As we all know, time is a construct created by human beings. According to Scientific American, it is believed that the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time at least 5,000 years ago. They had calendars to organise activities and public events or even schedule the shipment of goods. Little did they know that 5,000 years later, humanity would use their hard work to create one of the worst scourges to plague the Earth: Game of the Year Lists.

I've always found Game of the Year lists to be a bit bizarre. How can people bestow a game the prestige of Game of the Year? Who actually decides? How is game X better than game Y? What about different genres? I much prefer That Thing where That Website gets a bunch of Developers and Important People together to make their own personal lists, so that's what I'm going to do here for myself. And very much in That Website's fashion, it's going to be games that I've played this year. Not games that have necessarily been released this year. This has the unfortunate side effect of Dota 2 being included. Oh well, here we go.

A Monster's Expedition: Through Puzzling Exhibitions

Despite somehow having the best and worst name for a video game on the planet, A Monster's Expedition deserves a spot on this list for being a puzzle game that understands what the genre is. The issue I have with puzzle games is that I am far too dumb; the complexity ramps up to such a degree that I am no longer having fun anymore. I go from the "Aha!" moment to the "Oh, come on! Really?!" moment in a very short period of time. See the last 50% of Baba is You or the last 90% of The Witness to understand what I mean. A Monster's Expedition is different. It's simple, really: you push logs about on a grid. The map is made up of various islands and you have to push the logs in order to build bridges to take you to each one. That's it. Along the way, you are treated to some exhibitions of human paraphernalia where the monsters have comically misunderstood the purpose of what each item is for. The writing is hilarious and works as a great reward for the puzzles.

Sorry for spoiling this one, but don't worry, all of the exhibitions are just as good.

But the special thing about A Monster's Expedition is the way it ramps up the complexity. It does it in such a gradual way that you never feel stuck for too long. I don't know how they've managed to do it. It subtly introduces ways of solving puzzles which feels completely natural and makes you feel smart when you go back to previous islands and use your new found knowledge to solve puzzles that kept you stumped (get it?). It does all of this with one mechanic. Basically, it's The Witness, but it's actually good and funny and not pretentious. It's easily the best puzzle game I've played since Portal 2, and, who knows, might be even better still.

Talking about The Last of Us 2

The Last of Us 2 was a great game to play. It was a lot of fun to sneak around and stab zombies in the neck or start mowing down bad guys (who have names now) by the thousands with a machine gun while Ellie calls them a "fucker". What wasn't fun was the way the game held players accountable for actions that they have no control over, save from turning their PS4 off and throwing their £50 game in the bin. The Last of Us 2 aimed for 53 different points on the artistic spectrum and hit about 3 of them. Its depiction of violence feels pointless and the characters actions are so disconnected from the player that you end up screaming at your television by the end, begging them to stop (I didn't do that of course because I'm not a nerd). The Last of Us 2 is not on my Games of the Year list.

But it did create a lot of good conversation around these ideas. It's fun to talk about. My Last of Us 2 post is probably the one I'm most proud of this year because there was a lot of interesting topics to dive in to. And a lot of it isn't necessarily about what the game does well: it's about what the game could have done better. I hope games that aspire to be The Last of Us 2 look at what it did and learn from its mistakes. Perhaps one day we'll get a big budget game that tackles (poor choice of words) these issues much better than The Last of Us 2 did. Also, it was fun to see Gamers get upset because there was a woman in it with Big Arms.

What's that, you want to read some words that I wrote about The Last of Us 2? Ugh, fine, click here

Persona 5 Royal, Persona 4 Golden, Persona 3 FES

2020 has been a bit of a year, with most of it being spent confined to our homes. Many people latched on to video games as a supporting mechanism. While I would have loved to have nominated Animal Crossing: New Horizons as That Supporting Video Game, I unfortunately don't have enough soft logs to craft that opinion and I don't really want to go through my 45th axe in order to get it, so let's talk about Persona instead.

There was a discussion that bubbled up this year about video games being too long. I don't think there's a problem with video games being too long; I think there's a problem with video games being poorly paced, and unable to accommodate playthroughs over many months. This is why, despite each game taking 100 or so hours to complete, I don't think Persona games are too long. They are the perfect games to rely on if certain external factors are bad. The gameplay loop is the same: each day you wake up, go to school and work on the large objective that looms over your head like a surprisingly pleasant cloud. Sometimes you can focus on levelling up your Personas (Pokémon) while trying to work out the optimal moveset for each of them to increase your success in battle, but if you're not feeling it on that day, you can just relax and watch conversations unfold about a tough-as-nails dude struggling to express himself through his hobby of arts and crafts or an artist overcoming his slump or maybe even an heiress to a family inn that doesn't want to be the next in line.

