Gaming in a Hell Year: Top 10 Video Games of 2020

2020 was the opposite of a bad year for video games. It was an incredible year for games sales. Animal Crossing: New Horizons alone sold over sixty-million copies, double anything else in its franchise. Cyberpunk 2077 was arguably unplayable on launch and still sold thirteen million copies in days. Three months later I still cannot find a PlayStation 5, demand is so high for that thing. And that console basically doesn't have games.

Of course games did great in 2020. What else was there? Movies barely existed, sports leagues had bizarre seasons that seemed to barely matter, and politics was politics. You had Tiger King and video games, that is all of 2020's mass culture. So what could let you escape from the horrors outside?

Escape was the goal for people in 2020. There was nowhere to go but into a video game. The only meals out with friends I had in 2020 were in Yokohama in Yakuza 7. The only road trip was in Kentucky Route Zero. You couldn't date but you could flirt with Meg and Thanatos in Hades. Reality functionally had completely ceased. Life was on pause. Digital lives were about all you could create. Social groups held themselves together around Destiny 2 and Among Us.

Digital escapes were necessary to sanity for a lot of people in 2020. On the other hand, reality is unavoidable even in un-reality. Games still needed to be made by people made by blood and not pixels. A lot of these fantasies, no matter how pleasant, were created only after terrible costs and long brutal crunches. 2020 was a great year to sell a video game, but a really bad year to make one. Just ask CD Projekt Red. Or Naughty Dog. Or Ubisoft. Or the many more studios who delayed projects that may never be finished.

Or maybe it is just 2020. It is very hard to be happy about a lot of things right now. The storm is only just beginning to pass. We will be feeling the effects of it for years in this industry. If E3 2021 happens is really the least of the open questions for studios and critics and players. Games are doing better than movies are, but only after tremendous and still unappreciated effort to keep the wheels turning. There is no sufficient way to thank the people who gave up thousands of hours of their lives just so I could murder a zombie or two. I don't want anybody to forget that all this came at a cost.

However, I have no better way to thank those developers but to talk about how great their games are. Nothing I could say would be sufficient. So sadly, all I can offer is Top 10 List.

First off, the Games I Most Regret Not Playing because ultimately I am a lone human with a very limited amount of time and somewhat less limited amount of money on my hands. My gaming experience every year is nowhere near comprehensive. I always end up with more games I wanted to play than games I did play. Usually I don't play half as many games as I'd need to in order for this list to be perfect. It makes me sad, but also, there's nothing I can do. "Oh well", is all I got.

Here's everything that maybe should have been on here and quite a bit that might make it next year:

The Pathless, Wide Ocean Big Jacket, Umurangi Generation (waiting for Switch), Signs of the Sojourner (same) Haven (yet again), Genshin Impact, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Carrion, Star Wars: Squadrons, Bugsnax, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Ghost of Tsushima, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and Cyberpunk 2077 because that game was so unplayable on my current hardware that Sony delisted it from sale.

Also, before the Top 10, let us done one Honorable Mention: 

Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind (Square Enix)

Last year I gave an Honorable Mention to Celeste's free DLC, Chapter 9: Farewell. I am a bit torn on placing DLC in an inferior category. Post-release DLC can be the best content in a video game. The Witcher 3 is great, one of the best games of the last generation. Yet its Hearts of Stone expansion is a masterpiece. I really love Kingdom Hearts III and will fight anybody who disagrees! But I'll also admit that maybe the most fun I ever had with this game was the Re:Mind DLC from this past winter. So maybe Kingdom Hearts III never should have made my Top 10 last year, and should be on the Top 10 now. Or does it make both years?

Well, don't worry, Kingdom Hearts fans. This is not the last you'll hear from Sora and Kairi today.

I have argued before that a great action game needs to be hard. It does not need to be unforgiving or cruel, but it does need to demand a lot. Maybe not every boss should be a brutal slog that takes days to overcome. But give me at least one. Give me one really fucking hard thing that forces me to test the limits of the combat engine. Kingdom Hearts III's base release really did not have any particularly tough bosses, and certainly no superbosses worthy of the title. (Sorry, Dark Inferno, you're boring.) For a series that has given us moments like Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts I, and Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts II, you expect a really hard pulse-pounder of an experience somewhere in every game. We finally we got that with Re:Mind. We got thirteen super hard bosses! 

