Ok I’ll keep the introduction for this one brief because this list is long enough already. So, I’ve been working on this list for the past couple of months in between university work and I’m quite proud of how it has turned out. Keep in mind though that it is long, like 25000 words long so feel free to skip over the games you’re not interested in. Only games I’ve beaten will qualify for this list, I’ll briefly mention all the games I played but haven’t beaten yet though, if it’s something you can’t beat then I’ll only put it on this list if I have played enough of it. Also, DLC and any major updates will be on this list because if we’re being honest, some updates are essentially just free, mandatory DLC. Ok, before I start let’s get the games I wish I got to play out of the way.
2020 Games I Wish I Got to Play
DOOM Eternal – I own it, want to play it, just haven’t had the time.
Maneater – Looks like it could be fun, I’m always up for ideas that have been thoroughly explored in film being transformed into a game.
Hylics 2 – This looks super interesting, need to play the original Hylics first though. I love the art style and surrealism is my favourite thing ever so of course I want to play this at some point.
Spelunky 2 – Same with Hylics 2, need to play the original Spelunky first.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 – This is one of those which I would have zero interest in if it wasn’t such a technical achievement.
Resident Evil 3 – Really want to get into the Resident Evil series more than I currently have, I just need to get over my crippling fear of horror games.
Spiritfarer – This looks great, I will definitely pick it up at some point in the near future.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon – Yakuza is such a cool franchise, I need to put aside the time to really get into it at some point.
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension – Yeah, the first game is about as generic as you can get in the weird games about games genre but I like that genre, and the original was made in a game jam so it’ll be interesting to see what Pascal Cammisotto can do with some time to truly craft something interesting. I’ll play There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension at some point.
Demon’s Souls – I own a PS5, I kind of want to play an actual PS5 exclusive that isn’t Astro’s Playroom although I don’t have much interest in Souls games so I guess we’ll see.
Super Meat Boy Forever – I’ll get it on discount at some point.
2020 Video Games I Haven’t Beaten Yet So Aren’t Eligible for The Ranking
Watch Dogs: Legion – I’ve played around five hours and holy shit is this bad. It has an amazing idea that they just do nothing with, what’s the point of playing as anyone when everybody essentially feels the same and you can get away with playing as a singular person. Currently on track for a 3 / 10.
Assassins Creed Valhala – I’ve played around three hours and yep, it’s Assassins Creed, I don’t know what I expected. Currently on track for a 6 / 10.
Cyberpunk 2077 – I’ve played around five hours on my PS5 and wow what a disappointment. The bugs aren’t too prevalent on the PS5 but the game still feels unfinished, the graphics look like a late PS3 game, and even if you’re ignoring the technical aspects of the game it has a ton of problems. You can’t go anywhere without people calling you in and giving you missions that you aren’t a high enough level to reasonably do well at, the story is super generic, the pacing is bad, if it wasn’t for the interesting world, I wouldn’t have even played for five hours, it’s currently on track for a 5 / 10.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 – I’ve played around five hours and this really isn’t the kind of game I’d usually play. I don’t skateboard but have always been mildly fascinated by it so I decided to give this a go and holy shit is it good. The idea of throwing you into playgrounds and just giving you two minutes to get a high score and achieve a bunch of goals on your skateboard is just a lot of fun, can’t wait to play more of this when I have more time on my hands. Currently on track for an 8 / 10.
Paper Mario: The Origami King – I’ve played around ten hours and this game is so boring, the battle system is tedious, it hasn’t got the wit or charm that everybody keeps claiming it has, I keep trying to beat this one but whenever I put it on I just want to fall asleep. Currently on track for a 3 / 10.
Half Life: Alyx – Just got this one recently and don’t want to rush through it for the sake of this list, I might do a full review of it at a later point though as I have a lot to say, currently on track for a 9 / 10.
Ok let’s start this list proper shall we, also a quick warning the first two games on the list are really weird, I swear I do talk about normal games afterwards.
2020 Video Games Ranked
44. Breakout Poetry
Developer – Johan_Holm
Director – Johan_Holm
Available On – itch.io
https://johan-holm.itch.io/breakout-poetry
I don’t like to pick on games like this. Games that have very little recognition as it is, games created by a single person, games clearly made from a place of passion.
I played this game because I got it as part of a bundle, the game is free anyway so I’m not sure why it was in a bundle but oh well, the bundle was for charity and this games inclusion wasn’t why I brought it so no harm done. The concept seemed cool, I like poetry and Breakout, how would the developer mesh them together, well they don’t that’s what makes the game fell pointless. What you’re meant to do isn’t communicated at all, a number of blocks each have words from a poem and you are meant to destroy them, I think to make your own poem but that’s near impossible because how poorly it controls and even the best controlling Breakout doesn’t allow for you to be that precise. The lack of precision isn’t a problem in real Breakout because it never asks you to hit blocks in a specific order just to eventually hit them all because not being 100% precise is part of the game. So, what happens is you just play a bad feeling version of Breakout which is worthless because you can play actual decent versions of Breakout for free online as well. You’re not even judged on the poem you end up creating so what’s the point of the whole poetry aspect, you can’t make a poem and even if you could you’re not rewarded for doing so.
If you are reading Johan don’t take this as an attack on you or anything, I know how difficult games are to develop and you’ve managed to release one to the world, that’s not something a lot of people can say, keep making and releasing games, you clearly have creative ideas which is something the industry needs, I wish you the best and hope to see some more of your work in the future.
1 / 10
43. Mung Daal Sacrifices His Life For His Country
Developer – ThrillDaWill
Director – ThrillDaWill
Available On – itch.io
https://thrilldawill.itch.io/mung-daal-vietnam-the-game
I swear some games that people have actually heard of are coming up. ThrillDaWill is a video game designer who I have a lot of respect for, he’s known for transforming memes into video games and I think that’s hilarious. Why do I respect what are essentially shitposts though? Well for one we don’t have enough comedy games so that’s always a plus (we have games with comedy elements but games that are made primarily to make you laugh are rare). Two, games are so difficult to make so creating a video game shitpost is commitment, most people get bored of a shitpost after a couple of seconds, imagine keeping the passion for some shitty joke throughout the development of a video game. Thirdly, it’s showing people that games can be about anything. Finally, it might encourage some more people to get into game development, a lot of people don’t realise that short five-minute experiences are something they can make, video games can be any length and games like this might encourage people to make their own five-minute experiences. Create whatever the fuck you want, whether it’s a shitpost about Mung Daal from Chowder fighting in Vietnam or some of the more artsy games that are going to appear down the line. These are the games I want to develop so it’s just cool seeing them.
The whole game is based on that whole Mung Daal Vietnam flashback meme, am I the only one that’s glad that Chowder is getting some recognition as the internet’s next franchise to make jokes about.
It does what it’s trying to do although if you start analysing it like you would any other game it does fall apart, the third-person shooting mechanics are conflicted, the lack of cover and the long empty environments implies that it wants you to go in running and gunning but the fact that you can’t recover health, it’s really difficult to tell where enemies are shooting from, the fact that you go back to the beginning after death, and the fact that the gun isn’t even that accurate without you stopping to shoot stops you from doing this effectively. Ok, so even though the game clearly seems to be designed for running and gunning you’ve just got to take things slow? Nah, you’ll die even faster that way, to be honest your survival seems mostly up to luck. But analysing a game like this is fucking stupid, it was clearly thrown together as a joke and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Yeah, I’m not going to give it a high score, technically it’s dreadful and it’s not like I’m rushing to play it again, but I do have a lot of admiration for it and yes the more popular ThrillDaWill game is coming up.
2 / 10
42. Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory
Developer – Square Enix
Director – Tetsuya Nomura, Masanobu Suzui
Available On – PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One
I have a love / hate relationship with the Kingdom Hearts series. The story is abysmal but has its charm because it is told to us with so much sincerity, Tetsuya Nomura genuinely thinks he’s telling this ground-breaking story whilst in reality he’s telling a story about Donald Duck, Goofy, and one of the most pathetic people alive going to Disney worlds. It’s so rare to see such stupid stories be told without an ounce of self-awareness but because of that it does have its endearing qualities. It’s like if your child handed you their god-awful painting believing that what they created was a masterpiece, yeah it’s dreadful but the way it was delivered to you with so much confidence stops you from being able to dislike it.
The franchise is also one of the most unfriendly series for people to get into, I’ve beaten seven games in the franchise and watched movies and explanations for the others and I still don’t always know exactly what’s going on, the story is so fucking complicated because some people mistake a complicated plot with a good plot apparently. Whilst there are only three numbered titles it doesn’t mean there is only three games you need to play, we have the original Kingdom Hearts which is followed by Chain of Memories (which has a remake called Re:Chain of Memories which is the one you should play) which is a plot important retelling of the first game (yeah if you want to get into the franchise the second you stop playing the first game you’re going to have to play a game that just retells that games plot, have fun), then we have Kingdom Hearts II, this is where it gets complicated, we have a bunch of prequels, 358/2 Days, Birth By Sleep (the best one), oh we also have three plot important mobile prequels (one of which you can’t play anymore but is essentially retold in another), we have Kingdom Hearts χ, Kingdom Hearts: Unchained χ (this also covers the events of Kingdom Hearts χ), and Kingdom Hearts Dark Road. That’s not it, we have some games in-between II and III, Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance, Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, Kingdom Hearts Re:coded which is a remake of the mobile game Kingdom Hearts Coded (oh and these are also remakes of the original Kingdom Hearts). Then we have a movie titled Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover. Ok, finally we are onto Kingdom Hearts III which has the Re Mind DLC which is plot significant and now we’re finally onto Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, a rhythm game which yep is plot significant.
Out of the Kingdom Hearts games I’ve beaten (Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance, Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, Kingdom Hearts III, and this one), Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is the worst one and that’s coming from somebody who likes rhythm games. I love the music of Kingdom Hearts but a lot of it just doesn’t work in a rhythm game, I’d say only about one out of ten songs in this game works as something you can bop along to as you time your hits to the beat, yeah there is a lot of music and if you’re a fan of the franchise there will be some songs you like to bop to (my personal favourites are Simple and Clean, Roxas, Monochrome Dreams, Aqua, and Graveyard Labyrinth). The thing is, it didn’t have to be like this, remember this is a Disney / Final Fantasy crossover, give us only the Kingdom Hearts tracks that are good for a rhythm game and fill the rest of the song list with Final Fantasy tracks that fit and Disney songs. As far as I know there are only four Disney songs in this game and only one of them is part of the story and that’s the best part of the game because surprise surprise a song designed to bop along to is better in a rhythm game than atmospheric music that is very good but hasn’t exactly got me tapping my feet to the beat.
Ok, let’s talk other problems. So, you need to earn a certain amount of stars to progress in the game and you’re given three difficulty options and three starts in each song, cool so that should mean you get one star for beating it on easy, two for normal, and three for hard, right? WRONG!!! There are three missions you have to accomplish in each song to unlock stars, these are mostly just play well but it discourages you from picking the harder options, yeah, I know harder difficulty options are harder to beat but when you’re given the option before every song you expect to be rewarded for playing on harder difficulties, instead you’ll just do worst and get less stars. The thing is, hard difficulty is the most enjoyable difficulty because in other difficulties you don’t even have to play all of the song so you spend a lot of time not doing anything. So, we have a game that is only fun on hard mode which discourages you from playing on hard mode, if the game was really good, I might have wanted to practice more and be able to get those stars on hard mode but it is the kind of game which you rush through because at its best it’s just alright and it rarely gets to its best, most of the game is a boring slog.
Also, the story stuff is so minimal it’s like Kingdom Hearts: Coded, it’s plot essential but just only plot essential, they give us just enough story to make you have to play the game to understand what’s happening in the next Kingdom Hearts game (honestly just watch the story stuff on YouTube if you’re interested).
3 / 10
41. Mr Krabs Overdoses on Ketamine
Developer – ThrillDaWill
Director – ThrillDaWill
Available On – itch.io
https://thrilldawill.itch.io/mr-krabs-overdoses-on-ketamine
The second game by ThrillDaWill on the list and his most well-known game. Also, yeah, I think this is a better game than Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, at least this game accomplishes what it’s trying and I’ve definitely gotten more fun from this than Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory ever gave me.
Mung Daal Sacrifices His Life For His Country walked so Mr. Krabs Overdoses on Ketamine could run, whilst the clunky nature of Mung Daal Sacrifices His Life For His Country holds it back from actually being enjoyable to play, the clunky nature of Mr. Krabs Overdoses on Ketamine actually makes it better, seeing Mr. Krabs fling across the sky for no real reason is funny, the fact that it’s really easy to beat the game in under 25 seconds because of how exploitable the bugs are makes the game a lot of fun to speed run. Yeah, the game might randomly kill you unjustifiably but whilst Mung Daal Sacrifices His Life For His Country was a slog to get back to where you were before you died, Mr. Krabs doesn’t really have that problem because you can get back to the same point really quickly.
This game has so much effort put into it for what is essentially a shitpost. Like there is driving, combat, different camera angles in cutscenes, the game has a ledge grab and ledge pull up animation, it’s nothing special but who puts this much effort into a joke game? In fact, who puts joke games on their official 2020 video game ranking?
The game is actually really funny, the Patrick side-quest is hilarious, and the concept of Mr Krabs doing a fuck-ton of ketamine before rampaging through Bikini Bottom is just really funny. ThrillDaWill didn’t just recreate the Mr. Krabs overdoses on ketamine meme, he expanded upon it which stops this from feeling like a one trick pony, with the Mung Daal game once you’ve got over how funny it is to watch Mung Daal run through Vietnam it just becomes a shitty third-person shooter, I actually quote this game occasionally because it’s actually funny.
Yeah, just like Mung Daal Sacrifices His Life For His Country once you start to look at it through the lens of a serious game it doesn’t hold up well, the controls are awful, and sometimes missions just don’t load, but the game is a lot of fun, yeah I’ll rate it like a real game as I’m doing everything else on this list, I’m not going to give something a pass just because Mr. Krabs taking a man’s life is hilarious but I would recommend playing it, it’s linked above. Also, one last note, the trailer for the game is also really funny.
