2020. I wonder how this year will be remembered afterwards. That particularly dumpster fire of a year, or is it a beginning of something? So many things happened this year, so many losses, so many disasters, so many weird and crazy and off-beats events. This is the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, of worldwide quarantine. This is the year Mecca is left empty, because we want to keep each other safe. This is the year of protests, marches in the street in multiple countries, demanding that we do better not just for ourselves but for the downtrodden and marginalized.
My 2020 has been... weird. I started the year with an unpaid internship at a government office and got fired one month in. When the quarantines began and people were just starting to figure out how to work from home, I was already halfway into settling in. Not smoothly, as I wrote earlier in the year, but I slowly figured out a rhythm. I found a way to balance my studies, my part-time job, all the spinning plates of my different interests, and making friends, as well as I could.
Despite staying at home most of the time, I feel like I actually talked to people more this year. Back when I still commute to college I spent so much time being exhausted, assaulted by my myriad of health problem, I didn't dare reach out to other people. These problems don't just go away during the quarantine, of course, but being at home more gives me space to rest. I posted more things online, talked to more people online. Learned to be less anxious, to be less haunted by all the social faux pas I did (I am sorry, if I ever sound rude or hateful. I try not to be). I think I'm getting better.
That makes it almost sound like this year has been good for me. Huh.
I also played loads of video games this year. They feel like my home, in this strange time when your physical home is your whole world. I've picked some that are more home than others: my Games of the Year. As usual, they are not games that are necessarily released this year, but games I personally played this year, that defined my year in some way. This is roughly ordered chronologically when I first played them.
Yeah of course Hades is in here somewhere.
1. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
It feels weird to put this in this list because it doesn't feel like a 2020 game. I played it in January and beat it a couple of weeks, so this was entirely before the pandemic hits, before the quarantine, before the whole mess that is 2020 happened. We still had hope that the year was going to be a good one back then.
I love Fire Emblem and you already know this. My Games of the Year list last year was pretty much just full of Fire Emblem. Playing Echoes feels like the natural progression after all of that. I've heard things about how this game has rubbish map design and how it's a bit lacking compared to the other games, so I kept my expectation low when I went in.
And well, the maps are rubbish. But this game ends up being my favourite of the series. Not the best, and it's nowhere near as meaty as Three Houses, but I adore it. I love the characters, the stories, the themes, how it departed from what the series is already known as, how it dared to be a bit weird. On the surface the plot can be read as a typical chosen-one-save-the-world, but there's a lot of subtle undertones: the nobility system and how fucked up it can be, how you might not want to be the chosen one but you try your best regardless, what faith and worship can mean to a finite being. And when you kill a god at the end, you really feel that ramification of what killing a god means. I had a whole thesis writing itself in my head. I should have written them down.
And, well, the maps are rubbish, but they're rubbish in interesting way at least! I can still yell at you exactly how I feel about the massive plain with the tiny tiny bridge or the weird castle with long walls or the stupid endlessly replicating eyeball monsters.
The game was An Experience to be sure, and what a way to begin the year.
2. Dead Cells
I wrote down very early in this year that this game should be considered a Game of the Year. Good. Thank you, my past self. Because otherwise this game will be buried and forgotten, overshadowed by Hades.
I like Dead Cells! There's not a lot of game where I can just bury myself into it, don't think, just move, swerve, dodge, slash slash, jump, wham. It's refreshingly thoughtless, but not thoughtless in a way some games can be. Instinctive might be a better word. I have to admit I am bad at this game. I still can't beat the final boss after all this time. But I find myself enjoying nearly every run anyway.
I also have to admit I don't quite click with the combat, not in the way that I think I should. It feels... heavy. It's responsive, but not as snappy as I like it to be. Still, I remember the days when I can't think, when my brain just decides to turn into a broiling storm instead of working, and playing Dead Cells was a moment of peace in that mess.
Dead Cells, while it might not seem like it, is my most relaxing game.
