by mento
Same deal as the other "GOTY (Adjusted)" lists. The idea is to build GOTY lists that are constantly in flux, ever adapting themselves to a new year's worth of catch-up gaming. Like the Borg, but for video game lists. With enough time I should be able to play through every 2019 game that piqued my interest and construct a list that ideally represents what that year meant to me in terms of games, but that wasn't going to happen on the year in question: too many full-price new releases, too little time.
2019 was the calm before a deeply unpleasant storm, and being squeezed between two very memorable years for gaming ('17-'18) and one of the worst ('20) for reasons that went far beyond just the game industry alone kind of robs 2019 of any identity. It had its highlights, but I suspect this will be a year like 2014 where we'll have to dig into the records to remember what actually came out. I will say one positive in the year's favor: it saw the debuts of a significant amount of new IPs, some from developers famous for other more-established series and others from relative newcomers. Even the sequels on the following list were from franchises long ago lapsed. I was happy to see these risks happen in a year where they could hog more of the spotlight than usual, in lieu of too many big headliners.
Here's the original 2019 GOTY list, for posterity's sake. Reviews included only for the top twenty.
| GOTYs | (Adjusted) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 |
| 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 |
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
(2019 Games Yet to Play: Code Vein, Remnant: From the Ashes.)
(2019 Games Yet to Buy: Astral Chain, Blacksad: Under the Skin, BoxBoy + BoxGirl, Disco Elysium, Life is Strange 2, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Minoria, Picross: Lord of the Nazarick, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Super Mario Maker 2, Trails of Cold Steel III, Yoshi's Crafted World, Zanki Zero: Last Beginning.)
[Last edited January 2024.]
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2019 Rank: 1 2020 Rank: 1 2021 Rank: 1 2022 Rank: 1 2023 Rank: 1 I loved everything about Control, besides maybe its checkpoints and how well it ran on a core PS4. The setting had a magnetic quality to it, not only exhibiting some deeply strange and intriguing phenomena with heavily redacted lore you could read about everywhere you turned but combining it with a retro setting somewhat explained by the story (the Old House cares not for smartphones and the internet, probably because it's old and you know what boomers are like with technology) that felt like a '70s stuck-in-time federal bureau clinically reporting and filing the vast unknowable. The combat was excellent too, eschewing the usual cover shooting mechanics for a mix of gunplay, telekinesis, teleporting, flying around, and setting enemies on fire. Remedy's always tried to find the right balance between an exciting and versatile third-person shooter and delivering genre-fare dripping with personality and FMV indulgences, and Control's their most successful attempt since the first Max Payne.
2019 Rank: 2 2020 Rank: 2 2021 Rank: 2 2022 Rank: 2 2023 Rank: 2 Bloodstained is a game I'll forever adore in part because Igarashi was finally able to throw off the Konami fetters and make the deeply exploitable explormer RPG he perhaps always wanted. When a game like Bloodstained has a lot of systems and features in it, the difficulty curve can be compromised by having to cater to both the more involved players manipulating every one of these systems to their min-maxing benefit and those who will spend most of the game ignoring it all. Bloodstained honestly doesn't care if you want to spend the time and energy to turn your Miriam into an invincible demon-stomping goddess, and the game is just as fun with a moderate challenge level as it is as an embarrassing cakewalk because the latter will still require investment of another sort. It took some time to warm up to the graphics but it's shockingly robust and lengthy for an Indie explormer and one that'll be hard for smaller developers working that beat to surpass.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: 3 2022 Rank: 3 2023 Rank: 3 Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a textbook case of how to do a sequel: you take an excellent if flawed game and simply fix all the flaws without damaging the core appeal. I say "simply," but it can't have been that easy to turn DQB into a genuine rival for the Minecraft throne. With so much more content added to the core inventory of tiles and objects to create and mine on top of fixes like the irritating reset that follows every chapter and amending the issue of rampaging monsters destroying your carefully assembled architecture by having NPCs to pitch in and fix everything. There's a staggering amount of new features too, many of which are almost buried in optional late-game and post-game progression. Impressive stuff all round.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: 4 2023 Rank: 4 Didn't think much of it from my initial glance but I quickly found myself connecting to this world of silliness that found a way to combine an explormer with a first-person 3D platformer, in a stucture not too dissimilar from Metroid Prime but certainly tonally a lot difference. So many imaginative ideas packed into this thing, especially where traversal upgrades are concerned.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: 4 2022 Rank: 5 2023 Rank: 5 The year's second best explormer is one that doubles-down on a Bloodborne style of combat where parries are king, complementing its deliberate combat with really striking pixel art of disquieting monsters and NPCs based partially on Catholic apocrypha. The platforming is a little weaker in comparison to the combat but the game has some imaginative level design and traps to keep you guessing.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: 5 2022 Rank: 6 2023 Rank: 6 An adventure game that's really an excuse to explore a satirical version of late '90s internet that is as funny, cringeworthy, disturbing, and perplexing as the real thing. As a moderator, there's some clever puzzles involving finding illegal behavior that requires some lateral thinking and deductive reasoning, but the game's enough fun on its own just when you're exploring what's out there.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: 6 2022 Rank: 7 2023 Rank: 7 An excellent story and new set of characters with a compelling, faster combat system is enough to overcome the game's few flaws, such as the repetitive detective missions and far too much tailing. It's evidence if more is needed that Kamurocho can be the home to many types of urban crime stories, and I can't wait to see this new side of the seedy district explored further in Judgment's sequel. Needless to say it has a great soundtrack, voice acting, and presentation too, and there's a huge amount to see and do when you aren't tracking down perps; Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio remains the king of the open-world game.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: 3 2021 Rank: 7 2022 Rank: 8 2023 Rank: 8 Though full of jumpscares, there's no surprises in Luigi's Mansion 3. Luigi's Mansion was an imperfect but fully formed game, Dark Moon was a risky switch-up that didn't pan out, and Luigi's Mansion 3 is the culmination of all those lessons learned. Dividing the hotel-like mansion into floors did make it feel a little more compartmentalized, and so I missed the way the original mansion would be interconnected and would alter itself in areas you thought you'd already explored in full, but the sheer variety on display from one floor to the next made up for the shortcomings to this new approach. Gooigi is an inspired bit of silliness, and the puzzles and ghost bosses were all fairly excellent.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: 4 2021 Rank: 8 2022 Rank: 9 2023 Rank: 9 One's organizational node regularly gets a workout in our daily lives, whether it's something we need for work or just spending an afternoon alphabetizing a game or record or Blu-Ray collection, but rarely do games acknowledge how much calming Zen-like potential there is in an organizational puzzle game. A simple idea - you get influxes of new stock to sort in your warehouse space, and since you must quickly deliver what your clients ask for it's ideal to ensure that you can quickly recall where everything is by any system (color-coded, theme-coded) that works for you and your particular brain wiring. It can be challenging to get everything done in the short time you're given, but the game will regularly give you infinitely long breaks once the working day is done to get everything back in order. Constant upgrades and new stock varieties keep things fresh throughout.
2019 Rank: N/A 2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: 9 2022 Rank: 10 2023 Rank: 10 I was surprised by how much I found myself enjoying Raging Loop, a visual novel from perennial second-strings Kemco. Despite a relative lack of interactive elements - there's secret story paths to unlock, but there's no real challenge involved in doing so - the story of a village forced to play a real-life version of Werewolf remains compelling through its iterations due to its pragmatic protagonist and his time-looping curse. The story takes some big, bizarre twists towards the end too. Glad to have found this one and hopefully more of Kemco's other visual novels see localizations in time.
