Ten Short Stories, Framed by the Medium I Love (and resent) the Most

According to Dictionary.com, revolution is defined as

1. an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.
2. (sociology) a radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure, especially one made suddenly and often accompanied by violence.
3. a sudden, complete or marked change in something.

2020 will be a year most would rather forget. I know that. Not for me. You might be wondering what’s wrong with me. Am I a sadist who gets off on other’s trauma? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. I had my fair share of tragedy this year: of death, of change, of stasis, of progress, of regress…but I think it’s safe to say that I learned more about myself in 2020, isolated from people, than I had in my previous 33 years of life combined. I don’t take that to be an exaggeration.

I was in a dark place prior to COVID hitting. I was becoming more aware of the then “novel” Coronavirus come early March. I remember the stupid Corona beer jokes like a bad habit. And I remember the turning point being a Joe Rogan podcast in which he and an expert on diseases were having a discussion about it; that this was For Real, and it was only a matter of time before the United States was going to have to seriously deal with it. For most of us, that meant not dealing with the outside world (except through the internet and the media). I began assuming the worst, thinking of who I loved, but more selfishly, how it was going to impact my own life. Because in early March, I only gave a shit about myself, and the myriad stupid fictions I’d created for myself in my head. I was going nowhere. I was in stasis.

For the past seven years, one of these fictions has been fancying myself some sort of gaming journalist, or YouTuber, or twitch streamer; basically, my dream job for the past seven years had been to find some way to cover games. My favorite part of it was December, in which everyone began sharing their favorite games of the year, a culmination of a year situated by ranked lists. I loved it. Why I love ranking things, especially games, I don’t think I will ever fully know (perhaps some mild form of OCD, but that seems like a pretty lazy diagnosis) but that dream died a painful death late last year.

I never manifested my dream. I didn’t even try, really. Sure, I played a ton of games, I wrote about them, I THOUGHT about them, I consumed gaming podcasts, followed respected titans of the industry (critics), and still, I couldn’t pull the trigger. I was afraid to fail. I was afraid to even try.

So now arrives late January, a new year that could potentially wind up similar to how last year felt. The cynic in me can’t help but believe that. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

First, let me acknowledge a few games I didn’t get around to. Yakuza 7 was a game I simply wasn’t ready for in 2020. I love the Yakuza franchise too much to have my experience soured, so I’m going to wait until I’m ready. Like a Dragon would very likely find its way near the top of my list, had I played it. For my money, it’s the most underrated video game franchise of all time. And the fact that they eliminated my least favorite part of the Yakuza experience (the brawling) with one of my favorite pastimes (turn based role playing), I’d wager I’m going to love the game. Also, I’m very saddened I held off on Ghosts of Tsushima, a game I really want to play, but will probably hold off on until there’s a sale. Cyberpunk 2077, well, I tried playing it on my Playstation 4 Pro, and would say roughly three-quarters of my time with the game has bordered on miserable. As far as Gaming Disappointments of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 would be number 1 with a bullet.

There’s a number of others I didn’t get around to playing, because if I’m being perfectly honest, I didn’t play as many games as I would’ve liked to last year. Hopefully after reading my list, you will have a better understanding why.

10: Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Ori 2 has the distinction of being one of only two games on this list that wasn’t entirely affected by COVID. That’s half true, because I happened to start the game prior to COVID devastating the U.S, and I finished it a week after. I was a huge fan of the first game, and Metroidvanias in general, and the addition of serious melee combat in this one had me salivating, because I had just finished Hollow Knight back in January of 2020. Hollow Knight is the better game, far better, I’d argue, but Will of the Wisps has a whimsical aesthetic that can move you to tears. What it’s lacking in innovation, it makes up for in its immaculate synthesis of musical and visual poetry.

Unfortunately, I played the game on a base Xbox One, in which the game released notoriously buggy (a tragedy in the games industry that has hopefully reached its breaking point) and rife with frame rate issues. I still find it hard to fault anyone involved, because I played the game on Games Pass, which is still the best deal in video games. Things like Games Pass makes me wonder why I’m even sitting here spending 60–70 dollars on games, some of which I’ll spend no more than an hour playing, when I could easily spend the rest of my life combing through Xbox’s colossal list of critically acclaimed games. If I had to rank streaming services, I’d have to consider Games Pass at the apex.

