In this thread, you can talk about any game you want! For the nomination form, on-going games have their own category.
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The big caveat here is that I’ve started Yakuza Like a Dragon, which I’m ~12 hours into and really enjoying, and AC Odyssey which I figure will wind up somewhere on this list, but I’m too early into those long games to make some sort of final judgment of them.
So, Desperados III. It hadn’t really been on my radar until I heard Rob Zacny discussing it on Waypoint Radio and Three Moves Ahead, but I’m very glad I took the chance to buy it. The stealth puzzles Mimimi have crafted here are really satisfying to unravel, and there’s such a wealth of optional objectives in each mission that I didn’t think twice about replaying the entirety what is a 30 hour story - and then three more DLC missions, twice each.
It’s not the sandbox that the recent Hitman games are, but they allow and encourage missions to be done via alternate methods in a similar way. Getting to the end of a mission that took me an hour, and then finding out that there’s a badge for completing it in under 10 minutes, or without killing any of the dozens of guards I slaughtered - this could have been frustrating, but instead I felt compelled to figure out how it gets done.
I can’t say it’s totally unlike anything I’ve played before - it borrows a ton mechanically from their previous game, Shadow Tactics, which I only played briefly - but there aren’t a lot of real time stealth tactics games out there, and I found it a very fresh experience. The characters and music are playing on western tropes, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that they’re very well done, the icing on a cake of really cool gameplay mechanics.
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I’ve played 47 games (14 released this year) which sounds like a lot, but the majority of these were pretty short, a lot were free and I also revisited a lot of random games from past years, without necessarily hitting credits in all of them.
Favourite 2020 Games
- Spelunky 2. My personal GOTY. If I ever give up keeping up with video games and become someone with just one forever game, this would probably be it for me. Still playing a little every day, still having a lot of fun.
- Kentucky Route Zero. It’s quite something that the culmination of this game managed to be as surprising and thoughtful as it was. And on a smaller note, I’m really into LOMA so listening to Emily Cross sing I’m Going That Way hit me pretty hard.
- Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1. The Norwood Suite’s still my favourite game from Cosmo D and is probably a more cohesive experience, but this one’s really good too. Love this universe and the suggestion that there will be more volumes to this game.
- Signs of the Sojourner. Super elegant design and just the perfect length, honestly.
- Cloud Gardens. I really like these diorama-style games. There’s something so meditative about making life grow in these empty, somewhat post-apocaliptic spaces, especially in 2020.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This was my only multiplayer experience this year and it was great to virtually visit some friends that I really miss seeing in person.
- Umurangi Generation. Genuinely surprising. It unfortunately gave me some pretty bad motion sickness, but I still forced myself to finish it and even did all the challenges just because I was really enjoying it otherwise. I don’t think I’ll be able to get the DLC so I’m hoping I can experience it via some LP at least.
Favourite ““Old”” Games (played for the first time this year)
- Outer Wilds. Absolutely loved this to the point that I’m still constantly thinking about it, almost a year later. I don’t usually get emotional with games but just listening to the soundtrack honestly makes me want to cry (in a good way! I think!).
- Super Mario Odyssey. I didn’t play many 3D Marios before so maybe I was underrating them since Odyssey really surprised me and I had a blast with it. Maybe a little vapid, but it was just a very comforting game for me to play through some real rough months.
- Control. Great style and even though the combat was a lot during some boss fights, Jesse’s powers were super fun.
- Disco Elysium. Actually interesting world building and game structure.
- Mutazione. Love the sense of community in this game in all aspects, from the people, to their relationships and the place they all live in and share.
- Resident Evil 2 Remake. I’m not into horror games, but I have some fond memories of the original and I just had a lot of simple fun playing this as the adventure game that it is.
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It’s hard to pick one!
I’ve always had a love of roguelikes and this was the year I got into Hades, Void Bastards and Risk of Rain 2
I also got really involved with Death Stranding and Blasphemous
…
Thinking about it, Hades really is an achievement by the dev team, it’s got so much going for it: the art, the music, how it controls, the story and how they use the genre conventions of roguelikes. So I’d go with that.
Hey, i really enjoyed what Glorgu did for his backloggd list, so i made one of my own
I don’t really subscribe to 2020 games only for best list, nor did i really have the interest in ranking games this year, so I decided to run down the list of the 29 games I played this year. And listed the 10 games i played for the first time this year that really stuck with me. I quite like all 10 and really recommend them (Might not really recommend MTG though, as much as I’ve loved it for years)
In terms of stuff that came out in 2020, I played more than I thought I did, but its a pretty uneven group of games.
