Time is fucking weird, man. Whenever I look back on my (admittedly short in the grand scheme of things) life, it never falls neatly into the segments of months and years that make up the calendar. To me, 2016 didn’t really begin until after I had grown apart from some middle school friends and started taking the train to a high school several cities away. 2018 and 2019 have this nebulous anti-time zone between them when I was reckoning with what I wanted to do with my life while also realizing that I was bisexual. And 2020. Hoooooooo boy, 2020. Where to begin.
Nothing amazes me more than when I look back to the early months of this year and realize that I *gasp* did things. I ran clubs, I helped facilitate a retreat, I played some ultimate frisbee. Now, I doubt I could even throw a straight pass. (ha. straight.) I also played some games that I consider to be among my all-time favorites, like Elsinore, Control, and Outer Wilds. All of these I meant to play the year prior, but despite my belatedness, each gave me experiences in gaming that I’ll never forget. And then March happened.
I can actually pinpoint the exact moment 2020 really began for me. I had just gotten off the train and began to walk home when I realized that I was missing my sweater — I had left it in my friend’s car when he gave me a ride to ultimate frisbee practice. I thought it was no big deal, I’d text him later and he’d bring it to school tomorrow.
That night, the administration sent the email. We weren’t going back to campus the next day. In fact, they didn’t know if we could come back for the rest of the year. My friend and I texted each other jokingly, though looking back you can see the anxiety in our messages. I said that this would probably be over in a few weeks, a month at most. I could get my sweatshirt back then.
I wouldn’t see that sweatshirt for another five months.
Outside of that — and the ability to say a proper goodbye to the friends and mentors I had spent time with over the last four years of my life — 2020 didn’t take much from me. And I’m not going to spend any more time talking about my own struggles this year because it took so much more from so many others. People in America and around the world lost friends, family, and in far too many cases their own lives because of people too selfish to show basic courtesy and kindness, governments too corrupt and inept to actually help their citizens, and police forces too concerned with brutalization rather than protection. In other words, business as usual. And looking down the barrel of 2021 right now, it really does seem like nothing will fundamentally change.
Of course, 2020 wasn’t totally bleak. I also witnessed some incredibly heartwarming shows of compassion and inspiring examples of courage. And I know I’m very lucky to be saying this, but I had some good moments as well. Managed to make an okay transition into college despite not actually being at college, and met some great people along the way. Started writing movie reviews after an extended period of not doing that, which has been a welcome distraction and exercise in creative writing. Even wrote one of the top voted scripts in a screenwriting contest, which I can’t deny felt pretty good.
However, despite all of those extremely cool things that I got to do in 2020, I’m not sure that I’ll remember this year as anything more than a cloud of anxiety and stress in the long run. Looking around, it seems like the world is falling apart before I’ve fully stepped into it, and I’m not sure that’s a good feeling to have when you’re 18.
What I can say for certain is this: I played some damn good games in 2020. (And by 2020, I mean after March, because anything I played before then feels like it belongs to a different era.) Some of these games were great distractions. Others were insightful and thought-provoking pieces of fiction. And ultimately, all of them left me with something to write about for this list that I feel the need to write because my brain has been poisoned by the online hell world that is video games. Let’s do this.
Eight: Metroid II: Return of Samus
I’m kicking off this list with the game that kicked off my time in lockdown, the 1991 sequel to the game that kicked off the metroidvania genre. Despite being a huge fan of those types of games, I’m a bit of a freshman to the Metroid series, only having dabbled in Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission before this. However, in this case that may be for the best, because Metroid II is a bit different from the games that came before and after it. Aside from being the only game in its franchise to be released on the Game Boy, giving it a unique monochromatic style, it’s also fairly linear. Rather than exploring an alien ship or secret base, Samus is tasked with going into a cave system and exterminating the remnants of a parasitic species one-by-one. It’s honestly a bleak plot — wiping out an entire race of alien creatures — and it’s not alleviated by the fact that you’re constantly shown a counter of how many targets remain. It’s always there, a reminder of what you’re doing, and all it can do is count down as you descend deeper and deeper beneath the surface of an alien world. The game may practically unplayable by modern standards (there’s absolutely no way I would have gotten through it without a guide), but despite that, it was still an engrossing experience that managed to end with an unexpected moment of genuine emotion.
