Nora Blake’s Top 5 Games of 2019
It’s the end of the year, and we’re all looking back and making top ten lists. Well, I didn’t play 10 games worth talking about this year, so my list is only 5 games. Also, there’s one game from 2018 in this list because I played it for the first time this year. I’m the author and I make the rules!
5. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
I have been anticipating this game since I backed its Kickstarter, which feels like a decade ago. Bloodstained is, as was promised, a sort of spiritual successor to the Castlevania titles that IGA worked on. What surprised me, though, is that it’s almost like a second draft of one of my favorite entries in that series, Order of Ecclesia. Miriam and Gebel even look cooler than Shanoa and Albus, but it’s not a huge margin. I was immediately invested in the two, and I can’t wait to play as other characters when more DLC is released.
One issue I had with it was the difficulty. This game is hard not only in its combat encounters, but in its obtuseness. I needed to look up where to go next several times, and I don’t think the game’s clues were clear enough at all. I definitely only got through the final boss by the skin of my teeth, and my thumbs were extremely sore afterward. All in all, it’s still a fantastic game, but not better than the others on this list.
4. Control
This game owns! The combat is super fun and satisfying, albeit in need of an easy mode in the last quarter. Jesse Faden is really cool, and I was very fond of her relationship with the entity living inside her head. What can I say, I’m a sucker for plurality. The visuals in the game also bear mentioning, because every single title card that drops made me lose my shit.
Much like Bloodstained, my biggest complaint is that the game is hard. In particular, a couple of late game encounters just felt completely impossible, and it took completely different skills to get past them than those the game had taught me up to that point. Ultimately, I look past this qualm because the presentation is just so fucking slick. There’s a bit where they play a rock song as you go through this kaleidoscopic combat arena and it’s the coolest shit in the world!
3. Timespinner
This wasn’t released in 2019, but it makes in onto this list because I played it this year and I’m the author so I make the rules. Timespinner is another metroidvania, like Bloodstained. That’s one of my favorite genres, and playing one right after the other earlier this fall was a real treat. This game is about time travel, another thing I absolutely adore. It’s fast, it’s fun, and if representation is a thing you like to focus on it has plenty of that as well (I think the only cis het character is the main antagonist?).
In Timespinner, you time travel to examine and disrupt the course of history for a fascist empire, taking clues from one of the two main time periods to make progress in the other. Timespinner is also a short and small game by most standards, much to its benefit. Unfortunately, it’s in this scope that the game has its chief failing; it does not have the scale to accommodate the themes it wants to explore, and the result can ring a bit shallow at points. It’s still very cool to kick down the fascist emperor’s door and kill him, but the limited scale of the game means that there’s no real exploration of how and why history moves outside the realm of specific actions taken by world leaders. It’s a simplified version of a thing I am extremely interested in seeing more of.
2. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
In this, the year of our lord Anakin Skywalker 42 ASW (After Star Wars), Star Wars has been on my mind a LOT. Part of that was the release of the newest movie, which was the most remarkable exercise in cowardice since Bert Lahr. But even before that movie was released, I was anticipating Fallen Order. If you can imagine the sharp and precise combat from Sekiro dulled by blunt force into something much more malleable and approachable and then welded semi-haphazardly onto a platformer like Uncharted or Prince of Persia (2008), then you can imagine what this game plays like. The game takes place between the original and prequel trilogies, and a lot of its core design appear to take a lot of cues from the prequels and their associated extraneous canon. It uses a modern action game sensibility to take what appears to be a discerning combat framework and shape it into primarily a spectacle; not a test of skill or a pitched duel, but a choreographed dance that takes a moment to learn but looks beautiful when mastered.
The story and characters really hooked me in this one. Cere, Merrin, Cal, and Trilla all have this oppressive shadow of trauma hanging over them, the game does a fantastic job ascribing gravity to those weights. What it doesn’t ascribe weight to, like all of Star Wars, is characters’ material ideology. When Trilla cracks under torture and turns to the dark side, she joins up with the Empire who hunted and hurt her. Not because she’s been convinced of some virtue of fascism, but because the characters in Star Wars are always incarnations of ideals. As always, fascism is simply a consequence of individual moral failing rather than a discrete and insidious ideology that preys on desperate people in order to protect capitalist states.
I really hope that these characters can come back and tell more stories in the future, because seeing Cere re-assume the mantle of Jedi and seeing Cal come into his own on this journey were really wonderful moments. I adored all the interactions Merrin had with the rest of the crew to the point that I almost wish this were a TV show, and these characters could go on lots of cool adventures together. I won’t hope too much, but I’ll hope a little now that Disney Plus is around and the Skywalker Saga is over. Anything’s possible in Star Wars now.
1. Code Vein
No game has ever been more specifically targeted at me than Code Vein. Hot vampires in cool clothes fighting monsters with awesome weapons and blood magic, occasionally set to rock songs? Sign me the FUCK up. I absolutely love vampires, in part due to having an unusually sensitive neck as a souvenir of a childhood spine surgery but also in part due to my pet metaphor of vampirism as transness. It’s not a very applicable lens for this game specifically, but it’s the closest I’ve seen to an exercise in it outside of my own game, Facade. From its first pitch, I was on board.
The game is also exceedingly fun to play; I’ve never felt more in tune with a game’s narrative of me being a “blank slate” or “wild card” than I did here. The ability to completely change your character build in moments was really satisfying and allowed me to adjust to the game’s challenges in a way I’m not able to in other games in its space. The pacing of those challenges also impressed me; I struggled with a handful of late game bosses, but not to the point of frustration. The fluidity of tactics available to you really encourages you to try something new when you get stuck instead of quitting or grinding yourself into the ground trying to get past a boss.
The game shows a frailty of community and identity that was really affecting for me. In a large way in 2019 I too have felt like I have lost a part of myself. The pressures of society and capitalism crush our collective windpipe and I’m still healing from having withstood some of the most traumatic and tumultuous months of my life, so seeing the ways that the characters in Code Vein crumble under trauma and have to rebuild themselves after the dust settles really hit home. This game paints a hopeful picture of healing community and friendships that foster personal growth, and that’s what I really needed to close out the decade with.
That’s the list! If you want to complain about it, or if you have your own takes that you’d like to share, you can send emails to my podcast at exportaudiopodcast@gmail.com.
