The video game industry has always worked to a lurching rhythm. Every few years the PlayStation 3 evolves, with seamless inevitability, into the PlayStation 4, and so on, each numerical tick of the counter promising fertile turf from which previously inconceivable video game miracles will sprout. This year will mark the next round of the so-called console wars, as Sony’s PlayStation 5 competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Series X (destined to be confused by bewildered grandparents with the current Xbox One X). Like Blur v Oasis, or Star Wars v Star Trek, the true beneficiaries of this kind of tribalistic framing of capitalist enterprise will, surely, be the companies behind the products. As in the past, the rival machines will likely be equivalently powerful and share many of the same games.
In an attempt to lure consumers toward their product, Microsoft has pinned its hopes on the closest thing the company has to an exclusive mascot: Master Chief. Halo Infinite hopes to do for the Xbox Series X what Halo did for the original Xbox in the distant technological plains of 2001. That the ageing space marine might convince the zoomer generation to glance away from Fortnite long enough to marvel at the high-definition sheen of his extremely 2000s-era space armour is perhaps doubtful. (Sony is yet to confirm any exclusive games of its own for the PlayStation 5.)
As in the film industry, in 2020 video game companies continue to invest the majority of effort and expense to provide old, nostalgia-commanding games with a lick of digital paint. Chief among the renovations is Final Fantasy VII Remake, a vastly expensive project to rebuild the dearly beloved, eco-terrorism-themed 1997 adventure game for modern audiences. Final Fantasy VII is, to a generation of ageing millennial video game nerds, a cultural monolith that, like Star Wars before it, continues to cast a long and consuming shadow over entire identities. So great is the task at hand that the publisher has split the remake into a series of chapters, to be released in stages. How and when the project ends will, no doubt, depend on the success or failure of the opening gambit.
Those eager to return to the virtual worlds of their younger days will be similarly delighted by Half-Life: Alyx. It may not be quite the homecoming to City 17 that Half-Life’s faith-keeping fans have clamoured for since 2004, when the last mainline entry to the series was released, but, as a fully featured and exquisitely lavish virtual reality game, this may be a more interesting prospect. You’ll just need a PC of climate-change-quickening-power in order to run the thing.
This year will not only see eager returns to dusty franchises. Cyberpunk 2077, a Blade Runner-esque role-playing game starring a digital Keanu Reeves, is the standout attraction of the year. Made by CD Projekt Red, the well-regarded Polish studio behind The Witcher series (an adaptation of which launched on Netflix in December), expect a slickly finished game that allows its players to pick a unique way through the humming city, according to individual whim or character. Regardless of your chosen approach, however, expect a certain baseline of bespattered violence. So, too, in The Last of Us: Part II, the next game from Sony’s cinematically minded, multi-Bafta-winning studio Naughty Dog. Here you’ll play as 19-year-old Ellie, a likable, if troubled teenager who, having survived the various traumas of the first game, must now contend with a death cult operating in a post-apocalyptic United States.
If all this sounds too stressful in a world that feels, so often, as if it’s spiralling towards a similar bloody endgame, Microsoft Flight Simulator will offer serene pleasures as you yoke and yaw your way through unblemished skies. Or, if you prefer to conjure your own escapism, Dreams, from the British studio and LittleBigPlanet series creator Media Molecule, provides all of the creative tools required to fashion a soothing reality of your own.
If that sounds like too much effort, opt for the long-delayed Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which will allow you to retreat to a virtual village and live out your days in harmony (or passive aggressive co-dependency: no judgment here) with a community of jabbering animals, while you pay off your mortgage via pastoral errands. Bliss.
