Board 8 > Pumpkin's Top 10 Games of 2019

(+) Yeah! (+)

years over so heres my list:

10. Mutazione
9. Elsinore
8. Hypnospace Outlaw
7. 10 Beautiful Postcards
6. Heaven's Vault
5. Eastshade
4. A Short Hike
3. Anodyne 2
2. Disco Elysium
1. Outer Wilds

ah the four video game genres: detective, time loop, vacation, and strand

top 2 are all-time greats and it was tough choosing between them, a sentiment that seems pretty common from several lists Ive seen which is nice. rest of the list is no slouch either, and overall its been a good year for games. anyways, short write-ups to come.

also, honourable mention to Slay the Spire, which would be here if i didnt already have it on last years list.

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I've only played two games on this list (plus Slay the Spire), but they're my #1 (Disco) and #6 (Hypnospace) (and #2,) so I approve.

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the Anodyne 2 soundtrack is incredible

I've played Disco, Anodyne, Short Hike and Elsinore and adore all 4. I really do need to get around to Heaven's Vault considering how much I loved 80 Days.

did you play either Eliza or NeoCab?

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YAAAAAAY someone else who played Elsinore. It's really good!

I'm looking up the games on your list that I haven't heard of because based on the ones I have heard of you have really interesting taste

I played Eliza and liked it quite a bit - definitely considered it for the list. Didn't play NeoCab, but wanted to esp. since it falls into the 4 genres. Didn't get to Telling Lies or AI: Somnium Files either, which I really wanted to.

I'm part way through a second playthrough of Heaven's Vault. It has the feeling of discovery and adventure of 80 Days. It also has some weird controls and interface, like a 3D adventure game from before they figured out 3D adventure games.

And yess Elsinore - there's no way I wasn't going to play timeloop Hamlet fanfiction.

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10. Mutazione (Die Gute Fabrik)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1zN28WvtSE

Mutazione is a quiet, laidback game about community and gardening. You play Kai, a teenager spending her summer vacation taking care of a sick grandfather shes never met in her mothers childhood hometown, the Mutazione, which shes never known. The Mutazione is an island that was struck by a meteor over 100 years ago, killing most of the inhabitants and leaving the survivors with mutations. What remains in the present day is the wreckage of old buildings, overgrown by lush flora and fauna, and at the centre of it a giant tree, depended on by the tiny community of mutants who remain, isolated from the rest of the world.

What I love about this game is the roundedness of all its characters, the focus on their daily existence, and the way it folds you into the fabric of the community. Theres backstory to the place, but there isnt a lore dump or a list of questions you can run down. People have their own lives to get on with, and youre walking into existing dynamics, rather than being the player-character at the centre of the universe. Night in the Woods is a good point of reference, in the abandoned small town with deep wounds sense, though with less focus on the protagonists relationships specifically, and more on communal life. Often your presence is incidental and youre just overhearing an event and making a comment in passing. The store page describes it as a mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural which is apt. It has fun with soap opera melodramatics in places, but mostly this applies because of its focus on interpersonal drama, and the ripples of actions on a small, diminishing community across generations. Gradually, you learn about traumas both personal and cultural, but its never overwhelming and always grounded in humanity and daily life. On a top level, the Mutazione is reckoning with the scars of colonialism, of what was taken from them individually and collectively, of past events that suck them in and position them as the traumatised. Extended from that are anxieties about the future, either that there is none or that it bears no more than permutations of the past.

All of which are far too big for one kid to tackle in a few weeks. There are no easy answers, and youre not tasked with fixing anything. For the most part you can offer a sympathetic ear, or sometimes the best thing to do is to give someone space. Other times, the best thing to do is garden. Over the course of the game, your grandpa making a number of gardens for various individual reasons as well as one overarching goal on which hes mostly vague. Its not a particularly involved process you pick up seeds in the world or harvested from your other plants, each plant corresponds with a mood and a corresponding song you can play to make them grow, as well as an instrument sound they produce. Plants also require different soil types with limited space for each, which does a good job of ensuring variety in your plot. Beyond that you just go by what looks or sounds good to you, while making sure that everything has enough room to mature and whatnot. Initially, you have to plant enough to fill a meter which doesnt take much, and beyond that its a mechanic you can engage with as much or as little as you want. Now and then I liked to stop and tinker a bit, switching it up, sitting back and listening while working out the balance I want, all of which was a nice and soothing experience. Theres a mysticism and ritual aspect to the gardens, but the game, I thought, avoided the possible hokey primitivism by grounding it in the communal. On top of the medicinal or otherwise practical usage of some of what you plant, what youre doing is a lot about revitalizing a communal space, making it less like arcane magic, and more about the symbolic weight of the act when approached with the right frame of mind.

