Giant Bomb

There's never been a better time to play video games.

This is a sentiment that hop scotches back and forth over the line of irony. 2020, for better or worse (mostly worse... almost entirely worse) was a year that had many of us in front of our screens all day every day. It should make sense, then, that this was a great year for video games.

Well it was, and it wasn't. A byproduct of being home all day made it really hard to focus and play one game unless it really gripped me. I found myself often confused between checking in on 2020's hottest games, swapping between old SNES games and putting like 100 hours into Overwatch for some reason?? There's tons of 2020 releases I need to put more time into next year, but the games from this year that I stuck with I loved totally.

I'm going to keep this short, because I discussed the hell out of these games and why I love them in the podcasts you can listen to.

Also, as a personal note, today is my last day as a Giant Bomb staffer. I'm extremely grateful for all the kind words I've received about my departure. Thanks for putting up with me <3.

Anyways, here's 10 video games I really loved this year. Honorable mentions include Paper Mario: The Origami King, ScourgeBringer, Bugsnax, Spellbreak, and Good Sudoku.

Danny O'Dwyer is an expert in European sport and he makes video game documentaries at Noclip. You can follow him on Twitter.

Hey duders. In recent years I’ve struggled to put together five appropriate games for my Giant Bomb list, but it turns out a global health crisis is the type of thing that gives you a thirst for escapism. So here are my top ten ways to keep my mind occupied in 2020, with a few bonus adventures listed at the bottom. Let’s get into it…

SWERY is a game director best known for his work on games like Deadly Premonition, D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, and The Missing: J.J. MacField and the Island of Memories. He's @Swery65 on Twitter.

I think it should go without saying that 2020 was an unusual year for everyone around the world. Amidst everything that's happened, I'm overjoyed from the bottom of my heart that Giant Bomb, who I love, has given me another chance to look back on my own year.

Just like last year, it seems like more and more games are being released every year. This year, we also saw the next generation of consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X) along with a big update to the PC world with the Geforce RTX 3000 Series and the Ryzen 5000 Series.

Ron Funches is a comedian, actor, and periodic Giant Beastcast guest. You can follow him on Twitter.

What a year. I got married, I had my own TV show for Quibi, we all got to experience a terrifying life experience together. I want to thank the entire medium of video games for helping me stay sane and stay connected to friends at a time where it has been easy to feel isolated. These are my favorite games of the year at the time I needed them the most.

Please follow me on twitch https://www.twitch.tv/ron_funches and check out my TV show TSV Thursday 10:30/9:30c on Tru TV.

BAKOON is Bay Area artist Oliver Leach. When he's not creating his art, he's being a good boy on Twitter and Twitch.

Hello again Giant Bomb readers.

A real stinkhole of a year, but it left a lot of time to stay inside and game. I found myself wanting to go back and finish things and series I hadn’t had time to get to yet, so apologies if this list isn’t all newer titles. My gamer's fancy goes where it likes and I have no choice but to follow it.

Samantha Kalman is a Seattle-based game developer currently working at Respawn on Apex Legends. You can find her on Twitter @SamanthaZero.

Friends, it's been a hell of a year. I had approximately three months of normalcy in 2020, if you count studying for a Bachelor's degree in a foreign country "normal". When the lockdown hit in March I was settled in SE London, trying to keep up with my studies and wondering how long to watch the pandemic unfold before I needed to move back home. Lemme tell ya, London is a really cool place to live when you can be out in it! But when you're stuck in a single room it's a different story, even when you have time to make some awful experimental music.

Kenny Omega is one of the co-founders of All Elite Wrestling, and current AEW World Champion. He's @KennyOmegaManX on Twitter.

Austin Creed (AKA Xavier Woods) is a member of the 10-time Tag Team Championship-winning crew known as The New Day, and the host of gaming YouTube channel UpUpDownDown. He's @austincreedwins on Twitter.

