Don Everhart's Games of the Year

Don Everhart, Contributing Editor

I watched more credit sequences on games than in any previous year. That’s partly due to digging into some backlog challenges, primarily the “52 games in a year” one that’s spread across a few forums and discord channels. Mostly, I think that my volume of completed games is the result of finishing a bunch that I had started, or even played all the way to the last chapter or boss, before becoming distracted with something else. I find myself surprised at how easy it is to finish a game when I focus on it, even when it’s a longer, sidequest-packed experience. And in 2020, there was time and reason to focus.

Winding stairs leading upwards in Kentucky Route Zero

Due to the number of games that I finished, I’ve played enough new releases to have competition for a top 10. And seeing as most of the games I completed (70 and counting!) weren’t published this year, I’ve arrived at two lists. For the games that overlap, I salute you. It took a lot of quality to break through against games from previous years.

Without further ado: 

BEST NEW RELEASES OF 2020

1. Paradise Killer

2. Kentucky Route Zero: Act V

3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

4. Hades

5. Final Fantasy VII Remake

6. Treachery in Beatdown City

7. Spelunky 2

8. Mixolumia

9. Streets of Rage 4

10. Wide Ocean Big Jacket

BEST PLAYED IN 2020

1. SOMA

2. Silent Hill

3. Kentucky Route Zero

4. Yakuza 5

5. Night in the Woods

6. Paradise Killer

7. Spelunky

8. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

9. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

10. Super Mario Galaxy

I imagine that some of the games that did not make the jump from the first list to the second might raise some eyebrows. “Hades, not making the ‘best played’ list?,” one might say, “what an outrage!” It’s no accident. Hades is a fun game. I’ve been playing it daily for the last week or so, after about a month away from it. I very much enjoy Supergiant’s spin on the Greek pantheon, especially my main man Dionysus. I like the way that its structure moves the story forward as its protagonist, Zagreus, dies run-by-run. Its gameplay is fluid, the art is vivid, and Darren Korb is as solid on the tunes as usual (although I would say it’s only his third best OST, after Transistor and Pyre, and without a standout like “Build That Wall (Zia’s Theme)” from Bastion). Supergiant is an interesting studio in an almost classical sense of the word, filled with a house style and cast. Hades is a strong development from them, integrating lessons learned from their previous games. It’s very good, and that’s why it sits at number four on my new releases list.

A decaying undersea laboratory in SOMA

But there’s only so much room for new releases to break into that larger list. Just look at the competition! SOMA is a once-in-a-generation title in setting, theme, and execution, and is the finest Frictional Games has offered yet. There are outstanding moments in SOMA that make great use of the medium and which are simply not to be found elsewhere. The fantastic thing about SOMA is how it plays with body image, both graphically and within the plot. Few genres use the affordances of videogames like horror does, and SOMA is a horror experience like no other.

Similarly, I had a wonderful time revisiting the first Silent Hill. Like SOMA, Silent Hill provides an experience inextricably linked to the form. I’ll concede that Silent Hill is the sort of 1st generation playstation game that would require adjustment for anyone who didn’t grow into that style of gameplay. But for those who navigate it, the game is an incredible work within severe limitations. The core of Team Silent - Keiichiro Toyama, Akira Yamaoka, and Masahiro Ito, are now considered a dream team. Their work on Silent Hill is a great confluence of art, design, and direction, full of indelible moments and images. It’s a game that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

That brings me to Kentucky Route Zero. I played through all of its acts this year, replaying a few to really build up to what I was sure would be a strong conclusion in Act V. While, on its own, I think that Paradise Killer just edged Act V as the best of new releases, as a whole I can’t help but show respect to what Cardboard Computer accomplished with Kentucky Route Zero. Each Act somehow manages to build on the previous one. But each Act is also a departure, full of surprises in new characters, turns in the plot, and innovations in camera, navigation, and dialogue. Ben Babbitt’s OST is diverse and mesmerizing, ranging from ambient to folk to dreampop, and often in ways responsive to a player’s decision to wait or to move. Kentucky Route Zero incorporates major themes that few other games dare to surface - sadness, grief, guilt, memory, forgetting, memorializing, and moving on. It’s a powerful work, using the medium as a way to stage plays with impossible sets and to bring the collaborative storytelling of tabletop RPGs into novelistic prose.

Yakuza 5’s Saejima Taiga dressed for the Hokkaido cold

Speaking of navigating a complex cast and multiple chapters, Yakuza 5 is one of the finest short story collections ever put into videogame form. While its overarching plot is not particularly good, even by the soapy standards of the series, most of the individual chapters are outstanding. This is a game that gives full arcs to what would be side characters in any other game. My fave, Taiga Saejima, gets a fully developed prison storyline (as compared to his relatively sparse one in Yakuza 4); a mountain hunting village story that comes complete with its own variation on Monster Hunter; and a wintertime urban gangster adventure set in Sapporo. And here’s the thing: Saejima’s chapters amount to only one fifth of the game. Kazuma Kiryu, Haruka Sawmura, Shun Akiyama, and series newcomer Tatsuo Shinada also get stories of their own. Following those stories takes the player from the familiar fictionalized Tokyo setting of Kamurocho and Osaka’s Sotonbori to Nagasugai in Fukuoka and Kin'eicho in Nagoya. With so much range, I can’t help but view Yakuza 5 as a standout for the series.

Hanging at a beachside bar in Animal Crossing

Finally, some words for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I didn’t expect to enjoy New Horizons as much as I did, having bounced off the previous games. To be honest, I expected to have more fun with Isabelle in Super Smash Brothers (a runner-up to my “played in 2020” list). Yet New Horizons delivered for me at just the same time that it seemingly did for everyone else. It provided memorable evenings with distant friends, friends who may not have been together in years due to complications of geography, schedules, and attention. Because of the pandemic, however, we all had the time to be in the same place. Yes, I also enjoyed building surreal themed rooms in my house. It was fun to figure out how to turn a chunk of beach into a trash fire without pissing off Isabelle. But the game itself was purely secondary to my enjoyment of it. New Horizons wouldn’t have made my list in another year, but circumstances conspired to make it central to daily life and socializing for some time in the spring and summer. Credit where credit is due - even with Nintendo’s horribly obtuse online functionality, New Horizons was a great place to be.

That’s my year in games, more or less. I doubt I’ll accomplish a repeat. With hope, 2020 will be unique in how much time and energy I have had for games. Then again, who knows? For all the big studio offerings that made appearances on my lists in the form of Animal Crossing, Yakuza, and Final Fantasy, there are more independently made and produced titles. That’s a trend I plan to continue. Here’s to more games like Mixolumia, the best puzzle game of 2020. More like Wide Ocean Big Jacket, with its focus on short scenes, camera control, and genuine comedy. More like Treachery in Beatdown City, mixing up genre conventions and beating the piss out of racists. More to worthy sequels like Spelunky 2, which is taking its time to reveal its secrets. And more to games that I didn’t quite get to, like Extreme Meatpunks Forever: Bound by Ash. I’m sure that I’ll have more words for all of them.

For more excellent game recommendations, check out GOTY lists by Patrick Jagoda, Jason Mical, and Nate Schmidt.