"Wow, 2020 sure was a year, huh?" feels like an obligatory addition in retrospectives like this one, but I feel like it's impossible to start one of these without at least briefly reflecting on All That Shit. It felt like every day we had a new tragedy, a new story about how systems and institutions failed people. Video games felt trivial, and yet, they were essential in keeping me going through what was an incredibly difficult year in innumerable ways. Here are are the games that, one way or another, carried me through 2020.
Honorable Mentions:
Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers - This game is really important to me, and while there wasn't a ton of content this year, the team I play with cleared an Ultimate raid (the hardest content the game has to offer) and that felt really good. It also played a crucial role in staving off the isolation that constantly hovered over my shoulder through all of the year by giving me a reason to get together with folks on a regular schedule. As important as it was this year, I wanted to use my list to highlight other experiences.
Spider Man: Miles Morales - The swinging is good! I got to do more of it. This game was cool and didn't overstay its welcome.
Phasmophobia - Traditionally not a horror person, but when this game works, it works! It gave me some valuable chances to hang out with friends in a way that felt like I was with them doing dumb shit IRL in a year where that wasn't possible. It's on the backburner for now though as I wait for more content.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - I'm a big visual novel fan, so I expected to love this. It's quite good and gets really wild, but it didn't end up being that memorable for me. Kind of felt like watching a movie.
Showing 1-10 of 10 items
I hardly expected my favorite title of the year to be some free game on steam, but here we are. Our Life was a warm cozy blanket that got me out of my head during the cold, hard year that we had. It's nothing grand, really - a collection of small vignettes chiefly featuring your relationship with a boy, Cove Holden, in a quiet port town (a common setting in fiction, sure, but one I absolutely adore) that has decent writing, decent art, and a decent soundtrack (that I can't remember, but it must have had one, right?). Nothing to write home about. And yet, here I am, writing about it. Why? Because it just made made me so damn happy. Our Life, more than anything else it does, respects the player. You have a ton of ways to custom tailor your time with it to be exactly what you want it to be. I'm not one for self inserts, but the game made crafting a main character that reflected me, my history, and where I was absolutely frictionless. It gives you so many opportunities and ways to shape who your character is, how they feel, what they're comfortable and uncomfortable with, their interests, their hobbies, their values, and, crucially for me at the time, their sexual identity. I said in the jump that not a lot happened this year, but *something* significant did — I started identifying as asexual. It was a weird experience for me, having been raised in a very conservative, very Christian home, where of course I was some normal hetero dude, and even at the time I came to that conclusion I felt unsure. Our Life came in at the peak of that anxiety and let me be me! It let me build that unsure guy who thought, "hey, I think I'm asexual but I don't think I'm opposed to romantic relationships" to the T and looked at me and said "hey! you're valid! you're alright! and you can change your label if it stops feeling correct!" and God if I didn't need to be told that. Apart from that, the game does a great job of making its main love interest (or friend! you don't have to take it further than that if you don't want!) feel real. A lot of the things that happen in each vignette is self contained, but the ways Cove and his responses to you develop over the different life stages the game goes through really does make it feel like you're going on a life journey with this dude, and I loved every moment. There's still more content to come this year and I can't wait to return.
Yakuza has always been something I've admired from a distance. I've had it strongly recommended to me before, and I tried Yakuza 0 a while ago, but the combat just *really* didn't mesh with me at all and I dropped it after a few hours. When I heard Yakuza was moving to JRPG combat with its next entry, I was intrigued. JRPGs have always been an important genre to me (as further entries on this list will indicate). Turns out Yakuza is really cool when the gameplay works with me! They didn't totally nail it (the balance feels really off in this one, the usefulness of abilities feels all over the place), but the theme and dressing of it made it a joy. I loved the weird off-the-rails goofiness of many of the enemies and side stories, I loved running a national corporation and fighting greedy investors with the iron will of my employees, and most of all I loved the cast. They're incredibly colorful, relentlessly optimistic, and unfailingly supportive of each other in a way that warmed my heart. Also, the way the game is so centrally focused on treating the people in the margins, the people in gray areas who are doing their best to survive in a world that doesn't want them around was resonant in a year where it felt like a lot of folks fell through the cracks and didn't get shit from the people who could give it to them.
