In any normal year, a list of the 10 best recently released video games would adequately encompass that year in games. Not in 2020.

The best way to describe the way we consumed games in 2020 was as “comfort food.” Sticking the same pack of over-buttered popcorn in the microwave every day after work just to feel something. Ordering a 4-pound bag of childhood-favorite shoestring licorice on Amazon and slurping it down within a week. There were lots of new games we adored—the stylish and sexy action indie Hades, for one, is WIRED’s unofficial game of the year. But for the most part, we were looking for more than novelty from our time gaming.

We want to party in digital mansions swarming with catgirls. We want to channel our anxiety into managing spaceships. We want to flirt with the natural world. We want to dissociate on the couch with a free-to-play mobile game. Below are the games that we loved most in 2020. 

—Cecilia D'Anastasio

I was a little late to the Hades appreciation train, but after buying it in November, I just can’t stop playing. This has been a difficult year mentally and emotionally, and Hades takes you away from all of that into a fantasy hellscape with killer music. Seriously, the music is just that good. With the pandemic in full swing this holiday season, who wouldn’t identify with the protagonist Zagreus at least a little? We, too, want to escape the hell that is our reality and find Olympus (and our relatives and friends that are so close and yet so far).

The best part about Hades, really, is that you can do a quick 20-minute or so run-through, diving in and out of the world as a release before moving on to something else, such as your new hobbies of baking bread and knitting. Beat up some bad guys, build some fun abilities bestowed upon you from the gods, listen to some great voice lines and banter, and get to explore Hell—what more could you want from an action role-playing game? Also, did I mention the music?

—Saira Mueller

Playing Space Haven is an exercise in being compulsively hyper-detail-oriented. Think Stardew Valley meets SpaceX. For instance, I have to make sure there’s enough oxygen for my fleet’s crews. That itself requires that they have enough water, which means I have to make sure they’re discovering pockets of space with mineable ice. And I had built facilities required for the two-step process of converting that ice to water, and then to oxygen. All the while not forgetting that I need to budget some of that water to grow food because, well, my astronauts need to eat.

Looking after my pixelated spacefarers requires dictating their work/sleep/leisure schedules, micromanaging their task priorities, building out their space, and keeping them safe on scouting expeditions. In a year when planning anything similar to those things in my own life often felt like a struggle, Space Haven’s minutiae-mechanics managed to afford my brain the same good chemicals that daily life offered under normal times, when there wasn’t a pandemic to worry about.

—Phuc Pham

OK, look, I’m just going to admit that Destiny 2 is my forever game. At least for now. It took the crown from Overwatch, when I realized I was spending more time raging than enjoying myself (not that I won’t pick it right back up whenever we get Overwatch 2), and the only game that’s challenged Destiny 2 for supremacy in the past year or so has been Genshin Impact. I’m saying this for myself. Consider it catharsis.

The latest expansion, Beyond Light, advances the story in interesting and tangible ways, and while a lot of the game’s recent changes have been controversial, it’s the kind of controversy that breathes life into a game that could otherwise be a boring “log in, do game chores, log out” experience. It was easily one of my most anticipated releases of 2020, and for me, at least, it’s been rewarding enough that it’s kept me from opening any of the other games I’ve purchased lately—and yes, that includes Hades and Cyberpunk 2077 and other titles you’ll see on this list. So yeah, catch me on Europa if you need me, and if you have a Destiny 2 clan that’s chill and raids sometimes, please let me know. Please. I’m begging you.

—Alan Henry

For better or for worse, I’m inexplicably obsessed with the League of Legends universe. I’ve had flings with nearly every title in Riot Games’ roster, but Teamfight Tactics has been the stickiest. When it comes to gaming, I prefer low pressure—I’d rather build a house or hoard loot than face a Big Bad—and TFT has some of the lowest stakes of all. I’ve taken a chance on plenty of new games this year. None of them stuck long-term until I tried this one.

The allure of the auto-battler is that everyone starts on an equal footing. You pray to RNGesus and hope that your next reroll or random event gives you the pieces of the puzzle that you need. TFT has a hardcore ranked community, but every Grandmaster starts each round with the same amount of luck as me (a lowly rank Gold I). The meta evolves swiftly, the cosmetic rewards are adorable, and there’s no pay-to-win structure. Each game takes around half an hour, making TFT the perfect lunch break distraction, and the community is surprisingly nontoxic. I especially appreciate TFT because it’s both easy to learn and completely free. There’s no daunting learning curve (like Civilization) or misogynistic trolling (like Overwatch). Just endearing characters, tasty loot orbs, and the constant temptation to tilt.

—Louryn Strampe

Final Fantasy XIV has been the only safe place for me to party. In the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, players have channeled their frustrated social energies into raves, bar romps, live theater, and even orchestrated musical concerts. (Seriously—I heard a Moogle rendition of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” that low-key ripped.) One friend can pick me up in their black convertible, drive me through a crystalline wasteland, and drop me off with another friend who’s pummeling worms. I can join a 60-person Bob Ross–themed parade around town. It’s a great time.

Earlier this year, I convinced a surprising number of IRL friends to give the game a whirl with its fantastic free trial. The story content isn’t the main draw for us; it’s kind of a slog. FFXIV’s greatest value is as a place for us to be ourselves, together, plus or minus a couple monsters.

—Cecilia D'Anastasio

Ori and the Blind Forest set a high bar for side-scrolling platformers in 2015. But because of the way the narrative played out—the ultimate goal is to restore life to a dead forest—there were few friendly faces to be found throughout most of the game. It’s a lavishly crafted, yet ultimately lonely experience. Enter 2020’s Will of the Wisps.

