All The Video Games I Started But Did Not Finish In 2025

If the commenters of this site and also the Defector Twitch chat are to be believed, I have many problems, but there's one that haunts me every single day: I am terrible at finishing video games. Just an absolutely dog shit completionist, that's what I am. I played a lot of games in 2025, thanks both to how I am as a person and also The Backlog, which forced me to power through games when I felt the itch to start something else. I'm proud of that effort: I finished every Backlog game but one, which was so average that I simply could not force myself to spend any more hours on it; that game is on the list below.

Aside from the games I finished for The Backlog, though, I only finished one game all year. That game was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, winner of a ton of end-of-year awards and subject of excruciating discourse. (I also wrote about that game, and I won't pretend the allure of a complete blog wasn't a big part of me finishing it; it was also just a really good game). Other than that, though, by a rough tally of my libraries on my Switch, PS5, and PC, I started 26 games this year that I did not finish.

This is bad! I have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on video games this year—in my defense, most of these games were either cheap to begin with or on sale for under $20—and there are even more games than the 26 below that I bought and never even installed. There are many reasons for why I stopped a game before reaching the end credits. For some, I just lost interest, either due to becoming so overpowered that it felt like I was going through the motions (Tactics Ogre: Reborn) or just because the game peaked early (Fire Emblem: Engage). For others, I just stink at playing the game (Hades, Hades II, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring). And for an unfortunate batch of games, I just ended up getting distracted by World of Warcraft, as I often do (Disco Elysium playthrough number, like, seven was going well until a new WoW season came out).

What all of these have in common is that I lost momentum. I can't really play multiple story-based games at once, and so I need to be able to keep my momentum going without getting FOMO for some other game—sometimes, that FOMO comes just from seeing a random social media post about a game and thinking "Ooh, I need to play that now!" (Rogue Trader, The Hundred Line)—if I have any prayer of finishing. As you can see, I fail at this horribly almost every single time.

This is not to say that I did not have fun gaming this year, between incomplete runs and work obligations. I think I enjoyed gaming more this year than I had in any since 2020, partly due to getting a SteamDeck last December, which made couch-gaming a lot more feasible, and partly because I think I managed to balance my gaming hours with my, uh, watching-almost-all-of-Survivor hours. It felt like a nice balance, and I played some great games, but man. I really wish I had been able to finish a few of the games below.

Speaking of, this list could have been even longer if not for some common-sense rules I laid down for myself. To qualify, a game had to satisfy three criteria:

1. It has to have some form of concrete ending, so games like Europa Universalis V and Teamfight Tactics, two games I played for hundreds of hours this year, do not count.
2. I have to have never finished the game, even in previous years; I might not have finished my 2025 save of Final Fantasy IX, but that's my favorite game of all time, and I've finished it dozens of times.
3. I had to have played the game in question for at least four hours. Why four hours? I don't know, I just felt like it. This only really disqualified Persona 3 Reload (playing right now, 102 minutes played) and Heavy Rain (it was on sale, leave me alone, 37 minutes played).

With all that in mind, here's the list, ranked in order of how much I enjoyed them:

1. Baldur's Gate 3
2. Disco Elysium
3. Elden Ring
4. Divinity: Original Sin 2
5. Hades II
6. Hollow Knight
7. Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
8. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
9. Tactics Ogre: Reborn
10. Hades
11. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
12. Path of Exile 2
13. The Hundred Line -Last Defense
14. Unicorn Overlord
15. Blue Prince
16. Norco
17. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter (Remake)
18. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
19. Granblue Fantasy: Relink
20. Fire Emblem: Engage
21. LIVE A LIVE
22. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
23. Red Dead Redemption 2
24. Marvel's Midnight Suns
25. Monster Hunter Wilds
26. Getting my wallet emptied out by yet another Steam sale of games I will never finish
27. Assassin's Creed Valhalla