Every game I finished in 2019

At some point in 2016, perhaps inspired by Every Game I’ve Finished, I started keeping track of every game I, well, finished. (Also, to keep track of spending, I keep track of every game I buy or receive. I’ve always got an idea what my backlog is - at least, back to 2016.) Most of my prior game opinions have gone by the wayside as I toted them from blog to blog, but the question is whether any of them were worth saving. The answer is not really.

This year, though. This year will be different! Maybe! Without further ado.

Baba Is You

I got as close as I possibly could to 100% completing this game. I’ve missed one flower somewhere and I have absolutely no willpower left to go and find it. And I think it’s safe to say I have mixed feelings, when all is said and done, about Baba Is You. When it’s firing on all cylinders, it’s a fantastic puzzle game - the premise itself is inventive, pushing blocks around to change the fundamental way those blocks interact and behave, and on the best levels Baba rewards playfulness and inventiveness. Those were the ones I absolutely loved, the ones where some interaction I didn’t see coming delighted me, where I accidentally changed myself into WIN, where moving walls around (because now I’m the wall) let me push something just so, the creative ones. This includes the moments where you manage to create alternative exits from puzzles, consuming actual spots on the map as the usual puzzle-solving reward - flowers - and breaking the boundaries of the game in a game that already breaks boundaries.

The problem is that those levels are not the majority.

Especially in the back half of the game, and especially if you want to see every flower and puzzle Baba Is You has to offer, you will almost need a walkthrough (and finding an up-to-date one can be hell, as puzzles have been updated evidently to eliminate solutions the developer didn’t approve of). So many of the puzzles past the halfway point of Baba are combinations of obtuse, seemingly arbitrary steps required to move things into the one square where they’ll be effective, and doing so at exactly the right time, relying on you to understand not just the implications of what the words you’ve strung together do, but also weird side effects, like what you can get by with by pushing it one square at a time by doing some weird sidestep.

This is why I have absolutely no intention of ever going back to this game. I consulted way too many walkthroughs and I got incredibly close and I’m done! I’m just done.

The Longest Five Minutes

On the surface, this seems like it should be exactly my shit: facing the final boss of their quest, the appropriately-named hero Flash Back finds that he no longer recalls where he is, what he’s doing, or how he got there. The rest of his party is forced to remind him because the Demon Lord’s still trying to kill them, and the mechanic for doing so is a classic console RPG.

In reality, nothing you do in the RPG segments actually matters outside of the three objectives for each chapter. This ridiculous, already-thin plot wasn’t helped by the usual over the top NISA silliness (yeah, I get that it’s kind of a silly concept, but still) and it just put me off really quickly.

The Surge

It was free on PS Plus, and on the surface the concept was interesting - you play a wheelchair-bound character who gets strapped to a set of power armor that lets him regain his mobility, but the place he’s been shipped to, which honestly resembles nothing so much as a junkyard winding in and around warehouses, is full of rampaging robots. The combat system lets you aim your attacks at specific body parts, and once you’ve chopped them off you might even be able to use them as weapons.

A great idea, but the combat itself feels really sloppy, especially the hit detection, and the environments are so one-note and bland. I expected nothing and I got what I expected. Finished! Next!

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Now, granted, I haven’t even picked up any of the DLC (not even the early free DLC, adding Jeritza and Anna as playable characters), but I played the heck out of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It consumed me for close to two or three months. I loved it, to be blunt. I loved the inclusion of the time-reversal mechanic as a compromise between casual and hardcore mode, and thus for the first time since the GBA games I played a Fire Emblem on hardcore all the way to the end. I didn’t even lose anyone, no matter how much I wanted to recruit Lorenz and “accidentally” send him to his death. Oops. Such a shame.

I want to go back and replay one of the other routes - possibly the Blue Lions, since I’ve heard they’re the most completely different from the other routes - but I haven’t found the energy to pick it back up and be ready to devote myself to what is actually the longest route in the game. I’ve also heard the new “sewer kids” DLC is hard in really cheap, bad ways, and that doesn’t exactly encourage me to jump back in, either. But I really enjoyed the route I did play, which I felt struck a good balance between getting a picture of the overall plot, and also length of actual play.

(And in case you’re extremely curious, I chose the Church route in the end and married Rhea.)

Untitled Goose Game

HONK!

I picked up Untitled Goose Game on a Friday night after an exhausting day at work; I finished it later that night, having completed everything but the speedrun achievements. I think there is something to be said about tightly crafted little experiences like this, especially ones that are such a playground of unexpected interactions. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts

On the other hand, Sayonara Wild Hearts disappointed me in pretty much the same way as The Longest Five Minutes. The concept was solid, and the soundtrack absolutely slaps, but the controls are slippery and loose - not what you want for a fast, action-y, rhythmic game. Objectives are often unclear, leading to failures before you’re even ready. Mostly I just spent my time enjoying the music before I inevitably fucked up again and Queen Latifah got mad at me. I’m still upset at how much I didn’t like this game.

Pokemon Shield

[Warning: spoilers]

First off I’ll say that I didn’t really care about the incomplete Pokedex in Shield, and I still don’t. The coolest part of the game for me has never been importing a bunch of overpowered out-of-region Pokemon from old games and curbstomping it in that way. That out of the way: I enjoyed a lot of the little changes in this, but it feels like there’s so much potential here that we didn’t see come to fruition, and I’m hoping the expansion pass helps - it seems like it’s heading in the right direction but there’s still some niggling concerns I have about Pokemon Shield. Examples:

• The reversion of some TMs to one-use items that have to be farmed from max raids. Strongly dislike this decision. Unnecessarily grindy.
• The fact that we can’t just trade or battle with people we’ve already friended on the system itself; we’re forced to use 4-digit room codes. That’s an incredibly small collision space, and almost absolutely necessitates voice chat or at least text chat in another app, on another device, to make sure you’re connected to the right person. Someday Nintendo and their affiliates will figure out this internet thing, but this ain’t it, chief.
• The end of the plot - pretty much everything from when you stay at the hotel the night before the championship, right up until the final champion battle. I absolutely still don’t understand what Rose’s problem was (well, actually, I do, it’s a pretty blunt climate-related message) but I still don’t know why he summoned Eternatus. Was it supposed to… stop people from Dynamaxing? Provide resources to the region so it wouldn’t run out? I don’t get it. The post-game stuff with Sordward and Shielbert made a better end game than the actual end game, because the game’s ending was so unbelievably bad even by Pokemon standards.

I haven’t played it a ton other than trying to complete the Galar Pokedex. I usually tell myself I’m going to do some doubles battling on the ladder - I absolutely love the VGC format - but in reality I don’t have the time to train competitive Pokemon, especially since mobile gacha game Epic Seven pretty much scratches the same team building and tweaking itch, but in a way more portable form.

Anyway, last but not least:

Control

I’ve already written about Control elsewhere. It’s still my game of the year. I even got the dumb platinum trophy. I can’t wait for the story DLC to come out, to clear up - or create - more mysteries around the Oldest House. Do yourself a favor and get this game.