Top 10 Games of 2019

Here’s everything I wanted to play in 2019 but never got around to: Sekiro, Indivisible, Disco Elysium, Bloodstained, Mario Maker 2, the Switch port of New Super Mario Bros WiiU, the smol Link’s Awakening remake, Telling Lies, A Plague’s Tale, Devotion, NeoCab, Jedi: Fallen Order, Apex Legends, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Astral Chain, Void Bastards, My Friend Pedro, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Wargroove, Persona Q2, The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan, Valfaris, and like a thousand others I’m forgetting. I only finished the first chapter of Life is Strange 2! Gah!

I bring this up only to point out how weird it is to even try to make a Top 10 List of video games. It did not take that much work to see most of the movies I wanted to see in 2019. I won't call my list from last week definitive, but it's at least vaguely comprehensive. Games, however, are an order of magnitude beyond that. Nobody has played every game. No one website has played every game. It is not only possible, it's likely that your Top 10 lists looks nothing like mine. That's assuming you even played ten games. There's so much vastness in the infinitude that is our digital play spaces, you could abandon the concept of "new releases" altogether. Gaming isn't cheap, and not every has the time. I barely the time anymore. Maybe you just played Fornite or Final Fantasy XIV all year and were satisfied. Put 5,000 hours into your second life as a Lalafell. Enjoy yourself.

What I ultimately mean here is that you can't chase the release schedule. I only came up with this list after cramming the last two months. I beat six games since December and didn't finish half the things I wanted to. The paradise of play we have found ourselves in is beyond all comprehension. If most of my list is JRPGs and puzzle games, that's just how things have to be. It's what makes me happy and keeps me functional as a unit in this capitalist system I have to live in apparently. If my list looks nothing like your list, are we even having the same conversation anymore? Should games even be considered "one industry"? I don't care about Call of Duty just like somebody doesn't care about Kingdom Hearts. Why should both of us be called "gamer" as a catch-all? I wonder.

But luckily, no games seem to be coming out in 2020. 2019 was packed to all hell with new releases. So far in 2020 all we have is a bad DBZ game and Kingdom Hearts III DLC. Everything else is delayed and delayed again. I got plenty of time to finish up Life is Strange 2 and maybe finally work up the courage to play Sekiro. I'd be fine if we just all took a year off and enjoyed ourselves. I have a really big backlog I need to work on.

Honorable Mentions to the Honorable Mentions (AKA, Good Games I Played in 2019 That I Have Nothing to Say About Today): What the Golf, Pokémon Shield, Untitled Goose Game, Eliza, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Devil May Cry V, and Cadence of Hyrule.

Okay, now let's talk about the Big Honorable Mentions, the games I want to talk about but do not properly belong on the Top 10 for reasons I will get into:

Eliza’s solitaire minigame (Zachtronics)

Eliza is a pretty good Visual Novel where you play a depressed tech developer, Evelyn, whose creation, Eliza, is Uber for psychotherapy. She reenters her company as a low-level drone after years of paralysis and guilt. Her job is to just read the what the "AI" (and I use the parentheses liberally here) says back to people who come into the office. It's one on one conversations with a cast of characters in Seattle. Think VA-11 HALL-A but far darker. These people have legitimate problems, often serious ones. One poor cartoonist lady is basically half my Twitter feed. This program can only parrot back canned responses and recommend some games on their phone. Then it charges them money for this and steals their data. It's horrible.

Eliza is better than the Dark Mirror episode that this plot could have been. It grapples with the positives and negatives of the concept. But I thought the game was just okay. There are great characters, the dialog is really good, but other than reinforcing my absolute hatred for tech bro capitalism, I didn’t find much of a great conclusion to this game.

Instead, what I really want to highlight is the solitaire. In the game’s fiction, this is an app on Evelyn’s phone. Any time in conversations you can interrupt the flow of dialog to have her check her email or play this game. This is especially useful when talking to the various despicable tech dudes. They ramble about their evil schemes and you can interrrupt them and basically say: "Yeah, rich boy, hold that completely deranged thought, I need to get another game in here."

