If you want the HARD NUMBERS on the staff's GOTY lists and the many guest lists on the site, check out @marino's Data Dump: GOTY 2021 Staff & Guests Breakdown. If you want to know what would be the site's 2021 GOTY if it relied on HARD SCIENCE, then this is the post for you! Additionally, remember to check out Superkenon's Giant Bomb GOTY MEGATHREAD where they annotate and compile all of Giant Bomb's GOTY content into a single post!

Speaking of the site's GOTY content, if you tined into it and a the Bombcasts after it, you might have noticed a new version of the Giant Bomb theme song! This music is spectacularly brought to you by Vektroid/Macintosh Plus. Oh, and the Community 2021 GOTY voting results are up for you to marvel over! Read which game the community thinks should have been the site's 2021 GOTY!

Finally, here's a friendly reminder to the community to check out Rorie's "Giant Fire Bomb Side Chat" post on the forums! If you want to learn about the plans for NEXT week or when merch will be restocked, this is the post for you.

Outside of the normal scope of Giant Bomb, RedVentures a Mobile Gaming Editor for GameSpot! If you feel qualified to review and cover mobile games, check it out! Also, Danny posted a video on their Patreon that is available to everyone, even those that are not subscribers that explains what they have been doing and why they took a break from Giant Bomb.

Tweets

Videos/Clips

Is Jan Excited Or Disturbed? (By: @kone)

Kone is back at it mixing music and tight editing with a funny one-off moment from the Bombcast! This time, they ask if Jan is excited or "Disturbed."

Galleria

Jess x Possum (By: @kunsypt)

Over on Twitter, kunsypt decided to make some cut art featuring Jess crossed with an opossum! Check out their other works, and remember, support artists however you can!

Run For The Hills Fanart (By: @RobLopatto)

Over on Twitter, SlimeKing decided to make some AMAZING fanart of their new favorite video series on Giant Bomb! Here you go, and I think we can all agree it has merch potential.

LEGO: QuadBurger (By: @kone)

For those of you that follow Jess on Twitter, you might have noticed that she changed her Twitter profile picture. Here's the full-sized version of the new art that she's decked out her Twitter with, and don't forget to thank Kone for making this wonderful work of art!

Community-Created GOTY Content!

Author's Note: Okay, FINE! I LIED! After going on a one week break, I just couldn't justify not giving the user-created GOTY section one last hurrah before closing things up. For those that end up publishing their GOTY blogs and lists after this week, don't worry, I will still include them in the normal blog and list sections of the Spotlight!

GOTY Lists

• Yours Truly's 2021 Game of the Year Awards (By: @genessee)
• A Somewhat Ordered List of Very Good Games I Played in 2021 (By: @colonelsanders21)
• GOTY 2021 (By: @nia)
• GOTY 2021 (By: @brownsfantb)
• GOTY 2021 (By: @mento)
• A Somewhat Ordered List of Very Good Games I Played in 2021 (By: @colonelsanders21)
• Best Of 2021 (By: @rjayb89)
• Game Of The Year 2021 (By: @posh)
• Best of 2021 (By: @meatsim)
• Game Of The Year 2021 (By: @sinkjaer)
• Top 10 Games Played In 2021 (By: @makinbacon)

GOTY Blogs

2021 Game of the Year (By: @ronindrummer200)

ronindrummer200 reviews the five best old games and 2021 releases they played last year on their latest blog on Giant Bomb! Give it a read and see which games kept them entertained during the hellscape that was 2021.

The Game Of The Year Thing You've Clearly All Been Waiting To See! (By: @jeffrud)

jeffrud finally got around to writing a 2021 GOTY blog on Giant Bomb! However, as someone who primarily plays classic games, they decided to discuss the best and worst games they played last year, regardless of their release!

The Oh Shit I Have a Blog, Whoops GOTY Awards (By: @ford_dent)

Ford_Dent forgot to publish their 2021 GOTY blog on Giant Bomb until a few days ago! Give it a read and if you still haven't published yours, don't worry! You still have time!

Clagnaught's Game of the Year, 2021 Edition (By: @clagnaught)

clagnaught buckled down and got around to publishing their 2021 GOTY blog on Giant Bomb! Read all about the games they loved playing last year as well as their special "superlatives."

Activities

Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is The 3rd UUGPGC Selection! Finish By 2/14/2022 And Join The Discussion! Mark All Spoilers! +

The Pedestrian Is The Second Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club Game. Spoilers Open! (By: BIGSOCARTES)

ATTENTION! The third edition of Giant Bomb's Unofficial Game Pass Game Club is all about Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-! Get the details on when you will need to finish the game by clicking the first link. Also, if you missed the last roundtable discussion for The Pedestrian, the link is provided below that.

Blogs

Comparing History’s Greatest Video Game Enemies To The Shy Guy (By: @purpleshyguy)

PurpleShyGuy is a fan of the Mario Bros. Shy Guy enemy, hence, their username. In light of that, they decided to "judge" other game franchises and their canon fodder with the Shy Guy being their "Gold Standard."

Mobile Game of the Week: Dota Underlords (By: @daavpuke)

Daavpuke has a new episode of their "Mobile Game of the Week" series on the site and this one is all about Dota Underlords! Even if you have zero interest in Dota, it's definitely worth a read!

Indie Game of the Week 254: A Robot Named Fight! +

Go! Go! GOTY! 2021: Game 8: Tiny Lands + (By: @mento)

Mento has TWO episodes of their "Indie Game of the Week!" The first is about A Robot Named Fight!! Read why they enjoyed its Super Metroid-lite gameplay despite butting against its repetition. The second blog is for Children of Zodiarcs, and you can read why they think there's a lot to like about the game other than its impressive art.

Age of Discovery II: The Heart of the Multiplayer +

Age of Discovery III: Modes and Peripheral Systems (By: @gamer_152)

Moderator Gamer_152 continues their retrospective on Halo Infinite with a post about the game's multiplayer and another post about Halo Infinite's multiplayer. Read why they think Halo Infinite's multiplayer is inventive, forward-thinking, and liberating but also plagued by problematic incentive structures and technical failures.

What's the Greatest Video Game: Goof Troop +

What's the Greatest Video Game: Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call (By: @imunbeatable80)

imunbeatable80 discusses Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call and Goof Troop, with their latest "What's the Greatest Video Game" posts on Giant Bomb! Between the two games, see if they recommend you check out either in the year of our Lord, 2022!

Hook Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Directly Into My Veins! +

Fighting Final Fantasy XIII-2 - Episode 1: This Is One Of The Most Unfairly Overhated Games Ever (By: @zombiepie)

Moderator ZombiePie can't wait to play Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin and they write on Giant Bomb why they have their fingers crossed that the game is a complete clusterfuck. Learn more about why by clicking the link. Also, ZombiePie is starting a two-part retrospective on Final Fantasy XIII-2! Catch the first episode on why they think it cleverly refines XIII and considers it one of the most "unfairly overhated" games in video game history.

The Simple Genius of Super Mario Bros 3 Maps (By: @vookatos)

Vookatos takes to the forums to discuss Super Mario Bros. 3 and why there's a "simple genius" to its level design and why the game's maps are a friendly reminder that sometimes less is more.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: A Franchise Flashpoint (By: @jeremyf)

With the most recent news surrounding respawn, jeremyf talks about their time with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and if they think they want the prestigious studio making Star Wars games for the next decade.

The Wheel of Dubious FPSes Episode 15-18: The Hits of 1998 +

The Wheel of Dubious RPGs 49-50: Off-Season Spiders (By: @arbitrarywater)

Clive Barker's Undying, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, AND SiN are all the subject of ArbitraryWater's latest "Wheel of Dubious FPSes" blog feature! Catch some of the "best hits" of 1998! They also have an AMAZING episode that examines TWO recent games from Spiders, a frequent point of discussion by Dave Snider whenever the topic of "Eurojank" came up!

Welp. I Finished Inversion And I Have Nothing Of Interest To Say About It. +

Game Pass Gambols 5: Pupperazzi. Matt Rorie Thinks This Is A Pac-Man Game +

The First Templar Is An Awful Game. I Knew That And I Played It Anyway. To Completion. I Need To Make Better Choices. (By: @bigsocrates)

Don't ask why, but bigsocrates decided to play and complete their five-year-old copy of Saber Interactive's Inversion! Read what inspired them to explore the obscure title and why they regret doing so! bigsocrates continues to look at some of the more obscure indie games behind Game Pass with a blog about Pupperazzi! Use the link to read why they have mixed feelings about the dog photography game. Finally, some users might recall a hilarious Quick Look for The First Templar starring Ryan and Rorie. User bigsocrates decided to give it a shot and shares why it is one of the worst games they have played to completion.

The Other Mystery House: Japan's First Graphical Adventure Game (By: @bowl-of-lentils)

Bowl-of-Lentils recently posted an educational video about Mystery House, the first Japanese developed graphical adventure game, and is taking questions from the community! You can ask them ANYTHING and they will answer!

Dancing To A Different Beat (By: @pauljeremiah)

pauljeremiah pontificates on why Takeshi no Chōsenjō (aka Takeshi no Chousenjou/Takeshi's Challenge) still to this day makes them think about what drives us play video games, especially those that are not fun to play.

Discussion Threads

Sony Is Buying Bungie (By: @bigsocrates)

So... Sony is buying Bungie. In light of this news, the community continues to discuss what this means for the future. Can you imagine even more studio purchases from console manufacturers? Share your thoughts here!

Pokémon Legends: Arceus Discussion Thread (By: @tp0p)

Are there any Giant Bomb users out there that bought Pokémon Legends: Arceus Day One? For those that did, have you enjoyed what you have played? Joined the community discussion about the game.

Horizon Forbidden West Hype/Discussion Thread (By: @mellotronrules)

It is crazy to think but Horizon Forbidden West is right around the corner! How many Giant Bomb users can't wait to play the game? What do you make of what they have shown of the game thus far? Join the conversation now!

Game Acquisition Wars Heat Up Even Further With The New York Times Buying Wordle (By: @bigsocrates)

Are there any Giant Bomb users with thoughts about The New York Times buying Wordle? Do you think the purchase makes sense? How do you think the publication will monetize the puzzler?

Star Citizen Abandons Its Feature Roadmap Entirely (By: @rorie)

In a surprising turn of events, Star Citizen has abandoned its public roadmap for development! PEOPLE SURE SEEM PISSED! However, you can share your two cents' worth to the Giant Bomb community right now!

What Feature About A Game Makes You Think The Long Dev Time Wasn't Worth It? (By: @finaldasa)

With Dying Light 2: Stay Human serving as the impetus, a lot of Giant Bomb users are discussing when a game's long development "wasn't worth it?" Can you think of games or game franchises that showed off too little across too long a time?

The Next Need For Speed Is Coming By Before April 2023 (By: @gtxforza)

The next Need for Speed game has an expected release date of "before April 2023." Is that enough time to make a solid Need for Speed game? What do you think the franchise needs to do to reinvent itself?

Fan-Made HD Remaster Of Resident Evil 4 Now Completed After Eight Years (By: @atheistpreacher)

The Fan-made HD remaster of Resident Evil 4 is now complete! What do YOU make of the eight-year-long fan project? Does it motivate you to check out RE4 again?

Community Best Moment Or Sequence 2021 (Spoilers!) (By: @nuttism)

For those in the Giant Bomb community that feel like they can nominate a 2021 video game for "best moment or sequence!" If you lamenting the award being cut from Giant Bomb's GOTY cycle, join this discussion!

Reports Are Out That Google Stadia Is Focusing More On Licensing Technology And Less On The Stadia Service Itself (By: @bigsocrates)

How does everyone feel about the news related to Google Stadia? Are there any users out there that own a Stadia? If so, how do you feel about the state of the device and Google's new direction with Stadia?

Here's A Live-Action Trailer For Sifu (By: @rorie)

Sifu just got a live action trailer today and you can join the community discussion on if it is enough to keep you interested! Is there anyone out there that can't wait to get their hands on this martial-arts brawling game?

Potential TV / Movie Adaptation Of It Takes Two (By: @ironlink)

Variety is reporting that It Takes Two might see a TV or movie adaptation. Do you think the story in the game would lend itself to a non-game adaptation? Do you think the game has any room for expansion outside of the game?

What Is A Relatively Harmless Popular Social Media Convention That You Refuse To Engage In? (By: @sethmode)

Here's a discussion thread on the forums that has a lot of users talking: what popular social media conventions do you avoid? Are there any platforms that you tend to avoid or have skipped using entirely?

Stranger Of Paradise Looks Insane (By: @humanity)

The community is still BUZZING about the Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin trailer! Join the conversation using the link and share how you feel about the insanity. For example, how did you feel about "the song?"

Bloody Spell Is Out Out! (By: @imhungry)

Hey! Remember when Giant Bomb played Bloody Spell? Well the game has OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED! In honor of Ben, join the discussion about how the "release build" of the game looks like and if it's worth playing!

What Would You Change To Make A Divisive Ending Liked By Most People? (By: @topcyclist)

Here's something on the forums bound to get people passionate: how would you change your least favorite video game ending? Share the conclusion that still leaves a bitter taste in your mouth and how you would improve it!

Folding Ideas (Dan Olsen) NFT Video (By: @notsosneakyguy)

Are there any Giant Bomb users out there that have seen Dan Olsen's video essay rebuke against NFTs? Did you feel like the video missed anything? Can you think of any companion pieces that are better? Join the conversation now!

I Want As Many Games Where You Can Knock Enemies Into Holes/Pits And Defeat Them As Possible. (By: @the_thrower)

Here's a fun thought experiment! We have a forum thread where users are trying to think of every video games that allows you to "knock enemies into holes/pits and defeat them!" If you can think of examples, post them!

Lists

Games Starring Leaders of the Former Soviet Union (By: @jeffrud)

With most on Giant Bomb still in the GOTY spirit, Jeffrud decided to get weird with their latest list on the site! Here's a list of "Games Starring Leaders of the Former Soviet Union!"

No... really!

Far Cry Ranked (By: @splitterguy)

Splitterguy decided to break away from GOTY content and lists with a "HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC" ranking of every single Far Cry game! See how the science judged the many games in the series!

Playable Elves (By: @captainofthestars)

captainofthestars saw someone on the forums ask if there are enough fantasy video games that allow you to plays as elves instead of humans. As such, they made a list of games that allow just that!

User Reviews

• @bc2113's Shin Megami Tensei IVreview discusses why fans of Shin Megami Tensei V shouldn't forget about this game and why it is a great treatise on what makes a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game, a Shin Megami Tensei game.
• @bantha_fodder-5 had a decent time with Nobody Saves the World but they share in their review that the game's "sameness" brings down the entire experience.
• @retrogimp revisited the original N64 version of Perfect Dark and they review why no FPS game, even the XBLA port, scratches the same itch that OG Perfect Dark scratches.
• @tvonchair missed Stonefly when it first released and shares in their review why they think more people should play it after it released with little fanfare.
• @vookatos' Silent Hill 3 review shares why they think the game represents the beginning of the end of the series, and why they think it does not hold up as well as 2.
• @bantha_fodder-5 had a decent time with Nobody Saves the World but they share in their review that the game's "sameness" brings down the entire experience.
• @yyninja finally finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and articulates in their review why they think the game is both ambitious and bloated at the same time.

Hey everyone! These are the results of the community GOTY - the results of which (resultingly) have been resulted below. This year, 1655 of you submitted a top ten list, for a total of 12670 votes (not everyone always puts in ten games, which is fine!) on 807 different games. Wow! Amazing!

This is one of the tightest Community GOTY votes I've ever seen, with the top eight games all being closer together in weighted and regular votes than the top two games were last year, when Hades easily took the top prize over The Last Of Us Part II. It was certainly one of the more bizarre years for game releases in recent memory, with the full weight of quarantine development pushing many games out into 2022. There were fewer voters this year than last which might account for the relative closeness of the race, but I also know that I, personally, had a hard time making a Top 10 this year just because the big splashy AAA games that I like were relatively sparse on the ground. Regardless, congrats to Inscryption for being the game you felt the most strongly about, and big ups to Halo: Infinite for being the game actually played by the largest group of Bombadeers. I played one of those games!

It's kind of fitting that we're publishing this on the day that Dying Light 2 comes out; I dunno if it'll be great, but it definitely feels like one of the first huge (and long-delayed) releases of the year to me. I'll probably not be able to resist buying it this weekend! Anyway, since we have this community polling system that we only use once a year, I figured I'd throw up a poll to see your Most Anticipated Games of 2022. Vote early and vote often!

As per usual, we don't always separate out expansions or new ports in our wiki so if you see stuff like Dragon Quest XI or Destiny 2 you can assume that it's referring to a recent release.

Weighted Votes (1st place counts more than 2nd, and so on)

Pure Votes:

2021 is over, for better or worse.

Let’s get two things out of the way. First, I did not play Halo Infinite. Since I was 13 years old, I have played every single Halo campaign we could with the same group of friends, in co-op. Halo Infinite does not have co-op campaign yet, which means we’re waiting until we can play it together. Second, I’ve been a bit of a mess so this list is going to be a bit of a mess.

For me, it was an odd year: I started The Habibis with Fawzi Mesmar and Osama Dorias, a games podcast by three Arab game developers, and finally found the Arab home in games that I’d unwittingly been looking for. My post-Vlambeer sabbatical year turned into more work than I’ve ever done before--but for the first time in my life as a game developer I can’t actually talk about a lot of the things I’m doing. It was a remarkable year for me in work, but my personal life felt more like a train derailing off a bridge into a ship that sinks onto a submarine causing it to launch a ballistic missile into an airplane, and then the airplane crashes onto the derailed train, and the plane is carrying a nuclear bomb.

So, inspired by a thousand hours of Flight Simulator and a healthy amount of sadness, I guess I decided to actually train and become a pilot. When I was a wee six-year-old, I had the dream of becoming a pilot, but I’d been told that glasses would disqualify you. I needed glasses, and refused to wear them out of fear I could never become a pilot, until my parents convinced me that wearing glasses would make me more intimidating at the elementary school chess tournament. I won that tournament, so the glasses stayed, and the dream of aviation went.

Turns out the glasses thing is nonsense, so I took some flight classes in my early 20s, but had to drop out because first I couldn’t afford it, and when I could it was because I accidentally started a games studio, so I didn’t have time anymore. And thus, near the end of 2021, I decided to just try another flight class. I’ve been happily flying a Cessna 172 twice a week, weather permitting. It’s been wonderful. Really makes you appreciate how good Flight Simulator is. Also how expensive Flight Simulator is--between the peripherals and now the actual real-life flight training, I don’t think any game has ever cost me as much as that one. “It’s free on Game Pass,” my ass.

Anyway, beyond all that, luckily, there was a surprising amount of video games. I honestly did not expect much of 2021 in games--a new console generation in the middle of an airborne pandemic seems like a place to tone down your expectations, but it was far from necessary: The industry delivered and indie flourished in the space left by many big releases quietly or publicly postponed.

Best Game: Unpacking

Unpacking is a singular type of game--it is painfully straightforward, expertly executed, and laser-focused on its emotional resonance. It is a reminder that the games industry is this towering skyscraper of culture and expectations--choices that reach back decades in time and that defined the path forward--and that sometimes the most beautiful things are found on the grassy field right next door.

Unpacking has no central conflict. There is no failure state. There is no death, no game over, no enemy. There is her items and the place she’s moving into, and you are her. There is no story, beyond the items and the spaces. And yet, by bringing along her ever-increasing collections of figurines and books, the items that stay and those that disappear--Unpacking is by far the most effective video game and video game narrative I have played in a long time. If games are defined by finding meaning in interaction, in their use of rules and constraints to evoke emotions, in their ability to allow players to temporarily be someone else or have different options or problems--Unpacking is as close to a perfect video game as you can possibly imagine.

I played Unpacking thrice this year: the first time when it came out, as I had followed Witch Beam’s game since I was first shown it years ago in development--and I thought it was brilliant.

I teared up for who I was in Unpacking, as I slowly realized there would be no space for me to hang her diploma anywhere in the level--her proof of an achievement I knew she had worked towards for so long. I ultimately had to store it under the bed of the uncompromising and unhelpful partner she was moving in with--a moment so singularly brilliant that that one click made Unpacking my Game of the Year. I teared up again--now of happiness and relief--when the next level was two years later, as she unpacked her items back into her childhood room, eyeing a very obvious open space on the wall, and I cheered when the diploma came out of the box and went straight on the wall. Not a single word was spoken or written, and you knew exactly who she is, who he was, and why it did not work out.

The second time I played it was later in the year. My 2021 was partially defined by an incredibly difficult break-up, and after I spent weeks slowly sorting in my apartment through what artifacts and memories were left here of her, finding some strength each day to pack a few more items into a box. It all made the digital acts and beats of Unpacking incredibly resonant--to the point of feeling a little too soft to continue playing. I had an unembarrassed cry once more as I realized that the game was really telling me that it would all work out--that packing away the remains of my relationship would not be the end of my story--just of that story. It was an oddly needed reminder.

Unpacking allowed me to bring my feelings into the game, allowed me to feel for someone I am not, allowed me to overcome her issues, and then fed the reassurance it gave her back into my life.

And that brings me to the third time I played Unpacking, while writing this list, to help me answer a question that was critical to me figuring out whether Unpacking could be my 2021 Game of the Year: What defines a Game of the Year? Is it the game that affects you most? The game that was most effective at using the medium? The game that was the most impressive craftwork? The game that maintained the most focus on its goals? The game that reminds us that there is more to gaming than winning? For me, it didn’t matter much: for each of these definitions, Unpacking is my Game of the Year.

Best Touch: I already mentioned it, but let me repeat it: the diploma. It is a masterclass in game design. It is the purest form of game. It is narrative and mechanics molded together so well that you feel how wrong it is as you play, and the meaning hits you like a truck. It is perfect. It is flawless. It is the video game moment of the year.

Least Favorite: Witch Beam is uncompromising in their design, and despite effective focus on accessibility, every now and then the game feels like it is trial-and-error--a minor gripe mostly magnified by how smooth everything else is.

Alternative: Inscryption is a straightforward card game. Then it is not.

Inscryption got absolutely robbed this year--if it wasn’t the year of Unpacking, maybe the year of Loop Hero, Inscryption would’ve easily been Game of the Year. How can a card game stand out in atmosphere? In narrative? How can a card game be unnerving, scary, surprising, thrilling? I don’t know, and before Inscryption I would’ve had a hard time believing it.

Inscryption ever-so-slowly lures you in with a relatively straightforward card-game. You play some creatures with attack and defense stats, and a summon cost that you pay by sacrificing some cuter creatures. Maybe you brutally drain the blood from some squirrels. Before you know it, the game has become something else entire. Something uncomfortable. Something alluring. Something tense.

I would talk more about Inscryption, but I refuse to. That the game will surprise you isn’t much of a spoiler, but talking about how it will surprise you is. Go play Inscryption--what is the worst that could happen?

Best AAA: Hitman 3

Hitman 3 is Hitman at its very best, and the funny thing about that is that I was never a huge Hitman fan. I enjoyed the games, but to me they were always short distractions between the previous game and the next--interesting sandboxes focused on creating emergent situations amidst cleverly designed scenarios. I played Hitman because they are masterclasses in layered level design, and as a developer, I guess I love being schooled by the games I play.

Hitman 3 is IO Interactive doing something that is incredibly rare in games: making a good third game in a series. Of course, they had quite a bit of “Hitman” in their past, but Hitman (2016) was a risky reboot in so many ways that you can easily say they worked their way back up from scratch. Normally, when a developer does a very risky first game that works out well, the cadence will often describe something like this: the first game has great ideas but isn’t executed well--but it does well so a second game is commissioned. The second game has all the coolest ideas executed well, because the team has some freedom, some ideas left that didn’t make it into the first game, and a clearer understanding of what they’re making.

That game then becomes so big that the suits come in in full swing, and the third is developed under enormous pressure or simply pushes it too far as the good ideas have ran out. Think about it: Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Dead Space, BioShock, Half-Life. The first game is good but wonky, the second is incredible and solid, and the third disappoints because the money suits have shown up and the developers are under tremendous pressure to deliver better ideas despite having used all the good ones of the second game already, and they’re on tighter deadlines because the money is needed next fiscal year.

Not Hitman. Hitman shows tremendous restraint where it needs it, and absurd levels of whatever the opposite of restraint is in others. There is no world where Dartmoor, a level in a mansion that can play out either like a Hitman mission or Knives Out: The Video Game, was a necessity to development. It is clear IOI knew what they were doing, and enjoyed themselves tremendously creating some of the scenarios and situations Agent 47 can land in.

