We are a simple species. There’s no denying that we are very primitive and very stupid to the point where we see something and we get happy. We don’t even have to see something to be happy, we can smell something or listen to something and it fills us with satisfaction inside. It is not a bad thing to be happy, it is just something we’re on a constant search for. Sometimes we do find it and it is easy to replicate, and other times it is not. No, I’m not starting a TEDTalk about inner happiness.

I’m saying this because until December I didn’t have a Game of the Year pick. There was plenty to choose from, and I did enjoy quite a few games that I’d played throughout the year. However, none of them are “this is defining of the year or decade,” material. They were all just games from last year. I’m not trying to detract from anything I played, but I did find it hard to say something like The Surge 2 was my game of the year. Death Stranding, John Wick Hex, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, or EDF: Iron Rain weren’t either. They all should be spoken about for one reason or another, but not in those terms.

Now a week (and a bit) on, you can tell what we all picked. I picked Superliminal which Alexx reviewed in November. I’ve already given a short reason why and I did so in the simplest way to explain it all. “It does what Portal does,” which is to say that Pillow Castle’s Superliminal is touching that point in your brain that makes you happy for unexplainable reasons. Well, I say it is impossible to explain but we’re just simple humans. Let me explain.

The French 1896 movie L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is said to have made such an impact on the audience that their little human brains had a visceral reaction. Those of us who know French know the title simplified into English is, “The train arriving at the station.” The entire movie is 50 seconds long, a train pulls into Gare de La Ciotat in La Ciotat France, some people get on and others get off. Looking back it sounds stupid, but it is that visceral reaction one has to what they are seeing and our brain knows it is wrong. In short, they got out of the way of a train coming towards them.

Over time we’ve become a little numb to this feeling that something is wrong. The early days of 3D saw a slight resurrection of that feeling, but for the most part, we’re done. We know the T-Rex isn’t coming out of the screen, the spaceship crashing isn’t going to kill us, and the train is going to flatten us. Instead, we’re having a passive feeling of joy and adrenaline from these visual effects. The closest we’re getting to those early days of cinema with that reaction is VR. If you’ve played VR I’m sure you’ve sworn more than once as something is just there as you turn around. I’m not saying the story of L’Arrivée is true, but we’re close to repeating it.

It is that physical and emotional response that made me say that Superliminal was the game of the year in my books. It is also quite short, much like L’Arrivée and Portal, at about two to three hours it doesn’t overstay its welcome. So what I’m getting around to is that I might not have played Superliminal for days until I lost everything, it just hit what I needed it to. I felt like I was doing something with the gameplay, the story is something you can take or leave, and the final feeling was joy and adrenaline. Would I have liked something longer, with a great story, or more mainstream in the Game of the Year conversation? Not really.

As much of a Dark Souls and Bloodborne fan as I am, I couldn’t get into Abdul’s pick of Sekiro. Death Stranding might have a story, but it is god awful at doing it well. I’m not a fan of horror, and with that Resident Evil was far out of my wheelhouse. The Outer Worlds was my second option if my local Walmart didn’t have Death Stranding that week. If I had played it, Control might have been up there, but I still haven’t touched that one. So my runner up isn’t even among everyone’s consensus of what made their year in gaming great.

Plot twist, it isn’t even one of those that I’ve mentioned already. I had to say it was Codemaster’s F1 2019 in my books that took second place. Generally for the same reason as I gave for Superliminal; and not because of the other French film, C’était un Rendez-vous (It Was a Date). It is about driving very fast in European cities at one point. While it wasn’t brand new and turning heads, it did something that no others did for me this year: It was Euro Truck Simulator 2, but a lot faster.

No, it is similar in the sense that I got something out of it that was close to joy but I wasn’t playing it for that. The Euro Truck simile is what does it, I’d spend hours and hours playing it, building towards a mild goal, while doing all of it absentmindedly. It is the game I’d put on for an hour or so when I was waiting for something, watching something on another monitor, or just thinking about something as fickle as the self-congratulatory setups I do with the start of these articles. I’m happy to play it for hours, but I’m just as happy saving it midway through a session and doing something else.

In the review, I referenced that I don’t care for sports, just as I don’t care for F1, watching paint dry, or teaching an Alzheimer’s patient the chorus to Agadoo. If I’m very honest, ten years ago I would have rather watched paint dry than watch F1. Now they are about fifty-fifty with the idea of paying David Cage a compliment or stamping on a puppy’s head for the sexual pleasure of a politician. Even when I do watch it and I only get into it a little – no, I don’t stamp on a puppy’s head from time to time – I still don’t care as much as I do with anything else. I care more about a thrilling episode of The Weather during The News.

