Community GOTY 2020: Voting Begins!

I will proudly claim my place as the only person on the site who has Doom Eternal as GOTY.

I dumped so many hours into games this year, more than probably any other. I didn't feel like Cyberpunk deserved a spot on my list despite enjoying it for the most part.

Aside from things on the list, I also played through the entire Ys and Deus Ex series this year.

I put Genshin Impact in my #1 spot because of how enraptured I was by its world, exploration and gameplay even though I dropped it after a couple months. The live game aspects of it were the least interesting part, but they don't diminish the things I like about it. I simply don't want to log in every day and do dailies, it feels too much like WoW busywork that I got burned out on years ago. Arknights on the other hand does the daily gacha check-in so well it earned a high spot on my list.

The funny thing is my actual GOTY was Dwarf Fortress though I left it off. Hopefully the Steam release makes it next year and I can put another bazillion hours into it.

I hear you! My list has a lot of games I played to either escape or could play while listening to the many Giantbomb podcasts. I have close to 100 hours in SnowRunner when, under normal circumstances, I'm not sure I would have played that much. Getting stuck in snow and mud while Jeff honked obnoxious noises from his sound board was soothing in a masochistic sort of way :D

Hades, Monster Train, Fall Guys, Trackmania, Paper Mario... all games that I played a ton of while chilling. Realistically I would have added Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC to my list, but figured they wouldn't even make the edge case argument.

1 Factorio <- I did spend another 100+ hours when the "release" dropped. But this wasn't the most time I put in to a game this year. It's still a really good game that I love. And it's deserved some love for a long time. Since it's finally "out" I think it's time has come.

2 Hades <- great game. I can't beat it 20 times... it's just not happening. Going to watch some videos.

3 Ori and the Will of the Wisps

4 Two Point Hospital

5 Roundguard

6 Murder by Numbers

7 Afterparty

8 Final Fantasy VII Remake

9 Fire Emblem: Three Houses <- Spend most of my gaming time at the end of 2020 and the beginning 0f 2021 playing this 2019 game because...

10 Astroneer <-...I spent most of my gaming time in 2020 playing Astroneer.

If Astroneer and Fire Emblem: Three Houses were 2020 games they'd be #2 @ #3. With the exception of Hades, ever other game on this list is just kinda meh and games that I played (or watched a playthrough on youtube of in the case of FF VII). 2020 was a year of Obsession with a few deep games for me.

The correct list :)

I know ya'll said you are removing stuff released before 2020, but we're gonna vote on Among Us anyway.

Pretty good year overall for games, this is probably one of years that I played more games than usual because of the pandemic.

I also saw that Gamefly still exists and I signed up for it when the pandemic hit. That definitely helped me play a lot more games that I would normally.

I would be really interested to hear yours or others takes on why that character was badly handled or badly written. I thought it was incredibly touching, maybe my emotions blinded me to something bad.

Edit- actually I think I can see why it could be seen as bad when I replay it in my head, the final 'journey' was non-consensual. The ethics are a bit different to me because the everdoor isn't specifically codified as euthanasia or death, but it is passing on from that world. Thanks for making me think about it!

Didn't end up playing a lot of new games, but these I liked a LOT.

Everyone go play Murder by Numbers!

2020 wise:

• 1) 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim (really sad to see it on so few lists, blew me away)
• 2) The Last of Us: Part II
• 3) Tony Hawk Remaster: 1 & 2
• 4) Animal Crossing
• 5) Streets of Rage 4

I'm the type of gamer who is typically playing from a couple years behind so it's actually kind of surprising that I was able to list 5 games. Product of the pandemic, getting a Switch and having the sequel to arguably my favorite game of all-time (The Last of Us) drop in 2020. Feels odd to have the Tony Hawk remasters so high... but they were truly flawless and had even both of my roommates completely addicted.

I also beat and enjoyed (in order of enjoyment):

• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Last of Us: Left Behind
• Mirrors Edge 2 (flawed but deeply underrated)
• What Remains of Edith Finch
• Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
• Undertale
• Until Dawn
• Oxenfree
• Florence

Oh and I re-beat the remaster of The Last of Us as prep for the sequel. Crazy the amount of gaming you can get in when you're stuck in quarantine.

Here's my list so far.

I'm hoping I'll be able to finish up Yakuza and 13 Sentinels by the deadline because I feel like they'd probably make the list somewhere. Also, seeing a complete lack of Ikenfell on anyone's list makes me paranoid that I missed something and it was revealed that this game was developed by monster people or something. I figured a Mario RPG-like would be more popular. I really hope that game wasn't developed by monster people.

I thought this would be much harder to put together but it really was a great year for games. I had never played Demon's Souls on PS3 (only played Bloodborne prior) and got completely hooked. One platinum trophy and 160 hours later it's still the game I want to go back to. Excited/Terrified for GOTY podcasts. Umbasa.

