It starts with a game I’ve spent dozens of hours hating and ends with something I love in a way I struggle to communicate. Except in this one way: This list is a fucking mess. However much it might have been fun to opine about The State of Games, the truth is that (barring some rhetorical acrobatics) my favorite games of 2019 don’t have much to say about the decade that preceded them. Be embarrassed to include your guilty pleasure if you have to, but do it, and do the work of trying to untangle why it’s jammed itself into your psyche. And top 10 lists are the place where critics ought feel the most self-indulgent and honest. These are sentences begging to be written, but which mean little to me emotionally. A half dozen sentences and phrases just like it followed: “The dominance of games-as-service has never been more clear.” “…one positive: the slow normalization of crossplay.” “After XCOM, the tactics genre found an audience intrigued but cautious.” “What started as a way to draw new monthly subscribers has become a model for the future” “ More games doesn’t necessarily mean better games, and yet…” “It’s been a decade of roguelikes,” I wrote. But when I sat down to write this list of my favorite games of the year, I could feel the pull of this sense-making logic seeping into my words. 3650 days is a lot of days, and if my brain wants to filter down the noise of years the same way it transforms raw, overwhelming sensation into something usable, more power to it.
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