Imran Khan is a video game journalist that has been writing about the medium for 18 years. He used to be a senior editor at Game Informer and is currently a professional loudmouth at Kinda Funny Games with bylines at IGN, Inverse, Fanbyte, and many other sites. He's @imranzomg on Twitter, but pursue that at your own risk.
Until I started doing Game of the Year lists professionally, I feel like I always placed a level of importance on them that is becoming increasingly undue. There’s always an implicit parenthetical on these that reads “Game of the Year (That I Had Time To Play)” or “Game of the Year (That I Lucked Out to Discover)” and it leads to a rabbit hole of thinking about how deeply our lists are driven by conversation. Would there be another game in the place of some of these if I didn’t feel a compelling personal or professional need to be involved in the zeitgeist? Who knows!
At the end of the day, 2020 should have been one of the worst years for gaming in recent memory, but it comes out to somehow be one of my favorites. Maybe it is the fact that I have never been more at-home and confronted by video games than I am now. Perhaps it’s that, in an otherwise hair-receding year, I found a lot of comfort in the medium I have always loved above all others. Regardless of the reason, I had a lot more trouble narrowing down this list than I thought, and there is a high chance I rethink or regret placement or inclusion hourly until February.
10. Moon
Moon is a cheat on this list for several reasons. First, calling it a 2020 game is charitable--this Japanese RPG was first released in 1997 exclusively in its home country, and only finally translated into English this year. Second, I did not play Moon myself and merely watched my partner play it, which may actually be the ideal way to experience Moon. It is, in many ways, the progenitor to Undertale, the Charmander to its Charizard, but manages to use the 23-year-old rough edges to express a deep level of heart that you don’t get from safer experiences. Moon’s story asks the player to examine their role in the world and the positive marks they leave on it, but does so in an abstract and inarguably weird way.
I’ve had this fascination with side quest design in recent years, and how a designer decides what makes a side quest worth it, what rewards make a player feel satisfied to have gone through gameplay they ostensibly should be enjoying anyway? Moon tells the player there’s no real benefit to what they’re doing except for making the world a better place, bit-by-bit, life-by-life. It’s relentlessly positive, but unlike other games under that same banner like Animal Crossing, it proves that virtue in the face of adversity and without reward. Whether Moon is a great game or not is immaterial; it is unquestionably fascinating regardless of quality.
9. The Last of Us Part II
I don’t actually know how much I like The Last of Us Part II. I also have no idea how much I am supposed to like The Last of Us Part II. The game seems designed to make me uncomfortable, feel tense and gross, to square away the conflicts of comfort and fear, and I think it mostly succeeds at that. It’s an immaculate execution on design, it’s mostly just a question of whether you agree with decisions that lead to that design.
Being divisive is a virtue and a curse, and I spent a lot of time thinking about where The Last of Us Part II landed on that scale for me. Being divisive lets the game be true to itself and push outside the box in ways that a game of this scope and scale would usually have to avoid in order not to offend or turn off players. In a world where AAA games are told not too run too fast or go too far, The Last of Us Part II decides that it will go wherever it damn well pleases. I wish I liked the game more, but that’s all relative when talking about the ten best games of the year.
8. Genshin Impact
On paper, Genshin Impact shouldn’t work. I bristle at Breath of the Wild clones quite consistently, marrying that to a gacha game with minimal systems in favor of a dominant elemental structure, further driving the gacha aspect, seems like it should push me away like a repulsion field. Instead, I put damn near 250 hours into the game, which either makes me a ridiculous rube or means there’s more to the game than just its bullet points.
Probably both, honestly.
Its business model and the balancing around it warrants a suspicious eye, but Genshin Impact definitely aspires to be more than the sum of its parts, and mostly succeeds at that. The battle system is better than it should be, the world is larger than you would think, the systems interact better than you would assume, the good things pile up over time. My appreciation for Genshin Impact may be a result of confounded expectations, but there’s still benefit to how it did so.