...And also Data Luxord who isn't that hard at all.

Maybe the campaign that comes along with Re:Mind isn't that awesome. Mostly it demands you play through the entire last third of the game again. However, you do get to beat Master Xehanort with Kairi so we cannot complain too hard. Also, King Micky plays out an iconic Metal Gear Solid 4 scene. Importantly though, if you're a connoisseur of really great boss fights, this is a bountiful feast of luxury delights. Some of these bosses are an acquired taste requiring sophisticated gaming pallets. Yozora alone is quite a meal and was the most intense gaming challenge I had in 2020. That moment deserves some kind of recognition. 

People shit on Kingdom Hearts gameplay for being light fluff. Well, go try you hand at Data Saix, Dark Souls fans.

Anyway, now the main show, The Top 10 Best Games of 2020: 

 

10. If Found… (DREAMFEEL)

If Found... feels like the kind of cool indie comic book that only people who are cooler and more indie than me know about. The entire game is made out of hand-drawn anime-esque sketches. You have this psychedelic effect of deep colors and complex textures competing against the rough line work. The figures only occasionally are filled in with color or shading. That roughness extends to the main gameplay "verb". Mostly what you do is take an eraser and clear away the top layer. This is ultimately just an elaborate method of flipping pages from one scene to another. But it does create some really awesome screenshots. This is a game mostly about characters unsure of direction and future. It is a space between the sentences of their life. It is fitting therefore that If Found... is made up of striking transitions.

The narrative is split between two versions of what I think is the same character. We have Kasio, a young woman living in Achill Island, Ireland at Christmas, 1993 whose mother does not support her identity. Then we have Cassiopeia, a space explorer who discovers a black hole that will destroy the universe. Cassiopeia's story eventually takes her to Achill Island. It is unclear if one character is a fantasy the other is having or if narratives are linked in some kind of magical realism. (The older I get, the less certain I am about the definition of "magical realism", please forgive me.) The rich fantasy of Cassiopeia's story with Cthulhu monsters and space opera nonsense contrasts heavily with Kasio's more mundane, but no less interesting story.

I think was really sells If Found... is a kind of authenticity. Achill Island is a real place on Ireland's West Coast, one of the areas where the Irish language still survives. The English spoken here is heavily accented and intermixed with Gaelic words. If Found... is full of footnotes for its vernacular choices. Beyond that, you get the sense that the writers of this game have lived experiences of being a young person in this part of the world. 1993 was not that long ago, but it is a foreign country to us now in terms of how we treat queer issues and another galaxy in terms of how we treat trans people. If Found... demands better of the people of Achill but also is not furious or vengeful. It is a game about forgiveness and understanding, and the pains of getting there.

 

Also, I strongly believe we need more short video games. If Found... is only about three to four hours long depending on how fast you read. That is excellent. Compare to my next game, which is too damn long.

9. CrossCode (Radical Fish Games)

 

CrossCode is the one game on this list that I did not actually finish. I put in about thirty hours and probably completely 70% to 75% of the story, roughly. This game originally launched in 2018 for PC, only arriving on the Switch this summer. Unfortunately at launch, CrossCode ran only a bit better than Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch. It felt like a SNES trying to run a PS3 game at times. I can live with some slow-down and lost frames here or there. But also, there were bosses whose hit boxes simply did not work. Some big exciting moments were ruined by the entire system chugging to death. I eventually hit a point where I put the game down, hoping to hear some news about patches fixing the issues. Then months passed and I got lost in other experiences.

I don't know if I'll finish this game. It would absolutely rank a lot higher if it ran better and was again, a lot shorter. Short is not bad, developers. Please learn to appreciate short.

