Since the beginning of 2021, we have published separate posts on the site every day dedicated to the best and worst games of 2020. And if you missed something, it doesn’t matter – this one-piece top is just made for convenience. Below are the 10 best games of the past year according to the Kenobi editorial board.
10 место. The Last of Us: Part 2
In The Last of Us: Part 2, lead developer Neil Truckman and writer Halle Gross, who worked on Too Old to Die Young, by director and writer, were able to cope with one of the most difficult dramatic challenges. I would even say – impracticable. Indeed, at the very beginning of the game, we get into our hands such an unpleasant person as Abby, whose hands will very soon be stained with the blood of one of the most adored by the general public in the history of video games.
And we’re left with Abby for half a twenty-plus-hour game, with all the flashbacks and replays of the same events from different angles. And during these hours, through the actions of the heroine herself and her interaction with other characters (both “ours” and “strangers”), the impossible happens. The woman whom Ellie and I vowed to find and destroy at the grave, it is clear who, becomes for us, if not a friend, then a close and understandable person.
We see the world through her eyes, go through no less traumatic events with her than with Ellie and Joel, and end up with the best final confrontation in the history of video games.
Both heroines in The Last of Us: Part 2 have the right to both death and victory. Both are deserved, earned, dramatically justified with all the shortcomings and shortcomings of a drawn-out plot with an incorrect structure. Never before had a villain and a hero faced each other on equal terms in games – and who was the villain and who was the hero was not so unclear.
The finale of The Last of Us: Part 2 is even more significant for the gaming industry than the finale of the first part. Truckman and Gross showed how you REALLY make video games with multiple central characters.
They don’t have to just complete missions and hang out together, as the heroes of Grand Theft Auto 5 (one of the weakest plot parts of the series) do. There can be an irreconcilable, destructive conflict between them, in which the player will have to take one side or the other – if not gameplay, then emotionally. And in the best games in this direction, we will doubt to the last whether we took the right side.
9th place. Wasteland 3
A great purebred role-playing game, not early access, not a hybrid with an action, shooter or whatever, but a full-fledged RPG, is a luxury in our time. And Wasteland 3 is definitely the best this year, but not only because of the lack of competition.
Wasteland 3 is the perfect Fallout 3 in a world in which Bethesda did not release its sequel, and Brian Fargo returned to the executive chair. This is a traditional isometric top view, this is a well-thought-out system of pumping and skills that are still not enough for all-all checks, this is interaction with different clans and factions in a cruel world in which you write your history with blood and then.
Wasteland 3 can be criticized for a lot. At the start, 20% of my playing time was spent looking at the loading window. There were, by God, no less bugs than in Cyberpunk 2077. There is a lot of eclecticism in the game: screw a caricatured gangster named Farhan Baringo in place of one of the most notable minor characters – please. The town of Santa Claus, where elves pack drugs, is on your health. Unhealthy kitsch, tragicomedicity, angularity of the script and the world sometimes amuse, but more often – annoying. There is also this clumsy metaphor, where we decide whether to help a local strong business executive named Patriarch, or to lean towards, excuse me, a radical feminist – his daughter. They are all frivolous, aren’t they?
You can scold, but you absolutely don’t want to. The game has a wagon of small mechanics that make the RPG really deep. For example, in our editorial office, until the end of the passage, no one knew that a burning character can be thrown with snowballs, then it will go out. Found a trap? It is not necessary to neutralize it, you can simply shoot at it with a firearm and detonate it. Each mission and location can be completed in two or three ways, and I’m lying if I say that going into a head-on collision is more boring than looking for roundabouts and acting covertly.
Wasteland 3 is an excellent role-playing game that, despite all the slack in the plot and technical flaws, remains interesting – I climbed the entire map, completed all available quests, made friends with half of the factions and cut out the other half, studied the mechanics, got a war cat, a war parrot and a war robotic chicken. It doesn’t matter that the game has a weak ending and an unimportant start, the main thing is that it has an exciting process, to which it was pleasant to return every evening.
