Players put points into stats like “Esprit De Corps” which allows them to understand what cops are thinking, or “Shivers” which allows the city’s streets to speak to you. The storytelling and mechanics, however, feel like they come from the future. The details of the crime-and their personal life-are gone and it’s up to the player to fill in the blanks.ĭisco Elysium is a game that looks and plays like a game from 1999, a 2D isometric throwback with fully rendered backgrounds and point and click navigation. In this very dense role-playing game, players wake up with a killer hangover in a grungy hotel room and quickly realize they’re a police officer in the hotel to solve a crime. It’s the kind of video game that only comes at the turn of the decade, that special time when something ends and something new is born. It’s a video game that’s steeped in the past but looking towards the future. Released just months before the start of the 2020s, Disco Elysium is the perfect punctuation mark on a decade of excellent games. But Half-Life: Alyx is a virtual reality title and it’s unclear if Valve can bring its game-making magic to the new platform, or, for that matter, a new decade. It ended the decade by finally announcing a follow up to Half-Life, something fans had waited more than 15 years for. Valve has continued to make billions from its Steam distribution platform but failed to produce a game as genre bending and enjoyable as Portal 2. In the 2010s, Valve mostly iterated on Dota 2, released the Vive virtual reality headset with HTC and dodged questions about Half-Life 3. The 2000s saw the release of Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike, all enormously successful games. It marked the beginning of a decade where Valve stopped doing what made it so famous: making incredible video games. This decade, parents didn’t worry about violence in video games so much as they worried about time and money spent on neverending live services like Fortnite and Star Wars: Battlefront II.ĭeveloper Valve screamed into the new decade with the incredible Portal 2: a first person puzzle game that built off of the successful first game in every way, with a satisfying story and an increasingly clever mechanic in its teleporting portal gun. The business of video games also exploded, pulling in such obscene amounts of cash that legislators started to ask questions and consider regulations, particularly with regard to games including “microtransactions” which some have compared with gambling.
#BEST INDIE GAMES OF THE DECADE FREE#
During the past decade, some artists broke free of the business side and produced works of astounding beauty on par with any prestige television show. There are fewer auteurs and more venture capitalists. The tension between art and commerce isn’t the same in video games as it is in movies. The 2010s are when the hobby stopped being something semi-niche, and solidly took its place in the mainstream. Over the past decade, the cultural cache of video games has grown and its profits are now greater than movies, television or music. The video game industry was already a billion dollar behemoth when it rolled into the 2010s.