Top 10 Favorite Video Games of 2019
It’s been a notably weird year for video games. The PR messes got messier, video game fandom has turned on once beloved companies, and with new consoles on the horizon, something about this year felt just… off. I doubt I’m the only person to feel this way. Maybe that says more about 2019 in general beyond just video games.
Then again, some of that feeling is very much on me. A lot of the most critically beloved games of the year are in genres or styles that never appealed me (or they were on platforms I don’t have) and thus I didn’t partake. I’m not a survival horror guy, so no Resident Evil 2 remake for me. I don’t seem to be able to handle difficulty without getting too far into my anger and ruining the experience for myself, so no Sekiro for me either. As I’m bound to a PS4 and a MacBook Pro, I didn’t get to play Disco Elysium. The list goes on.
Even the stuff I like didn’t fully do it for me as much in years past. Don’t get me wrong, there are games this year that I love deeply. However, there isn’t a single game on this list that doesn’t have caveats. Some of these games run like garbage. Some of them have incredibly frustrating game design choices. Some of these games partake of business practices that I find unethical. (Actually, to be fair, only one of these games is guilty of that. But it’s a game that has a rather high spot on my list.)
But you know what? Once I was done ranking and nitpicking and cramming games in at the last minute, I realized something. I love this list.
I love how much experimentation worked for me this year, be it from a narrative or game design standpoint. I love the many ways the games on this list introduced me to widely adored game styles I’ve never been able to appreciate before. If you’re prone to making certain distinctions, you could accuse this list of trending a little too far into the pretentious indie side of things. But to me, this is the most video game-y video game list I’ve ever made, and that makes me weirdly happy.
I’ve seen many accuse this year of being a weak one for games. In a certain sense, they’re right. But it was also a deeply rewarding year if you were willing to look just a little bit harder.
Heavy Spoilers Below!
Runner-Up: Yuppie Psycho
You know that song “Sweet but Psycho” by Ava Max? That middling pop song that goes, “Oh, she’s sweet but a psycho/A little bit psycho…” and so on? Every time I sat down to play Yuppie Psycho, in my head (and sometimes out loud) I sang, “It’s time to play Yuppie Psycho” to the tune of “Sweet but Pyscho.” Because it pretty much matches if you bend it a little. I don’t know why. Welcome to my brain.
Anyway… Yuppie Psycho. Yuppie Psycho pulled off a number of things I didn’t entirely know were possible in narrative fiction. One of which is that I really enjoy saying “yuppie psycho.” Another is that it made me rethink the entire concept of “horror comedy,”
When we say “horror comedy,” generally speaking, we’re talking about comedies that are funny at the expense of the horror genre. Something like Tucker and Dale vs Evil, which takes the deranged hillbilly trope and turns it on its head or Shaun of the Dead, which adds a layer of boredom and monotony onto the capitalist zombie metaphor or Cabin in the Woods, which is basically a giant middle finger at the last twenty or so years of mainstream horror films. Sometimes, these movies take the time to be scary. But mostly, they’re more comedy than horror, and what little horror there is to be found only exists so it can be made fun of later.
Yuppie Psycho is a horror comedy that is actually, I think, quite scary.
In the game, you play as Brian Pasternack, an unremarkable cog in a dystopian early ‘90s throwback timeline where capitalism has devolved society into a full blown caste system. Brian, very low on the societal latter, gets a mysterious letter offering him a job at Sintracorp, a megacorporation that makes… something. (I don’t believe it’s ever stated, but if it is, it doesn’t really matter.) You go to the top floor to the management office, where “KILL THE WITCH” is written in blood, you sign an absurd contract, and you spend the rest of the day going through the corporate skyscraper getting attacked by monsters, dabbling in evil magic, witnessing horrific violence, and fighting to survive.
It is, as you may have noticed, a completely absurd premise, and this absurdity abounds in every aesthetic decision and story beat that befalls you in the game. Case in point: There’s a boss battle where you fight a monstrous dot matrix office printer. It sounds silly, and if you’ve ever had to deal with a shitty office printer, then you might see why someone would have you fight one in a video game. Then you see the thing.
Nope.
I hate that thing. I hate it. I hate how it looks. I hate the sound it makes when it moves. I hate what it does if it catches you. I hate everything about it. Of course, I hate it in a good horror way. But that thing creeps me the fuck out and I hate it.
It’s decisions like this that make Yuppie Psycho feel unique. It’s a game that commits so hard to an aesthetic and executes on it so well that it blows way past being funny and becomes terrifying. The fact that it’s a 2D pixel art game makes it all the more impressive.
