2025 Goals in Review

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Aywren

It’s that time of year again – the final day of 2025 in which I review all that I did in the past year as related to the goals I set at the beginning of the year. Overall, 2025 has been a rough year for me IRL between health issues and the loss of long-time employment. However, I’ve managed to mostly stay the course when it came to my gaming and creative goals.

Let’s see what I’ve done!

Play the Games I Own

This tends to be a yearly thing wherein I battle against the growth of my Steam backlog while ignoring the tons of free games I pick up for Epic and GoG storefronts. This year, however, even Steam was giving away a number of small free games, many of which found their way into my backlog.

My overall goal was to play 75% of the games I own this year. I started the year out at 70.1% of games played. I added about 35 new games to my backlog – either through my own purchase, picking them up for free, or as gifts from others. Despite that, I still played more games than I added this year, and managed to tick just a little about 75% of all games played as of December 2025, which reached my goal!

With the new Steam Deck on hand, I hope this will encourage me to pick up and play more indie and cozy games in my backlog in 2026. But that’s a post for another time.

Buy Only Games I Want to Play

For the most part, I did what I set out to do with this goal in terms of Steam games – which was my focus. We won’t talk about Switch physical game collecting, which totally went against this goal.

I think there might have been one or two games that I purchased that I haven’t sat down to play straight up this year. Again, I’m not counting free games in this. I stayed away from bundle purchases, which only tend to inflate my backlog more and promote buying in bulk rather than buying to play.

Overall, I’ll say that I reached this goal successfully in 2025.

Focus on Switch Gaming

Every year I set this as a goal. Every year I hardly reach the number played I’d like to see for Switch. Especially now that I have a huge library of physical and digital games on hand.

I did give it a try by setting up a second dock for my PC, which allowed me to play on my PC monitor. This did help me complete one of the Switch games that I had left sitting mid-game for many years. But that’s a drop in the bucket of what I really should be focusing on.

Add to this that I just have a sour taste in my mouth for Nintendo overall this year and… motivation to be excited for Switch is low at this point. Given my current employment situation, I doubt that I’ll be investing in Switch games going forward. I only have a few physical games left on my wishlist anyhow.

PC gaming is just cheaper overall anymore.

Finish Blogging and Coding Projects

While these are actually two different goals in my original post, they can be easily consolidated here as I look back on them. I wanted to do several things in terms of website blogging and coding projects:

I completed three of these four projects, having recognized that the 2022 Quest Calendar project was just too big to tackle alongside of the others. Building the Wayrift Archives took priority over most of my website projects this year, and even at a steady pace of coding every day, it took me nine months to complete this. I knew it was going to be a big project, but I just had no idea exactly how big.

I did recode and reorganize Sygnus.org as a landing page for all of my projects. I also did finally catch up with my Breyer horse model list, both through 2024 and 2025. I doubt I’ll be adding much to this collection due to financial reasons in 2026, so it’s safe to say that this section will probably remain the way it is for a while.

As for the 2022 Quest Calendar… that’s still a project that’s on my list. Maybe for next year. We’ll see.

Overall, even if I didn’t get the calendar coded, I’m very pleased with all the projects I did accomplish this year.

Read More Books

This year, I set a goal to read 10 books. I know that seems laughably small for some folks, but for me, that’s a challenge. I do include audio books and graphic novels in this number, and some of the books I read were pretty short this year. However, I completed 12 books, which exceeds my goal nicely!

As Bookwyrm states:

I have many great books that I want to read next year, so there’s a lot to look forward to!

Use My Traveler’s Notebook More

I both did and did not reach this goal. I did in the sense that I am trying out a new system of to-do lists and organization in my Traveler’s Notebook this year. It seems to work well.

However, I learned that trying to use it as a planner just doesn’t really vibe with me for some reason. I wanted to keep the planner and the notebook as one thing, thinking that consolidating would cause me to use it more. But that hasn’t been the case.

Instead, I struggled to use the calendar inserts consistently, mostly because it just didn’t feel great. This is why I am trying a different, separate planner in 2026. I will still absolutely use my Traveler’s Notebook for my organization, to capture lists and creative tasks, and to keep up with goals in FFXIV (especially achievement hunting).

But the new planner is going to be my hopeful daily go-to for calendar-type activity.

It does help that I’ve finally settled into a fountain pen/ink brand that works well for my Traveler’s Notebook. I think between the two of these, plus my journal, I’ll have plenty of planning and organizational tools at my fingertips going into 2026.

So, there we have it – my goals in review. I feel like I nailed most of everything I set out to do aside from playing my Switch library and blogging about a bunch of games I tried in my backlog. I still have a few games I haven’t blogged about yet that I set out to do back in November, but I did a good job of covering most of them. We’ll have to see what 2026 brings!

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*|* {December} *|* {2025} *|* {Gaming Goals} *|*

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