I think the only 2021 game I played was Teacup with my daughter, so I guess by default that is my #1. Umm, you don’t have to put that in the mix. (It is pretty good in its way.)
Shit, Jack, we can’t all be listing games we bought but haven’t played. My post would be a mile long.
- Forgotten City
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Diablo II: Resurrected
These are the only games this year I played that I’d give 9 or more.
Honorable mentions: RE Village, Ascent, Psychonauts 2, Days Gone, Outriders (all solid 8s).
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It Takes Two - The most fun I’ve had playing a game this year: playing this with my 13yo daughter. Relentlessly inventive, swapping in new abilities, and even whole new game styles, at such a rate it’s like the game is scared of letting you be bored.
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Death’s Door - Gorgeous Zelda-like, with combat difficulty perfectly pitched for me. One of the few games I completed, then went on to do a bunch of optional stuff to see another ending, because I was still enjoying it so much.
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Psychonauts 2 - It had a big reputation to live up to, and managed it. Loved the visual inventiveness of this, I thought it played solidly, enjoyed my time with it a lot.
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Before Your Eyes - A narrative game where your life flashes by - the game watches you through your webcam, and blinking can skip you forward in time. I thought it would just be a gimmick, but it is used really effectively. The number of games that have made me cry was increased to 2.
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Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy - The chaotic combat never really clicked with me, but otherwise the exploration, story, setting, the puzzles, and even the companions who never shut the fuck up, all combine to make something special.
Honourable mentions:
Inscryption which I’ve enjoyed so far, but I’m only at the start of the second act;
Wordle, a bog-standard word puzzle elevated to greatness by the decision to have only one global puzzle every day, and a non-spoilery way of sharing and comparing how you did with others;
Unpacking was sweet, a little sad, and very original;
Sp!ng, a perfect mobile one-touch action game;
The Magnificent Trufflepigs, a lovely walk through some British countryside, detecting metal and contemplating a life;
Last Stop, a walking simulator split across three storylines, with what felt like the most authentic recreation of the feel of London I’ve seen in a game - it at least swings for the fences in its final chapter rather than playing it safe;
Day Repeat Day, a visual novel, but with an integrated Match-3 game representing the mundanity of unfulfilling office work.
Can you change those colons to periods please?
Sure, think I got them all. Sry.
Not a problem! It looks like you may have missed #3 though.
Edit: looks good now
It is my way of saying “hey, this list could and probably would be different if I had played these other games, but unfortunately I didn’t, even if I mean to, eventually”.
Also, I followed the rules, so it shouldn’t cause problems for the script that will collect our votes. And I had no better place to post that info, so I thought this was the perfect place for them!
Of man there are so many games released in 2021 that I own but haven’t played yet. Based on what I’ve heard any of these could make it to my top 5 if I’ve played them. I guess I have over a week to try and sneak some in.
Shadowgate VR The Mines of Mythroth
Resident Evil 4 VR
Forgotten City
Endzone - A World Apart
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Mass Effect™ Legendary Edition
A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism
Chernobylite
Resident Evil Village
So I guess I’m not ready to make my list yet.
Was just an offhand comment, please don’t take it as a moderation note or anything. Feel free to post your entire backlog here sorted by reverse steam ratings, so long as it isn’t prefixed with numbers to mess up arrendek’s script.
My game of the year was Valheim.
But since it’s apparently not ‘legal’ I guess we’ll see if I still think so whenever it eventually hits v1.0…! :)
- Wildermyth
- Monster Hunter Rise
- Deathloop
- Nioh 2
- Shin Megami Tensei V
- Metroid Dread
- Gnosia
- Dungeon Encounters
- Bravely Default 2
- Jupiter Hell
All these games are really missing out on the chance to win the Qt3 Quarterlies by doing these long early release periods. Look what happened to Factorio!
- Nioh 2 - The most satisfying combat system ever with a great range of different weapons and tools that all feel great and distinct from one another.
- Returnal - I had some gripes about the pacing and structure, but the kinetic combat and sci-fi exploration atmosphere carried it, and it was great to see a true AAA-production roguelike.
- Unsighted - A game that wears its influences on its sleeve (NieR Automata’s sad existentialist automatons, Souls’ “going hollow” concept and stamina-based combat, Zelda-esque exploration), but executes them all with aplomb.
- Inscryption - Does its own thing (or many things), always keeping me guessing, but still rooted in a fun moment-to-moment card play.
