Americans celebrate Thanksgiving every November. It’s a time when families gather, friends reconnect and communities unite. On Thanksgiving you also announce what you’re thankful for in life, so several of our writers decided to let everyone know exactly which video games they’re thankful for. These thanks are comprised of releases from Thanksgiving 2019 to Thanksgiving 2020 and made up of a variety of reasons. Read on to see the titles everyone decided were personally meaningful enough from the past year to make the list!

Remember all those great artifacts with DEF as their Main Stat? Guess what, they finally have a use. Each character is Genshin Impact scales their damage based on a particular stat. While most characters need a high ATK stat, Gorou needs

Choosing a game to be thankful for in 2020 can be tricky. Given the current state of the world and how many of us are looking for ways to keep occupied while cooped up, I feel like we should be thankful for virtually any good, engaging games. But the one that I was thankful for the most is a game that felt optimistic, warm, comforting and colorful. Even if said game is about ferrying the souls of the dead towards the afterlife. I am, of course, referring to Thunder Lotus’ Spiritfarer. Aside from being a possible GOTY contender in general, Spiritfarer hit a certain sweet spot for me, not only giving me the freedom to craft an insane ship filled with tons of activities and giving me an open world to explore, but also providing one of the year’s best casts of characters. Azul, Gustav, Stanley…all of them were a blast to hang out with and I truly felt a bond between them as I learned more about their stories. It got to the point where I actually purchased the art book because I heard it had more info about them, and once I learned what not only went into their backstories, but how the world around them is all related to everyone and { Stella in various ways, and the absolute tons of metaphorical layers that went into everything, I couldn’t stop thinking about Spiritfarer for the longest time, about how what I thought were small bits suddenly had much more meaning. And all of this is just so refreshing. In a year where other games try to attempt drama by being continuously blunt, bleak and depressing by presenting horrible situation after horrible situation to the point where it almost cartoonishly feels like award bait and you stop caring about everyone in the plot, Spiritfarer decided to go hard in the opposite direction. Vibrant landscapes, cute animal characters who just want to hang out with you, a vast ocean filled with magical adventures…all of this means that when the emotional moments reveal themselves in a natural way and do hit, they hit hard. Spiritfarer never stops being comforting as a whole, but it deals with the themes of death and how everyone approaches them in such a beautiful, mature fashion. It’s a brilliant bit of fantasy with the year’s best writing and it’s something we all need right now.

If you love Gorou’s character design and playstyle, you can opt to get some constellations and increase his overall damage potential. But know that most of his constellations are designed around a Geo DPS team and help that specific playst

When Thoma’s Elemental Skill, Blazing Blessing , is used, it will deal AoE Pyro damage and generates a Pyro shield. The shield’s strength is scaled based on his max HP and can absorb 250 percent more Pyro damage. He also applies the Pyro element to himself cleansing any other detrimental effe

Any game that’s branded as a “free-to-play” title is almost immediately going to get inundated with any number of negative connotations and accusations alike. Long-winded, grind-inducing, predatory, a matter of luck over skill on the kind of content you’re granted outside of some voluntary, monetary investment. It may sound dismissive and pessimistic, but the number of such games whose priorities with maintaining a steady revenue stream doesn’t get in the way of the base game offered are few and far between. Enter Genshin Impact, developer miHoYo’s far from first rodeo on the F2P frontier — itself thrown many a condescending remark on being a clone of this or imitation of that. The similarities are there to see of course and while admittedly a touch obvious in parts, what I’m most thankful for with Genshin Impact is the genuine effort and design miHoYo have placed in crafting an enjoyable action RPG to start. A live service, continually-expanding release this may be, Genshin Impact’s starting world, its gameplay, its sheer breadth of exploration put many similar open-world efforts, let alone F2P attempts, to shame. To state with hand on heart I’ve now clocked near to 40 hours and still not spent a single penny — occasionally tempting it may be — I’m grateful that Genshin Impact has taken a more sensible approach to F2P games: satisfying base game first, additional monetization second as an option.