Also, theres a group of mutated, entrepreneurial sausages constantly discussing gaps in the market they should capitalize on while one of them gently reminds the rest that the Mutazione only has about a dozen inhabits and doesnt even use money. Theyre great.

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9. Elsinore (Golden Glitch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbWsmc1OhOg

On my way to the dungeon for an interrogation I pass by Hamlet in the hall for the first time in days. Hamlet, you see, is a background character in The Adventures of Bernardo and Ophelia: Spyhunter, a prince with an unremarkable arc of vowing revenge and then getting on with it the next day without much fuss.

Of the emerging trend of time loop mysteries in clockwork worlds, Elsinore has to be one of the most ambitious. The thing that would most likely break a game like this is people, and Elsinore lets you influence a bunch of them, driving the plot far from its source material, and weaving a tangled narrative web of dependencies. As indicated above, the entire basis of the play can be resolved on day 1, and there are so many other possibilities like it. As such, the game is an elaborate work of fanfiction, extrapolating for what-ifs, filling narrative gaps, and drawing new connections. Time never stops moving, and you have the freedom to follow whoever you want, so the game must fill in what characters get up to between scenes of the play, which was fun for me as someone who knows the play pretty well. For example, you can discover that Horatio and Gertrude have a friendly relationship that involves occasional walks by the garden, a detail that is not part of the play at all, but for me instantly recalls and contextualizes Horatios presence in the royal court in Act 4 after Hamlet has left for England, and then Im thinking back to other Horatio lines to see how they can be read to support this detail. So yeah, thrilling stuff.

Right, so that is what Hamlet brings to the time loop, but what does the time loop bring back to Hamlet? Perhaps more than Hamlet, a time loop evokes the prophecy in Macbeth, of a future that has become more real than the present, and of an inevitable order reinstated through disorder. Its not like Shakespeare needs help giving weight to tragedy, but a time loop reinforces an eerie sense of inevitability, even through accident and coincidence. The play is so wrapped up in Hamlets shit that we lose sight of how many other problems there are in rotten Denmark, which Elsinore builds on.

Ultimately, this isnt really Shakespeares Hamlet, the character or the play. Characters are changed and expanded considerably, the game has its own themes, and of course, Hamlet isnt even the main character here, Ophelia is. Shakespeares Hamlet is a contradictory character for a contradictory time, who falls apart in the space between himself and his actions, which is why his dilemma is unresolved. But in Elsinore, he along with everyone else, are less characters and more game mechanic. The funny thing about the set-up is that the clockwork world imagines them with fuller lives like real people, but the time loop turns them into programmatic, manipulated signs. Theres a scene in the play where Hamlet gets offended that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would play him like a pipe, would believe they know his stops, and can predict and control him. This is exactly what you do in Elsinore. Tell Hamlet x after y and he will do z, every time. So yeah, get over yourself Hamlet. Cheer up, you melancholy Dane.

Thinking about it further though, Hamlet would work as a video game character, and the play would work as a video game. Like a video game character, Hamlet is a blackbox, a series of gestures and a costume filling a role, and hiding a lack of any inner essence. Hamlet the play is bloated and occasionally inexplicable, like the midsection filler of a JRPG driven by the need for content and the expectations of a 60-hour playtime. The problem with Hamlet is he lacks an objective correlative according to T.S. Eliot, and why, isnt that just ludonarrative dissonance and wait where are you going

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https://twitter.com/elsinoregame/status/1210679038122946560

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Spoilers for my own list that I'm writing but I fucking love Elsinore and I've never even seen any rendition of Hamlet. I was worried it would be inaccessible thanks to Shakespeare's pedigree for being such, but not so.

side note: listening to waypoint's goty stuff and yes, rob's thoughts on nora in eliza was exactly mine, and why i tended to keep her at arm's length.

and the solitaire does slap - going back to finish it on expert was the last thing i did, so for me the canonical ending was evelyn going out to the waterfront to make her pivotal decision, whipping out her phone to play solitaire for an hour, then going home without deciding anything.

