DISCO ELYSIUM
If you thought gaming wasn’t art, 2019 sank your battleship hard, as the best game of the year was designed by a guy who has likely heard of Velimir Khlebnikov. And his team.
Just like Russian Futurism, Disco Elysium is hard to describe. As happened last year, the people who voted it #1 didn’t have a whole lot to say, with one exception. I’d say they loved it for being its own indescribable self. You could almost use their descriptions for the movie poster.
Then there was @MrTibbs:
Whoa, slow down! Warren Spector has never heard of Russian Futurism! But there were more comments, even from people who didn’t vote it #1. @Charlatan only voted it #2, but had this to say:
I’m pretty sure Andrei Bely could have come up with that, too? Right?
and @rhamorim voted it #3!
You might even say that Disco Elysium is eerily hilarious? A game about recovering your past in essentially a single building and its environs sounds like the ultimate “thinking man’s game”
Here is how the top ten fared:
Unlike last year, which was a real nail-biter, things shook out pretty quickly this year. Disco Elysium and Slay the Spire established the #1 and #2 spots early on, leaving Control as the most highly favored Joy Division simulator of 2019. If voting had been a college basketball game, the scoring would have gone like this:
Even with the deadline being extended by two days, there were only 81 votes this year, which was way down from last year’s 132, and was actually the lowest in the last five years, below 2016’s 84 voters. Maybe this has something to do with the closeness (or lack thereof) of the vote. I am sure data mavens will let us know! As for our yearly hardcore flight sim watch, IL-2 Sturmovik: The Battle of Bodenplatte managed to come in at #20 even though there were no IL-2 Sturmoviks, or Russian aircraft of any kind, at this battle! This seems to be Achilles heel of the hardcore flight sim genre these days, shedding any kind of historical accuracy for cheap action exposure.
You can find the final tally of votes here:
Thanks again go to @arrendek, who had harnessed technology to such a point that my job is essentially effortless (except for this post part) without laying anyone off. If we can take heart from anything in this post-autonamotic age, it’s this.
There has been discussion of a “best games of the Twenty Tens” vote, which I heartily endorse. I’m not gonna run it, but we have the power. The choice is yours!
Thanks again, everybody.