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Pudge

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GOTY 2019

Last year, I wrote that the year felt like it lasted forever. That may have been a curse, as 2019 has flown by. My first full year as a professional gaming critic saw my time eaten away by trying to make such a ridiculous profession pay the bills. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, but it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for spending hours with big AAA releases.

Not that there weren't a lot of them to go around, but I found most of them not worth making time for. Even the ones I liked ended up on the backburner for better or worse. I'm only a few levels into DMC V, Apex was a passing fancy, and I barely touched Borderlands 3. No, my 2019 was full of compact experiences that let me fit gaming in where I could. It's a different type of gaming, but I had fun all the same. Here are the best games I played in all of 2019.

Runners Up or 15-11 (In that order): Creature in the Well, Hell is Other Demons, RAD, Dicey Dungeons, Gears 5

List items

  • There are plenty of ambitious titles in 2019, but I'd argue that not a lot of them fully stuck the landing. Above Kojima's pet project, the time loop simulator and every puzzle game trying to break through on Apple Arcade, Hypnospace Outlaw succeeds in telling a small story through websites, player interaction and the same data recovery skills that everyone on the Internet uses every day. It evokes thoughts of a more hopeful Internet, a network of ideas and places rather than a data collection black hole. It creates new genres of music, revels in the absurdity of its own premise, and leaves you wanting more. As we move farther and farther away from the birth of the Information Superhighway, Hypnospace will exist as a reminder of just how far we've come, a warning of how far gone we are, and a historical artifact akin to the time machine from Idiocracy. As the decade comes to a close, that really fits the interesting times we're all living through.

  • I've probably played MTG: Arena longer than the rest of the games on this list combined. Returning to the card game after years away, this digital incarnation provides the perfect level of engagement and the right price. It's the perfect after-work palate cleanser, a free dip into the ultra-expensive world of cardboard amusements. I don't mind spending a few bucks for a battle pass here or there, especially when the new deck possibilities keep spilling out into my digital collection.

  • If Amid Evil captured nostalgia that wasn't for me, Ion Fury pulls the same tricks with a game I have a great fondness for. Redeeming the good ideas from the disaster that was Bombshell, Ion Fury is a full game built on the Duke 3D engine and enhanced with modern bells and whistles. It's got hard-hitting guns, unique enemies and kickass one-liners. I'm going to be sad to see the wave of retro shooters end because few FPS games in the past five years have brought me as much joy as Ion Fury.

  • I went into Void Bastards excited just to hear more voice acting from the man who made The Stanley Parable such an enjoyable experience. What I found when I dug in was one of the best procedural first-person shooters yet, a clever and demanding game with corporate-fueled humor that goes toe to toe with its AAA contemporaries. I rarely play games I review past my publishing date, but this was certainly worth my time months and months after release.

  • The Shovel Knight saga is finally over! It's rare that a collection of four (five if you want to count Showdown) interconnected games can all gel this well, but Shovel Knight is an exception to a lot of norms. King of Cards is another masterful 2D platformer with interesting mechanical storytelling and a full card game included as a bonus. Whatever the developers do next, it's going to rock our socks off.

  • The Outer Worlds is full of amazing storytelling, fun branching missions and one of the best representations of asexuality in popular fiction. Still, there's a version of The Outer Worlds that's on the top of my list, where I sing its praises till the space cows come home. This is not that game, and I hope that Microsoft's financial backing can let Obsidian iterate and make the expansive interstellar New Vegas that this game wants so desperately to be.

  • I think I'm not alone in liking Jedi: Fallen Order simply because it's a clean single-player Star Wars game, the type we just haven't gotten in a long while. It has technical failings, obvious gaps where the story is supposed to be, and it's not all that memorable in the grand scheme of things. Still, Fallen Order did enough to make me like a Souls game and told the best Star Wars narrative of the Disney era so far, so that counts for something. Now please EA, let Respawn make a new Titanfall.

  • The second retro shooter throwback from New Blood Interactive, Amid Evil cashes in nostalgia for games I never really got into. However, I still know a good shooter when I see one, and Evil's fantastic spell-slinging had me clutching my controller and circle-strafing all night.

  • While I didn't actually play too much Slay the Spire in calendar year 2019, its ranking here is based on hours and hours I spent climbing the spire in years past. Any game that invents a genre deserves heaps of praise, and all the card-centric roguelikes coming to roost in 2019 owe a lot to Spire's simple mechanical ideas and fantastic execution.

  • Metal Wolf Chaos XD is right up there with Deadly Premonition and Ride to Hell in the pantheon of "So Bad, It's Good" gaming. A legendary OG Xbox title that never got an American release despite being one of the most American games in history, it thrives soley on cheesy voice acting and over the top arcade action. It's a relic that's still a joy to play, and I'm glad it finally made the journey to its one true home.