- Curse of the Dead Gods - I feel a bit conflicted about my gaming tastes – this year there were a bunch of cool nonviolent indie games that explored interesting artistic territory (Unpacking, Sable, Artful Escape, Forgotten City, etc.). And for the most part my reaction was “Neat, glad games are doing this stuff, but I’m going to get back to whipping skeletons in the face now.” I dunno what that says about me, but CotDG sure does make it fun to whip skeletons in the face over and over again.
Honorable Mention
- Metroid Dread
- Final Fantasy VII Remake
- Beast Breaker
- Death’s Door
- Shin Megami Tensei V
- Dungeon Encounters
- Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth
- Wildermyth
- Trials of Fire
- Tainted Grail: Conquest
- Gloomhaven
- Unpacking
- Scarlet Nexus
- Old World
- Old World
- Diablo II: Resurrected
But in good news, Slay the Spire is eligible for the fourth year in a row.
That got a chuckle out of me.
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Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing this game. In large part to the tool box mod, which has a feature that should be in every CRPG—speeding up traversal through the world. I am too old to wait for my characters to slooowly walk across a city. I got the solutions to the puzzles online, because really, who has time for this?
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Remnants of the Precursors is probably the game I’ve spent the second most time playing. MOO with a modern interface is what I needed in my life.
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Old World I enjoyed this one because I am too laid back to care about minmaxing everything and too much of a builder to get too upset about the AI (which is strong enough for me).
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Wildermyth is the first game with procedurally generated story that actually made me care about the characters.
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Solasta: Crown of the Magister was a fun implementation of 5e in a CRPG, but the story was too generic to grab me.
Wildermyth seems like it would almost certainly be my game of the year if I had gotten around to playing it. Oops. Maybe I’ll come back and edit this before next Friday. Pathfinder and Dungeon Encounters are also very up my alley if I ever get there, as are the Diablo 2 and Mass Effect remakes that I probably won’t ever play. I was not playing Disco Elysium again so soon after the first time, though I will get to the Final Cut at some point. I will play 100+ hours of Old World when it finally comes out next year.
I did play most of the other games I was interested in this year, at least enough to get a feel for them, and this is the most lukewarm I’ve been about one of these lists over the however many years of filling them out. First place is still worth the same five points, though.
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Tales of Arise - if you had asked me going into the year what my top ten most anticipated RPGs were, I don’t know if Arise would have made that list, never mind top ten overall. Tales is my least favorite of the various long-running JRPG series that are a tier below the AAAs in budget and ambition, but every now and then an entry clicks for me, and boy did this one click. I like how Schreier described it (paraphrasing): it’s a comfort, fast-food series, the last few entries have been McDonalds or Burger King, but Arise is Shake Shack. The underlying product is still pretty much the same, but the execution and quality is a different tier, and I found myself motivated to carve out 50+ hours of PS5 time for it in a routine where PC and Switch are infinitely more convenient for me to play on a regular basis.
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Metroid Dread - there are a lot of things I don’t love about Dread, but everything it does right is so right and so irreplaceable by the other Metroidvanias out there (however good they are in their own rights). I mean, I regularly died a couple dozen times inside of 10 minutes in the stupid EMMI sections and never considered dropping the game. It must have been pretty good!
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Trials of Fire - I would have sworn under oath that this was 2020, but nope, I have been waiting for 1.0 on Early Access games the last few years and it looks like I played it at release in April/May of 2021. This had a ton of elements I really loved but was maybe a little less than the sum of its parts. I would have preferred a more focused core experience, versus a bunch of different scenarios that can be played a bunch of different ways. It still all added up to a very good game.
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Gloomhaven - this seems unfair since I had already played most of a board game campaign before it came to a screeching COVID-halt, but I enjoyed [and am still enjoying] the digital adaptation more than I expected to when I added it as a toss-in to my Frosthaven pledge. Turns out that a dungeon crawler and campaign design that I like minus the fun of the coop party (but also minus a lot of setup fiddliness) turns out to be something I still like.
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Shin Megami Tensei V - I should have loved this, and I did end up liking it, but I bounced off it more than I have the past entries, and there’s pretty decent odds I don’t end up finishing it. Maybe Persona has ruined me for vanilla SMT? I liked it well enough to give it a vote, but I probably won’t remember it a year or two from now.
Looks like I only finished one game that came out last year.
- Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector.
Happy to have this at number 1 anyway since I really enjoyed it.
Honourable mentions to Decisive Campaigns: Ardennes, Warplan: Pacific and War in the East 2 which I played, but have only really dabbled in.
I own a grand total of two games released in 2021. And I’ve only played one - and still haven’t finished it.
- Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin
Edit: Make that three games! But I don’t think Patron is good enough and I’m not far enough along in Grow to have an opinion.