Help

Settings → Your profile. A picture, a name, and your handles. It draws nothing on Home until you put something in it, so an empty profile costs you no space.

The picture

Tap the picture itself to choose where it comes from: a photo, the artwork of any game in your library, or a sticker — Memoji, Genmoji, or one you made from your own photo. The app decides what to do next by looking at the image. Something with a transparent background is already the subject, so it goes straight in and is drawn whole. A photo or a wide piece of key art asks you to choose which square survives, because something has to and you are better at it than a center crop.

Handles

Add a handle once, then tick everywhere you use it. That is the whole design: someone who uses the same name on five services types it once, not five times. Sign up somewhere new later and you open that handle and add the service rather than starting again.

A service belongs to one handle. Picking one that already sits on another handle moves it, and the row tells you so before you tap. You can add services the app has never heard of — Apple Arcade, a storefront, a forum.

Handles are decoration. Nothing signs in, nothing is fetched, nothing is shared. The one handle that does real work is your RetroAchievements username, and it is deliberately somewhere else: in the Keychain, on your device, never synced.

Your name, and its color

Use a handle as your name and the two stay linked — rename the handle and the name follows. The name can take a color of its own, and choosing Accent keeps it matched to your accent as you change it, rather than freezing a copy of whatever it is today.

Settings → Game page layout. Four arrangements of the same page:

• Showcase — the art fills the top with the logo underneath. The most visual.
• Classic — close to the original: cover on the left, details beside it.
• Cover — box art leads, at the size box art deserves.
• Compact — nearly all list, with the art reduced to a tint.

The choice applies to every game and syncs with your library. There is no right answer — pick the one that matches how you read a page.

Logos

Game pages fetch a wordmark on their own, from IGDB first and SteamGridDB after, and fall back to the game's name as text when neither has one. Settings → Use game logos turns it off if you would rather always read the name. You can still choose a specific logo per game from that game's artwork picker, and an explicit choice always wins.

Settings → Colors for your accent and the app’s background — both on one screen, so you can see a button against the ground while you pick it — or any status color under Status colors. The editor is a grid to pick from, three sliders, a hex field if you already know the color you want, and a hue wheel on the second page. The app’s own four colors lead the grid.

A background takes the color you choose and keeps the theme’s own contrast, so there is no way to pick one that makes text disappear. Settings → Appearance switches the whole app between System, Light and Dark.

The + keeps a color you have made, so you do not have to find it again; long-press one of your kept colors to remove it. Cancel puts back what was there when you opened the editor, so you can drag a slider and watch the real app behind the sheet without committing. Use the default resets that one color, leaving every other color you have chosen alone.

Kept colors live on the device. Your accent and status colors sync.

Settings → itch.io → Connect. itch.io's own sign-in page opens, you approve LevelSelect there, and you come back connected. The app never sees your password, and there is no key to find or paste.

What arrives is the games itch records as yours — anything you bought or claimed — with their cover art, ready to sit in your library like anything else. It only ever reads.

Why a game you own might not appear

itch attaches a game to your account when it is bought or claimed. The “No thanks, just take me to the downloads” link records nothing at all — no purchase, no key, no email — and a game you only ever play in the browser frequently records nothing either. Those games are invisible to any app, ours included, and have to be added by hand. That is a better path than it used to be: a game IGDB has never heard of now gets its artwork from SteamGridDB by name instead of staying a gray rectangle.

Collections would have covered most of the gap, and they cannot. itch's API will tell an app that a collection exists and how many games are in it, then refuse to say which — so LevelSelect does not ask for that permission at all. Approving something that can do nothing is worse than not asking.

Your token stays on your device, in the Keychain, and talks to itch.io directly. It never passes through our servers, and disconnecting removes it.

Settings → Steam, PlayStation, or Xbox. Each reads what you have played there and brings it in for review, the way a CSV import does — nothing is added until you have looked.

• Xbox signs in on Microsoft’s own page. LevelSelect never sees your password.
• PlayStation uses the sign-in Sony’s own app uses: paste the NPSSO code from playstation.com once. Sony doesn’t publish this route for other apps, so it could stop working without warning.
• Steam reads your library with the Web API key you registered on Steam, and only answers when your profile’s game details are public.

