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Hades
Hades nails basically everything it tries to do. It controls superbly, oozes style, has great VO, good graphics, good music, and successfully integerates a non-linear narrative into the gameplay in a way that has not been done before for roguelites. I eventually got burned out by the endgame resource grind, which is the one flaw the game has, but will return to Hades for years to come.
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Cyberpunk 2077
I’ve never been this immersed in an open world game, and probably no game of any kind. I felt connected enough to the world and the characters that even the good ending was enough to make me cry. But the UI is a travesty, and the quest structure of the game is almost designed to steer players away from the best content.
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Monster Train
It’s like Slay the Spire, but was released in 2020. Ok, ok, maybe it has some other things going for it as well :) Monster Train basically goes for far fewer combat encounters but with each one being much more complicated. It gives up on even any pretense of balance. Everything is overpowered in a way that in any other game would be totally broken, but in this game the only way you’ll succeed is by finding and abusing more and more absurd broken combos.
But honestly, after a month of heavily playing Monster Train, I was back to StS.
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Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Blue collar labor has never been this enjoyable. You work a orbital junkyard on dismantling spaceships. Use a handful of tools to slowly cut the ship to pieces, remembering to do things like drain the fuel out of the system before cutting into the fuel pipes or disconnecting the thruster or whatever. And it’s just such a chill experience to come up with a routine for how to deal with each different kind of ship, and then repeatedly executing on that plan and optimizing it.
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Among Us
I’ve play a lot of social deduction board games games, since some of my friends really like them. They’re all garbage. Either you have too little to work on with the deduction part, or the game is smothered under too much gameplay. Among Us does the same thing in video game form, and it actually works. There are various systems that give grist for the deduction mill, but it doesn’t weigh the game down because the computer will track it. It’s brilliant, and the emergent gameplay generated so many memorable stories for our group.
The only problem is that you need a lot of players. Minimum of 6, and optimal at 10. My group eventually lost critical mass, and playing with randoms doesn’t sound like a good time.,
This should have been a great year for playing video games, but for whatever reason it turned out that for me that meant obsessively replaying old favorites. As a result, my list of eligible games was way thinner for 2020 than it’s been in the past few years.