for the little things you might have missed
In the end, Black Mesa draws power from that limitation; it clarifies and rewires Half-Life's undercooked tale of invasion and colonization — one that continues with humanity itself colonized by an unimaginable cosmic empire. In that sense, Gordon arriving to Xen with his arsenal of weapons feels fitting; in a year like 2020, it should be clearer than ever that the mistakes, evils, and constraints of the past always ripple forward into the present and future.
And after hours and hours of moving those bodies around these chessboard grids, leveling mountains and razing forests with powers of the kind usually attributed to gods, the game's subtext begins to emerge. For all its smoke and flames, Into the Breach isn't really a game about cataclysm itself — it's about what led us there, and the increasingly invasive, disastrous measures needed to prevent a final slide into extinction.
Both Death Stranding and Animal Crossing imagine a kind of ending. The former: a more traditional vision of apocalypse, with a fractured society on a track to extinction. The latter: a more abstract ending — an end of needs and wants, replaced with something that one might be able to call "honest" work.
For all its complexity, summing up Deus Ex in a single word is simple: conspiracies. The game's plot features a series of nested conspiracies, all run through one central, iconic switchboard: the Illuminati. By way of government organizations and private industry, the Illuminati pulls the world's strings from the shadows, directing the future by influencing the present. And the present — of 2052 and, as it turns out, 2020 — features a deadly respiratory virus sowing fear and death across the globe.
Sunset Over Ithaca 