It’s based on an East Asian card system of some kind, with each symbol corresponding to a letter. Where your typical MS Solitaire's goal is to sort out the cards into the four suites, in this case you’re sorting them out into ten groups of four. The whole minigame is a like a really difficult block puzzle. You can easily run out of moves if you’re not careful. I became so addicted to the solitaire I started ignoring the Visual Novel entirely, and had to really struggle not to open up Evelyn’s phone again.

Buy the game just for the Solitaire. Or wait and see if Zachtronics releases it as it's own thing.

Celeste - Chapter 9: Farewell (Matt Makes Games)

Celeste was very easily my favorite game of last year. Not to feed into the "down year" narrative some people have, but I very well could have made Celeste my Game of the Year two years in a row. 2019 has a lot of great games and I'll go into them, but Celeste is really special. Celeste is now living somewhere on my favorite games of all-time list in the heavens with the other divine beasts like Undertale and Wind Waker. It is an insanely good platformer game that only got better in 2019 thanks to a completely free update.

I already was already thoroughly the Bottom in my relationship with Celeste. Chapter 9 took that sadomasochism to a whole new level of pleasure and pain. The C-sides were already the most ruthlessly hard platforming challenge in that game. But luckily, they were very short. This DLC is like a C-side as long as a regular level, maybe longer. By the end, every single room is pure brutality. Luckily for me, the more frame-perfect jumps and skills either were patched to be slightly more forgiving or I had just enough muscle memory from last year’s nightmares to blow through them. Somehow it became "relatively possible". I won’t say “easy”, since nothing about this is easy. The final challenge is a two-minute long extended sequence of acrobatics and jumps that needs to be done PERFECTLY. If you die once, you go back to the beginning.

This was, without a doubt, the most difficult single gaming thing I’ve ever done. (Outside of pushing that ball up a hill in Okami.) I died 6,743 times to finish Chapter 9. The game helpfully kept a tally of suffering. It was a week of a severe relapse of my worst and most toxic gaming relationship. I either descended into self-destructive madness or became the greatest possible version of myself.

If they ever come out with a Chapter 10, they will kill me.

Katana ZERO (Askiisoft)

If I were to judge Katana ZERO on gameplay, presentation, and tone alone, it would easily make my Top 10. It would probably rank very highly, actually.

Imagine Hotline Miami by way of Jacob’s Ladder. You’re a samurai assassin working hits for your crooked psychiatrist who supplies you with mind-altering time dilation drugs. The main concept of the game is to side scroll through enemies and use your slow down powers to take them out. It’s more strategic than pure action. You can survive as much bullets as the enemies. (One.) But I still found the rhythm quickly. I was so tuned into this game I didn’t even need the slow-mo power. I am that awesome I could deflect bullets with pure timing alone.

Sadly, the game isn’t finished. I mean, it is a complete product with about a dozen or so complete levels of murderous glee. There’s even a final boss. (However, you can miss that final boss by making the wrong dialog choices, so enjoy replaying the whole game to try to reach him.) But the story is not even close to complete. It would be one thing if the games ended on a cliffhanger - don’t worry, it does - but it ends around right around the middle of the second act in a complete story. The game barely finishes introducing all of its characters and ideas before it cuts to the end credits. The developer promised some kind of DLC. But a few extra hours of content really couldn’t finish all the threads that were set up here. Also, I don't know if that will ever come out, or if he's just making a sequel.

So much of what I love about Katana ZERO sadly becomes a weakness when the game ends like this. You don’t know what is real and what is a hallucination. But when you’re lost so deeply in layers of possible fantasy, what did any of it mean? I can't make a conclusion. There's really great story moments. Like there's a brutal scene where you're attacked by a fellow veteran this world's version of the Vietnam War and have the option to just kill him. There's a whole level on a motorbike where you fight a helicopter. You fight an inside-out Akira monster.