Each row is matched to a game on IGDB. Tap the arrows to choose between the games it found — each with its box, its date on your console and what else it came out on — and the console under the row is a menu, so a game you have on the Switch and played on the 360 can say both. Console for all sets every row at once. A game you already have comes in as “In your library — adds Xbox 360” and only gains that console.

Every sign-in and key stays in your device’s Keychain and talks to Sony, Microsoft or Valve directly, never through our servers. A game’s page can also bring in its achievements or trophies as a tracker list, with what you have unlocked already ticked.

Settings → Import & Export → Import from CSV. An export from Gamery, Backloggd, a spreadsheet or anywhere else: a title column is all that is required, and platform, status, rating, hours and notes are read when they are there. Column names can vary — Title or Game or Name, Shelf or List or Status.

An id beats a title. A row carrying an IGDB id is matched by it, which is exact; without one, the title is looked up and anything that did not match exactly is flagged for you to check. Nothing is added until you have been through the list, and you can swap any match or keep the name you typed.

A cell naming two systems — Xbox,Mac — makes the game yours on both. If iCloud is still bringing your library down, the import waits rather than adding a second copy of everything it is about to restore.

Add Game → the barcode button beside the search field, then point the camera at the back of the box. The code is read on your device and looked up on ScanDex, a database of game barcodes.

• A box ScanDex knows goes straight to the Add screen with its console chosen and Physical ticked.
• A box you have scanned before opens the game you already have.
• A box nobody has matched yet: find the game by name and add it as usual. LevelSelect remembers the barcode on it, and shares that match — the barcode and the game, nothing about you — with ScanDex, so the next person’s scan works.

Retro cartridges mostly predate barcodes, so search is still the way in for those.

An import can only believe what the file said. If forty games arrived on PC that are really yours on a Mac, fix them together.

Library → Filter & Sort → Select Games…, or the same from a console page’s Filter menu. Tap the ones you mean — each takes a check and an accent outline — then Set Console (your own consoles first, every other system under it) or Set Status. Setting the console changes which machine you own them on; the list of systems a game came out on is left alone.

Settings → System names. Mega Drive or Genesis. Super Nintendo or Super Famicom. TurboGrafx-16 or PC Engine. Master System or Mark III. Pick the one you say out loud and it changes every shelf heading, every chip and every widget that names that console.

The systems you already own something on are listed first, because those are the ones you will actually change. The rest are underneath, and your choice is remembered for when you do own one.

It changes the label, never the library

Your games keep the platform they were stored with. A rename cannot split one shelf into two, and it cannot strand a game somewhere you will not think to look. Only the words change.

The row under a game’s name says how you have it, and there are nine ways:

Physical · Digital · Emulated · Former — the ones you have. A hard drive of ROMs is a thing you own and keep, and Former is still ownership; it is just in the past.

Subscription · Rented · Borrowed · Shared · Arcade — the ones you only reach. Rented is the weekend from a shop that no longer exists. Borrowed is a friend’s cartridge or a library loan. Shared is a household. Arcade is the one where the copy never comes to you — and you can beat a game you only ever played standing up.

A game can be several at once, which is the point: a cartridge you dumped is Physical and Emulated, and one you sold is Physical and Former.

Choosing which ones you use

Settings → Ownership & access. Rented, Borrowed, Shared and Arcade are off to begin with, so a library that never needs them never sees them. Turn any of the nine off — and turning one off only hides it. A game already marked with it keeps the mark and goes on showing it, so a change of vocabulary can never quietly edit your library.

You can also set their order: the app’s own, most-used-in-your-library first, or drag them where you want them.

Home used to decide what came first. It is your page, so now it asks. Press and hold any shelf → Arrange Home. Drag the blocks into the order you want, switch any of them off, and bring Backlog or Finished up from Library if you want them here.

Your own order on a shelf: press and hold a shelf’s title → Arrange This Shelf, and drag the games. A game that joins the shelf later goes in front, so the one you just started is never buried. Automatic Order puts it back.

This order follows you to your other devices. Which sections you closed on a game page stays with the device, because an iPad has more room; how Home is composed is about you, not the screen.

A collection can be a shelf

Add a collection to Home from the bottom of Arrange Home, and “Six That Made Me” sits on your page with its covers under its name. Remove it with a swipe. Everything stays in Library whether it is on Home or not.

Someone’s consoles say more about them than their backlog does. So they sit under your name on Home in a three-wide case, six at a time, the rest behind See all.

