The Games I’m Excited to Play in 2025 (That Already Came Out)

Everyone I know has a long list of games they bought and then proceeded to not play, myself included.

This year my New Year’s resolution is to play through my backlog before buying any new games.

I will fail, for two reasons:

1. I wrote down all my unplayed games in a spreadsheet and I have 114 games that I have not played or not finished, and that doesn’t work out mathematically.

2. “Fantasy Life i” and “Pokemon Legends Z-A” are both coming out this year, and I’m not going to be able to resist those.

But, you know, the most important part of a New Year’s resolution isn’t keeping it exactly, it’s keeping any part of it and not giving up mid-January. So I figure if I can get through 20 games in the backlog this year, that will be a success.

I’ve organized all my games by release date (for remakes I went with the release date of the original)-- mostly because this helps me avoid decision paralysis. Of the 20 games I’m aiming to clear from my backlog this year, here are five I’m really excited to finally get around to:

Live A Live

This was a game I’d never heard of before it showed up in a Nintendo Direct and I can't wait to finally play it. I have played distressingly few HD-2D games, which is horrible on my part, because I love the aesthetic. But a classic Square RPG that as a bonus was never released outside Japan?

I bought this game two years ago with a birthday discount and I’ve been thinking about playing it forever and just never did. I’m not even 100% sure what the plot is, I just know that I love time travel on top of everything else, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about Takashi Tokita’s work. (Someday I’ll have to play Chrono Trigger as well, but that’s for after the backlog is cleared.)

Final Fantasy VII

Speaking of foundational Square Enix games, I’ve never played the original Final Fantasy VII! Or the remakes for that matter but I don’t own those!

I got the Switch port of the game for a class, beat the first boss, and then promptly forgot about it after writing my reflection on the class discussion board. But I feel like as a fan of RPGs, stories that screw with the player’s perceptions, and the fact that it’s one of the most foundational games to my millennial elder siblings, I should probably have beaten it a while ago.

I’m kind of dreading it given its size, but I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Also I need to know what the “Fight Club shit” is.

Cinders

Ok so my first semester at college, I was in a bit of a fairytale phase. I got really into the art and history of retelling and remixing fairytales, what people focused on when subverting them the evolution of “subversions,” things like that.

So to that end I saw this game on the Switch eShop while it was on sale, and then it was finals week so I didn’t play it.

But my interest in fairytales, the politics of retelling them, and the politics of revisiting them now has remained, so I’m hoping this will get my gears turning.

Child of Light

The second I had my own bank account as a college freshman, I might have gone a little overboard buying games on sale. I picked up tons of things purely based on looking pretty and being less than $10.

And DAMN is this game pretty. It’s got a great water-color storybook aesthetic, and it’s story about a girl getting the Sun, Moon, and Stars back from a Queen of Night fits it perfectly and was well-reviewed.

It almost makes me less nervous about the fact that it’s a platformer, my second worst gameplay genre is the fact that I have poor reaction time and panic when something jumps out at me (this is also true of shooters, which is why I’m dreading visiting the BioShock series.)

But, in the interest of strengthening my abilities as a connoisseur of video game narrative, that means diving in even when I suck at gameplay.

This War of Mine

The thing about being 23 is there are a lot of games that came out when I was in high school and received near-universal critical acclaim that just completely passed me by because I wasn’t really on social media yet.

I do not remember the context in which I came to own this game, probably another Switch eShop sale.

But given the number of games that are built on glorifying being a soldier at war, to the point where the US Army has an esports team, I have to admit a survival sim playing as a group of civilians is super compelling. 

This definitely seems like a game where gameplay sets the tone-- I expect to find myself frustrated and powerless at dramatic moments, and I expect this will be one of those games that makes me wish I liked alcohol. I can’t wait to play.

Are there any games in your backlog you want to finish? Please let me know. May we all make that mountain a little smaller this year.