Game of the Year 2019

2019 was a grind. 

I hate the modern year-end trope that goes something like “The year 20XX was a fucking tirefire. Bring on 20X(X+1)!” A year is a long time. Great things happen, tragedies strike, and on final accounting, the margins between a “good” and a “bad” year are razor thin. 

But 2019 was a grind. 

“Grinding” is a verb in video-games that means mining rocks or killing low-level enemies. For gamers, it conjures the lowest level of repetitive video-gaming – being asked to do the same thing again and again for a far off reward that feels  in the moment like an abstract theoretical McGuffin with no tie to reality. The moments of grinding feel like they no stakes or import. I tend to hate grinding, in videogames and in life. 

Those who know me know that I love grand narratives that cast me as the primary storyteller. In some circles my nickname is “Captain Narrative.” I look for games that give me consequential decision points, a limitless blank canvas, and minimal time doing bullshit repetition just because the game wants me to. I dream big and I want my games and my life to match the breadth and scope of my imagination. 

So 2019’s grind sucked. It showed up in the form of professional challenges, including an unexpected job change and some pretty gnarly toxic work periods. This was the year I went into therapy to reflect and reexamine some beliefs and assumptions about my core identity, and it was the year that challenged Sonja and I to communicate on a granular level about what we wanted and who wanted to be inside our relationship. Often times the very act of waking up and heading out the door felt like a mindless, repetitive task with only abstracted, theoretical rewards. 

On the other hand, 2019 also revealed some professional peaks that I hadn’t even dared imagine. I created new friendships, renewed old ones,  and gave sunlight to parts of my recreational identity that had gone long underserved. The successes of the year were small but vital. The rewards were ephemeral, but on final accounting, I feel a quiet pride in steps taken of 2019. 

Through this lens, it’s not surprising that my gaming tastes in 2019 hewed closer to the grind. I played different kinds of games this year and they rewarded me in different ways. Games taught me that there is restitution and reward that comes from repeatedly tackling the same problem again and again from different angles.  Sometimes the most rewarding changes are the small, intimate ones that are hard to talk about and are all but invisible. 

2019 Games of the Year, Ranked in order of Favorite.

1. Into the Breach

Don’t fuck this up.

Into the Breach is “perfect information” game. Every turn the game reveals the enemy’s plan of attack and the consequences of  actions (or inactions). With such crystal insight into the impact of my decisions, the game was how I clung to a sense of rational order during a period of my year was defined by vague unknowns and imperfect data. 

Thanks so a release on the Switch I was able to step into the drift for hours, revising and redeeming my approach to saving humanity, one run at a time. The game takes the concept of the gameplay loop and makes it literal – the player commands a team of mech pilots who can reset the timeline when a misplaced rocket pushed a bug into a civilian building which inadvertently causes a cascade of collisions that ends with the power grid failing and extinguishing hope of salvation in this slice of the multiverse. Those moments happened a lot, and there was freedom in the option to wipe it all away and start over 

While the reset button cushions the sting of failure, it also tempers the ecstasy of victory. Every successful run ends with a forced reset of the timeline. Your reward for saving humanity is to go back to the beginning and do it again, making the game itself an endless loop. Into The Breach taught me that my most hated element of grinding, doing the same thing over and over again, can reveal elegant solutions to the most difficult puzzles.  At a time when my professional world was crashing down around me, the game was a reminder that success is a result of good decision making and patience. 

I played Into The Breach for 60+ hours in 2019, but the game’s impact on my year was far greater. Spotify released my “Year in Music” data to me a few weeks ago. I was not surprised to find that Into the Breach’s music was my most listened to album. I listened to it as music to focus during work, and I used it to motivate me during half-marathons. My 2019 is best imagined as a montage of repeated failures underscored by pensive electronica. 

There are only a few games that outlive their initial exposure window. Games mostly live in memory and nostalgia, where completing a game means mounting it in the mental hunting lodge of past accomplishment. Into The Breach is the rare “forever” game. It is a game I want to play with my children as I share with them the elegance of what games can be. 

2. Fire Emblem: 3 Houses

Evil is a construct

If Into the Breach taught me about the meditative nature of the infinite loop, Fire Emblem taught me how grinding can open up new combinations of tactics games and narrative scope. Fire Emblem thread a needle few games have ever done for me. It is one of the most rewarding stories in games I’ve ever experienced, while also being one of the most repetitive and self indulgent games I’ve ever slogged through. 

The game games brilliance comes from tying together combat achievements and narrative depth. The more I succeeded  with certain characters the more I learned about them and the more story content i unlocked. To my great surprise, the characters were so well written that I formed unreasonably strong emotional connections to them. Their successes in battle felt immensely rewarding, and the more I learned about their motivations and back story, the more I felt compelled to keep fighting for their cause. 

