My Gameplay 2025
In 2025, I initially want to play less Steam and more NS games, thus in this year I mostly focus on games on Switch.
On Switch, I played Metro 2033 Redux, Metro : Last Light, Dragon Quest XIS, Red Dead Redemption, Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, Hades I, Super Mario Kart 8. I didn’t complete Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2024, hope I would have the mind to complete it some time. On Steam I played Creaks, GTA IV, Sleeping Dogs, Outer Wilds, Murderers on the Yangtze River, Civilization VI. I also played Silent Hill I (1999) on PSX emulator, Pokemon : Pearl and Zelda: Ocarina of Time on 3DS but both incompleted.
Comments & Recommendations
Among these, I recommend Dragon Quest XIS for anyone who is fan of Japnaese animations like Dragon Balls and One Piece, and those who like some piece among former works of this series, because it’s a game of summary for the series 10 steps through 30 years and contains a dense taste of the classic DQ flavour.
I tried Silent Hill I (1999) as girlfriend loves it. Though it’s a game of 25 years ago, it’s impressive in the form of expressing and display. The plot and story-telling rythm is just good and absorbing, it’s not very scary for its way of expression and the low-resolution of 3D surfaces. It’s an excellent classic for anyone being into moving story and obsessed to some extent of scariness.
Another impressive Japnese game is Dark Souls: Remastered. But this is for those fan of medival castle story, and DND’s design style. Also, if you don’t want to experience hard challange in games, don’t play this. Otherwise, it’s a great work and will make you want to play again after finish.
I played Civilization VI with my roomates mostly. This game is addictive when you’ve get used to its main mechanism. But it’s too time-consuming to play a complete round, often beyond 5 hours, especially when you play it with friends or challange yourself with hard mode. One interesting thing of playing the Civilization is: you have to take every civilizations in the choices table seriously and learn their advantages when you’re manipulating or in a round with them. During that, you naturally learn about world history and cultural distinctions and uniqueness. This learning is fun for me.
Sleeping Dogs is interesting for the Chinese culture especially about kunfu, tea and cuisine in Guangdong area. I love the Hong Kong view of buildings in old downtown. This game depicts a fantastic night scene espcially of food market downtown and the crowded residential block groups.
Outer Wilds and Murderers on the Yangtze River are impressive as well. The former may be boring or disturbing when you start to play, for the authentic but uneasy-to-control experience of spaceship manipulation and space travel. But when you got familiar with that and when you become desiring to know how the story mistry unveals, you would be astonished by its authenticity on space experience and physics. The story end is moving and beautiful. Murderers on the Yangtze River is a game from China, telling Chinese story happening around interconnected murder cases. For me, its gameplay is basically a mimic of Ace Attorny. Though the gameplay would disappoint some people for the mimic, but still fun enough if you like Ace Attorny’s gameplay and just enjoy.
The most important thing I got from NS is not those famous exclusive franchise from Nintendo like Zelda and Super Mario. I gradually found myself enjoying the form of physical game cards: simple to play but little expensive. Some people probably feel that buying physical cards to play games that’re available on Steam is an act of unecessity. But for me, the precious point of physical cards is exactly its unconveniency during purchase. I have more than 130 games on Steam but I only played about half of them, some games like God of War and Half Life are bought only because I know they’re great. But when using physical cards to play games, I don’t buy a lot once, I plan the gameplay first and then buy it because if I don’t actually play it I won’t but it and leave it somewhere. This is a tight gameplay experience: you plan to play some games and buy them when you have time. Besides, the feel of having physical cards is good. Sometime I want to buy some merchandise of a game that impressed me, I found the products not impressive to buy, mostly because they not that viral and widely-played. But now I found that owing a physical game card of the game itself would fulfill that desire. In that I would keep those impressive in card forms, others would be sold. For example, I keeps the Dark Souls: Remastered and Dragon Quest XIS. I even bought NDS card sets of Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest V even I played them through emulators on PC.
Games I plan to play in 2026
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Baldur’s Gate I
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Planescape: Torment
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Blackmyth: Wukonng
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Detroit: Become Human