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8. Hypnospace Outlaw (Tendershoot)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb4Jul496QE

A look at a few screenshot, and part of the appeal is apparent. Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in an alternate universe 1999, where you play a moderator for an internet accessed with a headband while you sleep, navigating a web directory of geocities/angelfire-type sites. Looping MIDIs, "Under Construction" signs, Winamp skins, a BonziBuddy pastiche it's got it all. Beyond the nostalgia trip, the game is very much its own thing. It being an alternate universe, a lot of fun comes from seeing a different development of 90s culture both internet and broader, some of which is recognizable as pastiche, but always developed in enough detail within the fiction itself that it doesn't feel like a reference hunt.

The nostalgia trip aspect is far from the most interesting aspect for me, but on that front it's well-realized. A big part of what makes it work is how seamless and faithful the interface is, with no modern concessions, and nothing like a stray menu or achievement to betray its world. There is an overarching plot which develops over multiple acts, but it emerges organically through e-mails and a few other tricks, without feeling like it's wrestling control away from the player. My process for these write-ups usually start with looking at screenshots I took as a memory aid, but turns out I didn't take any screenshots of this game. When I was in it I was in it, like falling out of our world into another. As such, perhaps it did not occur to me that I should take anything from Hypnospace when I left, as appropriate of the dreamscape it's supposed to be. Actually, that's not entirely true, because for at least a week after, I did take from it the reflex to shake my mouse to make stuff load faster, because that's a thing in HypnOS. This, to be clear, makes me feel like a rube, so your mileage may vary on whether or not this is a point in its favour.

At its core, it's a detective game. The game doesn't give you much direction beyond introducing types of violations to moderate, allowing you to freely explore as you wish. Another reason I forgot to take screenshots, a reason I can better live with, is that often the significance of what I might have wanted to remember would not have been obvious immediately, but accumulated from a series of pages encountered over the course of several hours. It feels a lot like the moments of revelation in Her Story, except here those moments can also come back as an unexpected puzzle clue. As mentioned, there is a plot progression which has plot triggers, but the necessary information is spread out, and hidden well enough beneath in-character writing that is funny and amusing in their own right. Exploring new pages and solving puzzles are both enjoyable, and work in service of each other.

This gameplay loop also expresses a theme, which is that despite the old internet looking a lot scrappier, it was, of course, still ruled by corporate interests. As an enforcer, you have a foot in both worlds, seeing both the fallout in a community you've immersed yourself in, and the corporatespeak e-mail which doesn't care. The enforcer has a clear vantage point to see how capital ruins everything, while, sure, playing a small compartmentalized role in the process. A constant tension is how the corporate can never fully anticipate the users. As such, a lot of the puzzle solving involve finding the ways users subvert the feature set of HypnOS. You spend a lot of time trying to get to hidden pages, which are responses to both moderation and the inadequacy of the pre-set zones. What you encounter aren't just neat easter eggs for the player, but emerging out of the needs and developments of community, which gives the archeological feel of tracing footsteps in a lived-in place. The time period, more than just being nostalgia, marks Hypnospace as not only a spectre of the past but of lost futures. The early internet was a tech utopian vision projecting a fake future that will never arrive. The excitement over the newness and the limitless potential are on display, but increasingly it turned out to be a massive nothing as just corporate messaging after all, and revisting the past turns up mostly defunct commodities.

Of course, we don't need a headband to go back to the 1999, because it never actually died. You absolutely do not need to have been on the internet back then to recognize this game, because the aesthetic still exists even if mostly as kitsch. Kids know vapourwave. There are music videos created in 2019 with digitally-created VHS degradation. Remember a decade ago when everything from the 80s was back, possibly because that was the group with the disposable income, with the assumption that in 10 years we'd be inundated with 90s nostalgia? Turns out, sure, but also the 80s are still fucking here. Nothing ever dies, only shorn of meaning and subsumed into the eternal present. The aesthetic is all that's left. Hypnospace Outlaw is more haunted than that, though. It opens up the past not because it was better, but to remind ourselves that it doesn't have to be that way.

