Insert "it was the worst year on record but a great year for games and I played more games this year than any other for obvious reasons" intro here.
5. A Monster’s Expedition
A Monster’s Expedition is lovely. It’s a sokoban puzzler where you push trees/roll logs to get from exhibit to exhibit in an open-air human museum. That is, a museum about the ancient race of humans and the artifacts excavated by monster scientists from a region known as “Englandland”. What else would it be?
The puzzles get quite tough, but each area is both visually distinct and centers around a particular idea or two, as well as becoming more difficult the closer to the center of the area. With no true blue tutorial, this is a great way to allow players to figure out mechanics hands-on, and ease themselves into the more complicated islands on offer. There’s also a charitable undo and reset system, where you can reset the entire island or back up individual actions you’ve done to return to a midpoint of solving the puzzle. It’s a perfect feature that I really miss when playing other puzzle games.
The whole game has a relaxed atmosphere; the concept of a field trip to a museum, the ability to sit down on the shore and admire the scenery, the goofy little descriptions on every exhibit, the wonderful soundtrack by Eli Rainsberry (who you may recognize from Wilmot’s Warehouse or their contributions to the If Found… OST). It’s such a pleasant experience, especially to satiate those sudden onset puzzle cravings.
4. Signs of the Sojourner
You can’t win a conversation. If you’ve been on the internet a while that may come as a surprise, wahey!
In all seriousness, it’s hard to imagine a game where winning everything isn’t actually a desirable outcome. “Winning” a conversation in Signs of the Sojourner means you’ve agreed with your conversational partner — but not always the other way around. That doesn’t necessarily mean you get what you want, whether it be an object, an ally, or insight. It was oddly satisfying to intentionally tank conversations with characters I didn’t like; in general, there’s a shocking amount of freedom in what, on paper, looks like a rigidly structured deckbuilder.
Even divorced from the wonderful narrative, worldbuilding, and characters, the conversation card game is just plain engaging. Two speakers take turns placing cards on the board. Each card has a left and right symbol, the goal being to match symbols until they’re done chatting. It’s a simple enough idea (especially with only a few symbols to choose from) but the dozen or so modifiers and deckbuilding choices keep it fresh throughout. After each conversation, you choose one new card from your partner, and leave one card behind. Different symbols and modifiers tend to denote people from new locations, so the mechanical implications marry perfectly with the narrative ones of leaving your hometown identity to fit in in a new city. It’ll expand your future prospects, but do you really want to abandon the relationships with your friends and neighbors?
It’s a bit difficult to describe it as interestingly as it plays out, but the way Signs of the Sojourner gamifies speech is something to behold — it may sound abstract at first, but it all coalesces into something that perfectly demonstrates how people really talk, with all the influences of who they're talking to, where they’re from, and who they are.
3. Mixolumia
You may have heard the term “flow state” used when referring to games before. It’s the fancy psychology term for being “in the zone” — a state of mind where you’re fully immersed in the task at hand, where that task is engaging, enjoyable, and comes naturally. Mixolumia is an on-demand flow state. It’s a block-clearing puzzler with true gravity, set on a diagonal. I think comparisons to Tetris are unavoidable, but truthfully, it’s kind of unfair… Mixolumia is much better at what it does than Tetris. After 32 years you’d think the best-selling video game of all time would manage a robust, melodic, singleplayer experience, with enough variety through game modes to satisfy any player, but I guess not.
Mixolumia’s inclusion of two challenge modes (three, with unlocks) and two separate endless modes, for both serious and laid-back players, is a godsend. There’s a mode for anyone to enjoy; there’s always something for me to play. Don’t want the game to end? Only got a few minutes? Don’t wanna stress about blocks falling? Hey, here you go. There’s a bit of a theme with my favorite games, this and every year, and it’s that I like when a game wants me to like it. Paired with these game modes are Mixolumia’s actual concept of matching blocks and gravity. It’s unpredictable because of how far into the future you’d have to see everything, but the three-in-a-row minimum and cascading fall of the blocks means that combos will just… happen, unintentionally, even for less experienced players.