Games I didn’t Like: Murder By Numbers, Atomicrops, Fall Guys, Carrion
Games I found Messy: Kentucky Route Zero, Signs of the Sojourner, One Step From Eden, Genshin Impact, Control: The Foundation
Games I Recommend: Teardown, Monster Train, Paradise Killer, Hades, Animal Crossing: New Horizons
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You may have your backloggd list set to private, I got a 404
(I didn’t have the courage to put MTG on my list, though it is the game I’ve played the most this year by a mile, just like, it wasn’t a good year for magic in the large part)
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Ah thank you, that should be fixed!
(Heh, i even mentioned in my little blurb that magic in 2020 was an absolute disaster, but i can’t deny that it remained my ultimate comfort game. Even at its worst this year, the rules and systems of the game have felt like an anchor to me)
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I’m going to be annoying and post my top 10.
1. Final Fantasy VII: Remake
I can’t believe how far Square knocked this one out of the park. I’ve spoken on the other end of year threads how much I love the music and all the specific moments that occur throughout. I love how much the remake is that original game and is true to the characters and the plot, all of which feel just as strong and meaningful now as they did in the late 90s. I can’t wait to see where they go with it.
2. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
I would never have imagined that a Japanese visual novel game would have been so high on my end of year list. I guess things haven’t been thet same since I finished Evangelion last year… And there’s no going back. I’ve not yet completed the game yet, but am fairly deep in gradually playing it at my own pace but I am glued to it. I suppose on the surface it is a novel wrapped up in a video game that you slowly unravel with a light action RTS game bolted on. Everything about the presentation from the art to the music is fantastic and it’s all in service of a story that could only be done justice by a game.
3. Doom Eternal
Most people have seen Doom Eternal as something of a disappointment. I certainly get that, I think some of the choices they made to focus the story on Doom guy’s lore wasn’t as good as what they did with the last game. My first playthrough was defnitely more of a limp through on easy, but as soon as I started playing it on PC, I just started to get better at the actual game part and having a much better time with it. I went back to Doom 2016 after Eternal and found it almost impossible to play, because the combat loop in Eternal is just so much more hectic and involving. I think it’s the best action game since Sekiro. Like Sekiro, the game wants you to be more aggressive. I’m also relishing the challenge posed by the harder difficulty settings and that new DLC. Which is very hard.
4. Spelunky 2
A few weeks ago, I would have said Hades would have been my roguelike of choice this year BUT I’ve spent the last few weeks playing Spelunky on my own and with a friend. Topline: it is more Spelunky, but that means more systems upon systems threatening to topple everything against you with one wrong move. There are far more secrets and powerups that keep things interesting. Hoverpack and shotgun felt like the key to the first game, but lately I’ve been discovering the joys of using the shield , which basically turns you into a moving wall of death
“Choo Choo motherfucker.”
5. Sea of Thieves
This game wasn’t released this year but it has been getting all the seasonal content? In a year as bad as 2020, Sea of Thieves has been the game I’ve been flocking to with my friends. I feel some of our existing social games like Destiny and Animal Crossing have kind of run their course and the grind just feels too pervasive. Sea of Thieves has no real grind, only the promise of a sandbox and plenty of adventure. I actively look forward to playing Sea of Thieves every Friday with my friends because you never really expect what is coming your way. Also that sea tech they’ve got in the game has the most impressive ocean in any game. In 2020 sometimes I just leave it on in the background because watching it is so therapeutic.
6. Desperados 3
As a kid I loved the Commando games, and I’ve so glad that there have been PC games that have kept up that kind of character orientated RTS. Desperados 3 is basically Commandos in the wild west with a cast of cool Western types co-ordinating heists and ambushes. It’s so very easy to pick up, but difficult to master - the ability to plan multiple moves with a press of a button never gets old.
7. Hades
I’ve yet to complete Hades because I suck at it and tend to get lost in some of the busier scenes. Most roguelikes are built on repetition and have to have strong gameplay loops to sustain multiple playthroughs. Hades has all that, but the way you can build out your character means no two runs are the same and forces you to never rely on one type of build. As with all Supergiant games, the presentation is top notch, from the music, dialogue and visuals. I love how the story and it’s characters unfold before you, keeping that roguelike grind feel less like nails on a chalkboard. Finally, Greek mythology has already been done to death in video games, so to make it interesting again is suprising.
