2019 is nearly done, and to put a ribbon on it all we present to you the Eurogamer reader's top 50 games of the year. Thank you all for your contributions, and for proving once again you've all got better taste in gaming than us. Although I'm not quite sure about your take on Fallen Order... Enjoy!

What we said: "A simple no-frills game that's more Destruction Derby than Flatout, evoking a different era for the racing genre with its no-nonsense approach. Unassuming it may be, but it's also absolutely wonderful, a knockabout racer that sticks to what Bugbear does best; this is all about cars lunching one another in a variety of events that are tuned towards maximum carnage, and as ever there's a cathartic joy to be found in seeing fields of pre-loved machinery crumble at your fingertips."

"Best racing game in years," writes merf. "More fun than Forza and Gran Turismo and makes every everything Codemasters turn out look pish. Looks amazing, handles like a dream, excellent AI opponents, great post release support, a tuning system that makes sense and a physics system that feels like it needed next generation power to make possible." Which is all well and good, but they go on to diss Fast & Furious and I'M NOT HAVING THAT.

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Editor's note: In 2018, the Eurogamer office divided itself into two clear game of the year camps: Team Tetris Effect and Team Fortnite. This year was much less clearly defined, and there were four or five games in serious contention, from the intricacy and grandeur of Sekiro: Shadows Dies Twice to the minimalist purity of Lonely Mountains: Downhill.

It was symptomatic of a year when the major studios and publishers were quiet but the indie scene saw an astonishing explosion of creativity. Some of those indies found a receptive audience on curated subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade, and it was on Game Pass that our pick for game of the year found a life of its own, spreading virally through players' breathless stories of discovery.

This was a great year for games that took you places but kept you grounded, grateful for the ground beneath you - and none did that better than Mobius Digital's bewitching space oddity, Outer Wilds: a pocket universe, perfect for exploration. Happy new year to you and yours, and we'll see you on the other side. -Oli

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

A hard-boiled, wild-eyed cousin of Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium is a game about defeat. Specifically it's about the defeat of the political Left, set on the run-down waterfront of a quasi-European metropolis that once played host to a communist revolution. Revachol was a city built "to resolve History", you're told early on, where "the terrible questions of our time will be answered". Five decades down the line, those answers are writ large in the bullet holes from mass executions, the bigoted orphans roaming the mouldy tenements and the craters left by the neoliberal governments that brought Revachol's revolution to heel.

It's certainly a painful game to contemplate if, say, you recently voted Labour, but Disco Elysium's atmosphere of despair should cling to anybody who has ever sought a better life for themselves, regardless of their politics. Early in the story, you dream of your own corpse dangling from a tree in the scattered light of a disco ball. Through blackened, bubbling lips, the body proceeds to damn you for this world's dreadful plight. "You failed," it croaks, against the melancholy lilt of a distant guitar. "You failed me. You failed Elysium. Four point six billion people - and you failed every single one of them." Coughed up by the past your character is desperately trying to forget, the accusation is ludicrous but horribly convincing: it reflects the demented self-aggrandisements of both severe depression and video games. You aren't just an amnesiac has-been detective, after all, drinking and drugging himself into a not-so-early grave. You're the Player. If any single individual bears responsibility for the state of this universe, it's surely you.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

I can't remember anything about Ghostbusters 2, except for one line from Egon Spengler that I will never forget. "We had half a Slinky. But we straightened it."

Okay, I'm not sure that's exactly the line, but anyway. He's talking about his childhood. God I miss Harold Ramis.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

I'm going to guess there's no other game on our end of year list more polarising than Death Stranding. The good news is you know where you stand pretty quickly, once the first of many lengthy cutscenes with Kojima's unique brand of techno babble and acronyms have come and gone, and you're faced with what the game is actually about. In this case, the game is about strapping a pair of muddy boots on your feet, hoisting a tall stack of cargo on your back, and walking through beautiful vistas with barely anything of use on the horizon.

For what is a fairly high concept game about death, ghosts, and reconnecting isolated communities in a post-apocalyptic America, Death Stranding doesn't ask you to do much at all. You pick up a delivery, and drop it off somewhere else. That's basically it. Though it's a game with vast stretches of land to navigate, you always know where you need to go, and you're almost always well equipped for the task - you just need the patience to get there.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

I didn't expect to be sat here at the end of 2019 batting for a battle royale, either.

Looking back, I think Apex Legends' appeal lies in what it isn't as much as what it is. When it released, I was coming down from a four-year-long Destiny habit. Destiny remains one of my favourite all-time games, and introduced me to a comradery - and competitiveness - I'd never had before, but good lord, it's a hell of a commitment, and one I was sadly struggling to maintain as professional and familial demands ramped up mid-year. (It's also difficult to maintain momentum when your clanmates quit one by one... but that's a different article for a different day, perhaps!)

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

Sometimes, playing Lonely Mountains: Downhill, I can't help but think the aim of the game is to stop playing it. On the surface this is a game about going downhill fast, about beating the clock, cutting corners, sprinting. The race to the finish often ends in a rush of relief, above all, that you've made it there intact. And then at the same time it's the absolute opposite: tranquility, calm, an invitation to stay a while and just listen. At once you're baited into crashing through it and challenged into slowing down for a ponder.

I could, honestly, leave it there. Lonely Mountains' tug-of-war between styles of play is enough in itself, the game a clever little buried lede of one kinetic, mechanical thing on the surface (timers, challenges, sprint buttons, checkpoints) and another, more contemplative, just beneath (crunching leaves, branching paths, hidden oases with fallen trunks to sit on and views to be quietly taken in). But there is so, so much more going on here. Lonely Mountains is, above all, a game about experience - about the act of experiencing, in fact - and played through that lens it's not just clever, it's divine.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

Control is a great game, because you can use your psychic powers to pick up an office chair, carry it to the nearest bathroom and launch it into a toilet. You can then pick up that broken toilet and smash it into another toilet, slowly becoming lost in a world of bathroom destruction, until you're surrounded by rubble. Sadly your well crafted demolition never lasts that long, as the Oldest House will always rebuild its bathrooms. I like to imagine, however, that a Bureau employee will visit the bathroom just before it resets and be horrified to learn that the end of the world can be so much worse.

This path of destruction doesn't have to be confined to the office bathrooms either. The Federal Bureau of Control is full of fire extinguishers, tables, benches, large pieces of piping and forklifts, to name a few, which you can lift into the air and cause some damage with. If you can see it in Control, then there's a large chance that you can supernaturally throw it at someone's face.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

I didn't want a Resident Evil 2 remake.

I've had my fill of remasters/remakes/reimaginings. Maybe it was the fault of those hysterically dreadful Silent Hill "remasters" at the end of the last console-gen, but I'd become very jaded, very quickly, at the rabid appetite for reskinning decade-old games. Usually, I'm nonplussed about them. In Resident Evil 2's case, I was apoplectic.

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Over the festive break we'll be running through our top 20 picks of the year's best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer's game of the year on New Year's Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here - and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

Most card games are about building decks, permanent decks, to use in every battle, and for a while, I'm totally on board with it. I enthusiastically dream up themes and strategies bigger than 'use the most powerful card' and wonder how anyone will possibly beat me. But it never lasts. A mixture of earning cards too slowly and increasing complexity puts me off, and I check out.

I could go and copy builds online, like everyone else, the cheats, but it bugs me. I like thinking of the strategies myself, it makes me feel fuzzy inside. But I can't keep up with the internet hive mind, so, before long, I fall behind. Then I see everyone trot out the same strategies against me time and time again, and I get cheesed off. What happened to spontaneity?

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