The sequel’s ambitions are grander than its predecessor, and therefore somewhat messier. At first, the addition of so many new characters and their side quests almost feels intrusive—an overcomplication of an already perfected formula. The last thing I wanted from a game as polished as Ori was a series of boxes to check. But I quickly came to love the various adorable woodland critters who guide you along your way (and ask you to find the occasional hat).

The characters in Will of the Wisps make the game’s gorgeous world feel alive and vibrant. The brilliantly bioluminescent landscape isn’t just pretty to look at, it feels suffused with history and personality. Of course, Ori’s world has problems of its own. There are great marauding monsters, fallen friends, and environmental devastation that will surely feel familiar to anyone who’s paid any attention to climate news in the past few months. But guiding Ori through these challenges is cathartic, and it’s deeply soothing when you emerge into an even more beautiful ecosystem that you helped create. At their core, these games are about leaving your campsite better than you found it. After a year of sickness, destruction, and chaos, Ori makes you feel like it’s still possible to spread light in a dark world.

—Boone Ashworth

The only game I've ever finished is the original Katamari Damacy. I bought it for my PlayStation 2 about a decade and a half ago, and although it took about nine months to play through it, I actually reached the end and watched the credits scroll—something I've never seen in any other game. I'm just not very adept with the controls of most games, so I get frustrated and quit. There are some games where I can keep up, but I get bored quickly and just want to move on. That didn't happen with Katamari. I kept going until I snagged the final rainbow.

Fast forward a million years, and here I am holding a Nintendo Switch filled with Mario titles, an adventure game or two, and that silly Goose game that was last year's must-have. I don't want to play any of these, so I do a quick search and see that Katamari Damacy Reroll is in the Switch store. Not a sequel or a spin-off, but a faithful recreation of the original. Sweet baby Prince! Downloading! Soon, I'm charging around a cluttered suburban Japanese home, scooping up onigiri and pencil erasers, running away from giant mice. Of course, the similarities between the onscreen cluttered apartment and my own real-world cluttered apartment, which I've barely left since daylight saving time ended, are starker this year than most. Come to think of it, I should really put the Switch down and do some tidying up. Eh, one more roll? Then I'll take a break.

—Michael Calore

“Love” is maybe not the right word for my relationship to Homescapes. “Played” might not be the right word, either, to be honest. Homescapes is one of those ubiquitous match-three mobile games that requires no money, no thought, no strategy, no feelings. In other words, it was perfect for 2020. It offered just enough stimulation to keep my mind from fixating on the day’s grim headlines, and if I’m playing Homescapes, I am physically unable to keep doomscrolling.

It’s almost not worth going into the conceit of the game, such as it is: You start to help a butler named Austin renovate his parents’ house by matching tiles and beating levels. The game, part of developer Playrix’s successful ’Scapes universe, has its critics. I won’t deny they make plenty of good points. But I am perversely amused by how Homescapes stretches out to fill seemingly endless space and time. Play it enough—and reader, trust me, I have—and you will begin to unlock areas that veer into the absurd. Austin’s childhood home turns out to have its own greenhouse, a boathouse, a dance hall, and a yacht. It seems like a suspicious amount of square footage for an older butler and a homemaker to acquire. And since we finished decorating his parents’ house, Austin has found a country estate of his own, whose amenities include a chocolate factory, a café, a throne room, and a marine biology lab. It all makes about as much sense as anything else this year. So I don’t think about it too much, and swipe on.

—Caitlin Kelly

Yakuza: Like a Dragon feels like a PlayStation 2 game, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. In our next-next-gen age of multimillion-dollar marketing schemes, microtransactions, and “live service” demands for always-on connectivity, a game with straightforward combat mechanics, a relatively small map, and a plethora of tangential minigames could feel quaint.

Instead, Like a Dragon is bursting at the seams. It's genius. It’s absurd. It’s GTA meets Dragon Quest meets Crazy Taxi. The premise is sharp: A fresh-out-of-jail ex-yakuza thinks of the world as an RPG because he never learned adult coping skills. From there, Like a Dragon takes a pulpy crime tale and infuses it with psychedelic parodies of old-school Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games.

Party members’ jobs, usually something like knight or warlock, are literally blue-collar jobs: the foreman of a construction company who wields an enormous war hammer and can summon a parade of workers to stampede the enemy. A bartender can use an ice bucket to freeze enemies, while a riot police officer can use their shield to tank.

Summons only up the ante. I can call a chicken to lay an MP-restoring egg or a biker to burn rubber over my enemies faces. I can call an adult man with a diaper fetish, his hideous cries reduce my enemies’ attack and defense. From there, I can call in an orbital strike from a satellite because Ichiban, in addition to being a himbo, also owns a billion-dollar dessert conglomerate.

But the wildest surprise was the sharply political moments of earnest reality in the side quests. Here, the game replaces zany humor with earnest discussions of homelessness, anti-immigrant sentiment in Japan, and the demonization of sex workers. The “job” function doesn’t even unlock until Ichiban & Co. solve a series of patronizing fetch quests from a shady temp agency.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m less interested in games that ignore reality and am more into games that warp and refract it, highlighting the strangeness and unfairness of the world we live in. I certainly wasn’t expecting that from a game where the protagonist dresses like a member of the Bee Gees.

—Sidney Fussell

I know we are all looking for an escape from our 2020 nightmare. This is exactly what Two Dots has been for me. The game on my iPhone has been my respite from anxiety. It is completely mindless and pairs perfectly with ambient TV or a fun podcast that is not at all news-related. Connecting colorful dots and working through puzzles that include ladybugs and fruit-eating monkeys while vaguely absorbing the plot of my latest Netflix binge leaves absolutely no room in my brain for anything else.

This game would probably be an excellent friend on an airplane, as well. I’ll let you know if I ever do any traveling again.

—Elena Lacey