8. Animal Crossing
I think other people have the ability to destroy everything that is good with Animal Crossing. Towards the start of lockdown here in the UK, so many of my friends were doing the daily grind of Turnip stockmarkets, and collecting all fossils before descending into that hell of selling villagers and it completely broke my enjoyment of the game. They’ve moved on now, and I’m back to enjoying the pleasant amble of island life.
9. Bugsnax
Only just finished Bugsnax but I loved it from start to finish. It’s a cross between Pokemon, Pokemon Snap, Stranger’s Wrath and bits of Gone Home.
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Spiritfarer
2020 has been a good year for Charon. Spiritfarer came out of nowhere and charmed me with it’s gorgeous artstyle and devastated me multiple times. You build up your house boat and look after your guests. Their houses remain on your boat until the end of the game longtimes after they’ve departed. Despite it’s inherent niceness, Spiritfarer still gets you.
Honorable Mentions:
Ghosts of Tsushima - Ghost of Tsushima was better than it had any right to be. A gorgeous photogenic world and decent enough sword fighting that did for fleeting moments fulfill that samurai fantasy.
Lithium City -
Prodeus - Early access retro shooter in the vein of quake. You play a nondescript cyborg in a low res polygonal world faced by armies of enemy sprites who splatter EVERYWHERE.
** Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey** Did you know you can just fly your bird around, like forever. During lockdown, I revisited this game to put it to bed. I spent one night just flying my bird around the gameworld. Flying over warring battleships, sleeping fortresses, and sperm whales swimming serenely in the ocean. I flew from Lesbos to Ithica as a way to roleplay as Odysseus. Despite everything in that game. Playing Bird Creed was one of my top chill moments of the year playing games and I would advise everyone to try it out. I’m hoping to fly the Raven all over Anglo Saxon Britain when I get round to playing Valhalla.
Begrudging Mention
Last of Us: Part 2: This game fumbled alot of things and was a gruelling slog to play, especially in it’s closing act. I didn’t need to feel as hollow as I did after finishing the game, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thoroughly absorbed throughout. Regardless I don’t really know what is worse, the hatemobs who hate the game despite never playing it, or the smugness of the senior creative team who are under the impression that they are immune from criticsm after snagging so many awards from Geoff Keighley. I don’t think there needed to be a sequel to The Last of Us that ended on such a great note, a mere look between two characters. I’m sure we’ll get another game towards the end of the PS5’s lifecycle, in which Ellie tracks down Abby AGAIN, to give herself over to the fireflies and save the world from death and stuff.
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I hate to be a downer, but 2020 is that kind of year unfortunately. I think most games I played that came out this year ended up being a bit of a disappointment.
This was the first Animal Crossing game I ever played, and I was able to get the appeal for a lot of people, but it ended up feeling kind of shallow for me.
Hades was initially a blast, but once I started to see the matrix it felt more like running on a treadmill and didn’t really have any of the features that I love about roguelikes.
Crusader Kings 3 is definitely a contender, and while I like all the UI and quality of life improvements to the game, I also think the game can sometimes feel a little too frictionless.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon is great because it is more Yakuza, and there are a ton of neat ideas in this game, but I also miss the old combat systems. Would love to see the next game keep party members, and building relationships with them, but go back to real-time combat.
The only video game I played this year that I unabashedly loved was also one of the games I put the least amount of time into because it was a shorter experience, and that was Half-Life Alyx. It’s a bit corny, but when that game started up and I was on the balcony rooftop in City 17 my breath was taken away, and I felt tears welling up from just having this really strong emotional reaction to being transported to this place at a time when the city had just gone into lockdown mode because of the pandemic and everything was terrifying and uncertain. Alyx gave me a sense of wonder in a year that tried to crush all of that out of you. I’ve always been kinda indifferent to VR, and I don’t know if it will ever take off, but I do hope it becomes more affordable and accessible to people so that other people can maybe experience a bit of what I felt from playing it.
There is one silver lining to the fact that I didn’t respond super well to a lot of video games this year though, which is that this is the year I got back into tabletop roleplaying games, something I hadn’t done since jr. high school. I had always convinced myself that I didn’t have time to get back into them as an adult, but this year when I needed something to do while stuck inside, it was a blast connecting with friends on Discord and checking out cool indie RPGs like Spire and Lancer. I just wish it hadn’t taken a pandemic for me to get back into the hobby!
