This list should be more complete than last year’s, since I actually kept it updated throughout the year.
I’m making some minor changes to the legend this year. Taking some inspiration from John’s post last year, I’ve decided to re-purpose the star icon to indicate a personal favorite, and added a check mark to indicate I finished a game. I also dropped the “trophy” icon for 100% completions since they’ve become rare.
Legend
🌟 A personal favorite. (Not necessarily for everyone.)
✔️ Beat the game.
👍 Recommended if you haven’t played it.
👎 Avoid it. It’s terrible.
PS4
Spider-Man ✔️ 🌟 👍
Managed to finish it this year, along with its DLC. Fantastic game.
God of War 👍
Lost interest in this one early in the year and never managed to come back. Hoping to finish it some day.
Red Dead Redemption 2 👍
This game looks amazing, and has a lot of depth. I just can’t keep the “run” and “shoot” buttons straight, though… So far, I’ve accidentally shot a guy in the middle of town and punched my horse.
Switch
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 🌟 👍
Continued playing this into 2019.
Starlink: Battle for Atlas
Still playing this one.
Overcooked! 2
Great with a group. Tough with two players.
Death Cubed
Played a demo with my wife. I like the puzzles, but the movement is annoying. While death is part of the game, it’s frustrating when you clip a corner and go flying off the map.
Splatoon 2
I wish there was a better single-player mode here, since I’m not interested in multiplayer at all.
Hyrule Warriors
It’s like a modern Dynasty Warriors, but fun!
Golf Story
Because all the world’s problems can be solved with golf.
Super Mario Odyssey
This was a really fun game, but I’d like to know what the designers were smoking when they came up with this… A kingdom of sentient hat-people who can possess other creatures? Weird.
Untitled Goose Game
Finally, a game where I have the freedom to be a complete asshole without hurting anyone.
Xbox
I played more Xbox this year thanks to Game Pass. I’m hoping it continues to be a great way to play new games.
Outer Wilds
Crackdown 3
Gears 5
PC
Oxygen Not Included 🌟👍
Still my favorite PC game.
Two Point Hospital 🌟 👍
If you liked Theme Hospital, you’ll like this one.
Elite: Dangerous 🌟
Played with some of the newer content this year. Finally managed to unlock some engineers to tune my equipment, and discovered the new deep core mining added to the game which I find both fun and profitable.
TerraTech 🌟
I’ve played this on and off for a few years. A few updates with new parts pulled me back to it. (I can finally build my hovering fortress!)
If you’ve never played it, it’s a big sandbox game. You can build just about anything you can imagine. You can gather resources around the world; destroy AI-controlled vehicles and collect dropped parts; and take on missions to unlock parts. Easy to sink a lot of time into.
Surviving Mars 🌟
I still love this game. Great music, pretty chill and challenging at the same time. This year introduced the “Green Planet” DLC, which lets you terraform Mars and make it a lush green paradise! As I made Mars greener, I found myself missing the red planet.
Destiny 2 🌟👍
My go-to FPS when I want to just shoot some things. The Season of Opulence this year was a big hit with me. The Menagerie was a fun new mode and I enjoyed being able to somewhat choose my rewards using the chalice.
Destiny’s move to Steam was great, and the Season of Undying introduced a lot of great new content. The new armor system is definitely a step in the right direction. I even got my first title – Undying – after some last-minute grinding that was rewarding but tedious.
And now that Destiny is free to play, it’s easy to recommend.
Scanner Sombre
A spooky VR game where you explore a cave with nothing but a fancy handheld LIDAR device.
BattleTech
A few new DLC packs with new mechs and the skill revamp had me coming back. I finally managed to beat the Smithon mission that was holding me back.
Diablo 3
I come back to this every season to play with my wife. Season 16’s free Ring of Royal Grandeur made some interesting builds possible. I played a Barbarian for the first time and named her Barbararian (the Barbarian Librarian).
Season 17 had me back to playing my Necromancer, “LichPlease”, to try out some of the adjustments in the latest patch.
Forts
Simple, fun, a little hectic sometimes.