9: Streets of Rage 4

This one tickled my nostalgia bone in a desperately needed way. I was a Genesis kid, and Streets of Rage 2 (and 3) was my childhood. My parents would only allow one friend inside the house, so myself and one “lucky friend” of my choosing would play Streets of Rage 2 co-op while my other friends would gather outside my bedroom window and watch us play. It was truly a bizarre sight, my companions pressing their noses against the window pane, leaving snot marks. I know, because my head was on a swivel, dumbfounded that my parents thought this was an appropriate way for children to pass time. Still, I soldiered on.

Streets of Rage 4 is a love letter to people like me who had weird and complicated childhoods. Obviously, it doesn’t do anything innovative, it’s a freakin’ beat em up in 2020. But I unlocked most of the characters and alternate stages, and vibed endlessly to the music. A massive debt is owed to Streets of Rage 2’s uniquely pulsating and ripping soundtrack, which helped define the zaniness of the 1990’s, and gave me my appreciation of music that I have today.

8: PGA Tour 2k21

How many gamers have this on their top ten lists? I love golf games, like most nerds, but what separates my love is that I actually love the sport of golf. It did the heavy lifting during early Fall for me. It was my silly-stupid-distraction-dumb shit-podcast-music game.

I’m just ecstatic I finally got a functioning golf simulation with the PGA licensed attached, especially after the non-event that was the ill fated Rory McIlroy PGA Tour 2015, a game so bad I rented it from Family Video and then got flagged from ever renting there again because I never bothered to return it. I still remember my mom telling me Family Video had called the house (back when I still lived with them), and my mom guilt tripping me by saying “You need to return Rory Mackelbaums PGA. There are other people who would like to play it.” I assure you, Mom, that you are the first and only person to have ever uttered those two sentences.

The career mode is pretty bare bones, but I got a real kick out of the online multiplayer. I hardly play games online with other people, because I am self conscious to a fault, but I was staying up way past my bedtime playing matchplay with random people across the world, laughing hysterically whenever someone shanked a drive into the pond and then booted out of the game in frustration. I think this game was so therapeutic, because I finally hit a revelation about myself: I am far too competitive in life, and would like to stop being that way. I wouldn’t say I was the best at PGA Tour 2k21, my win rate was probably 2:1. I even got good enough to play fairly well on the Master Difficulty, something I hardly ever engage with. But once I got a few wins under me and gained confidence, I started to realize how silly competition is in general; how it’s a ridiculous standard by which to compare people to one another. I get it, people love sports, including myself, and I’m not discounting that, but we radically need to rethink competition when it encroaches other aspects of our lives. Sportsmanship doesn’t have to be an obligation tacked on at the end, in which we begrudgingly form a defeated line like fascists and reluctantly shake our enemy’s hand. What I’m trying to say is, instead of acting graceful in defeat, try laughing during the bottom of the 9th, with the bases loaded and two outs.

7: Resident Evil 3

This one probably won’t be long, because justifying my admiration for Resident Evil is self-evident at this point. And let’s face it, RE3 is a very short game. Resident Evil 2 was my favorite game of 2019, because it expanded on one of my favorite games of all time while somehow being different enough. It made me understand that “remake” doesn’t have to be something filthy or cynical. Why the hell can’t we receive updates to the games that meant the most to us decades ago?

Resident Evil 3, both its remake and the original, doesn’t even try to leap frog its predecessor. Everyone already knows which game is better. In this sense, Nemesis was my first true DLC. Was it overpriced in both cases? Absolutely. But Capcom has won back my faith, preserving a very important time in my young adult years, desperately trying to learn what I liked and didn’t, like an infant trying to learn what’s edible and what’s an electrical cord stuck in an outlet.