3. Octopath Traveler
I wish I did write that article that was brewing in my head when I was playing the game. Something about how JRPGs, known for bombastic plots about a gang of teenagers fighting god, doesn't always need to be grand. It can just be about low-stakes problems, peppered with moments genuine enough to make you care, but not too intimate that it'll occupy too much of your mind. They can just be a place you can find comfort in.
Octopath Traveler's story is not particularly remarkable. It's eight unconnected stories about not fighting gods, ranging from a former soldier seeking the man who killed his king to a young girl inspired by pirate tales to go on adventures. The plot doesn't have too much going on in it, but the writing is competent, the localization is impeccable, and the setting well-presented, and so it manages to build a world with an atmosphere to match. It's a comforting, low-stakes place to visit and explore. There are sights to see and people to help and tales to follow along. You don't really follow the stories for the stories themselves, per se, but they're threads you hold on to so you don't get lost as you explore the world.
Add this with the gorgeous music and visual and the terrific battle system, and it's just a very comfortable way to spend a couple of hours. For those couple of hours I really feel like I was somewhere else, exploring Orsterra with these characters whose interactions with each other I mostly made up in my mind. Octopath Traveler gave me a world I want to stay in.
4. Signs of the Sojourner
It's actually pretty hard for me to pick which games go into this list and which get kicked out. Signs of the Sojourner somehow is the one game that I keep insisting will stay in this list.
It's a card game, basically, but the cards are abstractions of holding a conversation, and somehow I felt like it's more like a conversation than any dialogue systems ever implemented in any game. Sometimes you connect with the person you're talking to, and the conversation went smoothly. Sometimes the two of you just don't have a lot in common, and the conversation was uncomfortable, even as you try to make amends. After each conversation, win or lose, you change: you lost a card and gain a new one. The more you talk to them, the closer together you become, but perhaps it might mean you'll drift away from the people who used to be your friends.
"It's a game about change and growth, about travelling and seeing new sights and meeting new people, about coming home," I wrote in this half-unfinished review of the game. Travelling changes you, and your home changes even when you're not around, and you have to learn to accept that. But that doesn't mean you can't make the effort to reconnect; you aren't entirely defined by your home or your travels, you're both.
The mid-game was depressing. I changed so much I couldn't talk with my older friends, but if I cling on to them I can't make new friends. Eventually though, as I gained more varieties of cards, I managed to have a deck that I can use on many different kinds of people, an abstraction of how I'm better at conversing, how I'm no longer tied down by only a few ideas but can work with all that I have learned.
It's kind of hopeful, in a way.
5. Hades
Hades is a lot of things for a lot of people. I think we all expected this game to be popular, considering how consistently good Supergiant Games's works have been, but I don't think we expected it to be this popular. To receive a metric tonne of fanworks. To receive all the awards anyone would give to games. To be so beloved by so many people, in so many places, through so many circles. People who play a lot of games love it, people who don't play a lot of games love it, people who don't even play games love it. Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre also have lots of fans, but it never feels like it has a fandom, never to this degree.
(minor spoilers ahoy!)
So let met just be one more voice in that fandom: I love the game. I love how soothing it is to play, quick-paced and twitchy and just the right thing for my overactive brain to focus on. I love its characters, and the story (stories) it's telling. People tend to focus on how hot all the characters are (they are), but eventually the game, at least for me, becomes more about family ties than anything else. Zagreus's relationship with his father, with his mother, with Nyx who was as much a mother to him, with his distant uncles and cousins in Olympus, with Chaos who is like everyone's grandparent, with Achilles who might well be more a father to him than his father is. Home is not where you live, but who cares when you're gone. It feels fitting that it starts with an act of defiance and ending with finding that home has always been there. The defiance is necessary, to break out of your cycle, even if you circle back home.
