Alex Navarro s Top 11-ish Games of 2020
Thank you to @nomchonks on Twitter for this strange, but wonderful image.
Alex Navarro is an editor for Giant Bomb, and doesn t especially feel like writing a jokey bio this year. He s @alex navarro on Twitter.
Trying to care about video games in 2020 felt like trying to eat a nice breakfast in the middle of a bombing campaign. Games are, reflexively, the thing I tend to ensconce myself in when things are not going well, but to say that things were not going well in 2020 is an understatement bordering on obscenity. With few exceptions, every time I booted up a game this year, a nagging thought of is this really how I should be spending my time right now? would creep in, no matter how little sense that thought made. Like, what the hell else was I supposed to be doing this year? From mid-March on, I spent 95% of my time sealed up in my apartment with nowhere to go. It s not as though there was some vast array of better options for how to s
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Looking back at the games we played this year reads a bit like a soundtrack to a disaster film, with each game representing a specific piece of time. We dove into
Animal Crossing headfirst as lockdowns began. Then
Jackbox was a go-to for Zoom happy hours with friends and family. As time and the pandemic wore on and as reality sunk deeper into our lives and routines,
Hades conveyed the idea of persistence in the face of hell itself. And so on.
The games here offered some escapism, some human connection, a joyful retreat from the turmoil we faced and continue to face. We appreciate the developers of these games as well, who had no idea the context in which their work would exist. We re thankful that these 10 games in particular came out when they did.
Best Free/Cheap Games Of 2020 The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
2020 brought a bunch of notable free and budget-friendly games, and some familiar faces continued to dominate the conversation.
December 18, 2020 at 12:00PM PST
You don t need to spend $60 or $70 to get a great game, and quite often it s not even required to spend any money at all. It wouldn t be much of an exaggeration to suggest that free-to-play games dominate the industry, with staples like Fortnite: Battle Royale and Call of Duty: Warzone among the most-played games today. And when you re looking for a new single-player game, it s easy to find riveting and stellar indies for low prices.
For me, 2020 has been a year of isolation punctuated with brief, bright flashes of contact. Playing
Animal Crossing: New Horizons with friends in the first weeks of quarantine. The first socially distanced picnic of the summer, where I unleashed three months of pent-up words. My first hug, in late August, after five months without touch. It could be worse it could always be worse but this year has made me slightly feral, and it has left me very, very lonely.
It’s also been a bad year for my writing, and I can’t decide whether that’s because I’m too overwhelmed to create, or because the “everything” of it all is a great excuse not to. But in all this mess, I found a place of joy, of sustained enthusiasm, of people eager to