Press and hold the case → Arrange Systems. Choose how many reach Home, drag them into your order — or pick one in a tap: North American release order, most games, or A–Z — and choose a scrolling row instead of the case if you would rather, or if four systems look better in a line than in a grid. Drag after a sort and the order is yours again.

A console appears here when a game does. Add a game on the SNES and the SNES is in the case.

A collection is usually a list you picked by hand. It can also be a rule.

Library → Filter & Sort, set the filters — Backlog, on the SNES, physical — then Save These Filters as a Collection. Name it, choose whether it belongs on Home, and it fills itself: add a game that fits and it is in; change the game and it may leave. It opens like any other collection, and the rule is shown as chips at the top so it is never a mystery why something is there.

A console used to be a word on a game. It is a record of its own now, with how you have it — the same nine ways a game can be yours — when you got it, and a photograph of the actual machine, which beats the drawing everywhere it appears.

It fills itself in: add a game on the SNES and the SNES is yours. A physical game on a console you only emulate asks once and remembers the answer, so a display copy never quietly claims you own the hardware.

You can also add a console you own with nothing on it — the Dreamcast in the display case is a real thing to record. Consoles come with your export, and a deleted one waits thirty days in Recently Deleted.

“PC” is forty years of very different objects, and so is Mac, and so is the Game Boy. Open a console and choose which one to draw: the charcoal N64 or a Funtastic one, the front-loading NES or the top-loader, a Switch Lite in coral, a Game Boy in Play It Loud yellow, the SP in flame. It changes the picture everywhere that console appears.

Under it, Machines you have had keeps the lineage — tick every one you owned and the console page reads forward in time, oldest first. The one you draw is always included.

There is a free-text line too, for the part no list can hold: “Model 1, OLED, modded”.

Most games worth tracking already have a good checklist somewhere — a wiki table, a forum post, a guide. Tracker → Paste a List turns one into real tracker categories. Nothing is sent anywhere, no AI is involved, and nothing is invented: every item comes from your text. It does interpret as it reads — stripping list syntax, working out which part of a line is the name and which is the location — and the rest of this section explains exactly how, so you can predict what it will do.

Two formats work

A table, with a header row. Column names are matched loosely, so most wiki tables work as-is:

| Item      | Effect              | Location   | Notes            |
| --------- | ------------------- | ---------- | ---------------- |
| Lace Glove| Raises Attack by one| Ossex      | Reward from Ack  |

Recognized headers include Item, Name, Trinket, Title, Collectible for the name; Location, Area, Region, Zone for where it is; Effect, Description, Details; and Notes, How, Source, Hint. Anything unrecognized is skipped and reported rather than guessed at.

Or headed sections of numbered or bulleted lines:

## Heart Coins
### Koala Village
- [ ] Nia's Bedroom
- [ ] Cave behind the house

## Honey Pots
1. Alberto's Farm - Yak Cave

## becomes a category. ### becomes the location for the items beneath it. Checkboxes, numbers and bullets are all stripped.

The one rule worth knowing

In a line like Koala Village - Nia's Bedroom, is the first part a place or the item's name? LevelSelect decides by whether it repeats: a leading phrase that appears on several lines in the same section is treated as a location, and one that's different every time is treated as the item's name.

That gets it right for most lists — "Koala Village" nine times is clearly a place; "Wallet 1, Wallet 2, Bombs 1" are clearly items. Where a section is genuinely mixed, the preview screen shows which reading it chose and lets you flip it with one tap.

If you'd rather not rely on the guess, use ### headings for locations. An explicit heading always wins.

What is deliberately not split

Only - (with spaces around it) separates a line. Commas never do — otherwise "Crab, Eel, Perch, Trout" would shatter into four items. That's why a line written with commas comes through as one long name; renaming it takes a moment, and a parser that split on commas would quietly wreck other lists.

Imported lists are protected

Anything you paste in is locked: regenerating that game's tracker later won't remove or replace it. You brought that list deliberately, so nothing automatic gets to overrule it.

The generate button tells you what it's going to do, and you can change it for a single run by long-pressing.

• Add New Only (the default) — keeps everything you have and adds what's missing. It never removes or overwrites anything already in your tracker.
• Review Changes — generates, then shows you what would be added, removed and renamed, grouped by category. Nothing is written until you choose.
• Replace Everything — swaps the generated content out. It asks first.