Now, the real internet experience I need captured is an AsianAvenue page full of chibi Final Fantasy gifs and AzN pRiDe.

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I'm really enjoying your writeups.

TheArkOfTurus posted...

I've only played two games on this list (plus Slay the Spire), but they're my #1 (Disco) and #6 (Hypnospace) (and #2,) so I approve.

I've only heard of two games on this list (plus Slay the Spire)

haven't played any of them though

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I'd heard of 6 games on this list, I put Heaven's Vault on my wishlist right after I saw it, I don't know if Mutazione, 10 Beautiful Postcards, or Anodyne 2 would be to my tastes as much but maybe

Outer Wilds is one I badly want to play, A Short Hike I own but haven't gotten to, Eastshade and Hypnospace Outlaw are also on my list of games I want to get to eventually

Elsinore I've just beaten and I highly recommend

7. 10 Beautiful Postcards (thecatamites)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g334qBswGKc

10 Beautiful Postcards is an easy game to recommend but a rather harder game to explain. Im caught between calling it an utter joy and a transformative work, if were lucky, and hopefully I can express both without undermining either one. To describe the actual time spent pressing keys in front of the screen doesnt sound like much, but rather its appeal grows in the way it sits in the mind, and I dont necessarily value one type of experience above the other.

To put a name to it, its a flatgame a genre which involves moving through a flat non-hierarchical space in a non-linear fashion, with minimal traditional game mechanics. Focus shifts away from the systemic and structural towards the expressive and associative. The game mostly involves visiting 10 different hotels, through a collage of incongruous, fragmentary spaces. Hotels are sort of transient, liminal non-places of shape-shifting function rooms and parodies of home decor, which can be freighted with all sorts of affect without any one thing sticking to it, which works quite well here. Visually, its a wide mix of pencil sketches, scanned photographs, stock images, pixel art, clay, etc. In a Fantastic Arcade talk by thecatamites from 2017, he mentions that the development process is made to accommodate whatever medium he felt like working with that day, and all of it can be thrown in and configured later. You go through rooms in any order without knowing what to expect, each room a stream-of-consciousness extrapolation, a non-sequitur, or both or neither. A subconscious network of logic may form in the mind here and there, but thats about it. That said, its not a chaotic, random jumble, and there are motifs that emerge. A frequent character type is the absurd visionary/wannabe entrepreneur/eccentric chancer, who seem to see in hotels the possibility of imprinting their consciousness, of turning out a manifestation of their psyche. Think BioShock, then forget BioShock. Its not really like BioShock.

Its a funny game full of very good writing, but its always hard to convey jokes by describing them, especially here where theyre not really jokes and a lot of it is absorbed ambiently as you zip through a room. Sometimes jokes dont work out of context, but in this case its more like Im giving it too much context by sectioning it off, but here goes: Theres a room where a mouse orchestra is rehearsing, and the onomatopoeia in the text box below it reads parp parp. In the attic room above theres one mouse playing a clarinet who goes sob i got kicked out. Theres a museum with a text box above saying that this is the educational portion of the game, and the rest of the room are a bunch of giant rocks with the proprietor standing next to each with some variation of nope, dont know anything about this one. And these are some of the easier ones to describe because theres a bit of narrative connective tissue to discern, but I dont want to spoil too much of it. The writing exists as fragmented memories that seep into the subconscious, taking on an autonomous existence there. Theres no ambiguity, no promise that the bits would cohere, or that it will make sense in culmination. It is, as the store page says, a wonderful pile of rubble to sift through on your computer.

