The 2020 Goaties: Non-2020 Shoutouts
Plenty of games come out every year and go under my radar. I miss out on cool stuff, and have to circle back around to it. In some cases, I know a game is Good, and I need to stay away from it, for fear that it’ll swallow up all of my free time for weeks on end. These are four of those games.
“The Non-2020 Shoutouts”
You’re a little spaceperson! You’re hovering around, havin’ adventures!
Astroneer is one of those games that always sounded like a really neat time, except for the part where (I thought) it’s a stick-and-rock style survival game (see: ARK, Minecraft, The Forest, et al). As it turns out, it’s really not one of those at all, forsaking a lot of the genre’s minute-to-minute bar-monitoring that I loathe. Instead, you’re plopped on to a planet, given a magic vacuum gun, and given pretty free reign to experiment, build new research stations, and delve deep into the core of a planet before building a spaceship to ferry you to the next one. The gameplay loop of “vacuum up stuff, pour it into a tube, use that tube to craft some new refining station” is hypnotic, and you start hopping from planet to planet and back, making little forward operating bases on each, always theorizing as to what you can afford to leave with.
There’s a surprising amount of mystery and intrigue to the different worlds of Astroneer. You’ll stumble on massive purple geometric structures that seem entirely out of place at first, and as you dig deeper and deeper into the core of any one planet, they all reveal beautiful, intricate caverns and ecosystems. Eventually, you piece together the “actual goal” of the game, and being able to come to that realization organically was a genuine highlight of this year for me.
I said I’d never play another “traditional” MMO, and then I sunk 200 hours into Final Fantasy XIV this year. Quarantine does terrible things to us all.
So, real talk: I think XIV is a fantastic update to a lot of what drove me to tears of boredom in World of Warcraft. At its core, it’s still very much That Kind of MMO, where you pick up daily/weekly quests, queue for dungeons, and shuffle your way from zone to zone, following a story campaign where your character goes from Nobody to The One, True Hero, Praise Be Their Arrival, Help Us All. The combat is largely floaty and detached in the ways it has to be for an MMO, and it has so much content that it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed with the absolute gobsmacking amount of stuff you feel like you’re behind on by getting into it now.
The key differentiator here, and something that’ll bring me back to finish catching up in the wondrous tale of Tallulah Bonaventura, my beautiful pompadoured Lalafell Monk, is that the narrative in XIV is capital-G Good as Hell. It starts off fairly slow in the “vanilla” A Realm Reborn campaign, but by the time you hit Heavensward, the game’s first major expansion, it’s all delicious, intrigue-flavored gravy. I fell off about a third of the way through Stormblood, but I’ve heard so much intoxicating adoration for Shadowbringers’ twists and turns that I’ll have to see it through at some point.
Yarr harr, fiddle di dee, Game Pass allowed me to sail the high seas!
Sea of Thieves came out a couple years ago and felt like an impossible misstep from Rare, devoid of long-term goals or actual content to really sink your teeth into. Shortly after their Anniversary Update this year, and a few weeks after I’d finally built a new computer capable of rendering Sea of Thieves’ masterclass water in a way it deserves, we decided to take the plunge and see if they’d made a proper video game out of its initial foundation.
As it turns out, they have…for the most part! I still don’t know if there’s a tremendous amount of “game” here, and the lack of long-term progression beyond cosmetic options led to a lot of my normal crew falling off it quicker than most games we dink around with. The goofy, diegetic storytelling that does come out of an average nautical adventure, however, is lots of fun. There’s something to be immortalized about spending half an hour in a tense back-and-forth with a rival brigantine, only to have a kraken spawn on the both of you and swallow everyone whole save for your tiny rowboat with all your treasure. Learning you can fire yourself out of a cannon, and immediately doing so only to crash into a wall, aggro some bomb-carrying skellingtons, and die, is a sequence of objectively hilarious events. Deciding out of the blue to just go hunt down the local Skeleton Fort, turning an otherwise low-key session into a tense race to beat another crew to the spoils is a genuinely fun time.
There’s something to Sea of Thieves, and I’ll probably pop back in to it to try and work through more of the Legends campaign once the next Anniversary Update rolls around, but gosh, I wish I had more to show for my time investment apart from…a new color for my sail? A fancier hat?
So, this one is sort of an odd duck, because I’ve already seen all of it being played on Giant Bomb’s “Beast in the East” series. I know the twists and turns, the betrayals, the sewer tunnel-based boss fights. That hasn’t stopped me from digging in to the story of Kazama Kiryu and his ascension through the world of the Yakuza series, however.
As a brawler action-type game, it’s nothing too flashy, but there’s a tremendous balance of Very Serious Business and downright absurd bullshit happening in every hour of Yakuza 0. You’ll have a beloved friend attempt to stab you in the back, only to spend your next twenty minutes helping out a nearly-naked man named Mister Libido. There’s the desperation of wanting to belong and wanting to redeem your family name, weighed against sidequests where you meet a very obvious Steven Spielberg or Michael Jackson stand-in. You play a solid round of bowling, and are rewarded with a chicken. Several high-ranking yakuza officers die at your hands. An eight foot tall man named Mister Shakedown punches you to death and steals your money with every crushing blow. The game’s second playable character is introduced with a full band accompanying his combat tutorial.
It’s a really bizarre, special thing, and I’m excited to continue playing it. With the rest of the Yakuza series coming to Game Pass over the next few months, I’ll have lots of Kiryu’s story left to see.
We’re so close to the proper Goaties, Reading Friend. After a few days off, we’ll take a brief look at the Year in Destiny 2, with a focus on this year’s expansion as well as some scattered thoughts on the Season Pass, a chainsaw sword, and just what in the world you can get done with a chainsaw sword.
After that? Friend, it’s all Goaties from there on out.
Until next time!
