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 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.