Social gatherings are not your preferred activity. But this one is obligatory, and it threatens to ruin you.

You are Karen Zhao, a senior in college who is home for winter break, and seeing your old high school friends for the first time in years. You are not ready, not even close, but perhaps you could make the best of it.

Two endings, many paths to arrive there.

This is a sequel to Pageant, but it should not be necessary to have played it.

Reviews and Testimonials

Nominated for Best Characters and Best Writing at Spring Thing 2022

"I’m really glad to have played New Year’s Eve 2019, and I’m glad I can now wholeheartedly jump on the Autumn Chen fanwagon." - Mike Russo

"NYE, 2019 is a great portrait of this age, for these particular characters, with powerful secondary themes underlying the main conceit of social interaction as an optimization problem" - Dawn Sueoka

"But you know what? It really does feel like that, when you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty. New Year’s Eve, 2019 captures exactly the melancholy anxiety spiral that led me, like Qiuyi, to bail out early or mumble my way head down through a deeply draining evening." - Kaemi

"Zhao isn’t a protagonist I’d actively root for. She’s the kind of character that’s hard to look dead on at- the kind that I usually turn around from and cover my face, or close my eyes and cringe, sucking in a sharp breath- because the second hand embarrassment can be agonizing. At the same time- I think that she’s capable of provoking such a visceral reaction speaks quite highly to Chen’s writing abilities." - Sophia de Augustine

"I will say that New Year’s Eve, 2019 is a game in which the experience of agency is crucial to the experience of the story. It is one thing to watch someone fail again and again, and it is another thing to feel responsible their failures." - Drew Cook