Developer davemakes clearly understands what people want out of these sorts of games. The way they’ve coded track construction means they loop perfectly, even in the late stages of Endless games. They build into and then fade out of their more exciting moments with excellent timing, and even better, custom song modding (with sound effects!) is baked in. With a bit of tech know-how, any fan can create a song from scratch, or remix their favorite, and put it out there for the community to enjoy. There’s also a cute little color palette customization feature, perhaps more important as an in-built colorblindness fix. If that weren't enough though, there are also options to remove on-screen effects that may affect a player's vision. Mixolumia is the best of its genre, period. Also, it’s $10. Go play it.
2. Tenderfoot Tactics
I think most of us had a favorite game as a kid that we were never any good at, or never even beat. Despite coming out this year, Tenderfoot Tactics makes me feel like I’m returning to a childhood game at least slightly more capable than when I left it.
I say slightly more capable because Tenderfoot Tactics is pretty damn hard. On top of its many combat intricacies, it’s the kind of game that doesn’t pull any punches; enemies frequently outnumber you, and they have access to all the same spells and classes as you do. They won’t fudge turns if you’re on the backfoot, although they can be manipulated into going after suboptimal targets — either way, every encounter is a war of attrition, where aggressively trading damage and kills is more important than trying to come out unscathed. Normal encounters are a fun time (even though you can get totally stomped by unlucky encounter setups) but Tenderfoot really shines in the challenge fights. Hand-crafted arenas and semi-structured enemy encounters, along with more palpable goals like legendary trinkets and new goblin breeds, make these a joy to play out.
Speaking of goblin breeds (which are like classes or jobs, by the way), there are 18 of them in total, each with their own elemental affinities, unique skills, and playstyles. The level of customization within a single goblin breed is pretty impressive, but the addition of abilities Memory and Affinity, which allow you access to abilities from other breeds, will satisfy even the most serious theorycrafter.
Of course, this is all about gameplay, and says nothing of the beautifully low-poly, weird, technicolor pastel overworld, or the dynamic, industrial soundtrack by Michael Bell. Tenderfoot Tactics is a hidden gem — the one tactics fans have been waiting for.
Honorable Mention: Outer Wilds
I’m a bit of a stickler to what games can or can’t make it onto a game of the year list. It has to have come out in that year, or have a larger re-release/port than its initial release. I’m also not willing to include DLC, expansions, or Early Access games unless they’re in their own category. I didn’t play Outer Wilds until this year, for no other reason than that a lot of games come out every year and I didn’t have time to play it in 2019. However, it immediately became one of my favorite games of all time, and I feel the need to include it as an honorable mention.
Adventure games have a bad habit of treating the player as either extremely inattentive and incapable of remembering even the most important information, or asking them to remember every bit of minutiae they’ve collected and make unreasonable leaps in logic on a regular basis. I can’t remember the last time I played an open-world adventure game without an omnipresent waypoint that obscured all other points of interest, either because the game was too focused on railroading you onto story paths, or the signposting was so bad that it was necessary to find anything at all. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s frustratingly common for point-and-click adventures to expect the player to remember every detail of every room, character, and item present throughout large chapters of the game. Outer Wilds’s rumor map avoids both of these problems, and it’s what pushes it from great to incredible.
The game begins with you taking a sharp inhale, eyes to the stars, as some celestial object launches off a distant planet. Today’s the day you go to space. You head down to the observatory where ground control operator Hornfels is waiting for you. They recommend heading to your home planet’s moon and meeting with the Lunar Outpost operator, Esker, for your maiden voyage, and maybe checking out the alien ruins while you’re there. Immediately, the rumor map is populated with two modules - connected to your home village is Esker as well as the ruins. Because you’ve yet to visit the moon at all, they’re both represented by question marks instead of photos, with a short blurb on where and what you heard about them. Once speaking to Esker, their photo’s filled in and a synopsis of your discoveries written. A new symbol appears, too: an asterisk to indicate there’s more to discover here.
