Ollie Luddy's Top 10 Games of 2020 | Winter Spectacular 2020

It’s been a weird year for me. I took over startmenu in August of 2019, the same month I was discharged from an inpatient ward after three years of being in and out of hospital and really on the edge with my mental health. Mental health is an odd thing, and someday I’ll put proper words to this, but it makes you kinda boring. Not for your friends and certainly not for your family When you struggle with your thoughts they never really know what to say or do, and who can blame them. But you? You’ll often find yourself knowing exactly how you’ll be spending your time, all day, every day, weeks ahead of time. You know the thought patterns that you’re going to chase down the rabbit hole, even though you tell yourself not to, you’ll come up with excuses not to spend time with people, but most of all you’ll know exactly what things that bring you joy you’ll be avoiding. 

2020 is over we’re throwing a party.

All this is to say that for the last few years of my life - and teenage years especially - I’ve been pretty good at not playing games. Don’t get me wrong, I lived and breathed them still; I listened to podcasts, checked Twitter and news sites relentlessly and was always up to date on the discourse. But I actually very rarely allowed myself to sit down and play games very often, that would be too fun, an unjust reward I hadn’t earned etc.

I’m not claiming I’m in a great place now, it would probably be pretty easy to argue I’m not in a good place right at the moment. But in the last year despite how awful the world has been I’ve been able to make my slow return to actually playing the games I love so much. Good thing too because this year sure has been a real pisser, huh? 

All this meant that 2020 was a real backlog clearing year for me. I caught up on a lot of stuff I missed out on during my self-exile, figured out what I still want to play and even allowed myself to start buying games that I wasn’t going to play that very day (which was a big deal for me). But I already covered a lot of these games in a previous Winter Spectacular piece. So, with that in mind, here are 10 of my Games of The Year that actually released this year.

.tsenoh eb ot 0202 rof doom gib ytterp a saw ciportaraP

Shoutouts:

Hey, you should play Paper Beast: Folded Edition and Paratropic. They are both excellent short mood pieces that nail what they are going for in very different ways. The only reason they’re not somewhere on this list is there are few more games that stuck with me for longer.

10. Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to), A Short Hike and Tetris Effect

Ok, remember how I said that these would be games released in 2020? Well, I lied. They didn’t really belong in my backlog piece because they either recently came out and I just only got around to them early this year or, in the case of Tetris Effect, I’ve been playing it for two years straight, pretty consistently. The real reason these games are all grouped together though is that they are what got me through the beginning of pandemic. 

I’m sure you remember but there was a heck of a lot of anxiety and confusion floating around in March, and to be honest, I wasn’t handling it great. It was all just a little (or a lot) bit too much. It was at this time, amidst my ever-worsening dependence on doom-scrolling, I found a rare few good pieces of advice on Twitter (wild, I know). Most of the things that helped make me feel a little bit better at this time were small selfcare things and pictures of cute animals, but I found that as things got worse and worse and that knot in my stomach tightened like everyone else’s, two games kept popping up on my feed. Those were A Short Hike, from solo developer Adamgryu, and Kind Words, from the small team at Popcannibal.

Another day. Get out bed. Face the world. You can do it.

Kind Words feels like something that started as a grand experiment, to see if people could be nice to each other on the internet even if completely anonymous, only to have developed into something much more profound with the rise of COVID. I was pretty shocked when I learnt that even months after release Kind Words was still a kind place to go, it seems that lo-fi beats, a stunning art style and a nice deer can do worlds for people’s temperament. It is a game where you just put your feelings out there, sometimes asking for advice and sometimes giving it, and sometimes you’ll just compliment or reassure a stranger. When things started to get bad and we all locked ourselves away, Kind Words was a nice reminder that there is always someone to talk to.

Facing the world is important but it just as important to take a break from the rush of daily life every now and again.

A Short Hike is a game I think everyone should play. It’s simple, straightforward, short, thoughtful and somehow just cosy. I played it in one night, the first weekend of full lockdown here in Ireland. I spent almost my entire night wandering this small seaside mountain and camp just talking to other animals, taking in the sights and gliding around. It’s a game that doesn’t rush you and when the world felt like it was spinning a million miles an hour it got me to take a second, breath and just enjoy being somewhere else for a while.

