Now that 2025 is over and the reflections on its best games are done, the time has finally come to look ahead to what’s coming down the pike this year. I’m not yet sure how 2026 will stack up against the past couple of years, but it’s definitely got potential. There’s a ton that I want to play, and even more coming, so much so that I couldn’t possibly list it all. Still, I’ve managed to hone in on the games I’m looking forward to the most this year. Fingers-crossed that there aren’t any delays.

Mina The Hollower

I haven’t played any of the the Shovel Knight games, but I know that they’re well-made and that Yacht Club Games more or less knows what they’re doing when it comes to breathing new life into retro-style gameplay. So, when I saw Mina the Hollower and read that the devs were basing it on the Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons games, it shot right up near the top of my gaming priority list.

Those two might just be my all-time favorite Zelda games after Majora’s Mask, so it’s always been very disappointing that no one ever tried imitating or expanding upon them until now. They really were the whole package as far as 2D dungeon-crawling goes, with fun combat and really creative (for the time) item-based puzzles. And now, it’s all poised to come back (and then some) in Mina The Hollower. Here’s hoping the delay puts it in the first half of 2026 instead of near the end of the year.

Pragmata

I got to try this one at Tokyo Game Show 2025 last year, and I have to say that I came away very hopeful that Capcom is gonna get it right. The characters were just as endearing in the demo as they are in this trailer, so I’m really hoping that we get to spend a lot of time with them and get to know them really well over the course of the game. It was hard to tell from the demo whether such will be the case.

As for gameplay, there’s definitely potential. The demo covered an early game area, so it was difficult to judge just how involved the hacking and gunplay will get, but I can say that it was pretty fun. Capcom is definitely going to have to dial-in the difficulty, though. I’m not sure if the demo was just set to easy or something, but I never felt any threat from the enemies. It was all just a bit too slow. So, if they can speed things up and make the hacking puzzles a bit more involved, I think they’ll have made something that’ll be satisifying enough to play that it won’t have to lean too hard on the story.

Clockwork Revolution

There’s still no release window for Clockwork Revolution, but I’m really hoping that we’ll see it sometime this year. See, I look at this and I see the game that I thought BioShock Infinite was going to be. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy Infinite for what it was at the time, but it hasn’t aged well and was certainly not what the early trailers made it out to be. I suppose the same could be said here too, since we haven’t actually seen any confirmed gameplay yet. Still, this trailer has me feeling excited all the same.

The world feels fleshed out and lived in despite being so fantastical. It’s gunplay looks solid and the time manipulation looks much closer to what one would expect it to. Seriously, until now, the closest we’ve come to actually manipulating the passage of time as an active mechanic was in Singularity, and that one still only just scratched the surface. I’d be curious to see how the developers make using it a necessity, as players tend to ignore mechanics and tactics that aren’t actually useful, but other than that, I’ve got a very good feeling about this one.

Phantom Blade 0

This is another one I’ve gotten to try at past Tokyo Game Shows. The first time I played it, which was a couple of years ago, the combat controls felt alright, but were a bit still overall and left me feeling like I couldn’t move my character or respond to enemy attacks as well as I would have liked. The last time, at TGS 2025, there was no trace of that stiffness or gap between what could do and what I wanted to do. Combat flowed exceptionally well and Phantom Blade 0’s unique mechanics were very easy to engage with.

I particularly appreciated how it encouraged players to change their weapons and approaches based on the enemies they were facing. Heavy weapon-weilding enemies had to either be out-maneuvered with light weaponry or countered with heavy. Crowds had to be dealt with via area-denial or extreme agility, too. All encounters were like this. Switching up weapon builds was just a matter of a couple of button presses too! It’s almost certainly going to be a fantastic soulslike and I can’t wait to play more!

Saros

Saros is easily my most anticipated game this year. It’s not even close. See, this is Housemarque’s direct follow-up to Returnal, which I may or may not have been obsessesed with for a while. I just could not get enough of that game, going so far even as to compete on the global leaderboards and earning a decently high rank for myself. Unfortanately, Returnal didn’t sell all that great, so I was prepared to accept that it’d only ever be an awesome one-off. Yet, here we are!

Not only is Housemarque doing a follow-up, but it’s directly building on Returnal’s gameplay. It’s the kind of sequel made not just to carry on the IP’s name, but to continue evolving it! So many sequels either just continue the story with the same mechanics or change the gameplay so radically that it’s not even the same game anymore. So to see Housemarque actually keeping the Returnal foundation and finding creative ways to expand on it has me just ridiculously excited! I don’t see how Saros could be anything other than an absolute banger!

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What all are you looking forward to this year? Let’s talk about it below!

Image from the Housemarque website