The idea of writing a top games of 2020 list seemed dumb as hell for me. My daughter was born, I moved to a new city, I started a new job; I was just busy as hell. I got to play some video games, but not too many as I also played a bunch of board games and started delving into some other hobbies. I might’ve been able to make a top 3 list, but even that might’ve been pushing it. Luckily for me, something changed this year. I started getting heavily into playing games on my Switch. I started noticing that incredible indie games that I had wishlisted on Steam and wanted to play were popping up on the Switch. I ended up playing a lot of video games this year, a lot of incredible games. So much so that I managed to make a damn top 10 list! And 8 of those 10, I played on the Switch. Now ain’t that something.
I think I learned some pretty big lessons in 2020 that helped dictate my gaming choices in 2021, albeit ones I’ve been been hit over the head with every goddamn year: stop playing AAA games. It’s just a damn waste of time. They cost 4-5x more than cheap indie games, and they don’t have any creativity in them at all. They’re putting out the same old shitty ideas, and they’re all open world. Every AAA game is just now an open world piece of crap with fetch quests. “Go fetch this Hitachi non-phallic shaped object in a non-obscure package for my wife for a Valentines Day present.” “Go fetch a can of beans for me or I’m gonna starve to death.” “Go fetch me some ammo or those terrorists are gonna destroy my whole village.” Yadda yadda yadda. I ain’t got time or the willpower to do anymore of that crap. What I do have the time and money to do is try out a crap ton of indie games as they’re actually inspired by things other than hashing out the same idea over and over again, so they can jam their piggy banks full of my money. And if I don’t like it, I only spent $10-20 on it, so whatever. I can live with flushing that kind of money down the toilet as I know it’ll let that indie dev keep their subscription to Club Penguin and Runescape. With this new mindset, I managed to garner this badass list of games.
10) Monster Train
I tried out Slay The Spire, and I didn’t get any of the hype whatsoever. I can get why someone would like it though. Who doesn’t like roguelikes? That’s a rhetorical question, I don’t care about people that don’t like roguelikes. I’ll answer though: rogue, untrustworthy people don’t like roguelikes. Even though I love roguelikes, STS just felt pretty bland. The combos weren’t too satisfying, the characters felt very simple, and the cards were more vanilla than my wife’s face. After beating the game once, I gave up on it. I had played a couple other card roguelikes before on mobile that I loved, so it wasn’t like I didn’t like a good ol’ fashioned deckbuilder roguelike; I just needed a better one.
Well, I heard that Monster Train might be that. After I found out it was one of the few great deckbuilder roguelikes on the Switch, I booked my ticket and hopped on its train with one destination in mind: mindless fun time. Monster Train is pretty similar to STS in many ways. You progress down a branch of locations where you upgrade cards, slim down your deck of less useful cards, get artifacts, and fight enemies. The action point (AP) and card drawing system is exactly the same too. But here’s the difference my slayers.
Imagine this crazy shit. This train isn’t your ordinary train carrying a bunch of sissy humans and their stupid luggage full of junk: the luggage here is a big ass red crystal that will open up the gates of fucking hell. And you got to protect that shit with your demons. What’s more metal than that shit? Throw your horns up if you think this shit is metal as hell. The sad thing is there are some sissy pop listening losers trying to hop on the Megadeth train and are trying to smash your crystal! You know what that means, light some black candles, draw a circle on the ground and sit in it, and hold on tight to your pentagram necklace, so you can summon some demons to come in and smash those angelic pussies’ heads in. But here’s the catcher, you can’t just attack any of those boy band worshipping losers’ faces in, you have to attack the first groupie. Unless, of course, Satan gave you a special spell to mess up some of the other ones.
This creates this super crazy and over the damn top level of management that makes you feel like the black sheep himself. Placing your demons strategically to protect others, divvying them between the different levels of the train based on the enemies and compositions of your floors, all whilst trying to protect that blood red crystal is really damn satisfying. And on top of this, the cards are excellent, even at the more basic classes. It doesn’t take long before you start to get a deck that feels really different than the last and is super satisfying to play and optimize. And for the more advanced classes, the game really shines. How different Wurmkin and Umbra are from each other shows you how much the devs put into the game by not being afraid of creating all these new cards with a bunch of new effects and gimmicks.
