10 Best Nintendo Switch Games Of 2020
2. Hades
Strictly speaking, Supergiant's latest bespoke masterpiece shouldn't feature here, given it's also available on Steam, but it'd be beyond deplorable to disclude it from any of our year-end rankings on a technicality.
Simply put, it's a supreme, Stygian delight. Like every Supergiant effort, summaries abound with the same adjectives: effortlessly charming, beautifully illustrated, poignantly written, strikingly refreshing. But above all the usual expectations of the faultless studio, it achieves the impossible: it makes roguelikes palatable for those anathema to their very nature.
In Hades, death isn't the drawback it was in the olden days. Rather than see any progression wiped clean at the mistimed swing of a sword, each failure develops the narrative. In an instant, a setback becomes a success, and the motivation to try again grows all the stronger.
If the jaw-dropping aesthetic and typically endearing story isn't incentive enough, the razor-sharp, perpetually rewarding combat will be. All that time in early access purgatory was well spent: Hades atones for the prior sins of an often hellish genre to produce a must-have for roguelike lovers, and everyone else besides.