I’d go so far to say that the rebirth Capcom has been the best unmitigated success story in recent memory, a tale of redemption buried deep among the bones of excess and sameness that has defined AAA games for the better part of a decade. They have created two branching paths of Resident Evil: the one dedicated to preserving the past, and the one of the present, and I’m ecstatic that I get to bear witness to both.

It’s a big, stupid franchise with a big, dumb, beating heart. Except now it actually plays well.

6: Kentucky Route Zero

Once you ride the Zero, it’s impossible to remember the onramp. Life just moves different. KRZ is both a critique and an earnest celebration, one of them high falootin’ games Nathaniel Faulkner or Mark Twain would try out on Steam. “We’re all running a little rough, these days.” Well, what about the “good ole days?” The good ole days, in this context, meaning, in my lifetime, everything that happened before March of 2020.

I suppose it’s a little ironic that Kentucky Route Zero was the last game I fully immersed myself in before everything changed. As you’ll read more about in my Astro Bot piece, I began to read and understand better how we operate and make meaning out of an existence that has, in many ways, already been mapped out for us. I’m talking about Capitalism. I’m becoming That Guy. The insufferable prick who goes to a party and can’t wait to unshackle his tongue so he can vomit his bullshit Marxist credo, spouting off names like Foucoult and Deleuze without even realizing no one knows who the hell, and more importantly, what the hell, I’m even remotely babbling about.

But as mentally demanding as Kentucky Route Zero can be, it is by most accounts the most satisfactory literary game I have ever played. I’ve played JRPG’s with more word bubbles, and I’ve read through my share of visual novels, but Kentucky Route Zero is the first game I can say that laid out its message so effortlessly — through visual, musical, and poetic storytelling that had me utterly gobsmacked by its conclusion. It speaks to me in a way that very few people will ever understand, and that includes the people close to me. It is a profoundly personal experience, and it is this Thing without ever trying to tout itself as a Choose Your Own Adventure type of game. There are dialogue options you can pick, but they’re not your own, they are the story-teller’s. In other words, you can’t choose where the story goes, but you can choose an interpretation of where the story may go.

If you’d like to know more, I’d highly recommend Austin Walker’s piece on KRZ, which frames the game in a way I can’t do justice. I’ll conclude by saying that, whatever your thoughts are about Capitalism, or our place in the world, the best way to make sense of it, for me, is the cliche quote “the friends we’ve made along the way.” Once you finish Kentucky Route Zero, I hope you’ll know what I mean.

5: Astro’s Playroom

December was the month in which COVID finally got the better of me. It was also the month in which I was becoming a different person, at least, different from the one who was a sack of meat and organs breathing pre-Coronavirus.

Back in November, I still believed I was immune to COVID. Not physically, as something I’d overcome, but mentally and spiritually. I saw friends and family struggling, unable or unwilling to talk; I saw people on social media screaming at each other through a simulated forum governed by new digital gods who wouldn’t mind controlling the flow of digital media; I saw the high definition glow of my neighbor’s flatscreen televisions as they consumed hours of CNN and ESPN. I walked past, laughing quietly in my mind, feeling almost a sense of vindication that my time was now. Carpe diem, or something like that.

I remember my plan in the weeks leading up to the launch of the Playstation 5: make an effort to get one, but don’t go crazy in the process. Worse case, surely I could simply catch up on my massive backlog and maybe even try some new old gen games. The Playstation 5 released while I was away on vacation in Cancun. It was supposed to be my honeymoon, but because of circumstances, our wedding had been postponed. I tried to enter queues via Twitter updates. I did this while floating in luxurious swimming pools with swim-up bars. I tried late at night before bed nestled in a room that had its own mini bar and hot tub. Nothing. No matter. Then I returned home.

The cliche goes that “when it rains it pours,” or “the law of threes,” and for me, my law of threes started with Watch Dogs, carried on through Assassins Creed Valhalla, and ended with Cyberpunk 2077.