It also shows that this formula might have run out: they can make more, but I don’t think they can do better. I would love to be proven wrong, but it feels to me like the developers squeezed every possible bit of lateral thinking out of this one--they both present that Knives Out level, traditional Hitman levels in every meaningful configuration from open fields and farmlands to rooftops and skyscrapers, and even manage to include a straightforward and linear shooting gallery on a train. Hitman 3 pushes Hitman far beyond any reasonable expectation in all the best ways.

Best Touch: I’ve mentioned a whole bunch above, but Hitman 3’s Dartmoor level is a video game highlight. That level sits next to Titanfall 2’s Effect & Cause as a level that should not exist because there is no reason to spend that level of work or resources on a one-off, but clever management and diligent production made it possible to make something like that without damaging the rest of the title.

Least Favorite: It might seem petty, but I am just very tired of this one. IO Interactive made the one mistake that I simply cannot forgive: the original release had Arabic rendered backwards on certain signs in the Dubai level--a sign that there was a lack of care to ensure Arabic was implemented correctly. Despite the fix after several Arab players pointed this mistake out, it still hurts my (half-)Arab heart to have to call this sort of stuff out. It also emphasizes just how good Hitman 3 was: despite all that, Hitman 3 is still my favorite AAA game of 2021.

Alternative: Metroid Dread is the most linear Metroid game that feels like a Metroid game regardless. Every step you take in Metroid is designed to happen exactly as the team intended, but it hides that so well that you don’t even care. Dread is beautiful, engaging, and challenging in a great way. And no, we're not going to argue whether this is AAA.

Best AA: Bowser’s Fury

Bowser’s Fury is the most fun I’ve had in an open-world in forever. It is one giant epic boss fight spread across a dozen hours filled with delightful puzzles and you play with the best iteration of Mario camera and movement in forever. That’s it, that’s the whole story. I don’t know what more to tell you. I can tell you about the giant Super Saiyan Lion Mario, but it doesn’t matter much in the large scale of how good this game is. I can tell you about the wonderful integration of Bowser Jr. as an accessibility aid and multiplayer opportunity, but it’s icing on the cake.

Best Touch: It genuinely feels fresh, and that’s not something you expect out of a Mario game.

Least Favorite: Every now and then, the game ends up feeling a little disjointed--but I found the occurrence incredibly rare. The final final boss fight was a little underwhelming-you’d hope for something a little more creative than "the same thing but spookier."

Alternative: NieR Replicant is so much better than the original it is a remake of that it might as well be a different game in terms of how you play it. If you’ve played NieR before, this is a superior version. If you’re joining from NieR Automata, this will mess you up the same way. And if you’ve never played a NieR game before--well, Automata is better, but Automata is also one of the best games ever made. Pick whether you want to play the better Automata first or second, but I think it's absolutely worth playing both of them.

Best Atmosphere: Persona 5 Strikers

Persona 5 was my AAA game of the year in 2017, and I wasn’t sure about whether I wanted to play Strikers: after all, a mere spinoff of such a brilliant title was sure to disappoint, and the experiment of making it a Musou-like (sorry) game seemed arbitrary and odd. Persona 5 was about strategy, not about surviving overwhelming numbers.

It’s good, then, that I played Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors and loved them both, and had garnered a lot of respect for Omega Force’s ability to translate any game into a Musou-like (sorry). And Persona 5 Strikers 100% captures Persona 5--from the tone to the characters to the gameplay, despite being an entirely different genre of game.

And what an implementation it is. Fast, furious, strategic--the Musou-like (sorry) gameplay switches to turn-based combat in a flick of a button, and before you know it you’re just… playing Persona. You pick your attacks and swoosh, you’re back into the hack-and-slash. Somewhere deep down I know that it’s two different games smashed together, but like all things Persona 5, it’s done with so much bravura that you can’t help but feel it’s one thing.

Persona 5 was as loud as you could imagine, and while Strikers ramps up the loudness even further (down to some rock versions of the already memorable soundtrack) it somehow also manages to find more heart than the original. The two new characters that join the crew in their new mystery are fun, and I did not even once feel that the fact that the Phantom Thieves had to return to their thieving ways was contrived. The trip was lovely, the twists twisty, and the genuinely sincere naiveté of the crew makes for a more balanced genuinity. By the time the credits rolled, I honestly could not imagine Persona 5 without Strikers.

Best Touch: When I was done with Persona 5 Strikers, I genuinely remembered Persona 5 as if it had Strikers’ gameplay. The transfer between atmosphere, gameplay, strategy, and feel was so smooth that the Strikers gameplay mapped perfectly onto my memories of Persona 5. When I looked up Persona 5, the gameplay of the original mapped perfectly onto Persona 5 Strikers, and I had to make an effort to remember the hack & slash gameplay there. There is an incredible level of craft at display here, two games in two genres effortlessly feeling like the same thing.

Least Favorite: I enjoyed almost every minute I got to spend with the Phantom Thieves, but every now and then the random side-quests got really exhausting.

Alternative: Get in the Car, Loser feels like Christine Love’s take on Final Fantasy XV, which means it’s an incredibly queer road-trip, and it’s an incredibly fun RPG with a super solid atmosphere.

Best Emergent Territory: OPUS: Echo of Starsong

Let me preface this by saying I am biased.

Half a decade ago I was on one of my many journeys around the world to meet independent developers everywhere. By then, it had become my life’s goal to ensure anyone, anywhere would be able to make games with (at least) the same opportunities and support developers benefit from in the West. I spent a good 300 days of the year on the road, flying from continent to continent meeting developers, teaching them, and learning from them. I meet people, then ask them if there is anything I can help with, and then try and help.

One of my favorite things about that work was meeting developers, and learning of the work they’re doing both in terms of making incredible games, and helping others make games.

Opus: Echo of Starsong is an example of an incredible game--but when I met the Taiwanese SIGONO team at an independent developer event in Shanghai, they were working on an earlier game called OPUS: The Day We Found Earth.

OPUS: The Day We Found Earth was a mobile puzzle game focused on narrative, a clever game far beyond many similar games that were released prior to great acclaim from Western developers--developers with direct access to the Western media, media which did not and often still does not have eyes on regions on Earth outside of North America, Europe, and Japan. It pains me that so many incredible games go undiscussed every year, not because they’re not great, but because the audience has no way of knowing they exist--and the media can’t make the effort because it’s expensive and there’s enough releasing to fill the page where they are.

So when I met these developers, it became clear that they had one big dream: to one day break through in the Western media, and have the game be recognized there. The Day We Found Earth won award after award in mobile--where award ceremonies are far more international in general, but the game did not break through in the West. A sequel, OPUS: Rocket of Whispers was a similarly clever mobile game, also won several awards--but did not break through.

Perhaps a little desperate, SIGONO decided to make their next sequel a ‘big one’ - and that is OPUS: Echo of Starsong. Starsong is a PC game, focused on the strengths of what is now a franchise--a rich sci-fi universe filled with clever puzzles and exploration, melancholy and hope, desperation and love. They poured everything they had into Starsong, and it shows: it is by far the best Opus title, and one of the best narrative experiences of 2021.

Near the end of development, I caught up with the SIGONO developers and asked them what their hopes for the project were--if there was anything I could help with. They said they would love if I could help them reach the Western media. Their dream had not changed. I tried to help, as I would try to help any developer with games as good as theirs. We talked about their press release, we discussed the trailer and moved around some and cut some, we discussed timing and strategy. They were feeling very good about the game, and even the earliest cut of the trailer gave me goosebumps.

When the game launched and I finally properly played it, it was as incredible as I hoped--beautiful and moving, full of care and love, a game that can stand alongside some of the greatest narratives in games. On the shoulders of the game rode the hopes of a studio that had chased one dream for half a decade with tremendous competence and focus.

But there was nothing.

A few smaller websites wrote about OPUS, but the websites you and I would know never mentioned the game. A week went by. Then another, and another. OPUS performed well enough, not wonderful, but presumably well enough to look at a future for SIGONO.

The dream of one day reaching the Western press and market would stay out of reach.

So when Sisi Jiang of Kotaku wrote a review that concludes that “Opus: Echo of Starsong is a serious contender for my game of the year”, I sat at my computer and cried. Honestly, just thinking of seeing SIGONO’s incredulous and excited response to the review, I still cry. They did it. They finally did it.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is an incredible game. It is one of the best games of the year. It is beautiful, and moving, and absolutely worth your time. It ended up with just 5 reviews on Metacritic--the Western press sadly didn’t pick up on it much more than Sisi and those few smaller outlets did. But Echo sits at an impressive 88 on Metacritic, and over 3000 Steam reviews say the game has received an Overwhelmingly Positive response.

So many of the best developers I meet are incredible humans--kind, intelligent, empathic, focused, hopeful--they’re dreamers and workers that bring so much energy to their job for years to give you those 10 hours of wonder. This game reminds me how many incredible games by incredible people must be out there, unacknowledged, uncelebrated, just waiting for that one moment that will make the world see it, play it.

Best Touch: OPUS continues its series trademark of being one genre, but not like you’re used to. Echoes of Starsong manages to continue that beautifully--being many different things at once, yet mostly coherent. It is hard to overstate how impressive that is in the context of game development craftsmanship.

Least Favorite: OPUS occasionally trudges through the heft of its own world and story, and while at times that makes absolute sense, the game would’ve not been hurt by being slightly more streamlined at times.

Alternative: Eastward is charming and wonderful, and the Shanghai-based Pixpil pulled off a sincere homage to nostalgic RPGs without ever really feeling like it had nothing of its own to say. It is also gorgeous.

Most Whimsical: SPOOKWARE

2021 was the year in which my Analogue Pocket finally arrived - a Game Boy-shaped device that does hardware-level emulation of the Game Boy Advance. I had pre-ordered it to replay Golden Sun--one of my all-time-favorite games, but the Analogue Pocket made me grab my entire Game Boy collection to see what else I wanted to play. I found plenty: Advance Wars, Mega Man Battle Network, Monkey Puncher, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, and a bunch of others. There was one other Game Boy Advance game that I really wanted to replay: WarioWare, Inc.

I have played every WarioWare game, and while they’ve generally been ‘good or better’, the most recent release on Switch really wasn’t what I was looking for: the beauty of WarioWare to me was always quickly figuring out what to do, how to do it, and then executing on it. The latest one kind of flipped the script on that: you would know your mechanics already, just not how to apply them. It’s a fun two-player game, but it didn’t hold my interest beyond that.

It was to my surprise that I found my fix of minigame madness somewhere else--SPOOKWARE. SPOOKWARE is a skeleton-spooky indie take on WarioWare. Three ‘skelebros’ go on a coming-of-age journey, you move around the various locations you visit, and you play microgames to progress a rather whimsical story--and almost every part of this entire thing is full of horror movie tropes and references.

Just like in WarioWare Inc., the games last seconds, are wildly creative, use limited inputs, have an incredible amount of charm and joy and fun, and will make you grin, smile, yell, and shout at the game.

Is SPOOKWARE the best game of the year? No, not even by a long shot. Does it feel precision-engineered to be one of my favorite games of the year? Absolutely. Anyone that loves WarioWare Inc., or horror movies, or creative minigames, charming characters, fun, joy, or video games in general - anyone who loves any of those things should give SPOOKWARE a go.

Best Touch: I had to replay WarioWare Inc. to figure out if WarioWare hit the same level of charm on their ‘instructions’/’completion’ texts, and while WarioWare is charming, I actually think SPOOKWARE outdoes its inspiration here.

Least Favorite: SPOOKWARE wants to both be snappy and meandering at the same time, and it occasionally gives you a sense of whiplash as to what the game actually is.

Alternative: The Artful Escape is genuinely incredible--but somewhere I feel this game is going to resonate mostly with creative folks. Everybody I’ve talked to that is a creative fell deeply in love with The Artful Escape, as it perfectly encapsulates part of the identity crisis that being a commercial creative brings along--a fight between individuality and expectations, between converging and diverging, between genuine sincerity and practical cynicism. The Artful Escape also contains a design subversion that is so singularly well-executed that I do not want to spoil it: let’s just say it contains a moment that you’d expect somewhere else in the game, which is placed in line with the narrative of self-discovery and identity in such a beautiful way that I had to put my controller down and stare at the TV in awe for more than a moment.

Best Multiplayer: Destiny 2

Destiny remains my end-of-day destination for every day that my PS5 is around, and Beyond Light/30th Anniversary Edition remains the best iteration of Destiny since its original launch. The current version of Destiny also shouldn’t be mistaken as an expansion pack--it is effectively an entirely new title. 2021 brought new progression mechanics, added an entire new end-game fashion system, smoothed out entire subsystems to make Destiny more coherent and focused, and worked tirelessly to both do what the community wants and what the community doesn’t know it wants.

The most recent storylines have had more momentum and gravitas than Destiny has had before, as unlikely alliances are formed and threatened in the face of overwhelming odds. In the most traditional Star Wars storytelling tropes, the player is forced to question the duality of good and evil in power given, and then spends the rest of the year forming alliances with those that were foes a year earlier.

After you beat the campaign, Destiny 2 keeps evolving the story through weekly narrative moments, to tell the story of the deceptive Hive goddess Savathun, and the eternal Starhorse potentially representing the consciousness of the planets that really wanted to have a TV game show featuring our main character narrated by their mysterious shadowy tentacle-faced servant.

Alternative: Outriders. Remember Outriders? Good game. Just really solid action-game design, great narrative conceit and opening, and mostly held back mostly by somewhat unimaginative encounters in the later parts of the game. Really loved how ridiculously overpowered the player gets.

Best B-Game: Babble Royale

Babble Royale is a Scrabble Royale Battle Royale game. I don’t even know how to begin to explain this game, but we’ll give it a go. You play a version of Scrabble simultaneously and in real-time with almost 20 players - the game starts as your drop your first letter onto the field, and from there you use Scrabble rules, but you have to continue from your own words, and there’s power-ups, and if you connect your ‘chain’ to enemy player, they’re eliminated, and there’s also an ever-encroaching ‘circle’ that damages you if your latest word is outside of it.

If it sounds like absolute lunacy, that’s because it is--and I honestly only gave it a try because Frank Lantz’ name was attached to the project. His previous work includes Drop7, Hey Robot, and Universal Paperclips--and I love all three of those games.

Babble Royale, then, too, I fell in love with. There’s something oddly charming about taking out an opponent with a complex word, or an insult, or a banal word. There’s something incredibly exhilarating about barely making it out of the circle. There’s something remarkable about maneuvering yourself out of danger. It has many of the ups and downs of a Battle Royale, but it’s Scrabble.

Best Touch: In continuing with the theme of absolute absurdity, then, Babble Royale allows you to buy skins just like most Battle Royale games do. In Babble Royale, your skins are your starting letter. I bought the premium package so I can start with the letter “R”. I do not regret it.

Least Favorite: A good tutorial would genuinely be nice. Babble Royale might be straightforward, but it also makes you miss a whole bunch of things that are good to know, and don’t feel particularly rewarding to learn about later. Onboarding remains a particular challenge that indies struggle with, and while Babble Royale is accessible by proxy, it doesn’t exactly feel like it welcomes people in.

Alternative: Severed Steel is just utterly gleeful. Think three-dimensional John Wick Hotline Miami Max Payne. Think fast, loud, confident, fun. Think kicking in doors and sliding on floors and shooting bad guys in spectacular ways as you zoom through the air. It’s good.

Best Indie: Loop Hero

I had to delete Loop Hero from my computer. Loop Hero is too good a game. The way it subtly inverts the relationship between risk and opportunity is brilliant. The way the graphics are both informative and evocative is beautiful. The way it can lure you into another loop by enticing you with opportunities is conceptually staggering. I do not wish to speak of Loop Hero, before I am tempted again.

Best Touch: Since Loop Hero is about risk and reward, there is no singular moment that captures that tension better than standing at the campfire, deciding whether you’ll go another loop. It is a beautiful symphony of permutations and possibilities, an informed gamble in the purest form, and it frequently pokes at that one feeling other media than games can’t really evoke: regret. The same regret that I'll feel if I boot the game back up and lose another three weeks of my life.

Least Favorite: Loop Hero has almost perfect onboarding. It explains itself, lets you play, and then reveals itself through practice, and failure, and paying attention, and a slow unfolding of mechanics. That said, I really wish the game let you choose a character right from the start.

Alternative: Ynglet is a top-down platformer by the worlds’ politest indie rockstar, Nifflas. If ‘top-down platformer’ sounds like a curious thing, you’d be correct. Ynglet is meditative and wonderful.

Best Mobile: Fantasian

I want to be abundantly honest here: I didn’t love Fantasian--I just thought it was incredibly well done. If you’re in the running for a RPG with an accessibility twist, Fantasian is beautiful and impressively crafted for mobile. If you don’t have an iOS device, you’re sadly out of luck on this one.

Best Touch: The “dimengeon” mechanic can be lifted into every RPG ever as far as I’m concerned. You trap weaker enemies into some sort of alternative pocket dimension, and when it overflows you fight everything caught in there at once in one battle.

Least Favorite: I feel terrible for saying it, but Fantasian is stunningly unremarkable in most ways beyond the Dimengion. If you like Final Fantasy, you’ll like Fantasian. If you don’t like Final Fantasy, you won’t like Fantasian. If you feel you would like Final Fantasy but find it a little too much ‘work’, you might love Fantasian. That’s kind of what the game is.

Alternative: Bird Alone is absolutely a cheat choice here, because it came out in 2020. Regardless, I played it early in 2021, and I simply have to talk about it. The best way to play this game is knowing as little about it as possible, but if you could stand to have a little overexcited bird friend join your life for just a while, I can deeply recommend Bird Alone.

Best …: Mass Effect Legendary Edition

2021 felt like it should’ve been a slow year for games--a new console generation and COVID make for a rather challenging combination for game development. Somehow, the industry pulled off an incredible feat by filling the year with more than enough incredible games to say that 2021 was a good year for games. As we look to the absolute onslaught of titles slated for 2022, I genuinely look back with amazement at what the industry has pulled off. Well done, y’all.

This category I always leave for the end, to talk about a game I feel doesn’t really fit a category but does deserve a mention. But I also use it as an excuse to not have to care about any limits, so let’s talk about all the games I would recommend that didn’t make it onto the list first.

We properly kicked off the new generation of console games with the graphical absurdity that was Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart. We went on thoughtful creative journeys in both TOEM and Chicory. We went Skatebirding in Skatebird, took a glide across the world of Sable, and drifted around the stunning Mexican vistas in Forza Horizon 5.

I toyed around with Townscaper, which I don’t know how to mention anywhere in-flow in this section so I’m just going to do it this way. Maybe I can create some far-fetched bridge to ‘building things’ and mention Game Builder Garage in here as well--it’s a genuinely good on-boarding tool for young and aspiring game developers.

I jumped back into Tetris with Tetris Effect: Connected for some multiplayer Tetris, played It Takes Two and came away impressed by the continued co-op design expertise, and honestly would’ve believed I was playing with friends while I was playing Guardians of the Galaxy--that’s how good the characters in the game were.

JETT: The Far Shore’s opening is seared into my mind, the engine thrust accelerating as time ticks away, even if much of the rest of the game didn’t quite click with me the way I hoped. Death’s Door surprises as an action-adventure clearly made by a team with serious capacity in the art department, but with far deeper combat than you would expect. Unsighted was a significant and deceptively dense take on the genre, and Axiom Verge 2 was a phenomenal Metroidvania with Axiom Verge’s trademark focus on coherence and philosophy.

And then there were the roguelikes. There are so many roguelikes, and while the quality is highly variable, this year had a whole bunch of incredible ones. Curse of the Dead Gods is really good from the get-go, but I had to put the game away because I couldn’t commit the time. Deathloop is a delightful kind of narrative roguelike, but also kind of not, and somehow manages to stay focused through the odd-yet-enticing two-and-a-half-A experiment almost all the way to the end. Returnal really needed that save function, and I simply haven’t had the time to go back to it after they implemented it--but I loved what I had played when I put the game away--I hope to one day have some time to hop back in and play that properly. Wildermyth was a procedural tactical RPG that was a complete surprise to me, and I really appreciated just how granular the experience felt and how sincere the characters felt. And if you’re reading this and you liked Nuclear Throne--consider giving Dead Estate a go. I had a blast.

I went on stylish noir-esque adventures--say, noir-likes (sorry)--in Vancouver in Backbone, and then throughout the universe in Genesis Noir.

But the trip through the universe I want to talk about is Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is a very strange game for me. When the first game came out, I did not know that game development was a real career. When the second game came out, I was studying game development. When the third game came out, I had dropped out of university, started Vlambeer, been nominated for several huge awards with Super Crate Box, and had been featured with a photo in the New York Times as a spokesperson against cloning.

The one thing that had stayed normal as my life flipped upside down was that I wanted to know how the story of my Commander Shepard continued. The characters of Mass Effect are friends, comrades, colleagues. I have never before been so enamored with a game world, and despite having played games that are better, and grander, and more beautiful, I honestly doubt I ever will love a game world more than that of Mass Effect. Most importantly, I firmly believe The Normandy is the very best instance of a ‘home’ in any video game--a place to feel safe at, to be with friends at, to come home to. The Normandy sits in my memory as one of the greatest achievements in video game history.

When I finished a Mass Effect game, I never touched it again. When I completed the trilogy, I never went back. The story had played out, and the memory was so precious that I insisted to myself that it stay pristine. For me, the ending of Mass Effect 3 was perfect.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a phenomenal remaster of the original trilogy, and it was the first time I controlled Commander Shepard since 2013. I was amazed with just how much of the game had remained in my memory, and I played the game exactly the way I remembered it. I didn’t change my choices, besides now knowing how each decision would pay off. It all played out exactly as I remembered it.

The only change to my experience was that I played every Mass Effect game on launch day: I had never played a single DLC. They were my treat for this remaster, and several of them are utterly remarkable. I was at the edge of my seat as I played Lair of the Shadow Broker. I reeled from the implications of Leviathan. I broke down in laughter throughout Citadel. I broke down in tears at the end of Citadel, as the soundtrack concludes the content with the beautiful Farewell and Into the Inevitable, which unmistakably evokes the melodies of An End, Once And For All--a track that is burned into my memory for life.

Commander Shepard was the one stable thing as my life took me from a teenager with an impossible dream to the founder of a notable indie studio. Getting to come back to the Normandy again now, as a decade veteran of the games industry with a career far beyond the wildest dream of that teenager--I don’t know how to express in words how it feels.

It’s good to be home, huh, Commander?

Best Touch: It’s Mass Effect.

Least Favorite: Knowing myself, unless there’s a Re-Remaster, I will likely never play these games again.

Alternative: If you’re the kind of player that loves narrative games that don’t shy away from tackling some complex themes, The Forgotten City pulls you in and doesn’t let go until the very end.

Samantha Kalman is a game designer and musician. She's currently at Respawn Entertainment working on Apex Legends.

Wassup bomb kids? Bomb fam? Bombarinos? Bombadillos? Bombaramas? Fans of the excellent PS2 puzzle game Bombastic? And duders of all genders? It’s 2022 but with the ongoing time warp it might as well be 20XX, the exact year Megaman X occurs. I suppose our robot tech has come a long way, but Replicant tech is still lagging behind Capcom’s clairvoyant fortune telling. Honestly I’d take a robot apocalypse over this very real and very boring one. But enough about the droll of miserable reality, let’s talk about video games!

I have a short list for 2021. A lot of great games came out this last year, but unfortunately I wasn’t in a position to fully adopt 10 whole lovable games. I had to be selective about what I wanted to play and only a handful of games spoke to me enough that I really stuck with them.

#4 Deathloop

I always have this pattern with Arkane games ~ I’ll go into them hyped af, play a level or two and really soak into the experience, at this point I usually get frustrated that I’m not able to play stealthy or non-violenty enough. The allure of the perfect level playthrough hangs over me and I fall off. Or in the case of Prey, I got stuck in a corner without enough ammo/health to survive the skirmish of my save.

Although I didn’t finish Deathloop, it (ironically) helped me break out of my own personal trap with Arkane games. The emphatic violence and ridiculously intriguing setup kept me going for a while! I must have uncovered 60% or so of the solution to the perfect day, killed each visionary at least once, and earned that kickass shotgun which changed the game completely. The progression from stealthy nail gun and panic-escapes to kick-down-the-doors and shotgun everybody is probably my singular favorite moment from this year of play.