Tetris Effect is definitely the biggest copout on here. I mean, I put it on my GOTY list last year and it came out in 2018. I really am just being brazen at this point. But hell, if the messages of togetherness and connectivity that Tetsuya Mizuguchi has been littering his work with for the last two decades aren’t more relevant now more than ever, I don’t know what is. There really isn’t much I can say about Tetris Effect that hasn’t already been said but I will urge you to download Tetris Effect: Connected on Game Pass, even if it is just to witness the magic of the ‘Connected’ mode which finally managed to marry synthetic gameplay to the message Miz’s games in some spectacular multiplayer action.

HIYA!

9. Astro’s Playroom

This was a toss-up. It was either Astro or Super Mario Galaxy that was going to take this spot. Ultimately Galaxy missed out for a number of reasons; the collection it came in was pretty barebones (and also included Mario: Sunshine), the controls, while a good migration to the Switch, do feel like a compromised version of the Wii’s original layout and the shady business Nintendo has allowed to shadow the 35th anniversary of their top mascot, all contributed. But the main reason is Astro’s Playroom produced a really special feeling. I got a bit of this feeling replaying Galaxy but it wasn’t the same. Galaxy was a shot of pure nostalgia, but Astro, that was something different. There is a reverence for the history of video games, characters, developers and even hardware pouring out of every nook and cranny in Astro. This playful thoughtfulness has long been the property of Nintendo, monopolising our childhood memories with classic consoles and oddball throwbacks. But Team Asobi! has taken what was originally a character designed for a game that only existed to justify purchases of the supremely outdated PlayStation Move and Camera in 2013 and has morphed them into one of the most emotive and personable platform mascots we’ve seen in at least a decade. It helps that Astro’s Playroom serves as an astounding demo for the DualSense controller and its genuinely next-gen feeling haptics (I’m glaring at you, Joycons with your HD Rumble).

But the thing that really balled me over about this game is the life, the excitement for games, the positivity that just washes over you as you play. Also, it’s hard to argue that this might just be one of the best free pack-in games ever released.

OOOOOOH… Playroom! Now I get it.

Damn, everyone made in the RE engine is hot as hell.

8. Resident Evil 3

The Resident Evil 2 Remake released last year might be one of the generation’s best games and it is a testament to how Capcom has turned their perception in the last few years. They’ve gone from being a Japanese gaming giant of yesteryear that had seemingly lost its way trying to Westernise it’s franchises and failing at even getting Street Fighter right, to a shining beacon of innovation and reinvention as the posterchild of the return of Japanese Triple-A gaming … That still can’t get Street Fighter right. 

The Metrovadiana-like map of the Police Station, the genuinely worthwhile second run mode, the campy (but much more grounded than later entries) story and voice acting and devilishly clever adaptive difficulty all made RE2 one of the best games I played in 2020 (I only got to it in January). So maybe I’ve become a mark, I have gone from never playing a Resident Evil game to playing almost all the mainline entries over the course of two years, but colour me pleasantly surprised by RE3. The only reason I say that I was even taken aback by how much I enjoyed this game is because of how negative most of the post release reaction to this game was. 

See what I mean. Even Nemesis is smoking.

“Resident Evil 3 Remake is too short and it lacks the medtrovania aspect of the last game”, were the two most prominent issues leveled at Jill’s standalone outing. Both of these facts are true, it is a short game and it is pretty much a straight-shot beginning to end, but like, of course it is. RE2R was an remake faithful not in the directness of it’s adaptation (See the remake for the first Resi game), but instead faithful to the spirit of the original, twisting corridors, claustrophobic spaces, harsh item management and Leon being the world’s biggest dofuss were all brought back in a way that worked in 2020. RE3R did the same for a very different game. Action movie romp rather than a slow-burning, dread inducing horror homage. This makes sense when you remember that the original Resident Evil 3 was meant to be the tonal shift spinoff and Code Veronica the canonical follow up to 2. The characters have gone from struggling to survive in the last game to cheesy online spouting badasses and the game's story and setpieces (especially that final boss fight) all tag along too, in this move from horror shlock to gung-ho action. This results in a concise rollercoaster ride full of sights to see and zombies to shotgun apart, and I kinda love it.