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At times, it feels as though there are so many fucking battles. The same fucking song plays again and again, and sometimes the battles were so one-sided in my favor it became a chore to get through them. The grind was real – often times my only motivation for fighting the battle was to unlock more relationship capital with one of my teammates. There were battles in the final act of the game that felt like work, requires a level of commitment that made me reinvestigate the label of video games as “fun.” 

And yet, the time invested paid off in the end with one of the most satisfying conclusions to a video game story I’ve ever gone through. While it can’t hang with Mass Effect 2 as an overall package, Fire Emblem had surprising moments that gave me all the feels. As a game, it taught me that grinding can bring great catharsis. If you set your mind to it, you too can overthrow the oppressive yolk of divinity and claim your rightful place as ruler of humanity. 

This game also rates so highly because it was one of the rare single player social experiences of the year. I played it concurrently with two friends, each of whom had wildly different narrative experiences than I did. Through no conscious bias on my part, I chose the “evil” pathway through the game, which revealed to me narrative flavor that was unique and unexpected. A huge part of the fun of this game was bantering back and forth about favorite characters, roads not taken, and the very nature of morality. 

3. Divinity: Original Sin 2

Hmm…an oil field on fire seems bad….

Woof. This Game. 

This is not a game I thought I would ever come back to. In 2017, I wrote: 

“Oh boy do I want to put this higher. I’ve played thirty hours and it’s the best RPG i’ve ever played. Def better than Skyrim, from a story/character perspective. I have created an incredible universe in my head involving my dwarven storm-mage and his battles against his cousin the queen. I knock it for being repetitive: it’s going to take 90 hours to beat, and I just don’t know. The combat is so unforgiving that it requires a shitload of savescumming to get through. That was okay in the first thirty hours, but I’ve broken out of the tutorial island finally and have started the “main” game, and I don’t know how many cheese battles I care to have.”

What a difference a difficulty slider can make. Thanks to an easy mode, a release on the Switch, and a series of quality of life updates, this game is more accessible to a low level player like me. As of this writing, I’m at the 85 hour mark and nearly at the end of the game. It’s pretty much the only game I played from the first week of October through the end of December. 

The game is repetitive, surely, but Fire Emblem taught me that patience can be a virtue. Like Fire Emblem,  the narrative rewards have been…staggering. The sheer volume of quality writing make every encounter a memorable one. Choose the right dialogue option and I may be rewarded by an insightful monologue full of flowery prose from the eternal spirit of an Elven scholar. Choose the wrong one and I may be in for a fight with an entire royal family of fire slugs. At certain moments I would screenshot the game and send it to a friend just so I could share the pure delicious improbability of some of the moments the game delivered. Apologies to Ian and Zach for the time I live-texted them the joy of trying to sleep with a high class escort, having my estranged wife teleport into the bed, give me a vision, then teleport out, and then I wake up being robbed by the escort and her gang. A true masterclass of narrative. 

Also similar to Fire Emblem, I unexpectedly found myself drawn towards the “evil” path ( though isn’t evil just a label?). Like Fire Emblem, choosing the less familiar path in the game rewarded me with unexpected and fresh narrative, which made a replay of the first parts of the game (reduced from 30 to 20 hours thanks to difficult sliders!) even more enjoyable. 

Divinity Original Sin 2 is a modern throwback to a style of game that used to dominate the marketplace, and I’m shocked that it was made. I’m even more shocked how much fun I had with it the second time through. It’s the Baldur’sGate of its time, and i’m excited to see how this studio handles making Baldur’s Gate 3.

4. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

DK = Dab Kong

If this is an essay on the reward of repeating the basic verb of a game again and again to find deeper and deeper rewards, no game gives back as much as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Mario Kart is the same as it ever was: simple fun cartoon action disguising a nuanced and challenging racing game. 

I should also contextualize by saying that I became a Formula 1 racing fan this year, which ranks high on my list of most unexpected recreational obsessions. Motorsport racing is the very definite of grinding loops – it’s the driving around a track for two hours, looking for marginal advantages to eventually build a lead and find victory. 

Mario Kart taught me about real life racing in unexpected ways. I started thinking about braking points and racing lines and how taking the right angle into a turn could shave a valuable half-second off my lap time. 

Mario Kart also takes home top spot as the social game of the year. While Smash is always fun, there is something more accessible about Kart that means people are almost always into it for a few races. Historians will note that my constant refrain in these essays is “more social gaming.” I’m thrilled that once again Nintendo gives an easy conduit to collective play. 

5. Untitled Goose Game

Looking for these, punk?

There’s not a lot to write about a four hour game, but UGG penetrated the mainstream game consciousness in a way that no other game (sans Fortnite) did in 2019. I know that games are impactful on the zeitgeist when my brother, an occasional tourist in the gaming world, has thoughts on it. 

The combination of aesthetic beauty and deceptively elegant mechanics make the game one of the most enjoyable short games I’ve played in a long time. It made me remember that short games are awesome and something I should seek out more often.

