by It’s January 27, 2023, and this week’s hottest new releases include Dead Space and GoldenEye 007. Your cynicism might make you question why games are so obsessed with nostalgia. But these kinds of releases aren’t really about nostalgia—they’re about filling a void in the world of modern AAA games.
Dead Space is an exceptionally well-crafted remake of a beloved cult classic, yes, and while I enjoy the original game, fond memories aren’t why I’m so excited to dive into the new version. This is a single-player, story-driven game built to be completed in a few days rather than offering an endless stream of content.
Single-player gaming has always been alive and well, but today’s mode is big open worlds and dozens, if not hundreds of hours worth of things to do. The likes of Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West are fantastic, but I don’t need – or even want – each game to consume my life for weeks at a time. Something like the Dead Space remake is a throwback, yes, but it’s a throwback not specifically to Dead Space itself. Instead, it’s a linear, limited-scope game that we just won’t get much of in 2023 from the AAA space.
Over 100 hours of dissatisfaction
Modern games are often a fantastic place, with online games offering evolving worlds and endless content, while indies help fill the gaps with memorable small-scale experiences. But although you’ll never catch me saying that gameplay was flat-out better in the past, certain types of games have fallen by the wayside, and it has been a loss for many players.
The problem, of course, is that making a linear game isn’t necessarily easier than making a big open world or multiplayer feature pack. I’ll try to avoid embarrassing myself with too much wildly underinformed speculation about how game development works, but given how much publishers have invested in building much bigger games, it certainly seems like they think they’re going to rake in bigger profits – and more reliable payback of ballooning development costs – from games that players can spend more time on, and the financial records of live service proponents like EA and Blizzard would certainly agree.
I think this is why remakes have become a refuge for this school of games. The original Dead Space wasn’t seen as a particularly notable seller, but years of nostalgia have cemented its reputation to the point where the name still holds value. Between the Dead Space remake and the Star Wars Jedi series, EA has taken a surprisingly favorable stance on single-player games in recent years, and it’s hard to imagine that would be the case without established names helping to promote them.
Goldilocks
GoldenEye is a remaster rather than a remake, and it seems like a pretty light one at that, but it still offers a type of cooperative gameplay that we just don’t get in modern shooters. It’s long been accepted that GoldenEye was effectively rendered obsolete by Halo, but that ignores the way 007 was built around the now-dated control scheme. It’s slow moving so you can carefully line up your shots based on the exaggerated enemy animations.
The boomer shooter, er, boom, has given us plenty of modern throwbacks to classic FPS games from smaller developers, but they’re all hyper-focused on lightning-fast action and twitch reflexes. GoldenEye levels are endurance challenges – checkpoint-free affairs where you must manage your resources against a small pool of predictable enemies.
GoldenEye’s almost survival horror-esque emphasis on resource management was certainly born in response to the limitations of an N64 controller, but the slower action means it still maintains its own flavor, even today. Indie games like Neon White have proven there’s life in shooters outside of the post-Halo mold, and GoldenEye itself is being mined in games like Agent 64: Spies Never Die (opens in a new tab) and even Screencheat (opens in a new tab). What if we could also get these more varied types of action games out of the AAA scene?
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t want Halo or Call of Duty to give up the precision of the dual-analog controls. But would it be so bad if we got more shooters that were built in a different mold? Regardless, GoldenEye is still here to offer a type of experience I just don’t get out of current games.
Ultimately, of course, I don’t wishes several remakes. What I want are games that feel out of step with current trends every now and then. And hey, we’ve had an excellent example of that this week with Hi-Fi Rush, a bold, creative action game that feels like a throwback to a more experimental development era from Tango. But how often is a major publisher going to fund a small-scale experiment from top talent? It’s certainly going to be much less likely from a company that isn’t banking on a service like Game Pass.
For now, the remake and remaster trend mostly satisfies my need for robust games that stop at massive open worlds and endless content, and I’m most looking forward to remakes of games I never got to enjoy in the first place. Well, and the Resident Evil 4 remake. It will probably also be a blast.
There are a number of well-known titles among them new games for 2023but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