I thought the longevity and immersion afforded by open world games would be the best route, so I started with Watch Dogs Legion in early November. The idea of playing as anyone in the world was intoxicating, but the game looked dogged on my PS4 Pro, and the gameplay was uninspired. So I dropped it after a few hours. Then I tried Valhalla, a game that so desperately wants to be the Witcher 3 I thought well surely, Ubisoft will finally craft one of these I will actively care about. I liked it better than Watch Dogs Legion, but after 20 or so hours, I was still checking the same boxes I’d been checking for the last decade. “Don’t fret,” I assured myself. “Cyberpunk is coming, and it’s going to change everything.”

In the meantime, I kept checking Twitter, specifically Wario 64’s. He’d let everyone know whenever Walmart, Gamestop, or Sony itself would make available Playstation 5. I waited in digital lines for hours. Sometimes I drifted off and did something else, only to entirely forget about the line until it was too late. No matter. Cyberpunk is coming. It can wait.

The Cyberpunk debacle was the last straw. The weekend I finally sat down and gave it an honest shot was one of the most harrowing and miserable weekends of my life. My fiancé could hardly talk to me. I decided I was done with games. This one felt personal, like I was the butt of a sick joke, my ego continually laughing, telling me how stupid I was for thinking video games were going to save me.

So I turned to an older, lost pastime: reading. But I wasn’t reading fiction. I began reading Radical French Philosophers. 10 months of uncertainty, sitting on my ass with my fiancé and my dog, speculating about the future, and here I was finally speculating about myself, and psychoanalyzing my past and current relationships. Namely, what the hell was I doing with my life? It replaced video games in late November as my new obsession, so if I’m being truly honest, Cyberpunk never even stood a shot.

Turns out, psychoanalyzing myself and learning how the world truly works, through constant analysis that started waking me up at 3 in the morning, wasn’t a sustainable career path or a sustainable path for pretty much anything resembling a life of stability. So I made a decision: I was going to go back in one last time, to see if Video Games had truly abandoned me.

With the help of my fiancé, I finally secured a Playstation 5 in mid-January. The price tag for my existential crisis was 265 dollars more than the standard retail price of the disc version, so here I was, sitting in a car parked next to a cart corral at Meijer waiting for a stranger off Facebook Marketplace to upsell me an object I may never love. But 765 dollars was the price it took for me to find out the answer.

Console launches have always stuck out in my head, the Playstation ones more than most. I didn’t pick up a PS1 at launch, but the second I got it for my birthday in December of 1997, I was hooked. I loved the Demo Disc, which came packed with promises of the future, feverishly trying out Tomb Raider 2 alongside Intelligent Qube, and Crash Bandicoot 2 after Croc…remember Croc? But I loved that Demo Disc not only because it was free, but it offered brief vertical slices foreshadowing wonderful experiences I was going to have with the full games some day.

Astro’s Playroom is undoubtedly the most impactful pack-in game I will ever play.

It’s a demo not just for the Playstation 5, but the Dual Sense, which, after having it for just under a week, is the greatest controller I have ever used. The damn thing just has a feel to it that I can’t put into words.

I spent much of December 2018 telling anyone who was willing to listen how great Astro Bot’s Rescue Mission was. It’s still the best VR experience I’ve had, and a platformer I’d equate to Super Mario 64 in terms of scope, innovation, and pure nostalgia grabbing.

And yes, Astro’s Playroom only flaw is that its over way too soon, but that’s ok. Because it won me back. I spent all of that Sunday beating the game, finding most of the puzzle pieces, and dinking around in the Playstation Labo admiring my museum adorning the beautifully rendered machines of my past, present, and future. I forgot about myself for a few hours, and I eventually came out of the other side a different person than the one I was before playing Astro’s Playroom. That not Daft Punk song is playing on an endless loop in my brain as I type this. It’s an ear worm I pray doesn’t go away anytime soon.

4: Spiritfarer

Two stories about this game.

First, the lighter one. Back in October, when Spiritfarer began receiving some buzz, my fiancé was Facetiming one of her best friends, and I overheard her talking about a new game she was excited about. I’d never heard either of them discuss video games, so imagine my shock when my fiancé’s best friend ended up describing a game most of my gamer friends hadn’t even heard of. I was excited, thinking this was going to be the first serious game my fiancé and I would end up playing together. It didn’t happen.