CrossCode is a pixelated retro-return to old top-down RPGs like Secret of Mana or A Link to the Past. It is an extremely ambitious game for a studio whose website only lists eight employees. The game began development in 2012 and took six years to release on the PC alone. It took two years to reach consoles and even then, landed very hot. Radical Fish Games demanded high-polish out of all of its graphical assets, as seen in that beautiful giant whale up above. But also, this is not a mere linear adventure or a quick dash from dungeon to dungeon. It is a full-scale RPG with dozens of sidequests, a surprising vast over world with a well-simulated ecosystem, and a pretty long story.

I am really impressed by the level of depth and craft on display. The concept of the game is a simulated MMO, similar to the .hack series. You find yourself connected to a guild of friends, including a very lovable French girl, Emilie. But while traversing through one layer of the game, a second wider level breaks out. The MMO is under siege from a group of supervillains enslaving players. Maybe that helps justify the glitches and slow-down, a bit. At least there is a good explanation in-universe as to why my attacks wouldn't hit this butterfly boss which took me twenty fucking minutes to kill. 

 

But also, I wish this game just worked. I want to finish it. As cool as the overworld and sidequests are, it is a bit too much. A CrossCode half its current length could have been in my Top 5.

8. Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Moon Studios)

 

Ori 2 is another game I regret playing on my Switch. Not because the game ran poorly or looked bad. It actually is one of the most extraordinary ports ever. It is incredible how well Moon Studios adapted their game to run on the under-powered Nintendo handheld. (I not plugged my Switch into the TV for over a year, it is a handheld now.) That is because Ori and the Will of the Wisps on the Xbox Series X is the best-looking game of all of 2020. It is stunning how great a 2.5D side scroller can look. This game is doing all kinds of things with color and depth of field and atmospheric effects. This is one of the prettiest games I have ever played and that requires some recognition.

As a game, I don't think Ori and the Will of the Wisps is that much better than Ori's first adventure in The Blind Forest from back in 2015. By that standard, maybe this game does not "hang on this list" to borrow GiantBomb lingo. However, I never wrote about Ori 1 on this blog anywhere. I wasn't even doing Top 10 lists in 2015 for games. So as a representative of all things Ori, Will of the Wisps earns a place. These are really good Metroidvania platformer games. Ori 2 largely improves over the original. The combat actually has weight and satisfaction to it. The bosses... exist. And the story has more of a personal edge. This is the one to play.

Still there is something to this game that troubles me. As much as I really wanted to save Ori's little baby owl friend, I was not that gripped by the story. The ending did nothing for me at all. And while it is great there are bosses now, none of them were all that great. In fact, the boss in the swamps was goddamned horrible. 

 

But I feel like my tone is venturing on far too negative. These are great games of relative simplicity. It gives a nice breezy pleasant mood to Metroidvanias, a genre often too baroque and impenetrable. Ori and the Will of the Wisps took me only a week to complete. I do not regret a minute of that experience. That is exactly the length I want out of an adventure of this scale.

7. Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory (Square Enix)

 

Even I am surprised by this game making this list. When I first launched Melody of Memory I figured it would be a minor B-game that would never make any kind of impact on me. It would be an also-ran of 2020. It should be something that is perfectly fine for a weekend and then nothing more. This is a mediocre translation of Kingdom Hearts combat to rhythm action, way too expensive at $60, and has almost no plot to speak of. Sure, Melody of Memory looks handsome enough, but there are better Kingdom Hearts games and better rhythm games.

After concluding all that, a week later I had put in about forty hours into the game and was well on my way to mastering the most difficult songs in the collection. Melody of Memory had me telling myself "one more song" until very late in the night. This was my most extreme addiction of the year. Turns out I really love rhythm games and I really love the music of Yoko Shimomura. I bought this game largely out of obligation and so I could complain about how series director Tetsuya Nomura had once again done Kairi dirty. Instead I found myself out to complete Proud-level songs with thousands of notes pouring in all at once. Maybe the most intense single gaming hour was getting through "Wave of Darkness". Or pushing through the last measure of "One-Winged Angel" right when the game changes up the tempo completely without warning and always fucks me up! Dammit.