3 / 10
40. SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated
Developer – Purple Lamp Studios
Director – Daniel Bernard
Available On – PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Google Stadia
Remember that time when Jonathon Dornbush wrote an honest review for this mediocre game but everybody got mad at him because he hurt their feelings by saying that the game they liked as a child maybe doesn’t hold up? I don’t get why people can’t grasp the idea that they were dumb as kids so of course they weren’t going to have any standards when it came to the media they consumed. You can put anything with enough flashy colours in front of a kid and 20 years later they’ll be telling people to kill themself because they didn’t give it a great review.
People do realise that you can still enjoy the media you consumed as a child even if you recognise that it’s trash, right? I used to watch Yu-Gi-Oh! all the time as a kid and have a lot of nostalgia for the franchise but I can admit that the anime is actually dreadful, I used to play a lot of licensed games, I can guarantee they don’t hold up and I’m not going to yell at somebody because they gave Madagascar the video game a 5 / 10. As a kid I loved The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie game, SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab, and SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman but I’m not going to demand a remake and scream at anybody who doesn’t like those games because whilst I have a lot of fond memories of them, they’re all kind of trash games, I’ve replayed them recently, they don’t hold up. Just because you liked something as a kid it doesn’t mean that the product is actually good, also realising that what you once liked as a kid is bad doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. Also let’s say you replay it and you still think it holds up, cool, no need to tell people to kill themselves because they don’t like it.
People circle jerking about how great video games used to be has cost me too much money by listening to them, people climaxing at the idea of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated made me buy the fucking game until I realised, they were just nostalgia circlejerking as the internet is known to do. This is a below average 3D platformer, nothing more, nothing less, you can still enjoy it, just don’t be surprised when most newcomers don’t enjoy it that much.
I guess I better talk about why the game isn’t great. Early SpongeBob has some amazing writing, for something to feel like SpongeBob it really needs to nail the characters and general writing, this of course fails at this, the jokes aren’t funny, and the characters don’t feel like themselves, what this creates is a world which seems to be wearing the skin of SpongeBob but really isn’t SpongeBob, SpongeBob has personality and is fun, this is just boring. The platforming moveset is generic, the inclusion of a double jump makes most of the platforming trivial. The environments are messy, some objects just exist as decoration but don’t actually have any collision, it’s not clear what’s a platform and what’s just set decoration with no collision. I should never die in a game because the people developing a platformer can’t communicate what’s meant to be a platform. It’s not even enjoyable exploring these iconic locations from the show because they don’t really feel like the locations, Jellyfish Fields feels like your generic plains’ world, Goo Lagoon feels like any other beach level etc, it couldn’t even give me the satisfaction of allowing me to feel like I was exploring Bikini Bottom.
There are things that are alright with the game, it’s fun enough playing as Sandy even if you rarely get to play as her, she is the only character with a somewhat fun moveset mixing grappling and hovering. The slide levels are great which is something I never thought I’d be saying about a platformer.
It’s funny how I’d honestly rather play Mr. Krabs Overdoses on Ketamine, yeah this is a better game in almost every way but at least I was having fun with that shitpost game.
4 / 10
39. Hold the Phone
Developer – Yahtzee Croshaw
Director – Yahtzee Croshaw
Available On – itch.io
https://yzcroshaw.itch.io/hold-the-phone
So, I beat all of Yahtzee Croshaw’s games that he made as part of his Dev Diary series so expect to see his other 2020 releases on this list as well. The fact that these are higher than any of the triple A games is both a credit to Yahtzee’s development skills and an indicator of how shit a lot of triple A games can be, if your game that took years to develop is worse than a game made in a month maybe you should try a bit harder (I’m not talking about the developers who just do what they are told so they can feed their families, whenever I complain about those involved in triple A games know it’s always the higher-ups that I’m complaining about, the ones who call the shots).
I like it when a game picks a random idea and tries to gamify it, when all of the design goes towards trying to give off one specific feeling. Yeah it might not always lead to good games but if done right the game should at least be interesting. That’s the category that Hold the Phone falls into, the game simulates the annoyance of being on the phone with a company, answering all of their random questions, the stress of searching through documents to find a random code that they’ve asked for, making sure your phone is charged for this really important phone call. This very specific yet very real situation that we’ve all had to go through is simulated well here, the problem is the game doesn’t have much to offer beyond a simple simulation of a task. The game isn’t fun and is purposefully designed to be frustrating, if a game is going to be purposefully frustrating then it needs to be doing it for a reason better than to just emulate a real-life stress. I like it when games go beyond just trying to be fun, I like it when games actually make you feel stuff beyond “wow I’m having a jolly old time” but negative emotions like boredom and frustration need to exist for a reason other than to just simulate a real-life experience. Yeah, I’ve waited in long lines in real life but I wouldn’t want to play a game about it. I can’t get too mad at the game though; it has a great art style and I always appreciate it when a developer tries something different.
5 / 10
38. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Bunny Day Event
Don’t worry this ranking is only for the update, Animal Crossing: New Horizons as a whole is much higher on my list.
The first major update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the only one I stuck around long enough to see. A lot of people hated this update way more than I did, I enjoyed getting all of the Easter furniture but a lot of people new to the game were finding it hard to find the resources needed to progress because this update kept just giving them Easter Eggs. I can see why people like that would be annoying but for me personally it was enjoyable enough but nothing special.
5 / 10
37. SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE
Developer – Superhot Team
Director – Piotr Iwanicki
Available On – PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux
SUPERHOT has one amazing idea but always manages to mess it up in some way. The original had some dumb ass story that got in the way of the cool action and the words SUPERHOT plastered onto your screen so you couldn’t watch your cool replay. SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE mostly gets rid of the stupid story and even removes the words SUPERHOT from the centre of your screen when you’re watching your cool replays, but once again it manages to mess it up by giving you the same levels to play over and over again. The appeal of SUPERHOT is feeling like a badass action hero, but once you’ve seen something badass you don’t want to see the exact same thing again ten minutes later. The inclusion of lives is stupid, it encourages you to be careful, SUPERHOT is about running into a room, unloading bullets into somebody before throwing that gun at another guy knocking his sword out his hand which you grab and throw at somebody else before grabbing whatever is around you to use as makeshift weapons to defeat the survivors, it is not about hiding in a room with a gun carefully taking out enemies because you’re afraid to lose a life.
If we could mix the lack of a story and the lack of SUPERHOT being plastered on your screen from MIND CONTROL DELETE and the lack of repeating levels from the original SUPERHOT we might have ourselves a perfect SUPERHOT game.
5 / 10
36. Super Mario Bros. 35
Developer – Arika
Director – N/A
Available On – Nintendo Switch
Err don’t you hate it when your opinion changes on a game once you play it more so you have to write about it again on your video games of 2020 list even though you’ve already done an article on it. Below is my original article on Super Mario Bros. 35 just know that my opinion has changed.
Originally, I gave Super Mario Bros. 35 a 7 / 10, yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking, this is nothing special, it’s a 5 / 10. I’ll keep this brief but this game quickly divulges into getting a fire flower and just endlessly running through the first few Super Mario Bros. levels endlessly spamming the fire flower, it’s not fun. I think the reason I liked it so much initially was because I was pretty good at it, when you’re regularly coming out on top when against 34 other people, you’re gonna feel some sort of joy but just because I was good at something doesn’t mean I should have blindly recommended it to everyone, I apologise for that. At the end of the day Super Mario Bros. 35 is a fun enough excuse to play through some Super Mario Bros. levels but certain design choices such as the fact that it rarely goes to later levels and the fact that once you get a fire flower it’s really hard to die stop it from being anything actually good. It’s enjoyable enough for a couple of hours, nothing more, nothing less, it’s a shame that they’re shutting it down in a couple of months’ time though.
5 / 10
35. Bunker Bustin’
Developer – Yahtzee Croshaw
Director – Yahtzee Croshaw
Available On – itch.io
https://yzcroshaw.itch.io/bunker-bustin
Bunker Bustin’ is a game where you play as an evil dictator who must kill himself and the others who have participated in your many crimes before the rebels break in.
Bunker Bustin’ feels like one of those random mobile games you pick up because it’s free and got a good enough score just before you go onto a long flight. A game with a simple and fun gameplay loop that you wouldn’t play if you had anything else to do but does a great job at passing the time. Unfortunately, it’s not on mobile and instead is on PC where half of my video game library is also found and the other half is a simple turning on a console away. It leads to an experience which you know is solid and you could probably play for hours if it was between that and some generic action movie playing in 480p on a tiny plane monitor. It’s fun, it’s just the most standard level of fun imaginable, the most basic 6 / 10, something could be, think a couple of notches below Angry Birds, that’s the level Bunker Bustin’ is at.
6 / 10
34. The Magic Poo Machine
Developer – Yahtzee Croshaw
Director – Yahtzee Croshaw
Available On – itch.io
https://yzcroshaw.itch.io/the-magic-poo-machine
The Magic Poo Machine is another one of Yahtzee’s games and is the one I have the least to say about. It’s a game where you turn dog shit into various goods. I just really like games where you build machines where even a small miscalculation can lead to a huge failure, it’s why Human Resource Machine is one of my favourite puzzle games, and why I’ve spent hundreds of hours just building machines in modded Minecraft. The Magic Poo Machine has this appeal to it, it doesn’t do much bad and is overall a pretty good experience I’d recommend it, as with the other free games on this list it’s linked above.
6 / 10
33. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
Developer – Mediatonic
Director – Jamie Riding
Available On – Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Android, iOS
Fall Guys is a game where you compete with others to win in a fictional game show. I wasted my money on this game, I brought it when everybody was talking about it fully expecting my friends to join in on the trend. It’s a game that seemed to be most enjoyable with others, a wacky character stumbling around isn’t funny alone unless you’re four years old but with friends it’s hilarious, everything is funnier with friends. But me being the loser I am spent £20 on a game I played for about five hours and haven’t touched since because Among Us came out soon after and everybody jumped on that trend other than me who was still annoyed at my wasted £20.
Fall Guys seems like a perfect game for large groups of people to play. It’s simple enough that basically anybody could play it but isn’t mindless enough that people get bored of it quickly (unless a slightly better game comes along and is much cheaper anyway). I just think it should have been free, it’s a game full of microtransactions which are purely cosmetic yes but I kind of expect to get some cool outfits with a £20 purchase but nah you have to grind for them or pay real money. The game probably would have made more money overall if it was free, once people discovered Among Us which is super cheap on PC and free on mobile everybody moved on over to that because more of their friends were willing to play it due to its cheapness. Because of the large price and a lack of content Fall Guys failed to become one of those popular games that nobody shut up about, it got close, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about Fall Guys in months. Finally, why is it called Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, just call it Fall Guys, that’s an actual good name.
6 / 10
32. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Byleth
Developer – Bandai Namco Studios, Sora Ltd.
Director – Masahiro Sakurai
Available On – Nintendo Switch
I’ve never played Fire Emblem: Three Houses, in fact the only Fire Emblem game I played was Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade and I can’t remember much of that other than it being pretty good. So yeah, I don’t know if Byleth in Smash is an accurate representation, to me it’s just a cute anime boy and girl who are fun to play as. Yeah, Byleth is fun to play as, was Byleth literally the last character I wanted in Smash? Yes, we have so many Fire Emblem characters and I don’t have any attachment to the franchise. Did I attack Sakurai for it? No, because I’m not a twat. I had the Fighter Pass Vol. 1 anyway so I logged in the day Byleth was available, played as them, enjoyed myself, beat their classic mode, stopped playing and occasionally when I pick up Smash Bros. again, I play as them. I can’t really say much about them, they’re fun but don’t do much for me.
6 / 10
31. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX
Developer – Spike Chunsoft
Director – Shinichiro Tomie, Hironori Ishigami
Available On – Nintendo Switch
As a child I loved the original Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team. It did something forbidden when making a Pokémon game, it had a good story. Yeah, the gameplay was kind of mediocre but to young me that didn’t matter, and it’s not like regular Pokémon gameplay is anything special. To young Cameron all that mattered was I got to be my favourite Pokémon and live in a community with other Pokémon. So yeah, I have a lot of nostalgia for the game this is a remake of, I spent more time playing Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team than almost any other Pokémon game and you don’t see me crying because IGN gave it a 6 / 10 because I can understand that young me was an idiot, I can’t trust his opinion on anything so why should I assume that just because I loved a game as a kid it was any good. So yeah, if you want my opinions on the original playing Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team it has a great story, but mediocre gameplay, I think it’s better than most main series Pokémon games but I’d still only give it a 6 / 10. Cool, let’s talk about this remake.
Ok, now I’m not one to hate a remake because of changes, a lot of times I think remakes could actually change more, that’s what I think a remake should be, a game that looks at the originals flaws and seeks to use this knowledge to make a better version of the original game, not just make a better-looking version of the original with all its flaws intact. With that in mind let’s quickly go over the remake’s pros, don’t worry it’s quick. I like it that you can mega evolve now, I wish it was implemented earlier in the game but it’s nice that it’s there. I like it that you can pick the Pokémon you play as, I spent so long in the original resetting my game so I could play as a Pokémon I actually liked. Yeah, that’s about it, now onto why this is a bad remake. The art style isn’t great, it did grow on me slightly but the characters just clashed with the environments. The lack of friend areas was fucking annoying, chilling in the friend areas was one of my favourite things to do in the original but they removed them for some reason. Isn’t a remake meant to add content or at least keep the same amount of content. The game’s biggest problem is that your most powerful attack for your current situation is done automatically at the press of a button, it removes most of the challenge from the game, the only fun in the original games combat was the little bit of strategy that choosing your move offered, without that the game just becomes moving forward and clicking a button when you see enemies. I know you don’t have to do that but a player is their own worst enemy, I know it’s not the best way to play but if you give me a button that optimises my attacks, of course I’m going to use it. If you gave the player two weapons in a game, one is more fun to use but weaker and the other does so much more damage most people will pick the more powerful weapon even if it’s less fun.