I just wish I enjoyed playing it. For as much as I enjoyed the aesthetic choices and the narrative elements, the boss battles were frequently obtuse, the save system is annoying, there’s much the game does a poor job of communicating, and I had a glitch where the cinematics wouldn’t work, so I had to contact the developers on Steam and they had to walk me through some instructions that turned said cinematics into still shots. I could go on.
Still, I respect the hell out Yuppie Psycho. It’s far from perfect. But when it nails what it’s going for, there’s nothing else like it.
10. Afterparty
Once you start writing about the narrative arts on the internet, whether it’s for your job or because you pay twenty bucks a month to Squarespace to have the space to do so, at some point you’re going to commit a personal pet peeve of mine. It’s an unavoidable pet peeve, one I’ve assuredly committed before, but a pet peeve nonetheless. I can’t stand it when someone criticizes a work for the exact subtext it’s trying to communicate under the assumption that said subtext wasn’t the intent.
Fight Club is a movie about toxic masculinity. It is explicitly showing the audience the story of a man struggling with a perceived sense of alienation who manipulates other men struggling with the same feeling into a fascist terror group because a woman entered what he perceives as “his” space.
Of course, the problem with this line of reasoning is that art is art, and art is subject to interpretation. Fight Club is far from perfect, and there are genuine gripes to be had with it. (Personally, I haven’t watched the movie in years and I’ve never read the book. I’m sure it hasn’t aged well in every respect.) Yet when I see people criticize Fight Club because the men are toxic and authoritarian, I can’t help but think, “Yeah, no shit.” I realize this reaction is my fault, and maybe a little bit of my old friend the Thermian argument is at play here. But I can’t help it.
I mention all this because I’ve seen some criticize Afterparty because of its sense of ironic detachment, and I understand why. Afterparty is a game about two lifelong twentysomething friends, Milo and Lola, finding themselves in hell and trying to reclaim their living form by challenging Satan to a drinking contest. Rather than do what most of us would do, flip the fuck out, we watch them drink and snark their way through the bowels of hell and the souls who dwell there.
As I said, I understand why this kind of story would throw someone off. If you grew up in the era of the hipster, some of the way these characters behave can be a little too real. Or you didn’t grow up this way, and you just find them obnoxious. However, I can’t help but find this criticism frustrating because, to me, Afterparty is a game specifically about ironic detachment.
When I was reading reviews of Afterparty when it came out, I was expecting a lot of hack “Hell is X” comments. “Hell is Afteryparty’s gameplay.” “Hell is the story.” “Hell is these characters.” That kind of thing. Thankfully I didn’t see as many of those comments as I thought I would. But now that we’re in the this headspace, what is this game’s version of hell?
Sure, on the surface, hell in Afterparty is an endless sea of neon drenched bars, each more shitty and pretentious than the last, where the alcohol and dumb conversation never stops flowing. But hell is also the detachment that alcohol provides in the first place.
Hell, Afterparty argues, is detachment. It’s detachment from your friends, your dreams, and your own feelings. It’s watching someone you respect trade their passion for booze, even if that someone is the dark lord himself. It’s loving your best friend with all your heart, but not being able to be honest with them about what you need and how they’ve hurt you.
Hell, in this universe, is a never ending river of bullshit where sincerity goes to drown, and all that’s left in the end is irony. Physical torture for eternity is probably worse than emotional pain. But what if you lived your whole life, and you never had a real connection with anyone? Or you did, and you never realized it?
9. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Breath of the Wild, as I said when I wrote about that game, was the first Zelda game I ever played. Ever since I finished it, I’ve been terrified of playing anything else in the franchise.
Of course I know of most of the games in the series by osmosis and I’ve registered many a bewildered look from a video game fan when I confirm that yes, I had an N64 growing up and no, I did not play Ocarina of Time. I know they’re great. The problem is that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to appreciate them.
I know that there are a lot of differences between Breath of the Wild and the rest of the franchise. Or at least I know that there’s enough of a difference between the two that in my head, I could’ve considered Breath of the Wild to be a one-off kind of game. But it’s not really about mechanics or the evolution of gameplay. It’s about passion. Breath of the Wild is one of my favorite games of the decade, I kind of regret not giving it the number one slot on my list in 2017, and its a game that still looms large in my head. How can any of the older games top that?
But with that in mind, I gave the new version of Link’s Awakening a shot. No, I didn’t like it as much as Breath of the Wild, and I’ve still yet to try a 3D Zelda game. But it turns out that I had nothing to worry about.
There’s much I could say about Link’s Awakening. However, it would be simpler and less time consuming to say this: If any of those older Zelda games are a tenth as fun as this, then I’m playing all of them as soon as possible.
