Year Plans 2025: What I've Missed

Boy, this has been… a year. Please ignore my twitchy eye. Or the emotional exhaustion. Let’s just… talk about video games today, alright?

For the newcomers: I started setting up Year Plans in 2023, as a way to force myself to check out games selected somewhat at random through my collection. The idea was that if I only ever chose on my own what I wanted to play, there are games I own that I’d never touch! So why not leave it to luck? Of course, as I realized at the end of that year, I can always misjudge and overshoot. After all, I take direct inspiration from HowLongToBeat lengths to make these random picks, and I can never know how long a game will truly take me, versus how long that website says it takes on average. That said, I’m a very thorough player and I often go beyond just finishing a game's main story, so it often takes me longer than those indicated lengths to finish games.

Every year so far, I ended up with plenty of games I was hoping to cover in those 12 months, that I ultimately ran out of time for. 14 in 2023, and 17 in 2024. This year, however, I am proud to announce that I don’t have a lot of leftovers… only 8. I call that a win! But still, I wanted to operate the same way as before, by playing just an hour of each game and report on it for the last article of the year. Hell, there were so few this time around, I juggled with the idea of playing two hours of each instead! But nah. One hour will be enough. I’ll just write more for each.

The estimated duration of the eight games today ranges between 11 and 67 hours (…don’t start), and would have taken me an extra 250 hours to get done. I don’t think I would have had enough time.

Well then! With so few, I guess I won’t split these into categories!

Team Sonic Racing

Out of my way, Amy! I'm gonna steal the third place from
you!

There are many Sonic racing games out there, though for a while they existed under the “Sonic & All-Stars” umbrella that allowed characters from other properties to join the roster. This doesn’t quite work for Team Sonic Racing's concept, where characters play in their classic teams (with a few changes) and have to rely on each other to win each race. Each team has a Speed character (Sonic, Amy, Shadow, etc.), with a race car that has faster speed than average; a Technical character (Tails, Omochao, Rouge, etc.) with better handling and the ability to pick up rings more easily; and a Power character (Knuckles, Big, E-123 Omega, etc.) that is slower, but unaffected by most road hazards.

Five teams, 15 characters total, and the entire game is built around teamwork. The car of your teammate closest to first place leaves a trail behind, and the other two can drive along that trail to gain a speed boost. It feels a little like teamwork rubberbanding. Racers can pick up Wisps as power-ups – many of which feels directly inspired by similar items in Mario Kart.

One hour wasn’t enough to go too far into it, so I haven’t seen yet whether having to rely on your two CPU allies to get ahead leads to issues down the line (you never know how well the AI will play, after all), so… guess I’ll see when I get around to it.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas

This was going to be the mandatory Ubisoft Connect game for the year, but then I also had ZOMBI, and that was enough for me. And I had to download a 24.26Gb game for this one hour; Ubisoft really needs to optimize their game sizes. Sheesh. Also I’m covering the PC version, not Switch, so no StarFox crossover today.

Gotta destroy these extractors... I gotta, it's part of the
plot.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas is not a game I knew much about; all I know is that it was handed out for free through Ubisoft Connect one December, and I’ve had it since. Really took me booting it up and starting the main campaign to see – damn, I like that! Love the look, love the feel, love the gameplay. It’s not a survival game like No Man’s Sky, but there’s a few elements that I can only see as inspiration – as an example, interstellar travel, even if it’s limited to the Atlas planetary system, and the occasional encounters with an enemy group that seems mostly made up of robotic entities.

Scanning alien species for info is fun (and is a more involved process), and each planet is just the right size to occupy you for a few hours looking for everything. You can gain skill points to improve your character, equip your ship with plenty of modules, find all kinds of stuff when exploring… And what little I’ve seen of the story makes me look forward to playing again.

Tomb Raider (1996)

I don’t have a ton of retro games in my Steam collection, but I do have a few – and I didn’t take into account that I could run into issues due to some games’ age. Even recording this one was tough.

As you can see, I didn't get much done in this one.
Couldn't even finish the first damn dungeon...

The first Tomb Raider game was praised everywhere upon release and started a whole new franchise. Lara Croft usually makes it onto every list of best female video game protagonists. Okay, step 1: Learn the controls. No way to change them, and it’s a combination of Crtl, Alt, and the Spacebar. Okay, cool. But for some reason, the game would shut down every time I pressed the Windows key, which is right between Ctrl and Alt. So that’s nice, one mispress and boom, all progress lost.

Not exactly the best first impression. Second, to figure out all the controls, I probably should have read the manual beforehand, to really find out how to jump, how to grab ledges, how to shoot… With all the advancements to gaming controls since, so many of these feel downright unintuitive. Instead of freely moving left or right, Lara Croft only moves forward, and the Left and Right keys move the camera to make her go forward. And that's just a start. Then there's aiming and shooting with her guns, and then there's… So much more. Oooof, that one’s gonna be an uphill climb when I get to it…

The Witness

Instead of just showing some puzzle panels, I figured I'd
show one of the first puzzles where you need clues from
the environment to solve them.

Holy crap, this game is beautiful. A large, empty, gorgeous island, and you have no idea how you got there. A complete mystery that may remain unsolved. By the same token, you can’t explain the constant presence of panels with maze-like puzzles, which when completed open new areas. It isn’t too long until you meet new areas with puzzles that work differently from what you’ve seen thus far. Every area has its own special puzzle type, even if all of them involve traveling a grid from a large circle to a smaller, beaming destination.

Not much to explain here controls-wise; just the arrows to move, and the mouse to interact with things – mainly the puzzle panels, rarely anything else (for now; who knows, once I’m far more than an hour into this one…). The design so far has been great: An antepiece where the new area’s puzzle type is introduced with something very simple to solve, and then you’re given increasingly complex takes on the same base concept. And in some cases, you’ll have to study the surroundings to figure the solution out.