Whats astounding is the rawness on display. 10BP has greater freedom of choice than any of the games that sell themselves on that feature. This is perhaps a bold claim for a game where you press something other than a direction key only a handful of times, and all the choices are instantly reversible and completely inconsequential, but what it has is an unrestrained interpretive space. A choice-heavy game will signpost its big decisions, putting emphasis on what it deems important. At the least, if a game has essential information it will lock you into a cutscene or conversation and a hierarchy emerges just by the sequence of sentences. In 10BP? If a character has 5 things to say, theyre on the screen in 5 spots, movement and change all coexisting on the same plane. Time and space are flattened out and everything is given equal weight. Theres no distinction between foreground and background, interior and exterior. Theres no collision, which means you walk straight through walls which arent there, or even off into the surrounding void. Do you want to walk into the void? Probably not, since theres nothing out there, but theres nothing stopping you.

So much of video games is about not seeing, about solving for the underlying systems and recognizing whats important and whats window-dressing that can be safely ignored. Walk into a room with a lot waist-high objects and youre no longer in that room but in the anticipation of the combat arena to come when the conversation ends. Games are typically meta-games, but here theres no possibility of a meta layer when there is one layer, allowing for pleasure in the totality of the aesthetic experience.

Overall, pinball hotel is my favourite - 5 stars out of 5 will visit again.

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6. Heaven's Vault (inkle)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghsVOE93C9o

A triumph of narrative design. Every decision you make is tracked and incorporated into a dynamically branching story, making for a very personalized journey. This isn't a new concept, but what's impressive is how seamlessly and subtly Heaven's Vault pulls it off. Choices that you didn't realize were choices, small bits of dialogue forming a larger profile, past actions influencing later options in unexpected ways. A lot of the game ends up missable, and it's impossible to see everything on your first playthrough. Not only that, the game sometimes forecloses on your options by making past areas inaccessible or pushing a conversation on before you're done. Some of this seems like it should be annoying, like the feeling of missing out, but they pull it off smartly. In a given playthrough, your options feel like they naturally extend from previous decisions, which properly motivates the action. This comes through particularly in how the game handles imperfect or even wrong information, which is key to its archaeological goals.

You can hit all the locations in any order, or even outright skip some, which means the game cannot fully control what information you have in any given encounter. Questions are posed every time you land on a site: What is this place? What was it for? Who lived here? And so on. What follows is a process that feels like science, involving exploring, synthesizing information, and positing then revising hypotheses. Maybe Aliya has a theory based on something overheard or a resemblance to a previous location, or maybe all she has to go on is an inscription on a statue. You havent encountered words similar enough to whats there, so you make the best guess you can. Its not locked in but itll have to do for now, and even if youre completely off-base, Aliya will reference her translation, testing it against the rest of what she finds. It isnt just a matter of getting more or less information, where it feels like you can min/max for the best order, because the conclusions being drawn are complex and personal, influencing the tenor of each scene. Presumably, a speedrun of the game would involve making a beeline for a few essential locations, especially since every location is there regardless of whether youve been told about it, and it would still have a coherent narrative, just one involving a lot more guesswork on Aliyas part.

I mentioned inscriptions and, oh yeah, they invented a written language for this game. Its a testament to how much the game has going on that I didnt lead with that, though I absolutely could have because it's great. Wherever you go, you find artifacts and buildings from an ancient civilization that seemed to love putting inscriptions on everything. Translation involves slotting in previous words youve encountered, and then guessing for new words you encounter. Theres a pictogramic quality to a lot of it and a lot of words are combinations of other words. Over time you pick up on more of the rules governing the language, like what symbols relate to plurality or which words have to do with water. Its not terribly complex the grammar rules are just English, and there arent any words or phrases without a clear English equivalent, as can happen with real languages. Its more like a giant system of symbols than anything with a rich social history, but it does make for a compulsive loop. There are momentous plot revelations elsewhere, but much of the game is about has this cozy build-up of knowledge by small increments. The satisfaction is like the sort I get from a jigsaw puzzle, where every small bit of progress feels good even though the big picture is a long way off. Confirming a translation is satisfying like connecting two puzzle pieces together, and ruling out a previous wrong translation is satisfying like collecting puzzle pieces of the same colour in a pile, in this very good metaphor.

Ive spent more time describing the storytelling than the story so far. It's not the main draw, but theres great stuff there, too. The dominant religion in the world is the Loop, which is the belief that time is cyclical, making Aliyas field of archaeology kind of fringe as many dont regard or even believe in history. There are robots that are not built, but dug out of the ground. Everything you learn is placed on a massive timeline which is cool, if a bit finicky to navigate. There are major themes I can comment on, but so far at least the details of the world function better as intriguing hooks, as archaeology revealing how much may be irretrievably lost and forever fragmentary.

