2020 was a huge shit show, but you know what wasn't a huge shit show in 2020? Video games! Maybe that's not entirely true, but hey.
First, the also-rans:
Monster Sanctuary
Animal Crossing
Tell Me Why
Ghost of Tsushima
Crown Trick
Star Renegades
Here's my top 10 games, counting down from 10 to 1.
Man, something happened to me last month. I found myself playing a lot of Forza Horizon 4, Destiny 2, and Immortals Fenyx Rising. None of these is My Kind of Game. Immortals is probably the least surprising of these, because it at least has swords and bows and stuff.
Still, I dismissed and mocked Immortals Fenyx Rising when it was first shown. It was called Gods & Monsters back then, and the idea of Ubisoft making yet another open world game, this time aping Breath of Wild was not appealing at all. I only ended up with the game after trading in Cyberpunk 2077 for Xbox credit and looking into Immortals because I was very surprised to see it on Game Informer’s game of the year list.
To get a few things out of the way, it absolutely recycles a lot from Breath of the Wild: you’ll be hang gliding, scaling walls as a stamina meter drains, finding shrines that contain puzzles and combat and climbing towers to get a vantage point and find points of interest on the map. The latter feels the most fumbled in this game - you can zoom in and survey the landscape, and your controller vibrates when you are looking near a point of interest. Move the cursor over it and press a button to reveal it on the map. They split the difference between Assassin’s Creed’s “all the icons pop in automatically” and Zelda’s wonderful “manually mark places that look interesting to you on your map” system and ended up with something neither functional nor interesting.
That’s where my complaints end though. The game’s art style is similar at a glance, but it’s vibrant and gorgeous, and never feels like Breath of the Wild. The combat is snappy, responsive, and challenging. The puzzle design is often creative, clever, and rarely frustrating; most of my frustration has come from my overthinking the puzzle solutions. There is plenty of gear to find, and the game’s cosmetic options are intuitive and welcome. The game’s narrative is better than I expected; it feels like a B-tier Disney movie. The writing has made me smile a few times, and made me roll my eyes a few times. Zeus as comic relief is a pretty major miss, but it’s fine apart from that. It helps that I’m already familiar with Greek mythology.
It’s a huge, beautiful world where traversal and combat feel great. It’s sometimes hard to get anything done because I am constantly distracted by tracking down an icon on the map, or just exploring because I saw something cool or strange. Not all of the puzzles and challenges work, but that’s okay because I can move onto something else. Immortals Fenyx Rising is this year’s Dragon Quest Builders 2: gaming comfort food where it feels good to sit back and check things off a list at the end of a long day. Still don’t like the name though. And fuck Ubisoft.
The first mention of Atomicrops I remember was “What if Stardew Valley was a twin stick shooter?” which is bullshit, because the games bear no resemblance beyond “there’s farming”. Beyond that first blurb, what appealed to me is the idea that the game’s days take place in 2 phases: during the daytime, you go out and fight baddies to gather seeds, and at night the baddies invade your farm and you fight them off while planting and watering crops.
It’s also a run-based roguelike, and I am 1 of 26 remaining people who is still psyched to play those. Give me a challenge, mix up the details, let me upgrade stuff between sessions, and turn me loose. The game has a good variety of weapons and the challenge is satisfying and rarely feels unfair (apart from the bullet hell problem of too much stuff on the screen at times). I don’t love the art style, but the music sure makes up for it.
A game needs more than charm to be memorable and enjoyable. Charm can go a long way though, and Wintermoor Tactics club has it in spades. It takes place at a small college, and you play as a girl named Alicia. She and her friends are members of the school’s tactics club, and much of the game takes place around a table littered with graph paper, rulebooks, and snacks. As someone who loved tabletop RPG’s in simpler times, and never had the traditional college experience, a prettied-up version of that appeals to me in a huge way. It’s not wholly idyllic though, and it touches on issues of discrimination and what it’s like to be an outcast.
The gameplay itself is pretty straightforward tactics stuff and it works fine but isn’t really the draw here. I was propelled through the game largely by a desire to meet the next character, get the next story bit, and keep basking in the game’s wonderful aesthetic and smart writing. There’s something lovely about sitting around the table and playing a game with friends, and this game really captures that.
