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.
The Game Awards, the annual flurry of new game announcements interspersed here and there with bits of chit-chat and trophies, has come to an end for 2019. This year's event didn't really feel like it had any mega-blockbuster game reveals—no new Elder Scrolls game, or Mass Effect revivals—but there were certainly some big moments: Microsoft revealed a new Xbox, the Series X, and a new flagship game, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and a new MMO set in the Magic: The Gathering universe is on the way, which could be fun.
And yes, there were award winners, too: Quite a few of them, in fact, and some honest surprises, foremost among them that Death Stranding didn't run away with the whole thing. It did well, winning three awards including Best Game Direction, but the big dog this year was actually the outstanding detective RPG Disco Elysium, which claimed four trophies. Yet neither was selected as Game of the Year.
Which game earned top prize this year? Read on to find out. And don't miss our rundown of all the new trailers that appeared at The Game Awards right here.
Winter brings out a part of me that immediately seeks a mountain of blankets in which to burrow. Even in my seasonally confused state of Texas, the weather has tended towards the chilly and left me with little excuse not to have a kettle boiling interminably as I layer on socks and pull the biggest comforter from the top of the closet. But this presents a problem likely familiar to other cozy connoisseurs: how does one game while properly bundled?
I will admit it does limit possibilities considerably. That’s why I’ve curated a small selection of games perfectly playable while your other hand keeps coffee or tea always within sipping range.
In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree.
It is my failure and my shame for all to see, rotting in plain sight.
Martainaise, the broken-down home of Disco Elysium s broken-down police story, is an excoriating light shone not just upon its broken-down policeman, but also upon me, and my failure to be the person I thought I was. It is my mid-life crisis writ in grey rainfall, my dread realisation that death is coming and I m not who I ever meant to be.
In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree. Decaying in the rain. It s been there for days. Everyone sees it, no-one mentions it.