It’s December, 2019. It’s Christmas in a few days. I’m exhausted.

This year was a lot, readers. I’ve been running on fumes since January, and it took some bad news last month to realise just how exhausting it’s been.

I couldn’t put together an actual, capital-GOTY Game Of The Year list for 2019 if I tried. I think I maybe played, at a stretch, eight new games this year. I’m sure that Star Wars lark was fun. The Outer Worlds/Wilds looks way better than The Outer Wilds/Worlds. But between jetting off to events, quitting jobs, moving my PC across town and diving back into the freelance furnace, I didn’t keep up with games well in 2019.

Wow, that’s kind of a bad look for someone who makes a career of writing on games, huh! But I didn’t like, not play games at all. Don’t be daft. Besides returning to comfortable classics, I played a fair few bangers in 2019. I caught up with some absolute jams I missed from past years, and found some tiny gems on website-of-the-year itch dot io. Here’s a wee rundown of the games (old and new) that got me through this wild-ass year.

The Year Of The Mech

Hey kid. Did you, uh… know that I, Nat Clayton, enjoy big stompin’ robots?

This July, we launched our own sad mech game - an existential drama that left plenty of folk crying and shaking when trying it out at shows. A roaring success, then.

But in 2019, I spent way more time in other people’s cockpits. I caught up on Titanfall (we’ll get to that), spent a lot of time in a hacked-together Hawken client, and finally checked out Neon Genesis Evangelion when its Netflix release brought the discourse screaming onto my feed. More importantly, I returned to Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech, picking up the season pass and bringing a full Career to completion.

What a game, y’all. Now complete, BattleTech is a phenomenal package. Urban missions present new tactical opportunities, where movement is never a given and cover never permanent. I picked up the Bull Shark, HBS’ bespoke new Assault mech, at the very end of my run - the game rewarding my hard work with an absolute bastard of a ‘bot that can turn foes to scrap with a look.

It shines brighter in comparison to this month’s MechWarrior 5. I so, dearly wanted to love MW5 - but it’s a lifeless affair. Generic butt-rock accompanies too-visible tile-based terrain, forcing you into the role of a tepid fart of a protagonist embarking on a revenge plot pulled from any PS2 game. Alone as a successor to a decades-old series, it’s fine. But BattleTech proved that the ageing universe could go beyond hot-shot pilots and worn paperback plots.

Worse still, it doesn’t even support the Steel Battalion controller. Ah, well. At least walking through tower blocks is always a lark.

Squidtoons 2

I caved. I finally bought a Switch. The Lite looks well cute in banana yellow, and there was a hyper-stylish new Mech game out in Daemon X Machina. In hindsight, I don’t really rate DXM (it’s fun as hell, but the story is forced and throwaway), but the Switch? It’s pretty bloody good, lads.

There were some bangers in the first few weeks. Untitled Goose Game is honkin’ great, and I can’t undersell how wild it is to play Thumper on a bus (please don’t only play Thumper on a bus, but if you can, play Thumper on a bus). I’m borrowing Breath Of The Wild from a pal and yeah, y’all were right about that one. One game rises far above the rest, though. One day, I picked up a cute wee game called Splatoon 2.

I haven’t been seen since.

I’d kinda given up on finding a new, good team shooter to obsess over. Something to completely devour me in the way Hawken or Super Monday Night Combat did back in the day. Splatoon is phenomenal, a hectic upbeat 4v4 party that combines momentum and map control in one simple mechanic. It’s impossible to watch but a joy to play - and hey, when has that ever stopped Overwatch?

Splatoon filled the empty space in my heart once occupied by Jet Set Radio. Inkopolis is an urban battleground driven by music, Tokyo-To with a fishy twist and killer fashion. It’s a weird and wild world to exist in, and I’ve taken to just popping into empty maps to soak in the atmosphere. Splatoon’s singleplayer campaigns don’t quite carry that vibe, but they’re wildly creative nonetheless. Agent 4’s story is Super Mario Galaxy with guns. Octo Expansion is that, but… Portal?

