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berjiwhir

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GOTY 2020

Look, you don't need yet another belabored reminder that 2020 was a blighted fuck of a year. But while I was holed up in my house for months on end, video games were a necessary balm that I was often very grateful for.

This year marked the swan-song for the now last-gen consoles. And while I, like probably a zillion other sad saps, was unable to track down a PS5 to take part in the lukewarm but shiny launch of the next gen, I was very thankful that my brave, sturdy base-model PS4 remained up the task (mostly) of keeping up with the best games of the year.

List items

  • I love Supergiant games with an intensity that cannot be rendered in text, so of course I was always going to give Hades a try. When it hit early access in 2018, I thought it looked really cool, but maybe also that it wasn't going to be a game for me.

    When it hit its 1.0 release on Switch, I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than to support the team who's work I value so highly.

    I am so, so glad to have been proven wrong. Rather than a game I tried for a few hours and ultimately bounced of off (which was my secret assumption going in), I found a nearly endlessly enjoyable experience that I sunk 35 completely joyful hours into.

    I'm still, even after hitting the end credits, completely blown away by the amount of care and attention went into this game. I don't think I ever had a line of dialogue repeat, and so many times the game's reaction to what I had done in the game felt almost spooky. Like, the game reacted to me backing out of a long bit of exposition about a pillar. It *knew* someone was going to do that, and it had a line of text cued up to take advantage. I was amazed.

    And while the story was my main focus, the intensity and inventiveness of the combat really won me over. At each step, the game would introduce a new tactic or weapon, and I'd brush it off, assuming that my current tried-and-true build was going to be best for my playstyle. But then I cleared the game for the first time using the damn melee gauntlets, and I turned myself over completely to trying every little variant that Supergiant put into the game. It's all expertly tuned, mechanically varied, and just plain fun as heck.

    The progression is incredibly satisfying. I went from getting completely wrecked by the second boss to regularly constructing a build where I could take down the third boss without losing a life. And there are so many different boons and build options. Want an Athena build structured around reflecting and attacking from a distance? Totally winnable. Want a beefy Posiedon build dependent on bashing close-range enemies into walls and crushing them with your fists? Also, yes.

    And through it all, accompanying you on the journey, is an ever-developing storyline that examines what family means and how we engage with it, culminating in an ending that was just as warm and satisfying as anything else in Supergiant's peerless catalog. And the music! My god, the music!

    I am so proud to see Supergiant finally getting the mainstream accolades they deserve with this game, and I hope it encourages new players to dig back into games like Bastion and Pyre. Hades takes its place among 2020's best games, and it's easily my favorite experience of the year. I cannot wait to see what Supergiant cooks up next.

  • Miles Morales is a game that very easy to be cynical about prior to release. Sony's message on exactly what this game was--a sort of elongated side-story rather than a full-fledged sequel to the sterling 2018 adventure--left a bad taste in my mouth. Compound that with the fact that the protagonist of color is relegated to what is clearly a less prestigious product and, well, I wasn't quite sure what this game would end up being.

    In 2020, we were oversaturated with long games, so what an unexpected joy is was to get a chunk of game that is so polished, so considered, so wonderfully joyful, and also one that is comfortable getting in and getting out in a neat 10-15 hours. With game budgets and sales expectations ballooning year over year, we don't get games like that at this level very often.

    Miles Morales is, for my money, an even better main protagonist than Peter Parker. Both are lovable, fallible, and warm, but there's a youthful innocence to Miles that I really loved. Here is a young man regretful about his estrangement from his best friend, who is helping his newly widowed mother improve herself and her community, and who is trying--and often failing--to live up to the myth of the original Spider-Man. That's a heavy load for a high school kid, but Miles pulls it off with aplomb.

    The story is pretty boiler-plate--bad tech threatens the city, friends become enemies, hero has to prove himself without the aid of his mentor. But Insomniac's storytelling chops are so strong that they take this pretty standard structure and infuse it with a metric ton of warmth and heart and light. The end of this story legitimately got to me, on a much deeper level than the 2018 game's fantastic ending did.

    Miles Morales is, to be clear, a stop-gap game. I'm sure that Insomniac is currently working on a Spider-Man 2 developed exclusively for Sony's shiny new machine, and I hope that they take the lessons that they learned from Miles Morales to heart in its design. Bigger isn't always better, kindness trumps edginess, warmth is better than darkness, and anyone can be Spider-Man.

  • I got into this series in a big way with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, which is, I will maintain, one of the very best games ever made. But I never had a PS1, and by the time I had a PS2, the idea of going back to olden games seemed backward and unthinkable. So I never really played Tony Hawk 1 or Tony Hawk 2.

