My Top 5 Games of 2020

5) Dreams

It breaks my heart how slept on Dreams was this year. It feels like everyone played it’s main campaign back in February, but hopped right off after that. Well, I get it, that campaign was truly remarkable. It felt like both the most grounded game Media Molecule ever made and their most experimental. They have cute cartoon characters and fantastical sci-fi worlds, just like their previous titles. But they center the story around a realistic and relatable tale of lost creative spark, self-doubt, and fear of disappointing those close to you. I was blown away by how touching that grounded emotional core was despite the goofy musical numbers and over the top set pieces.

But this game is so much more than its roughly 3-hour campaign. Media Molecule has gained a reputation for making some of the most robust game creation tools outside of full-scale game engines like Unity and Unreal. Dreams feels like the culmination of the skill set that they’ve been building towards since LittleBigPlanet in 2008. You can make anything in this game, music videos, first-person shooters, short films, albums, hack and slashers, racing games, platformers and so much more. Sure, you can’t go completely buck wild, as MMOs and live-action video are off the table. But the things people have made with these tools are consistently remarkable.

I’ve seen trippy music videos, Grim Fandango inspired adventure games, Doom inspired shooters, and some of the best memes and shitposts on the internet. And even as someone who has come back every few months, I know I haven’t seen every incredible work of art in the Dreameverse. But I still love the game very much. The possibilities are endless, and the wonderfully positive community is nowhere near the bottom of that creative well. Overall, the game gives me the same vibe that flash games used to give me growing up. Hit up Miniclip, Andkon Arcade, or Kongregate and there would be dozens, if not hundreds of games and short movies to experience. Dreams brings back the magic of the Adobe Flash era once again, and even if I don’t visit it constantly, I’ll always keep it close by just so I can be impressed by the never ending depths of human creativity.

4) Astro’s Playroom

I never thought I’d ever get a game like Astro’s Playroom in my entire life. I may be the most devout fan of PlayStation All-Stars on the internet, but even I acknowledge that it’s a heavily flawed game. But I have no choice but to appreciate it since it’s the only celebration of PlayStation’s rich legacy that I thought we’d ever get. That was until I finally picked up a PS5 late last year. I had heard much of the critical love for Astro’s Playroom, and have even seen some of the game as well. But none of that prepared me for how much I would end up loving the game.

Astro feels like a game created with the sole intention to celebrate the past of PlayStation rather than trying to get you to invest in the present or the brand. Every pixel of it feels like it was crafted to delight the early adopter that surely picked up the system at the beginning of the lifecycle. Graphically it’s both clean and gorgeous, gameplay is consistently smooth and varied thanks to many mini-games that showcase the Dualsense’s features. But none of those features make the game an instant classic in my eyes.

The biggest problem at the core of All-Stars was that much of it felt more like a commercial than a celebration of history. This was evident by some franchises getting no representation, like Spyro and Crash, and other franchises not getting the right representatives, like the New Dante from DmC and Raiden from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. These choices felt directly motivated by money, where some of these aspects are there due to external publishers not wanting to risk reviving their older franchises for an unproven Smash clone and other publishers wanting to advertise their latest releases. Astro doesn’t suffer from any of this corporate drama.

Every easter egg in the game is not only tastefully done but pays homage to each game in a way that feels authentic to both Astro’s universe and the game it’s referencing. And some of the cuts are so deep that I was shocked to see so many franchises I thought were too obscure to immortalize so lovingly. Like, I was already delighted to finally see Crash and Spyro represented in a game like this, but to see games like Rain and Puppeteer get references blew me away. But the deep cuts don’t stop there, as the game has a reverence for PlayStation hardware that’s just as strong. Everything from the Playstation Pocket to the PS3 Move Sharpshooter gets a place in the digital museum known as the PlayStation Labo. And not only is every piece of PlayStation hardware represented, but each of them is also intractable. Hitting the PSP Go to see a Patapon parody light up the screen just warmed my heart so much that I nearly shed tears. And that was only one of the dozens of moments that overwhelmed me with joy. I can’t say enough great things about this excellent game, and if you are lucky enough to get a PS5, you owe it to yourself to play through the celebration of PlayStation’s rich 24-year history that fans like me have always dreamed of.

