Alex Navarro is an editor for Giant Bomb, and doesn't especially feel like writing a jokey bio this year. He's @alex_navarro on Twitter.
Trying to care about video games in 2020 felt like trying to eat a nice breakfast in the middle of a bombing campaign. Games are, reflexively, the thing I tend to ensconce myself in when things are not going well, but to say that things were not "going well" in 2020 is an understatement bordering on obscenity. With few exceptions, every time I booted up a game this year, a nagging thought of "is this really how I should be spending my time right now?" would creep in, no matter how little sense that thought made. Like, what the hell else was I supposed to be doing this year? From mid-March on, I spent 95% of my time sealed up in my apartment with nowhere to go. It's not as though there was some vast array of better options for how to spend that idle time, but nonetheless, that intrusive thought persisted.
I've seen numerous people describe 2020 as living in a sort of stasis. I thought of it more like living inside feedback. Everything's on this continuous loop, but whenever some new thing disturbed it, it just made things louder and more unbearable. And disturbing things were a constant this year. I mean, 400,000 people are dead in the US alone, a product of a callous and inept response from the people ostensibly in charge of the country's wellbeing. Police violence, climate disasters, death after death after death, it all kept happening over and over again. And now that we're out of 2020, it's not like things are suddenly, automatically better. We're still quarantining and will be for months, if not the rest of the year, because we're so far behind in our response to this pandemic. For fuck's sake, we can't even agree on how we're supposed to go about vaccinating people.
I've tried really hard over the last year not to dwell on all that misery, but when you're still in the thick of it, that's tough. So I try to find things to retreat into, and inevitably I turn to games. I played a lot of them, and in the case of nearly every game on this list, I genuinely loved them. But I never quite shook that feeling that these were mostly distractions from the reality taking place right outside my door, and the thoughts kept returning, and the feedback loop kept getting louder. Maybe in writing this, I can finally break that loop and find a way to feel good about this stuff again. I hope so, because I miss feeling good about much of anything, let alone video games.
Before I launch into the list, I want to give a few shouts out to the folks who hung out with me as we streamed throughout the year. Getting to indulge in my offline Rock Band and Truck Simulator habits for you folks was a balm on my soul this year. I couldn't really go out and play shows or drive many places throughout the year, so getting to mess around with those games, and y'all taking that journey with me, helped tremendously. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I also want to shout out some games that didn't quite make it onto the list. Despite the pandemic rendering in-person experiences nearly impossible, I didn't actually get into many multiplayer games this year. I kinda went in the other direction, hunkering down with single-player experiences to hide away from the world. That said, games like Deep Rock Galactic and GTFO were some of the best times I had with my coworkers this year. Deep Rock in particular is a real goofy gem, and a tremendous amount of fun if you've got a few friends who like to dig and shoot. art of rally was my driving game of the year, which is weird to say considering much bigger, hi-fi rally games were released in 2020. But its minimalist art style and tight controls were a breath of fresh air, to me, and it became something of a zone-out game of choice for a solid month. I never touched a controller in Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I watched people play it all throughout the year, and it's one of the most impressive things I've seen come out of games in ages. I didn't end up playing 13 Sentinels or There Is No Game or Paper Mario: The Origami King, but after hearing my coworkers speak so positively of them, they're next on my list.
And lastly, I want to give a special shout out to Blaseball, my favorite weird thing of 2020. Blaseball, for those who don't know, is a simulated sport that operates in a universe where players have names like Jaylen Hotdogfingers and Curry Aliciakeys, the threat of players being incinerated is a constant worry, and old gods shaped like peanuts periodically show up to challenge teams to JRPG battles that sort of resemble baseball. It's a browser-based experience, and while the developers take the role of capricious gods/commissioners, adding terrifying new possibilities to the world and issuing dire warnings about what might happen if those possibilities ever come to pass, it's the community that ultimately drives the narrative forward. The players and their weird names don't come with baked in personalities and lore, but the people who love Blaseball are more than happy to fill in those margins. In that way, it sort of reminds me of the e-fed I used to participate in when I was a teenager. An e-fed, for those who don't know, is essentially a roleplaying group for especially dorky pro wrestling enthusiasts. People would craft their own characters, type up their own promos, and imagine the matches that were taking place between them. In our case, we didn't have to imagine, exactly, because all the matches were simmed using N64 wrestling games, giving us simulated competition to base our character moments around. Blaseball hits a familiar note, letting the simulation mostly play out while the community votes for all the ways they'd like to see it break.
It's also largely impenetrable if you aren't following along constantly. I lost the main threads at least six different times over the course of last year, relying on Cat Manning's recaps to catch myself back up. It's a commitment, and I think that's the one thing The Game Band will probably need to figure out once Blaseball returns from its current Siesta and eventually works its way out of beta. The community driven nature of the thing is fascinating, but they need to find a way to communicate the events of the game that don't rely entirely on unpaid fan labor. Don't get me wrong, I adore the enthusiasm of that weird little community, and I'm not saying the devs have to completely retake the reins and overwrite the work those folks poured their hearts into. I just want to be able to talk to people about Blaseball without having to preface it with several thousand preambles about what the hell is going on.
Anyway, go Tigers. Never look back.
Speaking of which, here is a look back at the games I enjoyed/spent the most time with in 2020.