I’m sitting at a window in Sydney, Australia writing this, and I can’t see more than a kilometer down the road for the rich, smoky haze of some of the biggest wildfires in known history. I’m pretty sure there’s a metaphor for how I felt about 2019 in games somewhere there.
When I write these lists, I can usually automatically think of a solid 10-15 games that should be at the top. Every year recently there’s been almost too many to actively enjoy — consider that in 2017 four of my top 10 games of all time were released (Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Nier: Automata, and Hollow Knight).
This year I played a bunch more games total, but I mostly just enjoyed them rather than thought were worthy of sticking around in a listicle. I have a few to sing the praises of, but I don’t know. It feels like this year was a stopgap for next year in AAA, which has some amazing titles primed and ready to go. Still, there were some bloody good stopgaps this year.
Sekiro
From Software was my life from 2013-2017 (literally, I streamed the souls series most daily for that period), but I’ve felt myself growing apart from them since Bloodborne.
Bloodborne is a fantastic game which didn’t really suit my style of repeat playthroughs, an amazing one-or-two playthrough experience which I think might stand above almost any of their other endeavours from that perspective.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is another similar endeavour. Unlike the Souls series, there’s a very flat, linear progression with a few extra side paths thrown in, both in character (one weapon, none of the tools are that crash hot outside of outside cheese cases), and in story (there are a couple of side paths but all roads vaguely lead to the same place).
Sekiro is pretty close to amazing; the combat is fresh, visceral, and you feel like an absolute master the first time you manage to perfectly wrest a health bar off of the human enemies.
What Sekiro does well, it does amazingly. Human fights such as Owl or Genichiro are fluid and you can easily get lost in the flow of constant attack, block, parry, mikiri, repeat.
…But it can be just as stale on that same metric — tell me by the end of the final fight that you weren’t absolutely sick of whipping the crap out of the various forms of Genichiro, and that what had started as a beautiful dance of death hadn’t become mindless attack mashing with occasional parry or dodge.
I can’t wait for Elden Ring still, but I’d love From to get back some of the replayability that kept their games alive for years after the fact — as of the time of writing, there are more players online in Dark Souls III (2016) than Sekiro (2019).
Boneworks
Late 2019 I caved into the VR meme and bought myself an HTC Vive, which after the initial buzz and endless Beatsaber I’ve been largely using to watch Netflix in space.
Then Boneworks came out.
Getting my VR headset on, I’ve been so disappointed with the lack of ingenuity in the selection of games. Hell, even the obvious ones don’t seem populated — there are maybe 5 good wave-clear shooters and most of them are exhaustible in about 15 minutes of play.
Boneworks isn’t very heavy in the story department, but the first time I smacked apart a plank of wood into realistic splinter gibs I got a very similar feeling to the physics interactions Half Life 2 bends backward to impress you with at the start of the game.
Holy Shit, this is what this medium is meant for.
Apparently, this bad boy serves as a big inspiration for the upcoming Half Life: Alyx, and it feels like one more step on the so far pretty shallow and uninspired trek of VR. Most mediums start off emulating things we already know from past mediums (think Pong emulating Table Tennis), but this might actually be the first time I’ve felt like this game could ONLY work in VR.
It’s early days yet, but I’m hoping this — and Alyx — actually forge something useful out of the tangled and boring mess that is the Steam VR library.
Baba is You
I would like to rate Baba is You as the top game of the year, but I do not have the big brain necessary to get to the end and actually see if it remains satisfying. I did, however, enjoy the hell out of the first five or six worlds, which was more than enough hands-on on time with it to both understand it and my feeble mental limitations.
An amazing linguistic-based puzzler, where you block-puzzle push nouns (BABA, ROCK, GOAL, TREE) and descriptors (is YOU, is PUSH(able), is FLOAT, etc).
As a result of this, BABA might be YOU, but with a quick push BABA is ROCK and GOAL is BABA, and suddenly the aim of the level is to control the rock into your previous character.
My brain hurts explaining this. It’s a good game, and I can’t do it justice without another thousand words.
Tetris 99
Tetris 99 feels like a joke played one year late. Last E3, the absolute apex of comedy that the internet could muster was slapping the Battle Royale buzzword on the end of a franchise, in the vein of XBOX TV SPORTS from 2013.’
So sure enough next year rolls around and Nintendo releases Tetris Battle Royale, and it’s fantastic.
Anybody up to date with Tetris since the 90s will know that Tetris multiplayer isn’t new, the battle mode has been a thing for yonks, but it’s usually restricted to between 2 and 8 people maximum sending their excess blocks over as ‘Garbage’ for other players screens. All Tetris 99 does is open up the field to 99 total players, and it’s simultaneously the biggest meme of 2018 and one of the best games of 2019 in how dumb playable fun it is.
Honorable mention: Mario: BATTLE ROYALE (fanmade into an actual game)
Untitled Goose Game
