Spire. The Quiet Year. Degenesis [Potentially NSFW]. Starfinder. Symbaroum. Genesys. I'm cutting myself off there.
Disclosure: With the exception of Degenesis, all the links above are affiliate links
Wait, you mean that people will be disappointed in me if I don't write stuff?
(questions and image from autocratik.blogspot.com)
Spire is my dark horse hit of 2018. I backed it on Kickstarter in the final hours because I didn't want to miss out, and I regret not backing it at a higher level (though, on the other hand, it's definitely still been one of the best value-to-investment returns of any Kickstarter I've backed, in part because I just put in enough to get PDFs).
It's not mechanically thrilling, but it is really well executed and is the perfect example of a game that facilitates storytelling. The setting is fantastic, however, and that's what carries it through to be my probable Game of the Year at this point. I hang out in the Discord server and it's a perpetual source of intrigue and mystery, in part thanks to how its setting gets mutated and retold in various groups.
The Quiet Year is another dark horse hit, though I'm ashamed to say it's more that I just didn't know about it than that it's terribly obscure (at least from what I've found now that I've started writing about it.
I hesitate to call it a game in the same sense as other tabletop RPGs; it's more of a collaborative storytelling exercise. I love it nonetheless. It's been an inspiration for me as I go over some prospective designs for future projects.
Degenesis has a huge impact on me because it's now one of my most-played games, despite me only really starting to play it in earnest a couple years ago. As a bit of a side-note I did actually review and enjoy the original edition of Degenesis (which is very hard to find now), but the new edition is fantastic.
I love the quality and simplicity of Degenesis, and how a lot of the more complex elements of the system and setting fall upon individual players rather than the whole group as people play. The faction system is another hit in my opinion.
Symbaroum is an immense inspiration for many of the mechanics of Hammercalled, though Hammercalled is built on a very different skeleton. The shift to players rather than GMs handling the vast majority of rolls and basing everything off of PC stats makes it go a lot faster than many other games.
Symbaroum's also really pretty. So pretty. I like Degenesis for its hard-edge apocalyptic style, but Symbaroum manages to strike the balance between dark fantasy illustrations and the really cozy background illustrations.
Jag har den på svenska också, which means it's filling my need for Swedish books in a way that IKEA refuses to do.
Genesys is also something that I've studied a little. I haven't had time for a deep dive into it, and for some reason I just really have a problem getting into it, but I love it and the FFG Star Wars implementations as a quick cinematic system, though I sometimes question how the Star Wars games go about achieving their storytelling (I think they can be a little heavy-handed).
I'm really just a sucker for dice, even though a part of me blanches at the thought of having to buy specialty dice.
Starfinder is the one game here that I just didn't really enjoy in the past year (and barely in the past year, but we'll run with it nonetheless). I was looking forward to it as doing for Pathfinder what d20 Star Wars did for D&D, but it was not. Admittedly, my d20 Star Wars experience was fairly limited beyond Knights of the Old Republic, which wasn't entirely faithful, but I felt that d20 Star Wars was at least novice friendly relative to some games and had some good ideas.
Starfinder, on the other hand, had way too many tables and interactions. I just didn't find anything in it engaging beyond existing games, and the investment required to get into it (not to mention to keep up with Paizo's tendency to publish copious content additions) just was enough to put me off the whole game from the start. This was a valuable lesson to learn as work on Hammercalled really picked up.