Rob’s Favorite Games of 2019
Credit to Author: Rob Zacny| Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2019 15:10:45 +0000
Upfront, I’ll confess to a major bias in this personal game of the year list. I gravitated strongly to games that gave me satisfying arcs in a smaller time frame. In past years I’ve been more mesmerized by enormous worlds and sprawling stories, but this year I found it harder to get into and stay interested in long-form games.
I don’t think that’s evidence of a real shift in personal taste or a comment on the types of games that came out this year, but a product of how odd this year was. Did you know we recorded eight podcasts about Jane Austen TV and film adaptations earlier this year? Remember that time I fell in love with and then incredibly out-of-love with Evangelion?
Much of this year was marked by a combination of “get while the getting is good” indulgence in passion projects and frantic preparation for major changes and, frankly, losses. Knowing that Waypoint would cease operation as an independent vertical was tough. Going through the practical changes of saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, and having to learn what this job meant as part of the broader Vice, made it much, much harder to lose myself in games. At times I felt like the truth was starker: that I’d lost games, both as an escape and as an interest. I’d sit down at my computer or TV and before I even reached the main menu, I was dwelling on all “what ifs” and “what nows” that attend major work and life changes.
I think it wasn’t until this fall that it began to feel like life was in a new chapter, rather than mired in the lengthy conclusion to an old one. A lot of games I loved this year are games that I played fairly late, and while some of that is probably down to recency bias, I think it has more to do with the fact that sometime in November, I wasn’t so quick to start catastrophizing in every moment of idleness. I was able to stay in the moment, to invest thought in the problems of play rather than work. And just like that, I started to love the work again.
I like to think Waypoint is still around, a spectre haunting the discourse. But it’s not for me to say.
10. Ghost Recon Breakpoint
When Breakpoint is good, it is great. Moments like the assault on a mansion in the middle of snow-covered mountains, or a painstaking raid on some massive research campus, or an isolated and well-defended communications tower, were among my favorites of this year. I wish it wasn’t such a product of the Ubisoft Open World Monoculture, and I wish it had pushed to add more friction from things like fatigue and and traversal, but it still gave me some incredibly tense, unforgettable gunfights.
9. Mutant Year Zero
This came out at the tail end of last year but I still adore it. So many games have tried to mimic XCOM, but Mutant Year Zero only wants to borrow parts of XCOM to make for a beautiful and sadly evocative narrative tactics game. It remains one of my favorites games I’ve played in the last year.
8. Unity of Command 2
Even after my review, I’m still lost to this game and enjoying its devilishly constructed scenarios and the trade-offs it puts before me. This is probably the best wargame to come out this year, and is certainly the only one I’d recommend to people who aren’t deep into the genre.
7. Telling Lies
This forensic investigation of multiple lives converging around a central disaster is brilliant. It's also one of the few pieces of entertainment that looks hard at what police infiltration of activist spaces can, and has, actually entailed and what a particularly vile form of violence it is. More than just a great narrative experiment, this is probably one of the best pieces of crime fiction that games have produced.
6. F1 2019
Last year's edition narrowly missed my top 10, but the incredible improvements to the AI make this an undeniable favorite for mine for this year.
5. Death Stranding
Believe me, I know what a curious and flawed game this is. But I loved its sense of purpose, its singular focus on the feeling of laboring, traversing difficult terrain encumbered by both the weight of cargo and of responsibility.
4. Fire Emblem: Three Houses
If only the tactics game were better here. I think this game has such essential things to say about its characters and the way the personal and political intersect. But my God does the act of playing through its battles go from slightly tedious to nearly excruciating. This would probably have been by favorite game this year if it hadn't started actively repelling me. Still, it's a mark of how good its narrative is, how great its characters are, that it still finishes this high.
3. Total War Three Kingdoms
This might be the best game in this series. It's certainly the most imaginative I've seen from this series almost since its inception. But I think what I appreciate the most about it is that it doesn't let me stick to tried-and-true methods. Its armies are intentionally unbalanced, and much of playing this game is about learning the right tactics to employ that maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, because it is the rare strategy game that makes it impossible to have everything you want.
2. Control
What a delightful game. It came along at the exact right moment, and had just the right mix of charm and eeriness. It's emblematic of everything I've loved about Remedy over the years, but is a more coherent and cohesive experience than just about anything they've made since Max Payne 2.
1. Eliza
Inevitably this remains my favorite. How could it not be? It's a game entirely about labor, capital, mental health, and responsibility. It's also a game that presses hard on all these concepts, and demolishes all the easy escapes from tough questions that it could have given itself.
This article originally appeared on VICE US.