Lots of good games this year, though in my head the top 4 are really close, and there is big drop off when it comes to 5. I also played Mass Effect: Andromeda for the first time this year after the Mass Effect announcement at the Game Awards, and besides all of its faults I really ended up liking it a lot!

I'm a sucker for anything involving Spider-man and for Miles' first solo super hero adventure, it was pretty damn good.

Have not played much Immortals but i love the humor and charm of it.

I got back into Swtor pretty hard recently and it's a great game to play when you're locked inside. If you enjoyed The Mandalorian series, the Bounty Hunter class fulfils that fantasy to a T.

Two big positive surprises this year:

1. How much I liked the new Paper Mario game. That game just made me so happy. No other game has made me that happy in a long time.

2. How much I enjoyed JRPGs this year. Played these two and really loved my time with both of them.

And then three negative takes:

1. Only liked playing Animal Crossing for about week and a half, before it started feeling like a job.

2. I really feel, like the time on AssCreed games is running out. It feels like a drag and with very few upgrades from the last two.

3. The Trackmania people had the change of a lifetime to make a game that is well made, and failed. The gameplay and tracks are still good though.

List off the top of my head. Honestly, the top 3 were easy. Hades blew everything away for me this year. But then again, I spent 650 hours with Animal Crossing and it was a way for me to form a relationship with someone for the first time in 4 years while still social distancing. Yakuza 7 blended JRPG elements well (but not perfectly) with Yakuza and the stories in the game are just as charming and wonderful as ever (another 100 hours there).

Griftlands needs a specific shoutout. It's not officially "out" yet but it was a standout game I played in Early Access last year. In 2021, it's coming to Switch, and I have a feeling it may hit the way Hades did. It's a fantastic game that integrates immersive storytelling in the card-based rogue-like genre. (Austin Walker will probably talk about it a lot this year!)

I reserved 9 and 10 for two games that I think flew under the radar a bit generally. Immortals turned out to be a pleasure in the B-game sense. It's far from perfect, it's far from deep, but it has charm and it has a lot of the drip-feed map-full-of-stuff that brings me back to it.

Granblue Fantasy Versus is a gorgeous game with some really fun characters and a cute take on both the RPG-in-fighting-game genre and the gacha game thing (which is free in the game, but retained for the RPG to, I assume, reference the Granblue Fantasy gacha game directly).

Honestly, I think the entire back half of the cast is a poorly drawn stereotype and was a hinderance to my finishing the game quickly as much as the awkward progression. For most of the game I was like Vinny, just trying to max everything out and get every trophy, but by the end I was relieved to realize I could end the story before I'd sent off every other character.

I'm starting to regret having the game on my list at all, and after buying 13 Sentinels during the PSN Holiday Sale for 50% off and putting ~10 hours into it I'm pretty sure I'll be swapping them before the deadline hits.

1. Crusader Kings III
2. Cyberpunk 2077
3. Hades
4. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
5. Assassin's Creed Valhalla
6. Genshin Impact
7. Microsoft Flight Simulator
8. Godfall
9. Roundguard
10. Spelunky 2

HMs to 13 Sentinels and Clubhouse Games which I only recently bought and haven't had time to play them yet.

DM to TLoU2, would be 11 I guess, but ultimately was too disappointed by it.

Also holy shit, thanks to the people in this topic informing me about Desert Golfing 2/Golf on Mars.

I rarely do a GOTY lists, but I actually played a fair amount of games. I'm tempted to shift upGundam Extreme MBON.

Here's my ten, in descending order:

Hades:

I simply couldn't stop playing this on my Switch. I unlocked all the weapons. I beat it 20 times. I hit the 100 hour mark. I kept playing. It's as moreish as crack. And it's Supergiant's best game to date. A masterpiece.

Last of Us part II:

The most misunderstood game of the year for me. It's dark, yes—it's a dystopian horror, after all—but nowhere nearly as grim as it had been portrayed. It a game about vengeance, but it's also about the quality of mercy, and what you do with the second chances you're given. I loved its rich world, its flawed characters and the narrative twists along the way. And the stealthing-and-shooting wasn't too bad either.

Spelunky 2:

It's not as good as the first; it never could have been. But to have a whole new series of mysteries to unravel is more than enough. It was a real shame it came out around the same time as Hades: they are both games that deserve to take up all your time to the detriment of everything else.

Persona 5 Royal:

I played the hell out of Persona 5 when it first came out, so I didn't think I'd be able to play through this again. I was very, very wrong. And if this ever comes out on Switch, I might well play it a third time, too.