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As far as a top 3, probably in some order Hades, Animal Crossing and Crusader Kings III.
Another game that I don’t think I mentioned elsewhere but I did enjoy was the new Captain Tsubasa game, which wasn’t mindblowing in any particular way but definitely scratched an itch.
I also still have some games that are sitting in my backlog like Umurangi Generation so my 2020 list next year may be different.
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I tried to order things and ended up only really being able to put things in tiers.
Group 1:
Granblue Fantasy: Versus - Probably the first successful “will teach you how to play fighting games” fighting game, based on an IP with great characters and music. The main problems are that the netcode should have been better (especially given… circumstances), and that the game is just expensive at this point. They really need to do a bundle deal once this character season is over. It’s too bad this game had the timing it had, coming out in March; the offline events would have been amazing, but we got exactly zero of them.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - I don’t even know what to say about this game that wouldn’t constitute a spoiler for somebody, but ultimately it’s pure sci-fi popcorn told in a way that probably only a video game could tell by letting you bounce around between 13 (okay mostly 12) different story threads at your discretion–for the most part (they’re pretty smart about restricting you when they need to for the sake of ordering specific story beats.) Just make sure to turn the combat difficulty up.
Genshin Impact - What if somebody made Breath of the Wild except you could actually play as female characters, with combat that was actually interesting, and where at the end of every fight instead of checking to see how many weapons you broke you got to check the rolls on the gear that dropped? (And also what if there was a ridiculous mobile game time-gated resource that keeps you from playing the game as much as you want oh and also a character gacha with bad rates oops.)
Group 2:
Hades - The best video game Supergiant has made, though even with the narrative supplements the rogue-like repetition still started to strain for me a bit pretty quickly. It came out the same week as two of the above mentioned games so my time with it was split from the start, but I’ll still do a run once in a while.
Persona 5 Royal - It’s Persona 5 again I guess.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake - They did it! For now, at least. Looking forward to seeing it all fall apart in 8 years or whatever. Also I feel old.
The rest of a top 10:
Astro’s Playroom - I still feel old.
Sakura Wars - Musical theater groups with mechs. As far as Sakura Wars games go it’s only okay but hey we don’t have many options in English.
Nioh 2 - I love this game with the only caveat being that whenever I get to one of the duel-y samurai fights I start to wish I was playing Sekiro.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light - Good raid.
I played a bunch of games this year, but very few of them actually came out this year. FF7R and Doom Eternal are the only ones that come to mind at the moment, honestly. I’m sure I’m forgetting something obvious, but oh well … FF7R: I loved it for its graphics and its music. I should buy the soundtrack. I was pretty overwhelmed by nostalgia for a few hours there. A few hours is about all I ended up getting out of it, as I found the gameplay to be pretty dull and wasn’t interested enough to see the story through. I’m probably one of those crusty people who would’ve been happier if they had just literally remade the first game with better graphics. I don’t have a ton of patience for cinematic universes, extended videogame cinematic universes, or single games being remade into four intentionally bloated different games or whatever they’re doing with FF7R.
So that leaves Doom Eternal, which I think is pretty phenomenal. I’m playing on Hurt Me Plenty (which I believe isn’t the easiest difficulty but the next one up from easy) and I’ve really enjoyed the ride. It kind of stumbled out of the gate for me as it went about pretty quickly introducing a bunch of stuff that wasn’t present in the previous game. “So I’ve got my flamethrower, my frag grenade, my ice grenade, my chainsaw, my regular guns, each of which has multiple mods … gall dang this is a lot to keep track of!” I said to myself as I clumsily made my way through the early fights. But eventually it all came together in my mind and flowed out into my fingers and I’ve been ripping and tearing pretty smoothly for quite a while now.
The combat definitely has a lot going on. I’m not bothered by its resource management thing. I know this bothered a lot of people, but I’m enjoying constantly searching out or avoiding certain enemies based on my ammo level, shield level, health level, etc. It gets pretty intense, and I’ve found that moment to moment the encounters tend to be a lot of fun.