As the sun began to shine on a bright morning day, two kings were awakened...

Kenny: Ooo, I like this! So who's the other king? The suspense is killing me. Me ANNND?

Austin: Well, I was trying to imply that we were both kings...

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.

Scott Benson is an animator and game developer, best known for co-creating Night in the Woods. He's @bombsfall on Twitter.

God, this year. I feel like every time I do one of these I’m talking about how I’m tired and it’s been a long year and so forth. But I gotta say I’m tired and it’s been a long year and that is a part of this list, I guess. This is so far word for word the same intro I wrote to last year’s column and if I’m doing another one of these next year I am really hoping I’ll be able to say “remember when things were bad? Glad that’s over!”. But things are bad, and now it’s time to talk about video games!

Casey Malone is a professional comedian and game designer. You can follow him on Twitter.

Good riddance! Right? I don’t have anything profound or inspiring to say about 2020 here, but that seems ok. We’re all sick of talking about it. I consider myself exceptionally lucky, in that I’m safe and stable during an age of pure catastrophe, and even I’m drained thinking about the past 12 months. I mean, remember when Josh Gad became completely inescapable as soon as we went into lockdown? God knows that’s been taxing for us all.

But let’s focus on the good stuff. Did the chance of a hot person seeing the inside of my apartment this year drop to 0%? Sure, I could dwell on that. But did that free me up to finally get a gamer chair? You bet my sweet ass it did. So, for a few hundred words, here’s a list of things that brought me joy last year. Who knows, you might even be on it.

Colin Spacetwinks is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, but still probably most known for posting a bunch of shit online. They publish a bunch of their original work over on their itch.io page ranging from things like a collection of their personal tips and tricks to living and working with ADHD to a body horror story about coming to work on your day off. They also wrote that article about Christian Sonic the Hedgehog fandom that Alex shouted out on one of his drumming streams. Thanks, Alex.

Grace Bruxner is the creative director at Worm Club, the indie studio behind the Frog Detective series. She's @gracebruxner on Twitter.

Abby Russell is a comedian and former Content Producer with Giant Bomb. Like everyone else, she is currently riding out the pandemic and streaming regularly to twitch. You can also follow her on twitter, instagram, and YouTube.

Wow! I’m finally writing a top ten list, no longer as an employee of Giant Bomb! Somehow things feel so different and yet... exactly the fucking same. It’s probably because I get paid one million dollars a word, like usual. Wait. They AREN’T paying me to write my list this year?? Fuck!

I’m not saying anything new here, but this was such a strange year for so many reasons. And my gameplay choices were no exception. Spoiler alert! Pretty much everything listed below will have some form of multiplayer interaction in it. I think that is partially due to me not being particularly enthralled by the big-name, single player games that came out this year, and partially just because I think we all had to learn new ways to socialize.

Dan Ryckert is a guy with a couch and a Twitch channel. Every Sunday, he hosts a podcast about streaming movies and shows with his wife Bianca. He has set two Guinness World Records, got married at a Taco Bell, wrote numerous books, and is currently the #1 Gamer on Cameo. He used to work here.

Emma Kidwell is a narrative designer and writer who was recently named one of Forbes 30 under 30 for 2021. This year she had her most recent game, Half, showcased at the Smithsonian Museum of Arts and Sciences. Her upcoming title, I Wish I Were a Robot, will be released in 2021. You can follow her on Twitter @emmakidwell or check out her games on Itch.io.

You don’t need me to tell you how much 2020 sucked. Any grand plans of traveling, working on creative ambitions, or spending more time with friends were crushed and seem like a distant memory. Sure, spending so much time at home may have inspired others to find a new routine and adjust to their new normal-- I’ve worked remotely my entire career so that much wasn’t new for me. But the isolation had me searching for comfort in games, like I’ve done many times in the past. If you’re anything like me, you seek out nostalgic media to regain any sense of normalcy. In addition to going back to much loved games from my past, I also played more new games than I think I have in the last few years combined.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of PR firm EZPR, and he loves to play games to forget about work.

