What are your New Year’s gaming resolutions? (And how many of them involve playing more games in 2025?)

2024 was a difficult year in our household for many reasons. Other people definitely had it worse than we did, but in many ways I lacked both the motivation and mental bandwidth to be creative or play in new ways. I was looking at my Steam library, both the games I had played this year and the games I had purchased at the recommendation of others on this site or because they struck my fancy. I played mostly Blizzard games and a few phone games. Ultimately I played very little that wasn’t already in my comfort zone.

So I’ve decided that for 2025 this needs to change. One of my other hobbies is cross-stitching, there’s a practice of doing “stitch-a-longs” where groups of people stitch a pattern over the course of the year, with a segment goal each month. So I’ve decided that I’m going to commit to playing at least one new game per month. I don’t have a full plan of the games I will try, but I hope to have a reasonable mix of different game types. I have a bunch of wholesome and puzzle games queued up, some “Coming Soon” items on my wishlist, and some classic games I didn’t try when they were new. (The image in the header comes from an early access game called Dungeon Clawler, if its mix between action, roguelike, and classic claw machine mechanics interests you.)

This year Joe shared his two hour rule for new games: you need to play a game for two hours to see if you really want to keep playing it or not. (Coincidentally, you can play up to two hours of a game and still request a refund on Steam.) So I’ll play each game for at least two hours — assuming it has at least two hours of content, and stick with the games I really enjoy. I did manage to squeeze a couple of short puzzle games in this week, but most have been no more than an hour each. We’ll see how many games I manage to play in the coming year by giving each one a shot for a couple of hours.

How do you plan to approach your gaming hobby next year? Do you intend to expand on the variety of games you try, or are you going to focus on a small handful of games? What are your gaming goals for next year? What are some games you think I should put on my list?