Best Games Of 2020

[henke]

T'is the season, for best games rankings.

Henke's Top 20 of '20

20. Paper Beast - WOW FACTOR AWARD
A thoroughly surprising and delightful and terrifying experience. I'm glad I went in blind into this VR game by the creator of Another World, because it really made me feel like I was in ANOTHER WORLD! I unironically said "WOW" out loud several times while playing it.

19. Pro Gymnast
It's a full fledged gymnast game, which is not something I knew I wanted, but apparently I did.

18. Microsoft Flight Simulator - TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Well it's pretty much as perfect as a flight sim can be. I just wish it was more of a game as well. Once the novelty of flying over your hometown has passed there's not much to do here unless you really just like flying planes.

17. Kernmantle - THE HARDEST GAME AWARD
I might be one of the players who has made it the furtherst in this physics-based 2D climbing game, and I haven't even beaten it. It's oddly compelling though.

16. Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
A robust open world zombie survival game that plays well in VR despite have a lot of systems and even some immsimmy bits. I'm looking forward to getting back to this once I get my new graphics card.

15. Wide Ocean Big Jacket
A nice n' chill vacation-adventure.

14. Haven
Open-world sci-fi adventure romance with turn-based-ish combat. Fans of the Saga comic book would probably like this.

13. Tetris Effect (Oculus Quest) - AUDIOVISUAL SENSATION AWARD
Yeah it's just Tetris but when you slam down a 4-liner on the jazz level and the score goes SKEBIDI-BEEE-BOP it makes me feel things.

12. John Wick Hex
I was gonna make a turn-based John Woo shootout game until this game beat me to the punch. The animation is a bit wonky and the story isn't much to write home about, but the tactics gameplay is satisfying.

11. Watch Dogs Legion
It's Watch Dogs 2 but with more bells and whistels and fish and chips!

10. Climbros - HIDDEN GEM AWARD
I loved this arcadey platformer/climbing game and few enough people played it that I'm still in the top 10 leaderboard for most levels. It's only 1,63€ right now so GO PICK IT UP if you wanna have a good time.

9. art of rally
This was my chill-out-and-listen-to-some-tunes game for the last few weeks. Lovely arcadey rally gameplay to zone out to without the suspension-setting-up and tyre-changing and all that faff of a serious rally game.

8. Teardown (Early Access) - NO WAIT THIS SHOULD GET THE TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Dennis Gustaffson is like the new John Carmack, or something. There's really cool tech powering this thing, and the game ain't bad either! The heist-gameplay makes you feel like a criminal genius.

7. Deadly Premonition 2
York's BACK, BABYYYYY! This is a wonky mess of a game but when it comes to story and characters, it is as engaging as its predecessor.

6. Golf On Mars - MY MOST-PLAYED GAME OF THE YEAR
Just got to hole 7000. It's Desert Golfing, but better. I don't know how to stop. Help.

5. Half-Life: Alyx
I guess the highest compliment I can pay it, and the only metric by which it really should be judged is that it feels like a worthy follow-up to Half-Life 2.

4. Mafia: Definitive Edition
They combined the solid core gameplay systems of Mafia 3 with the storytelling of Mafia 1 and ended up with the best Mafia game so far.

3. The Last Of Us II
I really didn't want a sequel to The Last Of Us, because how the hell do you follow that ending without the whole thing just being miserable as hell? Well, you don't... you just make the whole sequel miserable as hell.

2. Hardspace: Shipbreaker - SURPRISE OF THE YEAR
I really didn't expect a game where all you're doing is sorting garbage in zero-gravity to be this engrossing, but here we are.

1. Snowrunner - GAME OF THE YEAR
It's more Mudrunner but with SNOW instead of MUD! What, that's not enough to get your excited? Ok, it also expands on the rather minimalist mission-formula of it's predecessors to turn it into more of a typical open-world game with lots of tasks and missions that frequently intersect with eachother. This was my go-to chill-out game for much of 2020. Just crank some cowboy-tunes and head out on a long haul. Pure bliss.