This is just a worst version of the original and the original wasn’t a masterpiece to begin with, I enjoyed playing this enough but if I ever want to revisit this story, I’ll replay the original.
6 / 10
30. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Min Min
![Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Min Min Reveal [SMASH ULTIMATE DLC PACK 2] - YouTube](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/66cfHrI83MU/maxresdefault.jpg)
Developer – Bandai Namco Studios, Sora Ltd.
Director – Masahiro Sakurai
Available On – Nintendo Switch
I couldn’t care less about Arms; it looks like something I’d find fun for about two hours and then never play again so of course I was disappointed when Min Min was announced. Arms wasn’t even relevant when Smash Ultimate first came out so it seemed weird to add an Arms rep more than a year after that but Min Min is fun to play as. Yeah, I’d prefer characters that have some relevance to gaming history, are relevant at the time of being added to Smash, or are at least popular (nobody brought Arms), but Min Min’s huge reach makes her a lot of fun to play as, yeah not much to say, same with Byleth I played as her for a bit, beat her classic mode and now whenever I come back to Smash, I occasionally play as her.
6 / 10
29. Something’s In The Sea
Developer – Yahtzee Croshaw
Director – Yahtzee Croshaw
Available On – itch.io
https://yzcroshaw.itch.io/somethings-in-the-sea
The idea of a monster dragging me down to the bottom of the ocean is actually terrifying, I can’t think of much ways I’d like to die less than by drowning and Something’s In The Sea manages to capture this fear really well. The horrifying heartbeat sound that plays as you’re being starved of oxygen, the camera getting closer to your character as they struggle for survival, the blood that slowly covers your screen and then the relief of the screen zooming out followed by silence when you reach the surface. This game nails atmosphere. The mechanics themself aren’t the strongest, things often feel up to luck due to the fact that the monster is so much faster than you. The fact that it’s beneficial to be grabbed by the monster so you can get deeper quicker kind of stops the monster from being as terrifying, when you start to outsmart the monster by using him for your own gain, he just stops being that scary. There really isn’t much to say about this game, it nails atmosphere and is my favourite of Yahtzee’s Dev Diary games from 2020, my favourite overall being The Life of Erich Zann from 2019 which I’d give a 7 / 10.
6 / 10
28. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Sephiroth
Developer – Bandai Namco Studios, Sora Ltd.
Director – Masahiro Sakurai
Available On – Nintendo Switch
Someone will always get mad at a Smash character reveal, Smash brings in people from all age brackets so when a character like Banjo is announced it pleases all the millennials, but some younger people get outraged that someone who hasn’t appeared in a game for 12 years and hasn’t appeared in a universally loved one for over 20 is getting some attention. When Steve was announced my generation loved it but more older people got annoyed that he just wasn’t doing anything for them. So, when Sephiroth was announced I was fully expecting to see the Fortnite loving youths screaming about how dumb of an inclusion he was, but for once I didn’t see much complaining. Maybe Steve had quelled the anger of the younger players who usually complain, maybe Final Fantasy VII Remake (which will appear later on in the list) made Sephiroth relevant to children and therefore made him a character that everybody could be happy with, who knows, all I know is in my experience I didn’t see anybody yelling about Sephiroth which was nice.
Sephiroth was a character nobody asked for but in hindsight he seems like an obvious inclusion, we needed more villains in the roster, some more Final Fantasy representation would have been nice, and Sephiroth is just such an iconic character. He could have a unique playstyle and we all needed some more Final Fantasy music in Smash (in my opinion the Final Fantasy series has the best video game soundtracks of all time, One-Winged Angel alone is better than most entire video game soundtracks). Also, we got to see Mario get fucking merked so that was nice I guess.
So yeah, I’m glad that Sephiroth is in the game, now there are only a few more villains we need, Doctor Eggman would be nice.
6 / 10
27. Bugsnax
Developer – Young Horses
Director – Kevin Zuhn
Available On – PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows, macOS
I initially wasn’t interested in Bugsnax, it looked like that Cyanide and Happiness short, Ted Bear and that was about the only thought I had on it, that and that the game looked like one of those “omg so random” games that pop up every once in a while. You know the kind of games I’m talking about, the games that are designed just for YouTubers like PewDiePie, Markiplier, and Jacksepticeye to play whilst occasionally saying things like “They’re bugs and also snacks, what’ll they think of next?” and occasionally screaming for no reason. But wait it got good reviews, games like that never get good reviews. Ok that’s promising but I have so many games in my backlog so good reviews aren’t enough to make me drop whatever I’m doing to play a game, what did though was my PlayStation 5. Like many console launches there is so few games on the PlayStation 5 that most of my time on it has been playing through old PlayStation 4 games. Most consoles at least launch with one killer app, the closest the PlayStation 5 has is Demon Souls which is a remake of a PlayStation 3 game which in my opinion won’t cut it as a great launch game (and I didn’t even get that because I haven’t got into Souls games yet), the launch of the PlayStation 5 was fucking pathetic. So here I was with no games to play on my brand-new console and then I got a notification saying that PlayStation Plus was giving away Bugsnax to PlayStation 5 users, yeah why not. It wasn’t the killer app I was looking for but it was something to play on my PlayStation 5, the other PlayStation 5 games I played are coming up but for now let’s talk Bugsnax.
Bugsnax is a first-person exploration, puzzle, partly horror for a bit of it, partly collect ’em all type game, part photography amalgamation of a game. It’s so hard to describe this games genre and somehow even harder to give a plot summary. Bugsnax involves creatures called Grumpuses going to Snaktooth Island to be with creatures called Bugsnax, each Grumpus is there for a different reason. Bugsnax are part food part insect creatures where if you eat them part of your body becomes food. Your job is to find out what’s going on by getting all the Grumpuses to be friends again after they had a huge fight with one another, this usually involves capturing specific species of Bugsnax and feeding them to the Grumpuses.
Rating this game was hard, it has good writing, an engaging primary gameplay loop, and an interesting mystery to unravel, but the gameplay loop does get stale after a while the mystery ends up with an unsatisfying ending, and the game has such a bad final act. My journey with Bugsnax went like this. I was loving catching the Bugsnax, exploring the island, and getting to know all the characters. Eventually the capturing and exploration started to get a little dull, this was because so many Bugsnax have the same methods of capture which made it so as the game went on and you knew your capture methods the game became less of a puzzle game and more of a repeat the solution you already worked out a couple hours ago again and again game. Yeah, it was getting kind of boring but I liked the characters and whenever a new puzzle did appear it was fun enough to solve it so I carried on, then I got to the ending which very minor gameplay spoilers contains an unsatisfying main narrative payoff, alright character payoffs, but one of the worst gameplay payoffs I’ve ever seen. You’d expect the game to end with one complex puzzle, maybe trying to capture one giant Bugsnax, nope it switches genre and becomes essentially a shooter, it’d be like if you were playing The Sims and after one of your Sims got close to dying, they had to fight off the Grim Reaper in an FPS boss fight. Don’t get me wrong the shitty conclusion doesn’t stop the game from being decent but it does prevent it from being anything more than that. Out of my around eight hours of play I’d say the first four were great, the next three were getting kind of dull but had some decent moments and the last hour was a train wreck. 6 / 10, on to the next game.
6 / 10
26. Super Mario 3D All-Stars
Developer – Nintendo
Director – Super Mario 64 – Shigeru Miyamoto. Super Mario Sunshine – Yoshiaki Koizumi, Kenta Usui. Super Mario Galaxy – Yoshiaki Koizumi
Available On – Nintendo Switch
Super Mario 3D All-Stars actually pisses me off, I arguably got more enjoyment from this package than I did almost any other game of the year but that isn’t a credit to the collection. If somebody put some of the best fruit in the world in a box made out of their own shit, I wouldn’t complement the box (to be honest I wouldn’t eat the fruit covered in shit either so maybe this isn’t a great analogy).
Super Mario 3D All-Stars not only excludes the second-best 3D Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy 2, but has so few additions and options for the three games included that it doesn’t warrant being a full priced game. To be honest the only way this could have warranted its full-priced status would be if it included Super Mario Galaxy 2 and they were fully remade like they did with Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, but nah here’s three ancient games for full price fuck you. Shit I guess you can have the soundtracks as well for as little use as they are because you’re not exactly going to be using your Switch to listen to music. Just put your music on Spotify already, or at least let us purchase them, holy shit Nintendo knows how to make good games but are incompetent at every other aspect of being a business.
How do you score a video game collection though? Well, I find the mean of the scores I gave the games within it and then increase the score by one if it’s a great collection full of bonus content, and not missing out on any essential games but I decrease it by a point if it’s lacking any essential games or much extras. If it’s just a fine enough collection I won’t increase or decrease the mean. Wow this is why I’m never going to get paid to review games, I actually just described my working out for a video game score. So Super Mario 64 is an 8 / 10, Super Mario Sunshine is a 4 / 10 (you heard me), and Super Mario Galaxy is a 9 / 10, this averages to 7 / 10 which of course is decreased because of how abysmal the collection is to a 6 / 10.
6 / 10
25. Control: The Foundation
Developer – Remedy Entertainment
Director – Mikael Kasurinen, Sam Lake
Available On – PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Microsoft Windows, Amazon Luna
The SCP Foundation is the purest example of creativity I can think of. A site where anybody (considering that they are good enough at writing) can contribute to a joint universe, they can make their own stories, their own concepts, their own characters, or even add to other people’s stories. It has such a wholesome feeling to it all, these people create these internet horror stories not for money, but to contribute a piece of something greater. Yeah, some of the stories in it are kind of trash but you can ignore them, that’s the beauty of the SCP Wiki, since there is so much contradictions you have to make your own head cannon. The SCP don’t even mind if you make media based on their world, my short film ranking of the year has one such piece of media. We have a ton of games of course such as The Stairwell, SCP – Containment Breach, SCP Unity, SCP-3008: Lone Survivor, and we might as well throw Control onto that list. Control is so clearly inspired by the SCP Wiki that you can’t have a conversation about Control without bringing up the SCP Foundation. Because of this clear inspiration of course I picked up Control as soon as I could, an action game with a heavy focus on supernatural powers taking place in the SCP Foundation seemed like my dream game and yeah, I loved it, Control was my 2019 game of the year. Other than framerate issues and a couple of story issues I loved everything about it so of course I was going to pick up the DLC, and I enjoyed it but kind of wanted more.
Control: The Foundation takes place in the foundation of the Oldest House which is essentially a bunch of caves with a few research stations scattered around them. Yeah, it’s not exactly that much of an interesting area to explore. I get that they wanted something a bit different instead of throwing us in another office building, but there are a ton of cool areas you could add to the Oldest House. Give us an abandoned floor where an altered item got out of control and the only way to control it was to just completely lock down that floor and forbid entry. Introduce more surrealist monsters, currently we only know of AWE’s, altered items, and objects of power, I’m sure some more surrealist monsters also exist in this universe, give us a floor dedicated to them. Give us an area set in an alternate dimension or something, anything but a fucking cave.
The second problem is that your new powers are so boring, you have the ability to create crystals in specific locations, and destroy these crystals. It’s so situational, if it allowed you to place crystals anywhere then it could have been a lot of fun, imagine being able to create platforms wherever you want, to impale enemies, it would have been great.
To be honest those are my only two big complaints though, I like it how The Foundation brings into question the loyalties of The Board, there are a few kick-ass moments which I won’t spoil but you’ll know what I’m talking about when you get to them, and it’s more Control, it’s my favourite game of 2019, even below average Control is still pretty great.
7 / 10
24. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2
Developer – Inti Creates
Director – Hiroki Miyazawa
Available On – Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One
Why are none of the Bloodstained games in the same continuity? Like first we had Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, which was a charming Castlevania throwback (and in my opinion the best retro Castlevania game because it throws away a lot of the dated design philosophy that tainted those older games (I do still like old Castlevania, in fact I think Castlevania 1 and 3 are some of the best NES games ever made, but they do suffer from outdated games design (wow we’re three brackets deep now aren’t we, and who said I wasn’t a real journalist))). Then we had the amazing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a throwback to the Metroidvania style of Castlevania games and one of my favourite Metroidvania games period, but it’s not a sequel to Curse of the Moon, ok, well at least Curst of the Moon 2 will be a sequel to Curse of the Moon right? WRONG, none of these games are connected other than featuring the same characters. I know that Castlevania ran into some problems because of its timeline stopped them from having time periods where Dracula could be revived unless you were to set it in the future, but the Bloodstained series doesn’t revolve around a character who wakes up every 100 years so setting up a coherent canology won’t lead to problems down the line.
Ok, onto the actual game. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 is a 2D action-platformer, you control four characters (there are others but that will be getting into spoiler territory), Zangetsu, Dominique, Robert, and Hachi. Zangetsu is your standard Castlevania protagonist and is a lot of fun to play as, he’s your typical jack-of-all-trades, master of none character, hasn’t really got any huge flaws, and is reliable enough in most situations but I can’t imagine he’ll be anybody’s favourite character. Talking about favourite characters mine is Dominique, she’s got great range, a plethora of abilities that are going to help you in any situation you find yourself in, she can heal herself, and even has Shovel Knights (or Scrooge McDuck) hop ability, what’s not to love. Robert is fun and I know a more skilled player than me could get a lot out of him but he’s way too fragile for me that when he dies, I never really care. Hachi was clearly made just for the lol random XD factor, he’s a corgi in a mech, how random. He’s fun to play as though, he’s the only one of your characters who is going to be able to tank a lot of hits, he can hover, and walk on spikes so I often found myself using him to just skip difficult sections of the game.
The game is a lot of fun, it’s one of those games which is really short but infinitely replayable, it takes like four hours to beat but with unlockable characters, multiple endings, and numerous ways to customise your experience it’s not really a game that you are meant to just play once.
If you need some retro Castlevania which is actually fair than definitely pick this one up, I think I slightly prefer the first Curse of the Moon but that’s just because it was awesome seeing 8-bit renditions of bosses that can be found in Ritual of the Night which is easily my favourite Bloodstained game.
