It all comes down to this! We’ve awarded system-specific awards for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC. Now it’s time for our overall selections!
These awards represent the consensus of the Siliconera staff. For more of the year’s award selections, check out our Game of the Year 2020 archive.
Winner: Final Fantasy VII Remake
Revisiting Final Fantasy VII was always going to be a daunting task. How do you meet fans’ lofty expectations after years of anticipation and decades of nostalgia? By focusing on one slice of the game at a time, the team crafted opportunities to invest a lot of time and attention to each moment and storyline. Everything’s bigger and more detailed. The gaps your mind filled in long ago are fully realized. It will take time to tell the whole story, but if this first episode is any indication, the series will prove a worthy successor to the original work. Even by itself, it’s our Game of the Year 2020.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
13 Sentinels is a lot of reading. It’s a lot of studying and considering. It rewards the time you invest into its world with more detail and nuance. That makes it a great match for a year when many players wanted to lose themselves in an engrossing story! For it to slowly but surely start using this world to say something deeper about society as you dig deeper into its lore is truly something special.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
So many people escaped into the idyllic islands of New Horizons in 2020, and it’s easy to see why. Sure, the world made a lot of people ready to take the first digital seaplane to wherever it was going, but the most fully-featured Animal Crossing game ever greeted them with terraforming, enhanced online features and a ton of customization. Its pace gave its players a daily respite, and its updates gave them new things to return and try.
What’s your Game of the Year 2020? Share your thoughts (and check out recommendations from our staff and community) on our forums.
