This post is a part of my Top 10 Games I played in 2020 list that I said I was breaking up into smaller parts to avoid having a single huge post all at once. Note that the games in this list weren’t necessarily new releases in 2020. To qualify for this list, it just had to be a game that I played in 2020. This post features games I rank as the #4 and #3 games I enjoyed playing most in 2020.
#2 Terraria
Terraria was #1 in my write up of my Top Ten Games I Played in 2019, with a big, final update on the verge of releasing at the time I wrote about it.
That big update has come and gone, with a few patches as well. In my opinion, the new gameplay mode is the perfect way to play. It allows you to play however you’d like, whenever you’d like. Want it hard? Crank up the difficulty or the enemy spawn rate. Just want to build stuff without being bothered by enemies? Enable godmode and/or turn the enemy spawn rate down to zero. Can’t see anything in the dark? Set and lock the clock to midday. Trying to farm a rare item? Crank up the enemy spawn rate so you can power through more enemies faster. Want to try to collect all the things? Team up with your friends and use the game’s Research and Duplication features to help each other fill out your collections.
My total playtime as of the end of 2020 appears to be about 990 hours. This is by far the game I have played the most in the past decade. And it is perhaps my most played game in the entirety of my life. It definitely holds a special place in my heart.
#1 Factorio
I’m quickly catching up to Terraria in number of hours played in Factorio. In my 2019 write-up I said that I had played about 300 hours. As of the end of 2020 I had almost doubled it, with over 550 hours. (And I’ve even started playing it again in 2021, and broke 625 hours a few days ago.)
Factorio finally came out of Early Access in 2020 and released their 1.0 in August. It was followed up in early 2021 by a 1.1 update with many Quality of Life improvements.
I honestly don’t know how to articulate what it is that I enjoy so much about this game. Ostensibly I’m just doing basically the same thing over and over, each time I play through it, which is something that I feel would normally bore me. But I constantly feel like I’m solving a problem/puzzle, and working toward some larger end goal, and I do try out new things or have new goals each time I play.
But the crazy thing is that I haven’t really touched any mods for the game, and there are mods that add so much more new content and things to do. I imagine this game could easily have another 600+ hours for me over the next several years. And that’s not even counting the new expansion(s) recently announced by Wube, the developers of Factorio.
While Terraria has been a wonderful and enjoyable experience for the past decade since it was released, I feel my interest in it starting to wind down and take a back seat. I still enjoy playing Terraria when I’m invited to play with other people, but I don’t play it solo much these days. Meanwhile, every few months or so I get an itch to start up Factorio again, and when I give into that itch, I’m almost guaranteed to add another 30-60 hours to my total playtime.
The factory must grow. All the things must be automated.