7 / 10
23. Control: AWE
Developer – Remedy Entertainment
Director – Mikael Kasurinen
Available On – PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Microsoft Windows, Amazon Luna
I love Control and I like Alan Wake so of course I was excited to see them cross over and potentially start a Remedy video game universe. What I got was kind of disappointing but only because everyone talked about it as if it was a proper crossover, in reality it’s more so the ending of Iron Man where Nick Fury appears saying that they’re gonna create the Avengers, it’s the confirmation of a future crossover more so than the actual event.
In Control: AWE you explore the Investigation Sector of the Oldest House which is a much more interesting location than the foundation from you guessed it, Control: The Foundation. This sector was used to investigate altered world events which is where the game links to Alan Wake, turns out everything from that game was an altered world event that the Bureau has decided to investigate. What you’ll get as an Alan Wake fan is a few references to the events that took place in that game scattered throughout the place, light based puzzles which are a nice mixture of the gameplay from Alan Wake and Control, and the third act of this DLC is about Alan Wake more directly. The rest of the DLC is very Control and to be honest that’s not really a problem. Yeah, I wanted a massive crossover but it seems like we’ll be getting that in the next Remedy game so I’m fine with just some more Control that’s slightly Alan Wake themed. It sets up the Alan Wake crossover and further establishes AWE’s which I think will probably be the focus of Control 2 (exploring somewhere which has been affected by numerous AWE’s would be a great way to keep the Control weirdness and give us a new interesting location to explore, some city where everything in it has gone to shit and needs to be contained). Even though Control: AWE is focussed on establishing future games it doesn’t forget to give itself an identity. Control: AWE’s use of light-based puzzles gives the DLC a unique feeling, and this DLC is definitely much more straight up horror than the rest of Control which is great in giving it its own feel.
The DLC offers new combat challenges which are great if you’re like me and have powered up Jessie so much that most combat encounters are trivial. The new abilities aren’t that interesting but are definitely better than the crystal making in The Foundation. The antagonist of this DLC is really creepy and has a pretty good boss fight. Just like the rest of Control some of the coolest moments are hidden, although the secrets in The Foundation are more interesting than the ones in AWE.
At the end of the day Control is great and AWE is more of that, I can’t wait to see what happens in the future of the Control franchise, hopefully it gets treated better than Alan Wake did.
7 / 10
22. Exclusion Zone
Developer – Kitty Horrorshow
Director – Kitty Horrorshow
Available On – itch.io
https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/haunted-cities-v4
So almost every year the video game developer Kitty Horrorshow will release a video game anthology called Haunted Cities. These are collections of short, experimental horror games which don’t rely on jump scares so I’m cool playing them (seriously I get so worked up by jump scares that I can’t play anything which relies on them too heavily, it’s just something about being put into fight or flight so quickly that messes with me). I love intelligent horror like this, horror that sticks with you after the fact, horror that seeps into your nightmares, not horror that just relies on loud noises. So yeah, all four of the games included on Kitty Horrorshow’s Haunted Cities Volume 4 are included on this list, I highly recommend giving them all a play, they’re all free and are a beautiful example of what I was talking about earlier, small five-to-ten-minute games that just want you to experience something (these are the type of games that I’d want to develop, in fact my dissertation for University is an anthology where every game tries to make you feel a different emotion). So, let’s talk about Exclusion Zone.
Exclusion Zone is hard to talk about without spoiling but I’ll try my best (I might do a spoiler heavy dissection of all of Kitty Horrorshow’s Haunted Cities games down the line at some point because they’re all worth talking about). Exclusion Zone is a game about exploring a facility and discovering what happened there, all whilst a giant tower looms over you. The design kind of feels like Breath of the Wild in a way, you have a clear end goal which you can go to at any point, it’s up to you how much exploring you do beforehand. In Breath of the Wild you explore to get more powerful, in Exclusion Zone you explore to get the information that will make sense once you climb the tower and experience the ending. It’s great, the ending gives you the answers, everything before that gives you the questions, it’s such an intelligent idea, you’ll have the questions you bothered to seek out answered but if you spent more time exploring, you’ll learn even more about this world.
This game doesn’t really do anything wrong to be honest, just like the rest of Kitty Horrorshow’s work everything feels deliberate which isn’t really possible in a larger game, it’s one of the great things about these five-to-ten-minute games, they feel much more like a complete unaltered vision than most triple A or even normal indie games manage. The reason this game isn’t higher on the list is simply because the story didn’t click with me as much as the others, all four of these games explore an interesting, completely unique story (which is fucking hard to find these days), it’s just that this one was the only one which didn’t leave me contemplating every little detail hours after finishing it. It’s rather basic in comparison to the other games in the collection which probably makes it the most accessible (although it’s still not what I’d call an easy to understand narrative, you’ve still got to think to understand what’s happening), but yeah it just didn’t have as much of an impact as the other three, it’s just a pretty sad tale which you are so separated from that you can’t really feel much from it. Still give this a go, it’s still great, it’s just the weakest out of the four in my opinion).
7 / 10
21. Minecraft: Nether Update
Developer – Mojang
Director – Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, Nathan “Dinnerbone” Adams
Available On – Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux
Minecraft is great isn’t it. It’s one of the only games where you feel like your options are unlimited, a game with no true ending. If I could only play one game for the rest of my life it would be Minecraft. I’ve put more time into Minecraft in some form or another than any other game, whether it’s the Java version, the Xbox 360 version, the phone version, the PlayStation 4 version, whether it’s with or without mods, by myself or with friends, this is a game I can keep coming back to. Whilst I do mainly either play modded or with friends at this point, I always make an effort to return to play single-player for a bit when a new large update is released.
The Nether Update did something we all wanted for a while, it made the Nether an interesting location. Before this update you’d go to the Nether to get potion ingredients, blaze rods for your eyes of ender, and maybe some quartz if you wanted to build some marble structures. With this update there is so much more to the Nether now to the point where you could reasonably live there now. I always wanted to be able to live in the Nether (in game) because it would be a fun alternate way of playing Minecraft, but without a real food source you just couldn’t do that, now with Hoglins you can start a farm and realistically survive there. I love it how they dealt with surviving in the Nether because it’s still not easy, Hoglins might provide food but are still hostile, you might be able to set your spawn in the Nether now but it’s so much harder to do than just crafting a bed in the Overworld, you can travel across lava now, but it’s slow and hard, it’s become what it always should have been, somewhere you could try to live in but it’s incredibly hard to do so, it’s meant to be Hell so that’s how it should be.
This update also brought some other changes which are great, netherite is so cool, being able to make equipment better than diamond is something that I’ve wanted in Minecraft for a while, if it was up to me there would be a ton of super rare ores that can make you even more powerful but this will do for now. Also, one of my favourite composers Lena Raine who worked on the music in one of my favourite games of all time Celeste composed the new music for this update and yeah it’s the best music in the entire game and that’s coming from someone who listens to the Minecraft soundtrack a lot whilst doing work because of how relaxing it is, beating the C418 music wasn’t an easy task but Lena Raine did it.
So yeah, I like this update a lot, can’t wait for the Caves Update so going underground becomes interesting again.
7 / 10
20. Grandmother’s Garden
Developer – Kitty Horrorshow
Director – Kitty Horrorshow
Available On – itch.io
https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/haunted-cities-v4
Grandmother Garden is the next game by Kitty Horrorshow to appear on this list. Grandmothers Garden is a remake to some extent of Grandmother, another game made by Kitty Horrorshow. From what I can gather both games retell a recuring nightmare she has had throughout her life, she decided to remake it when she got better at game development, don’t quote me on that though.
Grandmothers Garden is horrific, it’s the most disturbing game in the Haunted Cities Volume 4 anthology in my opinion. At first glance you’re in a kind of spooky forest which is unsettling but it’s nothing you haven’t dealt with in a game before, that’s when you notice something off. This forest is alive but not in the charming “oh look all the trees and plants are alive” kind of way, no, in the way that makes you feel like a parasite on a being that hates you. Organs and veins protrude from the forest, this isn’t anything you’ve ever experienced before. You barely survive by living off of the bile that this forest produces, it gives you less and less but still expects you to fulfil your roll for it, it expects the world but doesn’t offer you much in return because what are you going to do about it. This could be interpreted in many different ways, my first interpretation was very much one of government, of a system which gives us scraps and will happily kill us if it benefits them in the slightest, that the system will crush us eventually, but after watching Jacob Geller’s video on it I think I like his interpretation more, that this is about creativity, of you putting your soul into something but getting less and less out of it.
Another point of interest is the controls, out of the four Kitty Horrorshow games I’ll be covering in this article it’s the only one not to have a first-person camera, it has tank controls and a third-person camera which is definitely done so the game can frame the gruesome imagery exactly how it wants to without being forced to contend with what the player wants to look at.
I thought this was great, I just think the other two are slightly better, give Grandmother’s Garden a go, it’s linked above.
7 / 10
19. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Steve
Developer – Bandai Namco Studios, Sora Ltd.
Director – Masahiro Sakurai
Available On – Nintendo Switch
Steve from Minecraft was the character I most wanted in Smash Bros.. Yeah, Minecraft isn’t my favourite game of all time (although it’s probably in my top ten), but when I think of characters I want in Smash I also think about how they’d play. Yeah, it’d be easy to say I want Booker from Bioshock Infinite in Smash because that’s one of my favourite games but that’d be stupid, he’d be a super generic Smash character (although Elizabeth would work really well though). With Steve there are thousands of different moves he could have, as well as the basic bow and sword he could build, use a minecart, TNT, ender pearl, fishing rod, potions, lava bucket, eat to recover health, elytra, elytra with fireworks, spawn eggs, go into creative mode for his final smash, anvil, gravel, sand, flint and steel, piston, horse, pig, water bucket, the options are truly limitless and I think Sakurai and his team did an amazing job at translating these infinite possibilities into a character.
The fact that you need to stop and mine to improve your weapons is genius, it adds the time management aspect from Minecraft into Smash Bros.. Block placement works great and the fact that the character doesn’t rely too heavily on simple sword swings and instead has some more creative attacks like the lava bucket, TNT, and the minecart is great. Having Minecraft music in the game is a dream come true, I love Steve’s classic mode being a reference to the Far Lands, the fact that the alternate skins are Alex, a Zombie, and an Enderman are genius (although seeing a two-block-tall Enderman is a tad weird and I think it would have worked better with two Steve skins, two Alex skins, a Zombie skin, a Drowned skin, a Skeleton skin, and a Stray skin). The Minecraft map is great, I love how it varies. I know this is asking for way too much but I think it would have been great if the map had random generation on it, so you never knew what you were gonna get, I know that’s asking for way too much, just a thought. So yeah, I really like Steve, in fact he’s my favourite DLC fighter, I couldn’t have asked for much more other than maybe him turning into creative mode being his final smash, and the aforementioned random generation.
7 / 10
18. Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution: VRAINS Update
Developer – Other Ocean Interactive
Director – Charles Murakami
Available On – PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Windows
Look, is the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime shit? Yeah, of course it is. Is it so shit that people look at you funny when you mention that you actually think the card game is one of the best card games around once you get over the huge learning barrier necessary to learn the rules? Also, yes.
I’m so glad I’ve been into Yu-Gi-Oh! for my entire life because I would never have gotten into it otherwise, whilst most games just add more powerful cards to encourage people to keep on buying them Yu-Gi-Oh! just keeps adding new card types. If the last time you played this game was when the original series was still airing then get ready to learn a lot. Beforehand you had your fusion and your ritual summons, they were usually how you got your big boss monsters, now they’re really not. I’m not into competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! so maybe a fusion monster has been used in the champions deck, I don’t know, but for casual play they’re kind of pathetic. You’ve now got Synchro summons, XYZ summons, Pendulum summons, and Link summons, all of which have different summoning requirements.
So how would I recommend anybody get into this game? Simple, buy Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution which after this update has become not only a great way to play Yu-Gi-Oh!, but a great way to learn it as the game slowly introduces the more advanced summoning techniques to you but if you want you can jump right into them.
Originally before this update all of the summoning types were included in Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution yet there was just enough Link summons in the game for them to use it as a selling point. There were so few that it was kind of sneaky them putting the word “link” in the name, that was until this update. This adds all the latest cards, including a ton of Link cards, and a whole other campaign based on Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, the anime that introduced Link summoning (one day I might cover Yu-Gi-Oh! because I find the whole show so ironically good). Yeah, the campaign only has the duels featured in the anime without the story segments in between but who the hell cares about the plot of Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS.
Before this update the game was great, now it’s the quintessential Yu-Gi-Oh! experience.
I’m kind of ashamed to say that Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution is my most played Switch game, there is just so much content, and whilst the online community isn’t as large as I’d like, there is hundreds of duels based on the anime to go through, and whilst I have no real connection to the context of these duels beyond 5Ds, it’s still an excuse to play Yu-Gi-Oh! with a ton of different decks. Also, you get to make your own deck, my main one is an Aromage deck which I know isn’t exactly competitively viable but it’s so much fun to use.
Yeah, the game has its flaws, certain iconic monsters have an unskipable entrance animation which really slows down the pace of a duel, you can only buy one card pack at a time which is so annoying when you’re deck building, I just want to purchase 100 booster packs, let me do it in a way that takes less than an hour please. A couple of the cards don’t actually work right which sounds like a huge issue but keep in mind there’s like 10000 cards and I only ran into a broken one on like hour 200 of playing (and it was broken to benefit me). I kind of wish they didn’t cut out as much duels from the anime, yeah, I’m not dying to relive all the duels of the filler arcs which are mainly what are cut but it seems like easy extra content, they’ve got AI’s that can play any deck and they’ve got most of the cards, it really wouldn’t take much time to just make a deck for the missing duels. That’s a very minor complaint though, there is enough content in the game, I have around 300 hours and have beaten three of the six featured campaigns (and about half of the VRAINS one which this review is meant to focus on but when else will I be able to talk about this random Yu-Gi-Oh! video game that I’ve sank way too much hours into for someone who doesn’t watch the anime, read the manga, play competitively, or even play in person much).