As a designer and a player, I enjoyed working toward the objectives, but the REAL game doesn’t start until Julianna shows up. I must have had every possible kind of encounter with Julianna players. Treading stealthy, watching rooftops / sprinting toward combat Cole’s apartment / playing it cool and mainlining objectives / getting a surprise drop and blowing her away with my shotgun. I was also a fan of hacking the turrets, and lemme tell ya a well-placed turret is a GAME CHANGER when playing against her. I liked this PvP game smashed into the core of a PvE game so much that I ended up playing a bunch of games as Julianna, just to climb up her progression tree.

Ultimately my impression of the longevity game is a common one. I was breathless for the first 20 or so hours, then hit a point where something in the objective progression fell flat for me. After about 26 hours I put it down, but I fully expect to return to it this year to finish off the story and find out what the fuck is actually going on with that island. And just enjoy murdering the visionary pricks a few more times.

#3 Lost Judgment

This was a late addition to my year in gaming! I’d been waiting to secure a PS5 to play it on some buttery framerates. The one PS5 I did manage to buy was a gift for my brother in law. Funny thing is he managed to get one too, as a gift for me. Love is when family buys each other impossible-to-find gaming consoles for each other for the holidays! As luck would have it, the evening after the gift exchange we had several inches of snowfall in Seattle. Being effectively snowed in with a little time off work, I had no choice but to sit at home and play through Lost Judgment. Woe, woe indeed.

Some of you may remember that the first Judgment was my game of the year last year! So I went into this sequel with high expectations. Perhaps mistakenly, perhaps unfairly, I was a little disappointed. Now don’t get me wrong, Lost Judgment is a great game! It’s my third best game of the year! But it hits different. OG Judgment had the benefit of telling a story that was centralized and eventually revealed to be formative to the main character’s VERY compelling story. This story is very different, as it’s centered around events at a high school starting with an investigation into the severity of bullying that’s occurring. It goes from there, and it goes many places! It’s interesting and mysterious and it’s not at all clear how all these events and pieces of the puzzle fit together until quite late in the game. The revelations and motivations of the characters are nuanced and mature in the way adult humans are complex. I absolutely applaud the game for leaning into that nuance for character motivations. In an industry of entertainment products where “shoot the bad guy” rules all, a bit of unapologetic complexity is most welcome.

A critical aspect of tension in the story is uniquely rooted in Japanese culture, which I think works against most western players who probably don’t understand some fundamental differences about how Japanese society differs from our own. Briefly, the role of obligations to the society at large is vastly different in Japan. An individual’s actions reflect on their family and institutions they’re connected to. Committing a shameful act can bring shame those around an individual. We don’t really have the same concept of shame ingrained into our social codes. An example of this is actually a story from the first Judgment. After the initial Japanese release, one of the actors who was cast as a key character was arrested by police for a real-world crime. The crime was seen to be so shameful that it violated these rules I’m describing. The response was for the developers and publisher of the newly-released game to recall all copies that featured his likeness. They took some time to completely remove his presence from the game and replace it with another actor. This is the kind of action taken in response to this shame; erasure.

Lost Jugment grapples with this uniquely Japanese characteristic of shame in a serious way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the controversy surrounding the original actor was an inspiration for the story of this sequel. It’s very hard to understand how shame is integrated into the new story without some pre-existing knowledge. The translation of the game (in subtitles because I’m a dirty gaijin) doesn’t go out of its way to explain the dynamic to us foreigners. I only know a little about it because I was fortunate to study Japanese language & culture in high school. It’s the thesis of the story ~ an obligation that we all have to each other, and the impact of our actions on other people. It’s dark and complicated and moving, but it doesn’t have the hook of personal stakes that was present in the first game. By the end of the first game I was fully invested in the conclusion because I felt so personally affronted by the manipulative villain. In this sequel I “merely” wanted to help resolve the conflict for the good of greater society; the understanding that we are all in this together and we have to take care of each other.

It still has Mahjong! And great fighting games ~ both the latest Virtua Fighter 5 AND Sonic The Fighters! Bust out those arcade sticks, kids! Plus you get to ride a skateboard around Kamurocho and Yokohama and that’s cool as hell.

#2 - Inscryption

I’m not a big card game person. I played a lot of SNK vs CAPCOM Card Fighter’s Clash on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, but that’s about it. I had to hear repeatedly how Inscryption is a must play game. The sleeper indie hit of the year. And yes, it’s very impressive in the ways it is experimental. To talk much about it is to spoil it at all. And spoiling it at all is much too much spoiling.

What I’ll say is that Inscryption is full of surprises. The number and variety of them is kind of astoundingly creative. I think everyone should try this game. You might bounce off of it in Act 2 like I did, but I already played a shitload of Card Fighter’s Clash so that’s my excuse.

#1 - Metroid Dread

Remember when video games used to be difficult? In an esoteric way that’s more about deciphering “wtf am I supposed to do?” rather than “how do I git güd? Metroid Dread is so old-school in some very particular ways that for me it was a beautiful nostalgic joy. It also made me realize that I’ve actually played and finished every Metroid game, which was a small shock. I even played through Metroid 2: Return of Samus on the original blurry-screen Gameboy. In fact that was the first one I finished! Probably explains a lot about me. Fun fact: the way the occasional Metroid bosses evolve in that game scared the shit out of me as a kid.

The modern if minimal story setup is told through tightly-packed cutscenes. Don’t sneeze or you’ll miss something important. It’s sort of like the Matrix Reloaded where it just assumes you know everything that’s happened prior to this game. It does not give any more context than what’s needed to move forward, and I respect the hell out of that. I’ve seen a recurring complaint that it’s too hard to figure out what to do to move forward. But as a designer I think they did something really incredible. Here is a game that helped define a specific style of open-world 2D exploration games, and they implemented a very complex map with a system that prevents you from getting too lost. It’s basically a linear game up until the very end. I know because I tested that boundary many times, sometimes intentionally! The solution to move forward is always somewhere in front of you, and the game trusts you to figure it out. At the same time, the exploration ability progression that we’ve come to love about Metroidvania games is alive and well here. Probably one of the most satisfying progressions for me in a long while. When you finally get that screw attack it’s like coming home to a warm cup of cocoa. However they managed to make this game both linear and fulfill the escalation aspects, imo it’s a total badass accomplishment.

I found a certain but not overwhelming nostalgic joy in playing with Samus again. This is clearly the Samus I remember from all these other games, but in critical ways she is very much not the same Samus from the jump. All these missions fighting Metroids and the X Virus in Metroid Fusion have fucked her up real bad. And it’s not a story of recovery either, it’s about moving on and making peace with what’s happened. There are remarkable moments of both revelation and closure in the minimalistic story. It’s really satisfying if you’ve been checking in on the drip-feed of the series over 30-something years. Like meeting up with a childhood friend who’s grown and changed but you’re still very interested in their lives and want to help them shoot shit to solve problems. The boss battles are hard as fuck, and really very frustrating~! But not so frustrating that I ever believed winning any battle was impossible. Maybe once I backed out and did some powering up to make the next fight less of a struggle. The EMIs are a very new kind of “boss” encounter. I guess not everyone liked them very much, but to me they were almost all an interesting experience of stealth and tension. Those that weren’t were actually too easy.

#0 - The Matrix Resurrections

I thought the Matrix Resurrections was a movie, but is it? Lots of video games want to be movies. This is he only movie that wants to be a video game. Yeah I’m old and I saw the first Matrix in theaters when I was 17, twice on opening weekend. So the characters and the world are extremely formative for me. Right up there with Rez baybeeee. The new movie has been so divisive, I had to take a moment here on this platform to stan.

The Matrix Resurrections is not a power fantasy. It’s not about being the most badass kung fu man plugged into a video game. It’s about accepting what you know must do when you’ve been worn down and abused by the world. When age has drained you of vigor for life, how you might have already made severe surrenders just to get by. It’s about shaking off the dust and being brave enough to rediscover what makes your life worth living. Spoiler: it’s people, maybe a special person. It’s a deeply hopeful film that stakes its claim in the importance of love as critical to the human experience. It shows how we inspire each other, why we should take chances. It depicts a post-war world where peace survived! Imagine: a without warfare is actually attainable! And it reminds us how fantastical the real world can be, how rich it is with marvelous nature and technology that can’t be replicated in even the most cutting edge immersive VR.

It has a scene where Morpheus literally Does A Matrix from one table to another while dual-wielding guns, shooting down seemingly endless waves of riot cops that flood into the room. Sure seems a lot like a video game to me.

Plus Bugs is hot af and NO I will NOT be taking questions!

We're Albummer!, the first show on Giant Bomb to scientifically prove sincerity is the ultimate cringe, and selling ringtones is the only true art. Since everyone at this wonderful and foolishly supportive website is starting their Game of the Year conversations, we thought it might be kind of cool to give you our individual Game of the Year answers in the art form made most popular by The Heavens Gate cult, a blog post.

Jordan Olds

My game of the year was The New Therapist I Started Seeing. This one has a much better open-world map and also she isn't constantly threatening to steal my dog that she wrote an emotional support letter for.

Emily Panic

My game of the year is Marriage. The levels vary in difficulty and every boss is a different manifestation of our intergenerational and childhood traumas, except for one level which was strangely Bowser? And I was like "why is bowser in this game?????" 7/10 stars.

Katie Rose Leon

It didn’t come out this year but I banked like 40 hours on Banner of the Maid, the only game brave enough to ask “what if the French Revolution was fought not by pale and sickly Parisian men but big titty anime wives instead?"

Drew Kaufman

My game of the year was When I Knocked Over My Batman Forever Burger King Mug and I Instinctively Kicked it to Stop the Glass from Shattering, Bruising My Foot, and Spraying Iced Coffee All Over My Apartment. Supposedly this next DLC will add a hard mode where I have the option of also burning my small cat with hot sleepy-time tea.

Jeremy Hammond

My game of the year was, as it has been every year since 2015, Cities: Skylines. It’s the only game where you are God, and God likes trains. 10/10 perfect game no notes. Toot toot.

Lucie Steiner

My favorite game of the year was a tie between a Riding-A-Horse-In-Real-Life Simulator and Struggling Desperately to Give My Husband an Orgasm.

Parris Fosteer is a Community Developer for Finji, a believer in pizza bargains, and a quality follow on TikTok.

Hi, I’m Harris Foster. Normally I’m doing community work for games like Night in the Woods, Zelda Like a Fox, and Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Around the Giant Bomb world, you might know me as that guy who constantly gets his name spelled wrong. This happened once during Giant Bomb @ Nite 2018, and then many, *many* times after that. It even somehow came up during the Ghost Recon Breakpoint Quick Look. I still don’t know how this happens. It’s not even that hard of a name.

My constant misidentification on Giant Bomb Dot Com has wreaked havoc on my personal brand. Starbucks baristas hesitate when writing my name on the cup. I have to present two forms of ID when buying liquor now. I took a flight recently and the guy at the TSA stand took one look at me and called me a “fuckin’ dumbass.” This is all thanks to what I have been told was a “production mishap” at GB studios, but what I truly know to be nothing short of character assassination.

As an apology, Jeff Gerstmann offered me a lifetime subscription to Giant Bomb Premium, 300 dollars cash, and a five-minute Toys-R-Us-style “keep anything you can grab” run through his garage. I said “Jeff, I just want my life back.” He said “How about a Giant Bomb Top 10 list?” I said “OK.”

All of that really happened.

Welcome to the first ever Giant Bomb top 10 list created out of a mutual desire for reconciliation. A quick note: I’m leaving Chicory: A Colorful Tale off this list because of the whole “I worked on it” thing. I really love this game, and it would definitely fit in here, but I want to focus on games from other talented folks. OK! On to my favorite stuff.

10. Knockout City

Applying the expectations of an arena shooter to dodge ball has previously been attempted (much love to Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball), but Knockout City is the game that nails it with Nintendo Sports-like precision. I say “Nintendo-Sports,” because Knockout City feels like a return to the long lost genre of “larger-than-life” sports games that we were all about in the 2000s. Knockout City is not quite funky enough to be an EA Sports BIG title, and not quite “older sibling who teaches you cusses” enough to be a late-stage Midway sports game. Velan Studios has created a game that feels like a cousin to Super Mario Strikers or Mario Superstar Baseball, and they should be proud of that. Check out Knockout City - it’s wacky, it’s arcade-y, and it’s on basically everything.

9. Splitgate

I’m a big Halo guy. Spoiler alert: Halo Infinite is my #1 pick at the bottom of this list. Splitgate’s burst in popularity earlier this year was exactly what I needed, and acted as an appetizer to Halo Infinite.

This intro isn’t fair to Splitgate. It’s a terrific game. But you can’t talk about Splitgate without mentioning both Halo and Portal by name. Splitgate’s gameplay being a combination of two of my all-time favorite games made it feel like I had been training my whole life for its release. I was zippin’ all over the place. I was staring dudes straight in the face while shooting them square in the back. In my time playing Splitgate, no one ever figured out that Oddball becomes trivial with portals. Place a return portal, grab the ball, open an escape portal, close it behind you, and you’re gone without a trace. I was a little stinker when I played Splitgate, and I love any game that allows me that privilege.

8. Rat Battler II @ Meow Wolf Denver

The only spoiler warning I’ll give in this whole review is not for a game, but for a real-life experience. If you have any desire to visit a Meow Wolf exhibit, in this case Meow Wolf Denver, skip this entry. Meow Wolf is a thing that you should remain in the dark about up until the moment you’re inside.

Buried deep within the non-euclidian twists and turns of this incredible Disney Imagineer nightmare is a wholly unique arcade experience known as Rat Battler II. Essentially a Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots clone, Rat Battler II isn’t about the moment-to-moment gameplay. In fact, the machine didn’t even seem to work correctly when my girlfriend and I tried to play. BUT - what Rat Battler II is REALLY about, much like everything inside Meow Wolf, is that there’s nothing else quite like it.

The Rat Battler II arcade cabinet acts as a centerpiece for a slice of the museum devoted to being a gross little punk who wants to get loaded and have a good time. The cabinet is a 360-degree plexiglass enclosure spanning all the way to the ceiling, with your physical rat characters at the bottom duking it out. As the cabinet expands towards the ceiling, a complex diorama plays out inside, with miniature grimy bikers hanging off the fire escapes of nearby buildings and cops coming in to break up the fight. Pull yourself away from the cabinet and you’ll find Graffiti covering the walls while screeching guitar bombards your eardrums. Busted Game Boys and spent whippit containers litter the floor. Rat Battler II is a wholly unique gaming experience that would be physically impossible to have anywhere else. It’s a piece of art that is just as fun to play as it is to be inside.

7. Fortnite

Fortnite. God. As I sit here typing this list, there’s something poetically tragic about how a one-of-a-kind arcade experience gets outranked by one of the most universally popular video games of all time. I’m mad at myself for even doing it this way. Furious, really. But I can’t leave 2021 behind without shouting out Fortnite.

I can’t even figure out what it is I like about the dang thing! No single aspect or moment comes to mind--there are so many little things that have made Fortnite my number one battle royale of choice. Like how the skill-based matchmaking is at a point where I can play on a gamepad with zero fort-building skills yet I can still earn victory royales with my buds. Or how the game is constantly changing. Every time I log in, the map is new, there’s a completely unique traversal method, and something buck-wild is happening with Naruto or Spider-Man or whatever.

I don’t know, y’all. I don’t know. It’s got me. And my V-Bucks. Please bring it back to iPhone. Actually, don’t. I don’t know! I’m scared!!

6. Pinball FX3

I took a flight earlier this year and realized right before takeoff that I had nothing to play for the three or so hours I’d be in the sky. I flipped through Apple Arcade and decided to pick up Zen’s Pinball Party, and in the blink of an eye, I was on the ground at my destination. I had such a good time that when I got back home, I scooped up Pinball FX3 on Steam, and ever since then, it has become my “Let’s kill 5 minutes before my next meeting” game of 2021.

I particularly like how on the Theater of Magic table, if you make the guy fall down the stairs, he says “OH NO!” really loud. It’s very funny. I’m happy that in 2021, Zen’s pinball games were able to teach me about a slice of gaming I found myself on the outskirts of for so long.

5. Adios

Adios is a game about taking quiet moments of insignificance and giving them worth. It’s a game about filling empty spaces with value and emotion. There’s nothing like this game.

Adios is a narrative adventure about a Kansas pig farmer who receives a visit from his business partner. It’s not a very long game, I finished it in one sitting. It isn’t a game about getting to the end, in fact, quite the opposite. Moments after Adios gets going, there is a part of your subconscious that knows exactly how the game will end. For both the protagonist and you as a player, Adios is an experience about savoring the now and suppressing your natural urge to look forward.

This is all achieved by how masterfully Adios delivers its dialog. Video games rarely have the pregnant pause--the moment where, after a matter of importance is stated, the ensuing silence carries just as much weight as the statement itself. Adios’ dialog takes every opportunity to hit you with a long overdrawn pause, allowing the characters to reflect on their life choices, and for you to wonder if maybe, just maybe, you can affect what is playing out before you. I’ve never seen a game handle the complexities and subtleties of interpersonal relationships as well as Adios. You should play this game.

4. Inscryption

This game was number 10 on my list, and then I got to a Certain Part where A Thing happened. Now it’s much higher up on my list. That is all I can say about Inscryption. Thank you.

3. The Austin Cidercade

The Austin Cidercade (Conveniently located off Barton Springs drive, y’know--where the old Joe’s Crab Shack used to be) has it all: delicious pizza, a guy who is there every day playing DDR barefoot, and a Neo Geo with Aero Fighters II.

I’ve only been able to visit the Cidercade a handful of times since it opened--turns out the waxing and waning of a global pandemic has a direct effect on whether or not I want to touch grimy joysticks. BUT when numbers are low here in Austin, it’s always the first place I want to visit with friends.

The Austin Cidercade is massive--discovering a new game on every visit keeps me coming back. My first trip introduced me to the nightmare maze game known as Naughty Boy, a Jaleco game from the 80s that features some of the most hilarious marquee art I’ve ever seen. On the last few visits, my crew has gravitated towards the indie cabinet Deathball, a deceptively complex 1-on-1 sports game that answers the question “what if soccer was played by wizards who constantly did dope-ass frontflips?”

The best part about the Cidercade is that it’s an honest-to-god arcade. It doesn’t feel like some business guy’s skewed vision of an arcade of the modern era, it doesn’t need to have gimmicks to keep things fresh, it’s just a grimy place with excellently curated games.

2. Hitman 3

The gameplay formula of the Hitman games has stayed exactly the same since the series’ “soft-reboot” in 2016. Agent 47 starts in a beautiful exotic location, he tries his best to stick to the plan, and he runs like the dickens when it eventually all comes crumbling down. But the thing that makes Hitman 3 so special is how subtly the games have evolved since their first release.

When you step back and look at it with an appreciative eye, Hitman’s arrival on the new generation of consoles carries a lot of weight. IO Interactive’s dedication to maintaining Hitman’s years and years of content as one semi-continuous product, through iterations of both game engines, generational hardware, and heck even publishers, deserves mountains of praise. When I downloaded Hitman 3 on my Xbox Series X, it came bundled with the contents of Hitman 1 & 2 - a half-decade of passionate humility.

I didn’t even play the new missions right away. For my first session of Hitman 3, I chose to go back to Hitman 1’s Paris mission. Thanks to the improvements of the engine, I found myself in awe of a place I had already spent dozens of hours in. The marble floors now gave off a reflective sheen that had me googling “Does Hitman 3 have raytracing?” I let the camera spin around Agent 47’s head as I took in everything at a smooth 60fps for the first time. I marveled at the HDR glow of the brass sconces as I walked up a staircase I wasn’t supposed to and punched a guy who yelled at me.

I’m the best assassin in the world. Hitman 3 is the best game about assassins in the world.

IO interactive is the best developer of assassin simulators in the world.

1. Halo Infinite (Multiplayer)

Halo was “the game” for all of the kids in my neighborhood growing up. In my adolescence, I surrounded myself with a group of peers who measured the value of a person, a human being, in how well they could drive a Warthog.

Every year for my birthday, instead of a traditional birthday party somewhere around town, I would instead host a Halo 2 LAN party at my house. There’d be a CRT in each corner of the living room and tidal wave of middle-schoolers yelling the most awful things at each other--not because we felt these obscenities to be true, but because we were filled with Mountain Dew and we had just learned them. One Flag CTF on Zanzibar. Zombies on Foundation. The grand finale, with a real trophy and everything, would always be BRs-only Free-for-All Slayer on Lockout. Strategies were whispered, rivalries were ignited, and champions were crowned. But playing Halo itself wasn’t the best part about these LAN parties, it was the way a video game could bring together all of my school friends during the summertime. That was when I realized the power of a gaming community. Halo 2 is the reason why I’m now a community manager, and these LAN parties were where I felt most at home, the most I could be myself.

Playing Halo Infinite is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt this way again.

Halo, as a series, is about shooting dudes until you can get close enough to punch ‘em, and then you punch ‘em. It’s a combat pattern so familiar that even all these years later, I can still pick up a round of classic Halo and perform decently. Since taking over the series, I hadn’t felt like 343 Industries could really nail that feeling the same way Bungie did. Halo Infinite proves me so wrong. In the first round of Halo Infinite multiplayer I played, old techniques and muscle memory that had been buried deep in my subconscious bubbled up and took over. “Blow me Away” by Breaking Benjamin softly loops in my head every time I get a double kill. Halo is back, baby. But as I attempt to write out any specific new things I love about Halo Infinite, it all boils down to me with a big dumb smile on my face, throwing my hands toward the screen and shouting “It’s Halo!” in a very George Costanza-like fashion.

Halo Infinite earning my game of the year isn’t about the moment to moment of playing a round of Slayer, but instead an appreciation about how all these years later, Halo can still make me happy and bring me close to people. I know meta-ruminations on Halo Infinite aren’t anything new to Giant Bomb Dot Com, but yeah. The thing that makes Halo Infinite special is what its release has done to my Xbox friends list. I’ve seen gamertags that have been offline for years suddenly spring back to life. I’m getting party invites from grade school friends that I thought had “outgrown” video games in adulthood. Seeing these names log back in, one by one, is like seeing friends step through the door at one of my middle school LAN parties all over again. We might not be under the same roof, we might not even be playing any rounds together, but there’s something comforting about how we’re all playing Halo again.

The day Halo Infinite’s multiplayer shadow-dropped, I got a message from my old Halo 3 ranked duos partner. I hadn’t talked to her in probably 10 years. She asked if I wanted to catch a round, and we played until 2AM. We’ve played just about every night since. She has a husband and a son now. We’re ranked Diamond 2 and climbing. I told her about the problems I have with my Homeowners Association. She showed me how the weapon respawn UI works. We’ve made plans to have dinner next time she’s in town.

We met in 2006, where we sat next to each other in 6th grade Spanish class. We became friends because we both liked Halo.

Kenny Omega is one of the co-founders of All Elite Wrestling, and is also known for his video games-inspired persona. He's @KennyOmegaManX on Twitter.

Austin Creed (AKA Xavier Woods, AKA King Woods) is a member of the Tag Team crew known as The New Day, and the host of gaming YouTube channel UpUpDownDown and G4TV. He's @austincreedwins on Twitter.

Adam Cole is Adam Cole BAY BAY! He tweets from @AdamColePro.

Confined to a remote cabin in a remote location, free from all distractions while working - remotely - on this year’s TOP 10 video game list, only one burning question remains... Where’d I leave the remote???

Creed: Okay, I can see leaving the intro to you was a mistake already. Is this all supposed to be clever?

Kenny: Oh will you stop?! I was just setting the mood! Give it a chance to, uh, you know, build the anticipation.

Creed: For what? Your terrible list?

Kenny: Well, for your information, Creed, I was getting to the part where I spend my days away from the ring monitoring the neighbours from my rear window. There’s a part where I suspect maybe there’s a murder and everything! And then....

Creed: Yeah, that’s Alfred Hitchcock and that’s pretty much the entire premise to his movie called, “Rear Window”. Also parodied on the Simpsons. I know you know this.

Kenny: Whoa whoa whoa! Any similarities to people, places or things living and/or dead (or undead), are simply coincidental. This is like when people criticized my idea for a group of friends that zap ghosts for a living...you saw the match, I know you did!

Creed: ..... Oh yeah, we ALL saw that “match” of yours, Kenny.

