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The Mento Game Awards 2020

By Mento 5 Comments

This isn't going to be doing a super elaborate round-up, in part because I feel woefully unequipped to talk about 2020's games in full given I played, like, twelve new games this year. However, I've been doing this since 2010 so it's going to feel weird if I miss one out, and it turns out I still have a lot of video game talk to get out of my system so, hey, let's have at it.

(JC Denton couldn't be with us this year because he caught a virus. Not COVID; it's a computer virus because he's like a half-machine guy.)

Best 2019 Game of 2020

Candidates:

Just looking at the revised rankings in this "Adjusted" GOTY 2019 list I can see what the final top ten list should be: almost equal thirds of the best games I played in 2019, the best ones I played in 2020, and the best of those I've yet to play. I have a strong feeling Dragon Quest Builders 2, AI: The Somnium Files, Judgment, Disco Elysium, and The Surge 2 are all going to be high on that list when I can eventually factor them in.

Nonetheless, I still caught up with a lot of pressing backlog items, with Luigi's Mansion 3 being the most fun of the new batch if not necessarily the most elaborate or innovative. Turns out, 2020 needed some wholesome light entertainment more than anything else. The Outer Worlds proved Obsidian could make a compact New Vegas just as adroitly as compact Infinity Engine homages (I guess I just mean Tyranny, since neither of the Pillars of Eternity games were "compact" by any stretch). Reventure was endlessly inventive and genuinely funny, both qualities that are sadly rare for this medium, and a game ideal for anyone mourning the loss of the open-ended (so to speak) Don't Shit Your Pants. Wilmot's Warehouse found a brand new vein to explore within the casual puzzle sphere, relying on (and sometimes preying on) a player's organizational skills and OCD. Vision Soft Reset, meanwhile, was a little explormer that blew my mind with its intelligent (and intelligently accessible) approach to time-loops and time manipulation as mechanics.

Best 2020 Game of 2021?

Candidates:

You'll see a little further down, or perhaps have already since I posted the list last week, that my current 2020 GOTY top-ten is looking a bit sparse. Even during the lockdown, the game industry was able to power through and deliver some memorable games this year, if relatively few all-timers. I'm inclined to say the newest Yakuza game is my most anticipated, just because I love the series and I'm curious about this paradigm-shifting reboot, but I'm not sure I'll actually get around to it in 2021: I've still got Judgment to play after all, and I can only usually manage one trip to Kamurocho a year.

Other potential post-annum 2020 GOTY entries include Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, a combination side-scrolling brawler and farming simulator that I started just last weekend; it's been tough going at the start what with all my food rotting almost immediately but I'm presaging the kind of game it'll eventually become with a few more mechanics and conveniences and liking what I see. Ghost of Tsushima seems like a highly competent and attractive if very safe open-world game, and I often find myself coming back to that genre's gift for comfort-food gaming every so often. Wasteland 3 sounds like InXile's best game in years: a much more confident approach to the gallows humor post-apocalyptic setting they reintroduced to the world with Wasteland 2, with better combat and quest design. The Ori sequel was 2020's best explormer by most accounts, so that was an obvious choice to fill out this brief roster of 2020 games I'll want to catch up on in short order.

Best New Character

Candidates:

I'm sad that many of the game's best characters, or at least most talked about, came from games I didn't get to see: Hades and Yakuza 7 being at the forefront. Yet the games on my list still managed to produce some memorable characters, helped in part by my predilection for games with a narrative focus, with the married assassins of Sam and Lydia Day Break taking my top spot. Like the rest of the immortal cast of Paradise Killer, these two are initially suspects in a murder case and it's possible to implicate either as part of a conspiracy with enough evidence (also true for almost everyone else). However, I enjoyed their company so much - Lydia as a breezy cabbie/fast travel delivery service who always had some reassuring words, Sam as a skeletal bartender who kept the protagonist's favorite glass while she was in exile - that I purposefully avoided getting them mixed up with the court case finale.