Generation doesn't name things identically each time, so an item can come back with a different internal id. LevelSelect follows those renames by matching names and carries your progress across, telling you how many it moved — matching is careful but not psychic, so the review screen is there to check before a Replace. If something you'd worked on genuinely isn't in the new tracker, you're offered the chance to keep it as a personal goal rather than losing it.

Your own notes stay yours: no merge mode rewrites them, and a Replace carries each note across wherever its item can still be matched.

A list can be a roster: recruits in Fire Emblem, a Persona’s confidants, a Pokémon team. Each unit keeps its own fields — class, level, the emblem or ring it carries, whatever the game needs — which you can add, rename and remove yourself, and a generated tracker proposes for the game.

• The party: mark who is in it, up to the size the game allows, and the rest stay on the bench.
• Who fell: in a permadeath run a unit can be marked fallen, with where it happened.
• Status on anything: a quest can be in progress, failed, missed or skipped, not only done or not done.
• Chapters in order: a story list knows which one is next.

When you plan a tracker, it asks what the tracker is for — for an RPG, story only, a simple checklist, party and roster, or everything for 100% — and plans the lists that shape needs.

Tracker → Choose Focus. Pick the lists this playthrough is chasing. The rest fold into one “lists not in focus” row, and progress counts only what you chose. Starting a new playthrough asks What’s this run for? so a second run can chase something different from the first.

Any list can also count (the default), not count — a reference list of every sword in the game — or give partial credit. And a list can be remembered across playthroughs, so an encyclopedia you fill over three runs doesn’t start empty each time.

For games you replay in runs, Run Fields records what each attempt was — numbers, times, choices, and lists filled during the run — with your personal bests marked, and a list can tick itself from your run history. Life sims get a filter row for season, weather or biome across every list.

Any tracker item can carry your own note — press and hold the row and choose Edit item. It's for the thing the checklist can't know: which NPC you were mid-quest with, where you'd stashed the key, what you meant to try next. The note shows on the item itself, in your accent color, marked as yours rather than as more of whatever generated the list. Regenerating the tracker never touches it.

The same sheet is where you rename an item to whatever you actually call it, and record where it is.

Notes are not only for the item they sit on. Everything you write — on an item, on a session, on the moment you finished something — is gathered in the Journal, in the order it happened.

Where you left off sits at the top of the Tracker section: the last thing you ticked, when you ticked it, and your note about it if you wrote one. It's there for the game you haven't opened in three weeks — a percentage tells you how far you got, but not what you were doing. It records the moment you ticked something, so editing an old item later won't push it to the front. The same line appears on the Continue Playing card and its widget, so the answer reaches you before you open the app.

Finishes can be corrected, too: tap any entry under Beaten to fix a date you now remember better, change what it was, or add who you played it with. Played with is written down and nothing more — the app has no accounts and shares nothing — so a couch co-op finish remembers who was there.

Generated and imported checklists usually carry a hint or a location for each item — useful when you're hunting, spoilers when you're not. Settings → Game pages & trackers → Show tracker hints turns them off: rows become just their names, and location headings disappear too.

When you actually want one hint, press and hold that row — a card shows that item's hint, location, and badge, and nothing else. One item at a time, so checking a single objective can't spoil the list below it. Your own notes on items always stay visible; they're yours, not hints.

For retro games, LevelSelect can install the real, authored achievement list from RetroAchievements instead of generating an approximation — point values, missable flags, and each achievement's own badge art, in color once you've earned it and RA's grayed version while you haven't.

Connect your account in Settings and imported sets arrive already ticked with what you've earned, and a sync can only ever add — the app knows RA has no idea you played the cartridge on real hardware last week. The Journal’s charts gain a wall of your mastered and completed sets, gold-bordered only for hardcore mastery, because that distinction is RA's and the app keeps it. Your API key goes from your device to RetroAchievements directly — it never touches our servers, and it stays in the Keychain on each device.

Settings → RetroAchievements → Import my RetroAchievements library brings in every game you have played there for review, on the console you choose. A scored list shows its points in the header — “12/74 pts” — and opening a game with a set checks for new unlocks on its own, at most every few hours.

Doors out are everywhere the set is: the set's page on RA from the tracker, and your own profile from RetroAchievements settings.

