In that case, I’ll change it to Animalistic Crossings: Recent Horizonings for Make Glory of Great Penbladia
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The Cost - The most incisive board game I’ve played… ever? It’s a fun economic slugfest, but in the background also a trenchant commentary on the relationship between capitalism and labor.
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Kentucky Route Zero - This is a total cheat. I haven’t played KRZ in two years. But its final episode, which completes the game and I haven’t played, came out in January 2020, and I’m not about to let this gem slide. It’s beautiful, moving, and weird.
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Thank god for Animal Crossing in those first few months of COVID.
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Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy - I spent a few afternoons in late summer/early fall playing this in my friend’s backyard. Those days are some of my favorite gaming memories of the year, due in equal parts to the company and the game.
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Crusader Kings III - I had such a memorable run playing as the Kirgiz Khanate, seeing my family’s empire rise and fall to pieces and rise again.
[edited Jan 4, dropping the delightful Cosmic Frog to make room for CK3]
- Hades
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
- Monster Train
- Star Renegades
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
I also loved Wingspan (…in board game form more than digital, enough so that I have to say it’s more the 2019 release) and a bunch of the big re-release/re-masters (Persona 5 Royal, Persona 4 Golden on PC, Mario 3D All-Stars).
This is one of the few years I’ve played enough new releases to have an opinion on the Quarterlies. Stress buying games will do that, I guess. Judging by chatter, the top 2-3 seem like fait accompli at this point, but just for fun:
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Streets of Rage 4 - Undisputed, for me this year. I played this more hours than any other game this year, as it was my constant friend during the stretching pandemic lockdown days. This is probably the first arcade-style game that I truly played like an arcade game is supposed to be played: a couple times a day, every day, for months (even at my peak of arcade fighting games play I’d really only play on weekends). Yes, it’s a nostalgia play, but it exceeds that: the modern updates helped it to it nail how it felt to play these games back in the day.
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Paradise Killer - Just a wild, out of nowhere swing that hit me in just the right place at just the right time. I only played it for about 10 hours, but I’ve been thinking about it for far longer. I made a thread just to try to convince people to play it, and I won’t repeat all those comments here, but I think this is just a brilliant achievement, and I will be looking extremely closely at Kaizen Game Works in the future.
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Indivisible - Released on Switch this year. Unfortunately, this was tainted by some #metoo revelations around the developer Lab Zero, and is probably mostly known now for missing promised post release content, which is a shame. An incomparably South East Asian feeling game with a clever mix of fighting game, RPG, and hard but not quite maso-core platforming. Without a clear gameplay identity nor a clear cultural identity parse-able by American audiences, it was probably never going to make a mark sales wise, but this game made me felt more seen than almost any other I’ve played. Playing this while proofing bread dough occupied a number of quarantine weekends, and my daughter loved the characters so much she cried when I beat it.
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Hades - We all know all about this one by now. I played and enjoyed it immensely, but I think there’s a bit of an echo chamber effect going on with this sweeping so many GoTY lists. It’s deserving of nearly all the praise it’s received, but it doesn’t sit as close to my heart as the ones above it.
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Going Under - I don’t really have a #5 that was released this year, so I’m slotting in an okay but not great action rogue-lite that had the unfortunate luck of releasing the week between Hades and Spelunky 2. Some clever skewering of Silicon Valley culture, along with some somewhat janky-physics-y gameplay.
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Hades
This was such a gimme. Like @Nightgaunt said above, this is likely a best-of-decade title. My review here.