On the metaphoric third hand, this game actually does do Kairi very dirty. We started 2020 with Kairi finally playable for the first time in this twenty-year series. She got to beat the final final form of Xehanort in the Re:Mind DLC! That's real progress! And then, only months later, we're back to square one. She basically gets her own game in Melody of Memory and only Sora is playable. She only has two songs where she appears and they're not repeatable. This game ends with her not being allowed to go on the next adventure! Why do you have to do Kairi like this? To be Kairi is to be pain.

To be Melody of Memory is to be a lot more fun than this low-stakes package should have offered.

6. Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio)

 

I have hesitated these past few years to play any Yakuza game due to the sheer enormity of the task ahead of me. There are now about a dozen Yakuza games in the franchise. Every single one is fifty hours or more. If perhaps I could lock myself in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber from Dragonball Z and so magically conjure a free year out of nowhere to just play these games, I would do it. I could complete the entire story of Kazuma Kiryu and probably love all of it. These games seem so much to be my shit. They're crime melodramas about honor and betrayal. Crime melodramas set in wacky worlds where monkeys escape from zoos and steal construction vehicles, or you stumble into weird diaper fetish clubs.

So I am grateful that Yakuza 7, released here as "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" is mostly a total reboot of the franchise. The series is still carrying the weight of all that lore of Kiryu and his Yakuza clans. But mostly that stuff is a sideshow to the new hero and the new story. Enter center stage: Ichiban Kasuga. Ichican is a totally unrelated badass with his own giant dragon tattoo and his own melodramatic struggles with honor and betrayal. He's also a really weird dude who is way too nice to be a gangster, and is obsessed with Dragon Quest. 

 

Thus the game has gone from (frankly rather poor-looking) beat-em-up combat to a turn-based JRPG. 2020 was the year Cloud Strife was done waiting his turn but Yakuza: Like a Dragon decided JRPGs were back, baby! The game is far from a perfect JRPG, especially when the last third of the game is unreasonably hard after some awful level spikes. Yakuza probably could have been Number 2 on this list if not for that kind of bullshit. Still, I'll give this game credit for respecting the classics. Hopefully Yakuza 8 is a better JRPG.

Ichiban Kasuga is easily the best new character of 2020. He's just this infectiously lovable shonen idiot, despite being in his forties now. He also is a dirtbag and very proud of it. Ichiban grew up around sex workers, starts the game homeless, and finds honor in the dirtiest parts of society. I do wish Yakuza: Like a Dragon had a more complete political vision about homelessness and sex workers, but at least it has a positive vision of those things. This is a game that hates moral guardians and believes attempts by governments to clean up the streets will be implicitly corrupt and evil. Broken windows are tyranny.

5. Paradise Killer (Kaizen Game Works)

Paradise Killer is solving my problems with the Danganronpa series. Danganronpa is a series of visual novels where weird anime kids have to solve parlor murder mysteries. However, those games never shut up and never let you do real detective work. You follow the linear story and at the end, you're given the killer. Paradise Killer has no such structure. It has its own equally bizarre world and characters. You're dropped into it, then demanded to solve the crime you're way. Go any direction, find the clues, talk to whoever. Paradise Killer is willing to let you get lost or never find anything. You can accuse somebody with incomplete information and the game will execute them.

That freedom does come at a cost. Most of the Paradise Killer ends up a long clue hunt around this huge 3D island in first-person. Maybe too much time is spent picking up garbage or talking to suspects who are unwilling to give up even when you catch them in obvious lies. There's a long stretch in this game where every character implicates every other one. It becomes so overwhelming I wondered if the mystery was just an elaborate joke on the genre, like the kidnapping at the center of the movie Inherent Vice. Paradise Killer also locks away a few key abilities like the Double Jump and Item Radar, making the game more overwhelming and incomprehensible at the start than it should have been. (Make sure you find the foot fountains ASAP and buy those abilities.)

But luckily Paradise Killer does eventually come together and the mystery is solvable. By the end I had found out every lie in everybody's story and broken down the crime step by step. I did also kind of fall into the killer's lair who confessed to everything, so do not crown me Sherlock Holmes just yet.