8. Heaven’s Vault
Usually, my games lists are a random hodgepodge of conflicting tones and play styles. A beloved experimental indie darling followed by a big AAA first person shooter and then something else entirely. There were, of course, similarities to be found if you were inclined to look hard enough. Oxenfree and Titanfall 2 are both about, I don’t know, forging unlikely friendships after catastrophes or something like that. (Now that I think about it, that one actually works!)
This year, I don’t have to try so hard to find these connections. There were multiple themes that, one way or another, many of the games I enjoyed the most had in common. Specifically, I spent a lot of time in video games this year digging through the ruins of old civilizations. Something’s happening in the story’s present, and in order to find out why that said thing is happening, I need to find out what happened to the society that came before “my” own. It’s almost like the end of civilization was on everybody’s mind in 2019 for some reason. The first of these games is Heaven’s Vault.
Really, with Heaven’s Vault, there’s two things to talk about. Well, really, there’s three. But the third thing involves spoiling the ending of the game and the really really cool way it effects second and possibly third and beyond playthroughs. So we’ll stick with two, and the first aspect to talk about is the primary mechanic that will determine whether you’re on the Heaven’s Vault train or off.
As you explore the ruins of the previous civilization, you encounter their written words, a combination of hieroglyphics and traditional written language. To put it simply, you take some educated guesses on what they mean, then later, you lock in certain translations when you compare them with others or you check with others with a similar level of knowledge of the language
I spent a lot of time not taking in the surrounding beauty of where I was standing (we’ll get to that in a minute), but instead, looking at this text. At first, the logic I was using for my guesses was ridiculous. “That one kind of looks like a mountain, so sure, let’s say that means ‘earth.’” I was getting frustrated because it felt like I wasn’t making progress, not that progress in this game is necessarily measured by how much you translate. Still, I found my will to carry on decreasing.
But then something clicked. I remembered my middle school and high school days where I was taking French, and I remembered militantly going through each verb’s conjugation. Je parle (“I speak”), tu parles (“you speak”), il/elle parle (“he/she speaks), and so on. Not to ruin the puzzle, but I then thought to myself, “What if the first marking in any given word matters?”
Turns out it does, and that realization opened the mental floodgates. From then on, I fell completely in love with translating this ancient language. I understand why some may find it tedious, but all I wanted to do was stare at those screens, and that played a huge part in why I couldn’t stand a certain timed level you run into later.
The second aspect is atmosphere. Heaven’s Vault combines elements I’ve never seen combined before, and as I result, I can’t recall a game that feels quite like it. The way it takes Middle Eastern architecture and aesthetics and meshes it with traditional science fiction. How its religious lore feeds into how you get around from planet to planet. Its use of music, specifically the juxtaposition of the enormity of its story with the slight melancholy of its score. How the characters are drawn, and how their legs begin to fade the closer they get to the ground. Like their presence, in the cosmic sense, is only temporary.
I wish I enjoyed the actual playing of Heaven’s Vault more. It doesn’t always run well, there’s bountiful tedium in many of the gameplay aspects, and sometimes, navigating your ship can be a gigantic pain in the ass. But this game hooked me on a deep primal level, and though I spent a lot more time being frustrated with it than I led on, I love it and it’s one of the defining gaming experiences I had in 2019.
7. Super Mario Maker 2
Bear with me for a second here.
I’m a huge Giant Bomb fan, and my favorite end of the year ritual is staying up late and listening to the hours long Game of the Year podcasts in which the staff of the website records their internal deliberations and releases them in audio (and now visual) form. “It’s a sausage making process first and a podcast second” host Brad Shoemaker said one year.
At the end of the podcasts, they debate what their ten games are, then they debate their ranking. When it comes to the number one slot, some years, there’s a very clear winner from the get-go. But in most years, there’s a lengthy debate between two games. In 2008, it was Grand Theft Auto IV vs. Metal Gear Solid 4 and the next year it was Batman: Arkham Asylum vs. Uncharted 2. You get the idea. (Also, of those debates, I’m team Grand Theft Auto IV and team Arkham.)
In 2015, the debate once again came down to two games: Metal Gear Solid V, a game I spent dozens of hours playing and saw nearly every inch of, excluding the challenges, and Super Mario Maker, a game I spent zero hours playing because I never owned a Wii U. The debate didn’t last long before I realized that I was rooting for Mario Maker.
Granted, as I touched on a little bit in a previous article, Metal Gear Solid V wasn’t particularly hard to root against in the end. It’s a great game, but, long story short, Konami killed my desire to defend it. Still, even if Konami wasn’t being the worst (shout out to Jim Sterling), I’d probably still root for Mario Maker. I spent a lot of time watching people build and play levels, and there was something oddly moving about what that game brought out in people. It’s a game that allows everyone to express themselves using tools and objects most gamers know through a first hand love or cultural osmosis. It humanized game development in a way nothing had before, and even if I never got to play it, its mere existence made me happy.
