It's gonna be a long road gettin' from here to GOTY season, but whatever I play this year will go on this list.
As it is now December I shall now begin reordering the contenders by proper ranking.
Showing 1-10 of 26 items
The only game in years I've finished and immediately jumped back into for another full run. And then another. This is 2020's GOTY frontrunner and it's hard to imagine anything else even getting close.
The stats say 2013 but I'm not sure I care. Episode 5 is a 2020 banger, a whole lot of folks (myself included) are going to be hitting Kentucky Route Zero for the first time in 2020, there's new editions out on consoles in 2020, bingo bango bongo, here it goes on my 2020 list. It's a cliche, and probably also a list writer's crutch, to describe something like KZ0 as "indescribable" and just leave it at that, perhaps while gesturing towards a feeling or a mood or an aesthetic, without actually saying much of anything. But I also struggle endlessly trying to put into words how this game felt to play, or rather, experience. The "play" part is less important. Considering the number of decadal retrospective lists KR0 keeps headlining no one should be shocked if this does very well come GOTY season. It definitely will for me. This is one of the most important games of the last ten years, minimum. Superlatives: Best Tone Piece; Best Anti-Capitalist Work; Best Intermission; Best Ending.
This is possibly Supergiant's best game since Bastion and that's no small feat even without the Early Access label. Every update during this period has only improved the experience and there appears to be no plateau in sight just yet, either. I'm sure the full 1.0 release will be just as excellent when it finally lands sometime this year. Superlatives: Best Early Access Journey; Best Rogue-like; Best Dog.
nationalize Nook Inc. now
Every bit as fun to play as it is a total fucking mess at the store/launcher backend level. I've rarely jumped through as many technical hoops just to play a damn game as I have for PSO2, and yet I'm enjoying it way too much to stop. There's a very real chance that when PSO2 finds its way to other PC launchers it may finally knock a certain other freebie MMO off the top of my Steam hours played list. I lost a ton of time to the original PSO on the Dreamcast, so that feels right. A Phantasy Star game deserves to represent the full circle of my time with MMOs. With luck, anyway. I'm really not sure I want to start another one. Superlatives: Most Anime Per Pixel; Best MMO Mouthfeel; Worst Launch.
I've always been pretty bad at brawlers and I was never a Streets of Rage person in the old days despite absolutely being a Sega Genesis person, but Streets of Rage 2 (or its soundtrack, really) somehow got me anyway in one of the many recent Genesis collections, so here I am, jumping into SoR4 at launch. A weird road. This same team's Wonder Boy remake, Sonic Mania, M2's fantastic relaunch of the Sega Ages remaster line on the Switch, and now Streets of Rage 4, have put Sega and their partner studios at the forefront of super high quality legacy releases, be they new ports or remasters or full-fledged sequels. I can't wait to see what's next.
