2020! The year when video cards were announced...but were then impossible to find! Someone named HotGirlVideos69 became the shadow queen behind game news leaks! The biggest release of the year somehow became Schrodinger's game, both on sale and not at the same time! What a year for events, which were eventful all year long. I am now done with my introductory paragraph and would like to discuss other things before returning to the subject of games.
I regret to inform you that I did not read a tremendous amount of books in 2020 when compared to the couple of years preceding it, so I don't have a lot of my usual recommendations along those lines. (You can check out my 2018 and 2019 reading lists if you want, and I recently blogged about the exciting television that I've been watching in 2020.)
The bulk of my reading time was spent catching up with human word factory Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive books, which is up to around 5,000 pages even though only four of the 10 books have hit the shelves. I'm not a heavy fantasy reader, and I wasn't super impressed by his Mistborn Trilogy (the first thing of his that I've read), but if you're looking for something long and distracting, well get out of my pants and into one of these books! I also spent a bunch of hours catching up on the back catalogues of Adrian Tchaikovsky and Martha Wells, and I'm now working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For The Future, which yet again blends a realistic look at how climate change will affect us in the near future paired with what feels like an increasingly fantastic optimism about what we can do to mitigate those effects. I'm a bit more of a pessimist than he is!
Anyway, games! I played fewer games than I probably would've liked in 2020 but that's mostly because I spent significant chunks of time on a few comfort food games that kind of ate up a lot of the year! It was a year for some fuckin' meat and potatoes and I'm not going to apologize for my tastes drifting towards the AAA summer blockbusters with surprising celebrity cameos and maybe an intriguing after-credits sequence implying an inchoate expanded cinematic universe...in these unprecedented times.
I didn't turn on my consoles too often this year (except for FFVII Remake but I bounced off of that pretty hard when Aeris shows up), so this is mostly PC-oriented stuff. Before I get into my list of BEST GAMES, though, here are a few titles that I thought were worth noting even if they aren't on my actual list.
GAMES OF NOTE
Magic: The Gathering Arena
There's a ton wrong with this game! The client is poorly optimized, there's plenty of bugs, and it could use a million quality-of-life improvements. But it's still by far my most-played game of 2020 and it's a rare day that doesn't see me sit down for at least a few matches or some fiddlin' around with decks. While that is definitely more due to the fact that it's one of the best card games ever created more than the technical aspects of it, I still put hundreds of hours into it and don't see that changing anytime soon.
Destiny 2: Beyond Light
I really wish someone could take the shooting model from Destiny 2 and surround it with something other than the layers of cruft that Bungie is eternally piling onto it. I don't like the game's sense of humor, I don't care about the worldbuilding, the magic system has no internal consistency, and even after they Scarlet Witched half the planets in the game to make it simpler I'm still constantly confused as to what I should be doing at any given time. Beyond Light just makes me angry when I think about the design decisions that they made. "Keep It Simple, Stupid" should be graffitied above the doors to Bungie as a reminder and an insult to everyone who makes this game.
But the shooting is so damn good! It's just not good enough to make me want to spend any more time in Destiny than I already have and therefore I am breaking up with it. After a half-decade of wrestling with the franchise's shortcomings and baffling decisions, I've decided to jump ship, cut my losses, avoid the sunk-cost fallacy, etc. Keep what you do right, Destiny, and get rid of everything else. Otherwise this is goodbye.
Hades
I unfortunately have only really dabbled in Hades; I enjoy it well enough but simply haven't played enough of it to really get a sense for its quality. I know I'm pretty bad at it, but hey, we're all bad at roguelikes at the start! This came out around the same time as Spelunky 2's PC port and I've spent a lot more time with that game. But I'll try to get back to it!
Also I really don't like the weirdo caryatids that crop the action if you're on a BIG MONITOR. Should've just been black bars and are pretty distracting.