Kenny: I know, I know. Masterpiece, right?

Creed: I thought that it did a good job of respecting the source material, at least...

Kenny: I felt we did a better job of it than when you and your goofball friends did Final Fantasy or Gears of War!

Creed: WE’RE the goofballs??? And I don’t want to remind you that those were OFFICIAL collaborations whereas you - incredibly irresponsibly might I add - took it upon yourself to cosplay whatever the heck you wanted that day.

Kenny: Cosplay wrestlers... I think I like that. Thanks, Creed!

Creed: That’s not a compliment!

Kenny: Well I wanna take it as one!

Creed: Well it isn’t!

Kenny: Listen to this guy making the big decisions. Like, Who died and made you King?!

Creed: It’s funny you mention that...

Kenny: Oh no, let’s not go there. Can I just pretend to congratulate you and move on?

Creed: Would you pretend to congratulate Bret Hart or Billy Gunn?

Kenny: Of course, I wouldn’t!... Okay, I see what you did... YES, Creed, it’s quite an accomplishment. Truth be told, in some kind of way I’m happy that a fellow gamer and TV show host for G4 was able to pull it off. You’re quite a busy and successful man.

Creed: Why, thank you, Kenneth.

Kenny: ......Okay, now do me.

Creed: Come again?

Kenny: My turn, right?! Talk about all the stuff I did now!

Creed: Congrats on all the belts and whatever cool stuff people said about you.

Kenny: That’s it?!

Creed: Can we just get to the list already???

Kenny: Yeah, this intro has gone on long enough. I tend to milk the drama a bit too much when I work with people from other companies. My bad.

Creed: I get it, trust me. We gotta give the people what they want though.

Kenny: Couldn’t agree more! Soooo without any further adieu, let’s start the yearly top 10!

I’m gonna start by saying I unintentionally slacked a bit this year. I couldn’t play games in the volume that I wanted to so some strong contenders may not appear on my list. I’ll do better next year, but by no means, will my list be inferior to Creed’s.

Onward!

Kenny's 10. Persona 5 Strikers

I’m usually not a huge fan of Musou/Dynasty Warriors style games, but with the additional investigation and Persona-esque RPG elements and unique environments, I really enjoyed my time catching up with the familiar faces of P5. Also, the art and music are stylish as ever.

Creed's 10. Halo Infinite

First halo campaign I’ve ever played. I was distracted by unreal tournament 2 when the first one was out and I never jumped in after that. Really fun multiplayer obviously and the campaign has been fun.

Kenny: Uh oh, my BS detector is going off! I don’t think you actually played Halo, Creed! I mean, that’s ALL you have to say??? Can you believe this guy, Cole?!

Creed: Whoa, you have Cole there!? Now we’re talking! We were the best of friends back in the day when we used to -

Kenny: Yeah, when you used to. He’s with us now. Capiche? You guys were just a placeholder for when he could come back to hang with the Elite!

Creed: That’s not true! Tell him, that’s not true, Cole!

Cole: Hey guys... umm... Hate to be stuck in the middle but umm. No, that’s not true Kenny. I actually enjoyed my time with those folks and I can easily say it was one of the greatest memories of -

Kenny: Now, now, no need to worry about petty feelings here, Cole. After all, this is the guy who ranked Halo Infinite as #10!

Cole: Is... is that true? Surely it’s higher up on your list, right, Kenny...?

Kenny: Well, I was umm... Saving it for the co-op story mode for next year!

Creed: See?! He’s the REAL fraud!

Kenny: Don’t question me! I’m Cole’s real friend! I’d kill for this guy!

Creed: You literally killed Cole in story! Also knowing your issues with jealousy I wouldn’t be surprised if you did it again!

Cole: Wait, Kenny did WHAT?!

Creed: Yeah, back when the writing on BTE was stronger there was a whole thing and.... we can talk about it later! What’s important is that you CAN’T trust this guy!

Cole: Then I guess I’ll just have to be a non-biased mediator. I don’t have a dog in the fight.

Creed: You don’t have a dog... but you could have... a list!

Kenny: The first good idea you’ve had all day! Yeah, give us your list after too, Cole.

Cole: Fair enough. Until then, let’s stay on track!

Austin and Kenny: Deal!

Kenny's 9. Ys IX: Monstrum Nox

It’s no secret that I’m a huge Ys fan. Though their newer entries may never reach #1 status on my top 10 lists, I always enjoy my time with Adol in whatever new adventure he embarks upon. With fun, well paced gameplay set to an always incredible soundtrack from the Falcom Sound Team JDK, progress never seemed redundant or boring. The colour palette for environments could have been less dull and grey, but Ys games generally aren’t ones you play for blow away visuals. A strong number 9. A mighty one, you could say!

Creed's 9. Outriders

I had a good bit of fun playing this solo but I think my real enjoyment of it came from linking up with my friends and grinding. Was a much more relaxed experience getting to run through campaigns and gaming levels and drops with friends. In a loose sense, it kind of felt like baby’s first mmo. A nice entry point into those types of games.

Kenny's 8. 12 Minutes

This game was one of those pleasant video game surprises that happen at least a few times a year for me. I love point and click, I love mysteries, and I like Oldboy-ish twists to stories. Oh, I also enjoy a great voice acting cast and we definitely get that with James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. I always wondered how they pulled it off. How did they get these folks anyway?! Great game, short enough, and fun to play/solve with friends in the room.

Creed's 8. Returnal

I still wanna give more time to this game. I ended up falling in love with Hades late after it came out and this is the same type of game, but it feels like it has a higher learning curve than Hades. It was really enjoyable playing in the dark with the speakers blasting.

Kenny: Translation: I got wrecked. Pwned. I raged, I cried, I quit. Yeah, I run into your types often, Creed. Folks like you always tuck yer tail between your legs and run from rogues. Is this your King?!

Cole: Come on, Kenny. Rogues in nature are designed to be very difficult. After all, you lose almost all progress upon death. You can’t blame someone like Creed for cutting his losses and quitting when he couldn’t beat it. Nor can I blame you for your enjoyment of these sadistic types of games.

Kenny: Hey, whose side are you on here?!

Creed: Yeah man, what gives?!

Kenny: I don’t blame Creed for moving on. What’s important is that he tried his best and had fun.

Creed: And I don’t blame Kenny for being so hard headed that he’d refuse to give up due to his extremely egocentric nature

Kenny: Umm.. Yeah, what he said! I love nature and whatever you said before that!

Cole: Oh yikes....

Kenny's 7. Metroid Dread

I’m not one of the folks that say Super Metroid was the greatest 16 bit game of all time. Heck, it doesn’t even make my top 10. I ain’t even played Metroid Prime, brah. That being said, I still like Metroid in general and this game was fricken great. Same old familiar action and navigation but with a terrifying aspect introduced with the E.M.M.I that sets Dread apart from all other Metroid titles. A super fun throwback with a modern twist and further proof that Nintendo never messed up their 1st party titles. I don’t think? Yeah, probably not.

Creed's 7. Mario Golf: Super Rush

When Mario Golf dropped, I was playing a ton of games with my buddies, DA PARTY, and getting to run those speed golf courses way beyond fun. The solo part of the fame did a great job of keeping engaged and the tutorials were great.

Cole: Oh man the times we had playing this game! All 4 members of Da Party in a room, screaming and yelling and laughing as we played Battle Golf was maybe my favorite couch co-op experience this year!

Kenny's 6. FFVII Remake Intergrade

Expectation vs Reality kicked me in my arse with this one. In a good way, though! I thought that this would, at most, be a 2 hour romp. That we’d just get Yuffie in a smaller environment culminating in a single boss fight with that centipede robot thing. What we got was so much more. In a big way. Midgar and the characters really feel alive here much like the base FFVII Remake and I played almost every minute of the game with a smile on my face. Combat with Yuffie and Sonon? Also super fun. Your characters feel strong but the difficulty of enemies/bosses are well balanced. As a bonus too, we even got at least one new track that wouldn’t be out of place in any “best of” FF orchestral performance.

Creed's 6. Aerial Knight’s Never Yield

Constant running running and more running. I had the chance to speak to the developer and this was a passion project that he put his life into. You can feel his personality when you play the game and I always love being able to see how much a developer cares about their game. Great music and a really colorful and inviting look. Fun, endearing, frustrating, and most importantly fair. It lets you know that you can definitely conquer it if you keep at it.

Cole: Hey Creed, you KNOW how much I love a good game soundtrack…I’m making a face and shoulder dancing as we speak!

Kenny: Shoulder dance?! I don’t even know what that is!

Creed: A “Shoulder Dance”…. This guy….yeesh…

Kenny's 5. Monster Hunter Rise

I thought I was bit by the MH bug once with MH World and that I was over it. Guess not. Over 100 hours logged and I’m still looking forward to new monsters and the massive update coming in 2022. Quite a visually stunning game on the Switch too. Would love to try it on PC now that the option exists. In case you run into me online, I’m the Dual Blade master with the Golden Retriever Palimute.

Creed's 5. Back 4 Blood

I waited a long time for this to drop. Left 4 dead was the jam back in the day and Back 4 Blood was no different. Blowing up hoards of zombies will always be satisfying especially with a few other people. The card system was really fun. The fact that you get the chance to have a different type of play through each time you play it really makes the game replayable. The last stage stole what feels like years off my life. So many tentacles! Felt like my search history...

Kenny: You’re preaching to the choir! Been there, done that! Amirite, guys?!

Cole: I’m just a mediator, dude, leave me out of this!

Kenny: Ah come on man, come clean with your fan base!

Cole: .... I like Disney characters drawn in compromising positions. There, I did it!

Creed: See? Didn’t that feel good?

Cole: You know something? I had my doubts but I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. In fact, I might wanna talk a little more about.. oh wait a sec... That’s Britt calling. I um... I gotta step out for a sec...

Kenny's 4. Resident Evil Village

I went into 2021 with this game penciled in as my #1. I had high hopes and Capcom delivered. No, in the end it never took the #1 spot but we still got a beautiful word to explore with a compelling story and cast of characters that I cared about. There wasn’t anything incredibly horrifying like there was in RE7 (aside from maybe the doll house section), but the atmosphere was still there and I enjoyed my time in this world. It still maintains a fun replay too even though there weren’t any surprises left after my first journey through the story. One thing I will say is that I’d have loved for more interaction with Lady Dimitrescu, and I hope that in future installments there are always huge departures in the standard gameplay to feature MacGuyver’d up tanks and overpowered FPS sections like once Chris becomes playable.

Creed's 4. Deathloop

Fun concept and really cool how you get to get to mess with the timeline to get the visionaries (bosses) to do what you want them to do. The only thing I didn’t love was how it ended. I went and did all of the endings and none of them really satisfied me. But I freaking absolutely LOVED the rest of the game, apparently enough to have it at number 4

Kenny's 3. Lost Judgment

I’m still somewhat surprised this game is here. I was looking forward to it, I was excited for it, but I didn’t think it would get itself into a top 3 situation. Main story was great with stellar performances by the Japanese cast (w/ incredible localization, btw). I have heard the English VO’s are great too but I can’t comment. As always, the mini games are simple, addicting, and fun (as are the stories that go with them). I especially enjoyed solving the school cases. The boxing, robotics, and dance club were among my favourites. Soma was a very believable evil threat and Kuwana as an anti-hero was really well handled/written too. Highly recommended, but only if you have time to experience both the main quest and side missions. And yes, you can pet the dog.

Creed's 3. Far Cry 6

I usually enjoy the Far Cry games but I really fell in love with them heavy when 5 came out. 6 has a story that I enjoy and having that revolution vibe to it makes me feel like I’m really doing something substantial for these npcs! One favorite aspects of the game is probably the multiple amigos. You get a tiny puppy named Chorizo with no back legs. He’s got a tiny little wheelchair with a bunch of tools in it and he’s maybe the cutest digital animal I’ve ever seen. Essentially at this point being an open world game where you’re taking back the area piece by piece is something all of us understand so the extra things are what sets it apart for me. The setting of being in a Spanish speaking country, the lord behind the characters and the way they slow burn explain everything, and last but not least.... the cockfighting. I know this is not something that is ok in real life but having a fighting game set up where you select your chicken and then do battle was something completely unexpected that I ended up having a blast with. Overall I’d give this game a try, you already know if you like these types of games or not and if you do then I’d recommend playing it :)

Kenny: Yeah, I totally loved cock fighting too. No way you’d beat me though, Creed! My cock is for sure superior to yours!

Creed: There ain’t no way! I raised and trained my cock from infancy to be the strongest around!

Kenny: Mine may not be much to look at, but I assure you my cock is unmatched in resilience!

Creed: Pfft. I’ve seen your cock in action and I wasn’t too impressed.

Kenny: We’ll see how unimpressed you are when I’m all up in your face gettin' my licks in. I’m not one to shy away from a little cock-on-cock violence!

Cole: Did I uh... come back at the wrong time?

Kenny: Actually I’d say this is the PERFECT time! Let’s settle this, Creed! You tell us Cole. With your extensive knowledge on the both of us, whose cock would win? Creed’s or mine?!

Cole: Oh, we’re talking about Far Cry 6?! Oh, Creed would wipe the floor with you easily!

Kenny: Wait, We were talking about Far Cry 6...?

Kenny's 2. It Takes Two

It’s hard to summarize this game in a small blurb effectively if I were trying to sell it to someone. It’s a work of art. A true masterpiece. I could compare my feeling towards this game a bit to my experience with Celeste. The gameplay is never too complicated but the message is very profound. Speaking of gameplay, it’s ever changing and never sticks to one style. It’s truly an incredible feat to have effectively implemented so many ways to play with a heavy emphasis on cooperation. Not one new mechanic felt cumbersome or tacked on. Not one environment was ugly to look at. I often felt like I was experiencing the greatest theme park known to man. You’ll laugh, you may cry, but I can’t see this game leaving behind too many unsatisfied customers.

Creed's 2. Pokémon Unite

Pokémon Unite, I have done everything short of starting or joining my own team. To me the game is essentially a persons intro to MOBAs. You have an IP that everyone knows and loves and a pretty simple MOBA set up and because of that I’d imagine people that didn’t play them before are giving them a second look now. It’s one of those easy to understand but difficult to master types of games. Jumping on with a few friends and finally understanding how to jungle or kite effectively in what feels like a safe space made the game even more fun to me. I ended up getting it on my phone recently as well and I’ve been on it nonstop.

Kenny's 1. Returnal

So we’re finally here at #1. Much like with any other year I’ve done this, it was a toss up. It Takes Two makes a strong case and could easily stand in. What was the difference maker? Probably time and addiction factor. I played this game many nights for way too many hours and always left feeling like I’d accomplished something. The small bits they give to the story are extremely well timed. They give you just enough to chew on to keep you captivated and wanting more. Next you know, you’re gittin’ gud and making real progress. Finally once you reach the ending, there are a ton of questions still left on the table and it makes for great discussion amongst friends. Roguelites may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but tell me when you first see your earth’s house on an alien planet that you don’t want to find out why.

Creed's 1. Knockout City

LETS GOOOO! Since this game dropped it’s been awesome. There’s just something about dodgeball that is inherently fun. And getting to run around a full stage with teammates strategizing how to dominate sounds like an FPS. But the fact that it is dodgeball makes it even more fun. The game has a ton of customization features, tons of different balls with different abilities, and practice mode where you and your friends can knock each other off a building while seeing who has the best reflexes and doesn’t get knocked into oblivion after eating a charged up shot. And if you’re not good at the throwing aspect you can turn into a ball and have your friends toss you at enemies so you in ball form can help scout the area while your teammate looks for someone to knock out. All in all it’s just a really fun game that brought a ton of joy to my 2021 so I’m hoping to see even more from it in 2022.

Creed: That actually worked out!

Kenny: I always doubt that we will make it to the end.

Creed: Same so here’s the end.

Kenny: Hmm we really don't have a close for this year, unless…

Creed: I mean it would only make sense.

Cole: Why are you guys looking at me like that?

Creed: I mean we usually fight at the end of these things.

Kenny: (Now carrying a rolling pin as a sword and garbage can lid as a shield) Yea man, did you not realize that we can do whatever we want in this safe space?!

Creed: (Now in full wrestling and entrance gear) Yea, why do you think we do this once a year?

Cole: Oh once a year meet up! So it’s like that virtual reality episode of black mirror?

Creed: Yes, but also very much no. Besides - your other friends already did that in BTE for…. Umm…Fun? Oh Look, the portal is opening!

What seems to be a black portal appears out of thin air. Upon closer inspection, it’s simply a cheap black curtain hung on a plastic pipe frame.

Cole: Is that…?

Kenny: The portal? Incredible, right?

Cole: That’s not a portal! That’s an indy wrestling entrance-way that you made in your garage!

Kenny: No it’s not!

Cole: Yes it is! I went with you to Michael’s to buy the fabric!

Kenny: Quiet you!

Creed: (finishing his last loop of wrist tape) It’s about to get ugly here, Cole. You’d best take your leave, old friend.

Cole: Will do. But before I do… call me crazy, but as much as this thing you have is a rivalry - as much as it’s an anniversary of your video game top 10’s - I think it’s more than that. It’s an anniversary of… friendship.

Adam Cole looks back to the two warriors one last time and subtly nods as he disappears into the darkness of… a black sheet. An explosion of smoke erupts from the entra- the portal - and almost knocks Kenny and Creed to their bottoms. As the two wipe the dust from their eyes and pantaloons, the smoke begins to clear. There stands Adam Cole in full Halo Master Chief themed wrestling gear. Creed and Kenny’s eyes meet briefly and their scowls turn into warm smiles.

Creed: Maybe no fight this year?

Kenny: Only if it goes on record that YOU backed out!

Creed: …

Kenny: To friendship.

Creed: To friendship

The two bump fists and begin a walk together through the magic portal. “Living in America” can be faintly heard coming through the curtain as well as the roar of at least 50 fans.

(Slow Rolling credits over behind the scenes “making of” type of outro video)

After credits scene!

Cole: Well guys this has been a blast! Thanks for letting me be a mediator for this! Seriously, as your friend I look forward to your Top 10 list every year! And I’ll give a quick Top 5 myself!

Adam Cole’s Top 5

5. Little Nightmares II

4. Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart

3. Metroid Dread

2. Resident Evil Village

1. Halo Infinite

aurahack is an illustrator and character artist that works in both games and music. You might’ve seen some of the vinyls she’s made or some of the buffoonery done for videogames.com in the past. Currently, she is chairwoman of the Ascari Respect Zone, headquartered on her Twitter, which is also where she regularly posts art and great opinions. You can support her on Patreon or find her on Twitch where she streams art every Monday and Thursday @958 .beats.

I’m happy to be back with another list of cool games even if this year was still a weird one. My gaming habits changed a lot. About 1100 hours (to my count at least) of my game time this year exclusively in two games. I fell down the live-service game hole big time. I think I just... needed a routine? Consistency? After so much time spent indoors and playing the pandemic by ear and not really committing to any long-or-short-term plans, it felt nice to have something regular in my day. Week. Month. Some of it kinda took over my life for a while! Some of it... you ever have a game that just, changes your outlook on life? We’ll get to that.

I also made time for other cool stuff. Here’s a bunch of it!

Honorable Mentions

Shin Megami Tensei V

They released an actual new Shin Megami Tensei game in 2021 and... it’s exactly that, for better and worse. I’m kinda stunned! I mean, I’m kinda stunned it came out as a Shin Megami Tensei game and not as a Persona-like. It’s great! It’s all I could have asked for! For better, we got a new SMT soundtrack that’s suitably weird. Abstract, haunting, and full of borderline-bit crushed guitar riffs. It introduces a couple of changes to the battle system that while I don’t think always pans out, they’re interesting. They’re genuine attempts to mix the formula up that aren’t just “make it more frictionless”. There’s also some great demon dialogue this time around. The guys who call you a bitch for having your party full when you try and invite them make me laugh out loud every time. Maybe best of all, we got the Nahobino. I would gladly do nothing but stare at that man until the real apocalypse eventually eliminates us all.

But also, for worse, it’s... I don’t know. Unlike IV or Nocturne, V doesn’t have much in the way of that old-style SMT weird environment art. I mean it has some but its predecessors got so truly abstract with that stuff... I miss it. I miss that era, the SMT IIIs and DDSes and Devil Summoners. The era of internal-Atlus dev that knew its niche and its market and had a team that was generally allowed to explore the weird stuff they wanted to explore. Like cults. So many cults.

The biggest bummer is that SMT V is a lesser game for being on the Switch. It’s pretty heartbreaking. I don’t want to say “it’s unplayable’ but it’s hard to play! For real! The framerate gets to be downright awful in some spots and the field of view is incredibly restricted. It’s hard to see ahead of you in some areas and with the rest of the UI taking up what little screen real-estate there is on the Switch, you feel like you’re playing the game with horse blinders on a lot. I somehow manage to have a pretty high tolerance for stuff like motion sickness but the FOV in SMTV is so strict that it felt kinda disorienting at times. I really hope to revisit it when this inevitably makes it to another platform.

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster

The only thing more blessed than getting a new Shin **Megami **Tensei **game in 2021 is getting a remaster of the best Shin Megami Tensei game in 2021. Atlus deserves a lot of credit for the work done on Nocturne’s remaster. Revised localization, all-new (and great) voice acting, updated UI work without detracting from the original’s art direction, upscaled everything. Very rarely do these, especially with niche and beloved games, feel like they come out “better” than the original and that might be debatable for some in this particular instance (I think it is, personally!) but at the very least it’s a fantastic way of playing one of the best JRPGs ever made.

Playing SMT V and Nocturne this year really made me appreciate that style of game so much. What if things were fucked up and weird, and the story wasn’t the draw. What if games were just about you killing God and deciding who rules when God is dead. What happens in between? Who cares. Some people want power for themselves. Go ask em’ about it. Oh shit, they’re a cult, and they built a temple inside a skyscraper and it looks like an alien spaceship in there. The story, loosely defined as such, is an excuse to get you from moment to moment as you explore a weird and cool world full of cool demons.

This was always Shin Megami Tensei and it makes a lot of sense that, over time, newcomers to the genre drifted more to the cinematic story experience but we still get to have the former. And this year, we got to have more of that than we’ve had in a long time, so I’m very happy. I hope the Nocturne remaster did well enough to warrant them revisiting some other stuff of that era. The Digital Devil Saga games in particular, I’d love to see.

Valheim

I don’t have a ton to say about this other than, like for a lot of people, Valheim took over a couple of weeks of my life because for the first time in a while we had a new Minecraft. Not really in staying power (for me) but in that early “a bunch of friends are working together to make progress in exploring this uncharted world” way. We’d log in at night at disparate times as everyone was doing tasks and eventually go on journeys together either to mine or discover a part of the world we had discovered earlier. Some of us would log in the next day excitedly telling everyone else about a new thing they had JUST discovered when sailing around the map alone at 2AM the night before. To get to re-live that kinda stuff in a new context was great. So was staying up late a couple nights and rebuilding entire parts of our base to the surprise of my friends. It’s my favorite part of those games. But like most of this stuff it hinged a lot on people keeping up with it and the group I had moved on to other stuff so I ended up doing that too. Fun time while it lasted, though.

Chorus

I played a bunch of Chorviss and I will probably not see it to completion because it being an open-world game is exhausting and unnecessary but the couple hours I did put into it are good fun. It’s stuck with me since playing it though because it’s one of the strangest, I don’t know, examples of half-step execution I’ve ever seen. There is SO MUCH in that game that kicks ass from an idea standpoint. Space dogfighting game where you play as a cultist war criminal so disgusted by your actions that you move to take the entire cult down, constantly taunted by your homicidal ship AI to chase violence at every opportunity. It writes itself! Genius shit! Except, it apparently doesn’t write itself! So so much of the game’s writing and voice acting just flops on every idea it sets up. Every idea is the world’s easiest pitch setup and every attempt at execution is just motionlessly standing there with the bat in hand, striking out long after your time at bat is over. Chorves just repeatedly introduces so much cool shit and refuses to do anything interesting with it. It’s bizarre. The amount of polish the game has otherwise makes me wonder where the ball dropped.

At the very least, the space dogfighting is super fun. It takes a bit but once you get the drifting and teleporting abilities you really get to feel like the all-powerful ace pilot of the Space War Crimes cult you topped the ranks in. Every enemy becomes meaningless cannon fodder. It’s a great feeling. I just wish this wasn’t the only part of it that was so impeccably done. Abstract space religion/corrupting AI stuff is nothing but my jam but the game ends up feeling like it was conceptualized by someone who had an incredible vision and the rest of the team just could not pick up what they were putting down. I hope whatever’s next for that team makes better use of the talent they clearly have there.