Honorable mentions:
Carrion
Cloudpunk
Sludge Life
Fall Guys
My Exercise

Disappointments:
Desperados 3 - I loved Shadow Tactics but this cowboy follow-up just didn't grab me. Maybe because I played on PS4, the gamepad controls definitely feel clunkier than M+KB.
Ghost of Tsushima - The actual gameplay is fine, but the gameworld feels a bit too gamey with everything too close together, and also the story just isn't very engaging at all.
Wildfire - Yeah I dunno man. There's a lot of systems here. Maybe too many. It's all kinda a mess.

So, what was YOUR GAMES OF 2020?

Our previous Best Games Of The Year lists
2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010

[SubJeff]

The only 2020 games I played in 2020 were The Last of Us 2 , which is obviously my game of the year, and Noita which had it's v1.0 release in 2020 despite being in early access for about a year, which I've had too many glitches with to really rate. I wish I had the time you have henke.

But I did finish Spiderman on PS4 in 2020, and that was great.

The Last Guardian I abandoned because I don't have the patience for janky controls, and Death Stranding (PS4) needs more time per session than I can spare right now.

So, grim as it was, The Last of Us 2. It may have been bleak and grim, but it felt real. I loved the characters, I loved Abby. It was such a refreshing continuation, leftfield almost, and maybe that's why it got so much flak. After the first one I thought no sequel was needed. After this, I want more.

[Malf]

Once again, games that were actually released in 2020 wot I done played are relatively few and far between.

So, in no particular order (or rather, if and when I remember them):


Half-Life: Alyx
VR has to offer me something very compelling these days in order to get me to move the furniture around in order to fire it up.
Thankfully, Alyx is absolutely brillo.

This, for me, is probably VR's killer app (alongside Superhot VR, but that doesn't have the graphical or narrative heft of Alyx).
It turns out that Valve can still make a very good vidyagame.


Oxygen Not Included
If any one genre can be defined as being "my jam baby", it's the colony management sim.
Truly excellent ones are few and far between, with many lacking the depth or complexity necessary to give an experienced Dwarf Fortress player that sustained dopamine hit they crave.
Oxygen Not Included definitely does not suffer from that problem.

Indeed, the main reason it still draws me back (and drives me away!), is that I regularly get my bases to a stage where I suspect that in order to continue, I need to stop being stoopid and level-up my brain.

There are lots of intricately and inextricably linked systems at play in the game, and full comprehension of each is required in order to succeed. I usually end up abandoning bases when excess heat starts to become a real issue, and I only play with the "training wheels" on by playing in easy mode so germs and disease are less dangerous.
Probably my favourite Klei game to date, even surpassing the sublime Mark of the Ninja.


Cyberpunk 2077
Despite being buggy (although nowhere near as buggy as some would have you believe), rather old-fashioned (it's very much a first-person Witcher 3-style open-world game), having less narrative reactivity than previous CDPR games (although still a shedload more than most other AAA games out there), and having some very broken systems (I'm looking at you AI driving, AI crowds, levelling and gear), it's still utterly compelling. So much so that having finished the story once already, I dove straight back in with a new playthrough.
Because while the story might not be the best, it's the closest we've come to a massive open-world immsim. Every single quest or mission can be approached in numerous Deus Ex / System Shock ways, through hacking, stealth, melee, guns-blazing or gloriously, a combination of all of the above.

See, a lot of modern immsims suffer from giving you lots of toys to play with, but then punish you for actually using them. Usually, this is through achievements or mission scores and experience rewards.

Hitman rewards seemingly endless guns that are fun to use, but drop your final mission score in the toilet. And if you murder a single person outside of you main target(s), you'll never get the coveted Silent Assassin rank. This ultimately trains the player to be overly cautious, even on subsequent playthroughs where getting Silent Assassin is no longer necessary.

Dishonored gives you lots of wonderfully lethal toys, but then berates you for using them with a poorly thought-out morality system (something they finally started to address in Death of the Outsider).

Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided over-emphasise and reward stealthy and non-lethal playthroughs, again invalidating a lot of the toys they give you access to. On top of which, you can go the whole game chasing the non-lethal and stealthy achievements, only to fail due to the game breaking at some point miles back in your playthrough without it telling you you've failed.

Not so CP2077! You can start a mission stealthily and non-lethally, but if things start to go a bit wrong, it doesn't punish you for whipping out the big guns (or swords) and dismembering every last goon in the joint. And hacking is gloriously OP, like being a spell-caster, but with tech.
There are some missions where non-lethal and stealthy approaches result in better financial rewards, but ultimately, these aren't tied in to wider reward systems such as experience or achievements.

On top of which, it is a magnificently beautiful game, steeped in neon and bright primary colours, something still woefully lacking in many mainstream releases outside of Mario games.

And that there ray-tracing is none-too shabby either.


Hades
Thirith bought me this for Chrimbo, and even though I've only been playing it for a day, I can already tell that this will keep drawing me back, much like my other favourite rogue-lites, Dead Cells and Streets of Rogue.
At this stage, escaping the underworld seems an incredibly daunting task, but I'm determined to get good enough to do so.

After having played and loved the aforementioned Streets of Rogue and Dead Cells, where they're more open in their level design, it's interesting to come back to a more Isaac-like room-focussed rogue-lite design, and it's a change I'm liking.
On top of which, the gradual drip-feeds of story and progression are very compelling.

I wasn't anywhere near as smitten with Supergiant's Bastion as many people were, finding it overly-pretentious considering how basic the gameplay seemed. But Hades has won me over (even though there is still an air of hipster pretentiousness there).


Post Void
A psychedelic, psychopathic, acid-fueled fever dream, this has the compelling small play-through, long play-time loop of previous monsters of this weird sub-genre such as Super Hexagon, Hotline Miami and Devil Daggers. And as with those games, it possesses unique visuals alongside pumping and compelling soundtracks (although the one in Devil Daggers shares more in common with something like Ape Out).

It is so very easy to get trapped in a loop of "just one more go" when the core gameplay is so narcotically addictive.

It's ridiculously cheap too, currently on sale for £1.56.


Games wot I started but didn't finish, but still really liked and really intend to finish at some point, honest guv:
Death Stranding (AKA Norman Reedus Simulator 2020)
Gear Tactics (AKA XCOM with Jocks)


Old Game wot I regret getting dragged back in to, but I still really enjoyed and was a tonic in this weird year of uncertainty:
Guild Wars 2 - I gave this up in 2013, so played through all the stuff I'd missed in the past seven years, and there's a helluva lot of game there.
It's far more generous and large than 99% of MMOs out there, but is still tarnished by seedy FOMO mechanics always pushing players towards spending money.
You can play without spending a single penny (outside of paying for expansions), but the game heavily pushes cosmetics as being the ultimate reward, with the predominant proportion only being available through the gem store.
And yes, unlike other MMOs out there, you can buy gems using either real-world cash or in-game gold. And in doing so, theoretically you could buy the expansions with in-game gold. But the balance is carefully tipped in favour of pushing the player to spend cash rather than gold.


Colony management sims wot woz good, but not as good as ONI:
Dawn of Man (Captain Caveman simulator) and Foundation (laid-back cartoony minimalist medieval citysim).

[WingedKagouti]

CARRION is the only 2020 game I've played, and I only got to play it this year because someone gifted it to me in a Secret Santa. The 5 or so hours it took to beat were mostly fun, with some "How the f am I supposed to get past that?" moments. But the only things that took more than 2 tries were due to impatience and/or execution errors.

[froghawk]

I guess the only 2020 game I've played is doom eternal, which was alright- not really my thing in a lot of ways. Havent touched a single thing listed in this thread.

[henke]

Despite loving DOOM 2016, I oddly enough have zero desire to play Eternal.

Oxygen Not Included

There are lots of intricately and inextricably linked systems at play in the game, and full comprehension of each is required in order to succeed.

Yeah.