I’ll be honest, I thought this had a pretty good shot at unseating my top game on this list for a hot minute, because Spiritfarer is a game about one thing: accepting the inevitability of someone’s death on this material plane. But the game is simply too long. I imagine there will come a day when I have to return to this remarkable little indie game and have it impact me the way it has seemed to wallop a ton of people across their souls.

But I’ve also yet to experience a death in my life that has really hit me. I’ve lost people in my life, obviously, but I’ve been rather fortunate to not lose any one (or any animal) that has truly stung. The two biggest examples I can think of are my grandfather, who passed when I was 15, and my first girlfriend, who died way more recently. The common denominator in both cases was suicide.

I’ve made peace with my grandfather’s passing; he was a pretty universally loathed man, a retired police officer who didn’t understand much about humanity aside from the people who reinforced his own misogyny and racism. And if you think I might be acting a little too “woke” about this, I can assure you, I have the documents to prove otherwise.

What’s more interesting to me is my ex girlfriend, someone I consciously chose to be around. She was 29 when she died, I think. It’s hard to tell based on the obituary, but if my math is right, and my fairly decent memory of her birthday serves me well, she either was at the tail end of 29 or just beginning 30. I hadn’t given much thought to her, much less seen her, in over a decade. The time we spent together was brief. She was from the Ukraine originally and could speak Russian. Her and her younger brother would talk in Russian around me and laugh, and I felt like a dope, because they were almost assuredly talking shit about me. I really mucked up the relationship when I decided, after a spat on the phone, to ride my bike over to her apartment, unannounced, which was roughly 10 miles away from where I lived. She didn’t answer the door when I arrived, so I tucked a note inside the screen door and left, deflated.

We were broken up a couple weeks after that. She was a strange cat. She asked me to be her girlfriend literal hours after another man asked her to our Senior Prom (she told him yes). What’s even stranger, is the person I took to Prom was one of her best friends, so here we were, the four of us, hanging out at prom, awash in the decadence that is the Grosse Pointe War Memorial, and the bizarre dynamic was broached by none of us.

I’m not even sure what character in the game she reminded me of, but the closest approximation would have to be Stella, the deer you meet initially. She’s got some issues, but she doesn’t really let you in on them, not right away, at least. She’s moody. She smokes. She requires alone time. You can’t spam her with hugs.

The core gameplay loop of Spiritfarer is something resembling a mishmash of management sim and Stardew Valley. You perform a lot of busy work, menial tasks designed to upgrade various things, like your ship, or your kitchen. Sum of its parts being greater than the whole, etc. If you’ve played any sort of crafting game, you already have the basic idea.

And that part of the game is very well done. You live on a giant ship, among friends and enemies waiting to become friends, knowing full well the nomadic lives of everyone on that ship, including yourself, are destined to end once you reach the Everdoor. I won’t spoil the Everdoor, but I’ll warn you now: there’s a good chance you won’t be ready for it. And you won’t be the same once you walk through the Everdoor.

And so Spiritfarer sits near the top of my list, patiently waiting to be finished. And when I’m ready to face the Everdoor, I’ll be ready to finish it.

3: The Final Fantasy VII Remake

I think it’s safe to say us JRPG fans have become split subjects over the past couple of decades — Persona seems to be the only franchise we can find common ground. That is, until the game that grounded us all in the first place returned. Even if it was just a small part of it.

I, like most others, scoffed at the idea of Square-Enix releasing the game in acts, going for the full retail price. Going for our wallets so shamelessly. But like everyone else, curiosity got the better of me.

The Final Fantasy VII Remake turned me into a morning person. Before this year, I was never comfortable waking up before 10 AM; not since I was a kid, at least. I did, when I was forced to, but I never got used to it. I always felt haggard, like my nerves were chronically on a medium-low simmer. And then in April, I started waking up at 8 in the morning, because I wanted to play Final Fantasy VII before my fiancé and dog woke up. I wanted zero distractions from the outside, kinda like how I remember immersing myself in Midgar over two decades ago, tucked away in my bedroom.

