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The RPS Advent Calendar 2020, December 1stOur countdown of the best games of the year
Our countdown of the best games of the year
This is the RPS Advent Calendar, in which we reveal one of our favourite PC games of 2020 on each day. Headback to the calendarto open another door.
The advent calendar starts here, counting down our favourite PC games of 2020. What lies behind the first door? Reach out and pluck it open to find out.
Didn’t that feel beautifully tactile? It’sHalf-Life: Alyx!
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Graham:If a revolution in game design happens and no one’s in a VR headset to hear it, does it make a sound?Half-Life: Alyxapplies every lesson from the last few years of VR first-person shooter design, and then pushes the genre further with Valve’s talent for design, writing, and their unrivalled resources. The result is a great VR game that makes good on the promise of the medium, but it’s also, importantly, a greatHalf-Lifegame.
The marriage between HL and VR feels good enough that you’d swear the series was always meant to be played this way. Headcrabs are scary in a way they haven’t been since I was 14 years old, and Striders are imposing and kind of awe-inspiring in a way they’ve never been before. Even physics-based environment puzzles are better. They often felt like busy work in previous games, forcing you stop your exciting battle to repel invading alien forces and instead spend some time stacking pallets in a car park. HL: Alyx doesn’t jettison these challenges entirely, but the times in which you’re suddenly an electrician, trying to jiggle the wiring in an old apartment, made me crouch and stretch and crawl around my real world room. They made me feel more connected to a videogame space than I ever have before.
And then there’s the ending. No spoilers, but - oof.
If Half-Life: Alyx wasn’t a VR game, it would be the most talked about and influential game of the year. Except it wouldn’t, because if it wasn’t a VR game, it wouldn’t be anything at all. It’d be like a 2D version of Mario 64. VR is in some ways a blessing and a curse, but I lean towards the former. After years of waiting, there’s a phenomenal new Half-Life game to play - and it’ll be phenomenal whenever you’re able to get to it.