Boomerang X

Haven’t beaten it yet because I started playing over the holiday break but holy shit. Nearly every ability you get feeding into the already frantic pace of movement **is inspired. If I was making a fast-paced shooter anytime in the future I’d be looking at Boomerang X as the movement blueprint, easily. Really fantastic art style too and the way the music slowly builds in every encounter per wave cleared makes for some real “holding your breath”-type moments.

The Actual 10 List

10. The Ascent

It was really fun to play a good twin-stick shooter in 2021 but if I’m being 100% here, the time I spent with The Ascent was super positive almost entirely because of its worldbuilding. I am extremely tired of the synthwave/neon purple-and-green, red-and-blue cyberpunk thing. I have been for a very long time! There is no meat to it and it being repeatedly being attributed to media like Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer incenses me. The depiction of Kowloon Walled City-esque overpopulation as an aesthetic instead of a reality. I don’t know, you’re probably reading this being like “I don’t get it, it looks cool” and I can’t take that away from you but it’s important to me. I draw that stuff for a living! The why behind these places and how they come to be and how people live in them is important. The aesthetics don’t just materialize out of thin air. It’s a manifestation of community and local life, almost always under the crushing weight of capitalism. The warmth of the noodle shop light isn’t “warm” because it looks cool, it’s warm because it’s communicates comfort and respite, like a fire. It’s why those signs look that in real life! There’s meaning to that! I overlook my actual problems with this stuff a lot because I get it, right. The feelings those things evoke, that’s what you’re there for. You’re scrolling through Twitter, Pixiv, Artstation, whatever. You’re not taking everything in for several minutes at a time. You glance at it for a sec. It does something for you or it doesn’t. If it has the cool neons and the wet pavement, all of that stuff—the stuff that is born from people forced to commune and exist together, people with stories and struggles—clicks for a second and everything that made it is kinda washed over for the end result. How it gets there is evokes a thing and the “thing” is what you’re there for. That’s fine! It’s ok. But I love the stories that make those places. I love exploring those spaces not because I like finding the nooks and crannies but because I like the sense of people living there, the sense of community. The dream of that “aesthetic” to me isn’t the visuals, it’s the people that make those places. I like understanding how that place came to be, why it came to be like that, and why people still live there. “Sonder” is the poetical term for it, I guess. If you had to ascribe a philosophical meaning to the concept of people watching. You people-watch long enough and you start thinking about them, the space around them. How it came to be, what it means to them, etc.

Anyway, The Ascent did this in a way that truly fucked with me because I immediately dismissed it as one of “those”. “Oh great, somebody had Blade Runner running on a loop while doing concept art. Sure needed another one of those," I very cynically told myself when it was first announced. But it’s more than that. Places feel lived-in not just in decor but in the absurd puzzle of their layout. People built these spaces, which means they make no sense because people aren’t designers or architects. Residents of its hub areas don’t kinda aimlessly mill they talk to people, shop, navigate alongside you. It contrasts so heavily to me against something like Cyberpunk 2077 just plopping people down in front of you and despawning them the moment you look away. No matter where you existed in that game, its residents weren’t there to be people they’re there to be density.

The way Ascent’s arcology is written and mapped out is my favorite way of executing the idea. So much of that game’s world exists to make it a place. There is so much for you to explore and not find anything gameplay relevant but it’s just... there. It’s there because it’s a place in that world. You’re rarely given a linear path to navigate and you’re never given that in its open-world. I spent a huge chunk of the game exploring parts that never had any missions or sidequests in them, they were just fun to navigate and take in. The art direction and technical prowess of the game overall made it really pleasant to look at but the world design and environment design is a real standout. It’s a successful execution of an extremely oversaturated idea and no matter where I went in that game I was constantly thinking about the lives living there, helped by some surprisingly (if not kinda rare) poignant writing. Two moments really stood out to me in that game:

1. It takes several hours of game time for you to see a huge sweeping overlook of the rest of the arcology. Cyberpunk games love to show you this almost immediately because they want to show you just how overcrowded their overcrowded city is but The Ascent understands all of that is meaningless if you don’t spend the time learning about the situation of everyone around you, why they live that way, and how they persist despite. It made a thing that has become very trite have weight again.
2. The titular Ascent corporation’s reach extends across multiple planets in space, which are traveled to using transport ships that put its flyers into cryosleep for the journey. In your arcology’s spaceport, there is a random NPC completely off the path you can talk to that tells you this, and talks to you about how in cryosleep, you start having comatose-like dreams that feel incredibly real. You’re in such a deep sleep that the dream extends for what feels like months, years even. They dreamed of a life they had, a family they raised. And then they woke up. “I couldn’t stop crying.” They just stand there at the arrival gate, still reeling from it.

It’s the kinda thing where... you know, it’s nothing new. The ideas it sometimes tries to communicate aren’t new, but alongside every other effort made to evoke a true sense of humanity and place to its world, it has impact and that stuck with me for a really long time after putting the game down.

9. Forza Horizon 5

I could just write “It’s Forza!” and that could be that but Forza Horizon 5 might be my favorite one in the series for feeling like it’s the first game to genuinely give a shit about the location it’s in. Mexico is a really, really inspired choice and the scenery is expectedly beautiful but what surprised me was how much all of the “story” missions felt like genuine love letters to the place around it. A lot of really cute stories about local desert racing and South American car culture. For the first time, Horizon felt like it was less “we invaded a part of the world to hold our EDM-slash-racing festival” and more... well, “we invaded a part of the world to hold our EDM-slash-racing festival to show you how beautiful this place is.” That’s not perfect but it’s also not what I was expecting! And after how quickly tired I got of 4, it was nice to have this touch to it.

Somehow Forza Horizon 5 was also finally the one to fix its long-standing busted AI and design issues. Maybe some of this was confirmation bias on my part with 3 and 4, I was seeing the problems I wanted to see because I was just not playing “right” or something, but I just could not deal with the AI in previous games. I just gave up on playing after a handful of hours because the Drivatars are just bad. It isn’t a good system, my friends and XBL randos all drive like assholes, and I want to participate in races where I feel like I’m playing against skilled drivers not faux-matchmade maniacs. Worse was when it frequently pitted those jerks against me in the same two cars: a stock Ford Focus RS and Audi TT Coupe. No matter the car! I’m in a McLaren F1 LM! Why is this Ford Focus overtaking me at the last corner!!

Anyway, they fixed that. The AI has largely been pleasant and the latter issue never arose. It even restricted some of the vehicle selection a little more and forced me to take advantage of the variety in my garage which I appreciate. The last couple games really let you enter anything with everything, which, you know. Sure. But also why bother driving different cars if I can just use an S1-class Impreza in everything. Having a variety of standbys and some picks I had to get creative with let me develop a closer relationship with some of the cars I had. I had my favorites for some scenarios and the comfort ones I’d use when I just wanted to explore the map or make a long drive to the next race.

FH5 really re-invigorated what I felt for the series, even if after a couple dozen of hours clearing the map I’m now back in the seat of “The next Forza Horizon game might have to rethink what kinda game it is” because I just don’t know if I can deal with live service racing games anymore. The way it’s implemented in Horizon is bad and I don’t know if I’m interested in whatever “good” would be for it. Having to “grind dailies” and “do weeklies” and “Engage with The Content” just to get an AE86 because it’s purposely not in the normal dealer shop sucks big time. Real fun game to go out on though.

8. Hot Wheels Unleashed

I don’t know what else to say about Hot Wheels: Unleashed other than for a couple hours, I got to feel like a kid again and that I got to play a killer arcade racer in 2021 that wasn’t a Forza game. It’s been a dreadful couple of years for arcade racers. I’ve said this plenty on Twitter and stuff but the high cost of game development, broader audiences required to recoup that cost, unspoken requirement for “licensed” cars to reach said broad audience, licensees not interested in damaging their license/cars, and a buncha other miserable things that have largely ridden on the shoulders of the late PS2-era Need for Speed games have simply resulted in that genre of game dying out. Cars can’t be fun anymore. Or, you know, they can’t be “fun” in the “crash them into shit and make them all handle like Ridge Racer” way. Yet, by some miracle, comes Hot Wheels: Unleashed, a game by the (extremely sim-like) MotoGP games developer Milestone.

I’m sure there’s a more, like, “business” reason for how this game came to be but I choose to believe that one day, a Milestone developer was messing around with Material in Unreal and made a shader that really, really looked like plastic. “Oh wow, I even got the edges to look like it came out of a mold!” He calls over to the guys sitting at the desks next to him. “Guys, check this out.” “Haha, pretty sick,” one of them says. “Is this for next year’s [MotoGP] game?” another one asks. “Nah, I was just fucking around,” the artist tells him. “Kinda looks like what they make toy cars with, you know?” The first guy says. They all kinda fall quiet. The artist bolts out of his chair and makes a beeline for the company CEO. “GET MATTEL ON THE HORN. PHONE. ZOOM CALL, IDK.” And then it was history. Probably. Like I said, the reality is probably more boring but this is what I choose to believe.

The creative direction for Hot Wheels: Unleashed is incredible. The dedication to making the experience remind you of playing with toy cars is such a work of love. It loves Hot Wheels! It loves little toy cars and the burst of imagination you’d get from building tracks with little strips of plastic around the house. The career mode map being a giant carpet city, the levels all being to-scale living rooms and skateparks, the healthy mix of classic Hot Wheels cars, new ones, and licensed real-world cars-but-still-look-like-toy-cars. I hate repeating “I felt like a kid again” but like, I did! It’s a joyful game. And better still it plays great. Its boost and drift mechanics are simple but give you just enough depth to feel like you get better at it over time. What a fun game.

7. Halo Infinite

I ALWAYS BELIEVED IN YOU 343 I KNEW YOU’D EVENTUALLY FIND YOUR WAY.

Halo Infinite is great. The multiplayer could be an entry of its own but with the recent addition of Team SWAT and Slayer to the playlists all I really have to say about it is that it’s easily become my favorite multiplayer Halo experience. It feels great, sounds incredible, and plays almost flawlessly. If the AI cores didn’t insist on all being “Quirky Robot ;) ;) ;) Wow That Was Epic ;) ;) ;)” it would truly be a perfect game.

What I really wasn’t expecting was the campaign being the blast that it was. My life PTSD-style flashed before my eyes when they first revealed it as an open-world game but explaining their direction as “making an open-world that feels like the first level of Halo: CE” made it make a ton more sense. Even if, in practise, it feels more like an open-world version of The Silent Cartographer. Mostly because the indoor levels all look the same. The story is okay but you know what, I’ll take okay. It’s still got a bunch of that good ol’ 343 “bring up a concept or character and just refuse to explain what it is, signaling mystery but actually delivering incomprehensibility” but everything else they tackle is well-made, well-told, and even has some of that AAA “we watch a lot of HBO and Marvel shows” vibe for good measure.

The grappling hook, though. Man, the grappling hook. It’s so good. It’s so good in Infinite that I just barely used vehicles to get around. It’s so fun to zip across the world, swinging from tree-to-cliff-to-tree again. That the physics work almost identically to Pathfinder’s in Apex Legends made it even more fun to immediately start trying wacky shit in the middle of combat. It often ended poorly! But that’s Halo. The sandbox they’ve made is at its best. The variety of weapons is fantastic and the options given to you with the larger environments allow for a really refreshing mix of old-and-new styles of play. The task of capturing what Halo “felt like” while bringing in new ideas seems Herculean but 343 did it so flawlessly that it’s almost infuriating. How did it take 3 games to get here? Were the lessons learned from 4 and 5 that critical? It’s not actually that infuriating, I’m not mad about those games like some people insist on being, but it’s a shame it took so long for us to get an unbelievably fun Halo game. So fun that it was a no-brainer to keep playing the game long after I’d beaten it, clearing out what I had left to do in its open world.

All I can hope for whatever’s next is that it just understands what it finally got right instead of trying to eat its own tail like they seem so inclined to do previously. I really, really feel like the open-world of Infinite works because of how lean it is. It’s very small but very dense, and the things you get from exploring have value because they’re so limited in scope. There’s no XP, there’s no skill “tree” (just flat upgrades), there’s no loot, nothing there to ever get in your way of Doin’ a Halo. You are never stopped from letting Master Chief get in a Warthog and toss that shit off a cliff and you are never discouraged from just getting on with the story if that’s what you’re there for. After countless years of open-world games BEGGING you to engage with all of its populous, meaningless side-content so that you’re tricked into thinking its colossal world has any value beyond its square kilometrage, it’s incredible to play one that says “fuck off” to all of that and gives you a grapple hook on top of it all to say “go nuts”. More of these should just let you say "go nuts" and know not just the value of that but also that you don't need 300 hours of that. A tight 20-30 does just fine!

6. Final Fantasy VII Remake

The thing I couldn’t stop thinking when I beat Final Fantasy VII Remake is that it’s insane nobody came in to stop them from making this game. If any executive or CEO or, like, “money” guy looked at this thing at any point in development, they’d have pumped the brakes on it immediately. I’m convinced they tricked them. The dev team has some internal build sitting somewhere that’s a vertical slice of a 1:1 remake in Unreal and they kept showing that to the people that sign their checks and they were just like “Alright seems cool, please release it by X date.”

Like it’s not insanity that Remake ever got made, it was inevitable, but it’s insanity it came out as the game it is. I can’t talk about why without spoiling it but it’s just... I’m not even that big a fan of FF7! I like Advent Children more than I like the original game! I’m that weirdo! But alongside Evangelion 3.0+1.0 and The Matrix Resurrections, Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game about itself, its legacy, and what it means to Make a New One of Itself in a way that floored me. I mean, it’s rare to get a game series last long enough to ever really get to a point where that can be a meaningful thing to explore but they didn’t just do it, they did it for Final Fantasy VII.

I also just think FF7R is a really great game on its own merits. The music is superb across the board and the game gives genuine depth and thought to its characters, with a lot of story time devoted to it in a way that never felt like fluff or stretching for time. I have no idea how much of this is new or lifted from internal documents spanning decades but the world of Midgar is impeccably realized. It convinces you there really was that much to the original game’s city but it’s all new and it’s beautifully realized.

Going into Remake I think I expected to finish it thinking I knew exactly what would be next and being mildly excited for it but I truly don’t. I have no idea what comes next and after seeing the swings Remake takes, good or bad, I’m handing all my trust to that team. I can’t wait to see where they take it from here.

5. The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City feels like a lost 360-era game and I mean that in the most joyous and endearing way possible. It’s an ambitious idea executed very well within the limitations of the developer’s manpower and budget but the way you experience those limitations are never frustrating. They’re just reminiscent of an era of videogames where ambitious narrative ideas were still at the mercy of very scripted animations, invisible walls, and static event triggers. Would it make the experience more immersive to have all of that stuff more "modernized" or cinematic-like? I don't know. Probably. I kinda don't want it to. It very rigidly feeling like a videogame made me feel a lot more prone to mess around in its world and that frequently opened up new stories or secrets. I wouldn't have it any other way.

To say anything more would be spoiling several moments of a story I think is really worth seeing so I’ll cut it short and say it’s a really wonderful thing. The “true” ending is a very sincere execution of an idea that isn’t especially new but was still really satisfying to see all the way through. After living in what seems like a never-ending nightmare, it was really pleasant to start and finish something that left me feeling kinda nice and positive by the end of it.

4. Resident Evil Village

I’m not sure I’ve played a game this year or maybe ever that’s gone as batshit off-the-rails as Resident Evil 8. The Titanfall 2s and Uncharted 2s of the world, they’re incredible rollercoaster rides. That’s what a lot of those games are now. It’s fun! But Resident Evil 8 is levels beyond that in a way that creatively breaks my brain. I have no idea how so many people said yes to so many insane ideas and I’m honestly thrilled for the games industry that it sets that example. That you can just have a whiteboard up in a room somewhere with even half the stuff in that game and everyone is like “Hell yeah, let’s get to work.” People came up with those ideas, greenlit those ideas, gave those ideas a budget. Inspiring.

My Resident Evil VII playthrough was cut short since I insisted on playing it in VR and very quickly chickened out of that idea. It meant I went into RE8 not knowing, like, how that whole story unfolded but unlike RE7, I did see RE8 to completion and the way that story is “wrapped up” is just as crazy as the rest of the game. It’s incredible dumb videogame stuff that only a Resident Evil game could pull.

It’s really something that Resident Evil 8 is what it is and it’s incredible that 25 years later, the series is still putting out new entries that kick ass. I was bouncing in my seat after beating it. I immediately wanted to start a new game just to get on the ride again and I rarely, if ever, feel that way about games.

3. Apex Legends

This is gonna be a real “commiserate with me”-type thing. I went on a real journey with Apex Legends this year. Last year, I wrote a lot about Valorant and my experience of going from playing no competitive games at all to one of the most demanding competitive shooters. It was a real ride! And almost immediately after posting that, I fell off the game in a very stiff way. It’s not worth going into (It’s personal, actually!) but what matters is that I accepted my time with the game was over. My desire to play something to at that level persisted, though, and maybe what I needed was something that I could play on my own. Knowing that Apex Legends is maybe the only modern shooter that you can seriously competitively play without needing a headset/voice chat because of its fantastic ping system, I picked it up again. I played a bunch of Apex when it originally came out, kept playing it for a while after that and fell off in a way where I’d kinda only check it out for a few matches every couple of months. When I came back at the tail end of last year, about mid-way through Season 7, it just swallowed me whole. I was in. Twitch streams on all day, hours and hours of practise every evening and night. Hot-dropping on Estates not to try and win matches but to simply build the muscle-memory I needed to loot quick, shoot quicker, and survive the bloodbath that is the first 3 minutes of every round of Apex Legends, ranked or unranked.

That went on for weeks until maybe two or three months later, I randomly told my sister—who had started playing Valorant last year as well—”Hey you should try Apex Legends. :)” Then I realised that in 2021, I had to explain to someone what a battle royale was. That was weird. We gave it a shot. I felt bad. By then, my matchmaking rating (Elo for brevity’s sake here-on in) had skyrocketed because I was playing every single day. Partying up meant I threw her and her fiancée into the thresher. It was rough. But she kept trying. A lot. She also started watching streamers. A lot. Before I knew it, she was rapidly catching up to my skill level, Wraith solo queuing and calling bad players “bots” and all that. It had gripped her like it gripped me. We played every night and started crushing unranked lobbies until it eventually wasn’t enough. The real grind had to start.

Getting better at Apex was a challenge and maybe the most rewarding one I’ve ever taken on in a game. The way you develop game sense and movement/gunplay skills happen at a pace that’s beyond frantic. Before you even land, your brain is going a mile-per-minute. Where is everyone else landing, where are the crafters, where relative to our drop will be easiest to rotate from. You land. You’re looting, trying to find your usual loadout but there’s always something to read. What is the first in-meta gun you find. What ammo does it use. What ammo are your teammates using. Where is the ring now, where is it going to be, where are you hearing shots from early on, who’s getting killed in the kill feed this early, is it a bunch of squads or is the same squad wiping everyone, where is a care package dropping, where is the nearest beacon, where is the nearest choke, where is the smartest path through and around it, how many squads left, how fast should we rotate in. All of this in the first minute or two of the match. It’s intoxicating. And eventually, every scenario becomes this. Combat becomes this. There are endless permutations of how a fight can happen and the only way you get out alive is practise, teamwork, and knowing the exact set of variables you need to know before your enemy does. Once you put the time in and it all becomes second nature, when it all just falls into place and you don’t even think, when the R-301 one-clip just happens, you move on to fight the greatest foe.

My nemesis. The Apex Legends ranked system.

I’m not... I’m not gonna turn this into a manifesto about how I think the ranked system is busted. I’m not. I’m not mad!!

OK, I stopped myself. I actually did write a bunch. You can read it here if you want to know what I think of the ranked system but I will not put it here. It’s just not worth it and I’m not a game designer; this stuff is ultimately beyond my understanding. I just know I’m not happy with it. The long-and-short of it is that Apex’s ranked system encourages minimization of point loss as an efficient means of progress, which encourages a lot toxic match behavior instead of rewarding intelligent and tactful play. It wore me out. It killed a lot of fun I was having with the game, where play sessions ended up more focused on making any kind of progress over simply just enjoying my time with it. Which is infuriating because even when trying to make progress I was still, like, enjoying the game. It’s Apex! It feels incredible. The movement and gunplay are unparalleled. Respawn are undisputed at it. But for any fun I had in a match it was viciously ripped away from me at the end of it and making most nights frustrating and unfulfilled.

Fortunately, this frustration only came very late into my time with Apex. For the vast majority of the year, I just had a ton of fun playing the game. Getting good at Apex is a surreal feeling because it becomes a different game. I didn’t realize how much so until my incessant praising of it got friends to come back after not playing for months (if not years). They’d slowly prowl the ground for loot, inspecting every item to see if it fit the current loadout they were looking to build. Which, if you’re reading this you guys I’m so sorry I’m not trying to shittalk you I PROMISE. But competitive Apex is another world. The way its gunplay, movement, character abilities, and level design all work off each other (when they do) makes for some of the most exciting gameplay. When it all falls into place it feels like a perfect game, truly.

Nothing made this more clear than also getting into watching competitive Apex. The pro circuit, the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) is, imo, the best shooter eSport out there right now. Which is a very biased statement, I’m sure. But I stand by it. The scoring format for ALGS uses a simple point scoring tally based on kills/placement and when teams get a certain threshold, they’re at match point. Win a match on match point, you win the whole thing. It creates scenarios where teams don’t just have to “win”, they have to think about everyone else’s position in the match and leaderboard and creates some of the most intense, heart-pounding fights I’ve seen in a game. Genuine shouting-at-your-desk shit. Esports live off of stories built over the course of a tournament and in ALGS it happens over the course of a single day, if not a single match. I could go on about it for days. I’m sad its entire circuit so far has been online-only because of, you know, circumstances. I can’t wait to see its first proper LAN tournament after its recent resurgence in the pro scene. It makes me wish ranked games played the way ALGS matches play because if they did I would have never stopped. I had the chance of playing a few community tournaments using that scoring system and it was indescribably fun. It was SO rewarding to think the way I had to think in those matches. It almost made me angry that the ranked experience is not even anywhere close to emulating it.

In a lot of ways, my time with Valorant felt I walked with Valorant so I could run with Apex. And if I was going to go back to one for realsies, it would only and forever be Apex. But I also felt like whatever arc I had with the former went into turbo-mode with the latter. Apex is a very soloable experience until it isn’t. As I got better at the game, it got harder to find people who could keep up with the experience I wanted. The people I did play with competitively eventually found players in their timezone/with their schedule because the grind eventually demands that, so I was back to solo queues. By then, the game had decided that my Elo was in the top 5% or thereabouts. If I played ranked, I had to solo queue against demons in a fucked, unrewarding, and punishing system in a squad with people I didn't know. If I played unranked, I had to solo against demons who were tired of the fucked and unrewarding system and wanted to stomp on ants. I’d try making alt accounts to play with my friends but it very quickly realised I wasn’t actually a level 4 account and promptly put me in the “correct” lobbies, and then I had to subject my friends to not just those demons but to a different pace of game altogether. It was very clear they weren't having fun. I felt really bad and I quickly stopped trying to do that.

There’s now basically no space for me to just kinda enjoy the game, which is frustrating. I still watch it plenty on Twitch. I hope to come back to the game itself. I don’t know what force will make that happen. I miss it a lot. I miss the grind but more than anything, I miss the way it plays. But it’s okay. For 2021, I had my time with it, and the highs of it were unlike anything else.

2. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Where Hot Wheels: Unleashed let me relive the joy of playing with toy cars, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart let me relive the joy of playing a really good character platformer. Which apparently this year was the year for that! I’m told. I wouldn’t know. Ratchet is the only one I played. It’s really good. It’s probably my favorite Ratchet & Clank game. Rivet and Kit are really charming, the story is fun interdimensional wackiness, and the weapons are as goofy as ever.

