Finally, on January 2, 2021, I’ve finished writing about my favorite games of 2020. And once again, I wrote way too much for even a very patient person to read. So for the regular people who probably aren’t looking to dive into each of my longer-form pieces, here are my short, punchy summaries. 5. Hades…
GOTY 2020 #1. Umurangi Generation
Few games find ways to elegantly blend their environmental storytelling with their actual gameplay. Great environment design and art direction can tell a story in the margins of an experience, but calling attention to those details is a delicate art. Immersive sims like Bioshock or Prey often use audio logs, documents, and other threads of…
GOTY 2020 #2. Paradise Killer
Paradise Killer feels like a natural extension of lovably bizarre series like Danganronpa and Zero Escape. It has plenty of familiar pieces: a cast of over-the-top characters, a tangle of mysteries to solve, and a surreal world to explore. It has the same brazen and self-assured strangeness, but brought to unprecedented new heights. Paradise Killer…
GOTY 2020 #3. Blaseball
Blaseball is a game about tracking stats, betting on games, and watching play by play live “games” as they unfold. These are not usually things I like to do. Blaseball is also, however, a procedural horror game about changing the rules, incinerating players, and even fighting gods. Many of the games on my list don’t…
GOTY 2020 #4. Signs of the Sojourner
Game mechanics — the rules that govern the way you interact with a game — can often be understood as metaphors. It’s easy to forget this sometimes. What begins with individual actions mapped to buttons becomes a set of verbs that represent something more complex, like a battle or a . Some game mechanics are…
GOTY 2020 #5. Hades
I’ve been a fan of Supergiant ever since Bastion. Their games have been trending in a direction that excited me. Bastion was an intriguing, but mostly familiar isometric action game. Transistor was similar, but added cool twists to the combat system. Pyre was downright weird, a mashup of visual novel, RPG, and sports game. But…
Backlog #1. ECHO
Though I often appreciate them, I don’t typically play horror games. ECHO isn’t exactly a horror game, but it’s easily the most terrifying game I played this year. Developed by a small team of alums from IO Interactive (the studio behind the highly-regarded Hitman series), ECHO delivers a brilliant stealth experience that leverages the full…
Backlog #2. Pathlogic 2
Pathologic 2 (2019) is an ambitious remake of 2005’s Pathologic. Reconstructed by Ice-Pick Lodge, the same studio that created the original, it’s a gorgeous and haunting survival game about confronting a dire plague in a rural town in the Russian Steppe. It’s bizarre, dramatic, and unsettling, relentlessly punishing the players’ every small mistake to drive…
Backlog #3. Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is a noire RPG in the style of classic computer RPGs, developed by Estonian studio ZA/UM. It takes place in Martinaise, a dreary, industrial district of the occupied city of Revachol. It’s a strange, gloomy detective story about class and politics, filled with both dark humor and unexpected sincerity. I struggled to find…
Backlog #4. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor
I’m not usually drawn to games that wallow in frustration or hopelessness. The “it’s miserable, and that’s the point” kind of games like Papers, Please sort of miss the mark for me. For me, a frustrating game needs to provide a certain tonal balance to be worth the effort that it’s asking of me. Diaries…