Endgame Viable 2020 Awards

I only bought one new game in 2020 so it will be very easy to pick my own personal Game of the Year for 2020. But I also talk about a few other noteworthy games I played during the year.

Previous awards:

• 2019 Awards
• 2018 Awards
• 2017 Awards
• 2016 Awards
• 2015 Awards
• 2014 Review
• 2013 Review

A lot of other people pick their “game of the year” from among all the games that they played in a given year, to give a larger spread of games to choose from. I stubbornly refuse to do so, and only pick from among new games that I purchased and played within a given year. That’s because I specifically want to punish the games industry for failing to make new games that appeal to me personally.

And The Winner Is

With no further ado, it’s The Last Of Us, Part II on the PS4. That was my Game of the Year for 2020. It’s the only 2020 game I bought in 2020.

The story was fantastically crafted, thought-provoking, and particularly relevant to “these challenging times” of 2020. The gameplay was demanding and an improvement over the original. The game shipped in perfect condition at launch, with no significant bugs or problems, possibly the last AAA game to do so we will see in our lifetime.

For the record, I did record my entire blind playthrough, but I have not uploaded it mainly because I never uploaded my The The Last Of Us playthrough. I also like to keep my channel somewhere within the realm of “family friendly” and these games aren’t that.

Games I Skipped

Buzzworthy 2020 games I didn’t buy, but might get at some unspecified future time in a sale:

• Cyberpunk 2077. The cyberpunk genre has never particularly appealed to me, and I was able to resist the one-week FOMO period. I’ll wait for a sale and some bug fixes early in 2021.
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Origins and Odyssey were terrible Assassin’s Creed games, so it was easy to decide to wait for a deep discount sale.
• DOOM Eternal. This is just DOOM 2016 for a second time, so it was a no-brainer to wait for a sale. It was half price within months of release.

Other Games

Other noteworthy games I enjoyed (belatedly) in 2020:

• Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4)
• Pathologic 2 (PC)
• Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (PC)
• Doki Doki Literature Club! (PC)
• Remnant: From The Ashes (PC)
• Far Cry 4 (PC)
• Assassin’s Creed Franchise (PC). “Enjoyed” is a strong word for some of the latter entries.

Incidentally, none of those games were better than The Last Of Us, Part II, so even if I had included them for contention, they wouldn’t have won the coveted Endgame Viable Game of the Year prize anyway.

MMORPGs

The only new MMORPGs I played in 2020 were a New World beta (which was technically an alpha) and a Crowfall beta, neither of which impressed me much. I played Everquest II for a short time early in the year, and I played an hour or two of Astellia Online.

And that’s it for 2020. As of this writing, there isn’t a single game on the horizon that I’m looking forward to getting at launch in 2021. Thank god there’s a ton of older games around to play.