2019 was an interesting year for video games releases. While not devoid of games by any means (quite the opposite), it was a quiet year for the first two-thirds. While gamers found themselves wanting more during the first portion of the year, they found themselves overwhelmed by the wealth of releases from September onward.

Welcome to September, the month of entirely too many video game releases. Also the month of TGS and (most likely) a Nintendo Direct.

— Zalman (@enterzalman) September 1, 2019

But none of that matters in this post.

By now, particularly if you spend much time on Twitter, you’ve probably already seen a bunch of folks and publications highlighting their choices for Game of the Year (or even games of the decade). I don’t see much value in sharing my own “strictly released in 2019” picks, especially since I don’t play every release. Instead, I’ll use this post to highlight the games that I enjoyed most this year, regardless of when they released.

So here are the games I enjoyed the most in the year 2019:

Honourable Mentions

Okay wait before I start, let me highlight two games that I played this year that don’t quite make the list. I’ll be brief.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is one of my favourite games this year. After having higher hopes for the first Yooka-Laylee game, Kickstarter issues and pressure to be “Banjo-Kazooie but 2017” hindered that game I feel and I never really got into it. This game doesn’t strive to be a 3D platformer obviously, but it really nails being a 2D platformer. And being as my interest in those lately begins and ends at Donkey Kong Country (Tropical Freeze is one of my favourite games of this decade), it is HIGH praise to say that this scratches that particular itch.

So why is it only an honourable mention? Simple - I didn’t finish it yet.

Nier: Automata

Nier: Automata gets a mention here because it had gameplay that I didn’t hate but certainly didn’t love, but in the end it won me over to loving the game itself for the story and the way that story was delivered.

Folks who know me know that games by PlatinumGames typically don’t gel with me, for one reason or another, but I was told this would be an exception. It’s certainly the most I’ve enjoyed gameplay from a PG game, but it didn’t have me loving playing the game on its own. The story in this game is something else, and I won’t spoil it except to say that it’s absolutely worth it to play through all of the endings (C, D, and E).

Favourite Games of 2019

Alright let’s dive in:

Sea of Thieves

Folks who follow me know that I’m a big fan of Rare Ltd. This shows most in the way of the Donkey Kong and Banjo-Kazooie series, but I’ve always been really invested in their work and love to follow what they do. When they announced a new game with a pirate theme at E3 2015, I was highly intrigued. Rare has a history with pirate themes also, so it was kind of funny to see that finally come to fruition in a full game.

Fast-forward to release, in March of 2018. The game received a pretty mixed reception at launch, due to lacking content, and didn’t exactly get a huge audience because of that. The team took all of the feedback to heart, however, and adjusted their road map. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the game for its basics at launch. Sailing the pirate ship was, alone, enough to convince me that there was something special here. But the game was admittedly light on content. With lack of a regular crew interested in playing, I didn’t keep up much with it myself.

Jump forward again, this time to approximately February 2019. This is when I got a crew of folks interested in playing (via a “friends play free” promotion) and that’s when I finally got into the game proper.

When I first played the game close to launch, I was taken by how it really did just feel like “Be a Pirate - The Game”, a game where you and a few friends hopped on a boat and did pirate things. With a ton of added content in the year that followed, however, Sea of Thieves was really starting to feel fleshed out.

Then the Anniversary Update hit. Story voyages were added, cooking mechanics were added, fishing mechanics were added, and much, much more. This took what made the existing game great and added a ton of content and mechanics that really refreshed the gameplay loop for the better. It’s hard to imagine playing the game without the content in this update, honestly.

So it was around that time that I really got into Sea of Thieves with my friends. We played regularly, and doing so brought back to mind just what makes Sea of Thieves so great to me - what keeps us coming back to sail these seas and do these voyages, beyond the rewards (which are cosmetic and, for some, not enough motivation on their own). The real star of Sea of Thieves, for me, is the stories we have to tell as we walk away from each session.