I even like the admittedly kinda ridiculous turn they took with the Doom lore. The last game was kinda funny and meta about it all, they seem to have taken the opposite tack here. Tons of text about all this serious ANGELS VS DEMONS WAR ACROSS HEAVEN AND HELL type thing going on. There doesn’t seem to be any wink/nod with this new lore path, and I’m perfectly okay with that. I enjoy it, even. I read and enjoyed chapters I - XVII of “History of the Sentinels”. It reminds me of reading Spawn as a kid. Or the dark violent fantasies of Wolf in White Van’s narrator. It is some dark silly shit. I dig it.
I still see humor in the game. Everything is so over the top; the story, the music, the violence. It all feels extremely cartoony to me. Maybe the cartoon of a satan-obsessed teenage boy, but still a cartoon. At some point I probably was that boy and in some way always will be in some now tucked away facet of my soul. Doomguy grapples around everywhere with a grapple on his shotgun, and when he does so everything goes slow motion. It’s ridiculous. Doomguy does zany platforming all over the place, complete with monkeybar swings and Mario-esque spinning flames. It’s fantastic.
It’s been a pleasant surprise for me, seeing as how many people have been disappointed by it. I guess I liked most of the changes that most people tended not to. Ah well. I worry that if I turn the difficulty up a notch on a replay (or try the DLC) my enjoyment of it might tank… But it’s great fun for now. My GOTY 2020 (with barely any competition) DOOM ETERNAL. Bring on the Doom Extended Universe.
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Content warning for medical stuff…
Late last year I started coming to terms with the fact that my RSI is serious enough that I needed to find an alternative to traditional controllers, keyboards, and mice, or I needed to stop playing video games. After lots of back and forth with doctors I found that the only reliable remedy for my pain was to stop or greatly reduce typing, mousing, using controllers, etc. Since my job requires typing, I couldn’t really justify playing games with my hands anymore. I want to acknowledge at the top that this is, in the grand scheme of 2020, at worst a pretty minor tragedy.
Early in the spring of this year, when I discovered an alternative mouse and started using voice control to play turn based strategy games it really felt like a whole new world of possibilities opened up. Later in the year, I explored a bunch of other options (chronicled in this thread) and this culminated in playing Hades using a head mouse and noise recognition software. However, repetition is such a core component of that game that I had to stop playing it after a while because I was straining my vocal cords.
This experience sums up the joy and agony of video games for me in 2020. It was truly wondrous and remarkable that I was able to play Hades at all, and I deeply enjoyed the experience and hope I get to revisit it. But this was only possible due to the ingenuity of relatively obscure open source machine learning software, not due to the efforts of Supergiant games to make the game accessible.
I’m not a game designer so I don’t know if adding shortcuts would break the design. When I do revisit it, I’ll probably turn on god mode, but I’m a little skeptical that that’s going to make a difference, because I’m going to have to spend 10 or 15 minutes hissing and clucking and whistling my way through Tarturus before I can practice navigating the lava level with my head mouse without dying, and that may simply be too much vocal strain. Which means that I may never see the full game, so the question of broken design seems moot.
This is not the kind of celebratory GOTY post I want to be writing, but it’s an honest one. Hades might not be my favorite game I played this year (I don’t know what that would be, maybe Go/Weiqi/Baduk frankly…) however it is my “game of the year” for 2020 because it best represents my relationship to video games right now, for better or worse.
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Yeah, I’m not gonna dwell on this too much on the forums because I’m glad people like it, and I’ve complained about this on various Discords, but I fell off that game hard, very specifically due to design decisions Supergiant made, in a way that made me kind of… angry? I really enjoyed my first 20-30 something hours but I soured on the game almost immediately after my first “clear”. I might post about this on the semi-proper Hades thread, but I’ve never pivoted from “this game is fun and I’m having fun” to “this game makes me feel depressed to think about playing” faster in my entire memory of playing games.
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In any other year, games like Hades and Yakuza 7 would be in fair competition for what I’d put in my number one GOTY of the Year spot. But since January, there’s only ever been one real choice for me. You can probably guess what it is…
Kentucky Route Zero is my favorite game of all time.
What kind of game is it? I dunno (an adventure game I guess…maybe?). What happens in it? Couldn’t really tell you.