Paper Mario The Origami King's Bob-omb - or Bobby as he was known to... well, just Olivia - was a single, unexceptional bob-omb who had lost his wick and his memory both, and followed Mario and Olivia on their quest out of having nothing better to do; just a wonderful deconstruction of the Bowser Army's most disposable underlings. Hachisuka Koroku has been a part of most of Koei's Sengoku-related content for years as a fan favorite vassal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, though Nioh 2's interpretation saw him as a boisterous and charismatic shiftling: a half-yokai like the protagonist, though in his case explicitly half kappa. The pun-loving librarian NPC Paige's whole reason for existing is to give the generic hero a few fetch quests to do, yet finds herself drawn to the mystique of the new unexpected protagonist Lenna to the extent that she eventually tags along with her as a helpful companion and sort of breaks free of her programming in the process; there's even an optional same-sex romance path for the two of them, though one perhaps doomed to misery. Finally, Becky Call's the acerbic stand-out of Murder by Numbers's eclectic cast of creative Hollywood types, and initially fulfils the broad stereotype of a mean-spirited and bratty starlet until you dig a little deeper into the reasons behind her ambitious drive for award season - she also has some of the best withering lines, and a fun sequence when she takes charge during an emergency.

Weirdest F'n Game

Candidates:

I keep this vague and ambiguous category in year after year because I like coming across games that defy convention and/or sense, either incidentally from developers who can't help but produce strange narratives and characters in spite of themselves, or those creators consciously trying to set themselves apart with something a bit oblique. Paradise Killer is definitely the latter: a deliberate effort to invoke Suda51's unique style while telling a story all of its own about an investigator working for a syndicate of immortal death cultists, examining a mass-murder heinous even to a pack of mass-murderers.

The White Door has some fascinating ideas for a narrative about a paranoid depressive in a mental wellness facility which manages to humanize its troubled protagonist and doesn't demonize mental health issues; Moon Remix RPG is a metaphysical obscurity once known only to hardcore Japanese RPG fans that finally saw a western release by Onion Games, one of the few working developers likely to do it justice; Maneater makes a killer shark the hero, though that's perhaps stretching the definition of the word, and tends to build quests around eating a lot of people and acquiring magic powers; and Cyberpunk 2077 is less a fascinating game than a fascinating mess, sadly typical of the top "AAA" echelon of game development companies that seem to care very little about their audience and own development staff alike. (I know Yakuza: Like a Dragon probably should be on here, but I've been avoiding spoiling myself on all its lunacy.)

Best Indie Games of the Week

Candidates:

Another year means another fifty Indie Games of the Week, and as always it's enough of a challenge narrowing that list down to just five that I'm not even going to try to pick a single winner. It speaks to the sheer variety and volume of excellent games emerging from the Indie sector on a yearly basis that the more famous names I covered on the feature this year - Night in the Woods, Forager, CrossCode, Kentucky Route Zero, or Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince - couldn't match five games I had zero expectations for going in.

For instance, Vaporum is an older-style first-person real-time dungeon-crawler recently resurrected by the Legend of Grimrock games, and found its own niche exploring a steampunk-inspired tower of pipes and engines and mechanical monsters; beyond its thematic novelty, however, Vaporum is full of appreciated quality-of-life perks and far more lore than is usually offered by games of its type. Heat Signature, likewise, is a roguelite I was prepared to jump ship on after a couple of hours; instead, its inventive scenarios and combinations of space-age gadgetry and weapons made it a far more rewarding and tactical version of Hotline Miami's violent and chaotic free-for-alls. Ara Fell was an RPG Maker game (meh) with a generic fantasy setting (meh) that was nonetheless one of the most riveting and tightly-designed throwback RPGs I've ever encountered. Wilmot's Warehouse speaks to a part of the brain that goes underutilized and ignored by most puzzle games, while Timespinner narrowly pipped Monster Boy and Vision Soft Reset as my year's favorite explormer. (Other runners-up include: Clifftop Games's Whispers of a Machine (IGotW #167); Trinket Studios's Battle Chef Brigade (IGotW #190); Reventure (IGotW #191); and Team OneShot's OneShot (IGotW #196).)