7. The Last of Us Part II

Sound and fury.

I think the most telling thing about The Last of Us Part II is that after finishing writing about Resident Evil 3, looking down and seeing this was what was next on my list, I walked away from my computer and made myself a cup of tea. So here I am now, tea in hand, forcing myself to talk about this game… As if enough people on the internet haven’t done that yet. When you talk about TLOU2 you have to break it up into two chunks; the game itself and the trash fire on wheels surrounding everything else. To say everything surrounding this game was truly exhausting would be a discredit to sleep deprivation.What started with outrage over leaks and continues to this day with grossly bigoted YouTube videos that has made most of my associations with this game pretty negative. This is all without having mentioned the issues of labour, mishandled queerness and annoying studio heads that also come with conversation about this game. 

Moving on?

But with all that said; firstly, on a technical level The Last of Us Part II is a marvel (even if I don’t believe it was worth the human cost). The polish and quality runs the gambit here; from the game’s audio/visual elements being some of the most visceral and tender ever put to disc to its moment to moment game feel making it one of the best Triple-A stealth games since The Phantom Pain. Secondly, that acting is topnotch. But finally and most importantly I think the fact the game leaves a bad taste in my mouth means it succeeded at what it was trying to do. This is a truly grim, harsh, lonely world, where even when things get better at points or endings are ‘happy’ people carry the scars of the past forevermore. You’re not meant to come away from this game feeling good. All you do by playing the game is advance a tragedy, and even though some characters have glimmers of light in their lives now, they’ve been through some shit and so have you. I don’t think I have any intention of replaying this game ever but it will certainly stick with me as a powerful meditation on regret, grief and pain.

Yo, I heard you liked menus with cursors controlled with analogue sticks? So…

6. Apex Legends

This spot was always going to be a live game. They make up so much of the industry now that it is impossible to write about games and not form a connection with one. I enjoyed my time with Marvel’s Avengers more than most - with its story doing wonders to endear me enough to the characters kept me chipping away at its poor games-as-service parts. But if we’re being frank, that game is mechanically flawed in too many places, and they somehow made the Hulk the most boring character to play as. 

Destiny 2: Beyond Light was a strong contender - I have a long history with that game and I love it’s continued move towards just being the MMO it should have always been. But the thing that held D2 (and to a lesser extent Avengers) back was one key issue I have with almost all live-games at this point. I had no fucking idea what was going on anymore. I played about 50 hours of Destiny 2 at the beginning of this year and really enjoyed it, Shadowkeep released in October and kept me popping back in for a solid three months. However, by the time I got back to Destiny in November it may as well have been a different game, it felt like every menu had been changed and mechanic updated, not to mention the complete removal of three planets and overall of others.

What game didn’t I have this problem with? Apex Legends. A game which I also sunk a fair deal of time into at the beginning of the year only to drop off for almost a full two seasons worth of content. When I returned to Apex, this winter, it felt like coming home and slipping under my childhood bed, whereas Destiny felt like I’d arrived home and my parents had converted my bedroom into a sauna.

Apex does have the inherent advantage of being a battle-royale game, a genre so simple it can be encapsulated by an IMDb bio. But that being said, Respawn's surprise release from last year has done a great job of adding to itself without too much confusion for the playerbase. The hybrid map plan of adding both entirely new arenas and changing the previous maps seasonally means that things constantly feel new, but familiar and even if you’re not a huge fan of the new Horizon area if you wait 30 minutes all the games will rotate back to World’s Edge (pour one out for the currently vaulted King’s Canyon). 

Something that also cannot be understated is just how good Apex feels to play, the movement you’d expect from the studio that brought you Titanfall 2 has been there since launch but the new crafting mechanics, guns, characters and abilities all added since early 2019 layer themselves into the game seamlessly. Apex isn’t a great live-game because I can play it forever (even if some people almost exclusively play it), it is great because I don’t have to be worried when I take a break. It rewards you for playing it and never punishes you for taking a break.