Ghost of Tsushima:

I nearly let this pass me by and I'm very glad I didn't. It's one of the most beautiful games I've ever played and with a lovely gentle pace to match. The rhythm to the sword fighting is nearly perfect, and the dishonour of the stealth makes it all the more dirty and delicious.

FF VII:

Absolutely transforms what one expects from a remake. A massive surprise, that lovingly recreates the game that got me back into gaming all those years ago on my brother's Playstation. It adds wonderful depth to the characters and, once you get the hang of it, the fighting is great too.

Paradise Killer:

Ignore the bombastic writing style, the eye-melting palette and the ridiculous character names, and you'll find the best mystery game since the Obra Dinn sailed in to dock.

Crosscode:

I came to this looking for a retro JRPG experience, but instead it ended up a kind of quirky arcade puzzle game, and honestly, that might have been what I really needed.

Cloudpunk:

Easily the best game in a cyberpunk setting this year.

Spiritfarer:

A delightful meditation on death and coming to terms with it. Wrapped in the trappings of a Metroid-esque 2D platformer with some management sim bolt-ons.

Well there's a vast difference between something that is badly written in terms of being problematic, which I was interested in, and your comparing of the writing to stereotypes. I don't really see where you are coming from, the closet I could think of is that you are complaining about the use of tropes, which seems a little silly as all stories must use some kind of shorthand for brevity of storytelling. Everyone entitled to their opinion, so enjoy your naked mech simulator ;)

@oueddy: I'll point to some specific characters, then. Giovanni and Astrid have a horrible relationship and both of them are written about as broadly as you can write those characters in 2020. Astrid is so ascribed to one way of thinking about Giovanni that you just want her to shut up about her problems with his lifestyle, while Giovanni is just Italian Gigolo 101 to such a degree that it was honestly shocking coming on the heels of Gwen, Summer and Atul.

Likewise, Bruce & Mickey pull the double duty of stereotyping guys that have Scarface posters on their walls after college and really admire Pauly D from the Jersey Shore. These two guys really bummed me out because the art and animation was some of the most inspired in the game, but these are just nothing characters. They especially hurt the momentum of the game because they're also one of the most needy in the game at a point when the "charm" of giving people exactly what they want has mostly run out because...

In addition to these three, you're also dealing with Gustav at this point, who was the character that made me realize, yes, I could just not feed people when they said they were hungry or interact with them at all and the game wouldn't actually punish me for it.

Maybe the game was smarter than me and trying to teach me a lesson about learning to empathize with deeply unlikable characters, or how to survive on a boat full of them, but I was also so tired of being unsure where this type of wood or that type of ore was located by this point in the game that the generic characters did a lot to make me wish I'd never bought the lamp for the misty seas and could just cast them all out as to get lost while I kicked my feet up with Albert.

@nodima: Completely agree for the mobsters - as I said, they are tropey and as a result, unrealistic characters. I think you're harsh on Giovanni/Astrid given I sadly know a couple who are very much like this and it can be painful to watch.

Anyway, they didn't take away from the emotional journey of the rest of the cast for me, I guess I just kind of ignored them as they could be frustrating to deal with as you said. The writing of characters like Alice and Stanley was so good in comparison, they completely broke me in how much they captured the devastating loss from dementia for those around the person and the pain of a terminally ill child.

A real shame how some parts can ruin a game's feel, I've had it happen to me too and when you see the game's 'gears' the magic can be lost for good. The game definitely needed some tweaking on the resource side.

I was unable to play Astros playroom and Half-life Alex , these would definitely been in my top 10.

1 Doom Eternal

2 Ori and the Will of the Wisps

3 Hades

4 Amnesia Rebirth

5 The Last of Us 2

6 Resident Evil 3

7 Ghost of Tsushima

8 Streets of Rage 4

9 Gears Tactics

10 Dreams

I'm going to explain these in case I get too lazy to publish this as a blog or list.