3) Doom Eternal

It frustrates the hell out of me that so many people didn’t click with Doom Eternal, but I understand why. Doom (2016), one of my favorite shooters of all time, was sorta an accidental masterpiece, as its dryly comic tone and fast-paced combat made for a winning combo. And personally, I really loved how the game felt like a violent spiritual successor to Ratchet Deadlocked, with its wheel of weapons and levels littered with collectibles and upgrades. But Doom Eternal didn’t want to just give the exact same kind of experience again. No, id Software wanted to go way beyond that original reboot, and what they ended up doing is creating a brand new subgenre of shooters.

Having good aim is vital in any shooter, and it is in Doom Eternal as well. But id asks you do to do so much more in its combat scenarios. Movement speed is so fast that your forced to keep a mental image of the arena in your head so that you can path your movements out subconsciously. Dozens of enemies are thrown at you at once, so you’re forced to aim for weak spots on far off enemies to buy you enough time to handle the ones right in front of your face. And all the while, your ammo, armor, and health pools are all depleting, and that forces you to break up gunplay with flame belches, chainsaws, and glory kills regularly. It’s the first-person shooter equivalent of spinning a dozen plates. Spinning those plates can be demanding for those who expected Doom to stay the simple shooter it used to be. But for me, it gave combat the extra boost of stimulation that I never knew I needed.

Doom (2016), for as great as I think it is, did suffer from a runtime that did slightly overstay it’s welcome. And those few levels at the end tended to drag on due to how easy combat became in the endgame. All of the extra upgrades and mods made the demons of hell a pushover, and they eventually became nothing more than a slight impediment to collectible hunting and map clearing. The changes to the combat in Eternal make killing demons so much more active, to the point where I can’t afford to focus on anything else besides staying alive when I’m in the heat of battle. And add to that more engaging combat much more elaborate bouts of first-person platforming and you have, what I feel, is the natural evolution of Doom.

I mean think about it, we wouldn’t have gotten Bloodborne without God of War, and we wouldn’t have gotten God of War without games like Streets of Rage. In the case of Doom, the original PC game paved the way for Half-Life and an entire generation of slower-paced shooters. Doom (2016) paved the way to the return of movement shooters like Shadow Warrior 2. And now, similar to how Bloodborne is a more strict and challenging version of God of War, Doom Eternal is the stricter and more challenging version of Doom (2016). I think that is a great example of progress rather than a regression, and just because it’s more challenging doesn’t mean it’s worse. And in my opinion, it’s much better.

2) Immortals: Fenyx Rising

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is the kind of game that we really don’t get much anymore. It’s the kind of game I’d wake up at 9 am on a Saturday to binge when I was 13. It’s a world that is admittedly shallow, as all of its secrets lead to one of the same few pieces of gameplay or upgrades. But the goofy heart and satisfyingly designed puzzles and combat challenges always keep me playing and looking forward to the next piece of content. The vibrancy of the world is shown not just through its color palette, but also through its larger than life characters. Each of them has exaggerated, 90s Disney-esque personalities and while they might be too much for some, I found them all endearing in different ways. And the story, while I’ve yet to complete it, seems to have a sincere emotional core, which I’m always a sucker for.

But even when I’m not interacting with the Gods and their tale, I have so much fun just exploring the map. Not only is the world beautiful, but it’s densely packed with things to do. And unlike a certain game Immortals is often compared to, finding those activities are never obscured and are always presented to you on a platter if you want them to be. The numerous upgrade systems in the game are all designed in a way to push you into exploration. There’s no XP to earn, but there are multiple upgrade currencies scattered around that you can bring back to base. And even combat is way more varied than a game like this could have been, with slow-motion dodges, melee parries, light and heavy attacks, and special powers all being at your disposal.

Overall, I just had such a swell time with Immortals. It’s the perfect kind of gaming comfort food for me that has enough different things to do that I never get bored, and the world is visually appealing enough that I never tire of looking at it. On that latter note, the enhancements I’m now getting on PS5 have made those aspects even more profound. I’m really looking forward to spending more time with it, and in a year full of death and despair, it was incredibly refreshing to spend so much time in a world so pleasant.

1) The Last of Us Part II

As I’ve said, 2020 was one hell of a year. Thanks to many refusing to take precautions in a worldwide pandemic, it has felt like humanity made its cruelty and selfishness more transparent last year more than ever before. Thanks to a summer where racial injustice was finally forced into the faces of many for the first time, we saw just how different each of our perspectives of the same world are. And thanks to years of increasing political tension that seemed to come to a point with last years election, we eventually saw that rage from the losing side reach climax with a storming of our nations capital only 6 days into this current year.