Gang’s all here!

Amazing? Spectacular?
No.
Ultimate.

5. Marvel’s Spider-Man Mile Morales

Remember when this game was announced and there was a bunch of confusion as to if it was a full length game or DLC or something else? Well, firstly, Sony could have avoided a bunch of hassle by saying “it’s like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy”, and secondly, it really didn’t matter, did it? The worries that Miles Morales would be too short really feel trivial now, especially when you consider that the tightness of the finished package is probably Miles Morales’ greatest asset. 

The story here is economical and smart, it sets up strong relationships with affable characters and never tries to do too much with its short runtime, other than a few bombastic set-pieces. The side activities, littered throughout New York, have all been given enough personality and flavour that they never feel like the rinse and repeat, randomly generated monotony of Peter Parker’s solo adventure. The gameplay also feels more refined and focused than the last game, with its improved stealth and gadgets that synergise much better into general combat.

This game really does rule so hard.

The main star of Miles and what everything feeds back into is the characters. Nadji Jester is not just an incredible Spider-Man but also an endearing son, a funny friend and a kid clearly trying his best. While the Tinkerer (no voice actor here because that would spoil things) is a completely relatable foil, that leaves much more of an emotional impact than 99% of MCU incarnations of comic book baddies. But the thing that really brought the whole game together is the supporting cast; Jacqueline Pinol as Rio Morales, Griffin Puata as Ganke, Ike Amadi as Aaron Davis and Jasmin Savoy Brown as Phin all go a long way to making Miles’ struggle seem worthwhile and his home feel loving and worth fighting for. For a game set at Christmas I think the nicest thing I can say about Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is that it made me think about my relationships and how I communicate with those I love.

4. Necrobarista

We’ve all thought a lot about death this year. It’s been impossible not to. The world has felt like a cold, morbid place to live for the last ten months and it hasn’t helped we’ve all largely had to do it on our own, quarantined away from our friends and supports. I said that Kind Words helped me when things started to get bad, but after a few weeks I had to stop visiting my deer friend because there was so much COVID talk that it became all-consuming Even when people were trying to be supportive, it felt like everyone was just talking about how afraid they were of death and it really fucked me up for a bit. I went to a very dark place and couldn’t shake the despair that came with it.

This intro song fucking rips.

So it was incredibly helpful to be provided with a game that made death feel a little less cold, violent and harsh. Death in Necrobarista isn’t nice, or homely, but it is inevitable and that gives it a strange degree of certainty that was missing from our daily lives for a while. That certainty allows us to come to terms with life’s end and Necrobarista is a modern and sensitive expression of that. The characters are real and their fears valid but the world keeps turning and they learn to live with their pain and regret in a healthy way. And I really needed to see someone else do that this year. It really helped.

Care for a drink? It’s on the house.

3. Kentucky Route Zero

Now that 2020 has come and gone and its shittiness became a wide-reaching part of the zeitgeist to the point of feeling like an overused meme, it can be pretty easy to forget that the start of this year also sucked. 

I know that a large part of this was personal but the first month of 2020 was a truly rotten affair. I was incredibly withdrawn, as my feelings towards politics hit new levels of disenfranchised, there were no games coming out and I spent my Valentine's Day (a Friday) sitting in a cinema alone at 10 a.m. watching the Sonic Movie - actually that last one makes me laugh but you get the point. Things were pretty grim. I distinctly remember standing on a freezing cold bus one day, during my hour-and-a-half to two-hour commute home from a pre-college course that I was not feeling confident about, where for some reason I decided to listen to a political podcast. When I got home, I went straight to my room and forced myself asleep. Over the next day and a half I barely got out of bed and binged the first season of The Boys. By the season finale my last of faith in humanity was pretty well drained. 

