Video Games in 2020: An Awards Journal
By: Justin Fleming
Tags: Doom, 2020 In Games, 2020, Video Game, Hades

Then, as January concluded, so did one of the long standing great interactive plays of our time: Kentucky Route Zero. This five act point and click adventure game experienced increasing development times across its five acts and it was one of the remnants of my time making Let’s Play videos. I couldn’t play it without streaming it so my few followers could partake in the very quiet and touching farewell that Kentucky Route Zero had in store for me. Gaming culture at large placed Disco Elysium as a game with some of the best writing games have seen in years. And while that is true, I feel like the Disco Elysium hype focuses on the game’s well thought out world and political-economic strains, less on how writing can emotionally pull in and attach to people engaging in a game. Kentucky Route Zero knows this, and has been mesmerizing me for its crossroads of some of the most uncommon conversations about America, life, faith, regret, and death ever had in video games. And it did so by illuminating the lives of others instead of discussing those lives. I honestly cannot wait to go through it with my fiance some day now that the completed version has been nice and updated. I also want to experience the interstitial play “The Entertainment” in VR now that I can. So Kentucky Route Zero wins my award for 2020’s Best Writing. Sometimes a game’s writing doesn’t need to be profound or complex to be the best, especially when we’re talking about video games.

Then I moved onwards into February proper and played Metro: Exodus. I had really strong critical thoughts about this game. Metro: Exodus is a problematic sequel that I ultimately enjoyed, but only for about half of the game’s runtime. Some would call that a game only half-good, but it’s not that the back half of the game was bad. The world was still breathtaking, the combat sequences were still engaging, and Exodus had managed to make me curious about what happened to every new zone that other people called “home”, much like the game’s predecessors. But its mechanics in zones beyond the opening salvo only led to frustration and the story was…just okay, in the end. It could’ve been better, but it doesn’t feel like the end of the line for the Metro series. 4A Games stepped out into the open with this one and tried something drastically new for themselves. As a fan of the series, there was a lot to love here, I just hope 4A knows what parts worked in the beginning and what parts were already influencing the later parts to leave a not-so-great taste in the mouth. Being able to so easily comprehend what worked and didn’t work in Metro: Exodus leads me to award it 2020’s Most Transparently Average Game. Worth my time, but if you haven’t played Metro games before, consider its predecessors first. These thoughts were, once again, something I had semi-completed on Medium, but the writing was getting so long it was turning into a Noah Gervais video outlining so much of the plot that it got exhaustive and I felt like my words would never quite get to the point fast enough. So I axed it.

Part of the reason I had so much trouble staying on my writing was because video games kept coming up in the “dump it” timeline of winter in 2020 that kept occupying my life out of a sense of urgency. When I heard Black Mesa: Xen was having a limited beta testing in late 2019, I figured it wouldn’t be actually finished for at least another year. Low and behold, literally seventeen days before Half-Life: Alyx, Black Mesa shipped version 1.0 on Steam. I had already played the mod when it originally came out years ago, then went back in a couple times more after it launched on Steam a few years later. And now I could play the game, in its entirety, Xen and all, to try and cram it in the weeks prior to Half-Life: Alyx shipping. I managed it. Crowbar Collective have been working at this in different fashions and team groups over the past 15 years and it’s a testament to 1) the willpower of its creators and 2) the absolute insane amount of work it is to modernize a game like Half-Life 1 to whatever current moment fits what we call “modern” in terms of video game graphics and design. It’s why no matter what happens on the Steam awards, I’m labeling Black Mesa 2020’s Labor of Love award. 15 years, they’ve more than earned it. Black Mesa’s a great way to play Half-Life 1 again. But I do want to stress that again element. The Xen chapters are breathtaking, absolutely beautiful, and just a tad too long for their own good. But I can’t say I didn’t enjoy Crowbar’s way of expanding the various different realizations of the Half-Life universe. People should experience Half-Life 1 the way it was if they can, it still runs well in Windows 10 last I checked. But Black Mesa is the literal best runner up if you can’t enjoy it that way, and it’s improving over the original in some places.

Considering I had been waiting 13 years for the next official Half-Life game, I obviously not only finished Black Mesa in a matter of days, I went ahead and binged Half-Life 2, Episode One, and Episode Two just in time for Half-Life: Alyx’s release the very next day after finishing Episode Two. I distinctly remember working longer days that week and spending as much time experiencing that game as I could. If you have VR, you’ve probably already played it at this point. And if you haven’t yet but you can, it’s the game that VR promised we could have one day. I’ll always remember the time I ran behind a porta-potty to avoid gunfire, found a grenade at my feet, and had to scurry the door open, get in, reach out and slam the door shut to protect myself from the explosion. In plenty of other games outside VR, that’s just finding some cover. In VR, that’s a fake lived experience. I’m on my third run recently, enjoying every second of the developer commentary. A game like this wouldn’t win Game of the Year, it’s not flawless, and it’s not as impactful on gaming culture as we’d like it to be because it’s just not that accessible due to it being in VR. But for me, this was 13 years of waiting fulfilled. Only one other game this year is going to come this close to Justin’s Most Fulfilling Moment in Games in 2020.

