Welcome back, friends. It's time for the 7th Annual Cow's Game of the Year List. 2019 was a fantastic year for me when it came to video games! Last year I struggled to come up with ten games; this year I had 19 on my list and had to really work to narrow it down.
The two I didn't quite get to in time were Fire Emblem and Guildlings. Both are on my list for early next year, so we'll see if I have any regrets.
And now, let's get to the games.
From everything I saw before I bought it, Heaven's Vault seemed to be just another adventure game. Wander some ancient ruins, talk to your professor, hang out in Space Rome, solve a mystery. I like a good adventure game, so I was happy to give it a shot and see what story it wanted to tell me. When I bought it, I never expected it would be my favourite game of this year.
I honestly can't think of a video game that better captures the true spirit of archaeology like this game. I also can't think of one that captures the crushing frustration of doing research, discovering truth, and finding it completely and instantly shut down because it challenges the orthodoxy too much.
It also, like any good dissertation research project, is almost completely non-linear. A few story beats aside, you can do things completely out of order, and you can miss entire segments of the game. My second playthrough was completely different from my first.
They invented an entire language for this game, to the point that there's a section of the Discord--which I'm now on; I've gone that deep--devoted to playing with and exploring the linguistics. People have written poetry in the language, made art in it.
And amongst all that, the story is fantastic. The writing is brilliant. The characters seem real, and the choices you make in your interactions with them actually shape your relationship to them and to the worlds around you.
I thought I'd spend a Saturday afternoon seeing where this went, and instead lost an entire month to it. I even spent hours translating the entire historical book you find. And I think there are still stories I never uncovered, mysteries I never solved.
In a great year of video games, Heaven's Vault is far and away the masterpiece of the year.
Baba Is You has stuck with me for basically the entire year. I have over 20 hours into it, and I'll still find my brain thinking about it in the background and cracking a puzzle I thought I was stuck forever on.
I've found secret extra worlds. I know there's more to find. But where this game went from a neat puzzler to actually great in my mind was...I'm not sure I should spoil it, but a moment where the rules of the world become more important than the structure of the game and break entirely out of it. That moment was perhaps the biggest surprise of the year for me and cemented this game as truly brilliant in my mind.
I'm a sucker for good cyberpunk. I'm a sucker for a story whose villain is a thinly-veiled version of Uber taken to its most Silicon Valley limits, where the anti-labour campaign Uber has waged has eliminated human workers from the equation entirely. And I'm definitely a sucker for finding little moments of humanity in the deepest darkness.
And that's what this game is: little stories and moments of people's lives as they get in and out of your cab, and the threads that weave between us all, especially once the night has gotten too dark and dawn has to come again. It...has to, right?
No game has ever made me truly feel so small and alone in the universe.
It's like going camping, but in space. Sure, the sun's going supernova, but let's roast one last marshmallow before we too get roasted.
I didn't stick with this one all the way through, but I loved everything about it for as long as the ride lasted.
It's a new take on Kamurocho, but it's still Kamurocho, and that's fantastic. I might even like being Tak better than I liked being Kiryu. The story, the characters, the world-building, the localization, and all the fun side stuff are great, and seeing how the district has evolved was like going back to your college town. Mama-san is still serving drinks in the Champion District, but the old night club you used to dance at is all boarded up now.
That said, actually playing the game didn't land as well for me. The combat feels a bit tired, and boy howdy there's an infinite amount of it constantly popping up in your way. The neverending, repetitive Keihin Gang interruptions are especially obnoxious. I just want to be a cool detective and hustle people in poker on the side, but instead every 30 seconds I'm mashing out combos against enemies that have no chance.
Also it makes me hungry. I want a beef bowl so bad right now.
My goodness, this game is just soaked through with charm. It's not a long game, nor is it an especially difficult one, but it's a few solid hours of fun and whimsy with a lot of great music, art, and writing. One of my friends found this did absolutely nothing for him, so your feelings may end up wildly different from mine, but this landed perfectly for me.
This was probably my favourite bite-sized experience of the year. It's a simple little game that took me about an hour in total. You hike up a mountain and make friends along the way. It's a day pass to a provincial park with charming side characters and dialogue.
What a delightful surprise. I got Xbox Game Pass for PC in order to play a different game that very much did not end up making my list, but I grabbed Crackdown 3 out of curiosity, and it turned out to be fun. Video game humour often doesn't land for me but I really loved what this game did, and in a year where most of my favourite games were big heavy thinky games, having the Big Glorious Summer Action Movie: The Game was exactly what I needed. Moving around felt great, the combat was simple enough to make a nice action movie power fantasy, and the anti-corporate fight-to-break-free-from-dystopia message was a good time. I don't think this game really does much new or original, but it takes the open-world million-objectives-on-a-map style of game and makes a really fun implementation.
I never thought I'd get into a battle royale game. Battlegrounds did absolutely nothing for me, nor did Fortnite. But I was curious about Apex, and two friends and I made a pact: we would only play together and drunk. We had enough fun that we ended up dropping the alcohol requirement.
There's a moment for everyone where you feel that blood lust and know you're all the way in. For me, it was when one of my friends was facing off behind cover against some dude, and neither could get an advantage. I managed to sneak around the side, and the dude never noticed me until I had him point blank. Eventually we got our first win and, in true Apex fashion, immediately got mowed down in the next round because we were taking selfies against the giant banners with our names on them.
Our sessions together were fun, but we haven't really stuck with it. I'd still like to go back and play more, but it's never quite a priority. Still, some great moments, and it got me into a genre I never expected to like.
I got online in the era of BBSes, and my early high school years overlapped with the peak of Geocities and its ilk. (I was more of a Tripod person, but I had sites on Geocities and Angelfire, too.) When I needed community service hours to graduate high school, I did online tutoring on AOL.
All this is to say, the world of Hypnospace Outlaw is both nostalgic and fascinating. I've moderated forums, I've worked help desk gigs, and I've seen the staff portals of AOL.
I found Hypnospace Outlaw a fun toy, a nostalgic ride, and a great showpiece of a lost era. When it was over, I felt no need to go back with the endgame tools to see everything. But I really enjoyed those few hours that the main story's trip took you on.
