by mento
Same deal as the other "GOTY (Adjusted)" lists. The idea is to build GOTY lists that are constantly in flux, ever adapting themselves to a new year's worth of catch-up gaming. Like the Borg, but for video game lists. With enough time I should be able to play through every 2019 game that piqued my interest and construct a list that ideally represents what that year meant to me in terms of games, but that wasn't going to happen on the year in question: too many full-price new releases, too little time.
2020 was our first full lockdown year, so it lacked those relatively normal first few months of 2019 and the many projects near-completion that managed to hobble over the finishing line while people were stuck at home Zooming each other. Despite the dip in productivity it doesn't seem to have adversely affected 2020's releases too much - I guess it's not actually a big deal to have to work from home after all - but I'm looking at the remaining list of games to play from that year and there's not a whole lot left in it. It's probably for the best if it's a little more compact: if every year was like 2017 I'd never be able to catch up. That said, Ghost of Tsushima, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim are evidently the big games I need to see through before I can consider the year truly behind me (or this GOTY list thorough enough, for that matter).
Here's the original 2020 GOTY list, for posterity's sake.
| 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 |
| 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 |
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
(2020 Games Yet to Play: Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, Robotics;Notes, Sakura Wars, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, Tell Me Why.)
(2020 Games Yet to Buy: Astro's Playroom, Cyberpunk 2077, Deadly Premonition 2, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, The Pathless, Picross S4, Picross S5, Spelunky 2, Timelie, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, Trails of Cold Steel IV, Trials of Mana, World's End Club.)
[Last edited Jan 2025.]
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2020 Rank: 1 2021 Rank: 1 2022 Rank: 1 2023 Rank: 1 2024 Rank: 1 The reigning champ of 2020, at least for now. Nioh 2 is your typical video game sequel success story: riding that fine line of offering more of what made the first game work without running afoul of the law of diminishing returns by supplementing the existing gameplay with new content and mechanics that, for the most part, work to enhance what was already there. Nioh 2 also had Koei sneaking in some of their Japanese historical simulation background, placing the protagonist in a central role in one of the country's most tumultuous periods and having their immortality carry them all the way through to the other end some hundred years later. It's a fun story to experience for history buffs, even if you're just kinda hovering around the background of various pivotal moments of the Sengoku era like a half-yokai samurai Forrest Gump. But, man, the appeal of this game is really in its multitude of smaller moments and sparks of mechanical ingenuity: the Bloodborne-esque Switchglaive weapon, the endless tinkering with the loot system at the blacksmith, aesthetic armor (pre-empting Fashionsouls), all the stances and weapon skill trees and jutsu and the thousands of ways to build your own supernatural samurai. The combat, too, is relentlessly brutal and makes you savor every victory much like the dour action-RPGs it homages. The game's an absolute delight from start to end, albeit not without a lot of trials in store for you given its harsh difficulty, and the Souls experience I was craving that year.
2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: 2 2023 Rank: 2 2024 Rank: 2 I feel a little foolish letting my past aversion to Vanillaware's output—to be clear, I've always liked their aesthetics up to but maybe not including the incredibly thirsty Dragon's Crown, but the gameplay has always been kinda whatever—color my perception of 13 Sentinels because it truly is something special, one of those games from 2020 that I'm sure will maintain some sort of timeless cult appeal due to the novel premise and a wonderful balance of visuals and music (the latter helped into being by Sakimoto, a favorite composer of mine, and his Basiscape musician collective). Better still than even those aspects is the way the game masterfully weaves a narrative across its thirteen characters, their lives intersecting in various ways, and punctuates major moments with action stages where you direct a more resolute version of the troubled characters you've been watching as they fight hordes of kaiju in their sentinel mechs, each offering different roles on the battlefield. Nioh 2 still has my top spot for its sheer mechanical complexity and depth but 13 Sentinels and its unique charms come a close second.
2020 Rank: 2 2021 Rank: 2 2022 Rank: 3 2023 Rank: 3 2024 Rank: 3 The Mario games can weaponize the elusive quality of "fun" like few others, at least with its high level of consistency, and playing Paper Mario: The Origami King was definitely a rollercoaster ride of amusing situations and exciting moments. I am of course as irritated as anyone else that the series has long abandoned any semblance of an RPG. Acquiring special skills as one-off consumables instead of through character development really discouraged engaging with the random encounters since you gained nothing but cash, which could already be found everywhere. On the other hand, the earlier Mario RPGs have always excelled for another reason: injecting the otherwise dialogue-free travails of Mario and companions with witty writing and funny situational comedy, and The Origami King is every bit as hilarious as those early Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, and Mario & Luigi games. I could take or leave its combat, heavily influenced as it was on a specific type of puzzle that didn't have enough variations to stretch across hundreds of battles, but everything else surrounding it made it an endless treat. It also had as many collectibles and secrets packed into it as the recent Super Mario Odyssey, which is something I (possibly alone) care about a great deal.
