I barely played any new games this year. It feels wrong to admit that, as a professional games journalist, even one who’s not exactly on the frontline any more. It feels like an unforgivable lapse of curiosity. It feels like a retreat. And if I am honest with myself, it was a retreat that began before March – before everything in life became a retreat. I just couldn’t bring myself to start new games, to enter new worlds. I wanted familiarity. As I wrote in May, “there was nothing new I fancied playing, or rather I fancied playing nothing new – I wanted the soothing feeling of old routines, patterns of thought and movement worn smooth with use.”
Oli’s games of 2020Astro’s PlayroomHadesThe Last of Us Part 2Kentucky Route ZeroWorld of Warcraft: Shadowlands
No, this isn’t a pandemic thing, although it hasn’t helped. It’s also nothing to do with what’s been going on in games. I don’t mean to suggest we’re in the doldrums. Quite the opposite. A glance at my colleagues’ pieces will tell you that this has been a year of exceptional creativity and fun in games, marked by many brilliant releases – from Streets of Rage 4 to 13 Sentinels, Flight Simulator to I Am Dead – and supercharged by the excitement of the new consoles. It used to be de rigueur, come the end of every year, to declare “it’s a great time to be a gamer”, and it’s an awful cliché, but it’s as true now as it ever was.
Did I need to write this piece to justify the dozens of hours I’ve spent replaying a game I already had over 180 hours in? No. I’m having fun, what’s to justify! Did it make me feel a bit better about it anyway? … Maybe. https://t.co/xHxESeWMoD
— Oli Welsh (@oliwelsh) May 19, 2020
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And if you want me to give you a personal top 5, I can – just about. I played a handful of new games for work that really impressed me, and a couple out of curiosity. I wished I had experienced Kentucky Route Zero as a languid, episodic five-year odyssey rather than a weeklong binge, but its deep Lynchism, stunning interstitial vignettes and moments of complex grace stayed with me a long time. It was like installation art, but good. The Last of Us Part 2 was an openly conflicted blockbuster that carried its convictions through to a devastatingly powerful final third; I hope enough players got past the halfway point to understand what it was up to.