But none of it comes together into anything. Maybe one day you'll be on a future Top 10 list, Katana ZERO.

And now, the true Top 10 Best Games of 2019:

10. Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital)

I am in the most uncomfortable place with Outer Wilds.

I admire the hell out of this thing, truly. It made the Top 10 because of that admiration. This is a special experience that is unlike anything I have ever played. The entire game is like a massive machine of clock-like gears that is wound up between every run, then resetting to the beginning. It's like the devs wind up the little clock-work solar system for you ever time you die. (Think Majora’s Mask… in SPAAAAAACE.) So, on every run in on a planet called, Brittle Hollow, one tectonic plate will fall into the black hole at the exact same time. Things open and close at the same time. Outer Wilds is utterly ruthless when it comes to its adherence to its own rules. Space travel is a ruthless business in real life if you don't do the math, so this all fits. You will crash and die, you will be devoured by space fish, you will suffocate in the middle of nowhere when you run out of oxygen. It does not compromise.

Outer Wilds feels like the kind of game I imagined making as a kid drawing out graphs and plans. It’s endlessly imaginative, colorful, and full of unique mystery. There are some truly stunning moments. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I fell into a black hole and saw all the light in the universe twisted into an infinite vortex. I opened a door on a space station and saw the angry red light of the sun fill up the entire screen. I stared up into the sky of a quantum planet and had the very meaning of life stare back down at me.

However, Outer Wilds is… not fun. At all. I found this game lonely and often irritating. Unlike previous cycle-based games like Majora’s Mask, there’s no save system. If you die, you start the entire process again. This is extra bad when the game has platforming sections and caves filling with sand that can easily kill you.

Then there's the problem that Nothing you do matters since the entire cycle is locked forever. You can only learn more about the universe, not actually interact with that universe. And when you’ve already basically figured out all the secrets and know what happened, having to repeat the damn killer space fish sequence for the third time is a ridiculous chore. I wish I loved this game more. Some critics are out there having incredible existential experiences. I’m not having that experience. I got so fed up I uninstalled the game and watched the ending on Youtube.

9. River City Girls (WayForward and Arc System Works)

The most classic video game story is "rescue the girl". It's so old hat now, that if you’re not making Mario or Zelda, I don’t think a game developer could get away with that trope these days. It’s a plot that at its core is a bit problematic and worse, is uninteresting. People want to hear the woman’s story even in basic excuse plots like this. Years ago, on the DS, Super Princess Peach turned the concept on its head with Peach saving Mario. River City Girls does the same for River City Ransom. That alone would be kinda cool, but what makes River City Girls awesome is the style.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World took a lot of inspiration from classic NES beat-em-ups. It is only natural that a beat-em-up would take inspiration from Scott Pilgrim. This story is not nearly as sophisticated. It’s just two young women, Misako and Kyoko, breaking out of high school detention to save their boyfriends from an apparent kidnapping. In River City, the only way to have a conversation, look for clues, or probably fill up your gas tank is to beat up various wacky characters and bosses. Along the way there’s FLCL-style manga cutscenes. It’s just a great-looking game with a good sense of humor. There’s a cool soundtrack and inventive bosses. You fight this game’s version of Envy Adams while she rocks out on stage. Along the way you need to dodge Guitar Hero notes. There’s a fully a boss against a spider-like fashionista that summons zombie girls.

River City Girls is not fully perfect. Misako and Kyoko are likable enough but we never learn much about them. The action is decently addicting but has a few issues. Enemies are sponges for way too much damage and it can get tedious. The punch button is also the "leave screen" button, so often you’ll find yourself moving to another room if you’re too close to the edge. And the Abobo fight can kiss my ass.

More importantly, the GODAWFUL original ending can be changed now if you beat the Bonus Boss. If that hadn’t been changed, this wouldn’t have even made my list. It was a complete disaster of an ending, it made every character look bad and left me feeling gross for playing this. Thankfully, that is no longer the case.

