Last year’s stacked lineup of games for the Game Awards had us thinking: What was the best year in gaming? As part of our series on determining gaming’s best year, we’re putting together an article on each year, charting the major releases and developments of the year, and talking about both their impact and what made them great.
The Year: 2019
The biggest story in gaming heading into 2019 was the rise of the Chinese gaming market, which by 2019 had eclipsed the US in terms of revenue generated, powered primarily by a massive market – 640 million people – of mobile gamers. Part of this growth was a result of China’s adoption of DOCSIS 3 standards for their internet infrastructure, leading to the proliferation of high-performance cloud gaming services. The increase in cloud infrastructure then led to an increase in storage and computing, and gaming services quickly became one of China’s fastest-growing sectors for cloud-computing. Despite this, Chinese market growth slowed in 2019 as a result of new regulations and trade sanctions from the US.
Along with the rise of Chinese gaming came Chinese game developers, and heavy investments into mobile gaming. Tencent had already been investing in the mobile gaming space for some time but in 2019 its subsidiary would develop Call of Duty: Mobile and go on to be downloaded more than 35 million times. In 2019 Tencent held roughly half of the Chinese iOS market, followed by NetEast at 18%, though as the market would continue to grow these shares would drop.
Cross-Play Finally Becomes Common
Developers had started supporting cross-play between different consoles in 2018 but the practice would really gain steam in 2019 as the last holdout – Sony, would finally cave. The big turning point? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) fully supporting cross-platform play on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 out of the gate. Minecraft would also follow suit with an updated version of its PlayStation 4 port.
The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine
This cooperative trick-taking game from Thames & Kosmos released in 2019, letting players work together to explore space in search of an unknown planet over 50 different missions which change the game, usually by adding increasing levels of difficulty. It’s a game of incomplete communication that never feels so random that you feel like you don’t have strategic control.
Magic the Gathering Arena
Wizards of the Coast had supported digital play for nearly two decades in Magic the Gathering Online but by 2019 the game was clearly showing its age. While MtGO was a one-to-one recreation of the tabletop game, it just wasn’t much fun to look at or spectate, and that was a huge disadvantage as Hearthstone was continuing to gain steam as a competitor and showing up more and more on Twitch Streams. So in 2019 Wizards launched Arena, a version of Magic made specifically for digital play and streaming. Visually the game owes a lot to Duels of the Planeswalkers, and unlike Magic Online it opted for a free-to-play model and a much more limited card pool. Arena also offers a ton more visual flair and is built to be viewed on streams.
Unmatched
2019 was a banner year for skirmish games. Warcry, Undaunted: Normandy, Funkoverse, and even Aeronautica Imperialis if you stretch the definition a bit, all landed on shelves in 2019. And while it wouldn’t surprise anyone that Games Workshop and Osprey games put out bangers, the year’s best skirmish game was Unmatched by Restoration Games, a company that is most well-known for their refresh of the old children’s game Fireball Island. Unmatched is a skirmish board game featuring characters from popular public domain works and mythology, each with their own abilities. The game packs a ton of combat and tension into a small package. It’s easy to learn and play but at no point does it feel simple or basic.
Marvel: Crisis Protocol
Atomic Mass Games dropped its new miniatures game featuring Marvel heroes in November, 2019, with a starter box which included Captain America, Spider-Man, Ultron, Iron Man, Red Skull, and Baron Zemo. It’s a game of tactical, team-based combat that features a ton of interesting tactical complexity and some of the best plastic miniatures you’ll find in a game not made by Games Workshop. It’s a wonderful game and it’s almost worth playing for the terrain alone – the ability to pick up and throw cars at your opponents with stronger characters is so incredibly satisfying. Depending on who you ask, Marvel: Crisis Protocol is the best minis game on the market right now.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
FromSoftware’s 2019 Samurai action-adventure epic follows a Sengoku-era shinobi named Wolf on a quest for revenge. The game features imaginative sword combat that turns duels into more of an intricate dance, building momentum and attacking an enemy’s stance to turn the tide of battle against them through quick decision making. It’s another brutally difficult game from a studio known for making them but rewarding for the players who stick with it.
Death Stranding
After a nasty falling out with Konami which led to his Silent Hills project being scrapped, Hideo Kojima started his own studio, Kojima Productions. And they immediately set to work making a whole new game with Guillermo del Toro and Norman Reedus, and it’s one of the most batshit games ever made – and I mean that in a good way. Visually beautiful, philosophically interesting, and incredibly dumb, Death Stranding is everything a Kojima game aspires to be. It’s probably not the best game of 2019, but it’s probably the most memorable, crafting an insane narrative with some generally compelling mysteries and an all-star cast. If nothing else, the game’s imagery stays with you long after the game is over.
Super Mario Maker 2
After the runaway success of the first Mario Maker, followed by Nintendo seemingly expressing only annoyance at how popular the game turned out to be, they followed up with a sequel on the Nintendo Switch in 2019. Bigger and more ambitious than the original, Super Mario Maker 2 added new level types and options for players and is the definitive version of the game.
Blasphemous
A retro, pixel-art Soulslike Metroidvania featuring some truly inspired art design and a wonderfully brutal lore filled with mystery, Blasphemous was a wonderful indie surprise in 2019. Blasphemous is a game that pulls heavily from Golden-Age Spanish Catholicism to create something bizarrely grotesque and brutally difficult but beautiful to behold. It’s worth putting up with the game’s difficulty just to experience its wonderful art design and insane lore – as Goonhammer author Jon Bernhardt wrote in his review: “Blasphemous is a game about a version of Catholicism that is 100% about the sacrifice of Christ, and 0% about His salvation.”
