Jason Mical's Games of the Year

Jason Mical, Contributing Editor

Kind Words

The only rewards you receive for answering letters are thanks and virtual stickers, and that’s wonderful.

Let’s start with the good—not just the gameplay, but the social and moral goodness of a game. Kind Words is a simple, high-concept game that’s barely a game at all. The player can view a couple dozen letters written by other players and choose which ones to respond to—and the responses need to be kind. It’s the sort of game that, in any other year, may have been swallowed into the ether of similar websites and programs. In 2020, it highlighted a very real need: spreading kindness to others and the reciprocal good feelings that generates in you. It turns out everyone needs to hear—and say—kind words.

I spent a solid couple of weeks answering letters (I never wrote one of my own for others to answer.) I replied to people afraid of coming out to their parents, folks who lost loved ones to COVID, people who lost health insurance, and people who just needed to hear from another human being. The last category was byfar the largest. I sometimes spent upwards of an hour on each letter, and because I wanted to make sure I got it “right.” I still tap into Kind Words sometimes, but never as much as that initial push. Without a doubt, it was the right game for that time of the pandemic.

Stranded Deep

Don’t be fooled by its beauty, half a dozen things in this picture can kill you.

This may be the definition of a 2020 game: something you pick up on an Xbox sale, play for three fever-dream weeks, and put down never to pick up again. Stranded Deep is a pretty bog-standard survival / crafting game. This time you’re stuck on an archipelago of islands in the tropical Pacific, and you need to drink fresh water, eat, and avoid burning to a crisp in the equatorial sun to survive. You can eventually start making real shelters, farm, and explore the other islands around you. You can also easily perish.

A major part of Stranded Deep is swimming, hunting, and diving in the ocean. The ocean, naturally, is full of sharks and other things that can hurt and kill you. It’s also deep and hard to see, which means those things can come out of nowhere and chew you in half.

There’s a reason I put Stranded Deep down and haven’t come back to it. It turns out the last thing you need during the low-to-medium level of 2020’s constant anxiety is the medium-to-high level of “I could be devoured” anxiety in Stranded Deep. That may be others’ bag, but not mine. Now that the year is almost over, the vaccine is here, and the election is decided, maybe I’ll give Stranded Deep another shot. It’s certainly beautiful and the crafting mechanics are better than most.

Then again, eaten in half out of nowhere…

No Man’s Sky

Beautiful vistas are just one of No Man’s Sky’s peaceful features.

When I was waiting in a line for an hour to drop off some donations at Goodwill, a friend of mine related some of the gonzo things he was doing in No Man’s Sky after the game’s massive summer update. I was only vaguely aware of the drama surrounding its initial release and the subsequent updates adding in promised content, but it sounded like my kind of crazy. So I started playing. Now, almost 60 hours in to my main game, NMS is a major contender for my game of the year. I can’t judge its most recent content against its older content, but what’s there right now is a blast—literally, you blast stuff a lot. The most perfect description of NMS is probably Daniel Cooper’s in Engadget: it’s a midlife crisis game, especially when that midlife crisis falls in the middle of 2020. It balances senses of exploration, wonder, shooty-pew-pew, and making loads of money really well. It’s also beautiful, which is one reason why there’s a built-in photo mode for capturing screenshots.

I never would have imagined it, but No Man’s Sky is the perfect dip-in, dip-out, build-explore-make game for 2020. Highly recommended.

Civilization VI: New Frontiers

My first foray into New Horizons—leading Simón Bolívar to victory with Gran Colombia.

Civilization VI is another four-year-old game that’s still getting a robust load of new content, this time in the form of the New Frontiers Pass, a “season” of DLC that includes new civilizations, game modes, buildings, wonders, and map features. Civ has a history of releasing 2-3 major DLCs before the game is considered “complete,” and it seems like New Frontiers will do that trick for Civ 6. All in all the new stuff is a mixed bag—new leaders and civs make up the majority of the content, along with game elements like Secret Societies (which feels like they’re torn from a Paradox 4x game).

What New Frontiers offers is the chance for old players to hop back into Civ 6 and experience something fresh, although the enduring charm of the series is that you can pretty much do that whenever you want because each game is so different. Still, everything here is an absolute delight—the Pirate minigame is especially fun—and helps ameliorate the endless existential agony of 2020 by giving you something grand and fun you can control: a civilization that stands the test of time.

Roll20

The traces of a Delta Green op planned out on Roll20.

Roll20 isn’t a game so much as a platform on which you play games, specifically tabletop RPGs. While I used to be a weekly player, the combined forces of job and parental responsibilities led me to play on a much more sporadic basis. I was lucky. I found a group of parents with kids all about the same age, who were into the kinds of games I liked to play and tended towards in-person theatrics like music, lights, and props. Prior to the pandemic, the group had scheduled a 12-hour session in mid-March to play Delta Green, a modern-day setting for Call of Cthulhu. That got, to use a technical term, completely screwed. So we turned to Roll20.

I’d never played an RPG online before, at least not like this (my old weekly group used to Skype one of our players in remotely after he moved to a different state). Roll20 allowed me to set up different scenes and upload my maps, along with flavor art and basic information about the game’s adversaries. Its in-game cameras and audio never worked right so we defaulted to Google Hangouts. We ended up playing for four sessions, with one player ultimately assuming some cosmic powers and the rest, well, dying (so a pretty standard Call of Cthulhu game). That was in April, when we were still worried about empty toilet paper shelves.

Fast-forward to October, when I ran a Halloween one-shot for the same group. It was a good time, and like before, it helped us through that stage of the pandemic by giving all of us a much-needed connection to our previous lives. But even so, the signs of this ongoing trauma were there for all of us: taller drinks, massive circles under our eyes, and an overall level of exhaustion that was evident in how we played.

Roll20 wasn’t a game, it was a lifeline. It was something we all needed at those moments in the incredible shitshow that was 2020. And without it, it would now be a year and a half without us playing an RPG together. As bad as things are right now, that would be far worse.

Hero’s Quest

Ah, there it is, my childhood brought to life once more.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and Hero’s Quest is me mainlining the happiest parts of my pre-teen years. It’s a 30-year-old hybrid adventure-RPG from Sierra On-Line, and the first game in the Quest for Glory series. I began replaying it, something I do every couple of years, because I’d begun working on a history book about the series with the games’ creators, Lori and Corey Cole.

As I wandered through the 16-color forests of Spielburg one more time, I relaxed into patterns familiar to me from the last 30 years. I still have the game map memorized. I could walk to Erana’s Peace with my eyes closed (literally, I tried it.) Sure, playing Hero’s Quest was research for the book, but it was balm for a soul battered by the pandemic, the election, and every other goddamned thing 2020 threw at me. It was, in many ways, the very best game for the time—again.

For more excellent game recommendations, check out GOTY lists by Patrick Jagoda and Claire Brownstone.