I think I now understand what happened. During the early stages of the game, I was playing during the late afternoon/evening hours, my fiancé occasionally at my side, hardly paying attention to what I was playing. One Saturday, around 6 PM, she received a text and gasped horrifically. I had just reached the Sector 5 Slums, the town where Aeris lives (which if you’re reading this, you probably already know). I was atop the wreckage of a decaying superstructure, scanning down at the town, feverishly anticipating my descent into the land of the proletariats who would make this struggling village their own.

When I asked her what happened, she told me one of our ex-coworkers, also a mutual friend, had just lost her boyfriend of three years to Coronavirus. It was sudden. I knew he was sick, but I had no idea it was that serious. I don’t remember clearly what happened after that, but I do recall taking a break from Final Fantasy and driving over to my Mom and Dad’s, striking a conversation with them on the porch (they remained inside). I told them what happened, clearly frustrated, and then I left and drove some more, deciding to take care of errands I’d put off during the week late on a Saturday night.

I thought about texting my friend some cliched words, but per usual, I got in my own way, and I put the phone down. She ended up taking an extended leave of absence. I remember how resentful my coworkers, upper management in general, was of her taking time to heal. Almost like she was weak and pathetic for having just suddenly and inexplicably lost the person she was most likely going to marry and spend the rest of her life with. I couldn’t stand the words I was hearing, silently listening in the office, lacking the courage and the words to defend her.

A couple weeks passed and I had taken a much needed vacation from work. The Monday I returned, which happened to be Memorial Day, I parked my car in the parking structure the same way I’d done for the last ten years, but this time, I couldn’t get out of the car. I was already ten minutes late, but I was having a panic attack. Not like I couldn’t breathe; I simply couldn’t get out of the car. When I finally mustered the strength to get out, I headed inside, dreading everything that was about to happen.

Before my vacation, I had returned to my previous role in the company, which was to supervise the front end and take care of customers: Customer Service. So much of our staff had taken indefinite leaves of absence, so a ton of responsibility fell on the people who stayed. I fully expected to return to chaos and reintegrate myself into the chaos. Instead, I saw my friend, who was also a supervisor. It was the first time I’d seen her since her boyfriend had passed. She was back.

We spent the first hour of my shift talking about what happened, and I was honest with her in a way I never could have imagined before COVID. We laughed, and we even cried a bit. All the while still somehow performing our service as essential workers. I thought of Sector 5, of Aeris’ obnoxious but endearing positivity. The woman just wants to spread love and save the world.

I don’t know if Final Fantasy VII Remake will ever release as a full, united experience, and I don’t think I even care. Like Resident Evil 3, it is preserved forward in time; its timeless soundtrack modernized and enhanced, its combat now some sort of mutation of turn based and frantic Kingdom Hearts-esque action hack and slashing. It’s weird, it’s daring, and most of all, it’s interesting. It dares to take the game, now iconoicized as a classic, and make something new of it.

And having finished it, I can see how wrong I was. I don’t blame Square-Enix for releasing the game as separate, fully priced games. They’re earned my trust. As lame as it sounds, Final Fantasy VII is more than just a game; it defined a generation of gamers, for better and for worse.

2: Hades

I thought a lot about this one. Is Hades my personal runner up for game of the year? Probably not. Because as of this writing, I still haven’t beaten Hades (even once). I’ve faced him, and every time, I get my ass handed to me. Humbly.

But I felt the same exact way about Hades as I do about Dead Cells, which prior to Hades, I have no qualms calling the objective greatest rogue-like ever. But it took me bouncing off the game a couple times before it finally clicked. After going 14 months without touching the game, I nearly beat it in my first sitting. And then I did beat it. And it was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

Having played a couple dozen hours of Hades, I’m certain this is a better game than Dead Cells. It’s not the same type of game, not exactly. Dead Cells functions on a 2D, side scrolling plane, while Hades plays isometrically. Dead Cells is probably the better playing game. But Hades isn’t just concerned with pure gameplay. It has a story, a huge one. And it has well developed, shifting characters, who respond to you. And of course, it is brimming with sexuality and personality. I’m sorry, Dead Cells, but you are no longer the Prom Queen.