Hello everyone! This is my first top 10 list for Giant Bomb, and this has been an especially peculiar year for gaming for me, in that it was the first I can think of where I didn’t necessarily love ten games, and hated several major releases (Doom Eternal and Spider-Man: Miles Morales). But for the most part, the games I loved I absolutely fell head over heels for.

Dan Teasdale and Panzer are the dynamic duo that make up independent video game development studio No Goblin, creators of Roundabout and 100 ft Robot Golf. Hit them up on Twitter @deliciousbees and @panzerskank, respectively.

Dan: 2020’s over, baby! It’s 2021’s time to shine! Hell yeah, we’re living in the Johnny Mnemonic year!

Panzer: Aw fuck yeah, more Keanu Reeves.

Dan: To celebrate, we’ve put together a Game of the Year crossword puzzle for you to usher in the cyber future. If you want to play, just click on the Online Crossword Experience link below to get teleported to a new page that has a crossword on it.

Jeff Green is a former game journalist and current Partner & Business Development Lead at Minn/Max Consulting. In 2020, he launched and hosted the Branching Narratives podcast on US Gamer. He's @greenspeak on Twitter.

As a Professional Videogame Consultant, it is my job--nay, my calling--to assess a situation and provide analysis. So here is my professional opinion of 2020: It fucking sucked balls. Not that you need me or my expertise to tell you that. But what was also true about 2020 was that for introverted, antisocial dorks like me, who are far happier alone in front of a game than sitting with a forced smile at a party or dinner gathering or anything involving “having conversations,” there was a silver lining. Being stuck at home gave us the perfect opportunity to indulge in our hobbies to our hearts’ content, guilt free. For once we were told to stay inside, that it was better to isolate. We were doing our civic duty by playing Destiny for eight hours in a row!

Soha E is a Diversity & Inclusion leader at Riot Games and sits on the Board of Directors for Dames Making Games. She also streams every Saturday with her friend Kelsey and you can follow her on Twitter. Her avatar is made by @snowswallow_.

There’s a GTAV video that always makes me laugh. Michael flies a blimp toward a replica of the Griffith Observatory as Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time” plays on the radio and crashes right into the building. The blimp bursts into flames and screams from innocent bystanders can be heard offscreen. Michael ragdolls to the balcony where a quest marker waits for him, and a cutscene immediately starts where he throws his arms out to greet an NPC with a casual “Davey!”

Evil Uno wrestles for AEW as a member of the Dark Order. You can follow him on Twitter.

Hello, this is Evil Uno of the Dark Order. I’m a pro wrestler for All Elite Wrestling and now a Twitch streamer. It’s an honor to meet you.

2020, right? What a year. As shitty as 2020 has been, it's been a great year for video games. Last year I would have predicted some of my honorable mentions as being in my top three games of the year. The fact that they're not is a testament to the incredible line-up of games that released in this otherwise awful year. Remember that this list is subjective and there is no particular order to it; I’ve also included games that were released prior to this year. Please refrain from being angry if you’re game didn’t make my list, it probably sucked anyway.

Dante Douglas is a writer & designer who does secret lore things at Riot Games. He is online as @videodante.

Hello Giant Bomb Community. I’m Dante. It’s been a minute. I’m going to talk about video games. I would usually preface this with some words about the year in general. I don’t have those words this year. I’m sorry.

I feel like I’ve been yelling online about everything for the past eight months, so apologies for not being as eloquent now. Here is a link to a document I prepared earlier this year of national bail and mutual aid funds for bailing out protesters and supporting communities in their fights for justice. Consider donating to one, or one in your area, if you can.

Rami Ismail is one half of the former team best known as Vlambeer, the developer behind games like Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Nuclear Throne. He's on Twitter as @tha_rami.