Ratrpolis is “A fusion of roguelite, tower defense, city-building, and deck-building!” which sounds like a hodgepodge of nonsense. And it kind of is. It’s a city building game where you are periodically being invaded from either the left or right side of the screen (or both). You choose from 6 leaders, each with their own pool of cards and play style, start with a basic deck of cards and slowly evolve it. The cards consist of buildings, military units, and various economic and military buffs. The major things that set this apart from favorites like Slay the Spire are that it happens in real time, and there is an economic aspect to manage. Tax money comes in every few seconds, and it’s possible to make poor decisions early on and not understand why you feel hamstrung later.
I spent a lot of games like that, not really understanding why I’d be doing okay and then get overwhelmed. I had a few rage quits early on, but I could tell that there was something there. I started approaching it with the mindset of building an economic engine in the early game, and I started having a lot more fun and success. Each of the 6 leaders feels distinct, and figuring them each out has been a lot of fun. Runs are usually no more than about 30 minutes, which feels about right.
Despite identifying as a big JRPG fan, I’ve never enjoyed a mainline Final Fantasy game enough to finish it. This year I finished 2 of them: Final Fantasy XV and the Final Fantasy VII Remake. I played the original Playstation Final Fantasy VII release, I think I got through disc 1 and a little ways into disc 2. It didn’t resonate with me, so I came to this year’s remake with no reverence for the game. When many of the original game’s fans got upset with how much the remake changed the script from the source material, I didn’t have a horse in that race.
The remake is gorgeous, the combat and upgrade systems are engaging, and the story is interesting enough to keep me wanting to see what’s next. The 1997 release of the game had some stuff that isn’t going to play the same in 2020 like the scene where Cloud is crossdressing, the game’s themes of environmental activism, and, uh, the entire Don Corneo storyline come to mind. But the game handled all of this pretty well. I’m glad to say that this is one of the best RPG’s I played this year, and I look forward to the next entry whenever the hell it comes along. Cloud is still an unlikable punk though.
This one's a bit of a cheat, since I missed it in 2020 and am now playing it in early 2021. The game is simmering in the back of my brain when I'm not playing it, and that doesn't happen very often. It's a an anime visual novel RTS with nude time traveling teens piloting giant mechs.
The game is all the way up its own ass, but I'm meeting it on its own terms and I'm in love with it (even if it's a struggle to keep up with all the story threads). I'm surprised at how much I'm digging the RTS city defense parts of the game, and I can't wait to see where it goes.
Slay the Spire was a surprise hit a couple of years ago, and inspired a lot of folks in the indie space to take a crack at the deckbuilding genre. Monster Train managed to to take inspirations from Slay the Spire but still feels like very much its own thing. Both games have you progressing through a series of encounters consisting of battles, shops, or small events trying to defeat the big bad at the end of a journey. You start with a deck of basic cards and upgrade them and add new cards along to way. You can’t really start a run planning on making a certain style of deck, you just choose from the cards available and watch the strategy form. The way this process tickles my brain makes these games endlessly replayable. The “one more run” is very strong here.
Monster Train differentiates itself in a couple of ways. First, where Slay the Spire was always just your one character battling one or more enemies, here you are summoning multiple creatures on the lower 3 levels of a 4-level train (I don’t know either). If the enemies reach the top floor of your train, they attack your core directly and eventually defeat you. This adds a strong spatial planning element - now you’re thinking about which combatants you want on each floor, and in what order.
The other notable difference between the games is that while Slay the Spire has four heroes, each with their own unique pool of cards, Monster Train has five factions. It’s one better. The first three factions feel pretty standard from a creativity point of view - red/green/blue are fire/nature/ice. The last two factions you unlock feel wholly unique though: there’s a faction that summons weak, cheap units and feeds on them for combat bonuses, and one that is made of candle beings who are powerful, but melt away. Okay, the real reason is that each time you play, you’re choosing a main faction (each has 2 champions to use from) and a secondary faction (you don’t get their champion, but you get access to their pool of cards). This makes each run feel unique and makes the game feel endlessly replayable. Even after unlocking all of the factions and their cards, and winning a run on the hardest challenge setting with each faction, I’m still playing Monster Train.
If Kentucky Route Zero is my “It’s Not You, It’s Me” game this year, Spiritfarer might be my “Love at First Sight” game of the year. The game’s striking visuals grabbed my attention immediately when I first saw the trailer at E3 2019, and it was billed as a game about saying goodbye. My only reservation was that it was coming from Thunder Lotus Games, whose previous titles (Jotun and Sundered) both fell flat for me.