    This remaster, then, is masterful because it appeals both to people who loved those originals and also to fans like me to love the platonic ideal of Tony Hawk as it exists, frozen in amber in my memory, if not the actual aged titles this release riffs on. For me, these may as well have been completely new titles, and even through that lens this game totally succeeds. It underscores just how well these old titles were designed, to hold up so well in 2020 with 2020 expectations.

    Slipping into this game was like putting on a pair of well-broken-in jeans. Every part of it just fits. The old muscle memory from the long summer nights playing THPS3, 4, Underground, etc., all came back in a vivid flash, and before I knew it I was ripping mad combos and seeking out secret tapes and launching myself over gaps as if the intervening years between releases hadn't happened at all. Add to that a pretty decent multiplayer mode and a seemingly limitless skill ceiling, and it made for one of the purest experiences of fun I had this year.

  • At this point, The Last of Us Part II has been litigated to death, and there are very loud voices on both sides of the debate.

    What I came away from my time with the game is the feeling that it is a masterfully constructed narrative finger-trap that, at bottom, doesn't really have much interesting to say about the nature of revenge, cycles of violence, nor does it really meaningfully advance our understanding of the grim world in which the game is set. The braided, opposed revenge fantasies of the two principle characters are both equally fruitless and empty, and I'm not sure I needed a 30 hour lesson about how those impulses are ultimately self-destructive. To survive as a people, we need to be better than that, and the game posits, pretty clearly, that perhaps we are not.

    That said, I really enjoyed the game. The story is a fascinating, intricate exercise in release of information and empathy, casting each of the primary characters in the roles of hero and villain of their respective stories. It was a brave choice, and I think it ultimately works very well. It helps when you have the brute technical muscle of a studio like Naughty Dog to be able to render this awful world in painful detail--everything from the distant whistle of the weird death cult to the whimper of the dogs I killed--was so visceral that I would challenge anyone playing to not feel *something*. But is feeling something enough? If 2020 taught us anything, it's that the depths of despair are pretty well bottomless, and there's always a deeper darkness waiting further down. Is that an interesting idea? Not really. But did Naughty Dog do a good job of exploring and crafting a story around that idea, while including some genuine pathos and moments of humanity? I think that they did.

    The game also exposed to light more clearly a disturbing and cancerous sub-culture of this hobby, to the point where I almost want to sing the praises of this game in defiance of those hateful groups, but that battle, like the battle waged by the tragic heroes of this game, is endless, ceaselessly dark, and ultimately unwinnable.

    The Last of Us Part II is not the best game of 2020, but I think it was the *most* 2020 game, for better and for worse.

  • In the past three years, I've played pretty much every piece of available content for the two games immediately preceding Valhalla. I loved these open-world takes on the Assassin's Creed formula, and Valhalla gave every impression prior to release that it would be a rollicking, Nordic-flavored capper to this strange run of oddly compelling games.

    And it many ways, Valhalla is a wonder. The cold, eerie vistas of Norway are stunning to behold, even on my base PS4 system. When the light in Southern England filters through the ancient trees at golden hour, it's supremely majestic. The sense of place is spot on. 9th Century England is rendered with a perfect mix of pastoral squalor and deep magic--it's a brilliant setting for a game.

    Everything else, I think, is a marked step down.

    Part of it is Eivor, the enigmatic protagonist, our Viking warrior who, along with her brother Sigurd, sets up shop in southern England and start the work of bending the various kingdoms and regions to the will of the invading Danes. Eivor is...fine. But she lacks the quiet complexity of Bayek or the magnetic charisma of Kassandra, and not having an engaging protagonist is a near mortal wound, especially in a game that takes, conservatively, 70+ hours to complete.

    The other big step back, for me, was the structure of this story. Rather than a long, sequenced series of events that lead one into the next, Valhalla is structured as nearly 20 individual "Arcs." These stories are largely self-contained, with their own cast of characters and central conflict, and once you resolve it (usually with yet another castle assault) those events and characters never directly influence the direction of the main story again. So at hour 60, I was in the middle of yet another story arc, and I did not feel meaningfully different than I did in hour 10, except for the fact that I could now wield two greatswords instead of one. Eivor has no central, driving goal, other than to pledge the next area, win it, pledge the next, and on and on and on.

    The game attempts to mitigate this with a few Mass Effect 2-style moments where previous characters return at pivotal moments later in the story, but when I'm three Arcs beyond a fairly forgettable beat, I wasn't super stoked to see a character I did not really care about come back to give me a better battering ram, or whatever. These Arcs are filler that often feel like filler, while the more interesting story--Eivor and Sigurd's conflict and their mysterious ties to the ancient Norse gods--is constantly and frustratingly sidelined in favor of yet another meaningless story arc, yet another glowing dot on the map, yet another treasure cache that I don't need.