KRZ is the rarest of rare games for me. The episodically released game that kept me engaged with each new addition for as long as I’ve been following it. I’ve tried so many times to follow these games ever since playing the then-completed The Walking Dead game back in 2013. I kept up with The Wolf Among Us, but got burned by the final chapter when the big reveal had to do with a character I completely forgotten about months earlier. Life is Strange was really neat, but I couldn’t justify following it until it was completed, but even after that I only ever watched a Let’s Play of it. And The Walking Dead S2 just felt so much weaker with each successive chapter that I simply fell off of it, only able to occasionally remember that I did play it at some point.
So how is it, then, that a game known for dropping a 1-3 hour chapter every couple years held my attention for so long? I think the answer to that is simply there’s no other game like Kentucky Route Zero. It’s the game that made me start to think more about games. About Capitalism. About Gender. About the extremes of player agency/lack thereof. It made me look at this decaying and ill world we live in with a newfound sense of wonder. There’s a wistful magic to a dingy bar or a repurposed building that wasn’t visible to me before. I look at the titular Kentucky in this game and see a sad history to everything in my own world.
The final chapter of KRZ released this year, and I only played it once. It was great. There were so many moments that felt like the culmination of everything its prior acts were “about.” But the real reason why I can’t fathom calling any other game my GOTY is because I was patient about playing it. I never installed an update faster than this one, but nonetheless I took the time to revisit everything that came before it once again. From the mysterious first act, to the devastating fourth, to the wild Act IV interlude and its bizarre website companion. Seeing this all again hit differently for me. Back in January of this year, I was in a weird spot. I was coming to terms with my childhood trauma for the first time in my life, I was still burnt out from trying to find myself in my professional life, and I was beginning to genuinely question the gendered persona I’ve been living with for so long. And then when Act V finally released, I felt as though coming back to this world of Cardboard Computer’s ennui-fueled imaginations provided me a space where I could think about all of these things more productively. (Hell, I wrote my first ever Medium post about the queer underpinnings of the game’s characters and dialogue mechanics.)
I guess…I could see myself as one of these odd outcasts that make up the game’s cast. Johnny and Junebug were a mirror to myself devoid of artifice and accommodation. Conway’s internalized pain was my own. Shannon’s want for an uncomplicated direction life felt like my own aspirations. And being able to explore myself alongside these characters is the sort of thing games just don’t do very often. Where the resonance I feel with the writing was so personal and incisive that I had to take breaks and really think on what had just happened. I just couldn’t believe how much I had grown alongside this game, and how much that changed how I saw it.
Before it was this really neat, unique adventure-ish game. But now…it’s something I have difficulty putting into words. It’s the sort of thing that inspires me to fail at creative pastimes. To look at something – anything – from a new angle and see what I think. To write critical screeds like this one and not care so much about how many ‘likes’ it gets. KRZ didn’t just change how I think about games; it changed how I think about my life. It gave me a new strength to accept that this world is not my home, but I can still make something out of it. To make my own family when the one I was born with provide anything but comfort and love. To stop and question what my overbearing perfectionism actually does for me, if anything.
Kentucky Route Zero ended up being a freeform platform upon which I could place my own confusion and anxiety, watch it all morph over the course of the story’s runtime, and see a more true version of myself and the place I inhabit. It’s a game I’ll think about for the rest of my life. It’s more than a game to me. It’s self-care; it’s honesty; it’s peace of mind in spite of whatever maelstrom might be around me. It’s a piece of media that changed me for the better. And if I had to do it all again, I’d wait an entire KRZ development cycle for it without question.
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Me three, but I’ve said enough about this on various discords [and here in the Hades thread!] to say more now, too.
I just sat down and figured out what my top 10 games of 2020 are and it’s definitely… an interesting list.
Not going to explain any of the almost necessary rationale behind some of these choices since I plan to do that on my own time elsewhere but here they are arranged in order of their release date:
One Step From Eden (March)
ZENONZARD (May)
Umurangi Generation (May)
Phantasy Star Online 2 (May)
Kandagawa Jet Girls (August)
Spelunky 2 (September)
Pixel Puzzle Makeout League (October)
Eternal Return: Black Survival (October)
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin (November)
Yakuza: Like A Dragon (November)
Not as momentous as 2019 considering one of my favorite games of all time came out that year but still a strong list of games!
Also shoutsout to the following games I played for the first time in 2020 that either did not come out in 2020 or did and I didn’t finish them for whatever reason but still like quite a bit:
Gonner 2 (2020)
A Monster’s Expedition (2020)
Spiritfarer (2020)
Battletoads (2020)
Paradise Killer (2020)
Dandy Dungeon - Legend of Brave Yamada (2019)
NEXT JUMP: Shmup Tactics (2017)
The entire Zero Escape Trilogy (2009, 2012, 2016) but especially Zero Time Dilemma (2016), which sucks in a way I equally appreciate and detest.