And let’s talk about the combos. The combos are so stupid and longly drawn out, that there’s a fast forward button. Yep, just like in The Sims games. That button you click when your dumbass sim has to go to bed. It’s really silly and funny that it’s in this game. It is stupidly satisfying seeing these long drawn out battles between your demons and their angels. It’s metal as hell!
I can’t list all of the cool little things that this game does to go above and beyond what STS does, as I ain’t got the word count left for it (these early ones in the list aren’t supposed to be this damn long), but there are a lot, and they all add up to create one of my favorite deckbuilder roguelikes I’ve played.
9) Supraland
This game really is “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The graphics were a little weird on the Switch and performance was ok (totally understandable, it’s a pretty big 3D world). Everything has a somewhat amateurish feel to it, although at a very polished state weirdly enough. The combat is fine. The puzzles are pretty good. Everything about the game is pretty good except for one thing: the progression of exploring this open, metroidvania world. You see heroin addicts don’t give a fuck about the quality of the heroin. It could be laced with asbestos, lead laced paint chips, and baking soda, and addicts wouldn’t give a care in the world as long as when they put that needle in their arm and injected it, it got them as high as we thought balloon boy got. And that’s me with metroidvanias. If you nail that heroin-on-a-stick formula, I can’t help but chase after it.
This game does nothing different with the formula either. Start off with barely anything, but you slowly start to get better equipment, movement, and abilities. You see hints at what’s to come when you can’t solve certain puzzles, so you keep stock of it for later. And then when you get that sick new upgrade, you got a reason to backtrack. And every time you grab that needle off the stick in front of you—once you wake up from your zenful slumber—there’s a new needle full of that good good on a stick dangling right in front of you that you have to chase again. You continually get that rush from completing puzzles and trying to discovers all these hidden areas you missed the first time exploring a section of the map. And I think what actually makes this so good is that it is 3D. I’m used to my heroin in the 2D so getting to experience that in the 3D really just blew me away.
8) Hypnospace Outlaw
You know this feeling? You have a good day talking with your friend at school. You get home. You eat dinner. You work on your homework. Then you boot up the ol’ electronic box, turn on the monitor, and spin up MySpace. You check out your page and get enthralled by its dark gloominess and take in its glory. You’re hit with some All Shall Perish cowbell followed by some deathcore blastbeats. Ah yes, just the way you want people to be greeted. The perfect glimpse into your SOUL. You scroll all the way down and check out who’s in your top 5 friend list. You think to yourself, you know what, I had such a great conversation with Tyler at school, and we’ve been hitting it off lately, I’m gonna move that dude up the ranks. You throw him up to #2. Definitely one of your best friends. You submit that list and update your page, and then you go check out his page. Rookie mistake not checking it first.
He’s got a top 10 friends list. And you’re nowhere to be seen on it. How sad. You’re not on the fucking list, but he’s #2 on yours. You rush to update your list before anyone can see you’re a loser. Should you remove him from your list? Nah, that’d be lying. This dude is awesome. Should you extend your friends list to 10 and throw him at the end of it? That ain’t a bad idea. You check to see if you can fit anymore people on that list, and it’d be tough. Maybe you can check all your friends that have you in their top and start just throwing them on yours as padding. Meh, that’s too much work, so you just slap him at #5 of your list.
You know that feeling right? I actually know the exact same feeling as you, what a crazy coincidence. It was a little too specific to your life that it made it a bit hard to relate, but I also had a friend named Tyler, so I totally relate. What a small world we live in. Well anyways, let’s get away from the top 5 friends list and go back to the #9 entry on my top 10 games list of 2021. You see ZANE_ROCKS_14’s profile in the picture above? I was too young to experience the nuttiness that was, but I absolutely understand the feeling of browsing janky ass social media at a young age. And this game sells that experience so well. It’s this incredible time capsule of a game that just has hundreds of people’s profiles, businesses’ websites, fan pages, and all sorts of crazy pages you’d expect to see on the internet. It’s a wild and enveloping experience that is as hilarious as you’d think it would be based on that photo above.
