Most Baffling Good Time So I Wrote 3,500 Words to Explain It goes to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I ended up having a great time with it, despite things I couldn’t rationalize. That’s the only time I’ve written anything more than a few paragraphs about a game. Even so, what might be my clearest question, “Why push all the best parts so far into the game?”, only formed after I was done.
I Really Shouldn’t Be Playing This Game While On Voice Calls goes to Picross for a Cause. No words or big concepts to keep in mind. I wouldn’t play it if I could just care more…but I can’t.
Sliding in the final days of the year, Hardiest Backlog Survivor goes to Dishonored. I played it for 20 minutes in Feb 2013. I hazily recollect hearing good stealth things about it and expected it to have smarter guards and different systems. After almost 8 years untouched to lower expectations, it is done. What stood out most this time were the overly-strong god rays. I could see shadows in the air from even the closest of things. Next most, the absence of birds presumably so the game could be consistent in the use of the Possess ability.
Best Game To Play in One Sitting and Read All the Words Aloud With Friends goes to Space Bear.
The 2020’s 2019 Game of the Year Award goes to Judgment. I just adore this world and these characters so much, I had a hard time bringing myself to head into the endgame and wrap it up. If it had had a more engrossing set of minigames than the VR dice thing and drone racing, I might have even stretched this one further into 2021.
My 2021’s Presumed 2020 Game of the Year Awardwill almost certainly go to Yakuza: Like a Dragon. There is nothing I’ve heard about this that makes me think I won’t love it. Can’t wait to jump in.
The Hey Guys? I Think Something Might Be Wrong–I’m Actually Enjoying This! Award goes to Death Stranding. I’ve played pretty much every Kojima game, and ended up coming away irritated and regretting my time. And this one seemed to double down on the weirdness I’ve found so off-putting. But… I had fun? And I felt compelled to play more? I’m still not sure that’s right. Maybe I should make an appointment with the neurologist.
Okay, so I’ve been chipping away at this game for years, and every time I set the game down I end up restarting from scratch. This year was no different, and this time I played long enough to advance further than ever before through the main story line.
It never mattered how long it had been since I played the game, or what my party composition was in these runs, the one and only item in the first chapter that felt consistently awesome and rewarding were the Gloves of Teleportation, located at the beach near a couple barrels of oil and gigantic aggressive lizards.
I’m an explorer and treasure hunter at heart, so when I play RPGs I’m always most interested in utility items that help me reach places I normally wouldn’t be able to get to, or locate treasures I wouldn’t normally be able to find. And these gloves do just that for me. Teleporting is even better than inverting the entropy of an object through time.
Disco Elysium and A Short Hike. Yes, I know, they came out in 2019, but I didn’t play them until 2020. These were perfect games for the year - but unlike things like Animal Crossing or my personal method of forgetting 2020 existed, No Man’s Sky, these games weren’t about escapism. Disco Elysium is about the difficult but necessary process of confronting problems and A Short Hike is a short, sweet reminder that life is much more than just your own problems.
Game I could brag about not playing before not playing it was cool
Cyberpunk 2077. Seeing the out-of-control scope of the game a long way off and remembering The Witcher 1’s release, I decided to wait on the reviews for this one long before it came out. Um, and also I don’t currently own anything it would run properly on.
Best 2020 game I forgot to play until 2021
Fort Triumph. It was one of those Early Access games I bought but said, “I won’t play it until it’s officially done and released” … and then completely forgot I had purchased. For a year.
It’s a charming little fantasy strategy title that didn’t get the attention it deserved. Probably because it made the mistake of marketing itself as “fantasy XCOM” which it assuredly is not. Instead it’s Heroes of Might and Magic, but with tactical battles that are like a lightweight version of Divinity: Original Sin’s turn-based combat, where you use the environment to bombard your enemies with mushroom and barrels, set them on fire, etc.
Best pre-2020 game that I only played properly in 2020 goes to Anno 1800. I finally managed settings that had the game running and looking well without making my GPU run hot, which got me playing the game properly, and oh my, what a fantastic game. I find myself avoiding playing it now because if I start I won’t play anything else for a few weeks at least. ;) That said, I hope I’ll play it a lot more this year.
