MalibuProfen

It is good to see that Housemarque - the makers of one of the ten(ish) best games of all time, according to me, in Supreme Snowboarding - have a potentially very successful game in their hands with this game. At least the critics seem to be mostly enraptured by it from the things I've heard and read. Hopefully the audience gravitates towards it as well.

I played through Streets of Rage 4 after midnight to see how the positive memory of it from last spring stacks up to others for my personal list of best gaming experiences of 2020, if I decide to write down and publish a comprehensive list with words aplenty.

@shindig: The base version doesn't have that (or any other) DLC. Decided not to buy that Legends Edition since it seemed to be not worth it. The actual game itself, on the other hand, seems great after brief testing.

Bought last year's F1 2019 for €10 to sate my open-wheel curiosity after not having played Formula One games since the Geoff Crammond Grand Prix 3 days. Thought also about nabbing 'art of rally', but it would be 10 euros cheaper on EGS with their adjective-of-choice coupon cascade.

It's still way too early to tell, since it was released 10 days ago, but I've yet to see someone else on these forums other than myself mention to have played Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which is a very charming and heart-warming game. It's understandable, though, since a well-known big game was released just a day before it did. But I'll just go ahead and beat the drum for Alba for a second time in case the sound of it will appeal to more people looking to add something pleasant, relaxing, delightful and even touching to their list of games to play someday.

Other than that, I'd echo @mightyduck that Streets of Rage 4 might get a bit lost in the shuffle from this year.

(This is excluding Umurangi Generation, which I haven't played outside of its demo version and thus can't fully comment on it personally other than it has dope music, but heard potentially good things about its narrative and world building.)

I'm two hours in on Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which is a breezy and cozy game set on an idyllic, small Spanish island. You are playing as a girl named Alba who is visiting her grandparents and, along with her friend, seeking to stop the mayor of the island's village from his plans to build a luxury hotel on top of a natural reserve.

For some, the following sentence may persuade you to take a look at the game. My favorite game from last year was A Short Hike, and this game gives similar vibes that that game gave me. Maybe not the exact same vibes, mind, but very similar. The gameplay between them is different however. Whereas in A Short Hike the traversal and exploration through jumping, climbing and gliding were the key elements (and were utterly sublime), in Alba the player is strolling, skipping and narutoing leisurely around the island on the ground trying mainly to identify the various animals inhabiting the nature by taking pictures of them. You also help some animals and fix things more directly. Nothing considered complicated. It's simply a pleasant time.

At one point, as I was walking around the island, I felt for a brief moment as if I was missing the absorbing and brilliant non-diegetic music found in A Short Hike that is ever-present and changes depending on where you are on that island (and even within the handful of areas on A Short Hike's island the instruments and their arrangements shift coming in and out), but I almost immediately replied to myself in my head that the music of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is the sounds of the (mostly) birds - the sounds of nature. The game does also have region-specific, i.e. Spanish, music, and there are even a few radios with dials, so the aural atmosphere is more of a natural and diegetic one.

I'll probably finish the game today going about the island at my own leisurely optimized pace. And probably smile often doing so.

I forgot to mention Circuit Superstars, which was announced in 2019. As someone who's enjoyed old school top-down racing games (namely Ignition, GeneRally, Death Rally, Slicks 'n' Slide, Super Off Road and Super Cars II) when growing up, Circuit Superstars seems to have potential to add to that lineage of games.

To add three+1 other games to the mix, I'm hopeful, at the moment, that Evil Genius 2 will deliver on the premise and promise of the original while improving upon it.

Also on the strategy front, I'm curious what Humankind will bring to the Civ/4x genre in the upcoming spring.

And while it hasn't been announced for next year (yet?), Hollow Knight: Silksong is blinking on my interest radar because Hollow Knight was great.

Oh, and Psychonauts 2 is.

Out of the (few) 2020 games I've played this year, I'm in the Hades for GOTY camp. I haven't 100% completed it yet, but I'm somewhat close to having done so with 75 hours played. The game has been an utter joy for pretty much everything except for my right thumb for a brief moment - at the end of September, I was foolish enough to do more than two full runs in a row speedrunish style with many pacts of punishment hammering the attack and dodge buttons rapidly in rhythmic concert causing some slight, temporary strain on said thumb and the nerves connecting to it. Other than that, Hades is from top to bottom, as I like to call it, a good video game.

A secondary and much more divisive choice for my GOTY would be The Last of Us Part II, but since I only watched it being played through (while myself playing Civ V in the background at times no less), I don't feel comfortable making it an official nominee. Just writing down my brief appreciative appraisal of the game from a non-playing perspective and to have something for like-minded or opinion-differing passers-by to nod or shake their head to, respectively. Or for anyone else to shrug with minimal effort, as in 'who cares'.

Appreciate you putting these spreadsheets together. Fun to look at the hard data and compare it to the deliberations to see whether or not the crew got it "right" (mostly) by conversing. As you mentioned, this year the lists are very close.