So when they announced Mario Maker 2, I was through the roof. Finally, I’d be able to join in on the magic, and even if it’s not as special the second time around, I’ll at least get a whiff. I didn’t have the original to compare it to, but Mario Maker 2 did not disappoint.
The campaign mode is fantastic, and I even made two levels of my own! The first is called “Fakin Jax” (K2X-VQ5-HSG). The idea behind the level was to be as annoying as I could while doing as little as possible. (And it’s named after a rap song for reasons.) The second is called “Ghost Ride The Whip” (LRX-F6V-ODG, the “O” might be a zero). I wanted to make a level where you drive the car on ghosts… because “ghost ride the whip” was a thing and… yeah. Both my levels are really dumb, but I had a great time making them! Maybe I’ll finish my unreleased masterpiece “Tear Da Club Up” some day. It’s a level where you tear da club up.
But the draw for me is the user made levels. The only thing I really needed from this game was to deliver a fraction of the creative madness I saw in the original game. In that sense, with Mario Maker 2, my cup runneth over.
6. Life is Strange 2
I’m a big fan of the first Life is Strange. Is it a little too derivative of Telltale (RIP… sort of?) games like The Walking Dead and the underrated Batman games they put out before the studio closed? Sure, if you care. But there was enough to set it apart, it told its story well, and even if, emotionally speaking, it didn’t hit as hard as something like the first season of Walking Dead, it still hit. I had no doubt that Dontnod could repeat their success. But I was nervous about the sequel, and it was because of the dialogue.
The original Life is Strange waded into some more mature waters. Suicide, various forms of abuse, and PTSD to name a few. But at its heart, it’s an affective teen love story (whether that love is platonic or something more is up to you) rooted in teen soaps and coming of age stories. Less affective, however, was Dontnod’s attempts at teen speak. At best, it was unintentionally hilarious and at worst, it was beyond cringy. I eventually learned to love the first game’s dialogue. After all, it’s a story about awkward teens, so it makes a certain amount of sense that they speak awkwardly. I learned to embrace the absurdity.
Then the first episode of Life is Strange 2 was released back in September of 2018 (the release calendar for Life is Strange 2 is another problem), and it became clear that this was going to be a story about race and police violence in America. If this game was going to tackle these subjects with teen dialogue of the first game, then we’d have ourselves a problem.
Luckily, with the exception of a heavy handed line or two, Life is Strange 2 approaches these topics with a bit more grace, as well as such topics as the many failures of the American criminal justice system, labor exploitation, religious oppression, and many more.
Despite the young age of our two protagonists, sixteen year old Sean and nine year old Daniel, Life is Strange 2 takes place in the world of adults. Gone is the embarrassing teen speak. Gone are the cliquey high school politics. Gone is the angst and the awkwardness. That may be an abrupt transition for fans of the first game, but Sean and Daniel are thrust into the adult world just as abruptly as we are when their father is shot and killed by a police officer and nine year old Daniel discovers his telekinesis in the aftermath of tragedy. The cop doesn’t live.
So Sean and Daniel take to the road, heading south to Mexico to the town where their father grew up. Along the way, Sean and Daniel encounter some of the worst that America has to offer. Racism. Exploitation. Violence. At every corner, it’s tempting to let Daniel use his increasingly strong powers. But the game’s truest source of tension is setting a good example for your little brother. There are times when you’ll want nothing more than to punish those who get in your way. But it’ll come at the expense of your brother’s humanity.
For those of you who’ve played the first season of The Walking Dead, the dynamic should seem a little familiar. Granted, Clementine doesn’t have superpowers and Lee isn’t related to Clementine by blood. But they’re both games where you travel the country, and they both make you feel responsible for shaping the personality of a child.
The difference, besides the zombies and the superpowers, is that society in Life is Strange 2 is still intact. Nobody needs anything from you, thus there’s less reasons to show you kindness. Despite this, Sean and Daniel encounter as much warmth as they do adversity. You meet people who are kind. You have the opportunity to show kindness to others. Life is Strange 2 feels smaller in scope than its predecessor. But in the end, to me, it felt much more humane.
5. Hypnospace Outlaw
Hypnospace Outlaw is the second game on this list about digging through the ruins of old civilizations.
Okay, I’m stretching a bit here. Unlike Heaven’s Vault and a game that we’ll be talking about soon enough, the internet is still very much alive and well, and unlike the other two games, the world we’re exploring was definitely made by humans. But I was still progressing by exploring the past (literally, in the later sections of the game), and at the speed everything moves on the internet, even things that came out two years ago feel like they were made by another species.
It’s a stretch. But you may understand why it doesn’t feel like one.
