Greg Kasavin is the writer and creative director at Supergiant Games, the small independent studio behind Hades, Pyre, Transistor, and Bastion. Prior to Supergiant, Greg worked at 2K Games, Electronic Arts, and GameSpot. He’s @kasavin on Twitter.
I’ll never forget this year, that’s for sure. For the first three quarters, I was trying to tune out all the chaos of 2020 and stay focused on the last stretch of development of Hades, which I’d been working on since 2017. Then in the last quarter, I’ve been reeling from the amazing response to the launch of the game. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be part of such a talented team, to have had the opportunity to do some of the best work of my life on this project, and to have been able to continue working on it with all my might this year. Nonetheless, this was an intense and exhausting period that often left me with little time, energy, or even desire to play games outside of what I was doing for work (I played a lot of Hades this year). But I still enjoyed and found solace in a bunch of new games from studios of all shapes and sizes.
Though before I get into my favorites, as in years past, I want to begin by highlighting some of the games I just didn’t get to. Here we go!
My Top 10 Games I Didn’t Play Enough
There were a lot of games I just didn’t have the energy or time to really get into this year despite my brain repeatedly telling me “you should check this out both for personal and professional reasons; you’ll probably like it!”. I want to highlight some of these, if only to acknowledge their omission from my Top 10 below, and also to say a few words about why they’re interesting to me. Note this list is in alphabetical order.
Astro's Playroom
This PlayStation 5 pack-in is such a cool showcase of Sony’s new console and the legacy of PlayStation hardware and software over the years. It feels like an interactive museum / theme park all about PlayStation, and seeing those old consoles and peripherals rendered in such exacting detail as part of the game’s vibrant world filled me with more nostalgia than I thought I could muster. It’s a super charming, inventive, high-quality, great-looking platformer, and I love that it’s included with the system. I’ve been around long enough to remember when Sony was the newcomer to video game consoles, but by now, PlayStation has such a rich history, as expressed and celebrated through this great little game.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Amid all the madness of the growing pandemic this year, something truly bizarre happened in my household: All the sudden, every member of my household was playing video games, except for me! I was in the thick of work on Hades, and felt I didn’t have time to play anything for fun. My wife normally doesn’t touch the stuff, but Animal Crossing was a rare exception, and this time she and my daughter really got into New Horizons and played it each day for weeks. I experienced Animal Crossing vicariously through them but barely touched it myself. So it’s in a weird spot for me--technically I can’t say I’ve played it for more than an hour or so, but it’s still one of my favorite, most cherished games of the year, just because my family enjoyed it.
Cyberpunk 2077
I ran into enough issues playing this on launch day on PC that I decided I’d come back to it this coming year. From what I did play, I’m not sure this game will resonate with me the way Witchers 2 and III did, as I’m just more excited by Geralt as a character than I am about Cyberpunk’s make-your-own-protagonist, V. But I do want to see the sights of the big, teeming setting of Night City, meet its characters, and discover its stories. I feel deeply for the developers of this game, who clearly set their sights so high and had extraordinarily big shoes to fill. And I’m always interested to play games that try to do this much, and be so many things to so many people. Beyond the experience of the game itself, it’s almost like an archeological / anthropological experience for me. What happened here? How did they do this, and why? Those questions interest me with any game I play, but especially while playing big AAA blockbusters where I can hardly begin to imagine how they even exist.