8. Baba is You (Hempuli)

Baba is You is game. Game is puzzle. Puzzle is words. Words is rules. Rules define world. Baba is you. You push words. You change rules and world. Reality is breakable. Change reality and puzzle is solve. Mind is bend.

Game is clever. Game is unique. Game is hard. Game is not flexible. Puzzles have one solution. Puzzles is tight. Game is claustrophobic. Eric beat game. Eric not beat all puzzles. Eric is cheat. Eric watch solution on Youtube when Eric is mad. Eric get stuck. Eric move on with life. Eric feels smart then Eric feels dumb. Hard makes play limited. Play needs more freedom. Game needs creativity.

Baba is You is abstraction. All games have verbs. Verbs is rules. Verbs is actions. Link has cut. Mario has jump. Baba has words and rules. Baba is You is game of language. Language has rules. Language rules make literature. Baba is You is literature. Baba is You is metatextual post-modernist theory made game.

Baba is cute. Baba is friend.

7. Manifold Garden (William Chyr Studios)

Manifold Garden is a game I started one Saturday morning just to try it out a bit. By about 7 PM that night, I had binged the entire game in virtually one sitting.  I had a splitting headache from a mixture of missed meals and staring intensely at an iPhone screen for like ten straight hours. This game had torn my mind open. It's Apple Arcade and is absolutely worth a $5 one-month subscription to play it. But I recommend it on console or PC. You'll want to see this game in its best form.

Manifold Garden is a first-person platformer-puzzle game where you cannot jump. You can only change the direction of gravity and "fall" to where you need to go. So the opening is a simple enough journey down a linear corridor, using Inception powers to spin up and down to get from room to room. Then you go outside. That's when Manifold Garden goes from a cool-enough game to a downright terrifying one. It's easy to live in a world where gravity is not a constant. It's much harder to live in one where geometry itself is not constant.

This whole game is built on a concept of infinity. When you stand outside, you see towers in all directions. There's an infinite number of them. You have nowhere to go, so you let yourself fall off your tower. When you land, you'll be fine, there's no fall damage, but you'll be standing on the same tower you fell off. Every tower you see is the tower you're on. The game is a fractal pattern. Sometimes the world seems to work on four-dimensional rules where everything loops in on itself. It's wild. The whole thing becomes an MC Escher mindscrew. Waterfalls will fall back onto of themselves. Towers have no foundations, just as Mobius Strips have no beginnings.

Luckily, as imposing as Manifold Garden is, it's a very simple game. It's ultimately all about carrying blocks to the right spot. You just need to wander around to discover the "shape" of your current dimension, then move the block to the right place. As crazy as the labyrinth seems, the physics still follow Newtonian rules. Yes, there's an innumerable number of floors to this building, but the stairs still work. It's awe-inspiring and beautiful. But it's straight-forward and very solvable. It never gets as preposterously hard as say, Baba is You.

6. AI: The Somnium Files (Spike Chunsoft)

First, let me talk about the Zero Escape trilogy of games. They are central to why I played this. The games are a simply enough concept: imagine an Escape Room puzzle but it's also Saw. A maniac named Zero locks nine people into a death trap. They must solve all his puzzles to escape. Each one of the three Zero Escape games only goes more out-there with the plot twists. By the end of the first game, the director, Kotaro Uchikoshi, has thrown in concepts like astral projection, time travel, the Titanic, Ice-9, Egyptian mythology, and a lot of conspiracy theories. It isn't just the Escape Rooms that are the puzzle, it's the narrative itself. You need to travel the labyrinth of story options until finally you unlock all the many twists and reveals. Only then have you escaped Uchikoshi's maze.