Spiritfarer ended up being everything I was hoping for. You play as the newly-appointed ferryperson for the boat that transports souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Your ship acts as your base of operations, and you build living quarters, a kitchen, a forge, and lots of other facilities on it. The beings who join you on your ship are anthropomorphized animals, each with their own story. Your job is to help them be at peace, then send them to the next life once they’re ready.
In practical terms, you’re spending a lot of your time sailing from island to island to talk to people and find resources. There’s a plenty of crafting and time sinks in the game, and I appreciated the excuse to luxuriate in this game world. No game made me cry this year, but Spiritfarer (Alice’s story in particular) sure did try. It was the perfect respite for the nightmare that was 2020.
A lot of Yakuza fans were concerned over this game’s switch from the series’ usual brawling combat to turn-based RPG combat. I was not one of them. Everything about this game sounds like the sort of fan fiction someone like, well, like me would come up with on a late night drunken bender. “What if it was Yakuza, but like, JRPG battles? Why would that happen…..OH oh oh what if the main character was a big fan of DRAGON QUEST so he just, like, saw the world in those terms? You could have party members, and a Pokedex of all the weirdo scumbags you fight, and you could change jobs by going to a temp agency!”
All of that is in Yakuza: Like a Dragon. And I love it. The series’ producer says they decided to pivot to a turn-based combat system after positive reaction to an April Fools Day Yakuza RPG joke they put online. And there are some rough spots. Your party members get caught on the world’s geometry sometimes, and combatants are constantly milling around so AOE abilities feel like a crap shoot. The Yakuza series has always had about 30% too much combat, so translating it into a genre known for grindy gameplay feels like a perfect storm of sorts. Thankfully, I’m a fan of grindy RPG’s so all of this is directly in my wheelhouse.
This eighth game in the Yakuza series is the first with a new protagonist - goodbye Kiryu Kazuma, hello Ichiban Kasuga. Where Kiryu was very stoic, Ichiban is a hothead with the perfect mix of kindness, earnestness, and stupidity for a JRPG hero. He is an incredibly likeable and charismatic character, and I hope Ryu Go Gotoku Studio tightens up the battle system and keeps this iteration of the series running.
Hades seemed like a slam dunk. My favorite studio was making an action RPG based on Greek mythology. The announcement was the best possible version of “AND you can play it right now!” I bought it (in early access) immediately and played it a bit, but I didn’t want to burn out on it so I only briefly checked in on it every few months. As a result, my hype was pretty low when the game reached its 1.0 release.
Once I decided to fully engage with the game though, I was unable to put it down. SuperGiant’s games have the best writing, music, and voice acting in the business. That’s a pretty high bar to aim for, and they hit it once again with Hades. Both of their post-Bastion games (Transistor and Pyre) are games that I have to recommend with an asterisk though; the gameplay parts of each game is an acquired taste and will put some folks off.
Hades, however, I can give a full throated recommendation for. The gameplay is tight and the combat feels good. There’s a lot of variety in the weapons, so you can either find one that fits your style and stick with it, or do what I did and change it up every run. They also managed to achieve something incredible - they largely took the sting out of losing in a run-based game. There are things to unlock between runs as you’d expect from a roguelite. I found myself enjoying chatting with the denizens of hell as much as the moment to moment action gameplay. I’d respawn back home and make my rounds, taking to people and spending my cash. I had a route I’d travel each time, and that route ended with Skelly in the weapons room. Oh, the gauntlets grant a bonus if I use them this time….the door to start a new run is just right over there….okay I can do one more run tonight.
That personality and dialogue is sprinkled throughout the runs themselves too, in the form of the various Greek gods you talk to and get boons from. The variety in weapons and boons give the game tremendous replayability and give the game a deckbuilding feel. Every character in the game is incredibly well developed and well-acted. Zagreus is a likeable and relatable protagonist. He wants to get away from his disapproving father and find his estranged mother, and he and his father can’t see eye to eye.
The story and gameplay in Hades do equal lifting, the game is an incredibly complete package. The game also provided a couple of the most memorable moments of the year. Hades might just be SuperGiant’s best game. It’s certainly their most complete game.