I realised maybe half-way through why I felt so enamored with it and it’s that the PS5’s tech allowed them to basically eliminate load times—something it emphasizes in really flashy ways—but that there was also a very conscious decision to counteract that sometimes. There’s a lot of transitionals and moments of respite in both cutscenes in gameplay that feel more akin to movie-like editing than anything else that’s earnestly tried to do this in the past. I devoured the game over the course of 3 days because I couldn’t stop playing. It was so fun! The way it’s paced just let me take it all in like, you know, a good movie or something does. Which I hate saying because great games specifically don't do this but you know what I mean. Kit is also a really wonderful character. Both Kit and Rivet are great but Kit’s arc is well done and I’m glad they found a way to write that kind of story in a way that didn’t come across as trite.

There’s not a ton I can say more about Ratchet & Clank: RA. It’s just really good! In way that I was hoping for but also kind of exceeded my expectations in every way. It’s a ton of fun, doesn’t overstay its welcome, looks incredible, and like I said is just paced so well that it was the most frictionless playthrough of a game I’ve had in a very very long time. It does a bunch of neat new things, has a more involved story than previous fare, but most of all is just a great videogame-ass videogame. You jump around, shoot bad guys with weird ice guns, and you have a great time. I just felt excited for videogames when I beat it. When I beat it I immediately dove back in to New Game+ and get all my weapons powered up but I just... kept playing after that because the ride was too fun.

1. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA HOW

do i talk about this game

Look you’re gonna know if you’re in for reading this or not when I tell you that Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker isn’t just one of the best stories ever told in a videogame but that it’s also the best Final Fantasy game, it’s the best Final Fantasy story, it’s maybe the best JRPG story, and that it being an MMO is intrinsic to why that story is so good, so meaningful, and so impactful to both its world and to you as a human being with (hopefully) feelings. I wish I was better with words so I could do justice to how I feel about it. I feel fortunate to have experienced it. To understand why it’s so impactful feels impossible to convey but I’ll try.

In 2010, I was a year from starting college. I had a couple years of kinda... milling about. Depression. Working full-time at GameStop. More depression. Some very fraught relationship things. I started college in 2011 and in 2014, I started working in the games industry full-time. Since then, I moved to the city, I got laid off, took new jobs, got laid off again, moved into multiple apartments, took new jobs, shipped games, made new friends, traveled to conventions, quit jobs again, went freelance, became a character artist, came out, made a lot of new friends, made a lot of new girlfriends, no longer had a lot of new girlfriends, met the person who’d eventually become my wife, married that person so she’d become my wife, moved to Japan, moved back from Japan, moved to the US, made a comic, and spent two years locked inside due to a pandemic. It’s 2022, and we’re mostly caught up. I skipped some not great things, but we're mostly caught up.

In just ten years (11, sure, whatever.) I have been through a lot. My life has changed a lot, multiple times, in very very different ways. In one of those ways, I became an entirely new person. Don't humor me if you're just here to read but take a quick second and think about the big and not-so-big impactful moments of your live since 2013. 2010 if you really want to stretch it.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn didn’t come out until 2013, which is when I started playing, but even then that’s seven (eight) years. Most of the stuff I listed above still happened in those years. It’s an absurd amount of time. In that time, in all those years, you’ve gone through multiple stories and adventures. So many characters old and new, some who’d grow, some who’d stay the same, some who’d die. Multiple years, in-game, alongside these characters that became your regular adventurers. Your friends. Your party. The eyes with which you see the world through.

And alongside all of that, you made real friends. The people you meet in your free company, the bonds you forge in-and-outside of the game. The people you don’t even befriend, the people you just notice. The guy who’s always passed out on the ground in Limsa, being swept by a maid. The Weeabo Police of Famfrit. The weirdos in Diadem shoutchat. The adventurers you see for 30 minutes once in a leveling dungeon, have a really pleasant conversation with, and never see again. The party of Lalafell that perform Metallica concerts for whoever passes through the Gridania aether crystal. The people you have idle chat with during ocean fishing. The people you catch RPing. The time you spend housing and furnishing your own little apartment. The time you spend crafting, gathering, contributing to a world and economy that’s shared with everyone else in a space you feel safe and excited to explore. For some, all of these experiences, all of this time, it’s not much. It’s the past year, maybe two. Maybe three. For most it’s since A Realm Reborn and for some it’s even further back, since the dark times of 1.0. And for everyone, this experience shared together, came to an end. Closure, on a story over a decade in the making. Accomplishing this in any storytelling format is a feat on its own but to do it in this space, one that has seen multiple iterations and revisions with millions of people experiencing it in the way they choose... It's mind-bending to think about.

In the real world, it’s still not good out there. The people who’s sole job it is to help refuse to do so and the people who should have a shred of human empathy don’t, ensuring we are stuck in this hell for longer than any of us want to be and for longer than is likely sustainable. I played and finished Endwalker in this hell, as did everyone else. All of us, with all our own lives and our own problems and our own ups and downs experienced over a decade or more, closed a chapter of our lives together. The story, about the friends made and the bonds shared and the unquestioning hope and desire for a better tomorrow that comes from loving and caring about those friends and the lives they touch, landed for everyone in a time where the only thing holding our sanity together is the faintest empathy left after so much of it depleted. We share the desire to work together, to look forward, and know that however it happens, however we work towards a better tomorrow, it happens together, all of us.

I know that's a real hackneyed thing to say but how can I not genuinely feel that way after so much time invested in something, a life, my life, for it to come to whatever fucking nightmare we perpetually suffer now? How can any of us, emotionally frail and at a constant minimum of energy, not want to take an opportunity to process that with open arms. A likely third year of standstill, of plans and projects and ambitions all stuck in purgatory. Is it actually all that trite to go through this story and put all of yourself into it and let it emotionally Tumble Dry it until you want to do nothing but cry and plead to the world to be kinder?

None of this would carry the weight it does were it not for Final Fantasy XIV being an MMO. It’s the time spent. It’s living through everything up to this point. The dreadful political nonsense and painfully boring Lahabrea of A Realm Reborn, the devastating and heartbreaking tale of Ysayle and Nidhogg, the fight against occupation from an Empire in turmoil of Stormblood, and the rescue of a universe near collapse in Shadowbringers. All of it done at various periods of time in my life. At various points in your life. I see it end and I can trace back every step of the game’s story alongside my own. I cry for the characters I loved and lost like I cry for the real relationships and friendships that fell apart. The places I’ve been to, that I miss, that I’ve yet to see. The things I learned to do, the things I got really good at, the things I kinda forgot about. The people I’ve met along the way that felt like made my life worth living. The one person that my life revolves around, that means everything to me, getting to be by my side for the story and its conclusion. Closure on the story feels like closure on a third of my life. In a lot of ways it very literally is that and being faced with that is, well, devastating. How can it not be? Ten years.

The story FFXIV: Endwalker tells is a captivating one. It goes to some pretty wild places and the things it thematically touches on relies a lot on the groundwork established with Shadowbringers but it’s adeptly told nonetheless. To write everything I did like the story’s merit comes only from the circumstances around the game would be doing it a tremendous disservice because on its own it’s simply one of the best. In its franchise, easily, and in games in general.

But Endwalker is just more than that, for me. For a lot of people. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience that no amount of “fuck me up, Yoshi-P and Ishikawa” could have prepared me for. There are multiple parts of that game that shredded me emotionally. Repeated manifestations of that one Simpsons episode where Bart has a crush on an older girl and he imagines her ripping his heart out and kicking it into the trash.

All but the ending. You go through so much and see it come to a close and in its final moments... I don’t know. I didn’t cry! I just felt... hopeful? Optimism? Confidence in myself? I spent a lot of time after beating Endwalker thinking about the relationships I’ve built with people and how I could have sometimes done better. How one, five, ten years from now I’ll be looking back and probably be in the same situation I’m in now. What can I do to make those next years better for myself? For my loved ones, my friends, for everyone around me.

I’m rambling but I’m also being as earnest about the experience as I can. Endwalker will hit differently for everyone. Some people are still out there thinking ARR is still FFXIV at its peak. Some people will feel even stronger about Endwalker than I do. And some people will probably never see it through because honestly, for an MMO, the expansion has a lot of talking and cutscenes and surprisingly little “do MMO-ass quests”. That’s fine. The walks of life, all of them, is what the whole thing is about.

On all of these lists, we list the games that really hit with us during the year and the top one is always, you know. The one you think is “best” or “spoke to you the most” or any other factor that determines it as “your favorite”. This list is no different but I also know I will never have a number one like FFXIV: Endwalker again. This journey can only happen once. Everything I’ve experienced will never circle back around for me to get it right the second time or re-live it like I did the first. All I can do is move forward with the experiences I've had since I began it all, looking at the person I was then that helped form the person I am now, and live a better and fuller life as that person. And also get the rest of my classes up to 90.

Endwalker is really special. I don't know if I'll ever be able to succinctly put into words why in a real, like, academic sense but I hope at least came close to explaining why it is to me specifically and why it isn't just a "best of this year" but "will stay with me until the rest of my life" thing.

Smight: This year has brought me even further into the realm of indie games; I played them almost exclusively. There were some tremendous releases that offered a lot of innovation and beautiful artwork. I also ran into some fresh roguelikes aiming to absorb hundreds of hours of my time.

Emily: 2021 was a hell of a year! Thankfully, part of what made the year was an absolutely great track of new releases. Even weirder was the number of highly anticipated sequels that were like… a decade in the making? NEO: The World Ends With You, New Pokemon Snap, No More Heroes 3, Metroid Dread- it’s like some kind of stars aligned just right to see people get exactly what they’d been asking for. Maybe it was the universe’s way of apologizing.

But regardless of why they happened, I’m here to talk about my personal favorite releases of 2021! (Things that didn’t make the list that I recommend checking out, by the way: Monster Hunter Rise, New Pokemon Snap, Inscryption, Loop Hero, Resident Evil 8.) Unlike Smight, I played a lot of mainline stuff this year and it definitely shows in my picks! Hopefully at least one of them might be new to you, because I recommend them all highly.

Smight’s #5: Nuclear Blaze

A firefighting platformer from the creator of Dead Cells?! My interest sparked up immediately. This game features some gorgeous pixel art. The fire and lighting effects do their job of making it clear where the water needs to be. Very nice controls too. The firefighter movement feels great, and there are new abilities to discover along the way. And cats! In trouble!! I wasn't about to leave one behind.

This one takes place almost entirely in some sort of underground facility, which happens to be ill-equipped for heat. Finding out more about this place is part of the journey. Aside from fire, which hurts quite a bit, there's electricity, backdrafts and explosions to worry about.

Nuclear Blaze features a lot of options for visuals to give you various degrees of the retro look. I also feel like this would be a good game for speedrunners to tackle. My main one criticism, the game might be a bit short. However, it was heartwarming to open up the bonus content and see a mode designed for children, with a note from the developer about wanteding their child to be able to play. The objective is to take your now-immortal firefighter through various areas to rescue all the kittens.

Emily’s #5: NEO: The World Ends With You

I found the original TWEWY a bit late into the game’s life cycle, when it had gone from niche release on the DS to having some growing amount of cult following. But what I did eventually find was an incredible experience that made me really reconsider how I thought about myself and others. The style was fantastic, the controls challenged me, and the music I still listen to today. One of my largest criticisms, and some of the highest praise I can give, is that it left me wanting more. So, could NEO capture the spark that made the original shine so brightly?

The answer, for me, was a resounding yes.

As someone that absolutely loves a smartly designed combat system, I want to praise this first and foremost: They somehow translated the feel of the combat from TWEWY into not only a different graphical style but a different control scheme entirely. The original’s two-screen dual-control scheme was appropriately mind-bending for the time, but given the lack of dual screen with the move to a console it wasn’t possible to translate it directly (though the remasters have tried to varying degrees of success). But the use of a single-button input for the team, with each button having a different method of input (hold and move, tap, timed hits, hold and channel, etc.) means that you still have to try and keep your different methods of attack straight in the heat of battle. The Beatdrop Gauge fills the same role as the old Light Puck used to, ensuring that your team is at their best when they all work together.

The music remains a highlight, with the entire soundtrack keeping the tradition of endless hits alive. Taking both from a wealth of new and classic bangers, there were only a few longer days where I ever found myself getting used to a song and not grooving along. Picking any favorites is a rough ask… but if I had to try, I’d say that Breaking Free, Scramble, and the evergreen TRANSFORMATION are all ones I keep coming back to.

As for the story- and I mean this in the kindest way- I don’t think I’m the target audience anymore.

It’s a bit bittersweet, but I always felt that TWEWY is a series that’s aimed at helping people find something in themselves, whether it’s the confidence to take the lead or the bravery to express yourself freely to others. And while I don’t think that I’m as strongly in need of its message anymore, I think that it accomplishes exactly what it came here to do.

The characters are all wonderful, and the collection of a larger party over the course of the game means that there’s more opportunity for all of them to bounce off of one another in fun and interesting ways. The hooded boy you keep seeing around, the one everyone calls Neku in hushed and slightly reverent voices, is a personal favorite and one I was overjoyed to see return. But the newcomers manage to not only hold their own but shine brightly as worthy successors, with Rindo/Fret/Nagi/Shoka all truly being brought to life by the incredible work of their VAs.

If you liked the original, I can’t recommend this one enough, yo!

Smight’s #4: One Hand Clapping

It was the absolutely fantastic artwork and concepts that made me want to give this one a shot. A puzzle/platformer that uses your voice as the key to progress. It seems like a perfect game for a streamer to embarrass themselves. I sure did, as I meandered through the intro stage, awkwardly humming some doors down. Getting used to the idea, I started shouting generators to life and clocks into position.

I wasn't able to get away with just white noise for long; pitch and rhythm quickly became part of my quest. One Hand Clapping will have you singing duets in tune with animal friends to navigate through desert ruins, and drumming the darkness away on top of the mountains. My favorite sections recorded short samples from me to use later as effects, which produced some stellar sound design.

Using voice as a primary vehicle for solving problems is a new experience for me. The closest that I've personally encountered were the handful of Nintendo DS games that used the mic to detect any noise at all, and they didn't do much. One Hand Clapping is completely designed around it. After the intro, you won't get anywhere until you commit yourself to song. They also provide a healthy dose of accessibility options; You can adjust the range expected for your vocals, and enable on-screen displays to help guide your voice to the right tone.

Emily’s #4: Metroid Dread

That this game exists is wild beyond belief to me. After so long, I’d just kinda convinced myself that Fusion was going to be the furthest in the series timeline I’d see and the rest would be updated releases or well-crafted but self-contained stories. But almost 20 years later, I can finally pick up the sidescrolling Metroid game I didn’t know I needed all these years and it is FANTASTIC.

First and foremost, this game feels unbelievably smooth to control. Switching between all of Samus’ arsenal feels rough at first but more and more natural as time goes on, letting player skill grow right alongside the protagonist. The fluidity of the movement, the aiming, and the melee counters adds a degree of fast and tight play that I don’t know that I ever really felt from previous entries in the franchise.

Accordingly, the enemies in this game have been made significantly more potent. Bosses feel fast and threatening, enemies in the overworld feel like actual (slight) obstacles even into the endgame, and Samus feels exactly equipped to the situation as you make your way through the world.

But that isn’t to say that this game is as linear as previous installments had been accused of being. One of the biggest complaints against Fusion over the years has been how firmly the game holds you to a single route, and it seems like the developers of Dread really took that criticism to heart. Dread will absolutely guide you through what you would think is the ‘correct’ way on your first playthrough, an experience that feels tailored to guarantee you make your way through the game well equipped and constantly growing stronger. But a cursory glance under the hood of the engine and at a couple of the speedruns will reveal a much more open and flexible progression path than you might first see, and I think that’s a sign of level designers that have not only met but exceeded the expectations of their job.

If I had a single complaint to levy against the game and its levels, it’s that the EMMI don’t feel nearly as threatening as the SA-X once did. Billed as unstoppable predators, the threat falls a little thin considering how early you destroy the first and the reliability with which you’ll take them down throughout the game. That said, I still enjoy their sections as a small traversal puzzle to solve. But on either side of that puzzle is a truly engaging story.

The story too, for me, managed to exceed any expectations I had. Fusion was a hard act to follow, especially given the narrative density of the Prime games in the interim (and Other M, maligned though it is). But where previous games brought the world to life with dialogue and scannable environmental logs, it’s incredibly refreshing to see just how little Metroid Dread chooses to say with words directly. Samus’ story is told largely through body language, in how she handles the situations she’s put through, in exactly how unphased she remains after the numbers of wild adventures she’s had over the years. The care in her animations are an absolute highlight, even after finishing the game. And what dialogue is spoken, is all in service to a narrative that feels like it hasn’t missed a step in the time since the last installment.

Fantastic experience, relatively short but with fantastic replay value. Highly recommend if you’re a fan of the series.

Smight’s #3: Wildermyth

A procedurally-generated RPG campaign that ambitiously focuses on the details of your team, and allows for intense customization of the length and difficulty of the quest. Campaigns can be long enough that you'll find yourself retiring an adventurer to old age and picking up an inexperienced replacement. Design your heroes, develop their backstories, and watch as they interact with each other and their environments. They'll gain new familiars and abilities, earn scars, and probably lose a few limbs.

Wildermyth is a turn-based strategy and team-building campaign. Death and age are a big concern for your team. The degree of diversity is incredible; there are so many different ways to branch out each character's appearance, abilities, and attitude. I designed my team to be led by a fearless warrior who wasn't going to let anything through. Behind her, a wizard who specializes in turning rocks and trees into shrapnel, partnered with a ranger who didn't know how to miss. If this sort of game appeals to you, Wildermyth is as polished as they come. Tons of content to explore and many settings to challenge you as you become more familiar with it.

Emily’s #3: Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

This one’s rough to write about just because I genuinely do not think I can properly do justice to Disco Elysium in a couple paragraphs. That may be, in part, due to just how much there is to the game itself: Disco Elysium is one of the wordiest games I’ve ever played by not only a significant, but a widely significant margin. But this is a game that is built around, and works entirely in service to, a narrative that is meant for you to experience in a multitude of different ways. There are so many voiced options, different trains of thought, different responses to how your disaster supercop chooses to impose himself on the world around him.

So when I say that it’s absolutely mindboggling to me that it got voice acted IN FULL, I need you to understand what a massive undertaking it must have been. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is a miracle for existing, and an even greater one for all of the voice acting being done so well.

Part of what drew me in and kept me invested with Disco Elysium was the unique way your character is built. Your stats, in the absence of any active combat system, instead encompass a wide breadth of different facets of the main character’s personality. The Protagonist’s psyche is a wildly interesting collection of unique facets of his personality that all have their own wants, needs, and influence on how you can approach the world around you. The passive checks that are constantly running through conversations will occasionally pop in with a thought that feels appropriate, specifically because you’ve built your own version of the main character to think and act that way. It’s a way of characterization through character creation that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and don’t think I’ll see again any time soon.

Truth be told, I want to address every character in this review, mention every interaction, talk about every way the game impressed me. From the adventure with a couple young adults starting a club in an abandoned church, to the heartwarming interactions with a cryptozoologist at the local diner, to the conversations with the local union boss in a shipping container, to the constant comforting friendship of Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi (quite possibly one of my favorite characters of all time now), every person and interaction in this game left their mark on me. Even Cuno, whether I wanted him to or not.

But I feel like I can’t talk about it to someone without them having been there. Martinaise truly feels like a town to be experienced first, and discussed later. If you want an engaging story and world and you haven’t done so yet, Please Play Disco Elysium. The only thing I’ll say in advance is that when the opportunity comes to put some cryptozoological stank on yourself, I recommend taking it. Hobocop life isn’t complete without a bit of latent water strider stench, after all.

Smight’s #2: Monster Train - Last Divinity DLC

I missed the train on the deckbuilding roguelikes that really kicked off with Slay the Spire, so I hopped on the one to hell. Monster Train had absorbed so much of my time last year. I loved the visuals, music and general direction of the whole game. It's a three-lane tower defense inside the train, with vulnerable crystal that needs protected at all costs. Drop monsters, spells and heroes down inside the lanes to confront the hordes of demons and angels that are after your cargo. The UI was very helpful for me during my introduction to the genre. It helped me determine what was happening, and what numbers and effects my team was pulling.

After learning the ropes and sinking some 200~ hours into Monster Train, I finally started to run into some endgame repetition; the balance would prove to me time and time again that some things just wouldn't work, and others, like stealth, always would. So I moved on for a while, until the Last Divinity DLC released. When I came back, there was an entire new clan to play, many new heroes, and a new final boss. More importantly to me, a number of balance adjustments and new features that gave me deeper control over my team. The ability to sacrifice units to make a more powerful one was introduced, as well as the option to take on hazards for extra pay. Giving the player many viable options is what I look for in my roguelike games. So I really feel like this DLC has transformed a game that I love into a much more complete package. Needless to say, I'm much more open to the deckbuilding genre than I was before.

Emily’s #2: Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Echoes of the Eye is about fear, and I deeply respect it for that.

Let me back up. Outer Wilds is one of my favorite games to have played, that I truly regret never being able to play again in the same way. It is a game that, for better or worse, can be experienced for the first time exactly once. It accomplished everything it set out to do, and remains one of the few games to leave me crying with emotions I can’t even properly name. So when I heard that there was going to be DLC, I couldn’t quite figure out how they were going to manage it but I was overjoyed that they had taken the challenge.

I’m just as overjoyed to report that EotE absolutely kicks ass, and left me profoundly affected just as much as the original game.

By its nature, I can’t discuss much of the story proper. Part of the joy and wonder of Outer Wilds is in exploring the worlds of your solar system, piecing together the history and present of its collection of small worlds one 22 minute loop at a time. But I may be able to discuss the themes.

Outer Wilds, at its core, feels like a game that wants to talk about how we handle endings. Not of stories in a traditional format, but as a general concept. When it comes time to talk about how our protagonist approaches the catastrophic events of the time loop you find yourself in, it’s almost admirable that their first and foremost reaction seems to be curiosity. Led by the player, the Hearthian wants to know Why. For good or ill, they want to understand what is happening, and this is a sentiment shared by the Nomai before them. It’s a message of acceptance of the end that comes with this understanding, and that feels like a message I’ll carry with me for some time.

Echoes of the Eye is not about acceptance of an end. Echoes of the Eye, in setting and in story, is about an understandable and warranted fear of the end. This DLC is explicitly built to be scarier than its base game (an experience that already had its fair share of unnerving moments). But more importantly, it’s about how you process that fear and move onward. How you can put a light into the future, not for the absence of that fear, but in acceptance of it. And I think that’s beautiful.

Please play Outer Wilds. It’s a space exploration game with a 22 minute time loop mechanic, where you are given every tool at the start of the game and the only limiting factor to your exploration is how much you know and how much you understand. As a result, I can’t tell you much more. I can’t even tell you about the moments that brought me to tears. But I say that this game truly made me better value the time I have, and that I’ll always remember my time with it fondly. Scares and all.

Smight’s #1 PowerWashing Simulator

This isn't a joke, I love this game! I've powerwashed a deck or two in my day and never thought I'd be putting some silly idea like this at the top of my list, but it's so... good. Everything about it is so well done, and gets improved with each update. The maps are elaborate and beautiful, especially when they are free of dirt. The vehicle jobs feature intricate detailing with lots of individual parts afflicted with various gunk. The appropirate distance and pressure to use changes from piece to piece; rust won't come off to a light dusting.

PowerWashing Simulator is a game about cleaning the filthiest, grimiest town of all time. Houses are absolutely caked in dirt. Playgrounds and parks covered in grime. With the help of a truckload of water and various nozzles and soaps, there's a lot of washing to do. That's what the game looks like on the outset, and it is, but the feature list is incredible. You can hit tab to highlight dirt, adjust your nozzles on the fly with a quickmenu, rotate sideways on hotkeys, and turn on autospray. (Please turn on autospray, for the sake of your wrists!) The PowerWasher's tablet can be pulled up to figure out what parts are still gross, and set them to blink so you can identify them. Aiming at objects tells you how clean they are, what they're made of, and what needs removed. You can even set the reverb levels of your washer!

There is a bit of a developing story, amusingly done through incoming text messages while you clean. I'm actually rather invested in finding the mayor's missing cat. But what's really impressive about PowerWashing Simulator is that, despite the polish, it's still an unreleased, early access title. The developers have been providing huge updates to this game on a regular basis. The last patch included cooperative campaigns, and I have to say, it was the most fluid coop experience I've ever had. With almost no latency at all, I was able to hop on with my pals and start assisting on their projects. The overall experience, which I already enjoyed quite a bit, was dramatically enhanced by this feature alone. People who enjoy this sort of stress-free gaming session will find themselves checking for the next map release on a regular basis, along with the rest of us.