1. Hades is pretty much a flawless video game. It's a joy to play, the writing kept me interested and is well performed, the visuals and audio are superb.
2. Monster Train is really good deckbuilding combined with sort of tower defense. It owes a lot to Slay the Spire. Ultimately I think I prefer that Monster Train has cards/upgrades/relics where the potential is immediately visible if you just build towards it, compared to Slay the Spire's sometimes very esoteric cards/upgrades/relics that are often just kinda weird. StS has things in it where I literally would never have seen the true value to it without watching dozens of hours of Twitch and seeing a run where I go "ohhhhh, that's what that thing is supposed to do." Also the end game of Slay the Spire is just mean in a way where I think it's actually a design mistake, and I don't yet have this feeling about Monster Train (unless future patches really crank up the difficulty). I've played so much of this game in 2020, and there are still more updates to come.
3. Kentucky Route Zero has some incredible storytelling. I think everyone should at least try it out, unless you're absolutely not able to enjoy light-on-gameplay, heavy-on-reading sort of games.
4. Griftlands didn't enter early access in 2020, nor did it go 1.0 in 2020, but I'm including it anyway because the game is great and I sure played a lot of it. A cool mix of deckbuilding with a sort of light roleplaying. It's the kind of game I wish Klei would make more of, instead of churning out more survival games.
5. I played a lot of mahjong in the past month or two thanks to Mahjong Mornings. It's pretty fun! Mahjong Soul has terrible gacha grind for cosmetics, but luckily the mahjong part works perfectly fine on its own. Mahjong Soul is very much not a 2020 release.
6. But Clubhouse Games is a 2020 release! This game kept me sane by letting me play some classic games with others in meatspace. I also used it as a mahjong tutorial against AI before jumping online.
7. Ring of Pain is a rather low profile roguelite sorta thing. You travel through a weird literal dream/nightmare dungeon, collecting items that passively give you stats and weird abilities, kinda like Binding of Isaac. Its concept is well executed and the devs have done good balancing work since it came out, but overall it's kinda too simple for me to put it super high on the list.
8. THE BEGINNING OF PITY VOTES. These games make the cut only because I played very few 2020 games. Paper Mario: TOK is great in some areas (music/visuals, comedy writing, adorable little girl sidekick writing, boss battle ideas) and bad in other areas (regular battle/enemy variety, overall puzzle system that you figure out in about 5 hours but then the game goes on for 35 more, vestigial RPG elements that are so meaningless/braindead they should've been removed from the game). The game looks great and is charming as hell, but I found playing it to be very dull after a while and really had to force myself to finish the last 25% or so of it. A game of real highs and lows for me.
9. Carrion, another game of highs and lows. Highs: the monster animation and general feel of movement and grabbing stuff with your tendrils is absolutely great, and also the audio/sound design is solid. Lows: everything else. The game just has you do the same basic activities over and over, in areas that mostly look/feel the same, against about 3 enemy types. It's a really solid foundation for a game that I feel like just needed to be made by a larger developer that could put more man hours into making something with more variety and more memorable moments.
10. Yes, Your Grace is a decent narrative choice game, though by the end you start to suspect that a lot of plot points play out no matter what your troop readiness/war readiness/diplomacy/etc. is. Still, its family drama kept me interested, and I liked many of the kingly ethical decisions it threw at me.

Early in the pandemic I finished a lot of pre-2020 games that I couldn't justify putting on this list, but I liked much more than many games on my list. Yoku's Island Express, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Inside, Super Mario Odyssey, that DLC for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Celeste, 80 Days. Great stuff.

My list might be weird. These were the top 10 games I had the most fun with.

1. Animal Crossing New Horizons

The true cure to early pandemic blues, this game saves our lives. Flawed in the long run, but so much more than the sum of it's parts for months of isolation.

2. Sea of Thrives

I know, not a 2020 game, but covid changed the rules. My sons and I sailed the high seas every damned day for the whole summer and it ruled.

3. Deep Rock Galactic

What a nice surprise, dwarven left 4 dead with a great hub world and a ton of charm

4. THPS 1/2

Childhood restored!

5. The Last of Us Part II

Some bad pacing couldn't stop me from truly caring about these characters and their terrible decisions, some truly heartwarming and heartbreaking moments punctuate very good stealth action.

6. Crash Bandicoot 4

Holy crap, I did not expect to love this game but I played the shitttt out of it. Best platformer in many many years, and still diving in from time to time for hidden tapes or time trials.

7. What the Golf

Just a lot of fun, good local play and accessible for non gamers too.

8. Rogue Company

This is way better than it should be, really had me hooked for a couple months.

9.Hades

Felt a lot like another dang rogue like to me, but right controls and the hub of The Underworld set it apart. Not into visual novels so the sexy characters and story wore thin for me.

10. Warzone

Pubg skill ceiling too high, now I live in Verdansk

1. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

2. Gears Tactics

3. Doom Eternal - Agree they added too much as far as movement goes, but had a great time with exploring the floating temple in the sky and a few multiplayer matches were great.

4. Destiny 2 Beyond Light

6. Cyber Punk 2077 - played the intro, its good gave me some spectacle, then realized its an unfinished game and should wait a year.

5. Half Life: Alyx - Will probably be higher on the list, but was just now able to start it.

Non 2020:

1. GRIS - Gamepass until Feb. Brilliant little 3 hr experience that is just gorgeous.

2. Apex Legends - Made great improvements this year. fell off towards the end, trying to get away from competitive shooters.

3. GTA V online - Confusing as hell to start to play with friends. Once you do its a lot of fun and full of laughs.

Boards Games:

1. Burgle Bros

2.Chess

Dang. I thought voting was ending at the end of the day today, not at the start of the day. Tried to slip in my vote last minute but couldn't.