Now, I was born at very beginning of the nineties. I’m of a weird age where I can vaguely recall what people did for fun before the internet was as ubiquitous as it is, and some of my earliest memories are of the earlier internet. My dad showed my brother and I little cartoon made with Kevin Bloody Wilson’s “Ho Ho Fucking Ho” that I’ve been unable to find (some things are better left dead) and our nanny used to entertain me by showing me pictures of cartoons on AOL.
Later I went to a half sports half technology day camp where I made websites. And by “websites,” I mean shitty HTML sites that we made in Dreamweaver and then uploaded to GeoCities. One time I made a site about Battlebots. I was very cool.
The point is that I had just enough experience with the early internet to understand the online era Hypnospace Outlaw lovingly parodies, and the moment I heard my first terrible MIDI song and saw my first shitty GIF, I was hooked and surprisingly nostalgic.
If I had one knock against this game, in which you play as content moderator on a fake early ‘90s GeoCities, it’s that some of the later puzzles can get incredibly unfair. It’s not the only game on this list with that particular problem. But the ease of the puzzles depend entirely on information you may or may not have gleaned from your various digital explorations, and when you haven’t encountered something on a specific page, the puzzles can be a giant pain in the ass.
Luckily, guides exist, because the puzzles aren’t what make Hypnospace Outlaw special. What does, among many things, is the effort.
Let us consider coolpunk, a fictional genre of music popular in this fake internet. Generally speaking, coolpunk relies on a heavy usage of fake sleigh bells, synths, commercial jingle samples, and other “cold” sounds. It’s vaporwave, but slightly more specific. Now consider that the writers of this game wrote fake online exchanges debating what is and is not coolpunk, fake reviews calling coolpunk shit, and webpages written by former coolpunk fans calling the movement dead and declaring that “fungus,” a new genre that involves heavy sampling of cave drippings, is the new thing. It’s never clear how much of this is meant to be ironic. It doesn’t get more internet than that.
Also, they made a bunch of coolpunk songs, and they are, of course, hilarious garbage.
Every corner of Hypnospace Outlaw showers you with this level of detail. It got to the point where there were times when I genuinely forgot that I wasn’t on the actual internet in the actual ‘90s. Just listen to this fake nu-metal song they made for this game.
Despite some intentional anachronisms and science fiction (you visit this internet while you sleep), the internet of Hypnospace Outlaw might be the most convincing fictional space I’ve ever explored in a video game. The little details. They matter. Granny Cream’s Hot Butter Ice Cream.
4. Sayonara Wild Hearts
Fundamentally, you’re doing one gaming thing in Sayonara Wilds Hearts: Moving forward very very fast, dodging obstacles, and collecting hearts.
There are, of course, other things you occasionally do as well. Quick time events, bullet hell dodging, matching rhythms, resisting the urge to pause the game and throw as much money at the internet as possible to buy the soundtrack. But Sayonara always returns to that core: Move forward. Overcome obstacles. Collect hearts.
Though there’s certainly narrative subtext to mine here, I need to be perfectly honest with you: I don’t really have a good grasp on what the story of Sayonara fundamentally is, and to be honest, I never felt a particularly strong urge to look it up. I did get the basic gist of it. You’re a young woman who had her heart broken and you’re restoring some sort of stability back to the universe. But the metaphor wasn’t what moved me so, and even if the game didn’t present you with a narrator to frame everything, you’re moving forward and you’re collecting hearts. It’s not hard to pick up what it’s putting down.
For me, Sayonara is a blissfully sensory experience. Particularly on the ears.
If you go to Sayonara’s official webpage, you’ll see a big block text that describes it as a “pop album video game.” I don’t remember how, but I ran into that description before I actually played the game, and it made my eyes rolls. Sometimes, quirky indie marketing gets on my nerves
But the more I played it, the more it began to remind me of what I look for in an album. I don’t want my music to do the same thing over and over again. I want variance in style. I want the ideas to evolve as it goes along. But I also don’t want chaos. I want the sense that there’s a singular concept moving everything forward. Sayonara provides that experience in video game form, and not only does it apply to the gameplay, but every other aspect as well, particularly in the aesthetics department.
So the more I thought about it, the more “pop album video game” is actually kind of perfect.
There is, of course, another way it reminds me of a pop album as well. I have a philosophy about what I want in an album as a whole. But you know what I really want? Good music.
If you want to call this game an album, it’s easily my favorite synth pop album of the year, as well as my favorite game soundtrack of the year in general. And like any good synth pop album, it’s non-stop emotional highs, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it’s got style to spare.
Also, best surprise narrator of the year.
3. Outer Wilds
Our third digging through ancient civilizations game! And the second of three time looping games! (The Heaven’s Vault ending is a hell of a thing.)