When Hades stealth dropped in September, my fiancé and her mother were knee deep in a garage sale at our house. I wasn’t having it. I was worried about Corona, and getting my own life together. So I hid in my office and played Hades undocked on my Switch, half focused on the game, half concerned they thought I was a piece of shit for not helping with the garage sale. My only job during the garage sale was to ensure they had food to eat, so I’d make runs to the grocery store, or order pizza if I was feeling lazy and antisocial, which is quite often if I’m being frank.

I became red with envy when one of my closest friends told me he beat it, and then beat it again, using the same exact build. I told him he was playing the game wrong, not utilizing the myriad weapon builds at his disposal. As I was doing this, I myself was completely missing the best part of the game: the rerolling of the same world, always shapeshifting and responding to your actions in new and unique ways. I wasn’t appreciating the dialogue; I was singularly focused on obtaining the perfect run, never stopping to smell the roses. I was impatient, but impatience is unfortunately baked into my personality.

Another strange phenomenon surrounding the game is its apparent horniness. And then I had to learn another hard truth about myself: I can be an insufferable prude. I think most insecure men are. I have no problem watching John Wick shoot a man in the face point blank, or unloading another grenade into the unsuspecting mouth of a cacodemon (never mind how implicitly sexual THAT image is), but the minute a man is sweatily plowing his betrothed in a critically acclaimed drama on HBO, I recoil inside myself like a frightened turtle.

So like Spiritfarer, this is one of those All Timers that I will eventually see through to the end, I’m just not entirely sure when.

1: THE LAST OF US PART II

I think it’s safe to say the Last of Us has had the final word for two consecutive console generations. Technically, Ghost of Tsushima released a month after the Last of Us 2, but that’s like comparing Bubsy to Mario in the same sentence (I’m sorry Sucker Punch, I love your games, but when it comes to Events, Naughty Dog is still the gold standard.)

And I realize Last of Us Part 2 will not be as universally hailed as The Last of Us Part 1, for myriad reasons. It’s a longer, messier, more experimental game. Naughty Dog made two incredibly bold moves that I don’t believe many Big Name Developers would have the stones to pull off. The fact that both the creators of the game and the voice actors IN the game felt the need to defend their choices via online public forums was also a surreal thing to witness.

I may be reaching here, and I’ll admit the comparison is a bit lazy, but I can’t help but compare this to the release of Metal Gear Solid 2 almost twenty years ago. The internet wasn’t quite The Internet we all know today, but people were pissed. “Who is this effeminate Raiden character? Is this a sick joke? Where’s Solid Snake?” And while Neil Druckmann didn’t go down the batshit rabbit hole quite like Kojima did in his tentpole sequel, he crafted his own version of Metal Gear Solid 2.

I could sit here for hours and waste precious moments of your life making my case for why this is not only the best game of 2020, but probably the best game Sony has ever put out. The Last of Us was a perfect game. The Last of Us Part 2 is an imperfect perfect game. It’s undeniably going to have something that someone is going to bitch about, myself included, but isn’t that better than the alternative, of having the same cold cut and cookie cutter AAA experience we’ve forced ourselves into playing time and time and time again this past generation?

The Last of Us Part 2 also released during one of the most tumultuous periods of my life, so maybe I’m biased. As I was playing through the game, I was getting ready to quit to the job I had from Fall of 2009 up until June of 2020. In this world we live in, in which so many of us own a house or shiny new PC, lease a car every 2 or 3 years, have two children, we seem to forget along the way who the hell we even are. When The Last of Us released in June of 2013, I was spinning my wheels. I was drugged out of my mind on Vicodin. I recall sitting in my friend’s car waiting for our drug guy to meet up with us. As we waited, I thought about how close to the end of The Last of Us I was. I was stuck in that brutal subway tunnel area with all the clickers. My friend didn’t care for the Last of Us, so when we got our opium, we headed back to his place to play his favorite game at the time, MLB the Show 2013.