A game page has a Maps section. A map is a picture you own of the game — add one from your Photo Library, from Files, by pasting, or with Find One: give it a wiki page and it reads the map images off that page, checks each one actually exists, and keeps the site it came from with the map.

Open a map to pinch, pan, and drop pins — press and hold anywhere, or tap Place and pan the map under the ring. A pin is a collectible, a note, a warning or a secret, and the legend at the bottom is also the filter. Mark a pin explored and it dims with a check; Left and Explored split what is still out there from what is not.

A pin that ticks the tracker

Link a pin to a tracker item and they become one thing: the pin takes the item’s name and shows its checkbox, and ticking either one ticks the other — with the same journal line. In the tracker, an item with a pin says On the map; press and hold one without a pin for Pin on Map, which opens the map with that item already chosen.

Maps sync with your library, go to Recently Deleted when you delete them (and come back with their pins), and come with an export.

A session is time played — start it and it counts, including on the Lock Screen and your watch. A run is one attempt at something, for roguelikes: a loadout, an outcome, and a win rate over time.

They're deliberately separate. A run doesn't start a timer, and a session doesn't record a run, so your playtime never gets inflated by counting attempts. Run logging is off until you turn it on for a game — the Tracker section's Build menu, Log Runs for This Game — because plenty of games deserve a tracker without one. Once it's on, the Runs section carries its own controls, including switching it back off.

Open the game and look under Time played for Add time played before tracking. Put the number your console or storefront already knows in there — Steam’s hours, a Switch profile’s — and it counts toward that game’s total from then on, with your sessions adding on top of it.

It is a number, not a session. It never appears in your history and it never lands on a day in the Journal, because it did not happen on one. Set it back to zero to remove it.

A wishlist card counts down while the wait is short — Today, Tomorrow, in 6 days — and shows the date itself once it is further off. The changeover is a fortnight, because that is exactly where the countdown stops speaking in days: “in 2 days” is a fact about your week, and “in 6 weeks” tells you less than “Oct 16” does.

The date is yours, not the first one listed

A game can be out on PC and months away on Switch 2. The date you see is the one for the platform you picked when you added it — change the platform and the date follows immediately. The game page lists everything a game is still coming to, each with its own date and countdown. If your platform has no announced day, it says so rather than borrowing a date from somebody else's copy.

Dates are shown only as precisely as they were announced. A game known only as “2027” says 2027, and never invents a day to count down to.

The calendar

Library → Wishlist → Release calendar. Month by month, and it keeps the games with no announced date in their own group at the end — a calendar that quietly dropped half your wishlist would be lying about what you are waiting for.

Being told

Settings → Notifications → “Tell me when a game arrives.” Off until you ask for it, then on the day, or a day, three days, or a week before — always at 9am. A release is a calendar date rather than a moment, so firing at it would wake you in the small hours for a game that is not out where you are yet. Break through silent mode and Focus is one switch covering these and the still-playing reminder.

It moved into Library. At the top of Library, Collection | Wishlist switches between the games you have and the ones you are waiting for. The Wishlist half is the same as before: Yours, You Might Like and Deku Deals, the countdowns and the release calendar.

A wishlist game is already a game in your library with the Wishlist status — buying it is a status change, not a re-entry — so the two halves belong together. It also made room for search to sit beside the tab bar. Shortcuts and widgets that open the Wishlist still land there.

Library → Wishlist → You Might Like. It reads up to twenty of your games — the ones you rated highly, are playing or finished — and shows games that resemble them and that you don’t have: in the series you play, from the studios behind them, and games players compare them to. Each row says which of your games it came from.

What you’re into lets you follow or hide studios, publishers, tags and systems. Followed ones come first and the rest still appear, lightly scattered; hidden ones never do. It syncs across your devices.

A game page does the same for one game: more from its series and its studio that you don’t have, and more from the people credited on it — “Also scored by Michiru Yamane”.

The News tab reads the gaming sites you choose, in four views:

• All — every story, newest first, with a line where you left off.
• For You — news about the games you are playing and waiting for first, then the rest ranked by your systems. It reorders; it never hides.
• Topics — rails for reviews, your systems, retro, Mac and more.
• New & Upcoming — every game coming out in the next six months on the systems you choose, ports included, and what came out in the last two weeks. Tap one for its dates on every platform, trailers and the news about it.