When I was a kid, I would run away from home every time I needed an injection, which was at least once a year for the vaccination I needed for our annual family trip to my father’s homeland of Egypt. I would scream and plead and fight whoever tried to hold me down whenever I was in the doctor’s office. More than once, the sheer fear summoned some ungodly strength in me that injured whoever was unlucky enough to be involved in the process of keeping me healthy.

Chris Tilton is a composer and he’s written music for a few TV shows (Fringe, Zoo) and video games (SimCity, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Black). This year, Chris welcomed our robot overlords by writing the music for a robot companion called MOXIE, which releases in 2021.

In any other year besides 2020, Broadway Alex would be singing and dancing on Broadway for your amusement. You can follow him on Twitter.

Hey all! Alex Boniello here. Happy to be back to write another Game of the Year list for my favorite games outlet.

You might know me better as Broadway Alex (thanks for that, Dan). But, admittedly, it feels weird to call myself that this year.

Like many other industries, the entertainment industry has been decimated by COVID. Live theater, especially in New York City, has been brutalized on a level that I cannot possibly enumerate. Television sets have been mostly shut down. Live music, too. This has been the hardest year of my life professionally and personally. I have lost jobs to this virus. I have also lost friends. I am sure many of you can relate.

Drew Scanlon is a former Giant Bomb video producer. He now works in game development as a producer at Digital Eclipse Software, Inc./Other Ocean Interactive and occasionally talks about speedy race cars.

It has been, as they say, a year. After global travel became virtually impossible, I decided to end Cloth Map, the travel documentary project I had been doing since March 2017. The feeling was bittersweet. With the support of hundreds of generous folks around the Internet, we made some videos I’m incredibly proud of. But the opportunity to rejoin the game development world was just too good to pass up!

Anyway, after such a weird year, it seems only fitting that I should give you a weird list.

Hiroyuki Sakamoto is a producer at Sega's Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio working on the Yakuza series, including 2020's Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

4. Ghost of Tsushima

I was impressed to see that an overseas studio understood the unique history of Japan and made a game out of it. It would be difficult even for a Japanese studio to achieve this level of quality. The game’s control scheme is superb, and I could appreciate the stable quality of Sucker Punch Productions for myself.

3. Cyberpunk 2077

Nina Freeman is a game designer and streamer. She’s best known for games like Cibele and “how do you Do It?”. You can follow her on Twitter at @PersocomNina or check out her streams every week on Twitch at twitch.tv/ninamarie.

I went back and read my game of the year list introduction from 2019. I’m glad I read it, because I needed a reminder of my optimistic start to 2020. I was working on my new horror game (which I’m still working on! yay!), and I had high hopes for where it’d be by the end of the year. Then, 2020 happened (CW: 2020 things, skip the next paragraph if you need)…

Derek Yu is a visual artist, game designer, and sometimes writer, best known for creating the Spelunky series of games. For many years, he was also the Editor-in-Chief of TIGSource, the independent games website and community. He goes by @mossmouth on Twitter.

It was a busy year for me workwise, trying to get Spelunky 2 out the door with BlitWorks and our other collaborators, but I can’t really stop playing video games, can I?! That said, I’m still catching up on games from the last century, let alone this year, so I can’t realistically make a Top 10 list of games that were released in 2020. You’ll have to settle, instead, for a Top Ten list of games I played in 2020 that were meaningful to me.

Enjoy!

Alex Zandra is a Canadian game designer and light novelist. She makes all kinds of stuff on her Patreon. You can find her on Twitter @zandravandra.

Hey hi folks! It’s been… a difficult year. I hope you’re doing okay. <3

Exhaustion, personal stuff, heavy-duty therapy--and then, the pandemic--have meant that out of all the things I wanted to accomplish this year, only a scant few got done. I had planned to get my latest book out of the way in April so I could move on to other things; it got released in October. Of the half-dozen projects I had on my plate for the last two months, I could only muster enough energy for one and a half. I dragged myself across the 2020 finish line more tired than ever.