More importantly, Paradise Killer oozes style. That's style with multiple Ys. "Styyyyyyyyyyle". Paradise Killer lies somewhere between anime and that 90s swirly cup pattern as its core design. Check out the main theme. Characters are named things like "Lady Love Dies" and "Dr. Doomjazz". They're all extremely horny. One of your hero's main barks is "Nani, the Hell!" Plus this is a completely off-the-walls fantasy world set thousands of years into the future where immortal bureaucrats are trying to build a paradise on the labor of millions of dead souls - while also betraying and sleeping with each other. There's so much going on with Paradise Killer that the game is nearly impenetrable. But once you get in there, it is an unforgettable game.

 

4. Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix)

It is still unimaginable in my mind that there even is a Final Fantasy VII Remake. And in a lot of ways, there still isn't one. This is, after all, just an adaptation of the first eight hours of the original PlayStation version. I have struggled for months now to write up a full review of this game because this is not a full game. This is Disc 1 of some unimaginably vast super game that may take years or decades to be completed. How many "games" will this one game hold? How faithful will the final product ultimately be? Did we play the best part of Final Fantasy VII Remake or the worst part? I have no idea. That kind of paralyzes my critical faculties. I mean, fuck, we haven't even met Vincent Valentine yet! Cloud has not rode a dolphin! You want me to score that??

I will say that Final Fantasy VII Remake is a very effective pilot episode. We have met most of the key players (minus Vincent). You see all the spokes on Aerith -> Tifa -> Sephiroth Love Triangle that surrounds Cloud. This is the best that the Final Fantasy VII crew have felt since they were blocky Popeye Lego people in 1997. For years either the English adaptations or the remake scripts have made these characters feel like pale imitations of their 32-bit selves. Finally in 2020, Cloud feels like Cloud again and not just blonde Squall from Final Fantasy VIII. Cloud has all his dorky nervous energy that made me love him the first time. Aerith has never been more charming. Jessie is a throwaway character in the original and now she's one of the most memorable personas in the game. They did a great job and even improved on the original when it came to Cloud's "experiments" in gender.

 

If they had included an option for Cloud to keep wearing the dress, this would be Game of the Year, sequels be damned.

Ultimately, however, this Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a game I wanted. And that is fine. I did not think we needed a Remake at all. I definitely did not think we needed a Remake that did not feature classic JRPG combat. I absolutely did not think we needed a combat system that mixed turns with real-time combat. That style of game has never worked for me. But instead, Square Enix did all those things I said they shouldn't and did them really well. I don't love the combat - the dodge roll is terrible and I did not really grasp when to use Cloud's stance changes near the very end. However, the combat had a lot of great moments and translated team-based strategy well to real time. Final Fantasy VII Remake is everything it needs to be.

And for the first time in years, it is a GOOD time to be a Final Fantasy fan. This game ruled! Final Fantasy XVI looks fantastic. After a whole decade of disappointment, Final Fantasy is good again. Thank that FFVII Goddess who only ever appeared in Crisis Core.

 

3. Hades (Supergiant Games)

If any game made the most people the most happy in 2020, it was Hades. By that measure it should be Game of the Year, objectively. Importantly all reports out of Supergiant Games show this title did not require the misery of thousands to create. It was a game made at its own pace with a patient early access, with reasonable expectations of scale, and the devs were allowed to take vacation time. Hades therefore is the most positive story of the year. Everybody loves this game. Hell, by putting it as low as merely Number 3, I'm outting myself as only 99% loving this game, versus the usual critic who loves it 200%. Sue me, I still say Pyre is better.

Hades is a RogueLite that wants to defeat the main problem with the genre: the misery of losing. RogueLites are about the last surviving place of the dreaded GAME OVER. Just about every game now has auto-saves so when you lose, you don't actually lose all that much. Hades, however, is going to send you right back to the very bottom pit of Tartarus when you fail. All that progressin Zagreus' quest to reach the surface? Wiped out. That's a brutal, unpleasant kind of game design. Hades, however, is not a game about escaping or defeating the obstacles. It is game about being in Hades. It wants you to love the experience and love the characters down here. So whether it takes you 22 runs (like me) to beat the Final Boss or over 100, you always have familiar friendly faces to interact with. And every run adds just a bit to the various currencies and skill load-outs.

