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33 games released in 2019 and reviewed here, best first.
33 reviews
A detective RPG with no combat, twenty-four skills that argue with you inside your own head, and writing that has no real rival in the medium. Its negative reviews are almost entirely from people who call it a masterpiece and ask you not to buy it.
9.5 / 10
The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.
9 / 10
FromSoftware throws out the build variety and co-op that define its other games and replaces them with a single unbreakable rule — get better at deflecting, or don't get past this boss — and turns that gamble into one of the sharpest action games ever made.
9 / 10
The game that invented the deckbuilding roguelike as a genre in its own right, still sitting at 97% positive on Steam seven years on, and still worth the asking price even with a sequel already in Early Access.
9 / 10
A tower-defense puzzle wearing gacha-RPG clothes, where the placement grid matters more than the banner history — and where the sanity bar, not the wallet, is the thing actually managing your time.
8.5 / 10
The Paper Mario game a huge share of its own reviewers say Nintendo stopped making — turn-based RPG combat, real puzzle-solving abilities, genuine charm — built by a small independent team instead, and rarely called out for anything beyond a handful of specific, old-school JRPG design choices.
8.5 / 10
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI doesn't reinvent the turn-based JRPG, and that's the point — an orchestral score, a full second 2D presentation of the same 100-hour campaign, and combat that trusts the format instead of subverting it.
8.5 / 10
Read review of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
A free browser idler that grew into one of Steam's most respected incrementals by refusing to explain itself, stacking rebirth systems on rebirth systems until a wiki tab stops being optional and starts being furniture.
8.5 / 10
A space-colony simulation where the number that scales isn't a character level — it's the tangle of pipes, wires and thermal gradients you're personally responsible for keeping alive, and the game never once lets physics take a day off.
8.5 / 10
A factory game where your conveyor belts double as your ammo supply, so a bottleneck in copper isn't a spreadsheet problem, it's a hole in your wall. Free and open source on Android and itch.io, a paid one-off on Steam, and one of the most distinctive marriages of automation and tower defence around.
8 / 10
A ragdoll physics sandbox at 98.7% positive with a Workshop full of community mods — and a February 2026 incident where one of those mods spread itself across the Workshop and had to be shut down.
8 / 10
An emotionally overwhelming, near-universally acclaimed western epic — undermined for over six straight years by a mandatory launcher that reviewers say can prevent you from playing even the offline single-player campaign, and a 2024 "Labor of Love" award many felt the game's own neglect made absurd.
8 / 10
A quarter-century-old RTS landmark, still played and beloved by a genuinely intergenerational audience — and, since early 2025, at the center of a real controversy among its own most dedicated veterans over new Three Kingdoms civilizations they say abandon the series' historical design philosophy.
7.5 / 10
A beloved co-op space-building sandbox with three distinct eras in its review history — an adored Early Access, a 1.0 launch derailed by an EULA backlash that had nothing to do with the game, and a 2025 wave of long-term fans warning newcomers about DLC and premium currency arriving after a "strategic acquisition."
7.5 / 10
A colony sim that turns its whole progression system into a programming lesson — you don't unlock better robots, you unlock better scripts, and the game lives or dies on whether that scripting language can keep up with the colony you build with it.
7.5 / 10
A 2019 Steam idle-RPG where the class you pick isn't a build for life — it's a costume you're expected to change every run, and the game is built to make that swapping the whole point.
7.5 / 10
A shipwrecked hero levels up by winning minigames, not by clicking through menus. SoulGame Studio's sequel to its cult flash hit turns stat training into the whole game, and that idea is both the best and most exhausting thing about it.
7.5 / 10
A free, solo-developed idle RPG on its 161st update after seven years — with a monetisation model its biggest spenders defend, and a review calling it abandoned that the patch notes flatly disprove.
7.5 / 10
A survival-crafting game that replaces its genre's usual menu-driven fiddling with a diegetic system — you inspect your own wounds, dig leeches out with your fingers and physically reach into your pack for a fire kit — built around a sanity mechanic that can hallucinate you to death. A separate, heavily narrative Story Mode sits alongside the open sandbox and has drawn specific, credible criticism for how it depicts the Amazon's indigenous Yabahuaca people.
7 / 10
Tech Tree Games' 2019 space-mining idle has outlasted most of its mobile peers by giving the genre's usual ore-and-upgrade loop a manager layer, a reset-friendly prestige system and weekly ranked tournaments — then undercutting some of that goodwill with a loot-box-flagged IAP menu and a persistent offline-tracking bug.
7 / 10
Smilegate RPG's isometric action MMO still has the best raid encounter design the genre has produced, and still asks players to climb a honing ladder brutal enough that Amazon is now shipping a way to skip most of it. Reviewed as the Western service heads into an August 2026 server merge.
7 / 10
A charming, Ghibli-inspired post-apocalyptic crafting and farming life-sim that's built a genuinely devoted, cross-generational fanbase over six years — while a long, consistent thread of its own reviews keeps arguing the developers never quite finished fixing it.
7 / 10
A free browser idle-RPG about running a wizard's lair that quietly became one of the genre's most influential designs, then got left behind by its own creator and kept alive since by a scattered handful of fans.
7 / 10
Ubisoft Blue Byte's Industrial Revolution city-builder remains Very Positive across more than 32,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's most visually accomplished and addictive entries — undercut by a real, remarkably severe and still-current complaint about Ubisoft Connect, the mandatory third-party launcher that multiple independent reviewers describe locking them out of a game they purchased entirely, in incidents dated as recently as June 2026.
6.5 / 10