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Monster Train
Totally forgot about this one, but I played a lot of it earlier this year when I started getting tired of Slay the Spire. I didn’t stick with it too long, but I did log (checks Steam) 62 hours, so that must mean something. I didn’t quite like the aesthetic, but I did enjoy the sometimes super-gimmicky exploits that are the bread and butter of these games. -
Brotherhood & Unity
Wow, how could I have forgotten this. This three-player card-driven gem is such a beautiful thing, and I had no idea when I backed the Kickstarter that I would get this kind of amazing game. The publisher, Compass Games (run by Bill Thomas) is notorious for letting designers basically develop their own games, and then just give Compass the final product. Sucks? Too bad, that’s your fault. They have a design about the Korean War that–three years later–doesn’t have a working rules set. So I always approach Compass Games as potential combustion mechanisms for my money. Poof, burned up. And here is Tomislav Čipčić’s take on Bosnian War, told in a way only a Croat with access to lots of non-English historical materials could do. What I tell people is that if you want to know what the war in Bosnia was all about, play this game with three people (you and two others). All the geography, all the factional interests, everything will make instant sense. Not to say that ethnic cleansing and fratricidal violence makes sense, but if you want to understand the 1992-95 geopolitical situation from the perspective of Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats, here is something that will explain it to you. It’s not a substitute for careful historical literature, but on the other hand, what else is going to explain to you in 30 minutes why the Serbs were so obsessed with the Posavina Corridor? Without it, their whole situation collapses. Why did the Croats support the Bosniaks in some places even when they were fighting them in others? Take a look at the ethnic correlation to the geography and you’ll see: the Croats couldn’t let the Bosniaks collapse, or their own goals would have been unachievable. It’s Realpolitik in a $60 box. It’s the best boardgame of 2020, and probably a fitting game for the nature of the year. -
Imperial Struggle
The “sequel” to Twilight Struggle by Matthews & Gupta is nothing like Twilight Struggle. NUH-thing. And at first I wasn’t sure what to do with it. But after a dozen or more playings, I like what it does, which is pretty much exactly what Twilight Struggle does: cartoonify a certain period of history but with interesting brushstrokes. This is really a Euro with some 18th-century theming, but I’m thinking this is ok. You can go nuts arguing about whether the stuff you do in Europe from a diplomatic angle makes any sense at all. Neither does a Brush War in Italy. Still a neat mechanism. -
Last Stand
This is a translation of Masahiro Yamazaki’s Japanese-language title about the German Operation Typhoon to capture Moscow in late 1941. Japanese translations can be hit-or-miss, because sometimes I’m convinced the text is just someone copy-pasting into Google Translate and then trying to iron out the details. This one was done by Scott Muldoon (designer of Cataclysm) and in a couple of playings, I didn’t find any rules holes. The thing I really, really like about this is that once the rains come, the Germans are basically out of supply except on the Smolensk-Moscow highway. The supply rules basically make it impossible for you to keep Guderian supplied, for example. I’ve how you get to choose whose supply formations you commit (by army: 4th Panzerarmee? 2nd Panzerarmee?) and that the ones who don’t get the trucks don’t get to be supplied. The Soviet player basically has to do a lot of defending to get to the two turns on interesting counterattack, but there are plenty of ways to make the Germans suffer even while retreating. Nice components and graphic design, too.
[MAJOR EDIT: I totally forgot about Brotherhood & Unity!]
Jeez this is like watching an adult Tiger Woods compete in a high school tournament.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Horizon Zero Dawn. PC version :)
- Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
I would probably vote for HL Alyx but haven’t fired it up yet. I might edit this if I get to it before the deadline :) And I didn’t get to Wasteland 3. Dammit, playing games from earlier years just disenfranchises you when it counts :(
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Death Stranding
- The Last of Us Part II
- Nioh 2
- Immortals Fenyx Rising
- Hades
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons
- Crusader Kings 3
- XCOM: Chimera Squad
- Monster Train
I think I only played six games that came out this year for more than an hour or two. Sorry, Wasteland 3. There are a few things I was waiting on until I got a new video card.
Well, we still want to see who wins “best high school golfer!” :)
I might have ranked Paradise Killer if I’d played it more, but I’ve just begin with it. I do think it’s gonna be great, though.
The nature of these lists is to be time-limited, I know I didn’t get to a lot of 2020 games and obviously everyone only has what gaming time they have in a given year. The result is that if something gets a lot of praise, people are more likely to give that game their time in the year it was released, so they’re then able to vote for it. The result is a snowball effect worthy of later turns of a badly-designed 4X.
