Over the last year in particular I have started to use my blog to track things like my fitness goals and projects. Last week, towards the end of 2025, I saw lots of people posting lists of books, video games, TV shows, films, etc. that they had enjoyed during the year and I thought it would be good to at least keep a list of things I do in my downtime for my own reference if nothing else.

I am pretty bad at remembering what I have done and when and whilst I can generally refer to Amazon to see which books I have on my Kindle I have no real way of casually tracking other things so I’ve decided to add a Downtime page to my blog.

I’m not sure how much detail I will add to it over time (scores, reviews, or anything else) but I can at least start with some basic lists of things I am playing/reading/watching to start with and evolve things from there.

2025 Half-Remembered

This feels like a good place to note down a few of the things I really enjoyed during 2025 too.

Video Games

  • Tunic (Nintendo Switch) A fantastic action adventure game with scalable difficulty so older games like me don’t get stuck on early bosses.
  • Dungeons of Dreadrock (Nintendo Switch) A great story-based puzzle game split over 100 levels.
  • Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 - The Dead King’s Secret (Nintendo Switch) A sequel to Dungeons of Dreadrock which is more of the same.
  • Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (Nintendo Switch) A fantastic Metroidvania game which has scalable difficultly so you can play it as a challenging fighting game or focus more on exploring and the puzzles.
  • A Plague Tale: Innocence (Playstation 4 & 5) A mix of stealth, puzzles, basic fighting but overall a beautiful game with an intriguing story. I loved this right to the end when there are two boss battles which feel really out of place compared to the rest of the game.
  • A Plague Tale: Requiem (Playstation 4 & 5) A sequel to Innocence which expands on the gameplay and is as great as the first game. Again there are boss battles at the end which feel out of place but overall it is a great game, even if it was a bit jarring that the main characters lost their French accents between the two titles.

Reading

My favourite book of the year was volume two of Michael Palin’s diaries, Halfway to Hollywood , which I enjoyed enormously. I started volume three towards the end of the year but will not finish it until early 2026.

Film and TV Shows

My guilty pleasure TV show discovery was New Tricks (BBC TV Series) which I enjoyed enormously through the autumn. The show was broadcast between 2003 and 2015 and it follows a team of retired police detectives investigating old crimes and achieving an astonishingly high success rate. Most of the original cast had left by the end of the 10th series but it still remained pretty good although it then ended after 12 series in total.