There's something to say about how it seems like it'll build up into something bombastic, a final confrontation, but it instead ends with reconciliation. I'm reminded of one of Bastion's endings, where instead of the final battle you might be expecting, they let you go as you carry your wounded friend home. In a way, the story in Hades is a lot less dramatic, a lot safer, but it's okay to feel safe. To feel kindness. Zagreus is the kindest character I know in games, and seeing the length he can go, will go, to be kind to someone else, it makes me happy to help him get there.
6. Control
I'm in love with The Oldest House. I'm in love with all its architectural quirks, in love with how it places its lighting, in love with all its strong geometric shapes. I love how its the rooms and corridors connect to each other, going into one place and out the other. I love the dark spaces, the bold lines, the weird fungi and vegetation growing out of the cubic gaps. I love how it has a ghost who shows himself through projector light and talk through telephone line. I love how it decides to connect spaces through a motel of all things, love that one part where you emerge to a quarry bathed in starlight, despite never leaving the building. I love how there's a sense that the House acts like a child, so curious, so silly, untethered by the worries of an adult human as much as it is untethered by the laws of physics. Inhuman, but comforting. Wrong, but comforting. It doesn't make sense, and yet it makes sense.
Control has the strongest sense of space in any video game I've played. All its rooms and architecture are tightly knitted together, even the Weird Corridors feel like they belong here. I never get lost, and I even savor the act of just walking around in it. I spent so much time just looking around, taking pictures of all the small things: the lighting, the shapes, the trinkets impeccably placed on desks. How can something as banal as shapes be so beautiful?
I was never much for photography, since my hands are incredibly twitchy and all the photos I took were always bad and blurry. Control helped me realise that I actually enjoy taking pictures. This game showed me that it is its own kind of fun to find some nice lighting, some nice perspective, and take a really nice photo that no one else probably has taken before.
When I went on a road trip at the end of this year, I took a lot of pictures for the first time in a long while. It was the memory of taking pictures in Control that urged me on.
7. Blaseball
Is Blaseball a video game? You can think of it that way. But for me, and I'm sure this is true for a large majority of its fans, Blaseball is a whole unity of the game itself, the community, the lore we built together, all the art and music that came out of this space. Blaseball is a cultural phenomenon, and likely something that will never arise in the same way again, in any other time in history. Even Blaseball today is already a different beast from Blaseball as it was when it started. It's constantly changing, evolving, at a pace that no other game or community or cultural event can match.
At its heart, Blaseball is just a match between random number generators. Blaseball players have randomly-generated names, randomly generated stats, and they duke it out in games of semi-randomized outcome. But humans have the ability to see patterns in everything, and soon the names have a personality and then they have an appearance, and then the match-up become a space for those personalities to interact with each other. And humans have the ability, the need, to share the patterns they see. Soon there was a shared belief of what these personalities are, what actually happens in a single game, and from that we keep building up and up and up, together.
I'm not too involved with the game, and I don't interact with the community as much as I like to, but still, even just gaining the ability to see patterns in the randomly-generated matches in the same way as the community does, being able to cheer together just by seeing numbers go up (and down and sideways), it already makes me feel like I'm part of this phenomenon. In a way, it makes me feel less lonely. Even in quiet, we share this fascination, we have a common understanding, of this weird, eldritch, wonderful world of Blaseball.
We are all love Blaseball.
Honourable Mentions
I played plenty of games this year!
Arcade Spirits might not hit all the beats for me, but it came at a particular time this year when I really welcomed its upbeat and unashamed we-can-get-through-this tone. It's a visual novel about making friends and chasing your dreams and while narratively it treads familiar grounds, I really admire its energy. I remember playing this when I was feeling down, and I always felt a lot better afterwards.
Splatoon 2 and Smash Bros. Ultimate are absolutely fantastic games to just pick up and play whenever I feel like it. They're just pure unbridled arcade fun, polished to the peak. And I get to share these games with my sister (we took turns playing Splatoon and we co-op a lot in Smash Bros.), who don't usually play games herself, which makes me appreciate them more.