It’s a collection of all the information you’ve been told and how it connects to a person or place, and that’s everything it needs to be. With a story that spans more than a universe and an untold number of years, Outer Wilds is a lot to keep track of, and I don’t think the traditional “notebook between mouse and keyboard” strategy would cut it — but more importantly, it wouldn’t be much fun. It’s the experience of a rabbithole wiki dive after finishing a powerfully confusing game, except you do it all yourself, and also you’re in space. Unraveling the story by hunting through the rumor map is more entertaining than it has any right to be, both because of the story’s excellent quality (congratulations to writer Kelsey Beachum) as well as the tools at your disposal.
Considering the complexity of the planetary objects as well as the story, keeping the player’s options simple was a good choice. You have a spaceship, a jetpack, a projectile camera probe, a targeted signal receiver, and an alien language translator. The mindset of “ah, well maybe I could do this, but it’s a video game so they probably didn’t program it” rarely applies to Outer Wilds because of the care given to each individual tool, since there’s only five. It leaves more room to focus not on the tools themselves but on the environments, puzzles, and concepts that the player interacts with. I can’t remember a time I wanted to try something but couldn’t, to the point where I did the game’s one bad environmental puzzle completely wrong, but still solved it.
This is all punctuated by the absolutely stunning soundtrack by Andrew Prahlow. It shucks the 24/7 synths of a typical spacefaring adventure and chooses to center acoustic instruments (most notably the banjo), which really gives each planet and character a unique, grounded feel. This isn’t about some desolate future-humans taking to the stars for a cure for cancer or to save their dying planet, it’s a bunch of backwater aliens building a dumpy wooden ship and going to space because they’re curious.
If you spent countless hours in Dark Souls or Resident Evil hunting for every journal entry and item description to get a more complete picture of the world’s lore, I’d be comfortable recommending Outer Wilds to you with no other information - well, maybe a motion sickness warning, as maneuvering 3D space in first person is a major gameplay system.
1. Risk of Rain 2
In more ways than one, Risk of Rain 2 is what a game should be. It’s a shining example of a roguelike game, it has outstanding art direction & fantastic music, it’s great alone, but becomes something else just as amazing with friends, and its development during a wildly successful Early Access release should be studied.
Roguelikes can easily become frustrating time sinks; a low amount of truly great items or a large amount of bad ones combined with the player’s increasing understanding of them results in a lot of dead runs and wasted time. Outside of the standard risk of death, there’s no reason not to explore every room, fight every enemy, open every chest, visit every shop, etc. in the typical roguelike. You’d do yourself a disservice by not at least checking out everything available in a run - even if it’s tedious, it’s never smart to give yourself less decisions or less attempts at the best build. Risk of Rain 2 alleviates this issue in two ways: the sheer amount of items you amass, and its core concept of difficulty increasing over time.
Every item in Risk of Rain 2 can stack. More damage, more healing, proccing more frequently, and it all feels so good. Some are better than others, sure, but the commons and uncommons in particular were designed with stacking in mind, because you’ll end up with a boatload of them by the end of a run. Most are decent, too - outside of special Lunar items, there’s only one or two you would consider not picking up at all. But beyond that, there’s still the decision to be made: hang around looting, allowing your enemies to scale up, or speed through?
The game itself places value on time, and encourages action-packed gameplay throughout. While there’s now a final boss, forgetting him and getting hours-long “God runs” is still the standard goal, further encouraged by the lack of penalties for dying and the ability to leave once every few stages if things start going sour.
In short, Risk of Rain 2 has all the randomness, chance manipulation, and absolutely batshit combos you’d expect from a good roguelike. What sets it apart is its determination to be fun, and stay fun. Screw around with friends or tackle the challenge modes solo, with more content on the way this year.
(A side note, though: this game has terrible accessibility options. While I applaud its visual style, the particular color palettes chosen mean bad news for the vision impaired and/or colorblind, and even those on smaller monitors and resolutions. Button remapping is nice, but constant sprint cancels are a sore spot — literally. These shortcomings didn’t seriously impact play for me, but it did make challenge runs more sluggish, difficult, and less rewarding than I believe they should’ve been. It’s a testament to Risk of Rain 2’s quality that it’s still my Game of the Year despite this, but it's definitely worth mentioning).
