Disorganized Reflections on Games I Played in 2020
Death Stranding
I’ve never played more than a few minutes of a Dark Souls game or any of its siblings. Not to doubt anyone’s sincerity but something about the way these games are often recommended, with warnings like “you’ll die over and over and be miserable for 20 hours but then it gets good,” has always struck me as a bit too reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome for my taste. Or maybe it’s more like Sisyphus coming to enjoy the one task he has no choice but to carry out.
Death Stranding has you carry packages across a hostile landscape terraformed by sci-fi rain that accelerates the effects of time on whatever it touches. This is a game where a knee-deep puddle can completely fuck up your whole day. You’ll find a motorcycle, think “finally,” and immediately hit a section of jagged rocks that need to be maneuvered on foot. About two hours after that point is when I started having fun.
Anecdotes abound in such a game but I think the high point for me was climbing a mountain — and having tackled precisely one of the Adirondack peaks IRL, the experience is more faithfully recreated here than in any other game I’ve played — and then, from the top, noticing two ziplines placed by other players that were just out of reach of each other. I navigated to the mid-point, placed one of my own, and now I had a functional ski-lift to the summit making the once arduous trek trivial.
It’s really that simple sometimes: this used to be hard, I grew and learned and accomplished, now it’s easier, and that feels good.
Resident Evil 3
While cinematic remakes often seem like a waste of creative effort given that the original remains perfectly viewable, for games I’ll admit they can be essential for those of us who missed out the first time around. Before the release of the Resident Evil 3 remake in the spring, I would have had to illegally emulate the original in order to play it. On top of that, I’d also have to endure the wonky controls and counter-intuitive interface that lacks many of the player-friendly conveniences (like auto-save) that have become mainstays in the intervening years. So I wasn’t likely to play it, and I would have had a fairly bad time doing so.
All that said, there’s sometimes a hollowness to getting everything you want. Resident Evil 3 is not particularly difficult, or scary, or memorable. It’s easy to chalk this up to overcorrection, and assume there’s some perfect sweet spot between the obtuseness of the original and the dullness of the remake, but maybe there just isn’t. Maybe in 20 years there will be a Death Stranding remake that flattens the terrain and lets you zoom across on your motorbike learning and feeling nothing. Maybe things have to suck a little bit in order to be good.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
A fan of the series going back to the GameCube original (in the US, I am aware that there was an N64 installment in Japan and could exhaust you with similar trivia all day) I was quite stoked for the Switch installment of Animal Crossing. Pushed back from a fall release to an almost impossibly timed coincidence with widespread stay-at-home orders, expectations were high for this particular piece of software.
And for many, those were met. The biggest upgrade offered by New Horizons is the near-complete level of control the player has over the look and design of their town, and social media was quickly flooded with incredible, creative, and meticulous examples. Search “animal crossing” plus any fictional setting you can think of and you’re likely to see examples of players recreating them in the game.
But for me, while decorating has always been part of the series, I’ve never really cared for it. I just like turning it on for a half an hour or so every day, checking in with my neighbors, digging up the day’s fossils, and making sure I’m on top of any time-gated content. This new expectation (self-imposed, I don’t fault Nintendo or any of the brilliant island artists out there for this) that I also make something beautiful stressed me out. I’d start a garden, decide it sucks, and put the game away in a worse mood than when I picked it up.
Worse still, my digital chores soon became conflated with my real ones, as the remote work arrangement began to dissolve my mental barriers between what I do for money, what I do for my health, what Little Bruce of Isle Logan does to pay off his loans, etc. I brought two islands to the point where K.K. Slider deemed them worthy of a concert, and abandoned them soon after.
Unfortunately, New Horizons couldn’t become a part of my life as I’d hoped it would. I had to make the choice to put it down in order to tackle what I could in the chaos of my own life, hoping that someday I’d get to a point where I could not only make a beautiful island but enjoy doing it. Maybe 2021.
Half-Life: Alyx
It was probably a mistake to make Alyx the first game I played on my new virtual reality headset, not just because it’s the best native VR title by a country mile, but because it’s the most complete. The VR space is loaded with titles that are cool ideas and not much else. $30 tech demos that say “see, you can do sword combat with this technology, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a game designed around that?”