Despite being a big fan of JRPGs, I never played the original Final Fantasy VII. My first JRPG was actually Final Fantasy 10 (a game I still hold close to my heart). All I knew about FFVII I acquired through cultural osmosis; being as online as I am makes it impossible to not come across the game's characters (especially Cloud, Sephiroth, Tifa, and Aerith) in some capacity. The announcement of the remake gave me an opportunity to visit the Final Fantasy that everyone seemed to love the most. I had a blast. The combat was tight and satisfying (a vast improvement over FFXV's take on real-time), the visuals were (mostly) crisp, the music was stellar, and the story was gripping. I fell in love with the cast as I went, charmed by their interactions and motivations, and felt real animosity towards the villains (except maybe Sephiroth... what's up with that dude?). Turns out Final Fantasy VII is a good game. Though, I guess I can't really say that. This isn't the same game as the original, after all. A lot's changed: no turn-based ATB combat, vastly different visuals, and, uh, a different story? I got the sense a lot of folks were turned off by this one, but, to my shame, I'm a Kingdom Hearts fan, so I have a pretty strong tolerance for Nomura bullshit. Excited for the next chapter... whenever that is.
Key Visual Novels are pretty much always structured the same. You get a common route where you're introduced to a colorful cast, read through cheerful slice of life moments, build bonds with characters on an individual level, and then get emotionally devastated when you go into the individual routes and you find out what each character has going on under the surface. Summer Pockets is no different. It has a truly joyous and funny common route, and the character routes are each strong and compelling. One in-game day you might be playing ping pong, doing construction at a lighthouse (did I mention a lot of this game is set in a quiet port town?), collecting islandmon (bugs and oddities), or buying just about everything under the sun from an old lady at a candy shop, and on another, reflecting on what we do with the memories we have of people who are gone. Summer Pockets was a hell of a ride, and I consider my time with it (including that one night I stayed up til 3AM sobbing my eyes out) well spent.
I'm not sure why I started playing Kentucky Route Zero. While I do read a ton of visual novels, I very rarely play point-and-click adventure games. I'm also kind of a moron, so artsy, contemplative stuff usually goes over my head. I tried it anyway, and I was blown away by how much it affected me. Kentucky Route Zero sees you. It sees all of us, it sees the world we live in, holds up a glass to it and really, really looks. It looks at debt. It looks at tragedy. It looks at loss. And through all these things, it looks at what capitalism does to us. It breaks us, traps us in a noose that tightens day by day, and then it tells us that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. In any other game, this might be depressing. It might have dragged me down, made me miserable, made me hopeless. And yet, it did the exact opposite. KRZ sees you, and it reaches out its hand, and it tells you you're not alone. That there are a lot of you. That you aren't the only one the system has failed. That you can find a way to exist with the people around you, and that even in this hell world we live in we can still create beautiful moments with each other, and maybe, someday, if we work together, we can create a beautiful world with each other too.
In theory I should have been all over Slay the Spire. "Indie", "Roguelike", and "Deckbuilder" on their own are all categories of things I enjoy often. Yet, I fell off of it quick for reasons I can't really articulate. Monster Train, however, did. I'm not sure what made it click. Was it the charm of the characters? The way you see your deck come to life visually through the units you pick? The surprisingly strong soundtrack? The strategic considerations of focusing on multiple characters instead of one? The elegant simplicity of cutting down the overworld map to two lanes? The sheer satisfaction of building a killer turn that you set up for 6 turns ago? The pride that comes when your vision for your deck comes reality? Probably all of those and more. I played it a lot, all the way to max covenant rank, and I enjoyed every moment. I'm eager to go back when their next expansion launches.
