In 2020, Mike Mahardy left his role as a producer at GameSpot (and occasional guest appearances with the fine folks here at Giant Bomb) to make a daily show for Polygon. You can follow him on Twitter at @mmahardy.
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I’ll spare you the gory details about my personal 2020. We all have our stories by now, and you don’t need to hear mine. Suffice it to say, 2020 was a year in which I not only found refuge in games, but also “returned” to them, so to speak, and took the chance to interrogate my relationship with them entirely.
In some cases, I reconfirmed my love for certain genres. In others, I found dissatisfaction where I once found comfort. And in one select instance, I was drawn strongly to a game that runs counter to everything the past versions of me enjoyed. In an arbitrary chunk of months when I had so much more time to think, I guess it’s fitting--and fortunate--that games helped me know a little bit more about myself.
10. XCOM: Chimera Squad
“Where do they go from here?”
It’s a question I asked myself frequently in 2017 while playing XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It seemed as if developer Firaxis Games had dug itself a hole. Or rather, it had built itself a tower--one with unshakeable supports, gorgeous facades, and a towering spire for all the lesser turn-based tactical games to glare up at. The studio had (almost) created perfection. So again: where could they go from there?
The answer, as it turns out, was inside. XCOM: Chimera Squad serves as a reexamination of what makes the modern XCOM games tick--an effort to reinforce the foundation against future erosion. It introduces initiative-based turn orders, making the when of your actions just as important as the what. It adds a SWAT-like Breach mode that makes insertion part of the puzzle rather than something to safely take for granted. Finally, Chimera Squad takes a more involved role than its predecessors in the very act of storytelling, swapping out procedural recruits for 11 scripted characters with concrete backstories and incontrovertible quirks of their own.
And while I don’t love all of these changes--emergent characterization is my favorite part of the XCOM DNA, after all--I can’t help but appreciate Chimera Squad for its willingness to question tradition, and for what it means going forward.
9. Ghost of Tsushima
Speaking of questioning tradition: a friend recently pointed out that I seem to be fixated on “crisis of faith” stories. It pains me to say it, but she’s right. Just don’t tell my priest.
That paraphrased joke comes courtesy of my late Irish Grandpa, and it’s a joke I thought about often while playing Ghost of Tsushima. In an otherwise fine open-world game, the story of Jin Sakai and his questioning of samurai tradition cut the lapsed catholic in me to the bone. Ghost captures the feeling of being an outcast, of being one of the few to question a system that no longer seems tenable in the face of overwhelming chaos. Jin’s journey vacillates between meditative reveries and violent outbursts in an almost dreamlike manner as he returns to the villages of his childhood, reconnects with the figures he used to call mentors, and in the end, confronts the consequences of his perceived radicalism.
What’s more, in a clever manner of contextual storytelling, most of Jin’s most powerful upgrades tend to push him away from the Samurai code that his dead friends and relatives took to their graves. The same abilities gradually start to terrify the Mongols, as Jin becomes a force they can’t predict, less of a samurai and more of a, well, ghost. The old ways die hard. And in the grand sweep of things, Jin’s fight for his home is representative of a more universal conflict: the pain of confronting our beliefs, contemplating the role they played in shaping us, and deciding which ones might play a part in our future.
8. Wasteland 3
There’s not much to say here, really. Wasteland 3 is just an extremely solid role-playing game. It’s also a very old school role-playing game. For someone like me, obsessed as I am with inventory management and party loadouts, this isometric post-apocalypse from the veteran minds at inXile Entertainment was the laser-focused salve I needed to weather one of the strangest summers of my life.
By laying out its overarching objectives upfront--“Go here, kill this person, then go here, and capture this person, then go here, and talk this person down from a ledge”--Wasteland 3 frees up the rest of your brain cells to focus on fleshing out your Rocky Mountain base, recruiting characters into your Wasteland Rangers militia, and micromanaging everything in between. I’m not the first person to compare this effort to the early Fallout entries, but I will wholeheartedly support that claim.
At a time when so many RPGs are fixated on pushing boundaries - and that’s a great thing, to be clear--Wasteland 3 is clearcut, streamlined, and solid. And it’s just the kind of RPG I needed this year.