You could end up doing the same kind of voyages repeatedly in order to earn some gold and work towards the Pirate Legend title, but each of those voyages can go totally differently depending on the things that occur. You might end up running into another player (which is always a wildcard) or a Kraken you have to fight off to avoid losing your hard-earned loot. You might enter a storm and end up spending a good twenty minutes bailing rainwater and patching leaks, all while your friend holds the wheel steady so you stand a chance of escaping the chaos. You might lose to a skeleton ship because your crew mate didn’t want to let that trophy fish escape again. It’s a new story every time I play, and I love the game for this.

I could rant about this game all day, so I’ll move on, but this game has absolutely been a highlight of this year for me. I’m glad they’ve done as much to grow it as they have, and I’m glad the number of active players of the game seems to have grown substantially, as this game deserves the chance.

The Sims 4

I’ve always loved The Sims, but I actually haven’t played a great deal of the series. I played a bunch of the first entry back in the day, and spent countless hours making Sims, keeping their mood up, keeping their mood up some more, and then rounded off a typical day in that game by keeping up the mood of my Sims.

So, yeah, while I’m exaggerating a bit, the first game wasn’t perfect. But I loved it anyway. It was a really solid starting point that’s definitely hard to go back to now. A lot of people would say (based on anecdotal reddit-browsing) that the best game in the series was The Sims 2.

Which I didn’t play.

I didn’t actually get back into The Sims proper until the base game was put on sale for free back in May of this year. I figured, what better time to grab it and have some fun with it? I didn’t know that I’d be getting addicted to the game, buying all of the expansions, and putting it on this list. But I guess that was probably the whole point.

Even back to the first game, one of the most exciting things about The Sims for me was new things you were allowed to do. New expansions bring a slew of updates to the game as far as mechanics, features, house items, customization options, and even new worlds to play in. The game has always been about having your Sims live their lives, do things, etc. It’s a very vague way of saying it, and that’s sort of the point - the more Sims can just do more stuff, the better the game gets.

One of the specific things I found most refreshing when starting The Sims 4 this year was how gender-neutral most of the options in the game were. I noticed a lot of things in the Create-A-Sim were gender neutral, everything from clothing and voice options to how your Sim uses the bathroom. What really caught my eye was that you can change your Sim’s gender at any time. It turns out this was introduced in a big update back in 2016 and it’s a really, really great thing to see. A more recent update added gender neutral bathrooms as well! The Sims 4 feels very inclusive in this way, and they’ve been vocal about strides they want to make to continue working in a direction that allows anyone to play and feel represented.

What’s kept me playing The Sims 4 also is carrying a story. In the original game, aging wasn’t even a thing. It has been since The Sims 2, but this is the first time I actually tried it out. It’s kind of fascinating to me to carry a particular Sim through generations, and this is a story that’s kept me invested in playing.

Expansions have kept me invested too. The recent University expansion is one of my favourites, though it’s also probably the most challenging. But the only thing I really need to say about expansions is: look at this tiny dog are you KIDDING me:

The Sims 4 is great, and the base game and expansions are on sale quite frequently, so give it a shot!

Luigi’s Mansion 3

The only thing I need to say about this game and why it’s on this list was already said in this tweet:

jackpot #LuigisMansion3 #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/r0jqOHEtdN

— rar (@rardk64) November 11, 2019

Seriously, you can vacuum up EVERYTHING

But for real, it’s one of the best looking games on the Switch, with some of the greatest animations of any Mario game. Also it’s just extremely satisfying to play (which the above tweet outlines). I don’t have much else to say on this one other than - it’s really, really great.

Pokémon Sword (and Shield)

At the beginning of the year, initial reveals of Pokémon Sword and Shield had me interested but ready to be underwhelmed. After last year’s Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee eschewed random encounters (an extremely dated mechanic I won’t rant about here), it looked like they might be bringing them back for this “mainline” entry and I wasn’t really jazzed about that. Later gameplay footage showed that this was not the case, however, and it had me extremely excited about the potential Quality of Life improvements that could come with this newest entry.

And that’s really the star of the show here for me - the QOL improvements. The story in this game isn’t much at all, and it still isn’t some vast open world game like many people want it to be. But the series took some really great genuine steps to bring the series forward. Some highlights:

• Exp. Share is on by default, so your entire party gains experience when you defeat or catch a Pokémon. Your entire party gaining experience when you win a battle is a pretty standard JRPG feature these days, and I’m not a fan of grinding at all, so this was a pretty welcome feature for me.