    With Valhalla, these modern Assassin's Creed games reach their apotheosis, and also what is, to me, their breaking point. I dropped 70 hours into Eivor's story and I was relieved--and perplexed to the point of absurdity--when I reached the conclusion.

    I loved Origins and Odyssey, but Valhalla overstayed its welcome and did not respect my time.

    I still love my dual greatswords, though.

  • Chess! Like probably a million others, I decided to give chess a solid try after watching Netflix's flawed but fun show "The Queen's Gambit." One of my best buds is a seasoned chess player with shelves of chess books and a good understanding a tactics and history that remains far, far beyond me. And websites like chess.com, while wonderful, can be overwhelming if not outright hostile to fresh-faced newbies like me who need a little extra coddling and help to really get into the rudiments of the game.

    Enter Dr. Wolf. This game is a part chess tutorial (with excellent, in-depth lessons on everything from basic piece movements to advanced tactics like pinning) part constant chess companion. It reminded me a lot of the excellent iOS game Cribbage With Grandpas, in that my virtual pal was always down to play a game with me. Where this game sets itself a part, however, is in the dynamic teaching that happens while you play the game. You start the game with specific topics of study in mind, and it seems like your game opponent purposefully plays, at a suitable level of skill, to give you the opportunity to put those concepts into practice. He'll even point out, lovingly, when you've done something wrong and give you an opportunity to correct it.

    The game is light, encouraging, and consistently fun. I end most of my nights with a few games against Dr. Wolf, and I suspect I will for a good while. It has made developing chess skill seem attainable, while still calmly explaining how much there is to learn. I'm still very, very bad. But I'm less very, very bad than I was when I started, and I have Dr. Wolf to thank.

  • Ghost of Tsushima is the freshest game for me on the list. At the time of writing, I've only put about three hours into it. But those three hours left a strong enough impression that I'm pretty certain it will end up on this list, but I can't in good faith put it higher right now.

    I think the game, for me, benefits most clearly from its contrast with Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Here, the combat is slower but more demanding, the game world is lush and more varied, and the storytelling is simply more focused and sharper.

    This is the game I'm most looking forward to dumping considerably more time into.

  • Okay, look. I didn't actually PLAY Animal Crossing: New Horizon's this year. However, it dominated my household for months (and, in many ways, continues to). I watched my partner set up an illicit (but achingly wholesome) black market trading scheme using Reddit and a very complicated Google Doc. I watched my Discord as my best friends exchanged clothing and gifts, got the know all of the best villagers and their assorted dramas. Animal Crossing this year was less like a game I consumed than an alternate reality, separated from me only by the squat, shiny screen of the Switch, that I periodically, and joyfully, checked in on. I can't think of a better game for 2020, and even though I never put thumb to Joy-Con to toddle a villager around the island, it was one of my favorite games to observe and indirectly experience.

  • Overwatch, man. The little game that keeps popping up in my top 10s, almost five calendar years after it was released. In spite of Overwatch 2's frustratingly vague announcement and messaging, the original game continues to play like a dream. The constant drip-feed of new modes and seasonal events has largely filled the gap left by meaningful character additions (with the notable exception of the fantastic addition of Echo in 2020), yet Overwatch succeeded in ways that most other services game could only dream. Almost five years on, I'm still playing Overwatch regularly, and, most importantly, still having a great time.

  • It's been awhile since we've seen a game totally and completely take over a particular facet of the internet zeitgeist like Among Us did. It also happened to be, for many folks, the perfect game to play while being confined to our houses for long stretches of time.

    And while I never fell for it hard like many of my friends did (many of whom had dedicated Discord servers and long-standing scheduled games) I had a great time in jumping in for some sus action in the best chat room experience of the year.

  • I know, I know: not a video game.

    But D&D was my one constant gaming experience over the year. Each week, at our virtual table, I would get to lasciviously wink at the world with my doddering halfling Amberlough and check in with a small group of some of my very closest friends. The game, in a way, was almost secondary. Our Tuesday nights served as a regular check-in and sounding board for each other's wellbeing during a deeply traumatic year.

    2020 saw our crew brave the nefarious (and sometimes tedious) depths of the Doom Vault, and 2021 will find us wandering the misty dark lands of Barovia as we attempt to kill he devil Strahd.

    In a year when so much of my days were spent staring blankly into various screens, it was a great comfort to be able to slip into a world of imagination with some of my best buds.
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