AI: The Somnium Files is probably a lesser work of Kotaro Uchikoshi. It's not as good as any of the Zero Escape games. But those are some of the best games of the last ten years. This is just a really good mystery detective point and click game. Somebody in future Tokyo is murdering people and mutilating them by cutting out their eyes. Your hero, Kaname Date, and his cyborg eye partner, Aiba, must investigate a small cast of characters to find the killer. Only Date is a weird pervert and there's a lot of bad humor. He also has amnesia with no memory of what happened six years ago. And that couldn't possibly be connected to another rash of killings in Tokyo which also happened six years ago, could they? Nah. Your boss says they're not related. Just trust her word on that.

Instead of Escape Rooms, The Somnium Files has Escape "Dreams". Date and Aiba can jump into the dreams of their suspects and hopefully use their subconscious to discover clues. If the suspect is a Streamer Girl, turns out her head is all full of Minecraft. A particularly impressive moment is when you investigate the brain of a lady with dementia. Her Dream is full of white voids where her mind has frayed away. Sadly the puzzles rely on a Dream Logic which is often pure nonsense, so they aren't perfect. I ended up Brute Forcing most of my way through this game.

There's a lot I don't like about AI: The Somnium Files. It's padded and slow. The endless sex jokes are tiresome. The puzzles aren't very good. But the deeper you go into Uchikoshi's newest maze, the more interesting the story gets. This game faked me out completely. I saw this game going to a very weird place but turns out I was wrong, it was going somewhere else weird. I am very impressed Uchikoshi could trick me that hard. Also, the characters grew on me the longer I was with them. Even the shitty "nice guy" boy has more dimension to him than you'd think.

Finally, AI: The Somnium Files ends on a huge dance number. Anything that ends with all the characters dancing is automatically great.

5. Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition (Square Enix)

People say Dragon Quest is all about nostalgia. And yes, I am nostalgic for the style of JRPG Dragon Quest XI is. It has been almost twenty years since Final Fantasy X. Nobody really makes games anymore where the central concept is about going from town to town, solving local problems, and recruiting odd balls to your growing team of misfits. That's a such a shame. In what other kind of game would we get a character like Sylvando? He's an extremely flamboyant circus acrobat knight who calls everybody "honey". His reaction to the apocalypse is to dress up in an even flashier outfit and travel the wastes in a Mardi Gras parade. There just are not characters that much fun in a Persona game, okay?

But anyway, what I was trying to say is that yes, Dragon Quest is nostalgic, but in the same way that Mario is nostalgic. Super Mario Odyssey has Goombas. They might have a lot more graphical horsepower in them but they're still recognizable as the same creatures Mario jumped on back in 1985. Same with Dragon Quest and its Slimes, Slime Knights, and the big burly NPC dude with a mask. The times change, the technology moves forward, but Mario will always be Mario and Dragon Quest will always be Dragon Quest. They're aren't looking backwards, they just don't want to change. Both series have a pleasant edge of worlds built on childlike silly logic. Both are just fun places to be for anybody

Dragon Quest XI is the first fully 3D single player game in this series since Dragon Quest VIII. It's been too long. But this one is even better. It's retro but it's also well-tuned for modern audiences. You never need to level grind. There's no random encounters. The game actually quick saves. Its systems are simple but each character has a lot of depth in their Ability Trees.

I loved the sheer ridiculous size of this game. It's a true adventure across 100 hours, so it has a lot of moments. There's a tournament arc, there's mermaids that speak in rhymes, and there's some surprisingly heartfelt and sad moments. Rab, in particular, has a lot of tragedy in his life and his backstory is deeply moving. The latest Switch version includes another ten hours of solo adventures with each character, which are some of the best content in this game.

Also, your first ally in battle is a very good dog.

4. Death Stranding (Kojima Productions)

I'm curious why I felt so much drive to explore and be in the world of Death Stranding. Many other AAA open world games have a scale that feels like a chore. I did not actually want to drive around the deserts of Final Fantasy XV or ride my robot horse around the lands of Horizon Zero Dawn. But I wanted to walk around the Icelandic landscape that Hideo Kojima told me was America in Death Stranding. There are games on this list that I did not enjoy exploring nearly as much. Even Dragon Quest XI's big open fields did nothing for me. At least nothing like Death Stranding did when it drove me to want to just hike with a baby in a jar as a companion.

