Alex Navarro is an editor at Giant Bomb, a drummer for NYHC outfit None Above All, and the guy who accidentally made that one Nicolas Cage cameo clip go viral earlier this year. He's on Twitter @alex_navarro.
2019 was a weird year. Some of that strangeness was personal in nature. I made some moves this year that changed up the flow of my life a bit, a flow that hadn't really been disturbed in a long while. I started drumming more regularly, even going to the trouble of joining a band and playing shows. I started reaching out to a few folks I hadn't talked to in a while, maybe partially out of guilt for my lack of communicativeness, and also out of a desire to try to be more outgoing than I usually am. I tried to be a little less terminally Online, to varying degrees of success.
I also did not play a great many video games this year. Or, more accurately, I tried a lot of video games, but few of them stuck. This is not me launching into a diatribe about how video games had a weak year, or whatever. I think we all know that's kinda bullshit. Yes, this is a reloading year for the industry as we await new hardware. The thing is, though, a reloading year in the modern era is still chock fucking full of good-ass games. There are too many games being made at any given moment for a "weak" year to feel genuinely weak anymore.
Instead, I realized about halfway through the year that my head was just not in this stuff. I tried many things people were excited about, but didn't latch onto them. This is somewhat of a roundabout way of saying that there are a number of games that probably belong on this list, but ultimately fell off because I just wasn't in the headspace to enjoy them. Devil May Cry 5 is exactly the kind of dumb fun action romp I would have enjoyed any other year, but got little out of in 2019. I can easily imagine a time in which Disco Elysium is a game I fall in love with, but the tone of it was entirely wrong for where I was at this year. I look at stuff like Slay the Spire and Observation and Pathologic 2 and know that somewhere down the road, I will play them, like them, and chastise myself for not digging into them sooner. I just wasn't there for them, or many other games like them, this year.
I don't have a tidy explanation for why my head was where it was except to say that depression is a hell of a thing, and it sometimes manifests in places where you would normally go to cope. Most of 2019 was me trudging through the muck of my own mind, looking for ways to push myself forward. I ended up finding those ways mostly outside of games, which is not a bad thing, but doesn't really lend itself toward pulling together a complete-feeling list of year-end gaming favorites.
Anyway, the point is this: I really liked all these games. I might have liked other games more had I felt different this year, but I didn't, and so these are the ones I went with. These are great games in their own right. Don't hold my lack of interest against them.
11. Untitled Goose Game / Wattam
These two games occupy a similar space in my brain. Both are cheerful, whimsical little games that invite the player to explore their worlds to see what kind of silliness falls out of them. Both offer objectives that are ostensibly the point of the game, but also seem just as happy with you making your own brand of chaos in the margins. Both are very cute.
Where they differ is mostly in tone and intent. Wattam is a game about friendship and play and a childlike introduction to the things of the world. UGG is a game about a monstrous goose that inflicts suffering on humanity for reasons left to the player's interpretation. Where Wattam is about reconnecting people in a once-empty world--a strand game, if you will--UGG is about making people miserable, and having a good honk about it.
Both these games put a big, dumb smile on my face as I played them. Wattam's earnest love of interaction and play, and UGG's sociopathic menace of gentle villagers, both speak to me as a person. I am, at once, a friendly exploding mayor who loves to hold hands and summon trees who eat things and make meat fruit in order to return toilets to the world, and a vicious, honking, knife wielding, sandwich stealing creature of pure malignant instinct here to torment your every waking moment. These games are my dueling energies personified.
The next time you see me smile, wonder to yourself if you're seeing the mayor or the goose; the angel or the demon.
10. Void Bastards
Void Bastards combines two things I love: rummaging through abandoned spaces, and getting yelled at by Scottish people. That these two undeniably enjoyable experiences have been placed in a pleasingly weird shooter is all the better.
You spend your time in Void Bastards bouncing around a bad nebula where everyone is dead or mutated. You, however, are only slightly mutated and constantly on the verge of death, so it's up to you to rescue garbage from the decaying vessels littering the nebula for a corporate space computer that cheerfully hates you. The "you" in this case is an endless supply of space prisoners, who each come with a unique trait. Sometimes they are beneficial, sometimes they're a hindrance, sometimes you're just very tall.