Something I need to quickly praise the game on even though this should be the standard for paid games is that there’s no microtransactions, just one price for the game and you can start building your virtual deck the way God intended, through hundreds of hours of grinding. This would have been such an easy game to add microtransactions to and I’m glad that they didn’t.
The update turned Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution into the game it should have been at the start so I’m glad it’s free, and who knows there’s a new shitty looking Yu-Gi-Oh! anime airing right now Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS, fingers crossed for another free update where they add the duels and cards from that, or more likely we’ll get a completely separate game, Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution is an updated version of Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist after all which is just the same game with less cards and without the Arc-V campaign, so looking forward to Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: SEVENS Evolution in the future (which I will buy, I’ve brought both versions of this fucking game).
7 / 10
17. Astro’s Playroom
Developer – SIE Japan Studio
Director – Nicolas Doucet
Available On – PlayStation 5
It’s always exciting getting a new console, I was one of the lucky people who managed to get a PlayStation 5 at launch along with Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Sackboy A Big Adventure which are both coming up in a bit. But instead of spending time on those two games I spent money on, the first game I played on my shiny new console was the pre-installed tech-demo, Astro’s Playroom. I didn’t stop playing it until I had platinumed it and gotten all the extra trophies which existed for some reason, there are like five trophies in this game that aren’t needed for the platinum, my guess is they exist to show that off as a feature developers can take advantage of to allow users to get platinum trophies without having to do stupidly difficult tasks which in my mind kind of ruins the fun of a platinum but oh well. This game is longer than you’d expect, yeah, it’s a tech demo but if you want to do everything in it, you’ll get a good four to five hours out of it, and to be honest I recommend you play it that way, none of the trophies are hard to get, and a lot of them are gimmick trophies which will put a smile on your face with the hilarious things they ask you to do.
So, what is Astro’s Playroom? Well let’s not beat around the bush, it’s a PlayStation circle jerk, you travel through four worlds all based on different pieces of tech found in the PlayStation 5 where you collect devices from PlayStations past, experience each consoles start up screen as a physical location, and see the Astro Bots dress up and act like the characters who made PlayStation famous. PlayStation symbols can be found all over the place, everything is designed to show off how great the PS5 is, and the whole game takes place in your PlayStation 5. Is it PlayStation sucking their own cock for five hours? Yes. Does that mean I didn’t enjoy it? Of course not, this game is a blast. I’ve owned every PlayStation console including the PSP and PS Vita so it was just a blast seeing all the references to these worlds and characters who made me who I am today, who made me fall in love with gaming to the point that I want to make a carer analysing them (along with movies). It makes you feel like you’re part of the PlayStation family which I know is how they get you, I know in reality it’s a corporation who only cares about my money, but fuck my cynicism for a minute it felt nice. Nostalgia in games seems to cater to games that existed before I was even born so it was nice seeing a celebration of all of PlayStation, the PlayStation 4 could be your first video game console and you’ll still get a lot of the references.
If we’re looking past the circle jerk Astro’s Playroom is still a pretty good platformer which shows off what the PlayStation 5 can do (now all we need is some fucking games for it). The haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are amazing and are something that I think all future game consoles will include to some extent (other than maybe Nintendo, they can’t even get an analog stick working, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Nintendo are great at making games and thinking of fun ideas for their consoles, but as a corporation they are a joke and when it comes to making those consoles they’re a joke, wait that was a random tangent).
If you get a PlayStation 5 make sure you don’t give this one a pass, if you have any history with PlayStation, you’ll be smiling the whole way through, genuinely the ending of all the levels where you end up in the PlayStation start up menus are up there with my favourite video game moments of all time.
7 / 10
16. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Developer – Nintendo
Director – Aya Kyogoku
Available On – Nintendo Switch
Never have I decreased a final score for a game as much as I did with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. After playing for about ten hours I had it at a 10 / 10, then around every extra ten hours I put into the game more problems started to appear until finally I settled at around a 7 / 10. With that in mind you can completely understand why most people played it for about two months non-stop and after that just stopped playing, I haven’t touched Animal Crossing: New Horizons in months because it doesn’t give you any incentive to keep playing beyond that point. When you make a game that is designed to be played daily you need to implement reasons for people to come back daily which this game does for about a month. The game goes from “oh boy, that building should be built by now”, “oh boy, a new villager is meant to arrive today, let’s check them out”, and “oh boy, my expansion should be ready” to “looks like I need to pick my weeds”, “better talk to the villagers so they don’t hate me”, and “better look for bugs or fish, oh wait I have all the ones that appear in this season”. After you’ve seen the credits and decorated your island there isn’t much to do, this wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t a game that wants you back every day. It actively punishes you for taking breaks by making your villagers miss you and the weeds spread, it just makes me not want to revisit the game, I don’t want to go and get scolded because the game bored me too much to visit it and I definitely don’t want to clear up all the weeds that are inevitably growing there. If I made this list during that first month Animal Crossing: New Horizons would be my game of the year, as it stands it’s still high on the list because I did truly love it for the first thirty hours of play but after that it became a chore, something I just had to do because maybe something interesting would happen, it never did.
Also, I fully believe that if it wasn’t for the pandemic giving everybody a desire for something purely wholesome and in our control Animal Crossing: New Horizons would never have become as popular as it did, it would have been another Animal Crossing game, something that is talked about but not something encouraging people who don’t even play games to give it a go.
Other than all that there are… also some more negatives, crafting is tedious, the multiplayer is shit, it takes so long for anybody to be able to join and when they do they can’t even do much on your island, there’s not even voice chat so it can’t even serve as a chat room, there isn’t enough unique events, if I have to rescue Gulliver one more time I’m going to cry, the lack of multiple saves is unacceptable, oh and it takes too long before you can start fully customising anything really.
I’ve got positives, it is high on my list after all. It was nice being in control of something whilst fearing that everyone I loved in real life was going to die because the UK government is too incompetent to properly manage the virus, err… I like the museum, it looks nice, it’s cute. I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed it for that first month if we weren’t in a pandemic so take your 7 / 10 Animal Crossing and fuck off.
7 / 10
15. Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Developer – Insomniac Games
Director – Brian Horton, Bryan Intihar, Marcus Smith, Ryan Smith
Available On – PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Spider-Man: Miles Morales truly lets me live out my fantasy of having the exaggerated swagger of a black teen, and I guess being Spider-Man as well. With that joke out of the way what did I think of this game? Well first off, it’s not really a proper sequel to the original, think of it as Spider-Man 1.5, a shorter game using most of the same assets to tide us over until the eventual Spider-Man 2, and to be honest I like that. Games are really difficult to make so reusing the engine and assets in a smaller project is genius and often leads to games that are even better than the project they stole all of their assets from, look at New Super Luigi U, and The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask. PlayStation isn’t a stranger to the standalone expansion strategy, look at inFamous: First Light and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, both great games in their own right. So yeah, I wasn’t against this game and it does enough differently to make it stand on its own.
Firstly, the venom powers, I have no idea why they’re called venom powers, it’s such a stupid name in a world which has a villain who also wears a black suit called Venom, I can guarantee some people who don’t know better now think Miles Morales and Venom are the same character so thanks for that whoever named his powers venom powers. Anyway, venom powers, they add a lot to the combat, having these really powerful attacks at your disposal means the game had to make up for it by making you fight a lot more bad guys, you’ll be fighting a lot more people here making this game even more about crowd control than the original. They tried to make the venom powers useful in traversal but since you’re gonna want them in combat you’re never going to use part of your venom energy bar to move a bit faster when that could be used later on in combat. They should have made the venom traversal moves take up less of your venom energy and had missions that actually required you to use them, I got gold in all the traversal missions without using them (I don’t even know if you’re allowed to use them in traversal missions and I’m not booting up my PS5 and locating a traversal mission to find out).
Secondly, we have the invisibility powers, with these powers you can transfer between combat and stealth almost whenever you want, yeah it can make combat kind of trivial, only one enemy type can disable your stealth and they are rare so the option to peace out and start taking enemies out quietly is rarely unavailable, but challenges exist to encourage you to do a mix of stealth and combat. I never felt pressured to keep going invisible because I loved the combat so much but I know a lot of people will abuse the invisibility power because it’s the easiest route and it’s up to the developers to make sure players don’t optimise the fun out of their games so maybe the game could have had a few other downsides to invisibility.
You don’t have as much combat abilities as in Spider-Man PS4 but the ones you do get are enough for the game to be its own experience.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales actually fixes a few of the problems that can be found in the original, we get no more stupid stealth missions where you play as Spider-Man’s non-powered sidekicks. No more pipe dreams which is always a good thing, no game has ever been improved by making you move pipes around and I have no idea why so many developers look at their perfectly good game and decide to add fucking pipes to it. Swinging is even more satisfying now and the lack of load times on the PS5 is amazing.
With all of those improvements in mind it might seem like I prefer this to the original which I definitely don’t, the original Spider-Man feels like the definitive Spider-Man experience, you get an amazing story, probably my favourite version of Peter Parker, and the chance to fight some of Spider-Man’s best villains. Spider-Man: Miles Morales gives us a charming enough yet forgettable story, this version of Miles Morales just isn’t as compelling as Peter Parker was in the original, often feeling like Diet Peter Parker which really isn’t who Miles Morales is, he is such a great character and I think Insomniac could have done so much more with him here. Also, villain-wise we only get like three maybe four and they have cool boss fights I just wish there were a couple more of them.
So yeah, get this game if you want something to tide you over until Spider-Man 2, it’s good but definitely could have been much better.
7 / 10
14. Sackboy A Big Adventure
Developer – Sumo Digital
Director – Gary Moore, Ned Waterhouse,
Available On – PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
There aren’t many franchises that are as important to me as LittleBigPlanet. The first two games are some of my favourites of all time, LittleBigPlanet PSP and LittleBigPlanet Vita were both great portable experiences, and whilst games like LittleBigPlanet 3, and LittleBigPlanet Karting have definitely let me down I don’t think there will be a point in my life where I don’t check out the latest game in this franchise so of course I brought Sackboy: A Big Adventure alongside my PS5. For a start let me get this out of the way, I hate the title of this game, I can guarantee people didn’t give the game a chance because of the title, I rarely bring the game up in conversation regarding PS5 games because I vomit a bit in my mouth whenever I have to say it. Here are a couple of names that would have been better, Sackboy, Sackboy: A LittleBig Adventure, Sackboy: A LittleBigPlanet Story, basically anything other than Sackboy: A Big Adventure, the name makes the game sound like it’s exclusively for actual babies when in reality it’s a game that anybody could enjoy.
I also don’t like what this game means for the LittleBigPlanet series, LittleBigPlanet games are hard to make but Sackboy is marketable as a mascot for PlayStation so they seem to be taking Sackboy out of his home franchise so they can still make games that feature him without having to make a creative mode. Once I got over what they did to my boy I started to enjoy the game.
Ok, before I get into the positives let’s get the negatives out of the way. The game is at its most fun when you’re trying to speedrun it, I’m not usually the kind of guy who likes to speed my way through levels but the second I started doing that the game went from a slightly above average 3D platformer to something really fun, when you’re constantly rolling, using all of your high-level abilities to slightly extend your jump and never stopping it’s a blast but I can’t excuse that without doing that the game is kind of generic. Also, the game doesn’t reward you for playing through it quickly, I know most games don’t but the game rewards you for other things like not dying so it seems like the perfect thing to do just give a costume or something whenever you beat a level in a certain time. I love it when 3D platformers are fun before you’ve mastered the controls but once you know the specifics of all the controls and have mastered them the game becomes even better, low level play is just kind of generic in Sackboy: A Big Adventure and I know a lot of people will play the entire game without learning the high level moves and therefore a lot of people will simply experience a slightly above average platformer. The ending to each level is way too long, you have to stand still for like a minute as the game reinforces the fact that you did indeed beat the level, just like in LittleBigPlanet I imagine this would be fine in multiplayer as it’d give you a chance to talk about the level and slap each other in game but in single-player it’s a drag. They seriously try to pull the “you and I are a lot alike” trope with the villain and Sackboy. Even when this trope makes sense it’s cliche to the point where most people can’t take it seriously, Sackboy is an avatar he hasn’t really got a character to be alike the villain so this makes no sense. Some of the level themes are weirdly generic which is really unlike this franchise. The lack of online-multiplayer at launch is kind of a problem I guess although I’d rather they delay that then release an unfinished online service. Most of the characters in the game are kind of shit, the only ones I liked were Sackboy just because I already have a connection to him from the other games, Vex, and N.A.O.M.I..
Ok, onto why this game that I spent the last paragraph shitting on is my favourite PS5 game so far and is so high on this list. Once you do start to speed through the levels it is so much fun, it has a similar feel to when you master the controls in Super Mario Odyssey just to a lesser extent because that’s one of the best 3D platformers ever made and this is a 7 / 10. Vex is a great villain, yeah, he’s not exactly relatable or deep but he’s charismatic, funny, and intimidating. The whole world with N.A.O.M.I. was a blast and contained every time I actually laughed when playing the game. The music levels are great, I wish we had more of them but what we got were some of the best 3D platforming levels I’ve played in a while. There are some really creative world ideas in this, like yeah there are also the generic ones I complained about earlier but we do have some really creative environments with great scenarios. The power-ups are great and never ruin the flow of the game which is something you can’t often say for every power-up in a platformer. The load times were almost non-existent on the PlayStation 5 which I think will be a common praise for PS5 games. It manages to feel like LittleBigPlanet still, the worlds still have that weird English charm to them and all feel handmade, I often forgot that these levels weren’t made in a level creator and then I got sad that we didn’t get a proper 3D LittleBigPlanet (well unless you count the game that’s coming up next which I kind of do). The level design is amazing and they always manage to introduce new interesting ideas to keep things interesting.
So yeah, I like this game and as much as I’d love LittleBigPlanet 4, I wouldn’t mind if we just got sequels to this instead, I guess, just name them something that isn’t fucking stupid please.