Nevertheless, F1 2019 is a game I’ve played for over 80 hours. Most of those hours are following the review written back in June, and those don’t include the four to six hours I’ve lost from either the game hard crashing the Xbox or the Xbox overheating and turning itself off. There is clearly something that’s hit a sweet spot in my head where I can put it on for a couple of hours, play a full race weekend, and not get bored. The handful of times I have found myself bored, for lack of a better phrase, I’d keep coming back either a few days or a week later.

During our little break away from actively writing and publishing every weekday that we took during the New Year, I played a good 20 hours. From the US Grand Prix through to the Monaco race weekend; a good fist full of races with their three practice and three qualifying sessions. All of which surprised me until I sat down to think about it.

F1 isn’t particularly action-packed, the game isn’t perfect either. I’d go as far as to say the AI is awful at either safely defending their position without incurring damage or being safely blue flagged (they need to be overtaken by the leaders). Given I’ve played for as long, I’ve also seen myself leading whole races by anything between twenty-five seconds, two-minutes, and a whole five-minute lead. My joke of being a “driving god” in the review seems stupid, but when you’re beating the latter difficulties with that ease it seems like an apt description.

It seems ridiculous to say it was in the running as my “Game of the Year” when it is a yearly release; it would be like saying EA’s FIFA, Madden, or NHL series are games of the year. The Euro Truck comparison also makes it hard to say it was in the running; I love to change gear, change gear, check my mirrors, kill a prostitute, change gear, change gear. However, I had great difficulty trying to justify it as “Game of the Year material.”

Then after I’d written my piece, sent it in, and moved on I played something else. Rather I should say, I have been playing a little tiny bit of something else because it is long, the story is great, and it does fall in the consensus of those giving sexual favors to the indie games market. Yes, I played a bit of Disco Elysium. In lieu of a proper review delving deep into something that should be experienced, I think it is best to just tell you where it would be and why you should just play it.

“Play it” is rather generous when you think about it, Disco Elysium isn’t really a game, it is a book you play with a little. I’ve heard a lot of comments about Planescape: Torment, that other 90s game from the developers of Fallout 1 and 2. While I can’t speak on those comments, I would say they line up with my experience. There is a lot of reading, too much reading; though for a dyslexic that writes reams and reams of nonsense, that is a lot of reading. Some of it you will never see in your first playthrough.

You play as [memory redacted] waking up from a lifetime of torment from alcohol abundance, you’re naked, the room is trashed, and your tie is on the running ceiling fan. So you don’t know your name, where you are, how you got there, or why you are in this place. It sounds like every game, but it is that writing. Every detail, every artistic decision, and all the options are beautifully verbose and full of life. The description of simple objects, people, and locals are specifically chosen to both show the writers have a thesaurus and knowledge of their tone.

It is dark, cold, gritty, warm, happy, gut-punching, and creepy all the same time. It’s a very personal and philosophical piece not about the subject the character is meant to care about, but the character themselves. You spend just as much time learning who you are, the world around you, and the people you meet, just as much as you do about your character’s job. The world alone feels very 1984 and generally Orwellian, putting the tone into a somewhat dark place.

Yet never does it feel like there are characters taking themselves unnecessarily serious. It isn’t Batman where we only like things in black and very very dark grey, either the characters are done with your previous antics or are professional. It is the writing, the copious amount of it feels both tiring and entertaining. With tiny amounts of spoken dialogue, just enough to give you a sense of character, everyone feels just right.

I can’t go into too much detail because I may have played a lot of it, though most of it was reading, and the gameplay aspect of the game isn’t all that prevalent. If there is anything that is gameplay and that I have played to a large enough degree, it is the random dice rolls. Or rather there would be an expletive between those as random and dice rolls are as infuriating as always. You might have an 80+ percent chance at something, but you weren’t wearing the right clothes to call a large man a git.

To stop myself from going too far, I’ll say this: You should play all three for different reasons. As my only drug of choice is coffee, Superliminal feels like what it would be to drop acid and do a Mensa puzzle. F1 2019 is driving a rocket-powered go-kart on ice to relax after the acid comedown. Then Disco Elysium is purposefully making your brain hurt from both too much reading and too much great writing. Then you need to go back to the go-karts on ice to clear your head again.

Yeah, they might not all seem like a must-have from short, half unintelligible, and bland descriptions, but they are all easy to get into. Whether you like racing games, verbose and extraneous descriptions of the complete nothing you see when you close your eyes, thinking so far outside the box it breaks into small boxes or not. They are accessible, they are the best of their genres last year, and they are fun. That’s all I want from games, fun that either requires a stiff drink afterward or lets me relax for a bit.

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