Events in 2019 reduced the amount of time that I have available to play games, and I’m certain that this list would look a little different if I’d gotten around to playing some of the games that topped other charts (e.g. Control, Disco Elysium and Jedi: Fallen Order).  But nonetheless, I played some pretty good games in 2019, and here are my top 5:

  1. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PC)
  2. The Outer Worlds (PC)
  3. AI: The Somnium Files (Switch)
  4. FFXIV: Shadowbringers (PS4)
  5. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the latest and greatest from From Software, the developers who brought us Dark Souls.  There are bonfires, nobody tells you what’s going on and you die a lot — but there are enough twists on the Souls formula to make it feel like something new.  Instead of shaping a character to your play style, you must learn to master Sekiro’s sword fighting techniques; instead of figuring out how to cheese a boss or summon help, you must learn to read its moves and counter appropriately.  If you haven’t played it yet, you should definitely pick it up.

The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is basically “Fallout: In Space”.  Thankfully, it drops a lot of what made Fallout 4 such a slog — there are no bases to build, no randomly generated quest lines that repeat ad nauseum, etc.  It gets bonus points for its companions, and its companion quests in particular. The only romance quest line in the game sees you set up your companion with somebody that isn’t your player character, which is a real breath of fresh air.

AI: The Somnium Files

AI: The Somnium Files won’t be everybody’s cup of tea.  It’s a very Japanese visual novel from the minds that brought us 999 and the Zero Escape series, and the plot is utterly ridiculous.  You play a detective with an artificial intelligence living in his eyeball, who must dive into the subconscious of suspects to uncover clues and solve the murder of his best friend’s ex-wife.  It also features the song below prominently — once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.  You have been warned.

…I still find myself singing it almost 6 months after finishing the game.

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

FFXIV released another expansion this year called Shadowbringers, which came out a week or so before my daughter was born.  This was just enough time for me to fit in most of the story line and a few of the endgame bosses.  As with the previous expansions before it, they’ve done a great job of balancing MMORPG gameplay with single-player story content.  They’ve also introduced a new system (borrowed from Guild Wars) which allows you to play dungeons with NPCs!  Now is probably the best time to get into the game if you’re at all interested.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Finally we come to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a strategy RPG that’s exclusive to the Nintendo Switch.  It plays like a cross between Persona and Final Fantasy Tactics: between missions, you socialize with students and teachers at a military academy, and the strength of your relationships directly impacts your strength in battle.  There are something like four routes through the game, but I’ve thus far only experienced 1.25 — the second playthrough proved much more repetitive than I’d hoped, and it’s been (temporarily?) returned to the backlog.