Seven: Thousand Threads
This game was probably the one I knew the least about going into, and I think that was for the best. I can easily see how someone just describing this game might oversell its premise: you’re a mailperson who roams a sparsely populated land, delivering letters and doing chores for people while uncovering artifacts from a lost era. What makes Thousand Threads interesting is that while the land you travel through is hand-crafted, all the people you meet are procedurally generated with relationships to family and friends. Things get complicated when someone asks you to steal something from another person, an action that attracts attention not only from the victim, but all of the people they know as well. Pushing further through the game’s various biomes only gets you more tangled into a web of allies and enemies, though after playing for a while that webbing grows thin as the synthesized dialogue and quests NPCs throw at you becomes more and more repetitive. Still though, I appreciated Thousand Threads’s ambitions, and found wandering its picturesque, natural world to be one of my more meditative moments in gaming this year.
Six: Can Androids Pray
When compared to the hours I poured into the other games on this list, Can Androids Pray was a much shorter experience. In my first playthorugh I clocked just under thirty minutes, and my guess is when I go back for another round there won’t be anything substantially different about its runtime. What earns this game a spot on this list is how much it still managed to enrapture my mind even after I put it down. You would think a game that left me with so much to chew on must have been doing some wild shit in that half hour, but it actually manages to be pretty restrained in its premise. The entirety of the game is a dialogue between “two angry femme mech pilots” (a description from the store page (this is what convinced me to get the game btw)) who are wrecked and stranded on a forlorn battlefield, left with nothing but a semi-stable radio connection and failing life support systems. Can Androids Pray establishes that there’s no escape from this situation; the end is nigh for both of characters. And yet, in their final moments, they’ll talk about the things that touched their lives: religion, philosophy, war, love — all in a way that makes you ponder these concepts, but stills come across like they’re actual humans having a conversation. Or are they human? Who can say? I won’t tell you any more; I’d recommend you go into this game knowing as little as possible, considering how bite-sized it is. And I would recommend that you play it, maybe more than almost every other game on this list, because of how short and digestible it manages to be while still delivering an impactful narrative.
Five: Crazy Taxi
Before the lockdown, I went on a school trip to San Francisco. (It wasn’t much of a trip, I went to school in San Jose.) On it, we walked the streets of the city, looking at murals, going to museums, visiting historical locations. The existing knowledge and appreciation I had for San Fran grew over those days as I learned about the labor movements and queer spaces that flourished there in the 20th Century. It’s also worth noting that we worked at a food kitchen which fed what must have been at least a hundred people when we were there, an important reminder of what this city has wrought for so many people. It’s honestly depressing, seeing how the life was slowly sucked out of San Francisco over the years by cruel legislation and giant tech companies — the price for our record-breaking economy was paid with the suffering that comes from rising levels of poverty and homelessness. I like to think that Crazy Taxi paints of picture of what San Francisco used to be, seen through a bright, idealized lens you could only get in the 90s. Tearing through the streets, seeing people come and go on stylish rides and cable cars, rushing to get to a date, or see their grandparent in the hospital, or to bail their friend out of jail — what’s there is a celebration of the city’s history in its diverse, countercultural, violent, and beautiful glory. But what’s not there is as much a reminder of everything else.
Four: 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel
You know that feeling when you’re playing chess (or really any competitive game of a tactical nature) and your opponent pulls a totally unexpected decisive move that forces you to spend a couple moments figuring out whatever it is they just did in order to even begin planning your next move? 5D Chess is that, but if you had that feeling the whole time you’re playing it. On first glance it seems like a simple, fun idea: a game of chess that retains all the basic rules, but, in addition to the two dimensions it’s possible to move pieces in, you added the ability to move pieces back in time and across alternate timelines. Things quickly get out of hand, however, when you consider the possibilities this game opens up: being able to put a king in the past in check from the present, sending a piece to a new timeline to stall a checkmate, even putting multiple kings across timelines in checkmate with just one piece. It’s incredibly hard to convey the scope of this game by simply describing it, so I’ll leave you with this example of how mind boggling just one game of 5D Chess can get. (This is another game I highly recommend you get, only because I really want to play it with someone else.)