Best Original Soundtrack

Candidates:

Beyond Paradise Killer's funky synthwave lo-fi beats to investigate and solve murders to, there weren't a whole lot of soundtracks that really stood out to me this year, at least out of the games I actually got around to playing. Everything else either had the one fun intro/credits song (Lair of the Clockwork God, Murder by Numbers) or a whole lot of competent "melts into the background" ambient music (Genshin Impact, Nioh 2). The others on the above shortlist I had to source from other lists and award blogs, such as @majormitch's always comprehensive musical rundowns, having not played them myself. While I like them in abstract I'll have to listen to them again with the acquired context someday.

I'm obviously going to promote the soundtracks to any Falcom games that were released this year, and Trails of Cold Steel IV did not disappoint on that front: it's the culmination of that particular saga, so while I was careful to avoid spoilers wherever I could you couldn't toss a stone at that soundtrack without hitting something intense and climactic. Streets of Rage 4 pulled the Shovel Knight trick of ably combining the old and the new, bringing in original composer Yuzo Koshiro for a few tracks while the lion's share went to Indie fixture Olivier Deriviere. Speaking of favorite long-time composers, 13 Sentinels was blessed with the involvement of Hitoshi Sakimoto: a VGM creator I enjoy so much I've written whole blogs dedicated to his music, and the more synthy near-future flavor of 13 Sentinels seems to have jibed well with his sound (I look forward to seeing what he does with Unsung Story, which - surprising me most of all - sounds like it might actually come out eventually, if not next year). Finally, there's the new Yakuza soundtrack, which are always invariably a treat; they added way more wub-wubs this year, though I can't say I'm displeased.

(Honorable Mention goes to Fuser: though all of its "ingredients" are licensed tracks, there's much potential for delivering unexpectedly catchy musical mutants.)

Giant Bomb's Best Feature of 2020

Candidates:

Brad and Vinny frequently indulged their DIY passions during this year: Vinny building woodcrafts for his family home, while Brad perfected his "Marvelous Mr. MiSTer" one mail-order component at a time. However, they also brought that dad energy to some entertaining if chill premium features - across the year, mostly while stuck in their respective homes, they crafted interplanetary mining operations in Astroneer and Satisfactory, and pushed their engineering skills to the limit in a one-off Scrap Mechanic stream. (Vinny also took apart some spaceships in a solo stream for Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a game I hope Vinny and Brad both return to once it has more features, levels, and perhaps a co-op mode.)

Elsewhere on the site, we had an entertaining Breaking Brad feature on Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (a.k.a. The Real Super Mario Bros. 2) which isn't to dismiss Jeff's equally funny travails with the half-baked Super Mario Bros. Special for the PC-88. Mass Alex concluded the Mass Effect trilogy with all the slapdash business included with the third game, allowing Alex to share in the eye-rolling wonders that are Kai Leng and the tossed off multiple choice ending. Ben and Jan made a spirited effort to learn mahjong, only distracted briefly by Olive Garden starters, and even got fairly competent at the game of tiles after only a few short lessons on yaku and rons. Finally, where would the Giant Bomb community's sanity be without Alex's regular hang out drumming streams? I think he went live for 42 of the 53 Thursdays of last year, bringing us hot jams - and the occasional whammy - across setlists featuring over a thousand tracks total. That we're not even halfway through his full Rock Band library is reassuring for the near future, even if it makes us a little worried about his DLC spending habits. (Runners-up: Abby's various horror features, including the final series of Six Crazy Frights and the separate streams of Phasmophobia, Among Us, and In Silence; Jeff Gerstmann's Pro BMX XXX, which was the beginning of the end in more ways than anyone could've anticipated; and Jan's homebound adventures through Bloodborne and, briefly, Trails in the Sky First Chapter. Hoping he returns to the latter before too long.)

Best 2020 Game

GOTY 2020

1. Nioh 2 While perhaps too big by half, Nioh 2 represents everything I love about video games: myriad gameplay systems and features all working harmoniously, heavy player customization and development that's as granular as I can handle, excellent atmosphere, storytelling, and worldbuilding, a decent challenge, and a reaffirmation of my long-standing belief that video game sequels are unique in how they buck the usual stereotype of "sequelitis" diminishing returns by being so much more confident and polished in their approach the second time around. It sands off the rough edges of the first Nioh, adding nothing but welcome modifications and additions to the original's vaguely Soulsian formula, and adjusts the difficulty curve to be more amiable without denying the player all the difficult duels and hazards they could want.