You’re not doing it all for shits and giggles though, although there’s definitely giggles. You’re the internet’s red headed, freckled hall monitor, and you’re there to make sure there’s no violators of the rules. No copyright infringement! No bad mouthing others—I’m looking at you Zane. And the game somehow ties this all together with a surprisingly good story.
If you know the feeling I described above, and you see that stupidly unique image of the game, and you don’t want to play this game, then I don’t want you on the top 5 of my friends list.
7) Dicey Dungeons
Alright alright alright. So you know how there are card roguelikes like STS and Monster Train. Well, wouldn’t it be better if we made it where you can’t just choose the card you want to play using a simple AP system? And if instead, you had to roll a dice and then try to use its outcome to play your card, basically making the game a random roguelike? Oh, it doesn’t sound better? Damnit, there goes the elevator pitch. Guess whoever wants to make that can’t rely on the teat of a millionaire dollar publisher and will just fund their instant noodle diet themselves.
It’s not a great sounding game when it’s put like that, but it can sound better. Dicey Dungeons is a roguelike where you progress through these different levels of a dungeon where at the end of each floor you face an increasingly more difficult boss. On the way, you pick up more and more abilities, and these abilities need specific dice to be played. Take that picture above for example. In order to use “Mechanical Arm”, you need an even numbered dice to do so. Perfect, use your four. Now you can’t use that ability anymore this round, and you only have the five left. You could use it on the pea shooter and do 2 damage, but that’s shit. Or you could use it on “Plasma Blaster”, and deal n damage, where n isn’t greater than 5. Perfect. You see this game is a bit random because you’re interacting with your abilities through dice, but there’s also incredible strategy here when picking which abilities will complement each other best and determining how to use your rolls. It’s basically a roguelike, battle Yahtzee, and it’s badass.
And I can’t not mention that the characters in this game are incredible. Just like Monster Train, it makes you appreciate how much the developer did to help differentiate their characters from each other. There’s nowhere near as much content in this game as Monster Train, but what’s there is so addicting. Even when the game is smashing your face down to the ground to force you to lick that pile of white dog shit, you can’t help but come back for seconds—and fifths. And after your seventh serving, you get tired of the shit licking, so you come back with a new proposition: “If I roll double sixes right now, YOU have to lick up the white dog shit MARK”.
6) Hades
The third roguelike on the list. I blew my load screaming about how much I loved metroidvanias earlier, equating it to the disgusting drug that is heroin, but how many of those stupid ass games on list are there? One. And how many of the roguelikes that I didn’t even give a sentence to explaining what the hell the mechanic is are there? Three. Tom, you better start kissing roguelike’s ass and start throwing some praise on it. And you should start off explaining what the hell one is. It’s never too late.
Roguelike game where you die. But die kind of fun. Death purposeful. Because get strong after. Map random so no bored easier. The end.
You see it’s this simple equation that allows these games to become such units of a game. By turning such a bullshit thing like dying into a chance to make your character more powerful, and by also randomizing the maps so you don’t get bored of their layout when you’re dying all the time and having to restart the whole map from scratch, roguelikes have created this incredible loop of progression that is better than that stupid ass drug heroin. Who the hell wants to put needles in their arms anyway? My belt loop doesn’t even have a hole that will allow me to tighten it all the way down to the size of my arm anyways. Roguelikes are like the best and coolest drug: heroin’s uncle’s 2nd cousin: bath salts.
Supergiant Games is such a talented team, and roguelike seems like such a departure from their very linear story based games, but it really isn’t. They bring the story to the table, great music and visuals, tight ass controls, and then they slop on some roguelike on top of that sundae. Story in a roguelike? Psh, no way. Yep, Hades does it in such a seamless and cool way that it almost doesn’t feel impressive because of how cool and collected the game is about it. But it is very impressive what they’ve managed to do with the story. When you die, you get to explore sections of your dad Hade’s kingdom and talk with its inhabitants. But every time you come back, they might say something differently based on where you’re at in the game or it could even be someone different. You get to upgrade your weapons and character; smash that stupid talking skeleton around; and befriend Gods, Goddesses, and heroes. But honestly, even though it’s very impressive… and cool… and innovative… it’s not the reason I really like this game. I really like it for just how fun the game is and its controls.