The big point for me with Death Stranding is how it compares to Outer Wilds. They're both immensely ambitious games pushing physics systems in unique ways. One for space travel, another for just walking. It's an unfair comparison since Death Stranding is a massive title with backed by the full power of the Sony military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, Outer Wilds is just some guy's college project turned into a full game. But the difference is that Outer Wilds lets you explore, but it doesn't let you touch. Nothing you do matters, and that was alienating to me. Death Stranding is a constant interaction with the land. You leave footprints. You leave litter. The ladder you used once becomes a small helpful addition for a thousand strangers. That's what a world in a video game should be.

I am incredibly impressed by the ambition and madness that went into Death Stranding as a video game. Like Outer Wilds, I admire this game more than I actually enjoyed it. But that's fine. I want Death Stranding to be the template for AAA video game possibility. Be more ambitious. Be more messy. I spent a lot of time poking holes in Hideo Kojima's weird complicated thesis about human connection and environmental change. But at least he had a thesis! That's all I ask.

This game makes no sense to a lot of people, and that's great. That's the mark of really doing something special.

3. Kingdom Hearts III (Square Enix)

If I were truly an objective critic doing the math about what game really belongs in the No. 3 slot for 2019, it would not be Kingdom Hearts III. It is outright unfair that I jumped this game up two slots because of the Re:Mind DLC. But what am I going to do? Pretend I didn't play it over the weekend? I can't put Kairi kicking Xehanort's wrinkly ass back into the bottle. It's ridiculous to pretend those experiences didn't happen. And, this isn't based on any math anyway. Or at least, it isn't based on peer-reviewed math that would hold up to any kind of rigorous criticism.

I love Kingdom Hearts and I love how incomprehensible that love is to the uninformed Gentiles. There are people out there who haven't obsessed for fifteen years about the twists and turns of Tetsuya Nomura's anime universe. Their lives are just that much smaller for it. To them they see this game full of massive melodrama and Byzantine plot threads and it all looks like a kind of mass hysteria. Maybe it is. Maybe it is.

The thing that's truly great about Kingdom Hearts III as a conclusion (even if it doesn't actually conclude anything) is its willingness to have big emotions and not be afraid of them. A lot of media, especially in the West, that are about male characters are terrified to have feelings. The only feelings you can have are anger or lust. Kingdom Hearts won't do that. This is a place where male friendship is so intense its like a burning love affair. Characters get separated by time, various mix-ups in Hearts, and the wild schemes of hot dudes in black leather coats. And when they reconnect they are willing to be fully out there with their maudlin passion. Games are not exactly subtle psychodrammas, but they're never as big with feelings like Kingdom Hearts is.

Star Wars IX could not show this much of its heart, because that heart was not really there. Even Avengers End Game couldn't. The moment you feel something real in the MCU, somebody cracks a joke to return us to our safe unemotional heterosexual zones. Kingdom Hearts doesn't crack jokes. Everybody goes up on top of a tower and eats Sea Salt Ice Cream together. Roxas finally got to go to the beach and build a snowman out of sand. And it's goddamned BEAUTIFUL.

(Also I guess there's gameplay and I really like that gameplay... but more importantly, BIG FEELS.)

I cried again when I rewatched the ending to Kingdom Hearts III this past weekend. I can't believe how weak I am to this shit.

2. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent Systems and Koei Tecmo)

Kingdom Hearts III is probably the best Kingdom Hearts game. Dragon Quest XI is probably the best Dragon Quest game. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is not "probably" the best Fire Emblem. It is by far the best Fire Emblem game. This game took a series that was already great and made it much more. Turns out all the series needed was a morally gray debate about political theory. Who would have guessed?