Lair of the Clockwork God has some of the cleverest self-aware puzzle/joke I've witnessed/experienced in a video game, my God. It might be excessive to label it a love letter to video games, but it's definitely made by two guys who love video games a lot, even though they're also pretty grumpy about it too. Some of its jokes might be too dated to my young millennial/old gen-z brain, but the game also gave me more than a few chuckles and a couple moments of just being completely in awe.
Kentucky Route Zero is like poetry: how it unfolds slowly, how it doesn't follow the narrative beats you can expect from a normal story, how it tries to tell you, without directly telling you, the messages written between the line, implied, never spoken, circled around so you can truly appreciate it instead of just passing them over. Thing is, I never like poetry, and while I truly appreciate what KR0 tried to do and was successful at doing, at the end of the day, I have to admit I'm not really sure if I can recommend it to anyone.
It's an interesting experience though, and not one I regret at all.
Paradise Killer is such a weird and interesting game, in almost all of its aspect. In its tone, its world, its story, its characters, its aesthetic, its gameplay, they're all one-of-a-kind. It's a pink-and-blue synthwave island paradise vibe mixed with a massive dosage of cosmic horror and just absolutely going 100% into what it wants to be. It throws away all the conventions of the elements that make it up (open world gameplay, detective games, cosmic horror setting, characters with strong traits) and just, become its own thing. Boldest game I've played.
It also helped me get over my terrible sense of space, somehow. I'm the guy who always always get lost playing a 3D game, and here we were just thrown into an island, here's a mystery, no quest markers, go figure it out. Bold as heck. I was disoriented, but then I learned to take in my surrounding, to use that really tall tower as a marker of directions, to pay attention when I look down from the tall mountain, and soon I have a whole map in my head. By the end I always know exactly where I am and I barely need that map at all. Remarkable. What the heck.
if not us [click!] is a small game, but it's something special. It's five interactive fictions about five alternate timelines of the same event, resulting in five different tragedies, told through the eye of five different characters, through five different methods of interactive storytelling. It never tries to hold your hand as to what, in fact, is the story it's telling, but it will still hit you with the full force of its own emotion. "Obtuse as hell but gut-wrenchingly earnest" I wrote in my early review on Twitter. Hell yeah.
Coda: Animal Crossing: New Horizons
What will 2021 be? The pandemic is still ongoing, despite what some people might say. As of writing this in December, Jakarta is still hitting over 2000 new cases a day and there's no sign that it's stopping soon. The vaccine is close to finishing development, but that's on the other side of the world and who knows how long until we can get it on the populace. Hospitals are almost all overburdened. Life for a lot of people is uncertain. 2020 has been a whole mess and people are hoping that the next will be better, as if this year has just been particularly cursed and it'll be lifted at the changing of the year. But will it really? God I hope so.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not the game I was hoping it would be for me, but it seemed to be exactly what a lot of people needed. A lot of people wanted certainties, a place that they can mould into exactly what they want it to be, not a particle out of place. A place where all your friends are always there for you and are physically incapable of saying mean things. I was hoping for something else: a pleasant place, yes, but one that still moves even without my input. I want things to grow and overgrow, rivers to flood and seasons that shift and people who come and go, and I can just be one hand that can steer its growth when I want to.
Animal Crossing is a doll house when I was expecting a garden.
But I did enjoy the little trips I occasionally made to my island. When I can let myself relax, to not be worried that I'm just "wasting time", I did enjoy walking around the island, talking to my villagers, buying them new clothes, randomly fishing and catching bugs. During the rare moments when I was online at the same time as my cousins, who lived on the other side of the world, it was wonderful to be able to visit them and run around together and smack each other with the net.
I think I will still be visiting my Animal Crossing island from time to time in the next year. And I will still be on a lookout if anyone wants me to visit their island, or if anyone want to see the mess that is mine. Maybe I'll take more effort into it, instead of just awkwardly waiting for it to change when it never changes. Sometimes we can't just sit and wait for things to change. Sometimes we can take action, and I should do that instead of being too nervous or tired or defeated to try.
Here's to 2021. May it be a better year for all of us.