You try to escape the underworld by going up floor and floors, all the while getting closer to the surface while fighting dozens and enemies and bosses. All the while, you’re kissing ass to Gods, who are sending you their blessings, which will make you kick ass that much harder in the underworld. The enemies and boss encounters are excellent, the weapons you get to try out are really fun, and there are some really great random encounters with these offbeat characters in the underworld. The whole package they deliver here is addicting as hell.
And writing this made me realize one thing and one thing only: that you can have a healthy relationship with more than just one drug. Why not bath salts and heroin?
5) Subnautica
I had played some survival games before Subnautica. Shitty stuff like Rust and Conan Exiles. And then less shitty stuff like Don’t Starve. These types of games promote an achingly dull, grindy game loop where you need to hunt, gather, and harvest bare resources, so you can continue to survive and thrive in the world by creating equipment that will let you hunt, gather, and harvest better resources, so you can survive and thrive even more in the world. etc. etc. infinity and beyond. ad nauseum. These games never truly end as they’re completely open ended. And the exploration just sucks in these games, the graphics are mainly trash, and grinding feels so aimless, leaving you feeling like a teenager who’s dad left you.
Shit like that would fly when I was a kid with all this time burning a whole in my pocket, but as an adult, I can’t fathom wasting my time on that bullshit. So I was a bit skeptical of Subnautica when I got it for free on PS+, a service on PlayStation that gives you “free” games as long as you swear on the rising sun flag that you will never covet a Microsoft game. But my friend had actually brought the game up when I was at Farsight, talking about how scary it was playing that game and how it was an impressive game. That recommendation and the whole free part was enough to persuade me to try out another survival game.
As you can tell from its placement in the list, it was obviously worth it. The same loop that makes me fucking depressed in other survival games exists verbatim here. But this is an actual game with a campaign that you can finish. The end is tangible and finite. There is meaning to the grind because you are progressing through the story. And there is incredible payout here from the grinding because it allows you to explore more, which is great as the exploration here is excellent. You get to use your increasingly powerful gadgets to plunder and rape Poseidon’s sea and its inhabitants, so you can escape the sea planet. You explore new depths of the sea throughout while encountering new raw materials, details of the world, and wild beasts. And it’s all done in this vast ocean that is scary and off putting. And while the game does get very grindy at parts, I couldn’t help but appreciate the grind. I knew that when I was grinding too much that I was probably missing a step. I was missing some optimization to make the grind disappear, so I could focus on a new aspect of the grind. And this was always true. It was very easy to fall in love with optimizing the grind and exploring the incredibly beautiful and scary ocean.
4) Return of the Obra Dinn
This is a game about a boat and its passengers. Not any boat and not any passengers, but the most un-fucking-lucky passengers in the history of boats. Yes, even more unlucky than Leo DiCaprio and that suicidal band trying to make everyone’s last moments depressing on the Titanic. I know, I know. I’m comparing fictional apples to non-fictional oranges. But the comparison needs to be made. These passengers are so much unluckier because for the Titanic, it was just one massive unlucky mistake that fucked up everyone’s night on that boat, and unfortunately, there were a lot of people on that boat. On the Obra Dinn, the name of this whore of a sea lass floating on through the Pacific ocean, it feels like the passengers here are just being struck by lightning day after day. Everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. There are many chances for things to not be screwed, and they never don’t take a turn for the worse.
What’s so special about Return of the Obra Dinn is that you don’t actually get to witness the events of the boat first hand, per se. For every death that happens on the boat, starting from the last one and working all the way back to the first one, you get to hear the seconds before the death and then you’re cast into the scene of the death but everyone and everything is frozen in time. It’s so satisfying revisiting and exploring these incredibly cinematic stills of the past.