Mike Drucker is a writer and comedian living in New York City. He’s currently the co-head writer and co-executive producer of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS. You can follow him on Twitter @MikeDrucker and on Instagram @MikeDruckerisDead.

Man, thank fucking God for video games. As cynical as I want to be, and as unjustifiably bitter as I am as a human being, I have to admit that video games really did some heavy lifting this year. In a time when every article has to use the phrase, “in a time,” video games have been a source of incredible comfort. They’ve given us a way to spend time together, to travel somewhere that isn’t the inside of a quarantined house, and perhaps most importantly of all, make fun of Cyberpunk 2077.

Dave Lang is C3P0 at Iron Galaxy Studios. You can find him on Twitter @JosephJBroni.

One of my 2020 silver linings is that after my travel schedule got wiped from the calendar, I had a lot more time to play some digi-tapes.

Below is a list of games (in no order save the last one) that left a lasting impression on me this year. Please enjoy.

Pat Baer is a comedian currently living in South Carolina who you may have seen at various PAXes with his panels Pat Baer’s Anime Club, The Improvised Postmortem, and League of Heels. You also may have encountered him on Twitch, where he builds Gundams and LEGO. He hopes to move back to NYC in 2021.

I didn’t play a lot of video games in 2020. So here’s my Top 10 Anime, because I watched A LOT of shows this year. Honorable mention to Black Clover, which brilliantly wrapped up a multi-year storyline but also featured tragic queer villains and is my BEST/WORST of 2020.

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!

Kahlief Adams is the captain of the Spawn on Me podcast. In 2020 he co-organized Spawn 4 Good's charity stream to benefit VoteRiders.org (which featured Giant Bomb's own Brad Shoemaker and Alex Navarro).

When he's not lobbying to replace problematic emotes on Twitch, you can find him on Twitter at @Kahjahkins.

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.

Greg Miller is the head honcho of Kinda Funny Games. He's @GameOverGreggy on Twitter.

Let’s cut to the chase--I’m putting a couple games on here that aren’t great. Like, they have problems and everyone makes fun of them, but much like how wrestling is still real to that one guy, these games are still fun to me.

Mary Kish is a producer at Twitch. She's @merrykish on Twitter.

Rich Gallup is Executive Producer at OtherSide Entertainment and knows more Whats than there are Legos in his entire house. Find him working in his makeshift basement office surrounded by wood paneling, or on Twitter.

Hello everybody!

For many this year was stressful, sad, and lonely. I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent 2020 in relative safety and seclusion, waiting, listening, learning, and trying to keep my kids entertained in this Groundhog Day loop of laundry, dishes, and remote schooling. Big thanks to Battlebots, Jelle’s Marble Runs, and Word Girl, among others.

Leon Chang is a New York-based musician. His most recent album, Return to Bird World, released in 2020. He's @leyawn on Twitter.

I spent 99% of my time this year inside, and 99% of that time playing video games. There wasn’t any special reason for that or anything, I just like staying inside and playing video games.

In 2020, Mike Mahardy left his role as a producer at GameSpot (and occasional guest appearances with the fine folks here at Giant Bomb) to make a daily show for Polygon. You can follow him on Twitter at @mmahardy.

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I’ll spare you the gory details about my personal 2020. We all have our stories by now, and you don’t need to hear mine. Suffice it to say, 2020 was a year in which I not only found refuge in games, but also “returned” to them, so to speak, and took the chance to interrogate my relationship with them entirely.

In some cases, I reconfirmed my love for certain genres. In others, I found dissatisfaction where I once found comfort. And in one select instance, I was drawn strongly to a game that runs counter to everything the past versions of me enjoyed. In an arbitrary chunk of months when I had so much more time to think, I guess it’s fitting--and fortunate--that games helped me know a little bit more about myself.

10. XCOM: Chimera Squad

“Where do they go from here?”