Seven sites start switched on. Feeds (the antenna) switches them on and off, browses more, adds any site by its address, and imports an OPML file from another reader. The bookmark on any story saves it for later, and your saved stories sync.

Open stories in chooses Safari’s Reader — the story without the site around it, one tap from the full page — or the website. Safari ad blockers you have turned on work there too.

The magnifying glass beside the tab bar searches everything at once. Tap it and the tab bar becomes the search field; the tab you came from waits in the small circle on the left.

Results come grouped — your games, tracker items across every tracker (“which game had the Moon Pearl”), journal notes and memories showing the line that matched, news and releases — and last, games from IGDB you don’t have, one tap from Add. The chips along the top narrow it to one kind. Before you type, it shows what you searched recently and the games you are playing.

Library and the Wishlist keep their own search for filtering what is on screen. On a Mac, ⌘F opens this search from any tab without one of its own.

Widgets live on the Home Screen and the Lock Screen, and at extra-large sizes on iPad:

• Home Screen: Continue Playing (with a tappable next objective), "Choose a Game for Me" — a die that picks off your shelf and stands by its pick until you roll again — "Open To…" launchers that jump straight into a collection, status shelf or system, carrying that section's own cover art at medium and large sizes — point one at Now Playing and you have a shelf of what you are playing, a sixteen-week play heatmap, week and run trackers, and completion rings.
• Releases: Coming Soon is your wishlist covers with the wait printed under each; Release Calendar is the dates themselves — one game at small, four at medium, and at large a real month grid with covers standing where the day numbers would be.
• iPad only: three extra-large boards — a Command Board (your game, its objectives, the shelf, the week, all at once), a twelve-cover Shelf, and Where You Stand, a progress bar for everything you're playing.
• Lock Screen: a die that opens the app on a fresh random pick every tap, a week gauge measured against your own pace, a play streak, your current game's next objective with a real tick button — and the completion ring that was already there. Four circles fit the bar exactly.
• Control Center, Lock Screen and the Action button: the Play Session control starts a session for the game you were last playing, and tapping it again stops it. Add it from Control Center's editor, the Lock Screen's customize screen, or Settings → Action Button.
• Configuring: long-press any widget → Edit Widget. The die takes statuses, one system, and an include-finished toggle; different placements roll independently. Launchers take any collection, status, or system you have.
• If art looks missing at first: open the app once — widgets draw from a snapshot the app refreshes, and cover art for newly-placed widgets is fetched on the next open.

Every game in your library is a real entity in the Shortcuts app, Siri, and Spotlight — not just the app itself, each game. That means:

• "Open Hollow Knight in LevelSelect" jumps to that game's page. "Start a session for Hollow Knight in LevelSelect" starts a timed session for it without opening anything. Siri has to hear the name as it's written; when it doesn't, you land in search, usually with the game at the top.
• "Search LevelSelect for Silksong" opens search with the words filled in.
• "Continue playing in LevelSelect" opens the game you're playing. Open Section goes straight to Home, Library, the Wishlist, News, Search or the Journal.
• Spotlight finds your games by name, with a line of detail — “Switch · Playing · 12h” — and tapping one opens it. The same details (platform, status, hours played, rating, last played) are what Shortcuts’ Use Model action can read, so you can ask it about your own library.
• Build your own automations. Because sessions are Shortcuts actions, you can wire them to anything the Shortcuts app can see: an NFC tag stuck to the console that starts a session when you tap your phone on it, a Focus that opens your library, a bedtime automation that reminds you a timer's still running.

The shortcuts register themselves when the app is installed, and every game gets its own Open Game and Start Session tile on LevelSelect's page in the Shortcuts app. If Siri doesn't answer, open that page, tap ⓘ and turn on Siri — it can be off without anything saying so. Settings → Siri & Shortcuts in the app lists what to say and links straight to that page.

Beating a game and finishing every item on your tracker are different achievements, and LevelSelect records them separately. On any game's page, in the Beaten section, mark Beat the game, 100%, New Game+, or your own words. "100%" means everything on your list, the one you chose to keep; it doesn't claim a platinum.

Dates are stored only as precisely as you know them: an exact day for last night's credits, a month for "sometime that spring," a bare year for the game you beat in 2011 — and shown exactly that vaguely, because the app doesn't pretend to know more than you told it. Logging your history needs no sessions and no retroactive box-ticking. A beat can point at the playthrough it capped; that run wears a checkered flag, and the Beaten & Completed card opens each year into the actual list of what you finished.