As an overall narrative theme too, Hades is a game about accepting one's place and improving it. Zagreus is every angry teenager trying to escape his home and his parents. But this is a story not about breaking out and finding oneself far from home, but instead making home a home. I won't get too deep into spoilers, but I really respect a game that is bold enough to subvert the stated goal of its genre. You never really want to escape a RogueLite. After all, a win is just another reset to the beginning anyway. I completely missed the point myself, rushing angrily from boss to boss, annoyed that I had to beat the boring Hydra again. I never really stopped in Hades to appreciate the architecture of every room and the artistry behind every battle. Then the game, by design, demanded I slow down and smell whatever dead flowers Hell has instead of roses.

I play games like I eat food: too fast to be healthy. Hades imparts a kind of gamer patience I really need to learn.

 

2. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (Vanillaware)

There are two games within 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Everybody loves the visual novel side of this title, and I'll talk about it in a second. Also, everybody agrees that the top-down strategy side of this game is bland and under-cooked. Actually, the strategy side of the game might be perfectly fine and may have more depth than any of us have given it credit for. I don't know. What I do know is that the storyline of 13 Sentinels is so gripping and intense, that you never want it to stop. This is a pulpy beach novel that is impossible to put down. So when the game demands you actually stop reading to fight monsters in your robots, you don't care. Just get me to the next chapter so I can see the next exciting cliffhanger. Sorry.

13 Sentinels feels like a kind of avant garde experiment in how to create the most twisty and most gripping narrative possible. If you can imagine a twist, it is probably in this game somewhere. Is the explanation time travel? Yes. Is the main character insane? Yes. Is it all in The Matrix? Maybe... I am a bit unclear on that. This story is chopped up into thirteen intersecting and interweaving paths for all thirteen characters. You get the narrative told to you in a non-linear fashion, with a few sections possibly only being a dream. Thus every section of every character's story is full of insane surprises and sudden turns. The twists never stop.

Special props to the WWII veteran that discovers his sexuality and his love for Yakisoba Pan, a meal so iconic to this game I had to try it myself. And that is just one of 12 stories, most of which rule. The main kid is a huge Godzilla fan. How could I not love this game?

I have played a lot of very complex and very twisty visual novels over the years: the Zero Escape trilogy, Danganronpa, 428: Shibuya Scramble, and last year's underrated AI: The Somnium Files. 13 Sentinels feels a bit dangerous to me because this story is so much more extreme and ambitious than all those others, that it might have just concluded the entire genre. How can you do trippy complex anime nonsense anymore? 13 Sentinels just found the nexus between Evangelion, Megazone 23, and of all things, Primer. Nobody will ever top this. This is not Alexander weeping that there are no more lands to conquer, it is the people after Alexander weeping because they cannot even try. It's done. 13 Sentinels might be the definitive anime visual novel. 

I guess we all have to play dating sims now instead.

 

1. Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition (Cardboard Computer)

Kentucky Route Zero's final chapter released in January 2020. That game had been releasing its chapters and its Interludes for seven years, starting January 2013. Maybe it should have waited another year. We were not ready for it yet.

 

January 2020 was just before the storm. That time feels so distant now it might be another country. I went to a beer festival in Asbury Park with thousands of people and didn't wear a mask. What world was that? We had no idea what was coming. In contrast, January 2021 feels like the morning right after a storm. And that might be something of a delusion. The Coronavirus death toll in America will be 500,000 in just weeks. Donald Trump is no longer president but the madness that made him possible is far from over. Everything is still on fire, but the climax seems to have passed, thankfully. There may be other climaxes to come. Right now, however, we can relax just a bit. Rebuild just a bit. Allow ourselves to hope.

Chapter 5 of Kentucky Route Zero is about the day after a terrible storm. The odd band of heroes you have been building during the course of the game finally reach their destination, a town ruined by a flood. The people you started this journey with are no longer here. It is a quest that seems to have no purpose anymore. The heroes also find no answers at all. There is no justice for the crimes of this world. There is no solution to fix things. There is just picking up the pieces. There is burying the dead. With total strangers they find a kind of community in the simple work of cleaning debris. They can share in mourning for those lost.