Driftland: The Magic Revival
An RTS where you move floating islands around and use magical abilities to help your warriors. Feels a lot like Settlers but without the supply chain stuff.
Particle Fleet: Emergence ✔️
An interesting RTS with a short story and support for custom ships and player-made maps. A good challenge without being impossible.
Risk of Rain 2
I played the first Risk of Rain and it was fun but fizzled out pretty quick for me. I was hesitant to play the new one, but got it for my birthday. It’s pretty fun, solo-able (which is important to me these days), and has plenty of unlocks and progression. Sometimes finding the teleporter is a chore, though.
Bad North
It’s like a tiny tactical tower defense game. You get a few armies to defend a small island from invaders, with each map getting more difficult. Certain islands have special rewards, like new armies or special items.
Graveyard Keeper
A management game with a story. This game was pretty tedious at the beginning, but after I had a few zombies handling the basics I was able to have more fun.
Unheard
A fun little puzzle game where the gimmick is that you have to deduce things using an audio track.
Landinar: Into the Void
Take missions, earn money, upgrade your ship, repeat. Fun, but there are lots of games that do this now. The ship building aspect is pretty good.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order 🌟👍
Great gameplay, some slightly annoying platforming. Combat is fantastic.
Cliff Empire
Frostpunk Lite. Starts off easy but things can quickly fall apart. It’s fun to maintain the balance.
Aven Colony
Another Frostpunk Lite. I have a type.
Outer Worlds 🌟
It’s Fallout with a new skin. It’s still as fun as Fallout and I like the hyper-capitalist dystopian world it presents.
Mindustry
Picked up during the Steam sale. It’s a fun little harvesting plus tower defense game with a surprising amount of depth.
Jurassic World: Evolution 👍
Another one from the Steam sale. This one took me by surprise. It’s a theme park game with a lot of genuine Jurassic Park stuff added in – you send teams to dig for fossils, extract dinosaur DNA, incubate dinosaurs and release them into your park. You have to deal with storms and the dinosaurs themselves.
GRIP
A fun combat racing game.
Tabletop
Azul 🌟👍
Easy to play, fun, colorful, and has great components. Highly recommended.
Almost Got ‘Im
I’ve never been a big fan of Coup or Resistance, but this game is similar and much more interesting to play. I accidentally subdued Batman as Catwoman and lost.
Villainous
Fun and well themed. The game seems pretty well balanced, but there is some luck-of-the-draw involved with several of the villains.
Epic Spell Wars: Battle at Mount Skullzfyre
A great game with a lot of humor.
Yokohama Deluxe
A fun little economic engine builder. Takes a while to play, but there seems to be plenty of replayability. The deluxe version has some really nice components, though the stickers for the point tokens were a bit too large for the wooden token. (I 3D-printed replacements.)
Reef 🌟
Similar to Azul in a lot of ways. Simple to play, fun, and strategic. Played at Mox Boarding House while visiting John and Christina in Seattle.
Jumpdrive
A faster, simpler version of Race for the Galaxy.
DropMix 🌟
Stumbled on this a while back and was interested, but then copies of the base game were dumped at Five Below for $10. Easy buy. This being a Harmonix game, it’s fantastic. And some of how it works is simply magic. Fun to play with a group or even solo. The only drawback is in collecting the cards, which can get expensive.
Splendor 🌟👍
I end up playing this a few times every year. Still fantastic.
Fences
It’s Carcassonne-lite. Easy to play with cute barnyard animals.
Master of the Galaxy
A 4X game I’ve had for a while (backed it on Kickstarter), and finally got a chance to play it with my brother over the holidays. It’s fun and pretty easy to play.
Sagrada 🌟👍
A beautiful game about making stained glass windows using dice. Fun and a perfect amount of difficulty.
Tiny Epic Mechs
As usual for the Tiny Epic series of games, this is a pretty big game in a tiny box. I’m not sure about how well balanced the characters are, but in my one play with my brother, we forgot some resource collection rules that made it very lopsided.
Xtronaut: The Game of Solar System Exploration
Designed by the leader of the OSIRIS-REx mission, this is more of a hard-science game about exploring the solar system. It’s really simple to play and plays very fast.