7 / 10
13. Dreams
Developer – Media Molecule
Director – Mark Healey
Available On – PlayStation 4
This was easily the game I was most excited for this year. I’ve always loved Media Molecule and when they announced that they were making what could very easily be seen as a 3D version of LittleBigPlanet of course I was excited. This game was announced not long after the PS4 was released (it might have been announced alongside the PS4 I can’t remember) and ended up releasing as one of the last PlayStation 4 exclusives which to be honest was a detriment to me, I haven’t got as much free time now as I did seven years ago so I really couldn’t get into the tools as much as I wanted to. But I’m never going to complain that a game is delayed (yeah it impacted me but I’d rather a polished game now than a buggy one released earlier). But I played around with the tools of course and… well the platform Dreams is on is its biggest weakness, almost every option is mapped to button combos, it’s so much harder to create a game in Dreams than it was in LittleBigPlanet, yeah you can technically create whatever you want on the PS4 which is enough room for praise but if I’m being honest it’s easier to develop with Unity than it is Dreams. I’ve made games on Unity and I can actually publish those without them being tied to a game with a small player base, in the time it would take to learn the game creation tools in Dreams you could learn to be half decent at using Unity or Unreal. If this was on PC it would alleviate the issue of button mapping yes, but those who can learn the tools of Dreams could also learn the tools of Unity or Unreal and develop an actual game which they could sell. LittleBigPlanet creation was fun because you could create something cool in a fraction of the time it’d take to develop it elsewhere, that’s just not the case here. Dreams is a complex game creation tool on a dying platform on a sadly dying game. Media Molecules achieved their goal of creating a game development tool on PS4 but they were too busy asking could they instead of should they. It really pains me to say that, Dreams is a technical marvel but there is very little reason to learn to develop for it over something like Unity, programming isn’t that hard.
Ok but this is high up on my list I must like it for some reason. Well, the playing is great, I can cycle through thousands of games that have been created by others, some and great, most are shit, but there is a lot of fun to be had just cycling through random games. Art’s Dream is also a pretty great campaign, it manages to show off what the tools can do whilst still crafting a compelling story which is weirdly mature.
Dreams is kind of depressing for someone who sometimes wants to develop games, Dreams was worked on for so long, had so much passion put into it but currently has a very small player base, and I could see the servers being shut down on this before the 12-year-old LittleBigPlanet has its servers closed. I can almost guarantee they didn’t make their money back, it took so long to develop and therefore probably cost a lot to make and it wasn’t that popular. It’s a cautionary tale that the amount of effort you put into something doesn’t always translate to success.
7 / 10
12. Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time
Developer – Toys for Bob
Director – Dan Neil
Available On – PlayStation 4, Xbox One
This game shouldn’t have worked for me. I don’t like the Crash Bandicoot series at all, I think the first one is downright bad, couldn’t play much of the second one without getting bored and didn’t even try the third one because why would I after not liking the first two, so yeah, I had zero intention of playing Crash Bandicoot 4. I knew what was going to happen, it was going to come out and all the critics who played Crash as a kid were going to indulge in a giant circle jerk like they always do with anything nostalgic, praising it as one of the best games ever made yet not as good as Crash 2 and 3 because they were from their childhood so nothing can physically beat them. My nostalgia lies with Spyro so if Spyro 4 comes out and I start doing that I need one of you to tell me so I can shut up. Anyway, the game came out and the Crash fan circle jerk commenced but wait what was this, some of them were saying this was actually the best Crash game, the last time a game was heralded as better than its nostalgic brethren was with Sonic Mania and I love that game even though I’m not a huge fan of the originals. Crash 4 managed to break through the rose-tinted goggles and it did look pretty good so I brought it and holy shit this is actually good.
Ok, let’s start with my complaints though, the game isn’t perfect, there’s a lot to criticise. As mentioned by everyone beforehand the 100% criteria is absolutely ridiculous, this usually isn’t a huge problem but seeing that the main gameplay loop is breaking boxes which ends up being worthless (unless you’re playing on retro mode where you have lives) unless you’re going for that 100% criteria, yeah it’s a problem. During the whole game I was split between wanting to break every box because it was satisfying to do but not wanting to because it’d get me killed and I don’t get a reward for going out of my way unless I decide to go out of my way for 80+ hours to 100% the game. So yeah I didn’t go for 100%, if this was Spyro then yeah I probably would have but this is the first Crash game I’ve liked, I’m not ruining my experience by playing every level over and over again, not dying, getting all the boxes, and beating them in record time, and a whole lot more, YouTubers like The Completionist and Caddicarus went into the completion criteria way more than someone who didn’t even go for it could so go watch their videos after this if you’re interested in just how hard it is to 100% this game.
Ok, onto other complains. The level themes are kind of generic for the most part, I’ve played so many platformers at this point that I role my eyes whenever I see a generic snowy mountain level, the thing is this game doesn’t have an excuse, it’s about interdimensional travel, why the fuck are 99% of the levels so generic looking. Even when they tease the fact that the environments will get interesting, they pussy out, we get a generic alien planet and a city which is apparently obsessed with food but nothing about the level design really tells us that. Also, you get to play as five different characters, being Crash, Coco, Neo Cortex, alternate universe Tawna, and Dingodile. I hate playing as Neo Cortex, I never feel fully in control and who gave him a gun but no aiming controls, half of the time playing as him is just missing shots. Also, Tawna’s grappling hook and wall jump sometimes don’t work.
Ok onto the positives. Whilst we’re talking about characters, Crash and Coco (who play identically) are a lot of fun to play as, there moveset is one which seems simple at first glance but once you learn the little nuances it turns out to be much more interesting. Tawna is fun when her wall jump and grapple are actually working. Dingodile is my favourite though, he has the ability to suck up TNT and shoot it at enemies, he has a little hover, he’s massive which makes the destruction of numerous boxes at once so satisfying, he also swears which I did not expect but I guess the only people playing this game are people who loved the originals as kids and me for some reason. Talking about Crash fans, what are you guys doing? You realise I’ll only get my Spyro 4 if you actually buy this game, this game didn’t sell that well, maybe everyone realised that Crash Bandicoot is an overrated series. Anyway, back to praising this game, thanks to an amazing script, great animation, and amazing performances you can’t help but be engaged the entire time, like this is actually really funny thanks to a lot of humour which wouldn’t really be appropriate in a kids game. I don’t think you can classify this as a kid’s game, as mentioned earlier I doubt many kids are rushing out to play the new Crash Bandicoot and I think Toys For Bob knew this so they created a game for adults because they’re the majority of the people playing this game. Also, it’s so hard, with the lack of attention span kids seem to have now I can’t imagine many of them beating this game. So yeah, it was nice playing something with a child-friendly aesthetic which actually seemed solely aimed at adults without being overly edgy. Can’t wait for Spyro to say fuck in Spyro 4.
Anyway, it’s a great game, if you didn’t like Crash beforehand then maybe still give this a go if you like difficult platformers, maybe not at full price though, I’d say it’s worth £40, not £60.
7 / 10
11. The Last of Us: Part II
Developer – Naughty Dog
Director – Neil Druckmann, Anthony Newman, Kurt Margenau
Available On – PlayStation 4
God the reactions towards this game were mixed weren’t they. Now let me get this out of the way so I can talk about the actual game. People who have played The Last of Us Part II and loved it have a valid opinion, people who have played The Last of Us Part II and hate it have a valid opinion, people who haven’t even played the game should not review the game, this is why nobody takes audience scores seriously, at least with a critic they’ve played the game and have explained why they feel the way they do (I will genuinely listen to anybody’s opinion on a piece of media as long as they can explain why they think the way they do, you could tell me why you hated my favourite game of all time and as long as you explain why I’ll listen and respect your opinion). Nobody should be sending the devs or actors death threats, people that do that are actually a waste of space and can go fuck themselves, people who are attacking others because they have different opinions can also go fuck themselves, seriously aren’t we grown up enough to discuss a game without sending death threats? Can’t we just respect other people’s opinions on a video game without taking it as a personal attack.
Anyway, with that out of the way what do I think? Well, I’ll start with my positives. The game is a technical marvel, people who aren’t into game development won’t realise how difficult it is for a character to change clothes on screen, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done before now, they manage to get kissing done well which is another thing that is so difficult to do, Ellie playing the guitar is a technical marvel, the rope physics impressed me, and the game looks stunning. The fact that every enemy feels like a real person is impressive, it hammers home the message that what you’re doing is wrong which is really what most things in this game point towards, they all feel like individuals, not AI which you can predict, beating them feels more like outsmarting a real person instead of an AI which is a lot of fun albeit disturbing. In fact, the gameplay is even better than the original in almost every way, the puzzles whilst not amazing are pretty top tier when it comes to puzzles that are meant to take place in an entirely realistic setting. Imagine having to design a puzzle which doesn’t seem out of place in a regular city, it must be so hard when going for realism to create compelling puzzles that don’t take players out of the world and remind them that they’re playing a video game, The Last of Us Part II does this type of puzzle about as well as you can. The exploration is a lot of fun, they do horror much better in this than they did in the original, and the combat feels satisfying albeit disturbing.
Ok onto the more divisive decisions, the game has been described by many to essentially be misery porn, like everything is designed to make you feel like shit. Is this true? Yep, but that’s not a bad thing if it’s saying something, the genocide route in Undertale and most of Spec Ops: The Line both make you feel like shit and they work, the problem with The Last of Us Part II is that it’s not saying much, the message is essentially “revenge bad”, yep we all know that, do you really need to make us feel like shit for 20 hours to tell us that? Making us feel like shit works for the aforementioned Undertale and Spec Ops because in Undertale’s case you choose to be a shitty person and are punished for it, and in the case of Spec Ops it’s actually trying to say a lot of things about how dreadful war and glorifying it is, also the game’s like six hours long. Playing The Last of Us Part II is exhausting at times, it’s just 20 hours of you being told how shitty a person you are with very little pay off.
Really trying to avoid spoilers, the main thing everyone was mad about that happens in the first couple of hours I wasn’t too bothered by, it does a good job at putting you and Ellie on the same page for a bit (until you quickly realise that what’s happening is wrong and disconnect from Ellie which I also think is intentional).
Also, when it comes to Abby, I actually like her I would like a third game to focus on her (which it definitely won’t because everyone hates her).
I’ll probably do a full review of this at some point because I have a lot more to say but that’s getting into spoiler territory, just know I did like the game, I don’t play games just to have fun (in fact some of my favourite games of all time are pretty depressing and couldn’t really be classified as fun) so I went into this fully ready to love it, the problem is the miserable nature of this game isn’t really there to say much, I know revenge is bad The Last of Us Part II, you can stop yelling at me now.
8 / 10
10. Pikmin 3 Deluxe
Developer – Nintendo, Eighting
Director – Shigefumi Hino, Yuji Kando
Available On – Nintendo Switch
Should a remastering of a 2013 game realistically go on my 2020 list? Probably not but it has enough new content to be considered more than a port so why not put it on the list? Also, IMDb considers them as two separate games, so I’m going to use that as well as the word Deluxe to justify me putting it on this list, if you disagree than just move on to the next game I guess and pretend this was never even mentioned.
The Pikmin series deserves more, the games sell enough for Nintendo to not outright abandon the franchise but not enough to make new Pikmin games any kind of priority. Video games take a lot of time to make so of course Nintendo are going to focus on the franchises that make them more money, hell, if Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t like the franchise as much as he does, I don’t even think we’d have the three games, three ports, and spin-off that we currently have. It’s like Metroid, people want more of them, but not enough people to make them priorities like Mario, Pokémon, and Zelda are. And just like everything else in this franchise it appears that Pikmin 3 Deluxe sold alright, so yeah, we’ll probably get Pikmin 4 in around ten years. To be honest Nintendo probably shouldn’t have charged as much as they did for Pikmin 3 Deluxe, instead they should have packaged it alongside Pikmin and Pikmin 2 for £40. But nah Nintendo can’t run a company so we got a £50 version of a seven-year-old game, I can guarantee the price and the fact that many people would want to play Pikmin and Pikmin 2 first lost a huge chunk of potential buyers, so well-done Nintendo.
Before I discuss Pikmin 3 Deluxe, let’s quickly get my thoughts on the other two Pikmin games out of the way. I’ll probably do a true analysis of the games at some point so I’ll keep things brief. The original Pikmin is a 9 / 10 game, it’s short but infinitely replayable and still my favourite Pikmin game, it reminds me a lot of the original Portal, it doesn’t contain any unnecessary content and never wastes your time, I could play this game over and over and never get bored of it because of this, there is no point in the game which I dread having to replay, it’s just exploring and repairing your ship with your Pikmin buddies. Pikmin 2 is still really good being an 8 / 10 but it’s got big problems with it, for a start they removed the time limit which removes any kind of time management which was where a lot of the fun from the original Pikmin came from. They still have a day and night cycle which feels kind of pointless now, beforehand a passed day was scary, it was one less day you had to get home, now it’s just an annoyance. The caves would have been better if they weren’t so much of the focus, they’re fun but I’m having more fun when I’m on the surface exploring. So yeah, still solid stuff just with a few big flaws.
Pikmin 3 is slightly better than Pikmin 2 but not as good as the original. Let’s get my problems out of the way with this game and its deluxe version. I love in concept what they did with the time-management aspect, the more fruit you find the more days you have left, the problem is each fruit gives you way too much juice to the point where it goes back to time-management not being something you have to manage which kind of sucks. Pikmin 3 Deluxe adds a hard mode which I thought would be awesome but it turns out it’s just the original Pikmin 3 difficulty and Normal mode is just an easier version of Pikmin 3, what! It’s not like Pikmin 3 is a hard game, I’m all for easy options in games but package it as that, don’t make someone pick the easy mode when they click normal mode, luckily, I picked the hard difficulty so at least it was as difficult as the original version of Pikmin 3. They have another difficulty which you unlock after you beat it on hard mode which seems cool and I’ll definitely check out at some point, they just should have given it to us in the first place, I honestly despise Nintendo’s reluctance to ever just give us fucking difficulty options without being stupid about it. Pikmin 3 also spends a lot of time establishing its story before it lets you get on with stuff, of course I love stories in games but Pikmin 3 isn’t exactly Shakespeare, it’s a dumb Nintendo story so it kind of feels like if a Mario game opened with two hours where everyone discusses what the kidnapping of the Princess meant to them. Other than that holy shit is this game good.