The Journal tab, in three views: Timeline, Calendar and Charts. Nothing new had to be stored to fill it — notes on sessions, on runs and on the moment you finished something have been dated and synced since the first build, and were only ever visible inside the sheet you typed them into.

A day of a game is one entry. Three sessions of one game on a Saturday is a single row summarising the day; open it for each session with its own note and time, any runs, and whether that was the session you finished in. Tap to read, press and hold to edit.

When you stop a session the app asks what happened, once, while it is still what you were just doing. That is the note worth re-reading later, and before this the only way to write one was to go back and edit a session you had already finished.

Memories are for the part that happened before you had the app. A title, when, who you were with, where, and pictures. How well you know the date is a choice — an exact day, a month, a year, or not sure at all — and “Christmas 1995 or 1996” is shown exactly as you wrote it rather than re-rendered from a date the app invented. If you know the day but not the year, say so: it sits on that day in the first year, marked as uncertain.

The calendar opens on a year: twelve small months and a heat map. Ones holding something stand out along the year strip, empty ones are still tappable, and any empty day is a + that starts a memory already dated. Entries too vague for a single day sit under the year they name rather than being dropped.

A memory is something that happened, written down now. The Christmas you got a Genesis, the first time you played Halo 2 with four other people, the day you sold a collection. Journal → +, or tap any empty day in the calendar and it starts one already dated.

How well you know the date is a choice, and that is the whole design. An exact day for last night. A month for “sometime that spring”. A year. Or not sure at all — and then you write it in your own words. “Christmas 1995 or 1996” is a real answer, and it is shown exactly that way rather than re-rendered from a date the app decided for you.

If you know the day but not the year, say so: turn on I know the day, pick it, and the memory sits on that day in the first year you named, marked as uncertain. It will not quietly file a Christmas under 1 January.

A memory can be attached to a game or stand on its own, can name who you were with and where, and carries pictures — one becomes the header, more become a grid, and any of them opens full size. Everything here is in your export, words and photographs both.

Journal → Charts is your history in three questions, and the cards are grouped by which one they answer: Time (recent play, by month, your streak, most played), Finishes (what you completed, and your RetroAchievements masteries), and Library (ratings, status, system, genres, series, tags, release year). Overview sits above all three, because games, hours, sessions and percent-finished are the total the groups break down rather than one of them. The group a card belongs to is fixed; the order inside a group is still yours.

Every card that shows a breakdown can be turned over. Tap the chart icon in its corner and the card flips between bars and a donut — Library, Ratings, By System, Genres and Tags. Your choice is remembered per card, and it is kept on the device rather than synced, like the order of the cards themselves.

Tap a slice, or its row in the legend, and the middle of the ring becomes that slice: its count and its share. Tap again for the total back. The point is not to make you estimate an angle.

Everything here is built from your own sessions. Nothing is estimated and nothing is borrowed from anyone else's average, which is why a game you have never timed contributes nothing rather than a guess.

Settings → Import & Export → Export library writes a readable JSON file covering games, playthroughs, sessions, runs, tracker progress and collections, with a manifest of counts at the top.

It carries your library's content: games and their metadata, playthroughs, sessions, runs, tracker schemas and progress, your notes, maps and their markers, videos with per-part playlist positions, and collections — each record with its stable id — plus your appearance settings as a single preferences block.

And it comes back: Import LevelSelect export (same screen) reads the file and restores whatever your library is missing — never touching what's already there, so an old export merges safely onto a current library, and importing twice changes nothing. One honest caveat remains: map images are saved as links rather than embedded. Alongside it, Recently Deleted holds everything you delete until you decide otherwise — restore with a tap, or use the app's only permanent delete, which lives there and nowhere else.

Replace Library with Backup makes your library match an export exactly — everything in the file comes back as it was, and anything the file doesn’t have goes to Recently Deleted. Erase Library moves every game, collection, memory and console to Recently Deleted. Both show you what will change, ask you to type a word to confirm, and save a safety copy first to Files → LevelSelect → Safety Copies.

There's no lock-in here and there isn't going to be. Your library syncs through your own iCloud, and what's in the export is genuinely yours to take.

Something missing or wrong here? support@levelselect.app, or send feedback through TestFlight.