It’s this simple, yet ingenious, mechanic that makes this game so phenomenal. You are an insurance man trying to piece together what in the hell happened to everyone on the boat by stepping back in time and seeing most of the deads’ last moments on the boat. While doing this, you need to find out all their damn names and the title of their position on the boat. And unfortunately for you, they don’t have a name tag like the workers at Walmart. This is an incredibly tough, yet so satisfying task that you’re put in charge of. This mechanic is made elegant by the fact that you don’t know if you’re correct about a person until you get a set of three people correct. This all creates one of the best mystery games of all time, and it ends up allowing Lucas Pope, the sole developer of this game, to go 2 for 2 at the bat—his first grand slam being Papers fucking Please. There’s really an incredible amount of elegance going on with this game, and it creates one of the most unique and cinematic games I’ve ever played.
P.S. James Cameron, I bet you’re pissed you didn’t think about telling Titanic from end-to-start. Dummy. Maybe you can use that mechanic in Avatar 6. By that time, Lucas Pope will hopefully have released a couple more goddamn games—he needs to hurry the hell up, worst drug manufacturer of all time—and you can steal more of his genius ideas.
3) Disco Elysium
Tom loves a good laugh. Tom thinks that games should have more funny crap in them because ain’t nothing better than a good laugh in Tom’s eye. Tom thinks many games don’t have the balls to make a game that Tom loves. Tom doesn’t think that’s the case for this game though: Disco Elysium. It had the balls and the hair on them to make a game that made Tom laugh his hairy, little light-brown ass off. Only took a team of self-described communists/socialists, who want to throw out a manifesto one of these days, to make a game so risqué. Tom ain’t gonna waste time reading that crappy manifesto if it ever manifests itself, but Tom will gladly play another one of their games as they knocked it out of the park with this one.
Tom played as a fat, drunk cop in Disco Elysium. Stupid pig forgot who the hell he is. Stupid pig couldn’t even handle a couple of children in the form of a loser ginger, Cuno, and his redheaded groupie, Cunoesse, hiding behind a fence. Imagine what would’ve happened if Tom was there instead of Cuno. Maybe the cop would also be hanging from that tree. But Tom has got to admit: even though the cop’s memory is voided, he’s figuring some shit out. Sure Tom is leading him along and tailoring his decisions and dialect. Sure, four eyes Kim, his partner, is grounding him and helping him out. But drunken, loser cop ain’t too shabby himself even though he’s super flabby.
Tom hasn’t played much RPG’s like this before. A true RPG where you do skill checks for figuring out if you can get past an obstacle or persuade this person that you aren’t an oof, not one like Tom is used to playing like a hack-and-slash style where Tom puts his nose to the grindstone to level up. Tom hasn’t played a game with a universe so fleshed out and thought out. A universe brimming with characters spouting thousands of sentences. Tom hears that this shit is longer than the damn mighty book itself, the Bible. If the writing were as boring as that old ass scroll, then this game would be one of the worst ever because this game is nothing without its writing. That’s because even though this is a video game, there ain’t an incredible amount of gameplay here actually. Tom almost feels like this might be a visual novel. Albeit an incredibly dynamic visual novel with so much hidden goodies in it. One that knows everything Tom has done and will change the probability of Tom rolling a successful skill check based on those actions.
Tom thinks it’s incredible what has been achieved here. When talking with Tom’s friend, Tom brought up how pig met the man in the crate that shows up as a spectral light—he’s so much richer that a peasant proletariat like piggy can’t see him correctly. Tom got piss all lucky and got past a skill check of like 3% success and managed to unlock this incredible and hilarious questline. Piggy got an idea to sell some art to the spectral man, so he can make it into the 1%. So Tom brought officer-oinks-a-lot over to some edgy punk artist, who then gave Tom piss all, a shitty palette with some dried paint on it. Spectral man bought that pretentious piece of junk and gave pig some stock—enough to make pig a theoretical millionaire.