Honorable mention: The Binding of Isaac's new DLC is extremely good. Unfortunately, you won't be accessing it very easily without blasting through the rest of the game, which is extremely heavy, and pretty difficult! Because it's so heavily gated, I didn't feel it should make my list.

Emily's #1 Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

This is likely no surprise to anyone that knows me. I’ve been a massive fan of FFXIV for years, and so I won’t reiterate at length the things that the game, as a whole, continues to excel at. The gameplay is great, the spectacle largely unrivaled in the MMO space at this time, the community incredibly welcoming (but not right now, the free trial is closed, my world is queued, I am begging you to play something else so I can get in).

Instead, I want to talk about Endwalker specifically.

Endwalker, as a contained experience, is about hope and despair. It’s about loss and sadness as much as it’s about the joys both small and large that make life worthwhile. It’s a game that (much like Outer Wilds, actually) is about accepting that nothing lasts forever. That everything will end. That anything that we have is temporary, that there is no greater meaning than what we make for ourselves, and that ultimately there is no hope of ever truly living free of loss.

And Endwalker gets to be so many things to carry that message. Beautiful. Gut-wrenching. Overwhelming. Triumphant.

Now at a time when I find my own thoughts turning to the world at large, when I regularly feel defeated and powerless, Endwalker finds a way to remind me to always seek the lights in the darkness, small and fleeting as they are. It reminded me, in its own way, there will always be sorrow and suffering, but that doesn’t mean that we should never stop trying to do our part. That there doesn’t always have to be a meaning in what we do apart from the joy that it brings us, and the people around us. That we can be that light for someone else, or even for ourselves.

It encourages us to look at the life we live, despite the struggles we face, and asks us if it’s all worth it before leaving without waiting for an answer. And just as strongly, it encourages you to embrace everything that makes that answer Yes, and to always seek new adventures and new experiences. To acknowledge what drives us, and carry others even as we pursue those wants. To look at the questions that drive us, acknowledge that there will never be a single answer, and find our own. To tell us that an ending doesn’t mean our journey is over, just that it’s changed.

Because there will always be endings, both great and small. But it’s in the times leading to those ends, those fleeting moments, that we find the things that make it all worthwhile.

“In the same fleeting moment, thou must live, die, and know.”

Bakoon is a cool dog who makes crazy-cool photography art. Follow him on Twitter, you won't regret it.

Hello again, friends. It still feels like 2020, and that I made another list just months ago. Time has gotten weird as hell, but it has managed to unfold itself in such a way as so I could game like a heathen finally. Here are some I had fun with in no real significant order (Returnal is probably the best out of them this year, if I had to pick):

Psychonauts 2

For some reason I was sort of bummed about this finally coming out! I loved the original and just sort of assumed it wouldn’t be as neat but it was neater and meatier (no meat circus though). It was nice to go back into that world and see those little people again. Some really clever bits. Pop psychology based enemies and devices, and they made the platforming fun this time.

Tony Hawk 1+2 Turbo Edition

A superb Tony Honk, for the first time since marijuana has been legalized recreationally. Things have been rough all over lately for everybody, just a wave of life’s most bummed out shit. A burst of light rocketed out of that darkness, and silver fox old man Tony Hawk did a 50/50 grind down it.

Stellaris

This one is old but I didn’t know about it until this year so whatever! Sorry! It’s space Civilization. Lots to fiddle with. You end up with a galaxy sectioned out like a lunatic would add toppings to a pizza. Each topping is a trillion strong multi planet civilization of bird men or robots with feathers or Gundam space civil warriors. You can be a real sociopath to the citizens you are shepherding, a lot more than in any Civ and at a larger scale. It all sort of slopes into that eventually. Kind of bleak to think about, but a lot of fun.

Death’s Door

I liked this better than a lot of the 3D Zelda games. I liked how the little crow you controlled doot-dooted around like the claymation penguin Pengu. Great difficulty curve, very fun to move around in that world.

Quake

I have not played Quake (Quake 1, the trent rezone rocket jumper) since the Old Man Murray days (Chet’s new game looks really cool. ‘The Anacrusis’). They made it so it sort of feels alright playing it with a controller, which is wild to me. Playing it makes other games feel like when you step off the automated walkway at the airport.

SMT 3 Nocturne HD

They put out Nocturne again. I can let my rusty old PS2 rest now. You could almost feel the wave of frustration at people playing it for the first time hitting the Matador wall. Palpable. SMTV looks excellent but hell, I wanted to play this one (again). Now I want them to re-release Digital Devil Saga, immediately.

Returnal

Had moments that were genuinely and innovatively disturbing. Reminded me of one of my favorite Phillip K. Dick short stories, “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” and that Stephen King story ‘The Jaunt” just a bit. Tangent but damn that would be a good one to finally get adapted for a film or etc. By someone who knows what they are doing. Returnal is extremely fun to play on top of everything else being excellent. Housemarque makes great games, they always have.

Resident Evil 8

Another horror film inspired RE, this one going in on euro-sleaze Hammer films. I did not enjoy it quite as much as the gnarly, moldy previous game (I liked that nasty house as a location a lot) but this shit rocks, no question. First person torture porn. That Ethan’s hands get real messed up, I tell you what.

Loop Hero

A fascinating concept. It is the old Tower Defense type of game with roguelike/card battle/generative Dragon Quest map creation. I wish I had a Switch and this game back in the day when I was working a job fixing projectors. I played hundreds of hours of Binding of Isaac on that work computer. I would have loved to Loop as well.

Castlevania GBA Collection / NIS Classics vol. 1 (Phantom Brave + Soul Nomad)

It’s been a good year for these. One of the best “metroidvania” games and its two older brothers (one of them is cool but kind of boring, the other one is a fuckup who still lives at home and keeps slamming his weener in the bathroom door), and the glory of numbers going up. Disgaea type games, those numbers just keep going up. Always a treat. The second volume of the NIS classics apparently is including ZHP (Zettai Hero Project), the NIS take on “mysterious dungeon” type games, it is incredible. The time devourer.

Greg Kasavin is writer and creative director at Supergiant Games, the small independent studio behind Hades, Pyre, Transistor, and Bastion. Prior to Supergiant, Greg worked at 2K Games, Electronic Arts, and GameSpot. He’s @kasavin on Twitter.

It was a dizzying year. I was busy just trying to keep up, while counting my blessings. Hades, the latest game I worked on, launched back in the fall of 2020, though continued earning acclaim throughout this past year, including Giant Bomb’s own 2020 Game of the Year award. What an amazing and surreal honor! I’m incredibly grateful for the recognition, though I also couldn’t help but start thinking ahead at what might be next... and my process around that involves stepping away from games a bit to recharge my batteries and adjust my perspective, then coming to my senses and playing as much stuff as possible. Looking back, I sampled a ton of different games, played some in-depth, and finished out the year having experienced a few I expect will stick with me for a long time to come. I hope games have been a steady, reassuring presence for you, too.

As is my custom, let me first highlight some of the games I didn’t play enough before this writing, because they very well might have made my list otherwise; then get into my real Top 10 – including a number-one pick that I never would have expected even as early as the beginning of December.

My Top 10 Games I Didn’t Play Enough

I try not to let the concept of an ever-growing backlog of games weigh much on me, as we’ve reached a point where it’s temporally impossible to keep up with all the media that may be of interest to us, that we ‘should’ play/watch/read/listen to. Nevertheless there do tend to be some games I mean to get around to, or play more deeply, and these are the ones that most stood out by the end of 2021. It’s hard to limit this list to just 10 games, though here goes:

10. Chicory: A Colorful Tale

This game was love-at-first-sight for my kids at PAX West back in the bygone age of 2019, and I was happy to hear a lot of glowing praise about how it finally turned out. The coloring-book look is really well executed and the paint-themed puzzles and mechanics feel fresh and intriguing. I’m excited to play this more soon and share it with my family.

9. Unsighted

I played the demo for this 16-bit-style top-down action game and thought it was great – tight controls, crisp combat, interesting world-building, the works. I’m also really intrigued by the time pressure built into the design and story, where you’ll find yourself in tough situations where you can’t save all the characters you may care about. It’s amazing that this game was made by a core team of just two people.

8. Age of Empires IV

I got my start as a game developer working on real-time strategy games, so this genre will always have a place in my heart. The classic Age of Empires II also happens to be one of my favorite games in this style, so I was excited to see a new full-on sequel all this time later, launching to what seemed like plenty of acclaim. Real-time strategy games can be very involved and I just haven’t set aside the time to dig into this one yet, though I’m looking forward to doing so, and am heartened to see new entries in this genre making a splash.

7. Unpacking

While this is presented as a chill, relaxing game about making neat little living spaces, as someone who hasn’t gotten around to unpacking some of my own stuff for years and years, there’s something oddly anxiety-inducing to me about this concept. Nonetheless, I need to play it, as I love whenever games can create narrative experiences without using words. Here, just by taking certain objects out of boxes and trying to put them in the right spots, you start to piece together stories of who might have just moved and why, and I think that’s brilliant.

6. Guilty Gear -Strive-

Arc System Works has long since cemented itself as one of the most talented fighting game developers out there, and if nothing else, the sheer artistry of their games makes them a sight to behold. I played some of the open beta for Strive and followed its development pretty closely, but didn’t get around to playing the finished game just yet, something I’ve been meaning to rectify. This series keeps banging out some of the coolest, most imaginative character designs I’ve ever seen in this genre. Also, fighting games are the best, and I would just play them all day if I could.

5. It Takes Two

In recent years I’ve mostly enjoyed playing games on my own, though I wanted to make an exception for this one, what with the developer’s pedigree and all the awards It Takes Two has already racked up. So, my son and I have been taking the plunge, and it’s been a wild ride so far. I always love a good ‘you shrunk so everything looks huge’ premise, and this one has more going on with the central conflict between a husband and wife at the end of their rope. We’ve been enjoying the inventive co-op mechanics and I’m excited to see where the story goes.

4. Deathloop

While I’ve been pretty shootered-out these past few years and not felt too compelled to get into many of them, Deathloop’s fresh approach and structure that invites experimentation was really interesting. The ‘immersive sim’ subgenre of shooter I think has always struggled with a structure that theoretically invites you to approach situations in many ways, yet in practice punishes you for experimenting. Deathloop alleviates a lot of this by making dying and restarting part of the story and world, and giving you plenty of chances to improvise. I got a good chunk of the way through, though mean to press on.

3. Guardians of the Galaxy

Just picked this up over the holidays so I’ve only caught a glimpse so far of the great writing and performances from the ensemble cast here, though that’s really all I needed to want to see this story through to the end. Many AAA games are tonally dark, so it’s refreshing to have one that’s a bit more upbeat in its vibe. The ensemble cast is also really interesting to me, as one of the most powerful things games can do is let you inhabit different characters and experience the world from their distinct perspectives.

2. Psychonauts 2

You can just tell this was a labor of love years in the making. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played of Psychonauts 2 so far, though it’s one of those things where I got sidetracked and need to come back and finish what I started. The game is packed with wonderfully imaginative art, quirky charm, and funny, heartfelt moments, and took me right back to the 2005 original despite feeling like a wholly modern game. Seeing Raz and some of the other returning cast members again felt like reuniting with old friends.

1. Halo Infinite

Strange to say about a grim, war-torn world like Halo’s, but if Psychonauts 2 felt like reuniting with old friends, Halo Infinite felt like returning to an old favorite hangout. Just running around testing the various weapons or running and gunning against bots is a real treat in this game, thanks in no small part to its meticulously tuned weapons and controls. From getting my feet wet in multiplayer and starting the campaign, it was like experiencing the original all over again. Part of the reason I’ve yet to play more is I was saving it: I just recently was finally able to get an Xbox Series X, and can’t imagine a better game to lose myself in on a fancy new console.

Honorable Mentions: Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sector, Resident Evil Village, The Ascent, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Little Nightmares II, Shin Megami Tensei V, and more...

My Top 10 Games of 2020

Now these here are the games I played either to completion or at least at great-enough depth to where I’m comfortable sticking them on this list. This was an odd year for games for me, where I bounced between lots of different stuff, and kept noticing some new “oh I should play this” thing seemingly more than ever, at least once a week? A few of those I did end up playing really resonated with me, and I only wish I had more hours in the day to play even more.

10. Wildermyth

This fascinating, ambitious game gets closer than ever to delivering the feel of a tabletop role-playing experience with its procedurally generated narrative and solid turn-based combat. The procedural narrative does some really remarkable stuff, with characters that grow and change, living full and complete lives, and ultimately a lasting legacy in the world of your game. Even the cartoony visual style packs a great deal of depth beyond the first impression. Anyone interested in how games can tell stories in unique ways owes it to themselves to check this one out.

9. Diablo II: Resurrected

Good remakes are rare! The challenge is to take an old but beloved game and make it match the rose-tinted-glasses version in our heads, preserving everything that’s good and making everything feel fresh, all without messing with any of the fundamentals. The king of action RPGs certainly warranted this type of treatment, as while many newer titles have vied for the throne, few have really come close. I really enjoyed delving back into the world of Sanctuary and re-experiencing the iconic character classes, and even the heartbreak of losing a hardcore character to a freak accident. The Blizzard of today has changed a lot and been through even more since Diablo II first launched more than 20 years ago, though a game like this just doesn’t happen if not for a team of extremely talented people with a deep respect for their studio’s legacy, which gives me hope for Blizzard’s brighter days to come.

8. Super Robot Wars 30

This long-running strategy RPG series was doing big-brand crossovers before it was cool, though the licensing of countless iconic anime giant robots and characters was thought to be so impossibly labyrinthine that the series would never make it overseas (at least not officially). Well, Super Robot Wars finally made it, and to Steam no less, and I fell into this game just as hard as some of my favorites I played in years past. While I have only a cursory awareness of some of the newer characters in this game, I really liked the original characters, and loved seeing classic characters from Gundam, Getter Robo, Mazinger-Z, and more, all joining forces and dealing 8-digit damage set to spectacular battle animations.

7. NieR Replicant

2017’s NieR: Automata was my favorite game of that year, so this year’s NieR: Replicant was a chance for me to take another stab at the 2010 original, which I only played a little and was more than open to revisiting in light of my Automata experience. I didn’t realize the games were so strongly connected, since Automata stands well on its own, and the setting and theme of the original Nier seem quite different on the surface. I’m now really glad to have had the experience, and it made me want to revisit Automata again. I ended up playing Replicant all the way through multiple times until I reached the new ending, which was impressive and ultimately worth the journey. The story has some genuinely moving moments, with great voice performances and wonderful music, and invites self-reflection in a unique way.

6. Metroid Dread

Metroid is my favorite among Nintendo’s classic franchises, so I’m one of those people who’s been holding out hope for a while that Samus would surely be making her big comeback anytime now. In Metroid Dread, I discovered a game that felt tailored to longtime fans like me, offering up a challenging and intricate new installment that lives up to the quality of its predecessors, and twisting the format in some interesting ways. While Metroid Dread in many ways played things pretty safe, it felt great to have a well-crafted new installment, with tons of new power-ups to find and tough new bosses to take on. And its little riffs on the formula – even small stuff like ‘what if the Morph Ball wasn’t your first power-up?’ – were thoughtful and welcome.

5. Monster Hunter: Rise

If you’re like me, you’ve heard people obsessing over Monster Hunter for years, but struggled to get into it yourself. It’s dense with detail, and has its own very deliberate pace that may seem maddeningly sluggish if you’re expecting what you’re used to in other action games. But with Monster Hunter: Rise, I was determined to take another shot at this series, and sure enough I fell into it, hard. The samurai/ninja theme of this installment was a big part of the draw, as who among us hasn’t fantasized about going toe-to-toe with a T-rex using a significantly oversized katana, right? Monster Hunter has a great simple underlying idea – hunt dangerous monsters and use their parts to become an even better hunter – plus an arsenal of exciting, idiosyncratic weapons to master, and a host of big, ugly-beautiful monsters to use them on. The appeal of this series was never lost on me, but now I don’t just get it, I feel it.

4. Loop Hero

This unique rogue-like game at first seems to play itself, as your character automatically patrols a path and automatically fights monsters along the way. You spend your time changing the character’s gear, plus putting little terrain tiles down that affect your encounters and resources. Sounds simple, but this ends up being an incredibly engrossing process, and the adjustable pace of the game made it perfect for times when I wanted to lose myself in something without the stresses of having to be wide awake and alert in some challenging action game. Some interesting worldbuilding and great crunchy retro-style music and sound FX round out Loop Hero’s personality and cemented it as one of my go-to games throughout 2021, and one of my favorites when I look back.

3. Returnal

Speaking of games about dying and starting over, Returnal has outstanding action, great sci-fi horror atmosphere, and a structure that made me keep trying to get just a little farther than before (and usually failing!). Developer Housemarque has long been making tightly crafted action games in the spirit of arcade classics, and that expertise results in some really tense, excellent moment-to-moment play in Returnal, a shooter that relies on your situational awareness and gives you lots of powerful tools to traverse the environment and take down hordes of powerful foes. The genuinely alien feel of the world and environment adds so much to the experience, making you share in protagonist Selene’s awe as you delve deeper into new environments, discovering new weapons and systems as you go. Returnal ends up feeling unique among rogue-like games, and certainly has some of the best presentation this genre has yet seen, giving further evidence to how much untapped potential exists in this style of game.

2. Inscryption

This is the most astonishing game I played this year. It’s a triumph of creativity and design, and a tour-de-force for its creator and collaborators. Though, lest all this highfalutin stuff deter you, it’s also super funny and clever. I went into it expecting a quirky, horror-y card combat game, maybe along the lines of Slay the Spire or Monster Train. What I got was something wholly unique in its own right, the sort of game that’s best to go into knowing nothing at all. I was blown away that a small team could have come up with something like this, though a large team definitely couldn’t. I kept wanting to play further to see what else was around the corner, and was consistently delighted by what I found, through to the wonderful conclusion.

1. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

I never would have expected an old MMO with a new expansion to top my 2021 list, but then, the last couple of years have been prone to throwing us curveballs every so often. This at least was a welcome one. If you’re like me and have enjoyed Final Fantasy games in the past but avoided XIV because it’s a massively multiplayer game, and you struggle to imagine how such a game could possibly have the series’ best qualities such as rich character-driven storytelling and amazing musical scores, know that Final Fantasy XIV somehow achieves this. Indeed, it achieves this better than most other Final Fantasy games.

To be clear, I don’t especially care for the part where it is, in fact, a massively multiplayer game. I’ve played it almost exclusively solo except for the instanced dungeons that automatically group you with other players (all of whom, shockingly, have been friendly-and-welcoming, or silent like I usually am). My time has mostly been spent going through the main story, binging it hard. This story now spans the original game plus four expansions, each of which contain an entire full-size JRPG’s worth of story – and something like three games’ worth of amazing music mostly by series composer Masayoshi Soken, who’s like the second coming of Nobuo Uematsu with plenty of his own virtuosic flair. The story itself springs to life just before Heavensward, the first expansion, which was when I really became invested thanks to some wonderful writing and voice performances, and nuanced characterizations and themes. Some of the story sequences are very moving, and despite not having the most expensive animation by today’s AAA standards, capture small subtle moments between characters well. Sudden flashes of anger, knowing glances between old friends, eyes welling up with tears, those kinds of moments all shine.

The story gradually takes on a genuinely epic quality, yet wisely retains a very personal feel centered on an ensemble cast of characters who grow more and more interesting over time, while plenty of Big Consequential save-the-world stuff keeps percolating in the background. The character writing, voice performances, and music are really the big draw that’s been pulling me forward, and since this is such a big story, it means you get plenty of time to get to know everybody, making their triumphs and setbacks that much more impactful. The other very clever thing this game does is, it finds a way to make your character the hero of the story, which seems hopelessly at odds with a game where you’re surrounded by thousands of other players. But the writers frequently come up with novel ways to tie the MMO nature of the game back into the narrative, while still making your character vital to the narrative.

It’s odd to admit that, as of this writing, I’ve only just begun the actual story of Endwalker, the most recent expansion released this past year. Of course, though, I’ve been benefiting from all the improvements made along the way, including my choice from among the scores of intricately designed characters ‘jobs’ that call back to all the coolest Final Fantasy characters from over the years. But having ravenously played through Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers as the lead-up – which all must be played through linearly as one great big story – I’m committed to seeing where it all goes and know some of these characters will stick with me moving forward, alongside many other series favorites.

Hi! My name is Ben and if you’re reading this then you probably know that I used to work here. If you didn’t know that, welcome to Giant Bomb! You should know that Giant Bomb Premium gives you an incredible ad-free experience and access to hundreds of hours of premium content.

I’ve been very busy this year but managed to play ELEVEN video games that made an impact on me this year, so I cut one (sorry Pokémon Unite) and ordered the rest. You know how it goes.

Unfortunately, I am still in podcast jail with Sarah Koenig and The Office Ladies, so this might be my last message to the public for a while. Keep up the good fight,

-Ben

10) Back 4 Blood

Left 4 Dead more like Dead on Arrival if getting three of my friends to play this with me is any indication. But it turns out you can have fun even with a mediocre zombie survival shooter.

9) Valheim

Valheim has plenty to offer. Whether you are interested in mining, farming, seafaring, combat, or exploring, you can find your niche and stick with it or enjoy all the game has to offer. And as a bonus, the server-based nature of the game means that you can coordinate and focus on the tasks that give you the most joy.

Unfortunately, that also means that when one of your friends accuses another one of stealing his rare materials, you might suddenly find yourself in seas so tricky, not even the most veteran vikings would want to navigate.

8) Halo Infinite

Ok, I get Halo now.

7) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

If you want to hear my extended thoughts on the subject of this game you can listen to Giant Bombcast 709. It basically boils down to

Ok, I get Breath of the Wild now.

6) Inscryption

Best game I’ve ever played that lets me create poisonous corpse maggots.

5) Guilty Gear Strive

The first fighting game I’ve put good work into since Samurai Showdown. Fun, flashy, and fairly competent netcode makes this a game that should stay in my rotation for some time.

4) Chivalry II

I get to play Mordhau again without dealing with (as many) racists so I count that as a huge W.

3) Metroid Dread

Metroid Dread is the 2D metroid game I have been waiting for since finishing Fusion back in ‘02. It’s a return to form that is safe, yet incredibly effective

Outside of some hamfisted scenarios where you are not permitted from backtracking and the initial E.M.M.I. encounters, the game is a well-polished 2D action adventure, a genre that never goes out of style.

2) Chicory

By design, the first time you load up Chicory the world looks empty. Hiding behind the blank canvas is an intricate world bustling with secrets, collectables, and immaculate vibes. You often might catch yourself channeling your inner child as you sit and patiently wield your brush and restore color to every rock, river, and pizza parlor hiding in this deeply beautiful world.

1) Slay the Spire

I had never given Slay the Spire the time of day, despite being invested in the two genres it so masterfully melds. It was hard for me to get past the way the game looked. And the UI. And its sounds. Honestly it’s a miracle that this game found an audience at all.

That’s just a testament to how good the design is in Slay the Spire. It’s a game where every move matters. Top-level players can sit and think about something as simple as a card reward for twenty minutes, factoring in everything from their existing deck, future events, percent chance that they spawn a potion in the next hallway fight, and more. I have been forced to reset my progress on making it to ascension 20 three times. I wouldn’t be playing many other games where I had lost all my progress once.

Hello! My name is David Galindo, aka chubigans, and I run a small little indie company, Vertigo Gaming Inc., known best for the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series and a new Twitch-only free game called ChefSquad! I love making games and will continue to do so until the company either makes one hundred million dollars or declares bankruptcy, whichever comes first. Woo!

The Tabletop Zone

Before we get into my games list I wanted to talk a little bit about my favorite tabletop games of 2021!

• Super Mega Lucky Box is like Bingo mixed with strategy. With each number that’s called you get to choose which number to cross off on your number cards. Get a row or column cleared and you win a prize that can help modify numbers or add to your end score, and completely black out a card for lots of points. Easy to teach and extremely fun for any skill set, whether that’s your hardcore tabletop player or someone that’s only played (ugh) Monopoly in their life.

• Splurt is a game you can just throw on the table for a quick 10 minute fun session as you reveal the letter of the word you need to shout out as well as the theme (“stuff you pack in a suitcase” or “things you eat”, while the letter card can be “starts with B” or “ends in T”, etc.). Shout it out first to win the card, and the player with the most wins. Party games don’t get much simpler and fun than this.

