Will co-hosts a podcast with Brad called Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod and streams regularly on Twitch. He still plays a bunch of PUBG, but also plays more single-player and indie games these days.
This was a weird year, which caused me to play a bunch more games than I normally do, I streamed a lot more, and yes, I still played a LOT of PUBG. (On that note, the current team working on the game seems to really understands why people like to play PUBG. They’ve added a bunch of straight-up nonsense this year--spike strips, gas cans that you can pour out to build elaborate fire traps, dirt bikes, bombs that will kill everyone in a building--fun stuff! They even added planes, so now you can drop bombs onto people. And it’s all nice and balanced. Nice job PUBG!)
It’s impossible for me to separate this year’s list from nine months of quarantine, when most of my human interaction with people outside of my immediate household came from games, video conferences, or video conferences while playing games.
The top three in this list are explicitly not in order. They’re all my games of the year.
Game of the Year: Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I’ve loved a few Animal Crossings in the past. The GameCube version was a weird thing that my partner and I played on the reg for a year or two. The 3DS version is inextricably linked in my head to brunches at Denny’s with friends when my daughter was a newborn. This year’s version is the quarantine edition. It’s both the fastest to get started and the slowest to get to the part of the game that I really like. The game dumps so many new tasks on you at the beginning that you always feel like you have a bazillion things to do.
Unfortunately, all those tasks kept me from doing the things that I really enjoy about Animal Crossing until I’d upgraded my house and done a bunch of other nonsense. Once the animal residents were doing their weird business and sending me goofy letters and gifts, I was fully in, but if I’m honest, I’m not sure I would have made it to that point if were I able to, you know, leave the house.
And in our weird quarantine world, Animal Crossing has been a social hub and an impromptu game design workshop. Like a lot of people, I’ve been to parties on Animal Crossing islands; but the kids are taking this business to the next level. Sure, my daughter plays with her friends on their islands, but they’re making up their own games that just happen to use Animal Crossing as a setting. They started with freeze tag in the museum, then progressed to insect and fish hunts, and now they’re terraforming their islands to make them better for scavenger hunts. If Nintendo was able to capitalize on this by giving players access to the tiniest bit of game logic, they’d birth a whole generation of game designers.
As I’m starting to think about a life after the quarantine, I also wonder if Animal Crossing is going to be one of those games that is ruined forever for me. I wonder if I’ll ever want to play an Animal Crossing again or if it will forever be a reminder of the year my family and I spent at home.
Game of the Year: Hades
Supergiant does this thing where they make games that are mechanically perfect while simultaneously telling complex stories filled with well-realized characters. And while the character progression, God mode, and skill trees all combine to make a game that’s a delight for almost every kind of player; it’s Supergiant’s commitment to storytelling that I found most remarkable.
I played Hades for a few hours before I even noticed that something unusual was happening. As I failed my nth run and was talking to an NPC, I realized I hadn’t heard any repeated dialogue, even from characters I encountered multiple times in the exact same context. There was no trickery or magic, Supergiant simply recorded unique lines of dialog for every possible permutation of every NPC encounter. And they recorded enough of them that I hadn’t heard any repeats in 10 or 15 runs worth of dialogue. When I figured out why they’d done this, I realized I was midway through one of the handful of narrative-based games I’d played that was only possible to tell as a game--this version of the story of Zagreus couldn’t be told as a book, comic, TV show, or movie.
And that wasn’t enough for them. They also made this game accessible to almost everyone. God mode, which gently ramps up the player’s relative power each time they fail a run, should be the model for roguelikes, roguelites, and all games going forward. I’m 100 hours in and still discovering new secrets on every run.
Game of the Year: Half-Life: Alyx
Before I could really play Alyx, I had to learn how to play Alyx. I had to learn how to traverse the world, I had to learn that I was able to handle the smooth motion, and I had to learn how to interact with the world--grabbing, dropping, throwing, and blocking. And, I had to learn how to shoot, reload, and change weapons using my hands, instead of a series of hotkeys mapped to a controller or keyboard.