The game looks gorgeous, it’s so vibrant and the lighting is just perfect. The juice physics are actually a technical marvel which is something you can’t often say in a Nintendo game, like they’re still the best liquid physics I’ve ever seen, everyone was talking about how great the liquid physics of Half-Life: Alyx were when they should have been praising Pikmin 3. The music is great, if only Nintendo would release their music on Spotify. The additions of the Rock and Flying Pikmin really add a new level of strategy to the game. Three captains allow for much more interesting puzzles than in any other Pikmin title.
When it comes to extra content added in the deluxe version the side-story involving Olimar and Louie is a lot of fun, it gives you a ton of mini puzzles to solve in a time limit and is a nice variation on the Pikmin formula.
So, would I recommend someone who has never played Pikmin pick up Pikmin 3: Deluxe? To be honest as much as I love it this is definitely another example of Nintendo being incompetent and charging full price for something that should be sold for cheaper. Yeah, if it was a brand-new game than I’d say the price tag is worth it but it doesn’t matter how many times you say it’s a deluxe version of an old game, it’s still a glorified port of a seven-year-old game, and seven-year-old games shouldn’t be priced at £50. I’d say if you know you absolutely love Pikmin than pick it up as it will be a great time, if not then I’d say look for the original two games but the prices for those seems to have gone up (in England anyway, check if you live elsewhere). I don’t know, I love the franchise and want as many people as possible to experience it but I can’t say in good conscience that this is a good deal, if you see it below £30 then pick it up but if not, I’d say leave it if you don’t already know you love Pikmin.
8 / 10
9. Carrion
Developer – Phobia Game Studio
Director – Sebastian Krośkiewicz, Krzysztof Chomicki
Available On – Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux
Something I love when playing video games is seeing ideas that have existed in other media for years finally being translated into video game mechanics. An idea that beforehand you could only watch or read, finally being playable. Carrion adapts the horror trope of people getting picked off one by one by a monster which they just can’t get a good look at, the idea of five strong armoured men being slowly killed until it’s just one panicked trembling mess left. This trope has been translated perfectly into gameplay in Carrion, the twist is you’re the monster.
A lot in Carrion is genius, you have low health and it’s hard to take out numerous people at once until really late game so you are encouraged to play like what I mentioned above, crawling through the vents taking people out one by one. The idea of the humans barely getting a glimpse of you is enhanced both by this stealth approach you’ll often have to take and the fact that you are so quick. From how I’ve described it you might think this isn’t a power fantasy, that couldn’t be any further from the truth though. It is definitely a power fantasy, you can easily take-out singular people, use growls and your tendrils to trick guards, you can quickly isolate people, kill and eat them, you’ll be taking people out very quickly and feel powerful even if most of the time you are still hiding in the vents. You know in a game like Hitman when you’ve mastered a map and you’re doing everything correct and you feel like a total badass, that’s what most of Carrion feels like, yeah it will only take a few shots to kill you but you always feel like you’re in control of a situation. This game is just so much fun and keeps introducing new abilities to keep things interesting.
There are a few problems which stop it from being higher on the list, there are two points where you just have to go back into old levels to continue, it doesn’t tell you to do so, you just have to do it. The game has a central hub which feels pointless, it diminishes the feeling of getting closer and closer to escaping into the human world because even if a level shows that you’re closer to the surface you’ll have to go back to the hub anyway. I guess it’s there to give you down time but the games puzzles do that well enough. I would have liked a few different locations than generic industrial complex, I get that it all needs to take place in one location to make sense but you can add more variety to some random industrial research place.
But yeah, go play Carrion it’s great.
8 / 10
8. Rayman Redemption
Developer – Ryemanni
Director – Ryemanni
Available On – Game Jolt
https://gamejolt.com/games/raymanredemption/340532
https://gamejolt.com/games/Rayman_ReDesigner/539216
I have a lot of nostalgia for the original Rayman, other than the original Spyro trilogy Rayman was probably my most played game as a kid, I owned it three times, on PlayStation, PC, and GameBoy Advanced, I fucking loved that game. With that in mind holy shit is it a mixed bag. On one hand you have one of the best video game soundtracks of all time, a game that still looks gorgeous 25 years later, a unique great feeling moveset, and an amazing sense of exploration, on the other hand you have some truly awful, unfair level design, the fact that you have to 100% it to even see the ending, and such an intense difficulty that the game isn’t even fun once you get past the second world. So, you have all the building blocks for a masterpiece just put together in a couple of hours by somebody who had something else on their mind that day. What if someone took those pieces, added a few more equally charming pieces and actually made functioning levels which are still difficult but don’t feel unfair, you get Rayman Redemption.
Created by Ryemanni, Rayman Redemption is part remake, part sequel to the original Rayman game and if I’m being honest there is now not much point going back to the original. Rayman Redemption has all the beautiful visuals and music of the original but they’re actually put together well, there is actually fair game design, every time I die it feels like my fault. And this game isn’t easy, you’re still going to die a ton but it’ll be because you didn’t react fast enough, not because a random pencil fell from the sky and Rayman can’t physically move fast enough to dodge it. And this game could have only been that, a remixed version of the 1995 classic with good level design but there is so much more to this, Rayman Redemption includes a completely new world which feels right at home among the original Rayman worlds, I can guarantee that someone new to Rayman wouldn’t be able to tell that the world is new. You know the Candy Château, the world which looked really cool but it only served as a final level instead of a full world to explore, well Rayman Redemption adds it as a full world. The game expands the ending giving you an entirely differently themed final level which maybe a future fan-game of Rayman Redemption could expand into a full world (joking, it’s a great final level but wouldn’t work as a full world). There is new mechanics, and pre-existing mechanics which are only touched upon a couple of times in the original are actually used to their full potential here. Also, you don’t need to 100% the game to see the ending.
If for some reason you want even more, fear not, Ryemanni has created Rayman ReDesigner, which allows you to create your own Rayman levels, the first version of that is out now, the link is also above.
It’s nice that Ubisoft seems to be more chill on fangames than the likes of Nintendo who would have taken it down by now. Rayman Redemption is another example that fans can often create better works than the huge triple A companies they are basing their work on, go check this out, it’s amazing.
8 / 10
7. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
Developer – Omega Force
Director – Ryouta Matsushita
Available On – Nintendo Switch
The original The Legend of Zelda popularised exploration in video games. It introduced saving, and introduced many people to gaming that was more complex than high score video games and platformers, it made video games grow as an art form and whilst it has definitely aged poorly, I have a lot of respect for it. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time showed people what open-world 3D games could be and is considered the best game of all time by people who love being wrong (I’m joking of course they’re entitled to their opinion). After open-world gaming was getting boring the Zelda series appeared again and gave us The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which made exploration in a huge open-world fun again. Breath of the Wild is going to be known as one of the most important games in video game history, it’s a masterpiece and one of my favourite games of all time, 10 / 10 I could play this game for thousands of hours and not get bored. This love for Breath of the Wild was enough to get me to play a Dynasty Warriors game in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, something that looked repetitive and like a power-fantasy with no substance to me. I was wrong this is great and I’ll definitely go back and play some other Dynasty Warrior’s games at some point.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a prequel to Breath of the Wild where you get to experience what happened before Link had his big old 100-year-long nap. A great concept that is definitely not done as well as it should have been due to a few reasons that will be going into spoilers, if you’ve played the game you know what I’m talking about. Whilst I went into this game to experience the story, I stayed for the gameplay.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity’s combat seems like it would be boring on first glance, oh yay, I get to kill thousands of enemies that barely fight back, the thing is that’s not what this game is, killing the helpless enemies is more of a palate-cleanser between the real meat of the game which is the bosses. The game goes like this, you have some objectives which are mostly killing bosses, in between those objectives are thousands of enemies that are so week that you can just walk through them if you want, it’s not the case of killing everything you see, that will definitely level you up quicker but there are other less tedious ways to do that in game so I wouldn’t worry about it. Killing these helpless minions just became something I did to feel overpowered for a second before I took on the next boss, it’s something you can do for as long or as little as you want, I’m not sure if that’s the case in other Dynasty Warrior games but in this one you can mostly ignore the weaker enemies. What I’d often do is just run through crowds of them doing a few heavy attacks to get some satisfying kills and then keep on moving leaving a ton of living enemies left because the bosses are so much fun to fight. The bosses come from Breath of the Wild so if you’ve played that game, you’ll know how to fight them to some extent (the combat is very different here though so it’s not a direct translation). To beat the bosses, you need to do a mix of perfect dodges, weakening to the point where you can use your more powerful attacks on them, using your sheikah slate whenever the opportunity arises, and hitting weak points. It’s so much fun and they introduce enough new bosses and playable characters throughout to keep it interesting. That’s another great thing about this game, the playable characters, they all play completely different and some of them even have completely separate movesets depending on what weapon they have equipped. Apparently, fans of other Dynasty Warrior games were disappointed at the lack of characters but as a newbie to the franchise the number of characters was way higher than I expected, I expected to play as Link, Zelda, and the Champions and that was it but you get way more than that, all with unique movesets. The sheikah slate allows every character to use bombs, the magnet, statis, and ice all in a unique way which is such a cool idea, these powers introduce a level of strategy to the game they all have a cooldown so you can choice to use them in your regular combat or you could wait until the opportune time to use them which appears with bosses from time to time which will allow you to do huge damage and stagger them.
Negatives time, a lot of the side-content is just giving resources to people which is boring and I can guarantee will just force a lot of grinding if you want to 100% the game. Since so many missions force you to have both Link and Zelda in your team and you can only have one other character with you, other characters end up under levelled and you are discouraged to keep changing up your team, other than Link and Zelda I only frequently used four other characters.
But yeah, other than those few minor issues I loved this game, I’d highly recommend it to anyone who likes Breath of the Wild.
8 / 10
6. Lethargy Hill
Developer – Kitty Horrorshow
Director – Kitty Horrorshow
Available On – itch.io
https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/haunted-cities-v4
On first glance Kitty Horrorshow’s Lethargy Hill appears pointlessly edgy, a game which just revolves around walking around as the world mutates and you’re told a story which is truly horrific. It’s only once you start to pay attention and analyse the words put in front of you that you realise the true intelligence of Lethargy Hill.
There are numerous things you can take from this game, a story of someone who craves normality but can’t achieve it because they’re so broken, a story of crippling loneliness, a story of religion, a story about game development, a story about creation in general, all of this in one of the most uncomfortable games I’ve ever played (in a good way). Both Exclusion Zone and Grandmother’s Garden at least have video game tropes in them which remind you that what you’re playing is fiction, Exclusion Zone has the explore around to learn the backstory trope whilst Grandmother’s Garden is straight up an adventure game and is in third-person which disconnects you to some extent from what’s happening. When I played Lethargy Hill the outside world really didn’t matter to me, I was there, which is something really hard to achieve, to achieve full immersion.
Genius touches like the story revolving around the house on the hill which you can’t escape from but you can’t truly be there, it makes you feel like a parasite, like you don’t belong (which seems to be a common theme in a lot of Kitty Horrorshow’s work) this feeling of just being there turns even more scary as the game starts to acknowledge you, it really feels like you’ve stumbled across something you shouldn’t have and the things you really don’t want to disturb have finally noticed you.
Play these games, I’ve linked them above.
8 / 10
5. Tenement
Developer – Kitty Horrorshow
Director – Kitty Horrorshow
Available On – itch.io
https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/haunted-cities-v4
Yeah, a game made by a single person which was distributed for free is in my top five games of 2020. I couldn’t stop thinking about Tenement after I beat it, I don’t think I truly understand it but I believe that’s kind of the point. All four of Kitty Horrorshow’s Haunted Cities Volume 4 games seem to have an overarching theme of stumbling somewhere you don’t belong, it fits the description “even blank signs and unlit roads lead somewhere”, these are places you’ve stumbled across where you really shouldn’t be, places that don’t make much sense on a physical level but are thematically rich. Never have I felt like I don’t belong somewhere as much I did when I played Tenement.
Tenement feels weirdly cosy at first, a game where you are talking to monsters who are discussing stuff which you only half understand but they seem friendly enough and the upbeat music really makes you feel welcome. It kind of feels like you’ve stumbled into a place which you don’t truly understand but any fear you’re feeling is simply coming from your lack of understanding, that you’re not in any danger. I spent time exploring and trying to work out where I was, believing at first it to be the afterlife because a lot of people were saying that they were dead but then I started to think maybe it was an unfinished video game level, I’ve built places like this in Unity before, half-finished environments with nothing stopping you from just walking off the edge but I think trying to place this location is pointless, it’s a place outside of our understanding and your existence there is hurting it.
Whilst Grandmother’s Garden and Lethargy Hill made you feel like you were in danger, Tenement makes you feel like the danger, every time you restart the game, things change for the worse. The creatures that inhabit this world are better off without you and that’s a disturbing feeling, the feeling of your mere existence causing so much pain, but the fact that you can just leave and stop these creatures from suffering but continue because you want to see what happens next is even more horrific. You can interpret this in many different ways, being about someone who truly hates themself and believes that their pure existence is hurting the world, it could be taken literally as your character not being compatible with that world, or like all the other games in this anthology it could be interpreted as being about creation.
The game challenges are perception of who the true monsters are which I know has been done a thousand times before but it’s done really well here. It’s in a horror game where we know the horror will be coming from somewhere so of course we latch on to the monsters that look evil, little do we know the true monster was us the whole time.
Tenement truly feels like being somewhere outside of our reality, it feels like a real place, but a real place that we’ll never be able to comprehend, the huge amounts of dialogue definitely help with that, you get to understand these characters to some extent but not fully because half of what they’re saying is so alien to you.
I genuinely find it hilarious that four games made by a single person and given away for free have beaten so much of these triple A games made by hundreds of devs, it really shows that no matter how many people work on something, it’s hard to beat a true work of passion.