Tom suggested to pig that he need to find a team to help put this net worth to good use, so pig found some an even worse drunk loser and enlisted his help. The hobo used some of the net worth and started work on making an incredible art piece out of the statue downtown to promote the newly founded, on paper, millionaire. Except the loser didn’t even finish the project. Tom sadly didn’t even get to see the finale of this as he beat the game shortly after. This is one of the many questlines that is hidden in the game that will only show itself in certain playthroughs of the game.
Tom was really blown away by how funny and ballsy this game was. A breath of fresh air in the seemingly more censored art world. Tom was impressed by the small details that were so well done, and that there were thousands of these small details. Tom thinks this game is the fucking shit.
2) Deponia Series
Yes, the Deponia series. I copped out. Did grouping the series together bias the weight of this entry in this list due to it being a hefty four games? Probably. Might this not be as high if it were just one of the games? Probably. But it doesn’t matter as I played them all back-to-back earlier last year, and I think of that as a singular gaming experience. A singular experience of getting stuck on these ridiculous point-and-click puzzles where you are forced to resort to mindlessly combining every single item in your inventory with every interactable item in the world. But that’s an experience that I expect from point-and-click games, and I freaking love it. And it’s one that the Deponia series nailed.
I’ll always say this when talking about point-and-click games. I grew up playing the Escape the Room series on AddictingGames and I played Myst even before those when I was younger, and I was enthralled by them. Just exploring different sections, picking up items, and trying to problem solve to figure out how I get through that locked door is something that I’ve been hooked on ever since. The Deponia series plays very much like the old school 2D point-and-click games that were popular during the early days of PC gaming, games that weren’t popular while I was growing up. I managed to get rare glimpses of them through the likes of Machinarium, a super fun, silly game about a piece of crap robot trying to get past some mean robots to find his girlfriend. Deponia plays even more old school than Machinarium though.
When you click on an object to interact with it, your character walks to it. Anything in the game can be investigated, which leads your character to let out a remark that only a doofus would say. It’s really these few examples that make it have that old school vibe, which I have really disliked in the past. I thought Grim Fandango was boring as hell, and I quit fast. Having the option to examine everything sounds cool, but it is the opposite if the things that you read or hear when you examine that thing is dry as Jill Biden’s pus when Corn Pop and the President want to make sweet love to her. When I first started playing Deponia, I was greeted with dozens of these interactions, which was worrying. But those worries were immediately put out as I was delivered stupidly, hilarious one liners from the head doofus that you’ll be following along with: Rufus.
Rufus is the soul and heart of the series, and he never fails to to fail his way to the top of the mountain of success. He is determined and will bullhead towards anything he has his mind set on. He’s the perfect hero for the story to follow along with for a game like this. He just brings so much needed silliness and stupidity to the game, and I loved every moment of it. You play as Rufus who is trying to leave his literal garbage planet and try to reach Elysium, a place full of pretentious, “classy” idiots. On the way, he tries to snag the perfect girl all the while trying to prevent a somehow even more egotistical and jackass version of himself from getting her. Along the way, on this dumb adventure, you are put into all sorts of trashy situations.
The situations range from dumb to evil to hilariously dumb and evil, but they all basically revolve around Rufus pestering everyone, snooping into places he shouldn’t be, and stealing anything he wants. In one case, you need to repair some sort of electronic wagon to go put the lifeless body of the girl of your dreams on it and transport her somewhere. Yet in order to figure out how to repair it, you have to pry the knowledge from a homeless genius, mechanic named Doc. Rufus being the know it all, shuts down Doc’s help and suggestions right when he’s about to spill the valuable details of fixing the thing. It’s infuriating. I got stuck on that part for dozens of minutes trying to figure out how to get the damn bum to tell me the details. In order to figure it out, you had to listen to Doc’s relationship advice and then apply that to the broken wagon. It was so silly yet infuriating. But I love those little moments.
Another moment like that is the next puzzle where you have to somehow clean a dirty ass mirror. You see that Doc has some booze on hand that you can drink, yet he won’t give you the rest of it. You tell him you have herpes, and he gives up and lets you have to rest. You can then use this with a rag to clean the mirror! It’s genius stuff from Rufus.