The Worst Thing About Gaming in 2020 goes to trying to find gaming hardware, from video cards to next-gen consoles.
The Surprising Thing About Gaming in 2020 award goes to Animal Crossing - it didn’t make my list, but thanks to being stuck working from home right when this came out, I learned to really appreciate this game and games like it.
The Well, I Don’t Know What I Expected award goes to Animal Crossing New Horizons. I wasn’t going to like this game. There was nothing about this game that would have made me think I was going to like it. But I bought it anyway, and played it. And confirmed that yep, it is not a game for me.
Greatest use of secret Koreans award goes to Yakuza Kiwami 2. I’ve been on a Yakuza kick recently and just beat both 0 and K2 (I skipped 1 since I played the original a long time back) …and well, it’s Koreans all the way down in this game.
The Most 2020 Moment of the Year goes to G String. There’s a bit in the Smog Storm chapter, where you’re sprinting from cover to cover, trying to make it to shelter from the massive pollution-fueled calamity approaching, while the soundtrack samples some utopian techbro dipshits talking about how we’ve conquered nature.
You fail, and get swept down a storm drain. Well done, madwoman who spent a decade making this. That’s 2020.
Best Organ Drop of the Year goes to Warhammer 40 000: Mechanicus. Have you heard that soundtrack? It is fucking incredible.
The Award for Being Better Than It Had Any Right To Be goes to Terminator: Resistance. There’s so much enthusiasm and love here, for what you’d expect to be throwaway trash.
The Award for making me 100% more disappointed in 99% of other open world games goes to Metal Gear Solid V. I mean, there are exceptions like Death Stranding and the Yakuza games, but why can’t most of them make you pay attention to the space you inhabit instead of turning it into throwaway icon fodder?
I know what you mean about world detail. I just started playing Metal Gear Solid V a couple weeks back. The whole prologue had me happily fascinated while also thinking “Isn’t this more of a desert open world game?” Somehow in MGSV I’m fully signed up for where Kojima draws the line for what’s modeled in the world and what’s cut, what is allowed to exist in this reality and what isn’t. It feels coherent. Systems to improve game play fit in the world. And the more that friends tell me, oh, that’s based on a real thing, the more I surrender to Kojima’s vision. Death Stranding is definitely on the docket in 2021. May it land for me between @anonymgeist’s and @rhamorim’s award levels.
After about 3 years without a computer I finally got myself a gaming laptop this past summer. So the award for the First Game I Played On My New Computer goes to Faster Than Light.
You know how when you get a new computer and then all of a sudden you have a bunch of new games to play? I award Ancestors: The Humankind OdysseyGame I Would Have Spent More Time With If I Didn’t Have All of these Other New Games to Play. Really slides off the tongue there.
I almost bought this on Android but I award the Game I Got on the Computer Instead to Battle Chasers: Nightwar.
And finally the award for Game I’m Playing Instead of Cyberpunk 2077 Even Though I Like CP2077 is Control because I just got it yesterday and man does it look cool so far!
Greatest Gaming Bargain in the History of the World:The Itchio Racial Justice bundle, something like 1500 indie games for as little as five bucks, all for a good cause. It’s like a buffet where I can sample little tastes of things I wouldn’t otherwise. More than occasionally the bundle included gems.
I Surprised Myself by Signing Up: Xbox Gamepass for PC. I have never owned an Xbox and generally ignore MS attempts in at making inroads into PC gaming, but the inclusion of Wasteland 3, Crusader Kings 3 and OOTP in their PC Gamepass offerings got me to sign up for a measly $5 (now $10) a month. I haven’t bought a game on Steam since.
Return to a game I once loved thanks to QT3: @Razgon’s Anyone want to play a game of chess thread got me back into chess (along with the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit) after many, many years. Now I even watch chess videos on youtube and have dug out my stash of chess books. No early access, no patches, no DLC, no luck – pure strategy and tactics.
Even though I didn’t follow you guys over when you jumped ship, and am only currently being soundly beaten over and over by @krayzkrok (Sorry!), I do smile a bit everytime I see the thread pop up - so nice to see people play and enjoy chess!