Let me lay my cards down right now. I picked Black Eagles. I played the Edelgard route. I cross played as Female Byleth and married Edelgard at the end. And in my head canon we adopted Bernadetta because she is my special little girl and must be protected at all costs. Bernie killed like 200 people for me with her arrows. She was scared the whole time, but she fought for me anyway. Together we women built an empire built on fear, revolution, and lesbianism. You can have that experience in Three Houses. Or you can join a reactionary conservative house like the Blue Lions and keep the world the same corrupt place it has always been. You can make yourself the God Emperor of a twisted theocracy. These are the insane choices you can make if you want me to judge you as I slowly back away out the door.

Anyway, I wouldn't dare play the other Routes. Black Eagles was exactly what I wanted and I don't want to ruin that. We'll see what the DLC has to offer.

Anyway, to be frank, Fire Emblem was getting stale. Fates was too much like Awakening and just a few years I can barely remember that game. I did not even bother to play the last game on 3DS. Three Houses took the best part of the series: building characters and their relationships, and made it the central of the narrative. You're not just commanding an army, you're a teacher in Anime Hogwarts. The units you commanded in Fire Emblem were never just soldiers in any of the games, but they're especially more important now. You feel a responsibility to them. You've driven them down their path as warriors or mages, given them their orders, and watched them mature into adults.

There's nothing more tragic than suddenly seeing Leonie die in the final battle when she had come such a long way as a Cavalier. I pulled her out of the Golden Deer house towards my path of enlightened absolutism. I gave her the order that got her killed. I also didn't feel like resetting the game since the final boss was only a few turns away from falling. But she died so Bernie didn't need to take that hit. Thanks to her, Bernie got to marry a bookworm dude in probably a very unhappy marriage. Pour one out for Leonie. I failed her.

1. CONTROL (Remedy Entertainment)

I knew CONTROL was going to be my Game of the Year before 2019 even began. I've spent so many hours reading the SCP Wiki. So if there was going to be a proper big budget SCP game, I was going to play it. And I was going to love it. This is exactly my kind of thing. My favorite movie of 2018 was Annihilation, which could very fell fit into this universe. I love the podcast Welcome to Nightvale, where this kind of shifting mud of reality is played mostly for laughs... until its not. Throw in Twin Peaks. Throw in Haruki Murakami. I hear Kentuky Route Zero works on this logic, and I will play the hell out of that tomorrow.

It isn't some deep read to say the title "Control" is meant to be ironic. That's pretty obvious. CONTROL is a game about a universe where control is fundamentally impossible. The Federal Bureau of Control is a Orwellian organization in that its real purpose is the exact opposite. It deals with the absolute chaos that is the world. Our reality is a tiny drop of sanity in a vast ocean of chaos.

The horror of CONTROL isn't that there are no rules, it's that there are. People live and work in this lunacy. They have found ways to make it work. You don't bring rubber ducks to the office, you don't put brand names on the chips, you flip the light switch three times. In this world, rituals and totems keep you safe. You know they work, the only problem is you'll never know why they work. So fundamentally, you're never safe. The rubber duck rule works today, who can say if it will work tomorrow? This game is about that day the rules everybody thought kept them safe failed.

I was terrified the whole way through CONTROL. In truth, the horror of CONTROL do not really apply to you or your character. You're Jesse Faden, a woman chosen by this black triangle from another dimension that everybody calls "the board" (because of course) to be the new Director of the Bureau. So you have Jedi powers and can float around killing all the ghouls inside the building. This is not a hard game. The combat is satisfying and empowering. It's so much fun to Force toss a chair at a helpless dipshit. I was still scared fucking shitless. It was just the mood of this place. The Brutalist architecture, the endless mumbling of those infected by the evil in this place, and the fact that around any corner there could be anything. It could be a safe room of more computers, it could be a killer fridge, it could be basement full of fungus zombies.