UGG became the game I showed off to people who weren’t gamers to make the thesis that games are fun and for everyone. It didn’t always work, but it felt good to share with the world how unique and fun games are becoming in 2019.  

6. No Man’s Sky

I’m currently Jenny Odell’s book How To Do Nothing. She eloquently lays out a case for resisting the capitalist attention economy by actively seeking out modes of interacting with the world that are not measurably productive. She argues instead for intentional bioregionalism, a term she defines loosely as becoming attuned to the physical environment around us.  Her use-case is birdwatching: she walks the Oakland Rose Garden learning the bird songs simply because no one is measuring it with an algorithm. 

She quotes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, 

“We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images…So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” 

Through this lens, No Man’s Sky is the perfect nothing game. There is no winning (spoiler alert: When you complete the final mission, the game starts you all over again from the beginning). No Man’s Sky is the parable “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” operationalized. The game is about exploring, categorizing, and making your own fun.

For me, the fun was walking through digital landscapes and looking. I spent most of my time in camera mode, creating beautiful screenshots.  I played it for hours during my unemployment. Getting high and looking at new and interesting planets was an easy to way to cope with the feeling of aimlessness I felt in life. In my 20 hours or so, I didn’t accomplish anything. I simply was.

7. F1 2019

Trust me, this is fun!

If No Man’s Sky was a meditation on nothingness, 2019’s torrid love affair with Formula 1 was/is an obsession with progress for the sake of progress. 

I said earlier that this year was challenging at times. One of the biggest challenges was losing my job. All of a sudden I found myself with vast hours of free time and a gaping emotional wound. When I clicked play on a Netflix documentary about Formula 1, i told myself I was being intellectually curious about a niche sports culture. The reality is that I was looking for a cocoon of irrelevant nonsense to swaddle myself in as I made sense of my new paradigm. 

Formula 1 was the palliative I needed. A unique combination of sports strategy, statistics, and a degree of dramatic palace intrigue rivaled by any HBO prestige drama. Add in the gaudy sheen of Euro-trash, and I was sucked in. Hard.

I won’t bore you with the tawdry details, but the game F1 2019 is an excellent teacher for a novice. Whereas it used to look like the same 20 cars driving around the same circle, I understand now the unique particularities of the different tracks, and how drivers have distinct trademark styles. I even have a hazy understanding of the engineering and mechanical strategies of the sport that are largely invisible on TV. The game turned me into an aficionado.

Like Mario Kart, the sport and the game are about infinite grinding. To enjoy F1 2019 (and by extension, the sport) I had to tune into a different kind of progress. Rather than thinking about the grand epic scope, the game demanded and rewarded a high degree of focus. I had to be in the moment with my virtual car, attuning to the change in tire grip and the kinetic charge of my hybrid battery (Fun fact: Formula 1 cars are all hybrids). The game taught me that the sport itself is about grinding, and that success comes only after hours of mindlessly circling with little clear result. 

 

8. Motorsport Manager PC

Trust me, it’s fun!

2019 will be the first year that a FootbalL Manager game doesn’t make it onto a GOTY year list. RIP my Australian Arsene Wenger avatar,  Swift Blossomwood. 

Instead, my insatiable lust for simulated futures was indulged by Motorsport Manager PC, a near perfect addiction machine for those of us who prefer to keep some of our videogame narrative as head cannon (Captain Narrative returns) . I formed Hyphe Motorsports, led by Oakland A’s legend-turned Monaco-residing tycoon Rickey Henderson. After 60 hours of play, I’m finally contending for promotion out of Formula 3. My appreciation for the tire, financial, and political strategy of the sport has increased tenfold. 

9. Overwatch

Social gaming plus strategy. I’ll never be good at this game, but I love that Overwatch League exists, and that I have friends that watch it, and that the SF Shock are world champions. I love how bullshitty it all is. Playing the game helps me understand the strategies at play, and how far I am from ever being as good as a 20 year old from Korea. 

Games that I played but didn’t make the cut:

1. Sunless Skies 

I wanted to love this game so much. Honestly, if it comes out on Switch, it might make it to the top of 2020 list. As it was, too much floating through space. THere are unique narrative moments unlike any game I’ve ever played, but also a whole lot of nothing.

1. NBA 2k19

The days of Madden/FIFA/2K dominance in my life are over. It was fun, but I think I’d rather just watch basketball.

1. Baldur’s Gate

I played this on PC and was frustrated. However, it also was just rereleased on Switch…

Games I predict we’ll see on my list in 2021:

Outer Wilds – this game seems like the spiritual successor to Breath of the Wild, one of the best games I’ve ever played. I’ve very excited. 

Disco Elysium – this game seems like prime Captain Narrative fodder, and may end up representing a huge leap forward for the RPG video game genre. It seems like the Radiohead of games. 
Total War: 3 Kingdoms – The best Total War game ever made?