On a smaller scale, you have the story of Aliya and her robot companion Six. Opinions on Aliya are a bit mixed from what Ive seen, but I think shes a great character. Perhaps there are dialogue choices that push her into being way more of an asshole, but for me she was just prickly, with a strained relationship with everyone she knows. My favourite bit of characterization is her uneasy relationship with her roots. As an Elborethan orphan taken as a child to imperial Iox she doesn't fully belong anywhere, and there are a lot of interesting moments where you decide how she identifies herself. Her relationship with Six is very malleable and lends a lot of colour to the world. At any point as you explore you can press Remark or Question which strikes up a conversation, which is a nice unobtrusive way to do lore.

Also, I mentioned it earlier, but its got some weird UI and movement. Its not Gabriel Knight 3 levels of weird, but a bit like an evolutionary step from a year after that rather than a game in 2019? I don't even know if I find it obtuse-bad or anarchronistic-charming, so I'm just mentioning it here and trailing off

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I'm playing Hypnospace Outlaw on this topic's recommendation now I'm really enjoying it. It's just extremely fun to flip through all the pages of this ridiculous parody of 1999 internet and see all of the many different cliches they make fun of. It's so on point.

additional note: couldn't admit it at the time, but what really made me feel like a rube was not the mouse shake thing, but that the pizza song got stuck in my head and i ended up eating more pizza than normal.

also, i was just about to bump this! not in the headspace for it rn but i will get back to this soon.

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I like thecatamites' style, although I haven't actually played anything other than the games posted on glorious trainwrecks yet.
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i've played a decent amount of his catalogue and should probably get around to anything i haven't. love his writings on games too.

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PumpkinCoach posted...

additional note: couldn't admit it at the time, but what really made me feel like a rube was not the mouse shake thing, but that the pizza song got stuck in my head and i ended up eating more pizza than normal.

also, i was just about to bump this! not in the headspace for it rn but i will get back to this soon.

god the soundtrack in hypnospace outlaw is really special, between the oddly catchy MIDI loops and the glorious pastiches of the kinds of bands popular at the time, whether it's a pitch-perfect parody of Linkin Park on a teenager's edgy website or a 7-minute long prog rock anthem about a man shaving his face

I have Granny Cream, Squisherz, and Ready to Shave all in my favorite Spotify playlist.

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wow, Hypnospace Outlaw sure does end really abruptly and in a bummer way

yeah, what'd you think of that ending? It's odd in the moment, though I liked it more on reflection. The change of heart from Dylan makes sense when you consider that he's actually been sitting with this for 20 years, which the game leverages to wrongstep the player, highlighting the limitations of what you can conclude from the archives. As ever, you piece together a person from pieces, which is limited by not just a conflation that ignores the passage of time, but because ultimately how someone presents themselves on the internet is not the full picture.

And then the apology itself which felt unearned, because well, it is. Confessing your crimes and eulogizing the victims in the program that killed them is some unsettling, psychopath shit. He's still a techbro chud who thinks in tech solutions no matter how clearly inappropriate.

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play baba

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i did but i was bad at it

(will spend more time with it eventually)

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kinda put this down after my dog died 2 weeks ago because it was hard to focus, but i still want to finish this. how about a few quick honourable mention:

Observation (No Code)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDqy0aSmu8E

You get to be a shitty bumbling AI who gets lost constantly, which is very entertaining and does not ruin the otherwise unsettling atmosphere or slow-building suspense.

A Bewitching Revolution (Colestia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g7E1tOP4b4

Sometimes you want a nuanced and complex political discussion, and other times you just want some rousing polemic. In this game, you play a witch going around sparking a communist revolution. I've always liked games that involve slowly subverting a space, even more so when it's through tarot readings about the contradictions of capitalism.

Islanders (Grizzly Games)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnDWm9dpu3o

If you like adjacency bonuses, then this is the game for you. Between this and Superflight, Grizzly Games makes relaxing minimalist games that nail their one mechanic, and is definitely a developer to watch.

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