CONTROL as a production is as top-notch as video games got in 2019. There's so many great choices with lighting and reflections. One of the best parts is the ghost of the old Director talking to you, since they layer his live action footage over the gameplay. It's just three shots of the actor smoking used over and over, but it works so well somehow. The world was full of imagination and full of a very subtly addicting kind of horror. I wanted to read every single note on every desk. I wanted to watch every creepy puppet show on the TVs. I was terrified, but I wanted more. One of the scariest parts of CONTROL is how despite how utterly wrong this place is, Jesse is loving it. She loves every part of it.

Glad you found where you belong, Jesse.

Top 5 Best Video Games Characters of 2019:

5. Goose from Untitled Goose Game – **HONK**

4. Bernadetta von Varley from Fire Emblem: Three Houses

3. BB Lou from Death Stranding

2. Dr. Casper Darling from CONTROL

1. Norberto "Sylvando" Rodrigo from Dragon Quest XI S

Top 5 Best Boss Fights of 2019:

5. Noize – River City Girls

4. Final Boss – What the Golf (yes, there’s a boss in this game)

3. Confronting the Killer – AI: The Somnium Files

2. Data Luxord – Kingdom Hearts III, since he's the only one I can beat.

1. Dante vs (Spoiler, but obviously it was going to be Nero) – Devil May Cry V

Most Disappointing and Least Favorite Game of 2019:

I don’t play much in the way of bad games just like I avoid bad movies. But the worst experience I had with a video game in 2019 was Overland on Apple Arcade. This is a Rogue Lite tactics game where you gather a few expendable survivors in a Cormac McCarthy-esque post-apocalypse and try to drive across the country. It looked really cool. It was not really cool.

On PC or console this game is probably slightly more tolerable. I didn’t think it was possible to have really bad controls in a turn-based RPG. But on Apple Arcade, they found a way. Maybe it's been patched since but on release, you had about a 50% chance of actually getting your characters to do what you wanted. But even if Overland was playable, the game is grimdark in a way that really did nothing for me. It’s like Into the Breach but the game doesn’t tell you what the rules are of the puzzle. I didn’t know survivors in a car could drag their buddies into the vehicle and save you a turn. It was unplayable not just due to controls but because the game has a misery-addiction and wants you to fail.

I put in two hours into this and that was it. I was good. Thanks. Also, I haven’t seen the ending, but I think it’s fair to say this game ends with everybody dying anyway, regardless of how well you do. What is going to be in Californina? Nothing, I promise you. It's all a waste of time. Why would I want this thing in my life?

Game I Most Wish I Played in 2019:

It’s Disco Elysium. I’m bound to miss most big PC-only releases because I truly do not trust my shitty computer to be able to handle the stress of them. (Every year I promise myself I’ll radically rebuild it, then never actually do.)

Disco Elysium I'm told is a great RPG where it isn't about combat, it's about how you spec your character. His personality traits are your party members. And there's a murder mystery at the heart of it, involving a socialist plotline. I mean, this is my shit. Sadly, I couldn't play it. Here's to hoping it comes to consoles.

Top 5 Non-2019 Games I Beat in 2019:

5. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Spike)

4. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle (Ubisoft)

3. 428: Shibuya Scramble (Chunsoft)

2. VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action (Sukeban Games)

1. Crypt of the NecroDancer (Brace Yourself Games)

I didn't finish Mother 3 last year. I promise I'll do it this year. If I don't do it, you can cut off my left leg.

Totally Inaccurate Top 10 Games of 2020 Predictions List:

10. Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Project Red)

9. Babylon’s Fall (PlatinumGames)

8. CrossCode on Switch (Radical Fish Games)

7. Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games)

6. Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry) or Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Moon Studios)

5. Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition (Cardboard Computer)

4. Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 1 of ?? (Square Enix)

3. DOOM Eternal (id Software)

2. The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog)

1. Breath of the Wild 2 (Nintendo)