so i ended up wiping my windows machine after having butchered the shit out of it trying to block its telemetry and whatnot by removing apparently key pieces such as all the "WindowsApps" folders that you can never get back and then it breaks things like the start menu and system settings.

before I did that I backed up a bunch of my game folders but didn't realize that some games like Horizon Forbidden West put their save files in your My Documents folder which I did not back up

so i'm speedrunning through Horizon Forbidden West to get back to the same place I was at before I did all this which has taken quite some time and I think I finally just reached some new stuff late last night