If you’re the kind of person who pays attention to end of the year lists and all that good stuff, you’ve been reading a lot about Outer Wilds. Even in the reviews upon initial release, you’ve also probably read a lot about how it’s best to go into it knowing as little as possible.
This is, indeed, the case. So I’ll stick to two brief points:
1. Due to some weird scheduling on my end, I had to play Outer Wilds on a bit of a truncated schedule. Thus I relied more on a guide than I would’ve liked. But even in these not ideal circumstances, I still felt this game deeply.
2. Outer Wilds can be incredibly frustrating in the moment. It doesn’t make the best first impression, parts of the controls are intentionally clunky, some of its puzzles (Are they technically puzzles?) are outright unfair, and in many ways, it demands a lot of you. But I swear it’s worth it. Just stick with it.
2. Elsinore
Elsinore is the most underrated game of the year.
Actually, in order for something to be considered “underrated,” there needs to be a wider consensus of it, and not enough people seem to know about Elsinore in order for that to really happen. You may have gathered this from me saying it’s my second favorite game of the year, but I think that’s a damn shame.
So let me rephrase: Elsinore is the game I’ve been the most evangelical about in 2019. It’s the game that I want to shove down everyone’s throat, and probably will continue to do so in the years to come. I even went through the effort of writing a lengthy user review of it on Giant Bomb. Here is that review printed in its entirety, including the pictures I used. Yeah, I’m being lazy. But it says a lot of what I want to say, and I need to save energy so I can be even more obnoxiously enthusiastic about it next year.
“Have you ever read Hamlet, an immensely important text in the canon of western literature, a work of art bearing so much cultural significance that we quote it all the time without even realizing it because of how entrenched it is in our lexicon, and thought to yourself, “This needs more Groundhog Day.” I know I have! And now that beautiful fantasy has been made real with Elsinore, a literally Shakespearean time loop story and, so far, one of my favorite games of the year.
Elsinore is Hamlet. You play as Ophelia, daughter of the chief counsellor to the king, fated in the play to drown in a brook as a result of a possible suicide over the death of her father. The game begins with a short prologue. You learn about the journal that keeps track of your objectives and what you know about each character. You learn the point-and-click mechanics, as well as how to use the map and how to initiate conversations. You have a horrifying nightmare where you witness your own death as well as the brutal murders of your family and the royals. You know, the usual stuff.
You wake up and play out what is, essentially, Acts II, III, and IV of the play. (Elsinore takes a lot of liberties with the source material, mostly for understandable video game related reasons.) Talks of war with Norway and King Claudius has a strange reaction to the performance commissioned by Hamlet and your father's murder and so on and so forth. All this is familiar if you’ve read or seen the play. However, not long after this, you yourself are murdered by a mysterious figure in disguise. Then you wake up in bed again.
In order to unmask your killer, stop the time loop, and find out generally what the hell is going on, you must manipulate the events of the play based on what you learn by going through the loops, following and listening to the various characters that occupy the castle grounds, and feeding the right information to the right people at the right time in order to achieve the right effect.
And now we’ve reached the part where this game becomes difficult to talk about without spoilers. Elsinore, at its core, is a puzzle game. The solutions to the puzzles just so happen to involve changing the story and its details in a Hitman style clockwork environment. Despite how much I would like to tell you about some of the events you can set in motion (and believe me, you can do some wild shit), were I to do so, it could potentially spoil the solution of a puzzle.
On top of that, though you have specified objectives, there’s no order in which you have to tackle them and some of the objectives have multiple routes to completion. As a result, you could have a completely different experience from mine depending on when and how you do things. Though I didn't discover the identity of my murderer until around halfway through my time with the game, it's entirely possible to discover the murderer's identity on your first few loops.
However, it’s not just what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. One of the amazing aspects of Elsinore is how seemingly insignificant actions can result in huge consequences. There's a character named Irma. (If I remember correctly, she’s not in the play.) Irma is the head cook, as well as a close confidant of Queen Gertrude, having essentially been in her life since she was a little girl. Irma feels that Hamlet needs to be disciplined for the disrespectful behavior he’s displayed publicly toward his mother. I did something small to help her achieve that goal. As a result of my minor interference, two important characters wound up dead, two more were sent into exile, and before the loop started again, I ended up, shall we say… very much not dead in a pond.
Events and objectives also have a way of naturally weaving into one another. Early on in the game, I focused on how to prevent my father from being murdered by Hamlet in Gertrude’s room. (Not a spoiler. This happens in the play.) That meant being there in person to potentially stop it. The problem, however, is that the door is locked when the murder takes place. I found out that there are two characters who have keys to the room, and in the course of doing a favor for one of them, I discovered how I can leave the castle grounds, something a guard prevented you from doing up this point. Something I assumed the game wasn't going to allow me to do at all.
