- Bard’s Tale IV: Director’s Cut
- AI War 2
- Baba is You
- Anno 1800
- My Time at Portia
I’ve no doubt Disco Elysium would be on here if I’d had time to play it yet.
- Disco Elysium
- Outer Wilds
- Hypnospace Outlaw
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
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Age of Wonders: Planetfall
- (Xbox One & Steam) I play this game on both PC and XBOX One, but it’s the Xbox version I’ve put the most time into. I’m a series-long fan of the Age of Wonders games, and while I didn’t expect this series to have many surprises left for me, I knew I would probably love whatever Triumph Studios delivered. But this entry did surprise me, and not because of the game’s direction and setting so much as its translation to console, the impact minor factions (can) play, and the capture, defense, and exploitation of sectors. I am just thrilled to have this game available on Xbox, it’s everything I ever wanted in a couch-gaming experience without even knowing it.
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AI War 2
- (Steam) This game looked intimidating to me the first time I saw it, but a lot of that is because I bounced off the first game so hard. But because of the glowing praise Qt3 has bestowed upon AI War over the years, and because I had a cumulative discount of 65% off AI War 2 if I added up various coupons and such at release, I couldn’t pass on this one. I love this game. It wasn’t difficult at all for me to get going, it introduces several fleet management features that streamlines and eliminates so much of the micro I’ve come to detest in a lot of strategy games, and it’s got great music.
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Amid Evil
- (Steam) I didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as I do. I bought the game hoping for nothing more than a bit of a contemporary nostalgia trip back to the glory days of Heretic & Hexen… but the game delivered more than this. Nostalgia for the 90s aside, the game stands on its own as a great shooter, not just a great retro-shooter.
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Overdungeon
- (Steam) I enjoy deck builders, but I enjoy this one most of all. I see a lot of love for Slay the Spire around here (well… around everywhere), but that one never stuck for me. I don’t enjoy the plodding combat, I don’t enjoy the classes or cards available, I don’t enjoy the special encounters, and I don’t enjoy any of the trinkets. The game just felt so constrained at all times, and this is where Overdungeon shines for me. Overdungeon gets pretty wild, pretty quick. The gameplay is faster, the cards and trinkets can get balls-out crazier, and the game isn’t afraid to just get naked and go crazy the moment Stryper hits the juke box. And while there’s still a huge measure of deliberation required to put together and properly utilize a solid deck, the game isn’t at all dragged down by the process.
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Darksiders Genesis
- (GOG) I enjoy Darksiders 1 & 2 combat styles much more than 3 (which aped dark Souls at release but added a ‘classic’ combat style in later revisions), and while this might look like a top-down isometric ARPG, it doesn’t play like one. This is more of an action brawler, like the first game, and that’s all I wanted in a new Darksiders game. It also helps a lot that War is here to play the straight man against Strife’s smartassedness. As a sequel, I found it much more compelling than anything with the words Marvel, Ultimate, Alliance… or 3 in the title.
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Disco Elysium - Enjoyed this more than any other game that has come out in years.
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Field of Glory: Empires - A good game with some originality.
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Jon Shafer’s At the Gates - I got a lot of hours of fun out of this, but yeah, it has some gaping holes. Yet it is the only other game released this year that I had a good time playing.
(Except Spire of Sorcery, but that is so far from finished it doesn’t count. It’s “limited early access” now and should count as a 2020 game.)
Should we be doing a Quarterlies full decade edition? I feel like we should. Concurrently with this one or after it’s over? Sound off ye merry men and women:
- QT3 Best of the decade go!
- QT3 Best of the decade go, but in like 2 or 3 weeks
- QT3 Best of the decade no
- Shit Bonerz!
- QT3 Best of the decade go eventually, but maybe after a while when we’ve had some time to play these 2019 games
0 voters
In 2019 I spent more time with board games than video games. Although most of those board games were older, so it’s still hard comparing up with a top five.
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Pax Pamir 2nd edition – Far and away my game of the year. Fantastic theme, highly interactive gameplay, beautiful production. I love it.
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Outer Wilds – The only video game that really sunk its teeth into me during the year. I love exploration in games, and this does exploration as well as it’s ever been done.
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Bus – Yes, this is a new edition of a 20-year-old game. But it’s been out of print for almost all of those two decades, so I say it’s still eligible. Bus route planning + disrupting the spacetime continuum. Simple rules, deep gameplay.
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City of the Big Shoulders – Not perfect (it’s too easy for companies to generate money), but lots of fun overall, if your idea of fun involves crunchy economic games.
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Era: Medieval Age – In the words of a Covergirl ad: easy, breezy, beautiful. A great casual or family game.
Those four certainly deserve to be in my honorable mentions.
I took the bold out because I wondered the same. I’ll edit again to take the numbers out as well.
- Slay the Spire
- Disco Elysium
- Age of Wonders: Planetfall
- The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
- Steamworld Quest
Question - with regards to games like Age of Wonders: Planetfall which can have various ways to present it (just the word “Planetfall” or no colon, for example, but rather a hyphen or something) does the script account for that or if someone cleaning that up manually?
- IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Bodenplatte – The IL-2 series has been excellent, and combine amazing VR support with some great non-Russian hardware (P-38, P-51, Tempest, etc.) and improved AI and you have a pretty amazing combat sim experience.
- Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order - I hate platforming and wall-running and heights, but the production values, story, pacing, puzzles, etc. are all so good this still ended up my 2019 favorite.
- A Plague Tale: Innocence - A very different, very tense effort from Asobo
- Outer Wilds – Innovative gameplay, cool universe, crafty puzzles.
- The Outer Worlds – Not the best RPG ever, but still, an entertaining, interesting game. And I appreciated it being 40 hours instead of 120.
If you’ve already voted then definitely not because only your first vote will ever count. But even if you haven’t I don’t think so, and I can fix it if it’s broken that way. Quotes have their own formatting so I can ignore any votes inside of that.
The script isn’t magical enough to assign names in that way… I’ve considered doing a match on a lookup table for all released games but a lot of people do things I don’t expect like pick board games (this is sort of a joke since I’m a fan myself) or games that were released in other years (you rogues!).
However, I have a table that I manually add entries to that make them the same game, so I can add Planetfall/Age of Wonders: Planetfall etc and it’ll count as the same game. Also punctuation and case is ignored as well.
I look for outliers in the data (i.e. a single vote for something that should have more) for problems like misspellings or different naming and reconcile it with that “same game” table every so often and right before the final count I check every unique name to make sure there’s no vote split for the same title using different name variations.
Edit: sorry for notification spam, I cleaned up/added to this post a looot.
That makes sense, thanks for all the heavy lifting here! We appreciate it!
- Pokemon Sword and Shield - My first Pokemon game, love it.
- Farmer’s Dynasty - Weird and not good but I played 40 hours of it in the last week. Help me.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses - I actually could not finish the route I was on because I suck. Need to play again this year.
- The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
- Disco Elysium
I would have put DIsco Elysium on here but I keep bouncing right off of it. Meanwhile, gaze upon my odd selections and double dose of Pokemons. Let me show you them.
Long live the Switch.
EDIT: Finally had a chance to play some Disco Elysium, and oh man is it great. Would probably climb this list even more if I had more time with it, but for now I’m going to reserve judgement just slightly and put it below the two that gave me some really amazing experiences.
- Slay the Spire - just an amazing game in every way, one of my all time favorites now. Deckbuilding truly made into a top tier genre by this game.
- Path of Adventure - what a cool concept it is to do a text-based roguelike. I can’t wait for more games to attempt this model…(technically this came out on Android on Dec 21, 2018, but the iOS version I played was this year)
- Disco Elysium - I was chortling to myself uncontrollably while playing this, and it’s the first time in a while that I’ve felt any desire to describe something from a game to my wife (who generally just smiles and nods about anything game-related). She even got a kick out of my character’s inept attempt at coming up with a name and attempt to justify it with “I’m between names”.
- P1 Select - really fun little game that I got way too many hours in for how simple the mechanics are. The idea of changing characters by moving or shooting seems like one that could really be explored elsewhere.
- Hearthstone: Battlegrounds - basically an expansion pack with a wholly new game mode, this was an amazing addition to the game. It brings in the AutoChess format to revitalize Heartstone.
Honorable Mention
I doubt anyone else was going to vote for this anyway, but I’m still a big fan of Chess.com Puzzle Battle - unfortunately not on phones yet, but man is this an exciting way to play some competitive chess. You each get 3 minutes to solved as many tactics puzzles as you can without getting 3 wrong. It is fast paced and addictive and really improves your tactical ability in the game itself.
Please fix your first number, the space is before the period instead of after. Thanks!
- Eliza - If you told me at the beginning of 2019 that I’d list a visual novel as my top item on a Game of the Year list, I would not have believed you. This took me by surprise and completely blew me away. The story, with its focus on artificial intelligence, labor, and mental health care resonated with me in a lot of different ways. Highly recommended.
- Control - Very close to being my Game of the Year. The overall vibe of the Oldest House was maybe my favorite individual thing about any game this year. Pity about the action sequences though, which were alternatively mildly boring or extremely frustrating. I just want to see more creepy stuff. Reminded me of the Lost Room, which was a fantastic Sci-Fi Channel Miniseries (now on Amazon prime).
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses - The stories grabbed me here as well. I liked how different each faction’s perspective is, and how certain story elements can almost disappear depending on which faction you pick. This is a game that rewards replaying, but also feels complete after completing a single story path.
- Slay the Spire - I played it less this year than last, but it still ate a bunch of time.
- Rebel Galaxy Outlaw - Pew pew space dog-fighting at its finest.
Honorable Mention: Age of Wonders: Planetfall, Dicey Dungeons, Disco Elysium, DOTA Auto Chess/DOTA Underlords, Outer Wilds, Total War: Three Kingdoms.
- Thea 2: The Shattering
- Streets of Rogue
- Outward
- A Short Hike
- Disco Elysium
- Fire Emblem : The Three Houses
- Bards Tale IV: Directors Cut
- Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest
- Control
I feel like Auto Chess should be on the list too but not sure if that would count given that the version I played the most of was the mod version and not Overlords.
edit: I just realized that I voted for Slay the Spire last year so removing it