I made an excuse to leave early, because I wanted to finish The Last of Us while feeling this euphoria. I finally got past the tough clicker section at 6:30 in the morning, a couple hours before another soul sucking shift at the job I’d had for almost 4 years at this point in time. I had to wait until later that night to finish the game. Vicodin has a nasty habit of distracting you from the very thing you’re trying to do, and it’ll make you forget something you did, and the further removed from the experience, the less it sticks in your mind, sort of like a dream.

The ending to Last of Us still knocked me on my ass in my euphoric, hyper distracted state. It reminded me of the ending of No Country for Old men, not because of its content, but rather its profound ambiguity and subtlety. I remember thinking to myself, “Did Naughty Dog just pull off the world’s first “Best Picture” Video Game?

I beat The Last of Us Part 2 days before my final shift at my Old Job. And at the risk of sounding saccharine, my Old Life. A lot of people said Last of Us 2 wasn’t the right game for right now, which was released in the larval stages of a Pandemic, coupled with apocalyptic forest fires in the west, and massive civil unrest pretty much everywhere else. I tend to process my emotions a little differently. I don’t like running from them, I don’t really like distracting myself, so getting to role-play as (two) psychopaths molded and twisted by a broken world that didn’t give a shit about them seemed like a pretty apropos way to achieve my own catharsis.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the end of The Last of Us Part 2 is a pretty apt metaphor for life itself. Nothing really changes, even after all the bloodshed, intense rivalry, petty revenge. Maybe you’ve changed by the end, or maybe you haven’t, but most likely, you’re not going to be aware of it in either case. It’s just a stupid video game, it’s not real life. I keep hearing a lot of people say video games “feel” like the most unimportant, inconsequential thing right now. And I remember my walks, glancing into my neighbor’s homes, seeing the face of Anderson Cooper, or another high definition football game. I think of Neil Druckmann on Twitter, defending his game to a bunch of people who so desperately want to harvest any sort of negative energy they can. It’s just a stupid video game. It’s not real life. That’s a valid statement, but it’s one I vehemently disagree with.

Maybe life will someday return to some sense of normalcy, but I’d argue that the sense of normalcy most of us had prior to COVID infiltrating our lives, wasn’t all that great to begin with. Some have tried decoding a deeper meaning of what nature is trying to tell us with Coronavirus, like it’s a warning sign about the hubris of human nature. I can’t help but paraphrase George Carlin here: the world will go on just fine without us.

I feel bad for my parents, and people like them, a generation that seems quaint when compared to us; they have an aversion to technology, they’re a little more open about their racism and sexism, and worst of all, they appear hesitant in broadening their minds. They’re the ones who are going to struggle most, having to tamper not only with the idea of infection, but the possibility of spending the remainder of their lives locked inside their homes.

So I can’t help but get a little miffed when I hear things like “video games aren’t real life.” That’s like saying Twitter isn’t “real life.” Or for the boomers: “CNN isn’t real life.” Or for the jocks: “The Super Bowl isn’t real life.” Social experiment: spend your entire waking day scrolling through your Twitter feed, or better yet, your entire day watching Anderson Cooper on a giant screen in your living room, or even better yet, spend an entire day watching analysts spend their entire lives trying to quantify the humanity of the next star draft recruit. The “Real Life” we all like to wax poetic about, “the good ole days,” was already gone before March of 2020. “We’re all running a little rough these days.” And that’s ok. We’re all going to be ok.

And so, dear reader, if you’ve gotten this far, you clearly respect my time and what I have to say not only about video games but about the uncertain the state of the world right now. A revolution doesn’t have to happen through violence, and assuredly, violence doesn’t have to be physical. Violence can happen after a long day at work, resting by idly scrolling through your social media feeds, reinforced by accounts you follow barking at you, about what you should do, or how you should feel right now. I can’t help but take it personally, even if its someone who isn’t even aware of my existence.

After writing this, I’m clearly not done with video games. I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, even after typing all of these words, in the vain hope that I’ll connect to someone else out there. But I do know that after all these months of brutal introspection, I now understand that revolution comes from within, and it starts by yourself. Creation is my revolution. And while my foundation is cracked with uncertainty, I’m proud to admit that I’m bold enough to finally try.