As a half-yokai samurai who finds himself (or herself) deeply embroiled in the latter years of the Sengoku conflict, Nioh 2 puts you in a game built explicitly as a Souls ersatz but framed by a loot RPG sensibility and an instance/mission-based structure that makes the game convenient to play in bursts. Nioh 2 even tacitly acknowledges the true king of the Soulslikes - Bloodborne - with a new weapon class that transforms just like the Burial Blade, and is best suited for hunting monsters. Though exceptionally hard to quantify due to the sheer subjectivity involved there are those rare games that come along and just seem to grok you for the very specific type of player you are, and Nioh 2 was that for me this year.

2. Paper Mario: The Origami King I've not visited the wafer-thin variant of the Mushroom Kingdom in quite some time, staying away from Sticker Star and Color Splash mostly through a combination of their mediocre reputation and the fact first-person Nintendo games rarely seem to drop in price. The Origami King, however, started seeing a lot of good press despite the continued diminishing of the franchise's RPG aspects, and I was curious enough to eventually try it out. While it still has that fundamental dissonance to its design - random encounters are detrimental to progress, since you gain nothing and often need to use up your stronger finite items to win them quickly - the combination of its puzzle-like approach to battles and the effortless charm of its script and characters made it an extremely pleasant way to pass the time.

It didn't hurt, at least in my case, that the game was also full of collectibles and secrets to find and kept varying its approach from solving mysteries in the desert to sailing the high seas and discovering new islands in a style not dissimilar to The Wind Waker. When Super Mario games are at their best, they represent the purest and cleanest form of sheer entertainment and escapism this medium can muster, and The Origami King had that on offer during a year where such an experience was sorely needed.

3. Paradise Killer I don't know if there is such a thing as a video game buff the way there is for movies and music - specifically, dedicated fans who hold the bold, the strange, and the obscure in the highest regard - but Paradise Killer feels like a game made for them. A murder mystery adventure that keeps detailed logs on every clue, hint, and statement you've found or been given, while also an open-world game filled with incidental treasures that almost always hold very little relevance to the central investigation but operate instead as a means to deliver some of the wildest worldbuilding I've seen in a game setting: A death cult of immortal beings who regularly create and destroy a series of tropical paradises in pursuit of the best way to commune with their eldritch patron deities, who use regular humans like chattel and must avoid being "tempted" by any one of their gods lest they find themselves exiled to a quiet villa for three thousand years, like the titular detective Lady Love Dies.

It's a game that demands a lot of investment from its player, but offers enough narrative rewards for the curious mind to make that journey into madness worth it. Also, its mix of synthwave and '80s funk probably made for the best soundtrack this year, though I might have to do some more digging first...

4. Lair of the Clockwork God Ben Ward and Dan Marshall made a pair of adventure games in the late aughts that, while hardly pushing the envelope (by design), were full of warm affection for the slapstick LucasFilm era of point-and-clicks and were unusual among their peers in how they managed to keep pace with the wild comedic energy of genre paragons like Day of the Tentacle or The Secret of Monkey Island: a rare feat for any game from this or any other genre. Lair of the Clockwork God is both the culmination of that wit and the inevitable result of observing and working within the Indie game development scene for over a decade. It is nothing if not irreverent, for both recent trends in Indie gaming and for where British culture and politics are at now in general, and feels that much more a personal expression from its two grumpy auteurs as a result. It also finds the pair at their most imaginative and innovative, creating a string of thematically varied vignettes loosely connected by an overarching plot of teaching a sapient supercomputer how to feel, and an excuse for a rapid-fire delivery of some of the best meta video game jokes and silly sociopathy since Jazzpunk.

I didn't always see eye to eye with the game's platforming - Dan's fictional counterpart insists you can't make Indie games in this century without it, even if Ben staunchly disagrees - but this is a game absolutely worth playing through for its narrative content and humor (and yet another one that felt intended for me).