• You can fly from the Town Map. Just fly, without having a Pokémon know it or anything. This isn’t super new at this point, since Sun and Moon introduced it, but it’s pretty great to just be able to do it from the Town Map without initiating it from anywhere first.

• You can relearn moves anytime from a Pokémon Center, without paying. Also renaming your Pokémon, same deal.

• You can access the Pokémon boxes from anywhere. This was in Let’s Go as well, but it’s super cool so I’m mentioning it anyway.

The other great thing they did was the Gym battle system. It’s still your typical gym battles in the battling sense, but making the Gym an event-type setup, where gym battles are EVENTS, with hyped-up stadium battles, was a great change. Gym battles feel like they mean something now. And the Elite Four being replaced by an actual tournament structure just makes a ton of sense. I appreciated what they tried to do in Sun and Moon by eliminating traditional Gyms, but it felt confusing and all over the place as a result. This feels like a much better restructuring.

I love a lot of the new Pokémon designs too. Wooloo gets a lot of deserved love, of course, but I was a big fan of Corviknight myself.

The Wild Area was cool and the raid battles were fun, but I didn’t find myself spending a lot of time there. This time around I wasn’t even super big on catching a ton of Pokémon so it didn’t grab me much. I think I’d be more into the idea if the whole world was treated as a Wild Area type of thing, instead of it being one central place. But there’s that “big open world Pokémon game” idea again. I think they’ll expand on the Wild Area concept for the next mainline game. For now, I’m happy with what we got here. I enjoyed it a LOT more than Sun and Moon, and I hope they stick to their guns on a lot of the changes they made here.

Red Dead Redemption 2

I want to say so much about this game, but without spoiling anything. Let’s see how long I ramble on about it. I first started Red Dead Redemption 2 at launch, but I was way too busy to dive into the game at that point. I made it to chapter 2, set it aside, and didn’t get back to it again until this summer. But wow, am I glad I did, because it’s easily my Game of the Year.

I’d been feeling a bit of fatigue with how Rockstar set up their mission structure. Coming off of Grand Theft Auto V, which had a bunch of missions that felt like padding, I wasn’t sure how I felt about trying to play a game that boasted being as long as RDR2 is. What I was surprised by was that I was so into this game that, not only did not feel long, but I didn’t want it to end.

I was enamored with the world the game gives you. The events that can happen just as you’re riding through the countryside felt real and not super video game-y in the way that they occurred. I was taken by how natural every conversation felt (whether I was involved in it or not). The controls, while a bit unusual at first, felt really comfortable once I got used to them. The story, which I won’t spoil, is enthralling from beginning to end. No missions felt unnecessary, even optional missions blended well into the story.

I cannot neglect mentioning the way this game looks. I played on Xbox One X, so I can’t speak to how it looks on PC, but it looked gorgeous everywhere. The above screenshot was taken shortly after entering Saint Denis as night fell and I was treated to this foggy, eerie, city-after-hours vibe. It was honestly breathtaking, and this is far from the only moment in the game where I just stopped to take a look.

Can I just say I like when a game lets you lose your hat? Mario 64 did it and Red Dead Redemption 2 did it. List games that let you lose your hat in the comments, like, and subscribe, etc.

I can’t neglect mentioning the soundtrack also. A good selection of it is on Spotify, but the soundtrack really hits home in context. Some of the emotional moments in the story are accentuated by some really great song choices, and it just adds that much to the story’s impact. I’ll link the selection of songs that’s on Spotify here, but it really is best experienced as part of the game.

I don’t want to go into much more detail on this game. Just know that it has me excited for Rockstar’s next game again, which is something I hadn’t really been feeling before this. Honestly, the last time I felt this strongly about a game was probably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Onward to 2020!

Those are the games I loved most this year. I’m a little worried that I missed one, but these are the ones remaining at the forefront of my mind as the year draws to a close. Next year, I’m most looking forward to Animal Crossing: New Horizons! I’m also really interested to see how the next generation of Xbox and PlayStation consoles launch - what games they’ll launch with and, more importantly, what the console UI looks and feels like.

These are some extra screenshots I didn’t squeeze into the article