Guts’n (2000)
1 on 1 Government (1999)
Dancing Eyes (1996)
Gunbird (1994)
Crypt Killer / Henry Explorers (1995)
Valkyrie no Densetsu (1989)
Psycho Soldier (1987)
So, I slept on my thoughts on Paradise Killer after finishing it last night. At the time, over in the “What Games are you playing?” thread, I suggested that it hadn’t displaced my top games of 2020, but I think that phrasing was harsh in retrospect.
Paradise Killer is not a perfect game - it relies a little too much on first person platforming and having a useless map to make things harder [I don’t even want waypoints on a map - I just want one that I can zoom into to see where I am properly!- although being able to mark off stuff you’ve already activated so you don’t waste time checking them would be good too…]; it isn’t quite as smart as it wants to be sometimes (there were one or two points where Lady Love Dies seems much denser than she should be, encountering evidence that obviously works with stuff she already knows, but I suspect I collected out of expected order; and there’s one or two small holes in the plot in particular - even Judge accepts that One Last Kiss is Grace Bloodlines’ ghost because she knows her “blood code”, but the protagonist also seems to know all of them, and Doctor Doom Jazz, at least, would have access to all of them…); and I really wanted both a more involved Trial sequence (I know the point is to show how presenting evidence influences the perception of truth - and that (very mild spoiler) sometimes the person with the most evidence about them isn’t guilty… but some light Ace Attorney “break the suspects” to-and-fro would have been nice, especially with Sam and Lydia, who doom themselves to guilty verdicts by being stupid enough not to open up to Love Dies when she talks to them obviously knowing enough to convict them - compare to Crimson Acid, who actually knows when to spill) and a more shocking twist (for much of the game, I was convinced that the game was going to pull a The Murder of Roger Ackroyd on me, and have Judge’s confident assertion that they and Lady Love Dies were both above suspicion turn out to be untrue - both of them would have been in excellent positions to use their apparent alibis to organise the killing via agents).
but, for all that, I enjoyed a good 80% of my time in the game [when I wasn’t being frustrated by traversal or maps], the entire aesthetics and tone of the setting is excellent - vapourwave with the idle and “unthinkingly cruel” rich immortals on a bed of cosmic horror done right (less tentacles and more insinuated thoughts and sudden transmutations) and almost banal secrets. Each character / suspect / victim is written very well - albeit much larger than life - and most of the scattered items around the world are interesting and evocative [the other 20% are annoyingly positioned and I stopped caring about them].
And, unlike most games of the past decade, Paradise Killer knows not to stay around past its welcome - I finished up my first run after 20 hours, 1 or 2 of which don’t count as I left the game running for a bit whilst sorting out life stuff, and that’s quite long enough to do what it wants to do.
So, whilst Paradise Killer isn’t going to displace Disco Elysium as my best game of 2020 overall, it’s definitely rivalling Hades for “best narrative in a game released in 2020”, and “best soundtrack” and “best aesthetic” in the same restricted comparison. (I’m still up for Noita as “best game released in 2020”, but that’s for gameplay reasons, not narrative or aesthetics.)
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I generally do my GOTY writeups in a Giant Bomb list, but I haven’t gotten around to actually writing it yet.
Good thing in this case, because in my list of games I played this year that I add things to over the year, I forgot to mark Hades as a 2020 game so skipped over it as I was thinking of the rankings. Which shows how I felt about it in general, but I still put it into the final list just now.
Which is
Vampire The Masquerade Night Road
Horizon Zero Dawn PC
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Murder By Numbers
Paradise Killer
Hades
Crusader Kings 3
Immortals Fenyx Rising
Carrion
Spiritfarer
It’s my list so i’ll put my favorite game on there even if it came out in 2017, all I need is the 2020 PC release as justification. Still didn’t feel right giving it the top spot though. Which is fine, since VTM Night Road more than justifies its position. When a game is nothing but its writing that writing better be pretty damn good. Friends, VTM Night Road’s writing is pretty damn good.