Again, a lot depends on the order you carry out your tasks, but this leads to another aspect of the game that I love, which is the way the world keeps expanding and giving you more variables. Leaving the castle grounds isn’t the only time the board gets unexpectedly bigger, and with more variances comes more possible outcomes.
As events change, so does your relationships with each of the characters. If you know the play, you know that King Claudius is, to put it mildly, kind of a dick, and the game stays true to this spirit. However, at some point, intentionally or not, you’ll end up destroying everything he cares about and everyone he loves. You have the ability to shatter him, and you’ll probably end up doing so multiple times. Some of you may be inclined to think, “Well, screw that guy.” And you may have a point. But there’s something about the way he expresses his sorrow that made me feel incredibly guilty, and the ways you can take advantage of his sorrow made me feel equally as icky.
The more I played, the closer I felt to all these characters. (At least in the context of this game.) The closer I felt, the more my motivations changed. By the time I was able to leave the castle grounds, I had made Ophelia witness her father’s murder multiple times, I made her directly and indirectly cause said murder a few times, as well as the deaths of others, I manipulated my friends and family, and I did, to put it mildly, a lot of dirt. I did plenty of good as well, but I got the sense that everything I put Ophelia through was starting to weigh on her, and getting murdered every night probably didn’t help.
So when I left the castle grounds for the first time, I ran into… a character. (I won’t spoil who it is for the sake of any potential theater nerds reading, but let’s just say it’s not a character from Hamlet.) “Holy shit, what are you doing here!?” I exclaimed upon meeting this character. I then proceeded to spend an entire loop following this person, and, eventually, I discovered that I could do things with said character. Things of a certain carnal nature, if you catch my meaning...
...I had sexual intercourse with this person.
After my post-coital joy, two thoughts suddenly occurred to me. The first was that I realized that I arranged this particular event not just to see what would happen or because some objective told me to do so. I did this because I felt that Ophelia deserved a reprieve. Despite all the bloodshed and general messed up shit Ophelia had caused and witnessed, one of her more admirable traits in the game is that she refuses to see these people as merely pawns on a board. Every time she sees her father die, it breaks her heart all over again, and it's not like there are a whole lot of people she can talk to about it. She deserved a break, and maybe a little bliss.
The other thought was that even if the objectives did tell me to have sex with this person, I hadn’t actually looked at the objectives in such a long time that I didn’t know what I was technically “supposed” to do anymore. I was just doing stuff to see what would happen. So I opened the objectives to discover that I completed a great deal of them in the natural course of me pulling on threads and generally farting around. I was rewarded for doing what I would do anyway if I didn't hypothetically have a leash, as any good game should if they can help it.
Elsinore isn’t perfect. It’s not much of a looker in most regards, the clockwork routine of the AI can be a little naked to the point of immersion breaking, despite not needing a whole bunch of computing muscle, it doesn’t always run smoothly, and I have a narrative issue or two with the ending I chose.
However, apart from being fun and inventive with its mechanics, Elsinore is one of the richest experiences I’ve had with a video game in 2019. It’s a game about retaining your humanity in the face of ceaseless repetition. It’s a game about the ties we have to the people we control in video games, and in a broader sense, fiction in general. It’s a game that can explore any number of topics. All of it depends on what you do and how you feel about doing it.
Also, that guy in town? It’s Othello. I totally fucked Othello.
Thoughts/Things I Should’ve Mentioned (This was part of the original review too, but Squarespace won’t let you do the line thing in bullet points.)
There’s a fast-forward button and a timeline in the menu where you can keep track of where people are going to be and when.
There are, if I remember correctly, thirteen possible endings. The ending I chose deleted my save. Some might feel ticked about that, but I thought it was an effective decision, given the nature of said ending.
Great soundtrack. There’s some predicable loops one would expect to hear given its royal setting, but it also goes in some incredibly bizarre and unexpected directions if you go down certain paths.
I said it’s not the best looking game, but there are parts of it that stand out from a visual standpoint. The cutscenes, though few, look fantastic.
I also mentioned the AI. What I meant by “naked to the point of immersion breaking” are things like sometimes when a character doesn’t have anything to do, they’ll just stand still in a designated spot. However, the plus side of this is that they’re easy to find if you need them and you can pursue other leads if a character you’re following doesn’t have anything to do for a while. It also arguably feeds into the subtext, but I'll leave you to figure out why.
It's not written in Shakespearean english. You don't need the CliffsNotes.
There’s a part where you can tell Hamlet that he’s a privileged dickhead and make him feel bad about it. It’s real good.”