I did play a couple hours of this, and enjoyed it. Then I made the mistake of looking up a tips and tricks video and when I saw how efficiently the youtuber had set up his base with long neat rows of machinery I immediately because incredibly exhausted. Merely thinking about what it would take to turn the simple base I had into that seemed like a whole thing. No thanks.

[Malf]

I started Doom Eternal and New Colossus a couple of weeks before Cyberpunk came out, but neither really grabbed me.
The both feel a little too gamey, if that makes sense.
They run beautifully, but I think I'm just not in the mood for straight-forward linear FPSes at this moment in time. Maybe I will be in the future, I dunno.

[Twist]

I don't know about "best" game, but my favorite game of the year is Spiritfarer. It genuinely helped me cope and that's all the sharing I can handle for now so yeah, Spiritfarer.

[Nameless Voice]

Desperados 3, Doom Eternal, Partisans 1941... I think that's all the 2020 games I've played, which once again makes a "top 20 games" rather hard for me.

[henke]

Haha no please, don't feel any compulsion to come up with a top 20. Just your top games is fine. How did you think Desperados 3 compared to Shadow Tactics? And did you play on PC?

Also thanks to Malf for reminding me about Gears Tactics, forgot to mention it in my OP but I guess it'd go under Honorable Mentions. It's mostly a slick adaptation of the XCOM forumla, with some nice new improvements to it as well. I still got bored of it tho, never finished it. But as far as tactics games goes I still liked it better than Desperados 3, tho not as much as John Wick Hex.

[WingedKagouti]

I also got my hands on Hades, which I still think of as a 2019 title since it was available in Early Access then, but it was officially released in 2020. So I guess that's another title from this year that I can heartily recommend.

[Nameless Voice]

Desperados 3 was... solid, but somehow lacking something.
I'm not sure what. The mechanics were fine, the characters were well-written (better than Desperado 2, anyway, which I bounced off hard), but it seemed to be missing some magic to make it truly special.
I think a part of that problem was the writing. The characters had a lot of personality, but didn't really have particularly interesting goals and motivations. The levels themselves were good on their own, but they didn't really build into an interesting narrative.

Still probably my favourite game of 2020, with Doom Eternal a close second.
Doom Eternal... had its own problems, which I've talked about at length in its own thread. It was generally a solid game, but for me the heavy emphasis on very low resource caps and constantly juggling with replenishment mechanics took away from what made Doom 2016 great.

[Tomi]

I only played two and a half new games this year, I think. Mafia: Definitive Edition, Art of Rally, and the Melody of Mystery DLC for Trine 4. (yeah yeah, DLC doesn't count, but since I don't have anything else to put here... ) They were all excellent, Art of Rally probably provided me the most joy out of those, but as a whole you can't beat the Mafia remake here. It's not only my GOTY, it's also the best remake that I know. They've managed to capture the feeling of the original game so well, and the improvements are pretty much all for the better, which is almost an impossible task when it comes to a remake of an old classic.

[Aja]

I am currently downloading Hades! My game of the year is undoubtedly Animal Crossing because I played it for "180 hours or more" according to my Switch, and I still try to play for a half hour or so each day. Apart from Paper Mario, which I've only played for a few hours and so it's too soon to judge, I haven't really played a lot from 2020. I have a heck of a wishlist, though. I guess I'll save that for the what-will-you-play thread.

[Brethren]

As usual, I'm more focused on playing stuff from 2-3 years ago. But here's some faves from 2020 I managed to tackle:

The Last of Us 2 - I personally didn't like it as much as the original, but it was still great.
Amnesia Rebirth - Solid game from Frictional. Main downside was that gameplay wise it was just more of the same.
In Death Unchained - This is kind of cheating. Still, my favorite and most played game from this year, VR or otherwise.
Lies Beneath - Just started this recently. Its a really cool comic book style VR Survival horror game.
Dreams - Awesome fan game creation tool for the PS4, for both flat and VR. It's pretty amazing to see what people can make with this thing.

Edit: Forgot about...

Until You Fall - Really well done sword fighting game for VR. And this thing is a friggin' workout too.