Rufus is a scumbag that I got to follow around for four games, and I loved every moment of it because I am a scumbag apologist. Some games will have 1000’s of lines of voiced dialogue, but it’ll just be as bland as a boiled potato. And it’ll make you want to never investigate one more damn thing. But this game had me clicking every single thing because I couldn’t miss out on any of the toxic gold spewing from Rufus’s mouth. The absurd puzzles in this game and the hoops they make you jump through are so well worth it even when you get stuck on them for half an hour until you have to resort to an online walkthrough.
1) The Last of Us 2
I thought Koreans were good at making revenge based films, but holy cow, Naughty Dog out-koreaned Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) and even Park Chan-wook (Oldboy). I managed to avoid all spoilers about this game, but I knew a couple things: you would play as Ellie and that someone dies in the game and people who found this out had the game ruined for them. Maybe Ellie dies at the end of the game? Maybe Joel dies at some point? Maybe it’s a new character that dies? It was hard to say, so I didn’t waste time trying to figure it out and potentially ruin it for myself. I don’t think I want to write around that big, bad spoiler, so in case you have somehow managed to stay spoiler free of it and want to continue to live your life that way, steer clear of this. But Joel being the one that was killed off, even though it made sense and it was definitely up there in the realm of possibilities, was pretty devastating.
This is a game that was hugely influential on me as a teenager. As a teenager, playing as Joel and helping protect this teenage girl and taking her under your wing was a very defining video game experience. I remember writing about how Joel was a bad dude for what he did at the end of the game because he knew that Ellie would want to be sacrificed to heal the world of this disease that was ruining everyone’s lives, especially Joel’s life. The moment Ellie seen the giraffes, she knew the world was an incredible place even though it was no longer that. She had hope that it could be restored to its former beauty. She could be the sacrifice needed for the world’s restoration. But Joel took that away from her for his own selfish desires: having a replacement for his deceased daughter.
I was so surprised that this was the center of TLOU 2. I mean it makes so much sense that it would be a direct sequel and be completely related to the events that unfolded in the first. That’s how fucking sequels work usually dummy. But everything that was unfolding in this game did feel completely separate and associated with Joel’s past life before Ellie. It misled the hell out of me. Being tied to the emotions generated from the first though made this game so hefty emotionally. It was devastating to see Joel brutally beaten to death and so early in the game. But it was even crazier finding out later in the game that Ellie knew about the hospital, and that she was willing to kill hundreds of people to avenge Joel. That even though he had selfishly taken Ellie’s life out of her hands and into his by killing everyone at the hospital, that she felt that she owed him his life still. And that she would risk every aspect of it to avenge the bastards that honestly probably rightfully killed Joel.
She was horrified with what Joel did and was almost unable to forgive him for what he did to everyone that day at the hospital. But how could she be so ungrateful to a man that had done so much for her. A man who had done horrific things for her. A man obviously reeling from the loss of his daughter still and trying to fill that daughter shaped hole with her. She would do what he had done: kill all those damn people regardless of how innocent or guilty they were. He would crumble the world for her, and she had to return the favor.
I need not talk about the improvements to the gameplay here. Or the incredible graphics. Or the second part of the story—while very good nowhere near as good as the first half. Or how fucking ambitious this game was and how it managed to pull it off. I won’t talk about that because the heart of this game is Joel and Ellie. That’s what fucking hits with this game. The way the story unraveled itself was like an incredible thriller. It shows you how and why everything has come to be piece by piece and so brilliantly. The way the story was so dark, twisted, and cinematic like an incredible revenge film.
It’s funny. As an adult with a daughter and wife now, I still understand completely why I thought it was evil and selfish of Joel to have done what he did. But after having my daughter in my life, I not only completely understand the dilemma Joel’s was in, but I can completely empathize with and stand in his shoes. I ask myself if I were in his shoes in that hospital with my daughter, what I would do? I know the answer to that dilemma. Sure, the world is fucked and all, but what about your life and your happiness? What about family? Isn’t that important?