5. Murder by Numbers Actress Honor Mizrahi, a very curious robot named Scout, and a cast of '90s Hollywood types (with some prominent LGBTQ representation) all find themselves involved with a series of strange murders, and the only way to solve them is to scan for clues (the interface for which looks eerily like a picross puzzle) to piece together what happened and who the culprit behind them might be.

A Picross/Ace Attorney hybrid is a concept potentially fraught with issues - How do you maintain a decent delivery rate of picross puzzles without derailing the pacing of the ongoing story and investigation? Why would a picross puzzle of a cat tell you who the murderer is anyway? - but Murder by Numbers nonetheless found the sweet spot in its peerless execution, and coupled it with one of the most mature, realistic, and well-written stories I've seen in a visual novel while still dedicating plenty of time to moments of levity and goofing around. I'm glad the developers saw tremendous success this year (they also released Fall Guys) because it was well deserved.

6. The White Door An adventure game about depression that hit me hard, as anything to do with protagonists suffering mental illness is likely to do, but remarkable in its ingenuity towards using the medium of video games to deliver a narrative that either contains a genuine descent into paranoid insanity or an insidious external conspiracy to falsify same. An initially nameless patient is put through an experimental version of systemic routine therapy: that is, following the same directions at the same times every day to re-establish a sense of normalcy to that person's world. (The game also incorporates a few clever narrative puzzles in here regarding passwords and backstory details that I won't spoil.) A few loops of this, bookended with flashbacks of how our protagonist reached his current nadir, eventually starts to give way to tears in reality and a breakdown of said normalcy; the game itself messing with you by subtly mixing up the safe routine you've been following.

It's a well-paced horror story that doesn't diminish the dignity and humanity of those suffering mental illness, to its credit. Powerful and potentially difficult material that's very worth a glance if you're in a position to handle it. (NB: If you bought that Racial Justice and Equality bundle back in the summer, you should already have the means to check it out.)

7. Assemble with Care A relaxing game about disassembling and reassembling broken electronics and keepsakes, with a simple and clear-cut interface that neatly places every component in a dedicated slot, and with no timers or scoring systems that might add any amount of tension. Just a gentle tale about an itinerant repairwoman working on commissions from the picturesque seaside town of Bellariva to pay for room and board during a local festival, with her expertise and empathy helping to resolve two different family conflicts in the process.

Almost certainly the most wholesome game I played this year, and again something that really helped to combat the lugubrious and anxious mood of this year and its procession of bad news. Full disclaimer: Assemble with Care was originally a 2019 release for the Apple Arcade service - the interface is clearly built for phones and tablets - but we parishioners here at the Church of Rorie do not recognize Apple-based platforms so its 2020 Steam debut is the one that matters, at least for the sake of this list.

8. Helltaker An exacting puzzle game about getting it on with demon ladies. Doesn't require any description more elaborate than that, though its simple approach to block-pushing puzzles can start to get tricky towards the end. Fortunately, the whole thing takes like an hour total to complete so don't expect to get waylaid (so to speak) for too long. The entire internet was thirsty for this thing for a hot minute, but it turned out to be a surprisingly wholesome trip through Gehenna with each demoness given enough of a personality to make their acquaintance worth the brain hurty effort.

There's not a whole lot left to say about it without spoiling the story or puzzles except to mention that it's still free on Steam and won't take more than a lunch break to complete, so there's no reason not to check it out yourselves.

9. Lenna's Inception A Zelda clone with a vaguely Axiom Verge premise of presenting an archetypal video game world twisted and corrupted by a strange and pernicious underflow glitch. That meta aspect to the narrative only really makes itself known at the start and the end of the plot, though, and the vast majority of the runtime is spent in large, uninteresting procgen Zelda dungeons and overworlds. I like a Zelda randomizer as much as the next guy, but robbing dungeons of some well-considered architecture also robs Zelda games of their essence.

Solid enough gameplay with some neat narrative twists and goofy meta gags, but it doesn't half drag on at times. (This was free in the Racial Justice and Equality bundle too, fyi. I really cheaped out on this year's GOTY list.)

