Gamers, look around you. The truth can't be denied: we’re in the midst of a great gaming year. Already in 2023 we’ve had killer blasts from the past with Resident Evil 4, Dead Space, System Shock, and Metroid Prime Remastered, plus a full-fledged vision of our gaming future with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Not everything has been a revolution or a remake, and 2023 has chugged along with remarkably solid triple-A sequels like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Dead Island 2, Diablo 4, Street Fighter 6, and Octopath Traveler 2, plus standout new IP like Hi-Fi Rush and Season: A Letter to the Future.
As my colleague Tessa Kaur recently pointed out in their rundown of the year to come, 2023 only gets busier from here. July will bring Final Fantasy 16, Remnant 2, and Telltale's The Expanse adaptation. August has Baldur's Gate 3, Armored Core 6, and Sea of Stars. September is a solar system unto itself with Starfield, Mortal Kombat 1, and Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion. And October marks the return of Spider-Man, Alan Wake, and old school Assassin's Creed. When it's all said and done, 2023 might go down as one of the great years in gaming history.
But, it hasn't actually been all that long since we had an S-tier year. Though 2017 — which introduced the world to Breath of the Wild, NieR: Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, Hollow Knight, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Super Mario Odyssey, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Night in the Woods — frequently gets lauded as one of the all-time best years, there's another recent year that we frequently overlook: 2020.
It can be easy to forget how good 2020 was in games because it was uniquely awful in most other respects. But, if we keep our focus on gaming, the fact that the year ended with the messy launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which many players expected to be the alpha and omega of RPGs, left a sour taste in many a Game Fuel-coated mouth. I was one of those disappointed gamers. When I think back to that year in gaming, I remember the thought of playing Cyberpunk being a major oasis that got me through a terrible year.
But Cyberpunk was a rare disappointment in a slate that otherwise represents a number of studios operating at the height of their powers. The Last of Us Part 2 is the most obvious example, and though that game got a polarizing reception at launch, the further I get from it, the more it impresses me as a work of singular mood and power. Though triple-A gaming has, in the past 10 years, been molded in The Last of Us' image, there's no game that feels quite like its sequel.
That year brought two other long-awaited returns, too. Half-Life: Alyx, which I was reviewing when Illinois, where I live, went into lockdown, and Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which I devoted long days to in the vacation I had planned in advance for that April, which ended up being a forced hiatus as many of the websites I worked with temporarily closed to freelance submissions.
This is the trouble you run into when you try to talk about 2020 in gaming at all. If I write about the sheer amount of Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons I played in March and April, I can't help but situate those games in the first month of a crisis that was unlike anything I, or anyone, had ever lived through.
The Last of Us Part 2 came out one month into that summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings. I was playing through Ghost of Tsushima as I read about conservatives beginning to rally around Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante then-teenager who killed two innocent people at a protest in the summer of 2020. I was playing Watch Dogs: Legion for guides in the lead up to the presidential election in the United States, and doing the same for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla as the country waited to see if Donald Trump would accept his election loss. When the new consoles launched at the end of the year, they were extremely difficult to find because of the chip shortage brought about by a supply chain crisis that the pandemic caused.
“Everything happens so much,” goes the old adage, and 2020 was a year when everything happened and the only distraction from it all was video games. Online games brought isolated friends and family together, and Among Us, Fall Guys, Phasmophobia, and Jackbox Party Pack 6 will forever be associated with that time for many players. Hades and Spelunky 2 gave them comfort when they were alone. Pumpkin Jack and Spider-Man: Miles Morales helped bring a sense of time and place when the day on the calendar felt irrelevant. 2020 was a great year for games, but I mostly remember how bad everything around me was as I played them.