Otome games have been rapidly rising up in the ranks of Stuff That I Like, and out of the ones I've played, Code: Realize tops the charts. I started playing it for pretty dumb reasons (steampunk? cute guys? add to cart!) and it blew my expectations out of the water. It's a really good mystery, a really interesting adventure, and one of the very few visual novels I've played where every route is strong, both in their thrilling narratives and the relationship development between the heroine and the hero of that route. These all eventually come together in the game's canon/golden route and, while I'm normally not a fan of VNs throwing all their weight behind one route, the payoff during this final route is great, taking elements and plot threads of all the other routes and using them in interesting ways. All in all, great game! I was sad that it ended, but really glad that I read it. The problem now will be finding another otome that can meet the high expectations set by this one...
I've cooled on Persona 5 a little since I first played it, but it remains one of my favorite games. The way it, alongside the other games in the series, fuses visual novel and JRPG elements together really clicks with me in a way few other games do. Having not played Persona 5 since its release (and being the kind of guy who loves replaying comfort titles — I've played Final Fantasy X 5 times), Persona 5 Royal was an obvious pick up for me, and it didn't disappoint. The side content it adds to the game made replaying it feel pretty fresh, especially on the gameplay front. The new options they give you to customize your party members, the increased significance of Baton Passing and status ailments, and the new additions to the game's persona fusion system were all great additions. I also really got attached to the new characters, even though their role in the game is very limited until the new final act introduced with Royal, and really appreciated the expansion of Goro Akechi's social link. It's in that additional act that Royal really justifies its existence. I love pretty much everything that goes on in that final act, the story beats, the additional character development, and, surprisingly, the new antagonist. Base Persona 5 fell kind of short in presenting antagonists that weren't just straight hate sinks, but Royal's new anatgonist (and their dungeon) is gives you really compelling reasons to keep moving forward to see what's going on in their head. Royal doesn't add a ton, but what it does add is great and made revisiting this game worthwhile.
I got my start with video games on the PS1; I didn't own one, but I spent a lot of time at my cousin's house on his, taking turns and playing co-op games together. A few years later I got to own my very first console in the PS2, and I've more or less stuck with Playstation as my prime console of choice ever since. Because of this, Astro's Playroom felt really special to me. The entire thing is a love letter to the history of the Playstation line of consoles, and I've spent time with all of them (even the Vita!). Each level was a fun celebration of the consoles, and each collectible (well, most of them) sparked a memory. Getting to the end of each world and seeing the console associated with it was a weirdly spiritual experience. There's a ton more to Astro's Playroom than nostalgia, however. It's just a good platformer, and an excellent showcase of the capabilities of the DualSense controller. Having owned a lot of consoles since the PS2, I came in pretty skeptical of controller gimmicks, this one made a real impact on my enjoyment of the game. The way the controller gave you carefully crafted feedback specific to your environment and the actions you were taking was incredible and brought a whole new level of immersion to the experience in a way no controller gimmick ever has before. Astro's Playroom is probably the best pack-in game I've ever played.
I'm not a photography dude. I can appreciate cool photographs, I took a photo class in high school (that I've largely forgotten), and somewhere in my house is a dusty DSLR that I almost never use. It was no surprise, then, that the actual photo-taking of Umurangi Generation wasn't really that fun for me. It wasn't actively boring, but I never really engaged with it. However, it's the *rest* of the game that puts Umurangi Generation in my top 10. Umurangi Generation, with incredible environmental storytelling, captures the essence of 2020, of what it felt and continues to feel like to exist in the times that we exist in. What it feels like to be faced with an incredible crisis and to look to your leaders and see them locked away in ivory towers as the world around them burns. What it feels like to have the weapons the state employs to "keep the peace" turned towards the very citizens they ostensibly exist to protect. What it feels like to try to grasp at what joy you can in the midst of all the chaos. What it feels like to watch the world die. While I might not have enjoyed the mechanics within, it's undeniable that Umurangi Generation is the games that most affected me in 2020, because it *was* 2020.