10. The Lost Art of Innkeeping I perhaps like this game more for the conceit than the execution, as it's a rather dry RPGMaker project without a whole lot of graphical or mechanical flourish, but there was a time where I considered how you might build an RPG Innkeeper simulator back around the time when Recettear shined a spotlight on those nameless working stiffs manning all the vendor booths in our favorite RPGs. Developer SeaPhoenix hit upon an idea close to my own, where you'd have to decorate rooms in a specific way and complete unusual objectives to make each one of your idiosyncratic fantasy world guests feel right at home for the biggest payout. Add to that a game-long objective to repair the dilapidated mansion you inherited, fixing up rooms and opening up more floors to increase your guest limit, and spinning various plates on poles with timed events and tight scheduling.

It's a little stressful in its strategic planning and money management, as running a hotel probably should be, but its decision to weave in a story and exploration elements to ensure it's more than simply a loop of checking in clients and cleaning up after them made for a compelling hybrid. (See above, re: Racial Justice and Equality bundle.)

11. Genshin Impact [HONORABLE MENTION] Oh boy, this thing. An anime gacha game moonlighting as a surprisingly competent Breath of the Wild clone, taking Nintendo's many open-world innovations to heart when creating its rolling landscapes filled with incidental mischief with which to busy oneself. I'm never going to be that guy who pours money into a virtual slot machine in the hopes that some ultra rare waifu pops out, but Genshin's built in such a way where I don't have to be: the party you're given as part of the core story progression has more than sufficient skills and elemental coverage (which plays a major role in the game's combat and puzzles alike) to get you through the game's main content. You can toss all the microtransactions and gambling to the four winds and simply explore its world and take on its quests to your heart's content without paying a dime, and with two giant areas - and more on the way - it's a game I could see myself dipping into regularly throughout 2021 and beyond, at least until I hit that inevitable pay-to-win wall where progress screeches to a halt and the challenge level is insurmountable without monetary assistance.

My only reason for excluding it from the main list is that it's far from finished: it may well be a GOTY contender for 2025 with the ambitious roadmap MiHoYo has intimated. (Also, what was it with "cute" mascot characters obsessed with food in pop culture this year? And to that effect, could Grogu fit a whole Paimon in his mouth? I'm sure there's fanart but I'm scared to look.)

Best Game Played (For the First Time) in 2020

  1. Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter
  2. Nioh 2
  3. Tyranny
  4. God of War
  5. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
  6. Tokyo Xanadu eX+
  7. Paper Mario: The Origami King
  8. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
  9. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE
  10. Ara Fell
  11. Vaporum
  12. Timespinner
  13. Paradise Killer
  14. Lair of the Clockwork God
  15. Battle Chef Brigade
  16. Wilmot's Warehouse
  17. Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure
  18. Gothic II
  19. Reventure
  20. Genshin Impact

A new category for this year, the above list represents the best twenty games I played this year regardless of their original release date. They were all new to me in 2020, even if the oldest - Gothic II - came out eighteen years ago.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter was not only the best game I played in 2020, it may well be in my top five RPGs ever. With the world and mechanics established thoroughly by the first game, the second chapter was free to elevate the challenge and the narrative stakes alike, creating a game that was thrilling every step of the way. Nioh 2 comes second as my favorite of the new games played this year. Tyranny is something I'm still kicking myself that I missed out on when it released in 2016, as it would've had a decent shot at topping my GOTY list for that year. 2018's God of War was something I evidently needed to try out given its many accolades, and that assertion turned out to be correct. Yakuza 6 was, well, my designated Yakuza game for that year - didn't surprise me at all to discover it was also one of the year's best. (The rest - a combination of Indies, deranged visual novels, Falcom games, and a relatively ancient CRPG I was glued to for a month - are all well worth your time also.)

That's going to do it for this year's awards. I felt it best to focus a little more on the older games I've been playing this year rather than try to hand out approbations to the same twelve games in different combinations, but it's becoming evident that this isn't a feature that makes a whole lot of sense moving forward given how few new games I play. Might just stick to the GOTY list instead in 2021, and refocus December/January writing efforts elsewhere.

Either way, I'm looking forward to Giant Bomb's GOTY content when it happens and seeing what the community picked for their underdogs and dark horses: I feel 2020 was a good time for both, with most of the larger games disappointing us one way or another.

Speaking of disappointing...

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