Black Mesa is my game of the year | GOTY 2020
I don’t expect to see Black Mesa — Crowbar Collective’s long-awaited remake of Valve’s original Half-Life — on many GOTY lists. There was a significant portion of the year in which I didn’t expect it to top mine. More so, before the release of Hades and Miles Morales in the last few months, I was a little worried about that prospect. Up to that point, Black Mesa hadn’t had a lot of competition for the spot I’d tentatively penciled it into at the top. Because I’d spent much of this strange, destructive year replaying old gems or chowing down on bite-sized Apple Arcade offerings or tending a tarantula-infested island — none of which had moved me in the same inexplicable way — it seemed to be winning by default. That’s never a comfortable position to find yourself it.
But in the end, the competition it eventually received was what truly cemented its spot — and, more so, made me realize that being inexplicably moved by a game might just be what a Game of the Year title is for.
Death Stranding, Animal Crossing, and the Fantasy of Honest Work | GOTY 2020
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.
Deus Ex Ages into the Future It Imagined | GOTY 2020
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…
Godhood, Cataclysm, and the Doomed Bodies of Into the Breach | GOTY 2020
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…
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Sunset Over Ithaca 