[Thirith]

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what was released in 2020 and what I just played first in 2020. Still, here are some of the games I enjoyed a lot last year:

• The Last of Us Part II - I prefer the original and what it does with its characters. Part II is too intent on repeating the same handful of points regarding revenge and redemption and its ambiguities are less interesting IMO than those of the first game. Nonetheless, I love the craftsmanship and artistry put into the game, and I am certain I'll play it again at some point.
• Hades - Malf mentions the 'hipster pretentiousness' of Supergiant, and I think I know what he means, but I greatly enjoy the style of Supergiant's games, the aesthetic, the overall package, because it's unique in gaming. Hades is the first game of theirs where I would say that the polish and loving care extend to the gameplay. Admittedly, I also wish that Hades wasn't quite as great at being addictive as it is, because I want to finish all the storylines, but at the same time I wish I could quit the game, because run after run after run does become something of a grind.
• Half-Life: Alyx is a fantastic use of VR and a great continuation of Half-Life 2. It actively made me want Valve to continue the Half-Life story, after I'd pretty much given up on it. It's also a fantastic use of VR in pretty much every respect, and it managed to surprise me repeatedly. I'd expected supreme craftsmanship, but... I didn't expect Jeff.
• Star Wars Squadrons - This is the game that I've been dreaming of since I was a kid and first watched the attack on the Death Star (on Betamax, no less!). I don't think it's perfect, but at the same time it feels perfect when I'm in VR, holding on to my (cheap-ass) HOTAS and zeroing in on that pesky TIE Fighter or X-Wing. I very much hope the game was successful enough that they'll do more of these - what I'd love most, though, would be VR-capable remakes of the original X-Wing and TIE Fighter games using this engine and these assets. I don't care if the rest is done relatively simply: I just want to do more campaigns that put me in the cockpit of those iconic spacecrafts.

[Starker]

There are quite a few games I might consider to be pretentious: Bioshock Infinite, Kojima's games, anything David Cage makes... but Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre are not among them.

[Thirith]

I don’t think they are either, but I can see how their tone can strike some people as such, though (to refer back to what Malf said) hipsterish more so than pretentious.

[Starker]

That makes it sound as if their games are the way they are out of some kind of indulgence, but everything I know about the development seems to suggest that it was born out of necessity and the constraints of having only a few people to make the game, meaning they had to leverage the things they had as best as they could. For example, with Bastion, they didn't have the money to do animations to convey the story or do anything complex, really, but they also didn't want to interrupt gameplay with text or cutscenes, so that's the reason they went with narration. Not because they were trying to be "ironic" or "put on airs" or "try to seem deep" or anything else the words hipster and pretentious would suggest.

https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog...iting-bastion/

If there's one main underlying point in all this, it's that everything we're doing with the narration in Bastion is there only to support the specific type of play experience we're making. Everything from how the narrator character sounds and how he talks came about purposefully as part of the exploration around gameplay concepts and game themes. Bastion is hardly the first game to use narration to deliver story, so we never set out to pursue the idea of having a narrator purely for the sake of being different. Instead, we're pursuing it because we realized it worked well for the game we wanted to make and for the process we're using to make it.

[demagogue]

All right, here's my top 10 as I'm thinking about it right now.


10. Scourge Bringer. Slick platformer, spiritual successor to Celeste.
9. Art of Rally. Zen driving.
8. Tear Down. Mix of methodical sandbox strategy and quick 3D platforming. Not often a game can capture both of those elements in the same levels.
7. Hades. Slick gameplay loop, really easy to get sucked into it.
6. Outer Wilds. Really imaginative adventure game, great story, great gameplay, great puzzles.
5. MF Flight Sim. I like flight sims & exploring Google World and this is the best way to combine those things. Downside is that a lot of the most out-of-the-way places aren't very developed yet, but when they are, man, does it look good.
4. Nimbatus. I like games where there's a sandbox for crafting your own things, in this case drones, especially if it's completely open ended and especially if you have to play exactly the things you make in an open ended way, in this case mixing movement, collection, energy, defense, and attacking capabilities with your drone designs and see how they handle different design demands by the procedurally generated planets. This is the best game that does that coming out this year.
3. G-String. That old HL2 feeling.
2. Noita. I just like how open & sandbox it is ultimately. You can play it as a roguelike, but you can also just explore and play with the systems as you like.
1. Control. I haven't gotten much into it yet, so it's kind of an expectation going by videos & what I've seen so far. Not really an immersive sim, but it has an immersive surreal world and cool gameplay.