There's no real pressure with Persona. You can play for half an hour at a time, or you can play for ten. The stories are simple enough that you won't have to remember the smaller details, but still interesting enough to keep you invested. And the soundtrack will make you think about Persona even when you're not playing Persona because the soundtrack bops incredibly hard.

If you didn't have this playing in your head today, don't worry, you do now.

Persona 5 Royal is easily my Game of the Year, and Golden probably is after that. But the more I think about it, the more I think it was the circumstances surrounding my playthroughs rather than the games themselves. There might be a world out there where our governments are competent and the pandemic never ran rampant. I still play Persona 5 Royal out of curiosity, but after five minutes I shrug and go "Eh, the combat's a bit crap" and never play it again.

Dota 2

The Earth has made another full rotation around the Sun and I am still playing Dota 2. It's not really had a great year - there's not been any international tournaments so it's difficult to for Valve to determine the best heroes to change. The meta has been a sort of gelatinous blob of good heroes and items. One month it's a good idea to buy Hand of Midas; the next you're thrown out of the lobby for even thinking about doing so. It's been ostensibly the same patch for the entire year and things have been crawling at a snails pace. Even the special events have felt lacklustre without any major tournament presence to back it up. For the first time in ten years, Dota 2 is not the game with the largest prize pool in esports history and the best eighteen teams in the world did not compete at The International.

It's still fun to play though, especially with some friends. I've had a blast playing Oracle in the middle lane - something that, to a regular player, sounds absolutely mental since Oracle is a support hero, but it's worked really well for me. That's the beauty of Dota 2. You're able to innovate and think outside the box. Even after thousands of hours, you still find a new cool thing to try. Sometimes it works; sometimes it fails miserably, but the game never gets old. If we're not dead by the end of 2021, I'd wager you'll see Dota 2 show up on this list again.

Doing a lot of heavy lifting for the Oracle Mid statistics.

Hades

Sometimes, when a game comes out, you instantly know that it's special. It's not the fact that Hades interweaves its mechanics into its story like a tapestry or that it has polish oozing out of its edges or even that it doesn't have a final boss that Sucks Complete Ass. It's all of these things. Hades is a game that will be the baseline for roguelikes for the next five years, much like FTL: Faster than Light was. It's a game that rewards the most hardcore players, while also providing doors to those who aren't particularly fussed about learning attack patterns or optimal builds.

It has a final boss that doesn't Suck Complete Ass.

There is thought placed in pretty much every corner. It resembles The Stanley Parable in that you can try something that's so out of the box, so left field of what the developers expect you to do… and yet the developers have expected it somehow. There is dialogue for every small instance, every possible interaction that it's a nightmare to imagine how any of this actually got made. Where did the money come from? How do you even think about all of this? I can only imagine that the (virtual) walls of Supergiant's (virtual) office looks like a conspiracy chart.

It takes so many things that we are used to with roguelikes and flips them on its head. Every run matters. Each run feels (mostly) fair, the only thing between you and taking down Dad is your ability to push buttons on a controller. It completely breaks the notion that roguelikes have to be unfair to be good. It has a final boss. That doesn't. Suck. Complete Ass. A genuinely incredible achievement in the rougelike genre. I hope we take many a lessons from it. Mainly about making final bosses that don't Suck Complete Ass

Psst! Do you want to learn more about the things Hades does to separate itself from the other games of the roguelike genre? Don't worry, I won't judge. Click here!

Among Trees

This year I spoke some words into a microphone about No Mans Sky and how it's lost a little bit of what made it special on launch. No Mans Sky was a tranquil game with a gameplay loop that got turned into a never-ending checklist of boring tasks. Among Trees is the answer to that.

It's in early access and it's the bad kind where it's not 90% finished, but what's there is still worth talking about. It's a survival game where you're alone in the woods, but it's more Firewatch than DayZ. You build up a cabin, collecting various plants and tree branches in order to establish yourself. But it's not really about survival: it's about introspection.

Do you ever feel like leaving society behind and going out into the woods, chopping firewood, fishing and foraging for berries because JavaScript is just that bad? This game is the closest you'll get to living out that fantasy. It's a survival game that's not about the survival; It's about having a rather nice time walking around in some incredibly pretty looking forestry, idly looking for that one Chicory you need to build your greenhouse. It feels very earthy. I don't think I've played that many games like it.