I’ll be happy to pick this one up again!

Final Fantasy VII

One of the biggest hitters of the entire RPG genre, its presence here ironically echoes my experience from last year, where I failed to play FFVI, and thus just gave it a short 60 minute test run. In only one hour of VII, you meet the gang, you are introduced to the major organizations (SOLDIER, Shinra, AVALANCHE, etc.), and you are given a decent bit of exposition and worldbuilding (in what pertains to Midgar, the setting). You play as Cloud and help your teammates in their current mission.

A giant scorpion robot? To guard a reactor? Geez!

Due to playing VI for an hour last year, I was already acquainted with the Active Time Battle system and its mechanics. And yet, I had completely forgotten about it, or that it was also present in VII! Well, memory of it came back relatively fast. And I guess I did well enough to reach the first boss and give it a good whack! I guess I’m not too thrilled about not being able to save at will (the Save option is always in the menu, but greyed out unless you’re at specific points), but that’s not too surprising for a game from that era. I only had time to play a little more, seeing some details about Cloud’s past involving Tifa. Barret was part of the party for most of the hour, and I also spotted Aerith, so… I guess I’ve met the main four.

I wished I could say that I'll play this one in full in 2026. But I think I’ll catch up on that raincheck and tackle VI instead. Not that it matters much playing the Final Fantasy games in order…

Rust

I have decent experience with survival games… I guess, if we can count Valheim as one. But the viking adventure can be entirely played as a single person, while Rust’s servers are always open for multiplayer. Which, for a new player, is a double-edged sword. When you don’t even know all that much about the game, you’re easy pickings for those who have been around longer.

Pfft- Lame! In the old days, vikings without reesources or
tools would chop down trees with their fists!
...Or at least, so have other survival games taught me.

Every player starts bare ass naked on the beach, armed with nothing but a large rock and a torch. To even start playing and crafting, a player will first need to use their big rock to chop down some trees and gather wood. Breaking other big rocks into pebbles might help, too. Cool, cool. Except the first server I joined had its opening area picked pretty damn clean. I persevered a little longer after my first death at the hands of another player, but yeah – there wasn’t much to do here.

The second server I found was a lot more newcomer-friendly and I managed to amass a decent quantity of stuff from exploring nearby areas, with my game time ending after I literally swam across a large body of water, towards the only accessible spot where my character wouldn’t freeze to death. So, uh, guess there’s also procedural generation to take into account. Alright, at least I experienced it. There’ll be a more complete experience eventually…

La-Mulana

La-Mulana is one of two games I’ve purchased back on the Wii Shop Channel, that remain unplayed so far. This one, released in 2006, feels like an indie game before indie games got really big; it’s a platformer with some Metroidvania elements, and a retro style directly emulating the look and feel of another console (namely the MSX, a home computer from the ‘80s).

I already got to see a few of the first areas of La-Mulana,
so at least I know what to expect from now on.

Our main character, Lemeza, is an archaeologist. He has only one weapon at first, a trusty whip (I sense a reference here). He can jump, but his jumps are… weird. If he falls off a platform, he’ll fall in a straight line and his fall cannot be controlled. Similarly, if you jump left and right, it works fine, but if you first jump up, then try to readjust with left or right, it’ll take a moment.

One hour isn’t enough to see much of the ruins that we’ll explore, but it sets up interesting elements, such as the items you can purchase having a clear purpose while in the dungeons. As an example, you can obtain an item that can read steles and study areas when in use, but many steles and stone tablets will be written in an unreadable language, which will necessitate the purchase of translator software. That tool, added to Lemeza’s laptop, will decipher the texts, giving more hints. And I guess it only increases in complexity from there. Well! That’s one more that makes me feel like I’m missing out!

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Oh, those things are SCARY in the early game.

Ho boy, that’s a big one. I already played an hour of it when I first got my Switch, but I focused on plenty of other games since. Thing is, I first put an hour into several of the first games I got for my Switch, back in 2023; and I hadn’t touched this one since. Took me a minute to figure out where to go next, because I was completely lost. Heck, it even took me a moment to remember all the controls.

Chances are, anyone on their first playthrough will probably not leave the Great Plateau in the first two hours. Or maybe it’s because I got lost that it took me so long; all I know is that I only completed one of the goals for the current mission. At the time of writing, I still haven’t gotten my hands on the Paraglider. Guess I’m just taking in the sights and the sheer size of this world. The Plateau alone is humongous. All I know is that I encountered a misshapen golem and I haven’t beaten it yet.

To be continued, hopefully not ten years from now!

Preparing for 2026

How will I pick the games for 2026? Well… These past few years, I went at semi-random, but this time I’ll do things a little differently.

-I’ll pick the games on consoles and on non-Steam platforms separately from the rest of the list, and specifically focus on the shorter ones, to get many done in the year. The same will go for one specific collection of games that I purchased in 2025.

-Everything else that will remain will be on Steam, and as usual I’ll select all the shorter games and lump them together for the next Quick Reviews.

-If some games picked in the above two points are continuations of franchises, and I also own and haven't played the previous entries, I’ll add those as well. (Shouldn't happen too often, hopefully.)

-I’ll split the remainder of the Steam list the same way I usually do, but this time I’ll purposely choose the games that are either the oldest in each category, or the ones I’ve owned the longest – that way, I can force myself to play the games that have been waiting for way too long.

-Then, I'll trim a bit so that I don't overshoot too significantly.

Sounds like a plan? Good. I'll post that list in the retrospective, next week. See you in 2026, may it be better than 2025.