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LavenderGooms

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Games of the Year 2020

It's been a weird year for video games. At least the ones i've played. To be honest, several games on my list are only there by default simply because there wasn't a whole lot new this year that I greatly enjoyed. Some notable exclusions to my list are Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. I played these two games. I enjoyed them quite a bit. Cyberpunk gets disqualified for CDPR's dreadful treatment of its workers, its awful and exploitative marketing campaign, and the wretched state in which the game was released. Valhalla gets disqualified for having an ending that I hated so much it made me decide to never play an Assassin's Creed game again if this is the direction they are taking the story.

List items

  • I love me a good story in video games. A good story can make up for poor gameplay, in a way that the reverse often cannot. The story in this game I absolutely loved. I've been starved for good vampire games for a while now, and it looks like I will be for the forseeable future as well, so I tried VTM Night Road almost out of desparation, not expecting nearly anything from a choose your own adventure text-based rpg. It absolutely blew me out of the water. While its rpg mechanics are nothing special, the way that the writing facilitates things, leading you into creating a consistent character that is then supported by the story shifting itself to represent the character you've made. And this is what these types of games always do, this is what the genre is, however VTM Night Road is so incredibly well written that it feels like it is doing something new even as it's simply a well-done example of the medium. I cannot enthuse enough how good the storytelling is in this game. If I had one complaint it would be that the lack of manual saves makes it difficult to try different choices, having to start a new character from the beginning, but that is a minor point since the strength of the writing meant I was fully willing to play through it again regardless. When a game is nothing but its writing that writing needs to be something special to make it stand out. Vampire: The Masquerade- Night road is something special.

  • They did it, they took one of my two favorite games of all time and released it onto PCs, which is the only excuse I need to talk about it again. But really, what more can I say about HZD that I haven't previously? The story is still great, the characters are still absolutely amazing. And while I can unfortunately never experience it for the first time again and get the full impact of the reveals and plot developments, it all still worked for me flawlessly. However, one area where the move to PC actually improved things for me was in the gameplay, specifically the controls. Being able to use a keyboard and mouse gave me enough accuracy that I more fully engaged with the different weapons in combat. While I enjoyed the gameplay a lot on PS4, the inability to be fully accurate meant that I often defaulted to the easiest options when setting up and entering combat. This time I was able to experiment more and better tailor my strategies based on what was in front of me, and it made everything click even more than it had previously. It's just an absolutely incredible experience that I was happy to play for the fourth and fifth times on this new platform for it.

  • Ori and the Blind Forest is a gorgeous game, so it's pretty incredible that Moon Studios managed to top themselves in the visuals department with the next entry. Goddamn this is a pretty game. Even the terrifying spooky locations are still beautiful. The gameplay is great (except for the escape sequences, stop doing those they aren't fun), the characters are adorable and amazing, and the story keeps you hooked the whole way through. Even for a genre I love by default they elevated it well above, into one of the best examples.

  • Hey it turns out that picross is a pretty fun game. If you like picross then by god there's a lot of picross in this game. So much picross, holy shit. You won't believe how much picross you'll be doing when you play this game. In addition though, you'll be getting a rather charming anime story about murder investigations as a former actress and her partner a floating talking computer help a grouchy detective solve crimes. It's an anime story that never annoyed me and that is a heck of an accomplishment.

  • What a weird game. This is maybe the most unique setting i've seen in a video game in years. I still don't fully understand the nature of this island or what these characters do when there's not a murder being investigated, but their charm and the way the story unfolds kept me consistently invested. The way the gameplay is set up where the optimal path is for the player to simply go everywhere in the city picking up everything they find and figuring out context later isn't great, but all these items working as flavor for the world or as clues in the investigation make them worth seeking out. It's a game that is fully willing to let you make whatever conclusions you like from the evidence you find, then live with the consequences. Also there's a lady who helped fight off a demon invasion on the previous island so she was blessed by the gods to have a goat head and now works as a propaganda idol to encourage the lesser citizens to work harder in order to accomplish a perfect world.

  • I'm generally not a fan of roguelikes. I like a good story and a definite ending, i'm not really into the whole "repeat the game over and over indefinitely" thing. Hades gets around this by having a good story and a definite ending, and an actual reason why I should repeat the game over and over. There are interesting characters that I want to talk to more, there are regular persistent upgrades that I can work towards purchasing, and I guess the gameplay is pretty good too. Supergiant got me immediately with their first game Bastion, then lost me just as quickly with their second game Transistor. Hades was a return to form from them for me, and it was nice to have a game of theirs I could enjoy again. It's fair to say that everything Hades sets out to do it accomplishes flawlessly.

  • Well dang it all if they didn't actually go and make a Crusader Kings game actually accessible and understandable. The hallmark of Paradox strategy games is the depth of their mechanics, and while Crusader Kings 3 is no different in this regard they actually go out of their way to teach the player how to use them as well as constantly surfacing potential actions they are able to take. If my second cousin who I married to a duke suddenly has a claim to an area because their husband's uncle died, I don't need to remember that relationship and dig into menus to find it, the game will tell me in its convenient "these are some things you can do" window right at the top of the screen. This allowed me to sit back and enjoy the many absurd stories that come out of this dynasty simulator's experience, in a way that I was never able to with the previous game. Paradox makes good games and it's nice they finally started teaching their players how to play them.

  • Ubisoft in all its wisdom decided to release three gigantic open world collectathon games in the span of a month, and it turns out that the cartoony one full of "jokes" was the best one. The combat is simple but enjoyable enough, the exploration is the standard ubisoft map icon clearing but flight and traversal make it fun to get around. Zeus' interactions with Prometheus in the narration is ever-present, but even though the jokes are usually bad they aren't bad enough to ruin things completely. I actually even laughed a couple of times in my 40 hours spent with it, and as I neared the end of the game the characters and story became actually interesting. Overall it feels like a story meant for children, but there's nothing wrong with that. This is a perfectly fine game.

  • Dang it's fun to slime around this research facility eating scientists and smashing stuff. Mechanically it's simply a metroidvania without platforming, but the aesthetic and slow reveal of the nature of this science lab as well as the creature you are controlling works well to give it a unique flavor. It doesn't outstay its welcome, and there are enough ability unlocks to give a good sense of progression as it goes along. Just a solid, fun game.

  • My feelings on Spiritfarer are complicated. I think that its gameplay systems work against its story in a way that diminishes the impact of it, I hate a couple of its characters, and its length is too long and spreads out the story even further. And yet it's undeniable that at many points it affected me in a deep way. I enjoyed spending time with several of these characters, and frequently during their sendoffs I would become a complete wreck. I started crying immediately upon starting Astrid's farewell quest, even before we had started traveling to the gate, that's how much she resonated with me. Spiritfarer is a game that is absolutely elevated above its gameplay by the strength of its character writing. Hell if I understood the overall story though.
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