What Chapter 5 is more than anything is an exhale. Kentucky Route Zero is not the most intense or dramatic story. But it does steadily build in energy right up until this final act. This is the one moment in the game where the characters can finally sit back and take stock of what has happened. You don't know what will happen tomorrow, but at least right now, on this day, they have each other. They are safe for now. They have something for now. 2020 for us was a year where you could never exhale. You could never let your muscles relax. "Unrelenting" is the word I'd use for the year we just had.

Kentucky Route Zero was virtually guaranteed to win my Game of the Year regardless of how good or how bad 2020 was. This is an incredible game. 13 Sentinels might be the definitive and comprehensive weird visual novel, but Kentucky Route Zero is easily the greatest. It is a game about an alternate America our America seems to become less and less alternate to every day. Route Zero's narrative is something like One Hundred Years of Solitude meeting Welcome to Night Vale meeting Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace or some equally dense literary masterpiece that you need online forums to even begin to understand. Kentucky Route Zero is thick with references and meaning, but also, easily graspable. Our world is too similar to that one to miss the point.

This is a game about capitalism and how it destroys everything. There's incredibly wacky and insane things that occur along the way. There's a giant bird and android folk singers and an extended metafictional play on Colossal Cave Adventure. There's some fascinating experimental segments in this game. Whole scenes play out from the perspective of people watching it from a distance, barely remembering the events a day later. There's a long minigame involving an automated phone menu. You watch first person dramas about characters who only matter at the periphery of the main story.

 

Kentucky Route Zero really is about people with no place being asked to pay for what little they have left. The world has gone insane and corporations have monetized the insanity. Kentucky Route Zero is not an angry game. It is not demanding that we burn landlords or short squeeze GameStop stock. It is a deeply sad game. It merely recognizes the tragedy, and without malice, Kentucky Route Zero hopes for better.

 

...

 

Okay, now for some other business:

Best Game I Played That Nobody Else Played:

 

This is something less than an Honorable Mention, but I figure I'll never get another chance to talk about this game, so here we go. Banner of the Maid from Azure Flame Studio is a Fire Emblem-clone set during the French Revolution. You play as Napoleon's little sister, Pauline. Baby Bonaparte in this anime version of events is a general in her own right. You build an army of figures both historical and non-historical to fight against the Royalists and English across Europe. 

 

As history, Banner of the Maid is frustrating and unsatisfying. This is the main reason it did not make my list. We never even get to Egypt in Napoleon's career. The game wants to rewrite the Revolution to be more about women, mostly so that Marie Antoinette can be a major villain. However, I can think of many women who were incredibly important to that era who do not appear in Banner of the Maid at all. Those would be women like Olympe de Gouges, Madame Roland, and Charlotte Corday. We do get the Duke of Wellington's baby sister as a final boss, but that is not enough for me. Also any feminist credentials are somewhat undercut by the huge tits this game has given Marie Antoinette.

Still, Banner of the Maid is a perfectly acceptable turn-based strategy game. Definitely not a great one. There are a few levels that are way too difficult, and by the end I had to set the game down to Easy to beat it. I still love the idea of adapting grapeshot and dragoon charges into a Fire Emblem setting. Let me tell you, if you really love corsets and wigs, this is your game. Joachim Murat has some rocking hair and he looks incredible as an anime hero.

 

Best unit: Adelaide. She could hold off entire armies of cavalry all on her own. I wish this game had romance options so I could marry you.

Game I Wish I Loved More:

This goes to Spiritfarer the other indie game set in the afterlife that isn't Hades. I have heard nothing but high praise for this game. I really love the art style. The music is beautiful. I love how well the animated every character is and how they all have custom hug animations. Being hugged by your big frog uncle was a moment I really needed in 2020. Unfortunately, Spiritfarer feels like doing chores. It is a constant rotation of minor tasks like cooking, planting, and fishing. I don't want to do chores in real life, ask my roommates, I definitely do not want to do it in a game. You're maintaining a lot of cool-down timers with no real fail state. I was bored.