Lastly it would be stupid of me to at least not try to look at these four games as part of a package, whilst they definitely do share themes of creation, losing passion, and stumbling upon somewhere you don’t belong, these games weren’t made together, they were made for Kitty Horrorshow’s Patreon’s throughout the year and were packaged together later, yes she most likely made them with the intention of putting them into one of her Haunted Cities collections, but I don’t think they’re four pieces of a greater whole, just four amazing horror games which happen to share some of the same themes.
8 / 10
4. Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Developer – Moon Studios
Director – Thomas Mahler
Available On – Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
The most important aspect of platformers is how they feel to play. There have been endless platformers released but 99.9% of them are immediately forgotten, yeah that could be to do with bad marketing, bad level design, an unmemorable setting etc but it’s surprising what platformers are considered classics because they have great controls but little else. Have you played the original Mega Man, the level-design is atrocious but Mega Man is fun to control. As mentioned earlier the original Rayman has awful level-design but is known as a classic due to the unique and fun to control main character. If a character is fun to control a lot of other problems can be ignored. Is this relevant to Ori and the Will of the Wisps? Well it was incredibly buggy at launch but is still one of my favourite games of 2020, so yeah I’d say it’s relevant.
The game has a lot going for it in numerous areas, it’s beautiful, it’s got a heart-warming story which may or may-not have made me cry, and it’s got an amazing soundtrack, but it’s the controls which I can’t get out of my head. You start off pathetic as you often do in metroidvania’s but by the end of the game you’re barely touching the ground, you’re chaining moves together to navigate areas that seemed impossible to ever traverse at the beginning of the game. Yeah, I know that’s just how all good metroidvania’s work but I’ve never played a metrodivania where the moves chain together so well, a game where the whole moveset works together as one.
If I didn’t have to wait for some bug fixes to play the game this would probably be a 9 / 10 but during the first few days of owning this game I had constant audio issues which cut through the atmosphere so hard that I just didn’t want to play it in that state. I expect a game to be finished when it’s released for purchase. I know it’s unfortunately commonplace in video games nowadays but it shouldn’t be. I’ll always dock points for glitches that effected my enjoyment of the game, and the sad thing is it’s not usually the developer’s fault. Games are hard to make and developers are so often pushed to release unfinished games by the higher ups, it’s why I don’t want to get into the industry, I like making games but I’m happy developing weird artsy games for whoever the hell wants to play them without making it my career. But yeah, the bugs seem gone now but that doesn’t mean the game was released in an acceptable state. Still one of the best games of the year though.
8 / 10
3. Ghost of Tsushima
![Ghost of Tsushima official Wallpaper Banner [Image] : PS4](https://external-preview.redd.it/VzcL3IMDmg-tH4XqsLJZ0KP74U8IM3dt0uW06rNC58g.jpg?auto=webp&s=1f9c1851306a9f725ac46c1c014d58cc8e23e909)
Developer – Sucker Punch Productions
Director – Nate Fox, Jason Connell
Available On – PlayStation 4
Into the top three let’s go.
I, like many have become numb to open-world games. They’re often too long and are just filled with overly repetitive tasks, they feel more like filling out a spreadsheet than playing a game. I get the appeal that they’ll give you something to do for hundreds of hours but I prefer shorter sweeter experiences. So, whilst I avoid huge open-world games like the plague most of the time, Ghost of Tsushima seemed different so of course I had to give it a go. For a start it was developed by Sucker Punch who made the Sly Cooper and inFamous games which granted them my respect, and according to hltb the game only takes 24 hours (which I recognise isn’t short, but seeing how a lot of open-world games easily take 50 hours to beat I’m happy with 24 hours), what’s this? An open-world game that might not be insanely padded. The setting looked interesting as well, it wasn’t generic fantasy or generic city it was 1200s Japan, now that’s an interesting setting I can get behind.
So, I played the game and yeah there’s so much to love about it. Let’s get the few flaws out of the way first so I can fanboy over it uninterrupted after. It still has a few of the open-world trappings that keep me avoiding the majority of the genre, the game has crafting which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own but it does manage to fall into that bad spot of their being just enough ingredients to be annoying to craft things whilst not enough to make the hunt for those items interesting and have a payoff. The generic climbing that was popularised by Assassins Creed is in this game (yeah, I know climbing was in games before that like in Prince of Persia but I’m talking about the just point the analog stick in one direction as your character does everything kind of climbing). There is still slight padding in the story, it feels like it could easily be about five hours shorter and not lose anything of note.
Ok, other than that the game is amazing. The game manages to feel magical yet still realistic with its visuals alone, most games set in a real life environment won’t try to find the beauty in that environment, when adapting a forest most developers will just create green trees and grass, Sucker Punch realised that not all leaves are green and flowers do exist. I know that doesn’t sound like much but green can only be so beautiful, adding huge strokes of colour to the world make is so much more appealing yet since the colour is coming from a realistic source instead of something more abstract the game retains its realism. It manages to feel like a real place and a beautiful painting at the same time. This game realises how important lighting is which is something many games ignore, there is no way to mesmerise me quicker than amazing lighting and Ghost of Tsushima has that. I love it when games take abstract mechanics that are present in numerous games and give them context in the world, Hades, Super Meat Boy, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time all do this with death, Fallout and Firewatch do this with menus, and Ghost of Tsushima does this with that little line you often follow in games to get to your location. Ghost of Tsushima will have wind blow in the direction of your objective whenever you want, it’s honestly breath-taking to the point where I’d often do it even when I knew where I was going just because it was so cool seeing the wind blowing through the trees.
The story is surprisingly good, I never expect much from open-world stories because they’re usually kind of lacking but nope this story actually made me feel something, it has fully realised characters who go through believable and interesting arcs, I know that should be the bare minimum but video game stories are often kind of trash and that’s coming from someone who believes they’re the future of entertainment and might even eventually kill off movies.
But anyway, yeah, this game is great, it managed to rise above the usual triple A open-world mess and be an actually really good game.
8 / 10
2. Final Fantasy VII Remake
Developer – Square Enix
Director – Tetsuya Nomura, Naoki Hamaguchi, Motomu Toriyama
Available On – PlayStation 4
Never in a million years did I think Final Fantasy VII Remake would be this high up on my list. For a start I’ve never beaten the original Final Fantasy VII (I’ve played through all of Midgar though so I can compare this to the original to some extent), although I do plan on fixing that after university. The game stretches a four-hour story into a 30 to 40 hour one. Tetsuya Nomura directed it and his work is very hit or miss for me, another one of his games is near the bottom of this list which I think highlights that pretty well. It was a remake of a pretty janky game from what I played of the original, and you know how fanboys are, if a remake improves on something, they’ll cry that it’s not faithful enough, bitch you can still play the original. So yeah, I shouldn’t have liked it but I couldn’t put it down and I can’t wait for the sequel.
I can’t think of any other example where something has been this stretched out but still remained as a quality piece of art. This game is almost ten times as long as the content it’s based off, it should be shit but there’s very few times where the game actually feels padded, they use the additional time to flesh out characters who had a couple of lines in the original, Jessie went from a nobody to a fan favourite character, Biggs and Wedge are actual characters in this. Characters like Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, and Barrett are expanded upon, given new layers to make them even more engaging, I think I left the game having a crush on all four of them (oh and Jessie of course, sorry Biggs and Wedge, you’re not my type). This game fleshed out elements that you didn’t pay any attention to in the original, yeah, the game still feels kind of padded in some areas, you could easily cut around five to ten hours off the game and it’d be a much better end product, but seeing that most of it should have felt like padding it’s impressive.
This game has amazing voice acting, like the voice acting alone made me feel things which is unfortunately rare in video game voice acting. Cody Christian does a great job as Cloud Strife who isn’t an easy character to play, Cody had to play a character who doesn’t want to show emotion but can’t help it sometime, and the act of showing an emotion whilst audibly suppressing the expression of said emotion can’t be easy, the nuances in Cody’s performance is what makes it so special. Barrett is arguably the most difficult character to voice, he’s a character whose speeches are meant to rally people to his cause, if the performance is off, even slightly, you wouldn’t believe that so many people would rally behind him, but John Eric Bentley does such a good job. You can truly understand why Barrett would have such a strong following, the speeches are actually powerful stuff and John Eric Bentley’s delivery makes them even more powerful, “A good man… who serves a great evil… is not without sin. He must recognize and accept his complicity. He must open his eyes to the truth- that his corporate masters are profiting from the planet’s pain” is still one of the most powerful and most honest quotes I’ve ever heard and it is perfectly delivered. I love what they did with Aerith in this, a lot of the time when you make a super nice character, they end up boring, not Aerith, she’s super nice, wants everyone to be ok but isn’t afraid to get into a fight, she’s happy to banter with her friends, she’s slightly flirty, genuinely funny, looks on the bright-side of her shitty situation and Briana White does an amazing job at conveying all of this. Playing a character that complex must be difficult. Britt Baron does a great job as Tifa, just like the other party members she’s deep, she doesn’t know the line she’s willing to cross yet, she wants to save the planet but doesn’t agree with all of Barrett’s actions, you can tell how conflicted Tifa is because of Britt’s voice talents. Everyone did a great job in this, and in an industry where bad voice acting is sadly the norm it’s nice having a consistently good cast.
The combat is great, when a game has numerous playable characters there will usually be at least one you don’t like playing as, that’s not really the case here, it feels super satisfying to mix magic and slashing with Cloud, dishing out the damage whilst standing back avoiding the enemies mostly was a lot of fun to do with Aerith, she’s a character where you always need to worry about her positioning more-so that usual which was fun, Tifa was great, landing huge combos on enemies is just fun and they managed to make all of her punches feel so powerful, Barrett is straight up a third-person shooter which amazingly doesn’t feel bad. Usually when a game just switches genres the different genres gameplay isn’t going to be as polished as the rest of it or as satisfying to play but nope Barrett feels amazing to play as.
The game looks gorgeous. Midgar looks amazing, everything is just so detailed which makes the flat images used occasionally seem slightly jarring, like I get that it would be a lot of 3D models to load but there must be something you can do other than just loading an obviously flat image and calling it a day. The amazing character models and facial animation really helps you connect to these people.
The soundtrack is amazing, I want the soundtrack on Spotify, I need it on Spotify.
This game is great, I’ll probably do a full spoiler filled review of it at some point once I’ve gotten the time to replay it because I have a few more positives and negatives that I can’t really bring up because spoilers. Anyway, onto my game of the year.
8 / 10
1. Hades
Developer – Supergiant Games
Director – Amir Rao, Gavin Simon, Greg Kasavin, Eduardo Gorinstein, Alice Lai
Available On – Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, macOS
Hades reminded me of why I love video games, very few games are interested in improving the art form, in taking any risks. Most games are designed to trick you into spending money. Most games lack an identity of their own, and just feel like everything else on the market, oh and they’re really glitchy because they were rushed. Not to mention how cruel the video game industry can be, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about a game when you know hundreds of people were broken to get it made. Hades is the opposite of this, it’s a game that I truly believe will lead to future games weaving their narratives and gameplay in much more interesting ways, there’s no stupid microtransactions, I brought the game and now I can access all it has to offer without having to pay anything more. It definitely has an identity, it feels like nothing else on the market, I encountered zero glitches when playing the game because it wasn’t rushed, and from what it seems all the developers were treated really well. Hades is another example of why indie games are the place to look when you want interesting video games, five of the nine games I currently consider a 10 / 10 are indie games (The Stanley Parable, What Remains of Edith Finch, Undertale, Celeste, and The Beginner’s Guide, the four triple A games are Portal, Portal 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and The Last of Us if you were wondering). So, let’s talk about my 2020 game of the year a bit shall we and don’t worry no spoilers.
Hades follows Zagreus as he attempts to escape the underworld much to the distain of his father Hades who is the god of the underworld. Aiding you on your quest to escape is the Gods of Olympus but even their power isn’t going to make escape easy as every time you die you don’t just respawn at the closest checkpoint, you respawn right at the beginning of the game. Unlike many roguelikes and roguelites there is a story reason for you going back to the beginning every time you die. Where do you go when you die? Hell, so of course it makes sense. This is just one of the many examples of Supergiant Games weaving the narrative and the mechanics together beautifully. A roguelite was the perfect genre for Hades, by making it a really difficult game that you just have to keep trying over and over again it really emulates the feeling of escaping hell (or at least I think it does, I’ve never personally escaped hell but with the way the Earth currently is I’m convinced I’m in it). Whilst death in a lot of games like this would feel punishing, it doesn’t here. There are so many variables in each run that you never get bored, dying gives you an excuse to chat to all your mates in the House of Hades which allows you increase your friendship with characters and progress the numerous little narratives that exist in the game. A lesser game would only have these narratives exist in the House of Hades but nope, a lot of these narratives involve you speaking to specific characters in your escape attempts and the fact that you need nectar to progress the friendships in the House of Hades which can mostly be found in your escape runs makes both portions of the game feel connected. Also, when you’re escaping you can befriend the Gods of Olympus, they’re all such interesting characters and becoming close to them, seeing them argue with other gods, and even sometimes attack you is fascinating and a lot of fun. Also, the fact that you get different gods giving you their powers each run alongside the game encouraging you to switch your weapons around will always mean new escape attempts feel different.
Can we briefly appreciate the amount of voice acting here, I’ve played for around 30 hours and I’m still consistently hearing new voice lines, it’s amazing.
My only minor gripe is that some weapons really don’t feel as fun as others but that’s just a nitpick. Play this game it’s so good and it is easily my game of the year 2020.
9 / 10
So that was a long list wasn’t it. If you liked the list make sure to follow me on Twitter, and follow Mainstream404 on WordPress and Facebook if you want to stay up to date on my new content. Now that the ranking articles are complete, I’m going to go back to my Pixar marathon, expect the Ratatouille article to be out in the next few weeks, you might get a couple of smaller articles in between, who knows? Thank you so much for reading it means a lot to me. Thank you and bye bye.
Mainstream404 