However, at the end of January, something surprising happened. Four years after the release of Act IV of Kentucky Route Zero Cardboard Computer dropped the final Act along with the console version of the game. KRZ is a game that has been bounding around this space since 2011, when it reached its mind-bogglingly small - for a modern indie game - Kickstarter goal of $6,500 (raising a total of $8,583). After two acts in 2013, the astounding third act in 2014 and the heartbreaking fourth in 2016, Cardboard Computer went pretty much radio silent, each act has had a short free interlude that could be downloaded online and they set up a free-to-call helpline for those wondering if the finished game had a release date yet (it hadn’t). 

That almost decade long journey made the final release of the game hit like a truck for many that had been following its storied and mysterious development. I, however, was in a different boat. I’d played Acts I-IV of this surrealist journey the previous December and was left more than a bit shaken by the fourth act’s message of lifelong debt, regret and failed dreams. It was one of my Games of The Year last year because it left such a mark on me. It left me wallowing in my past mistakes, reaffirming that the past never forgets.

But then Act V released. I don’t want to spoil anything too major here, but there is a quiet optimism to the final two-or-so hours you spend in that world, a world which loses much of its ethereal edge as it concludes. After finishing Kentucky Route Zero’s first four parts I can only describe my mood as melancholic but when credits finally rolled on this modern masterpiece I felt something different. I was still definitely sad, even to the point of mild despair, but it didn’t feel like it was for nothing. KRZ is a great reminder that even decade-long voyages into darkness come out somewhere a little bit brighter. Going into the rest of the year that was 2020 I don’t think I could be more thankful for a message to have on my mind.

Huh, sun’s out again.

The message of accepting you pain in the finale palace kind of broke me.

2. Persona 5 Royal

I think the best thing a friend can do is make us try to be better. I contemplate that a lot when I play Persona 5, it has this strong sense of morals and justice and plenty of opinions on society but then it fumbles things. It’s like that friend that is trying, really trying to understand you and the world but still has some deep-rooted biases and prejudices. 

A character that learns the importance of rebellion in the name of equality only to become resolute in joining the police force (IN JAPAN). Encouraging the formation of healthy relationships with a wide range of peers and strangers only to sexualise younger cast members. Some really shitty stereotypes for marginalised people. These are but a few of the issues core to Persona 5. The Royal edition seeks to remedy some of these mistakes but more often than not fails to quite get it right… again.

All out.

Persona 5 Royal really is the embodiment of “a problematic fav”. But it earns its place as a “fav” because of how hard it tries. P5R wants to preach rebellion to a conservative society but it just hasn’t been given the vocabulary over the years to really verbalise what it is trying to say. But it still tries. And you see that in every character. Every confidant and party member is trying to be better. In a year when contact with real friends was limited, there was something powerful in seeing these people try to raise each other up and better themselves. They didn’t always succeed but I sure as shit didn’t either, so can I really hold it against them?

(Also Persona 5 Royal might be the most stylish game of the decade and its soundtrack is bangin’)

1. Hades

THERE IS NO ESCAPE.
But that might not be the worst thing?

I’m not going to labour the point here too much. Because I think everyone that has played Hades either believes it to be the best game released this year or could understand why someone would say it is. Early access was a risk for Supergiant but you’d be a fool to doubt their ability to excel at this new release format. 

Hades feels much like a fine blade honed to perfection and sharp to the touch from almost two years of development in concert with a caring community. The game crackles with life and personality and the gameplay might be some of the best feelings you’ll ever find in a game with a camera so far away from the character. The music does exactly what it needs to at every moment, pounding away during fights and making you just a little misty-eyed when it needs to. And again, like Persona, there was something deeply moving about building bonds with these people (and deities) and seeing Zagreus grow, like literally no roguelite protagonist has done before. Hades nails everything it does so well it feels unfair to pit it against other games but I had to, and honestly, it was never really a contest.

Honourable Mention: If Found...

“Honourable Mention” tends to be death by faint praise for those labelled with it. But that’s not the case here. I don’t think Dreamfeel’s If Found… was the best game of the year or even my favourite game of the year but it has lodged itself so firmly in my brain I think about it almost daily. And right now I believe that’s for the best, if I just think on it a bit more, and then hopefully, someday I’ll find the words to describe what it means to me.