
"I genuinely thought I'd hate it," she says. "I assumed it was just mashing buttons and getting destroyed online by teenagers. But the World Tour mode eased me in, and by week three I was actually learning combos. It was the most mentally engaged I'd felt playing a game in ages."
Her experience isn't unusual. The gauntlet keeps coming up as a genuine antidote to what a lot of gamers describe as a kind of low-level burnout — that feeling of scrolling through a massive library and somehow still feeling like there's nothing to play. When you've committed to a specific title in a specific genre, the decision is already made. You just play.
For Brisbane's Tom, 34, it was the roguelite category that changed things. He'd bounced off Hades twice before because the permadeath mechanic frustrated him. The gauntlet forced him to stick with it past that initial wall.
"Something clicked around the third or fourth run. I stopped playing it like a game I had to win and started playing it like a game I was learning. The deaths stopped feeling like failure. That was huge for me."
Why Nine? Why Now?
There's something intentional about the number nine — beyond the obvious nod to a certain gaming website you might be reading right now. Nine is achievable without being overwhelming. It's roughly one game every six weeks if you pace yourself across the year, which is completely manageable even for casual players juggling work, family, and the general chaos of Australian life.
It also maps nicely onto the way gaming actually works for most people. You're not being asked to become a genre expert. You're not grinding ranked ladders or speed-running anything. You're just spending enough time with a game to genuinely understand what it's offering — and then moving on.
The challenge also quietly tackles one of the most common gaming complaints: abandonment. Australians are, statistically, some of the worst in the world for starting games and never finishing them. The gauntlet flips the script by making completion the actual goal, not a bonus.
The Rules (Such As They Are)
The community has landed on a few loose guidelines to keep things honest without making it feel like a chore:
- "Finishing" means reaching a natural endpoint. For a narrative game, that's the credits. For a roguelite, it might be completing a full run. For a visual novel, it's one full playthrough. Use your judgement.
- You can swap one game per genre if you're genuinely not vibing with it — but only once. The spirit of the challenge is persistence, not punishment.
- Free-to-play counts. Australia's gaming budgets are tight enough without the gauntlet adding financial stress. If a free game covers the genre, it absolutely qualifies.
- Share as you go. The challenge works best as a community thing. Post your picks, your progress, your frustrations. The conversation is half the fun.
Surprising Discoveries From Early Challengers
One pattern keeps emerging from people who've started the gauntlet: the genre they expected to hate ends up being the one they talk about most.
A Sydney-based streamer who picked up Baba Is You for the puzzle category described feeling genuinely "broken" by it in the best possible way. "It rewired how I think about game logic. I'm now looking at every game differently."
A self-described "shooter only" gamer from Perth reluctantly picked Unpacking for the visual novel slot and finished it in a single sitting. "I didn't expect to feel anything. I felt everything. I texted my mum afterwards."
These aren't flukes. They're what happens when you give a genre a real chance instead of a ten-minute demo.
Ready to Start Your Gauntlet?
The beauty of this challenge is that it scales to whoever you are. Hardcore player with 20 hours a week? Go deep on each genre. Casual gamer squeezing in sessions on the commute or after the kids are in bed? Pick shorter games for the trickier categories and give yourself the full year.
The only real requirement is a willingness to feel like a beginner again — and if you've been gaming long enough, that feeling is actually kind of rare and kind of wonderful.
So here's the question the 9-Game Gauntlet is really asking: not "can you beat nine games?" but "what kind of gamer could you become if you stopped playing it safe?"
There's only one way to find out. Pick your nine. Start your clock. And maybe — just maybe — let 2025 be the year you discover your actual favourite game was hiding in a genre you'd never bothered to try.