Cyberpunk I really enjoyed but is disqualified for all its obvious reasons, both within the game and without. Valhalla I loved but is disqualified for shitting itself in the last two hours and making me never want to play another Assassin’s Creed game again.
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So a lot of the games I played this year were not from this year. Two of my favorite games this year were finales and re-releases. moon: Remix RPG Adventure is one of my new favorites, but its a translation of a game from 1997. Kentucky Route Zero started back in 2013, but it’s easily one of my favorite games, and one of my favorite things of all time.
I spent a great deal of time playing retro games, so a lot of what I played didn’t even come out in the past two decades, let alone this year. There’s no shortage of great games I haven’t played yet from this year. I can’t wait to get to games like Umurangi Generation, A Hand With Many Fingers, Bugsnax, Going Under, Petal Crash, If Found…, Mixolumia, and… countless other games, frankly.
But I want to talk about a game I don’t know how to explain. A game that is honestly unlike any other game I’ve ever played. A game that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about much. A game I’m still playing. A game that haunts me in a way that I struggle to verbalize.
The premise of :THE LONGING: is simple enough to spell out. You are a shade, a creature born of darkness, born in the palm of a subterranean king’s hand. He tells you that he must rest, and that in 400 days, you must wake him up.
And then you start waiting.
For 400 days.
Games are filled with waiting. We wait for all sorts of things. We wait for loading screens. We wait for the right time to jump. We wait for an opportunity to strike. But these moments are short and frivolous. Even a long loading screen (say, a whole minute) is not too significant a chunk of one’s life. In recent design, however, there has been new kind of game, and I’ve heard them called “slow games”. Slow games reduce the frequency of action significantly, down to even something as slow as one move a day. And you can see hints of this kind of design in gacha games, clickers, and idle games.
But what’s on the other side of waiting?
There are questions I ask myself here. What is beyond my longing? What is beyond these 400 days? Should I be beholden to the king and wait for him to wake up? What do I owe him? For the gift of a life I never asked for? That gift, a life of servitude? In his massive palace, full of gold and gems? Should I not revolt against him, he who has done nothing but ask of me to be his servant? Why should wait when I can break these chains? Or should I just wake him up? Would it be so awful? Should I honor his request, if out of nothing but the kindness of my heart (if shades even have hearts)? Should I brave the darkness below? Should I brave the brightness above? What is beyond my longing? What is beyond these 400 days?
:THE LONGING: is a game about time. Both about the passing of it and the taking of it. Everything takes time, and time is always passing. The shade does not move particularly fast. After all, it doesn’t need to get anywhere quick. So it pitter-patters slowly across the room, across each room, across the entire palace, the entire kingdom. You can use a mattock to harvest things, but the shade is weak, and that will take a lot of time. It’s almost like an idle game. It occupies my mind; hovering in the back of my head, knowing I’m still waiting for – for something, I don’t really know what.
But :THE LONGING: is not about delayed gratification. It does not reward you for waiting. It’s about making peace with waiting.
The strange thing is, despite being a game that was in development before COVID-19, this might be the most Quarantine Era game I’ve ever played. Because at its core, it’s a game about how you choose to spend time. And then, what those choices do.
I’m a reclusive person. I struggle to get out of my room a lot. It’s a problem, but I’m used to this. But a lot of people aren’t, and were introduced to this lifestyle through necessary social distancing measures. When you spend a lot of time indoors, you notice something, though. Time starts to distort. Time starts to stretch and contract. Time starts to stop making sense. Days turn into hours, and weeks turn into months. Timepieces exist to give us a concrete understanding of the passage of time as it flows around us. But in an era like this, a clock is a mockery. They lay bare our human and subjective experience of time.
So you start filling the time. And what you fill that time with changes how time feels. You can fill it with art, with music, with literature. You can fill it with exploration, with introspection, with curiosity. What you find within each moment can change it from the inside. Time may speed up or slow down. But it never stops marching on. There is no shortcut or fast-forward. It just keeps moving forward, flowing endlessly, no matter what you do.
Something told me once:
As long as there is time, there will always be longing. And once all longing has ended, the world will no longer need time… And those without longing will no longer need the world.
I don’t know if I agree.
As I write this, my longing has not finished. I am still wandering the dark kingdom. Searching for an exit, for fulfillment, for an escape, for purpose, for something to do. Maybe I am speaking in metaphor here, maybe not. Time marches on. Let it march. I shouldn’t dwell on it any longer. It’s time to move forward.
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