Its gameplay loop is very clever. The days are intentionally short - there's only so much you can do in one day, so you're forced to centre yourself around your cabin. But it's not a stressful affair either - the punishment for not making it to your cabin in nightfall is a generous several minutes before you freeze to death. I've not died at all on my playthrough. The short days gives the game structure. Today is the day you need wood for building a kitchen, so you spend ten minutes chopping wood while listening to the birds before the day is over. The next day you venture out a bit more and find a cave with valuable rocks that you need to build your storage room.

I also want to make clear that this game does not feel like a craftathon, contrary to my description. You won't be trawling around in crafting trees to make one thing to make another thing to make another thing. The recipes are simple and straightforward. The focus here is on the exploration. Despite its early access status, a lot of polish has been put into the animations, making you feel very connected to Fake Nature. The animation that plays when you finish cooking is somehow one of the best animations I have seen in a video game. I'm serious.

It has big 'Lo-fi Chillhop Beats to Relax/Study/Chop Trees to' vibe

It has a long, long way to go, but what I've played so far has been more than worth it to fit amongst the rest of these games. I seriously hope the game doubles down on what makes it special. Make sure you turn the bears off.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla?

Look, I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game in about seven years. If you told me that Assassin's Creed Valhalla would be on this list at the start of the year, I'd be very concerned for my wellbeing. Yet here we are.

It's not really Assassin's Creed, but shedding that façade makes it all the better for it. Ubisoft have managed to take many of Breath of the Wild's interesting components and add their own spin on it. It's nowhere near as good, but it gives me hope that a lot of the essence of what makes open world games interesting - the exploration and the emergence - is present here. Simply exploring the beautiful, haunting ruins of the Roman Britain is a joy and the characters and story have come a long way from the stilted, awkward conversations of previous games. Eivor and her cast of comrades are genuinely charming to watch bounce off of each other.

Woah, look at that cool Viking, too bad he doesn't exist in my game because I'm playing as female Eivor.

There's also so much here, but for the first time in a while, it doesn't feel like I'm checking off of a list. Locations are obscured from the player, just dots on a map. You have a general idea of what you're going to find when you get there, but you're not exactly sure what awaits. There are seemingly innocuous side quests that lead to entire new areas, including one such area that I was not expecting at all, featuring one of the most impressive bait and switches that video games has to offer.

There is still some classic Ubisoft shenanigans on display here. Not everything is fun, but just enough of it is to make playing worthwhile. It's a bit of a task though. I am still no where near finishing it, so let's hope the ending doesn't suck or this inclusion will be very embarrassing.

The Idea of Playing Lair of the Clockwork God

I'm sorry, okay? It's been a terrible year. I haven't had the chance to play all the games I've wanted to. I own Lair of the Clockwork God. It's right there. In my Steam library. I played it for an hour I think, but for some reason just didn't get to finish it. I don't really know why, I must have got distracted or maybe I got stuck on a puzzle. Every time I read a tweet about it, I feel a tinge of regret. Ah yes, that's the game I bought, but haven't really started yet. Oh, everyone is saying it's good, I should really get round to it. Wow, it's meant to be quite funny, that kind of game really appeals to me. It's right there, you have it installed, you don't have to do anything. Just play it. You can join the Cool People club of people who have. I've heard they get a badge sent to them in the post.

I don't even have it installed anymore. That's how little faith I have in myself.

Well it hasn't worked out. Here's to the games that we didn't get to play this year, despite wanting to. Perhaps at some point maybe I'll just pretend that I have played it. When someone brings it up, I can stroke my proverbial chin and say "Ah yes, I've played that game, very impressive indeed, I like the puzzles" but deep down I know that I'm a fraud. A conman. A coward. I haven't played Lair of the Clockwork God and it's not even for any good reason. I just haven't. I suppose I could play it in 2021, it's not like there's an expiry date on it, but will it feel the same? Will I be part of the crowd who is on the cutting edge of video games? Probably not. If I try to start any discourse around it next year people will know. They'll whisper. "He's talking about Lair of the Clockwork God? That game came out last year. Isn't this the man that's meant to have his finger on the pulse? Shameful". I could set it as my New Years Resolution? Well that's no good either, we all know that New Years Resolutions are statistically likely to fail. Might as well just not bother. I will carry this burden of regret for the rest of my life, bottling each unplayed game up like a potion seller. Eventually I will reach a full shelf of games that look quite good, but I still haven't played. Exposed. For all to see.

Anyway, hon-ments are Monster Train and the Command and Conquer Remaster. One is an attempted refinement on what came before and the other is a remaster of Command and Conquer. See you next year