1. Apex Legends
I must confess something that might sound a little crazy in this online era of gaming of ours. But here goes nothing: I’ve never voice chatted with a stranger in an online game before.
I’m generally fearful of communicating with strangers on the internet in general, let alone in video games, and for that reason, I play most multiplayer games with everyone muted. It’s not that I’m going to get super pissed off or offended if someone calls me a “cuck” or any one of the numerous slurs produced by the english language over the last few hundred years. It’s that if I have the option of being called a “cuck” and not being called a “cuck,” I choose the latter.
It’s important to know this because it’s a huge part of the reason Apex Legends is my game of the year.
I spent the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 in a PSVR headset, and Apex Legends was the game that returned back to the wonderful world of playing games on a 2D screen. I loaded it up. I played the tutorial. I smiled at how much of the feel of my beloved Titanfall 2 translated into this game. Then I booted up my very first round.
I was first in the rotation. I briefly went over all the available characters at the time, then based purely on aesthetics and conception, I picked Bloodhound. Coded non-binary mystical hunter person in a AAA video game? Count me in. The other two picked their characters, and once that was done, we were flying over the map. Right before we jumped, a woman’s voice kicked in. It was one of the other players on my team.
“Hi, Uncle Jam!” the voice said. (My PS online name is UncleJamREDACTED NUMBER.)
“Hello.” I sarcastically said back, thinking she couldn’t hear me.
Then I saw the little microphone next to my name go up. “Oh shit,” I thought, “they can hear me. How can they hear me?” It didn’t take long for me to realize it was because of the built-in microphone in the Playstation Camera I had to get for my VR headset. The moment I realized what was happening, all those reasons why I’ve never done voice chat with strangers before came flooding back into my mind, and a mild fear took hold of me.
Much to my surprise, I ended up having a really lovely time chatting with this woman and the guy she was partied up with.
I told them that this was not only my very first time playing this game, but my first time ever playing a battle royale game in general. (Forgot to mention: I’d never played a battle royale before.) They were both very accommodating, and walked me through the basics. Throughout our time together, I kept trying to wall-run, which amused both of them very much as I explained that I was a semi-dedicated Titanfall 2 player who had a lot of unlearning to do. Later in the match, I got a kill! They were both impressed, and they were both very entertained by my foul mouthed mini-rant about how many times you have to shoot someone in this game before they’re properly dead.
We kept playing, we talked, and we laughed. Then we all got killed. I didn’t know the functionality of how to friend them yet, so they disappeared forever into the internet void. But that encounter set a tone. Instead of turning off the mic like I had planned to do, I left it on.
As I kept playing, I had more and more encounters, and to this day, I’m still surprised that pretty much all my interactions have been positive. Granted, I’m playing on the PS4, and I’m sure the PC crowd probably isn’t as, well… humane. But all in all, I had a fantastic time.
In fact, I’ve only had one negative experience. One night, I picked my beloved Bloodhound. (More of a Pathfinder guy these days, but that’s neither here nor there.) Once I picked them, the most poindexter-y poindexter voice chimed in and said that he had several hundred kills with Bloodhound. It was too late for me to do anything about it, so I apologized and said I’d find him something good. He got jump leader and jumped us out of bounds, killing us all.
“See ya!” he said in a smug sarcastic voice.
I responded by laughing and calling him a “petty little dipshit” or something to that end. He sighed deeply and his line went dead. Even my negative interactions weren’t that bad.
But as I said, it’s been mostly positive. I had deep conversations about hip hop’s role in framing the narrative about gentrification. I played with a guy who played who insisted on playing in character, panting as he ran and grunting as he vaulted and slid, which I thought was hilarious. (The fact that he was doing it earnestly made it even funnier.) I played with a guy who sang the song “School of Rock” from the titular movie while a friend of his played the guitar part in the background. I’ve had countless incredible interactions, some just pleasant, some hysterical.
In a year or two, I’m probably going to look back on this list and regret not giving Elsinore or Outer Wilds the number one spot. Of course, Apex Legends is a beautifully playing game in a countless number of ways. However, Elsinore doesn’t dabble in predatory monetization practices, nor do you potentially have to deal with hackers if you’re playing it on the PC, and Apex Legends is a refinement on a style of game that’s very much in the zeitgeist thanks to Fortnite and PUBG. I had more innovative and emotional experiences this year.
However, Apex Legends made me better at talking with people on the internet. That’s got to be worth something, right?
Honorable Mentions
Ape Out
Baba is You
Control
Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard
Luigi’s Mansion 3
Neo Cab
The Outer Worlds
A Short Hike
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Untitled Goose Games
Void Bastards
We Met in May
Will Play Someday
Death Stranding
Disco Elysium
Manifold Garden
Tetris 99
What the Golf?