I sat for hours trying to play this game one day and found myself wanting to do anything else instead. I actually did clean the bathroom instead of playing more Spiritfarer at one point. Spiritfarer is an unforgettable experience... for somebody else. I wish it was me.

Worst Game I Played in 2020:

Here's a burning red hot take: The worst game of 2020 was The Last of Us Part II. Game of the Year 2020 for the VGAs is actually Worst Game of the Year. It was a truly unpleasant experience that has forever damaged my love of the original. The Last of Us 1 was one of my favorite video games. I don't know if it still is after the sequel. The original might not be the most hopeful game, but at least it had some kind of complex morality by the end. It at least ended on an interesting twist that left a question that could be debated. Not the case in the sequel. The Last of Us II is bad all the time. There is no space left for further discussion.

 

This game is so nasty that even the "happy" moments feel like manufactured manipulation. You want me to be happy about riding a pretend spaceship just hours after you had me torture and brutalize a helpless woman in a basement? Fuck you.

 

The Last of Us II is a great example of how masterful direction and production cannot overcome a toxic worldview. Ambition never is a good reason to put your employees through crunch hell. The ends do not justify the means. I can feel the shitty production process in the final product. The Last of Us II was a genuinely negative thing that cannot imagine a better world. It was the last kind of story we needed to hear in 2020. This game is watching a lot of people exploit the pain of others (particularly trans people) to find deeper meaning. Nobody needs to create victims to feel better about themselves, and The Last of Us II is 30 hours of creating victims both in the studio and the characters.

Also it is too fucking long.

Best Boss Fights of the Year:

5. The Ratking, Last of Us Part II - As much as I truly hate this game, I'll admit this boss ruled. This is a deliciously gross monster design that is as close as this series gets to Resident Evil fun.

 

4. Apollo (third fight), CrossCode - I really love a boss that is your equal. Apollo is another Spheromancer of roughly your level and your same abilities. He's basically a skill check demanding that you've mastered your Combat Arts. And master them you must to beat this guy.

3. Sephiroth, Final Fantasy VII Remake - Spoilers, I guess. This is finally the Cloud vs Sephiroth fight from Advent Children but playable. It also is a moment in the game that proves how much more fun the bosses are when you have Aerith and Tifa by your side. Them joining in to beat up Sephy is one of the best moments of this game.

2. Yozora, Kingdom Hearts III DLC - Yozora is the most difficult boss of 2020 and one of the most difficult gaming anythings I have ever overcome. It was satisfying as fuck to beat the shit out of this kid.

1. Data Xion, Kingdom Hearts III DLC - The greatest single boss fight of the year goes to Data Xion, who might be the best boss in Kingdom Hearts history. This is everything I want out of an action RPG fight. She's fast, fast, and faster. This battle never stops and never slows down. Masterpiece.

Preemptive and Probably Highly Inaccurate Top 10 Games of 2021:

 

Assuming any of these games come out.

10. Nier Replicant Ver. 1.22474487319 (Square Enix) - I have been meaning to play this game since the PS3 era. And finally I can fix that mistake.

9. Season (Scavengers Studio)

8. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (ZA/UM) - Soon to be on PS4/5! What might have been GOTY 2019 could be GOTY 2021. I really need to get a workable PC.

7. Resident Evil V.I.l.l.age (Capcom) - Lady big.

6. Shin Megami Tensei V (Atlus) - Once again we shall overthrow and replace God.

5. Umurangi Generation (ORIGAME DIGITAL) - On Switch! Again, I need a PC. I keep missing all these super cool games that are PC-only.

4. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart (Insomniac Games) - If I still cannot get a PS5 by the time this game releases I will retire from gaming forever as a hobby. I'll write Top 10 Lists about musical theater or burgers at the end of the year instead.

3. Deathloop (Arkane Studios)

2. Stray (BlueTwelve Studio)

1. Final Fantasy XVI (Square Enix) - I want to believe it is coming this year, okay?