2020 Rank: 3 2021 Rank: 3 2022 Rank: 4 2023 Rank: 4 2024 Rank: 4 Paradise Killer has all the confidence of a toddler showing you the weird shit they just drew while beaming with pride, but unlike that toddler there's a lot of craft and talent behind what Kaizen Game Works has made here. Very much a vibe piece, with one of the best City Pop soundtracks I've heard in a video game, Paradise Killer has its central murder mystery to solve regarding immortal cultists and the dark, cosmic deities they regularly sacrifice thousands of lives to appease, but is in no hurry to force you to do the necessary legwork as quickly as possible. Rather, it lets you soak in the atmosphere as you explore this enormous island of strange relics and lore objects which illuminate nothing about the bizarre universe the designers have created while you interrogate the occasional NPC about their alibis (and sometimes seduce them, which doesn't feel like something a detective should do but then the heroine did get exiled for a reason). That doesn't mean it ever forgets that it's a whodunnit game as it is very meticulous in keeping notes on everything you've learned, picking up possibly related side-cases along the way. Like the off-kilter Suda51 games it clearly venerates, Paradise Killer is something worth experiencing first-hand just to let its style wash all over you.
2020 Rank: 4 2021 Rank: 4 2022 Rank: 5 2023 Rank: 5 2024 Rank: 5 It had been a hot minute since Dan and Ben collaborated on one of their irreverent point-and-click pastiches, but some time away working on their own projects has given them an insight into the wider sphere of Indie gaming that turns out to be equally ripe for parody. Lair of the Clockwork God is a series of loose vignettes centered around teaching a machine intelligence about human emotions that all operate as knowing winks to typically maudlin, critically-acclaimed Indie games and is structured as a half adventure game, half puzzle-platformer (Ben absolutely refusing to take part in any genre construct that's not the former). It's also hilarious and unpredictable throughout and, like Horace from the previous year, is perfectly on my wavelength as a pop-culture obsessed 30-something Brit who plays way too many video games. Always nice to be able to click with something on a more personal level, you know?
2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: 6 2023 Rank: 6 2024 Rank: 6 I've never really stopped loving open-world action-adventure games even if it felt like the western AAA game industry was milking it for every drop it could squeeze out of the format. It takes a game like Ghost of Tsushima, which does very little new with the format elsewise, to polish it and make it compelling with its framing as a narrative about Japan first encountering the value of asynchronous warfare and how it clashes with the honorable code of the samurai ruling class. Truth be told, I didn't care for the story too much, but the aesthetics dripping off every field of flowers or muddy battlefield made the game a striking one to explore and sometimes I just want to chase around a bunch of map icon barf looking for fox shrines or a new haiku-writing spot. Like 2018's Spider-Man, it's nothing new but it polishes its oldness to a fine sheen.
2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: 7 2023 Rank: 7 2024 Rank: 7 Vaporum was a surprise hit for me and managed to make an impact in the already-packed year of 2017 due in part to a format and series of features that seemed purpose-built for me alone. Taking the venerable Dungeon Master mold of a first-person four-directional dungeon-crawler, adding a heavier narrative aspect with NPCs and found notes and audio logs, compounding it further with a steampunk aesthetic that—while not normally my thing—was at least a breath of fresh air compared to the usual mildewy fantasy dungeons, and finally an optional turn-based mode to make the movement- and timing-based puzzles far more palatable to deal with. The unfortunately timed Lockdown is really more of the same with a bit more mechanical depth with its use of elements (both usable and used against you) and a little more focus put on puzzles and exploration. It can be a tough series, especially where those laser drones are involved, but rewarding in equal measure.
2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: N/A 2023 Rank: N/A 2024 Rank: 8 Something about the awkwardness of Phoenotopia, from its hit detection to the way it sends you flying after getting hit to an annoyingly exaggerated degree to that verbal CrossFit course of a title, really rankled me for the early hours of the playthrough but then its ambition and charms (and soundtrack) eventually won me over. An explormer created in the Zeldersatz model (I'm going to need my own glossary at some point, damn) and specifically Zelda II where the large open world is peppered with population centers full of NPCs with sidequests and incidental lore to impart as well as various major and minor dungeons to visit made for an expansive game with some lofty storytelling and worldbuilding chops. Not kidding about that OST either: check out "Phalanx" or "Katash's Theme" or one of its many town tracks if you have the chance.
2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: N/A 2023 Rank: N/A 2024 Rank: 9 A balletic cyberpunk thriller which regularly exhausts the platforming potential of a first-person game a la Mirror's Edge, Ghostrunner kicked my ass more times than I can count in the pursuit of that one perfect sequence, where you cut down (or if you're feeling really nasty, deflect the bullets back into) a group of heavily-armed goons without getting a single scratch on you. In fact, you're not even allowed to get a single scratch: every enemy bullet is fatal, so you really need to work on your stealth, speed, platforming, and audacity to avoid a (thankfully rapid) restart. The game is dripping in style too, so even if you're getting tired of dying all the time you've got some nice dilapidated future-ruins to look at to calm your nerves for the next foray. Definitely a time investment but worth the struggle.
2020 Rank: N/A 2021 Rank: N/A 2022 Rank: 8 2023 Rank: 8 2024 Rank: 10 I enjoyed InXile's Torment: Tides of Numenera sort of reboot, but I skipped their Wasteland revival from a few years earlier. Jumping into Wasteland 3 without it created no problems though, as its new wintry setting of a Colorado facing the effects of a nuclear winter offered something very different to its desert-based predecessor. The modern Wasteland games takes after modern Fallout (though I should state somewhere for pedantry's sake that Wasteland came first) in that much of its quest structure is faction-based, and will often have you working against potential allies so tough decisions are everywhere. You only have your reputation this far from home: no-one's going to go to bat for you unless you help them out first. While I hate the FOMO that ensues from a branching structure like this, I'd argue it was put to good effect, as was a tactical turn-based combat system that incorporated a lot of what made XCOM so compelling.
