Castos Creator Spotlight: Andrew and Alex from the Gaming Backlog “Book Club”

There is a particular kind of conversation that used to happen before smartphones turned gaming into a solo activity. You’d find your friend at school Monday morning, the one playing the same game, and spend homeroom trading notes. Andrew and Alex wanted that back.

Their podcast, The Gaming Backlog “Book Club,” works exactly the way the name suggests: one game per season, a chapter goal before each episode, and a weekly conversation about what you just experienced. It is built for adults who love games but have far less time to play them than they once did, and it asks listeners to play along rather than just watch. Nine seasons in, the show has covered Death Stranding, Final Fantasy VI, Hades, and Astral Chain, among others.

Andrew and Alex have known each other for more than thirteen years, gaming since the 90s. The show grew from a familiar frustration: they kept finishing games months after release, with no one to compare notes with. The podcast gave that conversation somewhere to go.

Host Name:	Andrew and Alex
Go-to Tool:	Riverside’s integrated export directly into Castos
Consistency Philosophy:	Do it for the fun of the conversation, not the follower count
Using AI?	Not using it
In a year:	100 active Discord members having real conversations about the games
Recording/editing tip:	“Make sure you’re having fun with the topics you’re focused on, and doing it for the fun of the conversation, not specifically to make money or quickly gain a following, since it is a slow process.”

For their debut season, Andrew and Alex chose Death Stranding, a Hideo Kojima game where you play a courier reconnecting post-apocalyptic America, navigating ghost-like creatures called BTs with the help of a baby in a pod. This is all real. It also confused a fair number of people who weren’t entirely sure it counted as a game. Full disclosure: Death Stranding has been in my Steam wishlist for a while. I haven’t played it. When I came across Andrew and Alex’s show, I listened to their first season instead of more recent episodes, which tells you both that I’m bad at following directions and playing along with them and my ability to commit to a video game in elder millenial-hood.

Nine episodes later, the format had found its footing. In episode 1.9, as the story revealed that a central character was something called an extinction entity, Alex put it plainly: “By the end of this, my mind was blown.” Andrew devoted a passage to a floating cargo carrier that clipped through a ruined floor mid-mission and took all his gear down with it.

Season 8 brought Final Fantasy VI across eight episodes, including a guest from Mavroid of the JRPG Book Club to discuss the game’s lasting legacy. Season 9 is currently working through Astral Chain.

Andrew and Alex don’t measure success by downloads. Their goal for the year ahead is 100 active members in their Discord community, people who show up between episodes to talk through the games, not just to listen to the show. That is, ultimately, what the whole thing is built around. The conversation is the product, and having more people in it is the win.