Wow, 2020 has been a year to say the least, but hey we’ve got games to play to keep us busy right? So let’s highlight some of my top games from one hell of a year.

Bronze: Superliminal

If nothing else Superliminal is a technical achievement with the it handles physics scaling and transforming objects. The heart of its puzzles is how it plays with perspectives, as an example for some of the basic early puzzles you might need to grab an object and move it close to you at your feet to shrink the object essentially scaling it directly to your perspective. It’s an interesting experiment with the unique experience of games.

I got some additional enjoyment from it as during the brief period where indoor socialising was permitted, got to witness a friend going through it and trying to piece together how the perspective puzzles worked.

Silver: Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Many years after the PS3 tech demo dazzled everybody we have an actual HD Final Fantasy 7. Well kind of it isn’t a remake of the full Final Fantasy 7 instead being a part one focusing on just Midgar. If I’m honest this had me nervous expecting an open world experience with icons vomited over the map but I was pleased to see it was a more linear experience that didn’t feel padded.

It is a game of 2 halves it has some really cool moments and the way it’s adapted the turn based ATB from the original to a more action style is impressive. But on the other side the plot starts to go a bit off the rails later. Clearly, they didn’t want to just directly remake FF7 and wanted to do some of there own stuff, and that includes modern Nomura’s tendency to want to keep setting up stuff that will “definitely” pay off in later games.

Gold: Animal Crossing New Horizons

I feel you’ve got to take the context of the year when considering the game of the year, and well Animal Crossing New Horizons could not have timed it’s release better if Nintendo themselves had engineered the virus.

In a year where we’ve been trapped inside and life has been put on hold for a lot of us it was the perfect, the chance to go out, socialise and work towards goals. On a personal note I’d been planning on house hunting during 2020 and getting my own place which has obviously been paused so decorating rooms has been something I’ve really enjoyed.