What I’m trying to say is that the last 12 months have been defined by incredible human suffering, painful social isolation, and our collective unbridled rage at each other. And in the real world, there’s rarely something to look forward to at the end of that suffering. Like, we are getting a new administration that is certainly going to be a huge improvement to Donald Trump. But Biden’s calls for unity and compromise send shivers down the spine of anyone who wants systemic and overwhelmingly progressive change and leads us to believe many of the travesties of the last four years will go unexamined and unpunished.

And that’s why I adored The Last of Us Part II. Escaping to a world full of just as much human suffering, if not more, and just as much rage, if not more, wasn’t something I was excited to do. The marketing of the game claimed that the story would be about hate and rage, but by the time June 19th, 2020 came around, I had so much experience with those emotions that I didn’t wish to immerse myself in them further. But for the sake of these characters that I love so dearly, and since I didn’t want the game spoiled for me, I booted it up on release and soon my worries faded away. Because Part II isn’t a story about rage and hate, it just uses rage and hate to talk about a much different core concept: forgiveness.

The Last of Us Part II drags you through the mud emotionally, with character deaths, torture, and bigotry being constant occurrences throughout the story. But thankfully, mercifully, there is something at the end of that road. These characters do hit some of the lowest points of their entire lives, but they are able to climb back out. And they don’t always stay out. They do stumble at times, but they always pick themselves back up and manage to forgive both themselves for their own sins and others for the sins done against them. It was a refreshing change of pace to the traumas of real-life which seemed to not only never let up, but also seemed to never lead to any learned lessons or change of heart as a result of that suffering. Being introduced, and reintroduced, to characters that actually learn from their failings and become better people was a refreshing change of pace to the frustratingly stagnant main characters of the real-life news cycle last year. And it also was in contrast to much of the other post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve previously enjoyed, as the hopelessness of The Walking Dead TV show and The Road was rarely found here.

But the game is still so much more than its narrative themes. Combat wasn’t a revolution, but a satisfying evolution from the original, and additions to melee combat and increased weapon fidelity helped make combat and weapon upgrades much more satisfying. Level design played into the more nibble player characters and grapple hooks, tall grass to go prone in, and, finally, jumping all make exploration and combat encounters more fun. And there are some incredible set pieces and narrative twists throughout the whole experience that I often couldn’t believe what I was witnessing.

I could go on forever about how much The Last of Us Part II succeeded my expectations, and how it manages to justify its existence in the face of me and many others never wanting a sequel to the original game. But, all these months later, I’m still questioning if I like it more than the first game. I keep coming down to the fact that the sequel is so completely different. It is not a tour through every post-apocalyptic trope ever conceived, like the first game was. It’s a hyper-focused tale of 1 person, or technically 2 people, and therefore it has to tell a completely different narrative to accommodate for that. And I will always appreciate how daring that choice to be different was, especially when delivering more of the same likely would have lead to more universal praise and rewards. But being divisive has made the game more engaging, and more terrifying, to talk about, and that is one of the greatest things I feel I can say about any narrative. So for all those reasons, and a few more once Factions comes out, The Last of Us Part II is my Game of the Year for 2020.

And that’s all I got today. Video games really helped me through the several rough patches of 2020, but games aren’t the only thing that helped me. My friends really helped me through, with everything from cracking jokes with me on Twitter to joining in Among Us matches and movie watch parties in Discord. And, funny enough, the collective shittiness of the last year, I feel, kind of brought a lot of us together in a strange way. When all of us were sharing the exact same anxieties, if kind of made those mental, and often physical, burdens a lot lighter. So, for all of those reasons and more, I want to thank you, the person reading this. I say it all the time, but the fact that anyone out there cares about anything I do blows my mind. But the fact that you guys have kept watching the videos and streams, kept reading the articles I post, and kept listening to the podcasts I’ve been on during a pandemic has warmed my heart. And thank you double for keeping that same energy for all of my fellow members of the site, as I’m proud of pretty much everything we do here.

Here’s hoping that 2021 treats all of us a whole lot better, and here’s two more great games and a much better year for the folks who make and play them. Enjoy this picture of me in an Apex Legends onesie when I finally got my PS5 after several weeks of hunting. Keep it real, keep it trill.