The 2019 Goaties: The Outliers
I’m doing something a little more elaborate with this year’s Game of the Year selections. Instead of collapsing them into one interminable list, we’ll look at one game with a little more detail every day until the proper Game of 2019 has been decreed. But before we get to the top 10, and inspired by a friend’s suggestion to at least touch on some games I beat but didn’t necessarily fall head over heels for (shouts out to PK), it’s time for the inaugural edition of...
The Outliers
or
Five More Games I Liked
What the Golf?
(Apple Arcade, Epic Games Store)
What the Golf? is secretly the 11th best game of 2019, a hilarious, genuinely weird release that bills itself as “the anti-golf game for people who hate golf.” It is exactly that, because it refuses to seriously consider anything more than the core concept of the sport: get thing into hole. Instead, it takes that idea and spins it off in a thousand different directions. Whether you’re paying homage to various other games (including Portal, SUPERHOT, and...well, there are plenty of others) or playing first-person golf, it never feels like you’re doing the same thing more than twice.
Mechanics are constantly introduced, explained, and then immediately thrown out the window...just because they can be? There’s a vague sense of a story going on as you make your way through the Golf Institute and...fight a robot? I think? There’s some flesh horror stuff at one point?
The story’s not important. What is important is just how damned funny What the Golf? is. It’s inventive, charming, and the steady stream of jokes, whether they’re mechanical or in the level complete messages, make it hard to ever be upset with the game for long. Every level comes with two extra challenge modes that can also dramatically change things up, if that’s your speed.
Superliminal
(Epic Games Store, Playstation 4 [soon])
Superliminal was on my list of Games I Wanted to Play from the initial development GIFs I saw scroll past me on Twitter. A physics puzzler (yes, like Portal) centered around perspective, it is a brisk, straightforward game about a nameless main character undergoing a sleep study that goes somewhat awry. Some aspects of the game seem almost deliberately trope-y: the cold clinic most of the game takes place in, the disembodied feminine AI asking you to stick to the script, large buttons on the floor you put objects on to open doors.
Where Superliminal succeeds is in the earnestness of its story and the main thrust of its core mechanic: objects grow (or shrink) depending on how you manipulate your view of them. Tiny chess pieces grow to be twenty feet tall, doors can be shifted to grow or shrink your character in turn, and scattered sections of art - when viewed from the right angle - make real objects pop into existence. Across nine chapters, developer Pillow Castle manages to take that core concept in several different directions and tones, weirdly enough. With the game taking place within a dream space, they hop between Escher-esque scenes, one mildly harrowing horror segment, and a gorgeous final sequence that leaves the player with a pretty uplifting message about positivity and stick-to-itiveness.
There are a couple of puzzles in the final hour of the game that are a bit too obtuse for their own good, and one in particular with a downright impenetrable solution, but we aren’t getting as many games these days that try to explore the edges of the first-person narrative/puzzler space that Portal established, and this is definitely worthy of the three or four hours it’ll take you to see your way through it.
JUMPGRID
(Steam, itch.io, iOS, Android)
The first game I wrote about on this very blog that wasn’t World of Warcraft or my GotY list from 2018, JUMPGRID’s sheer sense of style remains in my mind ten months later. It’s a visualizer-meets-action/rhythm game in the purest sense, and every second of the frenetic flight through each of the game’s four worlds is an opportunity to just bask in those clean lines and sharp, bold colors.
From my “Post-Game Game Post” earlier this year:
“Broken up into four distinct themes/skins/songs, JUMPGRID shines when it starts deliberately messing with the player in a good way. The titular grid is obscured in so many strange, creative ways - first with mere blocks and pills, followed by segments that reveal squares just as often as they remove others, and even more devious tricks continue from there.”
It’s incredibly confident, and though the boss stages that cap off each section of the game still ring a little hollow, JUMPGRID is an extremely underrated gem from this year. I’d play a fifth theme/skin/song in a heartbeat if one was suddenly made available.
Resident Evil 2
(Steam, Xbox One, Playstation 4)
Hey, this game bites.
Honestly, this is probably my least favorite game of 2019, but I can also see why so many people love it. It is a true-to-form survival horror game, taking (what I assume are) the best parts of the 1998 classic and marrying it with some shifts in the storyline, a legitimately incredible sense of atmosphere and some cool set piece moments.
But, as someone who is not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the genre, I constantly found myself asking what felt like basic, borderline-insulting questions: Why on Earth is the boss you kill with the crane such a clusterfuck to manage? Why does the back half of that game feel so much more sterile and bland than the jaw-dropping, wonderfully-condensed police station segments? Goddammit, why does a game in 2019 count Key Items towards your miniscule inventory limit? Even after getting Hip Pouches to upgrade that limit, it’s still exhausting!
What is going on with the voice acting?
There are legitimately wonderful things about Resident Evil 2. I adore the map system, which manages to be smartly designed and efficient as hell in telling you which parts of the world you should still be exploring. Setting aside the voice acting, the audio and visual design of Raccoon City and its underbelly is tremendous, dripping with detail and atmosphere. A substantial group of people got a lot out of RE2, and I’m probably in the minority here, but I just wish the part where you played the game was as engaging and functional as the world that it takes place in.
Pikuniku
(Steam, Switch)
What a singularly bizarre game Pikuniku is. One part platformer, one part puzzler, it’s a joyful, exceptionally friendly tale of The Beast (that red fellow) awakening and unwittingly getting itself involved in the goings-on of villages and the free money schemes of Mr. Sunshine, who seems to be slowly siphoning away goods with giant, cloud-shaped robits. You’ll roll up and down hills, kick a lot of objects onto buttons, travel into the magical world of Toastopia, and slowly gather a resistance effort to take on Mr. Sunshine.
The thing that sticks out most about Pikuniku is just how wildly distinct it feels. It’s got a very down-to-earth vocabulary and tone that reminded me a fair bit of last year’s Donut County, and much like What the Golf?, it feels like it’s always got another trick or joke up its sleeve. It’s full of minigames, short little sidequests, hats, scavenger hunts involving pixelated dancing bugs, and it never takes itself seriously. That soundtrack also just whips, featuring several earworms that sound like Genesis music brought screaming forward into 2019 in the best possible way.
It’s just nice to see a game that is so content with being pleasant at every turn, even when the story dips into some light commentary on…corporate ownership and resource control? Pikuniku is arguably shorter than you’d want it to be, clocking it at maybe three hours in total, but it also doesn’t really overstay its welcome. The last stretch of the game does kind of revolve around some boss battles, which do start to kind of blur together, but there’s so much heartful, wild stuff on offer here that it doesn’t weigh things down overall.
Okay!
There are a handful of other games that I did finish in 2019, but I don’t have terribly much to say about them that other people haven’t already said. Untitled Goose Game is exactly what you think it is, Hypnospace Outlaw is an impressively devoted idea that didn’t quite click for me mechanically, and there were a few other Apple Arcade games that might be worth looking at in Spek and Neo Cab.
We’ll start digging in to my proper Top 10 Games of 2019 list on Friday. I’m pretty stoked about 2019 in games, generally speaking, and I think we’ve got some good ones to talk about in the week and a half to come.