Control
Remedy’s shared universe world building really stepped things with 2019’s Control, an action-adventure game about the Federal Bureau of Control, the X-Files-esque group dedicated to investigating weird phenomena in the Alan Wake universe. It’s a solid game with some interesting ideas and successfully works both as a standalone game and a set-up for 2023’s Alan Wake 2. The game keeps you guessing from start to finish and if you’re a fan of the SCP Foundation project, this is the best video game take on that concept ever delivered.
Resident Evil 2 Remake
After nearly killing its classic Resident Evil Franchise a few years earlier and resurrecting it with Resident Evil VII, Capcom kicked off a new trend in high-profile remakes. The Resident Evil 2 Remake set a new standard for remakes, taking the original and not just updating the graphics, but significantly improving the story, gameplay, and mechanics to the point where I’d suggest the remake is now the definitive version of the game. On that note, Resident Evil 2 Remake is hands-down the best Resident Evil game, taking the crown from 4 as not only does it update the gameplay to be more in line with 4’s advances, it also presents a legitimately scary horror game in a way that 4 doesn’t. It’s one of the best games of all time.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Respawn’s 2019 Jedi: Fallen Order brought us a new look at the survivors of Order 66 from Revenge of the Sith, following former Padawan Cal Kestis as he runs from the empire and works to recover a holocron with the locations of remaining Jedi on it. It’s a fun action-adventure platformer with a compelling story and great acting and animation that really feels like being put into an adventure in the Star Wars universe in a way that few other games accomplish. We’ve already written about it at length – you can find our review here.
The Outer Worlds
Obsidian’s 2019 action RPG puts you in the role of a traveler working in the Halcyon space colonies founded by megacorporations from Earth. It’s an interesting game with a winding, branching story that puts a lot of decisions on the player, often with interesting outcomes.
Outer Wilds
Not to be confused with the similarly-named game above, Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds puts you in the role of a space archaeologist exploring a small planetary system, mostly at your own pace. And every 22 minutes you die when the system’s sun goes Supernova. But then time resets, and you play the loop again, each time gradually uncovering new things and figuring out why the sun is exploding. It’s a wonderfully inventive action-adventure game that uses the time loop premise to tease out some compelling mysteries. It’s one of the best games of 2019.
Baba is You
One of the most inventive puzzle games of the last decade, Baba is You is a block-pushing puzzle game where the rules are simple: Baba (the character) is (controlled by) You and each stage has a series of rules like “Wall is Stop” or “Rock is Push” which are themselves pushable blocks, allowing you to rewrite the game rules in every level to create interesting and ingenious solutions to the games hundreds of puzzles. It’s an incredible concept and the game takes every opportunity to explore it in depth.
Disco Elysium
Marcy: Arriving in October of 2019, Disco Elysium took many players by surprise with the deeply rich storytelling and worldbuilding surrounding alcoholic and amnesiac detective Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, whose attempt to solve a murder spirals into a beautiful and sprawling examination of philosophical and metaphysical examinations of the self, political ideologies, and quite a lot of anti-capitalism (positive connotation). The depth of the subjects covered in the game is bolstered by the painted, isometric world that Harry inhabits, evoking one of the most memorable and unique aesthetics at a period in which many games had been grappling with the shift to hyper-realistic HD graphics. Much of Disco Elysium feels like a call to games such as Planescape Torment or the original Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II, as well as point and click adventure games of the 80s and 90s, causing the game to spread like wildfire around the internet.
The ongoing Pandemic lent an interesting weight to Disco Elysium’s philosophical questions and narratives about being, connections, and the ways in which one’s choice can cause ripples in the world around them. The wider release of the game through 2020’s Final Cut allowed even wider audiences to experience the game, and at the same time the unfortunate and slow demise of ZA/UM from Communist team to Capitalist corporation, perhaps providing the saddest death knell to the game and it’s ethos in the years that would follow it’s release. As a game, Disco Elysium explored topics many games hadn’t considered or pursued in wide acclaim, nor did the game shy away from difficult and open political and social critique. There may never be a sequel to Disco Elysium (probably for the best), but the thunderbolt the game sent through players and revived interest in the adventure rpg genre cements it as an exceptional and important game.
Untitled Goose Game
The most hilarious game of 2019 was Untitled Goose game, a wonderful indie game in which you play an asshole goose wandering around a small town, stealing things and causing mischief. It’s a wonderfully simple game and incredibly accessible. It’s not particularly long, but it’s incredibly memorable and fun, and even after finishing the game you’ll be tempted to pick it back up just to honk at things.
Why It Was the Best Year in Gaming
2019 was a weaker year for games in many ways – Resident Evil 2, Death Stranding, Control, Sekiro, Baba is You, and Disco Elysium are all very solid entries, but when Call of Duty Modern Warfare is showing up in your year’s best of lists, it’s a weak year. That said, there’s still a lot here to like – those four games I mentioned are very good, and Fallen Order, Blasphemous, Untitled Goose Game, and Outer Wilds help fill out a list that’s strong enough to keep 2019 in the conversation. 2019 also gets a boost from some solid tabletop games – beyond Unmatched and The Crew, games like Pipeline, Blitzkrieg!, Lovers, Wingspan, and Watergate make it a very solid year for board games, with plenty of games which made being stuck inside for a year much more tolerable. Marvel Crisis Protocol is legitimately one of the best miniatures games to come out in the last two decades, and that helps push this year up quite a bit.
This article is part of a larger series on the best year in gaming. For more years, click this link. Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
