Every Game I Completed in 2019

It’s the start of a new year AND a new decade, which means it’s time to compile online retrospectives and listicles-a-plenty regarding the year AND decade prior. And this year I’m excited to chronicle my own year in games, armed with a wealth of data I meticulously captured throughout 2019. Being that it’s now January 4th, 2020, I’m already behind the curve as most of the rapturous enthusiasm for year’s end “CONtent” (ooof) fizzles and fades before the prior year has even officially ended. Nonetheless, here’s the list of my completed games for 2019.

By “completed” I am strictly referring only to games for which I saw credits roll in 2019. Effectively, this list excludes numerous games I spent considerable time with but did not finish, and many of my favorite games of this year (Outer Wilds, Sekiro). I’ll round those up in another post. It also inherently excludes online service games or games that (at least seem to) never end in this sense (No Man’s Sky, Hitman 2). Some of my and my family’s mainstays are missing (Beat Saber, Super Smash Brothers, Tetris Effect) but I’ll round those up separately as well.

I wanted to not only capture the games’ titles, but also the date and platform, as to me, these additional details tell a compelling story in their own right: at the beginning of the year, I was committed to catching up on “older” noteworthy games I’d never before completed; thereafter, I played through perhaps my favorite game of 2018 a second time, as I contemplated and re-evaluated my manner and effectiveness as a father; during the summer I played through What Remains of Edith Finch twice in the same day, on two different platforms, first as my oldest daughter slept in and again as we played through it together so I could share its phenomenal storytelling; also in the summer, I clearly had a kick for mystery and walking sim games, sharing part of the fun with my family, solving puzzles with their occasional input; in the fall, all I wanted to do was curl up with my Switch; the PS4 was knocked down as my console of choice later in the year as friendships faded; Xbox Game Pass was transformed in 2019 to include a roster of games I not only wanted to check out, but even play countless hours of.

I was pleasantly surprised to look upon this list and find that for the most part I did manage to maintain my goal of gaming self-edification in 2019 — or, catching up on renowned modern classics I’d missed in the prior decade when I wasn’t playing games, and others I’d missed out on or hadn’t finished in more recent years. It’s also telling that for as much as I kept up with “current” games in 2019 and participated to some extent in the zeitgeist surrounding their releases, few of them were games I actually completed in 2019. But hey, some of them will surely grace my personal lists and compilations at the end of 2020.