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178 games released in 2020 and reviewed here, best first.
178 reviews
A gentle, ten-piece picture-matching memory game built by a father for his two-year-old son who struggled with a mouse - and it shows, in the best way, with real button-based cards that were confirmed to flip correctly under a real finger tap.
7.6 / 10
A visually stunning, richly written supernatural action game widely called a Remedy highlight — with a genuinely well-documented 2021 "Ultimate Edition without the Ultimate DLC" controversy, and a still-unresolved oddity for a single-player game requiring an internet connection just to launch.
7.5 / 10
The best character-driven strategy game ever made, and the clearest case in gaming of DLC that doesn't just add content but withholds answers. Its players log 117-hour medians and write four-hundred-vote reviews about the storefront.
7.5 / 10
Mimimi Games' Wild West prequel to the classic Desperados perfected real-time tactics stealth well enough to earn Overwhelmingly Positive acclaim — and a specific, articulate minority of its own fans arguing the genre it perfected is really an elaborate puzzle box in disguise.
7.5 / 10
A js13k 2020 3D puzzle where you hop a cube across a tilted pyramid of blocks to reach a target tile — genuinely touch-playable via a dedicated on-screen d-pad toggle, confirmed with real taps that visibly moved the player, correcting an earlier finding that touch didn't work.
7.5 / 10
A "Risk of Rain, Dead Cells and Borderlands had a baby" FPS roguelite RPG that reviewers overwhelmingly praise for its gunplay and build variety, held back years after launch by stagnant level variety, an unpopular EULA change, and a server relocation that badly hurt latency for large parts of its audience.
7.5 / 10
A side-scrolling idle RPG that dares to make its active layer matter — timing jumps through coin trails pays out far more than watching the run play itself, right up until the moment you close the app and the game quietly goes back to being a spreadsheet.
7.5 / 10
A joke about blowing leaves off a lawn that grew, update by update, into one of Steam's biggest free incrementals — dozens of interlocking systems, five years of support, and a DLC list that doesn't always match the "no paywall" pitch.
7.5 / 10
A vertical, three-floor twist on the deckbuilding roguelike that Slay the Spire built, still sitting Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam more than five years after launch — and still worth playing on its own terms, even with the numbers showing exactly where its late-game balance stops holding up.
7.5 / 10
A quietly brilliant, cape-based Sokoban-style puzzler about escorting mud-averse nobles across the map, praised almost unanimously by reviewers for its clever, unique mechanics and witty level design, held back only by a genuine early difficulty spike and a surprising performance inefficiency for such a small-looking game.
7.5 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
A city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
A critically adored sequel to one of the defining roguelikes, whose own hundred-plus-hour veterans are split on whether its harder edge stayed "fair" — and whose online co-op has spent years plagued by a sync bug that a cross-platform update itself introduced.
7.5 / 10
Twenty-six years after Streets of Rage 3, Dotemu, Guard Crush and Lizardcube brought the series back with hand-drawn art and a soundtrack fans call a highlight of 2020 — layered over specific, corroborated combat friction that a real slice of longtime players never stopped arguing about.
7.5 / 10
A text-driven political drama that casts the player as the president of a fictional post-colonial nation, earning praise as close to a genre landmark for its writing and worldbuilding, while a large, detailed share of reviewers push back hard on how little direct control the actual mechanics give the choices that supposedly define it.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely clever Tetris/Minesweeper hybrid — clear lines to reveal a minefield hidden underneath the stack — confirmed working with real keyboard input on desktop, shipped here as the same free browser demo build the developer offers on itch.io.
7.5 / 10
A six-person Korean studio's XCOM-meets-Final-Fantasy-Tactics SRPG that has quietly built one of the most devoted fanbases in the genre — thousands of hours logged by individual reviewers, a mastery system deep enough to write wikis about, and a developer who reportedly replies to nearly every single Steam review personally, all wrapped around a translation reviewers compare unfavourably to the internet's most infamous mistranslation meme.
7.5 / 10
Some of the best-written quests and dialogue in any CRPG, wrapped around turn-based combat that knows what it's doing — and six years of bug reports that never quite stopped, concentrated almost entirely in the co-op mode it was sold on.
7.5 / 10
A meditative js13k 2020 entry about drawing a trail through a hand-illustrated world and looping it around things if you feel like it — no score pressure, no fail state, just a soft pastel scene and a line that follows your finger exactly where you take it.
7.5 / 10
The fourth mainline Kingdom Rush flips the series to the villain's side and adds a pre-stage tower loadout, and Steam's 93.9% all-time positive score says it landed — but a loud, specific and consistent chorus of long-time fans call it the weakest entry yet, over tighter tower plots, trivialising hero balance and two paid campaign DLCs sold years after launch.
7.4 / 10
A pocket-sized, wordless-but-witty space adventure where you explore a stricken spacecraft by pressing and holding, told entirely in flat vector silhouettes.
7.4 / 10
A striking, atmospheric Bitsy narrative piece about grief and light, featured by LIMINAL magazine's GLITCH series — confirmed to control correctly by touch and keyboard alike.
7.3 / 10
A 13-kilobyte js13k 2020 entry that turns swordfighting into a one-finger slingshot — pull back on the screen and release to launch your character, sword-first, through whatever is in the way. The pull-back gesture is the entire game, and once you understand it is a slingshot rather than a flick, it works.
7.2 / 10
A minimalist Steam collection of twelve chess variants plus 400-odd puzzles from a small studio that clearly loves the game — elegant and cheap, but thin on true online multiplayer and, per its own achievement stats, barely explored past the basics by most buyers.
7.2 / 10