It’s ignited a joy that would’ve had 18-year-old Tumblr Nat neck-deep in fandom. Bitter, tired 25-year-old Twitter Nat is just along for the ride, furious at herself for not having picked it up sooner. Splatoon 2 is one of those games that’ll stick with me for a long, long time.

Respawn make good games. huh.

No, I didn’t play the Jedi game.

Why would I want to, anyway? Callum Starwars’ lightsabre romp looks fine and all, but that’s not what I go to Respawn for. On track with Splatoon 2, I didn’t pick up Titanfall 2 ‘til long after its release. Me. The Mech liker. Shocking.

Big mistake, lads. Turns out parkour-running, mech-gunning team shootin’ action is entirely my shit? I got into Titanfall 2 around the time Apex Legends dropped, along with thousands of new pilots who wanted to see what they’d missed first time around.

Here’s a take, though. That campaign? It’s okay. It’s… fine. 7/10. Standards for singleplayer shooters must’ve been awful in 2016, because while the novelty levels are neat, the real belters are few and far between. They’re also not enough to hold up how naff the setting is - a beautiful, mil-tech sci-fi world with absolutely no character behind its main actors.

It took Apex to turn the Frontier into something with character - just enough to add some devilishly fun characters into the Respawn battle royale. ApeLegs is probably the 2019 game I spent the most time with in 2019. I’d missed the BR craze - PUBG was pricey and dour-looking, while Fortnite moves too fast to keep up with.

Apex, though? It’s brill. Wallrunning and mechs aren’t missed when you’re sliding down hillsides and vaulting entire buildings. It keeps delivering, too. The latest map blew King’s Canyon out of the water. Halloween resurrected Halo 3 zombies and revived Titanfall’s dropship escapes. I’ve taken time away (for uh… squid reasons) but I’m pumped as hell to see what’s next.

To all the Itch games I met along the way

Oh! I almost forgot writing this, but my Itch library exploded this year.

A lotta that’s down to doing news coverage for Rock Paper Shotgun for a few months there, mind. In the hunt for neat stuff to write about we uncovered a lot of hidden gems. That also means it’s hard to say anything new here, so I’ll add links to my past words as I name ‘em.

No Players Online is a haunting revisit of dead servers, something I’m all too familiar with. An Afternoon Rippling is warm, a lonely road trip through the strange and surreal lives of strangers. Throw Cubes At Brick Towers To Collapse Them is exactly what it says on the tin, and shouldn’t have eaten so much of my time as it should have. Eat Girl is both a fascinating modern retelling of Pac Man, and a wordless, deeply melancholy exercise in tone. I finally discovered Sokpop’s library of bouncy, daft games including the brilliant timewaster Pupper Park.

They weren’t all passing curiosities, mind. I got deeply in Noita this year. Part Spelunky, part “that powder game wot you played on the school PC”, I’d have gone all in on Noita if my rig could run its simulationist pixels but a little better.

...and the rest

Of course, there’s a bunch more stuff worth mentioning. The early days of Nate Crowley’s RPS Minecraft server were a bizarre riot, as noted by Sin’s fantastic Hermit diaries. I’ve returned to Team Fortress 2 and Garry’s Mod more times than I care to admit in the last 12 months. Finally, 2019 was the year I broke the World of Warcraft habit for good. After narrowly avoiding being sucked into a hole with Classic, I’m ready to admit that I’m done with Azeroth for good.

I don’t know what 2020 holds - in games and in life equally. Next year’s tentpoles (Cyberpunk 2077, Half Life: Alyx) won’t be for me, either for lack of interest or lack of expensive plastic headsets. I often feel out of the loop on new releases, which is a stressful problem to have when trying to make a career outta them.

But then I remember Dreamfeel’s If Found comes out next year. I remember that Ethen Redd has to release Killer Auto and Blazing Legion eventually. I remember that Hyper Light Drifter is getting a 3D sequel at some point, that there’s still an entire series of Halo games yet to hit PC. There’s plenty of good shit on its way. I’ve probably never heard of my favourite game of 2020.

Guess we’ll just see what happens, eh?