I imagine Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima, and Halflife VR Alyx would go on the list if I played them. Maybe the new Ori game.
Honorable mentions are: Stilt Fella , Cloud Punk, Manifold Garden, Virtua Verse, World of Horror
If I included things like mods, FMs, indies, and DLC then: Painter's Wife (TDM FM), Snowed Inn (TDM FM) ... oh, I'm going to have to look into DLCs and indies, so I might come back and edit this in later.

[henke]

Bout time someone remembered who brings home the bacon around here!

also: Scourge Bringer. It's in the game pass but I haven't played it. I like Celeste. But I don't like bullet hells, a focus on single-screen arenas, or roguelike platformers. All of which seem to feature prominently in the trailer. Should I still play it?

also also: Mutha Fuckin Flight Sim

[demagogue]

Haha, I'm gonna leave that just for the BAMF value.

Re:Scourge Bringer, I'm mostly ranking it for the aesthetic right now. It's another one I haven't played much yet, just enough to get some of the vibe, and even that was months ago so I'm already forgetting it. So I should say it shouldn't get an official verdict until I properly play it. It might not be as good as my first impression deep into the game.

[Briareos H]

10. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. Still haven't finished it due to being really put off by crafting systems in games these recent years, but the core gameplay and exploration aspects are good.
9. Prodeus. Very early access, but I already know it's a game I will regularly come back to, especially with the good editor and custom levels.
8. Teardown. 2020 is the year of the voxel and I'm very happy it will continue in 2021. Terrain destruction is a childhood dream, add a sleek presentation and a great Nordic atmosphere and you get a winner. Not all missions are equally interesting, though.
7. Microsoft Flight Simulator. This is magical, I haven't had such a good time in a flight simulator in a very long time. Weather and world simulation are incredible, and once I find a smooth VR configuration I know I will spend hundred of hours in there.
6. Noita. It's my new Binding of Isaac, a game at which I suck but that I keep playing. I am not sure it will have the same longevity as BoI, but perfect for short gaming sessions.
5. Paper Beast. A wonderful VR experience, an artistic, beautifully interactive walking sim with god game elements. A must-have for VR.
4. Quake and Thief fan levels. Like every year. I especially can't get enough of Quake.
3. Cloud Gardens. Aesthetically pleasing, relaxing and occasionally challenging. A perfect blend.
2. Half-Life Alyx. Not as innovative as I hoped but still extremely good and a great achievement. Custom levels will surely keep me entertained in 2021.
1. Cloudpunk. What I wrote about it earlier: I know it's not super exciting in gameplay and the driving could be much better, but this has hooked me in ways no other game has in 2020. The writing is very good, the atmosphere and sense of place are incredible and I've turned around completely on the voice acting, which I now (mostly) love. Really looking forward to the next major update where they will introduce a new storyline and hova races.

Honorable mentions:

• Virtuaverse for MBR's soundtrack and commitment to old-school, irritating adventure gaming.
• Carrion for a fun easy time that did not overstay its welcome.
• Outer Wilds for reviving a sense of cosmic discovery I hadn't experienced since the Mercenary series.
• The Room VR for doing exactly what it says on the tin in a beautiful way despite being too short.
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker for fresh and interesting gameplay that unfortunately hasn't really grabbed me yet.
• Ghostrunner for confirming that I suck at persevering.

[Tony_Tarantula]

Last of us 2, no contest. Heartfelt writing and the best story of any game in the past five years.

[Briareos H]

3. G-String. That old HL2 feeling.

Man that stuff is bleak. I love the atmosphere, too bad the rest seems to be 50% jank, 50% air ducts.