Mind you I don’t know if Hades is worthy of the hype or not, since (as you can see from my list) I got to play almost nothing from this year.
This was a struggle for me to get to five 2020 releases. I would have expected to play more video games this year than usual all things considered.
- Retro Bowl—This is probably the 2020 release I spent the most time with and was a near constant presence for me throughout this trying year. While it is not quite the Tecmo Bowl clone I’ve long wanted, it is a simple phone-based gridiron football game that is an excellent way to burn a few minutes, or longer if you’re so inclined.
- Super Mega Baseball 3—SMB is still the most fun (non-sim, obviously) baseball game I’ve ever played, and this version is as ever slightly better than the previous, now featuring a career mode and snazzy new New Orleans-based stadium.
- Bloody Rally Show—Some dude on the forum kept hyping it. Was not a space game, so it couldn’t have been the usual suspect. Turned out to be pretty good.
- Hades—I am not really a fan of rogue lites and the repetition does get to me at times, and yet here I am still playing it and here it sits at #4.
- Golf on Mars—Adding more stuff to Desert Golfing (spin! That’s not essential!) is counter to my understanding and appreciation of the peerless Desert Golfing, but Golf on Mars is still mostly the same game with a different color palate so to #5 it goes.
The game I played the most was probably Out of the Park Baseball, but it feels like a cheat to put it on an annual list. In the non-video games space, shouts out to Mouse Guard for getting me into TTRPGs and Band of Blades, which worked out wonderfully for a solo playthrough during Spring lockdown even if the ending was a bit underwhelming. Also, on my (theoretical) table is Blood Bowl: ‘Second’ Season Edition, which I’ll play once the painting is done.
- Huntdown - A spectacular retro game that made me feel like I was a teen again with my new Genesis or at the arcade with some friends. Having a bunch of cool 80s movie Easter eggs was a nice bonus, but the game stands on its own. A classic level based platforming run & gun evocative of Revenge of Shinobi, and Rolling Thunder as much as Metal Slug. Fantastic pixel graphics, an excellent soundtrack and some decent voice work along with a very tight gameplay loop.
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Last of Us II
- Desperados 3
- Demon’s Souls
This was a crazy good year for games IMO a lot of other great stuff like Hades, Nioh 2, Miles Morales, Immortals: Fenyx Rising, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Tony Hawk 1+2, Gears Tactics. Really my top 5 list could changed at any moment with some of those swapped in depending on my mood.
I understand the instinct to disbelieve the hype, but I’d hate for people to be suspicious of Hades just because so many people are talking about it. I had never heard of the game, ever, until on release day it showed up on my Steam Store page and I saw it was by Supergiant and I thought, hey, I should buy this to support my old editor at Gamespot. That was the sum of my reasoning. And then I decided to try it and played it and then all of a sudden it was the best game I have played in at least five years.
Vinraith, sounds like you feel the same way I felt about Witcher 3 whatever year that was.
Again, I haven’t played Hades so I certainly don’t want to discount it just because it’s well loved. That said, I wasn’t a fan of the Witcher 3 either, and in fact I’ve seen this happen quite a few times and often with games I ended up not being wild about. So yes, I’ll admit it gives me a little pause to see something praised to the heavens, if only because I’ve been burnt before. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s learned behavior. :) Add to that my past experience with Supergiant titles and there’s a lot of caution in play here. That said…
This and your review are both really encouraging. I don’t think of myself as much of an action gamer but I know that’s not exactly your natural home either, and that you enjoyed this so much certainly makes me want to give it a shot. In a less fraught year I probably would have already.
All that said it wasn’t really my intention to make this about me or about Hades, I was just trying to note that yearly best-of lists produce a natural clustering effect.
If it helps, I also felt like Supergiant’s previous games were–while always interesting, well written, and boldly conceived–not always that fun to play for the long-haul. For me, Hades really transcended their previous games in that respect.
I didn’t enjoy 2020 games very much. I’m skipping my list this year to keep it from being full of filler (or only one game long.) I’m not passionate enough about enough 2020 releases to highlight them this way.