Alyx, meanwhile, never asks you to meet it halfway. This is a Valve product with the level of polish you would expect (I’m sorry, what’s Artifact?). Objects in the world have full physics and can be picked up and thrown- and if you’re using the Valve Index controllers, that is literally what you are doing with them. The levels are carefully designed in order to teach you the mechanics before testing your mastery of them, almost like a real game. One section has you covering your mouth in order to not make noise, and you might spend a second wondering what button that is before you realize that you actually just have to cover your mouth. It’s very difficult having had that kind of experience to try to enjoy the more rudimentary fare of other VR games, but I suppose such is the burden of we with disposable income to throw at high-end consumer electronics.
What actually impressed me most about Alyx is the storytelling. Valve has a history of acquiring tiny studios and hiring all their employees in order to make use of some mechanic they’ve developed (Portal’s origins are in a simple student project called Narbacular Drop). For Alyx they bought Campo Santo, who made Firewatch, and it’s easy to see where their talents went. Even though you’re free to look around in 360 degrees at any time, you never feel that you are missing narrative information expressed through the environment. One character is only shown in shadow, because you’re in a vent and can’t get a clear look at them, and isn’t that what it’s all about.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2
Forget everything I said about Resident Evil 3. Remakes are good and essential and THPS 1 + 2 loses nothing in translation. The game is still hard, but it’s also still just a fun space to screw around in at the same time. You have goals, but many of them are just “be good at skateboarding,” and if you’re like me that could take a while.
The skill ceiling in a game like this is incredibly high, but it’s fun whatever level you’re at. If all you can muster today is landing a heelflip, you’ll feel good when you do it, and someday you’ll figure out the revert to manual technique. It’s all good. Enjoy the music.
Hades
Somehow Hades sat in early access for two years before it crossed my radar, which is maybe fortunate because all I needed to hear was “Supergiant made a roguelike” in order to completely reorganize my life to maximize the time I could spend playing it.
It is being rightfully showered with accolades and its simple brilliance remarked upon by people more insightful than me, so all I’ll say is that I’ve played all of Supergiant’s other games as they’ve come out and each time thought “this is beautiful and amazing and I wish it never ended.” With Hades employing the iterative formula of the roguelike, that’s mission more or less accomplished.
Far Cry 5
I mentioned that I had two Animal Crossing islands and maybe it sounded like I chose to start over but what actually happened is someone broke into my home, threatened to kill me, and made off with my Switch and some other replaceable items. In fact, because Nintendo hadn’t yet implemented cloud saves, my island was the only thing that wasn’t replaceable.
It can be challenging to parse out the exact psychological impact of this past year’s various traumas, but something about the home invasion made me finally decide to play Far Cry 5. I’d played 3 and 4 and liked them fine but found the formula getting stale and so I passed on 5 at release. I knew that it would drop me in a hostile world that I would slowly conquer through (narratively justified!) mass-murder, and I knew that it would train me to use stealth at first and pull out firepower when inevitably cornered.
There’s a moment at the beginning of every Far Cry game where you are taught to take out your first enemy from behind using a rock or whatever is available, which allows you to take their gun and go from there. Whenever I’m put into conflict with another character in a game, I instinctively know how to react. It was not especially surprising to me that this didn’t translate to the real world, and the thought that I could use force against my assailant never even occurred to me, at least in the moment. He said he had a gun and he wouldn’t show it to me but it turns out I really do not want to die and so he got to take my stuff.
What was strange was my fixation on the thought over the next few days. I went back, re-analyzed every moment, asked myself what I could have done differently. Why have I been lifting weights for five years if I’m just going to roll over for the first malnourished psycho who threatens me? If I’d taken him out from behind like I’ve done to thousands of NPCs when he was shuffling through my personal documents expecting to find some kind of precious metal, would that have felt good? Would that have traumatized me more than what in fact did happen?
I don’t know. I’ve mostly stopped asking myself those questions. I played through Far Cry 5 over the next few weeks and found it about what I’ve expected: shallow, silly, everything I hope open-world games learn to leave behind as developers learn from the success of games like Breath of the Wild. What it was, and what I needed it to be, was a temporary distraction. These days those can be very valuable.
Ghostrunner
The last game to challenge my assumptions this year was Ghostrunner, which is extremely difficult and yet fun immediately. The secret I suspect is speed- your guy moves quickly, which is fun, and when you die you respawn quickly and get to try again, so failure is not that painful.
I don’t think this blows up the whole idea that games like Death Stranding or Dark Souls are built on, and chances are my memories with Ghostrunner will fade sooner than those with games that asked more of me, but I guess that’s fine. I don’t know if next year will be better than this one (I suspect it kind of has to, though I’ve learned such assumptions are dangerous) but I did survive it in large part thanks to interactive media that let me escape to somewhere else, if only temporarily. For that I’m always grateful.