And you’d think that means, “Welp, he finished Alyx and probably started it over right away” but think again! Doom Eternal was on the horizon shortly after! In fact it came out days before Alyx. So instead I spent some time playing the 4th and 5th episodes of Life if Strange 2 with my fiance. Finishing that game made me realize I may not have much interest in DontNod games from here forward. Not because they’re bad. Quite the opposite, I think we need more games exploring adolescent themes in this vein. I’m just not so sure DontNod are going to strike the crazed nightmare fuel that Life is Strange 1 did. I cannot, as a non-marginalized person, consider if Life is Strange 2 is telling a story well or correctly about two American citizens that fall into a marginalized category. But I know DontNod worked hard to create a sense of empathy and a strong narrative about the importance about the bond between these two brother characters in the game. DontNod have since already released two more games this year following similar formats, which for me sounds off an alarm that they are moving too fast for their own good to really take in some lessons and learn how to grow these games to be better than what they are: Earnest, though a little awkward, and wild. I want more games like these, I just don’t want the same games again (which is what DontNod’s “Tell Me Why” and “Twin Mirror” seem to be doing). By the time we finished Life is Strange…quarantine had already hit. And that altered plans even further. For now, Life is Strange 2, despite being finished in 2019, gets the award for 2020’s Sign of a Series I’m Not Gonna Care About Before Long. These are good games and a market for someone, I’m just not sure I’m going to be ready to go when Life is Strange 3 gets announced. I’ve already skipped out on Tell Me Why and Twin Mirror. Who knows how I’ll feel later.

April — June

We going there

I started Doom Eternal in March quickly after Alyx and finished it by April 9th. I uninstalled it shortly after and I haven’t really looked back wanting more ever since. While enjoying the game, I found myself enjoying what I personally consider to be the wrong things about this game. I call them the wrong things to enjoy mainly because the things I loved in Doom Eternal were all the things I didn’t really care about in Doom 2016, which would be the art direction and the background lore. I know Doom 2016 included readable UAC lore on everything, and I’ve read it all, I know it was pretty funny and metal at times. And in many ways I love how dedicated Doom 2016 is to portraying the UAC Mars base from Doom 3, but a version of it we can see. It’s great. But I was way more caught up in the ingenious design decisions in Doom 2016 that made us feel like the unstoppable threat those hell lore tablets spoke of regarding the “Doomslayer”. So for me, more of the same sounded good with Doom Eternal, but in more ways I was looking forward to the follow-up to 2016’s soundtrack with Mick Gordon at the helm again. And maybe using that cool sword thing. That’s not exactly what happened though. Instead I burned through Eternal, frustrated at its steeper difficulty until I toned it down one notch to just “Hurt Me Plenty” and found that still challenging enough compared to my ability to play the previous game at “Ultra-Violence”. That wasn’t what actually frustrated me though.

I found myself as a player who simply falls into the landscape that finds just about everything in Doom 2016 preferable over Eternal. I felt like Yahtzee’s review summed up my feelings really well, and I also felt like the same hat trick again just wasn’t working on me quite as well except when the game gave really cool lore background to the Doomslayer’s life, that stuff I couldn’t put down and wanted to stare at a lot. Meanwhile I fell into the camp that had problems with a combat design that required me to approach every fight a very particular way or I was going to have an awful time of it. It certainly made the gameplay something new to learn and a challenge to uncover, but once mastered it only made the sensation more frustrating. The Marauder is the culmination of that design, leading me to flipping off the enemy every time I bested him from the comforts of my home. And yet, I appreciate the weight with which an entire culture at large was able to discuss and look at game design in such a way to realize what it is that we prefer when it comes to Doomslaying. People who preferred Eternal’s methods weren’t wrong, they’re legitimately just preferring an approach to the FPS design that leans closer to a character-action game. And so that’s why despite having iffy thoughts about Doom Eternal, despite preferring Doom 2016 over it, I can’t help but give Doom Eternal the award of 2020’s Most Well-Debated Game Design Choices. For a game that’s been kicking around time and time again since the 90s, that’s good. The longest standing FPS series of all time should be making us debate what makes a good shooter. Doom Eternal accomplishes this in spades, blood, and guts.

Now in April, I was looking for a way to interact with my fiance while the whole state stayed in quarantine. So I bought Telling Lies, something I had been hoping to do for a while and we had fun piecing together the story. Sam Barlow’s previous creation “Her Story” showed there was still room for really genius innovation in the industry in some of the most mundane of concepts. And it was hard to say before I touched this follow-up game whether or not something like this “search engine video tool” has legs. But I found myself even more engaged in Telling Lies, with pages and pages of names, notes, and scribbles by my side as we played the game. It took up our time wonderfully and made strong improvements over the original. It could probably stand to use a video slider in its player so I don’t have to hold rewind or fast forward, but Telling Lies, unlike Doom Eternal, wins 2020’s Coolest Improved Innovative Design for me, even though it’s a 2019 title. After Telling Lies, some early Epic Game store sales launched and I bought and played two more titles from 2019 that I wanted a good opportunity to experience. The first was last year’s Outer Wilds, the absolute best video game to adapt the experience of space and everything humanity feels about it. Razbuten has a good video about it, comparing the efforts we place within Outer Wilds to that of making major changes take place (or saving our world, or our lives). For me Outer Wilds perfectly demonstrates through mechanics and design just how dangerous it is to do things in space and why space exploration really is a big frontier for us. But the game also doubles as undoubtedly the best puzzle game I’ve played since Portal or Myst. The galaxy is the puzzle and coming to grips with how this universe you’re in works helps you solve the great riddle of life here in this video game. Like many before me have said now, Outer Wilds is a game I want to forget and learn how to play all over again. Even a year later Outer Wilds is 2020’s Best Dang Puzzle Ever.