Three: Spelunky
If you haven’t heard of Spelunky, it’s a roguelike that has you descending through randomly generated levels of caves, jungles, and temples, while going up against a colorful cast of creatures out to get you. Despite the fact that you can reach the credits of the game in under 30 minutes even if you’re not a speedrunner, it’s easier said than done. You start every run on level 1–1 and have to make your way to the end in one go, knowing that slipping up even once could send you all the way back to the start. I’ve gotten into and out of many rougelikes over the years, but I think what made me stick with Spelunky for so long was that every encounter felt like a puzzle. Unlike other more combat-focused games in this genre, all of the enemies here just felt like another variable among the plethora of obstacles this game throws at you. I was never fighting my way through Spelunky’s depths, I was always carefully considering my next move, slowly pushing further and further down, until some misplaced bomb or giant spider I hadn’t noticed sent me panicking, sprinting through a level desperately, and almost always led to me dying and winding up all the way back at the beginning. It’s a punishing game, and I loved every second of it.
Two: Dark Souls II
“A kingdom once stood here. Drangleic, they called it, I think. I’m not really sure. Nobody is. They say a thousand empires rose and fell on this spot, and that, in time, a thousand more will too. You can see traces and shadows of them, those old hegemons: a tome here, a statue there, memories that predate the fallen royal family. Deep down, I think that’s why we build monuments — temples, sculptures, gates, walls — not necessarily because of their use to us now, but as a reminder to those who come after that we were here. Isn’t that the greatest victory there is? To be remembered ages after you’re gone? Is that why you came here? To be remembered? No. Silly me, no. I can see it in the way you carry yourself, whenever you pass through here. You’ve come to save yourself. That’s why you kill, isn’t it? That’s why you seek out the great ones, in their sea-stricken cathedrals and inferno-bound bell towers. Well, I hope you at least know that in your fight you help more than yourself. Other lost souls seem to have taken a liking to this place, the home of your priestess ally. Majula, we call it. The sun’s always on the horizon here — I like that. Though I’m not confident enough to say whether it’s on the precipice of giving us a new day, or leaving us in eternal darkness. Then again, I’m not sure it matters to someone as blind as you.”
One: Umurangi Generation
This year, the trait I realized I want most in a video game (and perhaps with any medium of art) is honesty. I mean that in the sense that I like when games are willing to be honest with the player about what they’re about to play, and when developers are willing to be honest about the experience they’re trying to convey. I played games this year that were honest in their aesthetics, their challenges, and their narratives, but no game I played was more holistically honest than Umurangi Generation.
In the first level of the game, you’re on the roof of a skyscraper with your friends (and their mysterious pet penguin). The space is abound with punk elements; graffiti, skateboards, and boomboxes all stand out in plain sight as seagulls sit together on a rusting fence. Looking out beyond your immediate surroundings there’s even more to see: a bright yellow sun in the sky, its reflection in a crimson sea, and the massive wall that prevents your city from being flooded and crushed under the weight of an ocean that towers several stories above the streets. And when a squad of fighter jets fly overhead, burning fuel and brandishing the letters “UN,” it’s clear what’s being said: welcome to the end of the world.
Umurangi Generation’s core gameplay loop is wandering through different environments and taking photographs of various objects, some mundane and others less so. However, most of my time spent in this game was taking photos of things I could technically ignore, but found impossible to look away from. In one level I was only required to take a photo of two objects in a lounge, but found myself enraptured with all of the signs, glassware, and people that decorated it that I left that level with a full camera roll. To me, that’s the sign of a successful game that makes creativity its primary mechanic, but this game succeeds in more than one way.
The title “Umurangi Generation” refers to a generation in a “shitty future” (the developer’s words, not mine) that’s defined by environmental catastrophe and political strife — umurangi being a word that comes the Maori language Te Reo, meaning “red sky.” The world this generation is born into is already doomed, and the game is very clear about who is to blame. The police, corporate media, and military-industrial complex all rear their ugly faces at one point or another here, whether they be on some TV screen or agitprop poster, or up in your face with the end of a baton.
I don’t want to spoil any more of Umurangi Generation because it is the game on this list I most highly recommend you play, even if you’re not so creatively inclined with a camera. The story this game manages to tell without any real “text” is an accomplishment on its own, but speaking to our current moment in a way I’ve seen few works of fiction able to do puts it into a league of its own.
I may not be part of a literal umurangi generation, but not long enough ago I looked up and saw a red sky, tinged with corrosive smoke and terrible omens. Umurangi Generation spoke to the moments like that in 2020, and it asks you to take a closer look them. Yes, you’ll see the terrible forces bringing them to fruition, but you’ll also find the beauty in them that survives despite all odds.
Have a good year y’all.
