Bruno Dias is a video game writer and designer. He’s currently a narrative designer at Failbetter Games, writing for Fallen London and working on an unannounced project. Previously, he’s been a Giant Bomb and Vice contributor, the narrative designer on Neo Cab, and a writer on several games including Pathologic 2.
2020 was not a year for enjoying things. It was a year where finding and evaluating new games was harder than normal, like literally everything else, and where I found myself gravitating even more than usual towards old gaming comforts.
In a year of diminished joys and expectations it was hard to cobble together a top 10 list. Usually there’s a gap somewhere between the true standouts and the games that were merely good; this year, it didn’t feel realistic to even put them in the same category.
So, this year, I have five games that I’m calling honorable mentions: Games that I have mixed feelings about, or that I felt were good but not truly exceptional. And then I have five games that I think are in a league of their own.
Honorable Mentions
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I have very mixed feelings about this game. It’s obviously a lovingly crafted space of comfort and warmth that has helped so many of us stay sane, myself included. It can also feel like an emotionally manipulative pile of chores that seems to draw on the worst impulses of live service games without any of the rewarding aspects. I crashed out of Animal Crossing hard, and my feelings towards it are probably harsher than they need to be. But there’s no there there, on that island; it feels like coziness and cuteness without substance, which is fair enough in a game that is, ultimately, still for kids. But the position that game ended up having in the culture was just untenable and incompatible with honest enjoyment; and as 2020 wore on, my patience for ‘wholesomeness’ in games ran out entirely.
Desperados III
There was a lot of ‘oh, one of those’ for me this year and this is my ‘One of Those’ of the Year. It’s just a well-designed game and I’m glad it exists, especially given that the old Commandos games don’t really exist in a playable form right now. In a way, it feels fundamentally like a remix of Shadow Tactics, but not in a bad way: It has its own design space that emerges from recombining which characters have what kinds of abilities. It feels like Mimimi can keep making these forever and I will keep buying them.
Persona 5 Royal
This is 90% of a game that I had already played with some small additions that I love but which are fundamentally inessential to what the original game was. It is so very inefficient with the player’s time, but that’s endemic to the genre.
It also ends with a boss fight set to a rock ballad sung from the perspective of the villain explaining his hateful ideology to you, after an epilogue that is somehow an escalation from the original game’s ending which already had you (spoilers for a 2016 game) shooting god in the head with a giant bullet forged from the seven deadly sins. I love it dearly and I am never finishing my NG+ save.
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
This game is heartbreaking for me. It’s the product of incredibly talented people writing some very compelling characters but is constantly hamstrung by the confines of what’s politically acceptable for a big-publisher boxed product to say and what’s expected of the superhero genre.