• Project L is a fascinating Tetris-like game that mixes the satisfaction of sliding those tetrominos into place with the strategy of deciding when to gain pieces, boards and points. This is a more advanced game to put on the table but even novice tabletop players were able to catch on fairly quickly as you trade up tetromino pieces for more complex shapes as you fill in boards to score points. Its beautiful in its presentation and satisfying as heck to play, and is one of my all time favorites.

• Wonka’s Golden Ticket is one of those instant family classic boardgames that works for just about any skill level. You choose one of the kids as your character as you wander the town collecting money and Wonka candies and powerups to exchange for actual Wonka bars. These little Wonka bars are incredibly cool to use as a game element as a few of them contain a golden ticket slipped in and shuffled around beforehand. Once all the Wonka bars have been distributed everyone opens up their bars to see if they’ve won. I played with my family over New Years and despite my Wonka bar pile being twice as big as everyone else’s I had no golden tickets- while my mom with the least amount of bars ended up having all three (and played as Charlie to boot). Is that fair? Who cares, it was hilarious and exciting at the same time. Highly recommended.

• Finally the Back to the Future: Back in Time game is one that captures the spirit of the classic film while adding tabletop friendly elements that make it feel like both a great adventure, fun co-op and a throwback to film that is loved by so many. In fact every bit of this game feels like a love letter to the movie, and it’s very fun to play as you run around Hill Valley trying to gain all the parts for the DeLorean as Biff wanders about, while also trying to make your parents fall in love before lightning strikes the tower. While it’s replay value is a bit more limited than the other games on this list, it’s still a blast that any major fan of the movie should check out.

I’d love to see Project L in videogame form to be quite honest…speaking of which, let’s break down all the games I loved in 2021!

The Videogaming Zone

10. Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon/Loop Hero

Two games that fall short of being instant classics in one way or another, but deserved to be talked about- you can almost think of this as my Honorable Mentions list!

(Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon) A quirky puzzle roguelike that’s unfortunately quite short, Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon is one of those games that is so close to greatness. It’s incredibly difficult and quite a fun mix of fighting and puzzle elements, but I was able to buy out the shop of unlockable items within the first two hours and aside from different colored outfits there doesn’t seem to be a ton of content to progress to, yet the fun enemy matching and damage dealing is unlike any other puzzle game I’ve played. I had fun with the game and I hope they can take this idea even further with DLC. (Played on Switch)

(Loop Hero) I really thought this game had me with its brilliant design, amazing art and sound effects and fascinating story, yet it never quite got there for me to get hooked on. It could be the sometimes unforgiveable difficulty (which honestly can be chalked up to my fault- you can choose to leave a level any time you want to get all 100% of the collected resources) or luck of the draw with what cards you get on each level. The fact that this isn’t near the top of the list feels more like a me problem rather than the game- if it looks remotely interesting to you based on the trailer, you should absolutely check it out. The controls fare better than expected on Switch given the mouse-focused PC version, though I found the Switch version to ultimately play slower as a result, not a bad thing per se. (Played on Switch)

9. Arcadegeddon

Some games are content with just being solid. Arcadegeddon is a very stylish game with some good shootin’ and good lootin’, with each run being as long as you’d like it to be (or, of course, until you die). Arcadegeddon is at its best when it focuses on a ton of enemies on screen as you blast your way through to the warp gate (less so during the optional player vs. player segments) and the guns feel great. At the moment it’s a bit light on content and the roadmap looks promising, but as of now is a great fun diversion to blast through with friends. (Played on PS5)

8. The Matrix Awakens

Is this the future of videogames? When I saw the Mario 64 demo for the first time as a kid in my local blockbuster, playing Dire Dire Docks, it was a magical moment, as if I had been thrusted years into the future. I couldn’t believe I was playing a game that looked this incredible. The Matrix Awakens wants to conjure a similar feeling- that this is the future of not only games but entertainment/movies- but as a game dev, it hits differently. It looks incredible, yes, but will devs pick up Unreal 5 and master this tech as quickly as the engine’s authors have? How expensive is it? Can we go about 30fps and still retain most of this fidelity? God, I hate asking most of these questions, but it’s all I can think of when I see tech demos like this- stunning, stunning tech demos, but a glimpse into what can be all the same. This is not a game of course, but a statement. This is Unreal Engine 5 and it blows the crap out of all these cross gen games and even some first party titles on next gen so far. Mission successful. I hope devs adopt it and we see actual games looking like this- but goodness, it’s gonna take a while. (Played on PS5)

7. Powerwash Simulator

Sometimes the hardest things to get right are the seemingly easiest looking games out there. Powerwash Simulator could have just lived up to its title as you go around blasting mud and grime off vans, pools, skate parks and even a rover on Mars. But it was all of the small details that made this game zen-like. You get paid by the piece of equipment cleaned, such as a park bench or the right side mirror of a van, and once you get 90% of the grime off of it the object flashes clean and money is deposited into your account. It makes tackling the largest levels much easier as I skipped around levels trying to earn enough money to buy a little spray nozzle attachment. This is such a satisfying game. It belongs in a genre that I’m striving for in my next unannounced title- a satisfying experience that just makes you feel good. The way the water sounds when it hits different surface types. The way I blast bird poop off a playground. Saving enough money to be able to afford a cleaner that can blast rust off a classic old car. The only reason I stopped playing was to wait until my Steam Deck gets here so I can play this in bed. I can’t freaking wait. (Played on PC)

6. Unpacking

Video games have the ability to tell stories wholly unlike any other medium out there. How difficult would you think it would be to tell a story without words, without actual characters except the ones we manifest by actively playing? Unpacking is full of brilliant moments. This is exactly the game it appears to be: an unpacking simulator where you pull items out of boxes until they’re all in the place you feel they should be and move on to the next stage of the game (progressing through the life of a young woman through adulthood). This game never subverts your expectations- something I’m not overly fond of as it feels like everyone is chasing the Frog Fractions dream- but instead creates real moments of emotional power simply by the places your items go. I was completely shocked at some of the negativity surrounding the game for being a short experience. The game so completely nails the unpacking aspect that I found myself taking weeks to do one of the larger levels, taking it box by box each night and enjoying the nice chill moment before bed. But even if I were to run through it quickly, it feels like a game that is exactly as long as it needed to be. (Played on Switch)

5. Fireworks Mania

Honestly my two minute video sums up everything you need to know. (Played on PC)

4. Deep Rock Galactic

Sometimes a game just comes along that you want to hang out in and have some low key chats with friends, whether that’s blasting bugs in a deep underground cave while I’m searching for eggs or protecting a drilldozer as it burrows into the cavernous alien planet that has explosive sacks littered everywhere. There are only four classes in this game yet each one feels both integral to the experience yet also unnecessary to win a mission. Sure, the three of us can do without a Scout, but boy, when you have a Scout on your team that can light up the dark caves with beautiful light, that’s when you realize how much you missed them. Sure I can dig through this rock, but when the Driller comes to burrow the dirt like it’s made of paper, hoo man it feels like the difference in riding in a luxury car. (The purposefully imbalanced classes also make for some great funny moments, like myself as a soldier trying to climb up a cliffside oh so slowly only to see the scout with their scout-only zipline zip past me like Spider-Man as she shouts “wheeeeee!” on the Discord call- Lizzy if you’re reading this I still think about that moment and laugh.) The best thing about this game is the dynamic difficulty you can set each mission to, as some friends may like an extremely intense experience while others can appreciate a chill, easy bug-shootin’ splatfest. Grab some friends, explore the caves and get ready for a hell of a good time. (Played on PC)

3. Dicey Dungeons

Is it OK for a game to lie to you? I don’t mean in the sense of subverting your expectations- I mean in the sense of telling you this dice roll was completely 100% random even though you know that’s some grade A bullshit and has to be an absolute lie.

Dicey Dungeons wouldn’t be the first game to tilt the scales of power for a more fun game- heck, that’s what rubberbanding is all about in Mario Kart, or the fact that you always miss 3 point shots in NBA Jam if you’re too far ahead (and always make them if you’re too far behind). But in a game where my rolls determine the attacks I will do to my opponent, who are also running “random dice rolls” to do the same thing to me (like hell you are) I have to wonder just how much of this game really falls into the sphere of chance.

I’m sure the creator, Terry Cavanagh, has outlined their game dev of this game in a really good GDC talk or blog post, and I never want to read it. No, I rather feel like I was cheated of my amazing win by some really tilted sixes a random dungeon enemy rolled to cut me down immediately. Could a game like this really be random? Would you really want to leave your game design completely up to chance instead of making sure enemies are constantly hitting you 50% of the time? Wouldn’t that make for better design anyways? Oh this enemy has to roll snake eyes to freeze my dice huh? Well good thing that has a rare chance of happe-AH CRAP! All of this is a weird set up to my number three game on my list, but for every complete bullshit roll an enemy has rolled against me, I have rolled against them to win in spectacular fashion. While I can change the rolls of the dice with a specific tool to get the number I want, it takes up a slot in my inventory, which might be better served with a weapon that activates on six instead. The way you can strategize how you attack your opponent with completely luck based rolls (there’s that luck word again, something I’m sure this game actually rigs right???). I love this game, except for the parts I absolutely hated. This game is incredible, most of the time, most all of the time, sometimes. (Played on Switch)

2. Guardians of the Galaxy

I am not a fan of most Marvel movies, and I especially hated Guardians of the Galaxy, so much so that I almost want to watch it again just because I can’t precisely say why I disliked it so much. The trailer for this game was so poor that I instantly wrote it off as another Avengers debacle (right up until release I thought it was a multiplayer game) and had no interest whatsoever. The Twitter buzz of this being a good story and a great game still didn’t win me over- a great Marvel movie/game/show is still a Marvel movie/game/show I have zero interest in- but what do you know, one lazy Sunday afternoon I saw it on sale and thought, sure, why not. My goodness- this is one of my favorite games of this generation. The story, motion capture and acting, as well as the game’s dazzling graphics (especially in raytracing mode) hooked me about an hour in. It takes its time to tell a story, build characters, and feel as if there’s lore brimming underneath that I actually want to explore, unlike other Marvel properties that feel like I walked in at the middle of a story (which, in most cases, you are). But it was the weaving of certain story choices and gameplay that makes this even more special- nothing that games haven’t done before, but gosh, when I get access to some areas hours after a key moment I explored in the narrative simply because I wanted the story to progress in that direction- it feels extra special. Small moments, like your crew doing various tasks in levels far later in the game that you don’t have to direct them to because they’re functioning better as a team- small moments that pay off so well. Less special is the gameplay, which leaves a pretty bitter impression for the first few hours as the main character’s gunplay is very unsatisfying, and never gets all that much better (along with some of the most baffling enemy designs I’ve seen that looks like a fried GPU graphic glitch). Thankfully directing the rest of the Guardian crew is fun and with more unlockable moves later on actually becomes quite fluid and a blast in the late stages of the game. Years ago there was a game called Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that had such an incredible story, full of funny, tragic, emotional, fun and heavy moments, all with a property that had no right being so good. That game felt like a small miracle. Here is another. (Played on PS5, Raytracing Mode, Quicktime Events off)

1. Monster Train First Class

Here we go- another attempt at Covenant Rank 15, a difficulty modifier that essentially has made the game’s base difficulty 15x harder (well, perhaps not 1:1, but it certainly feels that way as I am on a losing streak of 20+ games, which is about 12-15 hours). I have tried so many different clan and allied clan combinations and nothing is working. The game is about placing monsters in your four level train, with the top floor being the train’s engine that must be protected, and the next three floors being where enemies shuffle in and battle their way through to the engine room (or Pyre Room). You start with a hand of five cards and a deck, which can be added to and upgraded/modified as you progress through the world to the literal end. God, I love so much about this game. I love the gameplay mechanics, which never feel unfair, just brutally difficult at times if I’m not paying attention to what’s ahead. I love the music and beautiful sounds of some of the monsters- truly special care was placed with the sound design of a lot of the bosses, which sound haunting and powerful all at the same time. I love the graphics and UI, which gets a lot of the game’s mechanics across as clear as possible (though the Switch can get a little clunky at times with using the d-pad as opposed to the mouse on PC). I love that each run feels different yet can synergize well with your deck depending on the decisions you make early on, and the risks involved in taking powerful upgrades which can also increase the difficulty. Finally, I have won. I beat Covenant Rank 15 after weeks of hitting what felt like an unsurmountable wall. The joy and sense of accomplishment feel incredible. Ten more ranks to go. I can’t wait. (Played on Switch)

Chris Tilton is a composer and he’s written music for a few TV shows (Fringe, Zoo) and video games (SimCity, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Black). You can hear Chris Tilton’s latest work on the upcoming Epix horror series, From.

When not working, he can be found playing video games, or perhaps procrastinating in chat on a Giant Bomb live stream.

Even though I made little progress towards completing games in 2021, I sure did have some fun! But first, my obligatory 2021 “didn’t get to these yet” list: Umurangi Generation. Beyond a Steel Sky. Disco Elysium: Director’s Cut. Inscryption. Psychonauts 2. Forza Horizon 5. Guardians of the Galaxy. Now, on to the games I DID play.

5. No Man’s Sky: Frontiers

I jump back into No Man’s Sky about every six months, and it’s relaxing every time. 2021 saw the release of Frontiers, which added a bustling outpost for you to build up. There are also new world types to explore, which I’ve just started to get into, and I have yet to make it to a derelict freighter in space. Ah well, in 2022!

4. Unpacking

This was a delightful distraction. The pixel art is great, and I particularly loved the sound design. I played this with headphones and it does a stellar job at putting you into the space: the outside traffic, indoor electronics hum, an upstairs neighbor stomping around, etc. When it came to the game itself, I particularly enjoyed having to unpack into an apartment already occupied by other roommates. The DVDs all have to be together! And true to the title of my list, even though this is only a few hours long, I STILL have not finished it, but I love it so far!

3. Lost Judgment

The original Judgement was my 2019 game of the year, so it is no surprise the sequel is high on my list. The story is juggling a lot of balls and it feels a little overwhelming compared to the first one, but I am really enjoying the high school setting and the new city. My first Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio game was Yakuza 0, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’m still making my way through all the Yakuza games, but I will stick with Lost Judgment, as I like this series even more than Yakuza.

2. Riders Republic

I was all set to play Forza Horizon 5, but Riders Republic captured my interest at the last minute. It’s a similar format to Forza Horizon (open world with races and lots of side activities), but with an extreme sports bent. There’s a bit of ‘tude throughout the game, and if you’re not into that, it is easily mitigated by lowering the voice over volume. First person downhill biking is pretty thrilling! With activities that often only take a couple of minutes, this was a great morning routine to get into. I still play it every day!

1. Halo Infinite

In preparation for Infinite, I played the first few missions of every previous Halo. In addition to being an interesting time capsule of progressions, it confirmed to me that Halo 3 really had the best combination of epic story and goofball fun, and Infinite has captured that combo better than any Halo since. The open world is the magic here. I thought about going back into that world every time I was away from it, which is a good sign. Nothing beats calling in a Razorback warthog, packing it full of marines and then going out to fuck some shit up. I could have done without the linear levels that bookend the game, but in between them is the most fun I’ve had in a game all year.

I played more games than usual in 2021, just like I did in 2020, for the extremely obvious reason that we’re living in what threatens to be a forever-plague. Desperate as I was for distraction, it seems strange to judge games for how “good” they were. Any game that got me to stop thinking about the circumstances of our shared existence for longer than a few minutes gets a 10/10 from me. I was an easy A.

That caveat aside, some discrete elements of the new games I played this year have managed to stick in my head for weeks and even months after I put them down. My list is an attempt to explore and examine these things. Some of them impressed me, some delighted me, and some of them pissed me off, but they’re all still on my mind. Given the state of my mind these days, that’s quite the accomplishment.

Nier: Replicant Ver. 1.22’s intentional tedium

Nier Automata is a 2017 Yoko Taro game I connected with on a “Matrix plug that goes into the back of my head” level. Everything about its melancholic, decaying world drew me in. And the questions it asked! What, exactly, constitutes a post-apocalypse? If the world ends so hard that only steel and concrete survive, but so much time passes that another world grows up around it, is it still the post-apocalypse? Aren’t we living in the post-apocalypse of the Aztecs, the ancient Greeks, the Neanderthals? What is a robot? What is a soul? Does the steppy robot lady have an Onlyfans? What is a person? Provocative stuff!

When I finished Automata, I started looking into its 2010 predecessor, Nier, and quickly found out I’d need an Xbox 360 to play it in English. Since mine was freezing in a storage unit on the other side of the country, I gave up hope… until this year! Remakes, baby! Everything old is new again, and that includes video games that are boring on purpose. If you make it through this list, you’ll see I’m not easily bored. Nier: Replicant Ver. 1.22 sees my infinite patience and responds “we’ll fucking see.”

Nier: Replicant Ver. 1.22 is stuffed with intentionally tedious, repetitive sidequests, ostensibly as a criticism of other games stuffed with tedious, repetitive sidequests. Most of them are simple fetch quests where the only difficulty comes from travelling across the enormous, empty landscape, occasionally harried by easily-defeated shadow creatures (fast travel is limited, and only becomes available in the second half of the game, at which point the player is locked out of completing most of the sidequests). As you complete these errands, a pedantic living book bobs along in the air behind you, mocking you for your easily-exploited altruism. The rewards for completing these quests are largely useless: weapons that are usually weaker than those you already have, or gold to buy more useless weapons. Some of the quest-givers do mix things up by requiring a large number of rare-drop materials or by requiring you to kill a monster that has an extremely low chance of even appearing.

And yet! And yet! I did all of them. There’s something very interesting about a game that is up-front about being intentionally boring. The stories the sidequests tell are surprisingly affecting, and the game’s frequent acknowledgement of the tediousness of completion, initially frustrating, begins to feel like encouragement to continue. “I know it sucks, but stick with this. I’m making a point here.” There’s intentional tedium and frustration in a lot of the main story, too. At the time, I kind of hated it. But now, half a year later, I think it was great? Maybe that’s the point being made? Is life a series of arbitrary obligations, loosely chained together by a vague sense of purpose that can only be glimpsed in hindsight? I can’t say, since I still have to beat the entire second half of the game several more times to see the rest of the story. I’ll circle back on this next year.

Magic the Gathering: Arena’s excellent tutorial

2021 saw the release of the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set of Magic: The Gathering. I saw friends posting pictures of the lands, which come with little D&D-appropriate story hooks.

I had a half-formed idea of using them in D&D – I figured I’d get my players to draw from a stack of them, then send them through a hole in reality to briefly participate in the combat/story beat implied by the text. I went to my local game store (hey, The Deck Box!), got some Adventures in the Forgotten Realms booster packs, and, on a whim, also picked up Planar Portal, a preconstructed Commander deck in the AFR set. Flipping through it, I was entranced by the complex strategies implied by the interaction of the cards. Vaxxed to the gills and looking to make more friends in a new city, I decided to attend the store’s “Casual Commander” night. I didn’t actually know how to play Magic, but that seemed like a minor hurdle. I just needed a crash course.

Magic the Gathering: Arena seemed like a good fit. And it was! The game has a friendly, engaging tutorial that starts with the basics of playing lands, summoning monsters, and casting spells in semi-scripted duels against bots whose personalities reflect the theme of their decks. Magic is a famously complicated game, but MTGA is dense with helpful hints, highlighting all the cards in a hand that can currently be played, defining keywords like “trample” or “deathtouch” when clicked on, or warning me when I tried to play a card that I might be misunderstanding.

After a couple afternoons with Arena, I felt like I understood the rules well enough to go to the in-person Casual Commander without feeling like a burden to the other people at the table. I’ve gone back week after week, getting to know the other players by their decks and how they played, just like in the tutorial, riding the high of a new special interest and membership in a thriving subculture (word up to the Magic group DM).

I kept playing Arena, primarily because it was the easiest way to play more Magic between the weekly Commander nights. I climbed the ranks in PVP, feeling like a cards genius every time I beat somebody. But all too soon, I ran into decks that I simply didn’t have the right cards to beat, and playing with the starter decks was getting me eaten alive. I didn’t want to pay actual money for digital cardboard cards, so I leaned on the weekly and daily challenges that are Arena’s main source of “free” cards. These challenges gradually became an obligation. Whenever I didn’t complete them, well, shit. That was like throwing cards away! And I needed cards. I needed cards so I could beat people in PVP, so I could get more cards, so I could beat people in PVP, so I could…etc. I wasn’t even enjoying playing anymore. I just had to win, and when I lost, I felt like I was getting robbed. Totally healthy mindset, right? Very healthy.

In a moment of clarity, I uninstalled the game. I’ve got an addictive personality (more on this below), and while Arena is significantly less predatory than some free-to-play games I’ve been suckered by, it still has lots of little fishhooks in its design that tore at my fingertips whenever I’d try to put it down. The point where I’m playing a game less because I’m having a good time and more because I’m anxious about the opportunity cost of not playing the game is the point where I need to walk away from it.

Unpacking’s silent story

I don’t have much of an interior design aesthetic when it comes to video games. Given the opportunity to build/decorate a home base, I lean hard towards the utilitarian. I’m happiest with drab lockers to sort my crafting materials, named weapons, and all the other shit I’m afraid to sell because I might need it later. This is also how I live my life. Beyond putting up art because blank walls invite spiraling depression, I’m content for my things to just end up wherever, so long as I can find them later.

Unpacking asked me to inhabit the mindset of a person who actually cares where their stuff gets put, telling the story of someone’s life through glimpses of the days they moved somewhere new. The core loop is pretty simple. Given a room (or several) and some taped-up cardboard boxes, unpack the boxes, one item at a time, and find a place for each item. The only limitations are common-sense: clothes go in closets, shoes don’t go on the bed, towels go in the bathroom, etc. There aren’t any puzzles beyond the true-to-life conundrum of trying to fit more stuff into a spot than there’s room for. That’s good, because contrived puzzles would have undercut the verisimilitude that gives Unpacking’s storyits charm–and its teeth.

It’s a story told through inference and the accumulation of small details. In the “1997” level, I could feel the young protagonist’s excitement at finally having their own room well before the labeled photograph at the end of the level spelled it out explicitly. In “2007,” the shared interests between the protagonist and their new roommates can be divined through their matching tabletop game figurines and DVD box sets. When the protagonist moves in with someone who has a skyline view, but no room for the protagonist’s art supplies, well, that tells a story too. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s a charming, cathartic experience, something I needed at the end of 2021.

Metroid Dread’s linear exploration

Imagine a beautiful mansion where every door is closed. Imagine walking inside, trying to open a door, and discovering it locked. So you try another–locked! You try and try, jiggling every handle until you find a door that’s unlocked, and you open it. Behind it, you find a key! But what’s this? Why, this key’s the same color as one of the locked doors you already passed! Better backtrack to see what’s behind that door. Oh, it’s a key of a different color! Repeat until you unlock the door that rolls the credits.

The locked-door mansion is one of the irreducible progression models of game design (see also: “participate in a series of fights” and “gather resources in order to become more efficient at gathering resources”). The keys can be literal keys, but they can just as easily be something else: the fire arrow “key” opens the “locked door” of a progress-blocking spiderweb. The double-jump ability key unlocks the gap that can’t be crossed with a single jump. Bombs unlock cracked walls, fire armor unlocks fire. Killing a boss in one place unlocks a door somewhere else. Sometimes, instead of core-path progress, a door guards a health boost, ammunition, or a time-saving shortcut facilitating quicker passage through the mansion. It’s all keys and doors.

Metroid: Dread dangles its keys in a specific, intended order, one after another, funneling the player towards core-path progression with one-way doors and a helpful robot assistant to tell the player exactly what’s blocking their progress and where to go to clear it. I was a little disappointed with this aspect, honestly. When I backtracked to an earlier area to use a new weapon to unlock a door I’d noticed earlier, I received an “upgrade” for a weapon I didn’t have yet, which felt like yet another nudge back onto the path and away from exploration. Movement through the mansion of Metroid: Dread feels less like exploration and more like a guided tour, complete with frequent reminders to stay with the group.

That’s not to say the game isn’t great! I didn’t just put it on this list to complain that it’s a linear experience. It’s gorgeous, and the sound design is haunting, especially for the extremely tense E.M.M.I. encounters. The boss fights are a hoot. But it’s just a bit sad that the descendant of Metroid, a game so nonlinear that it inspired an entire subgenre built around aimless exploration, seems so afraid to let players get lost.

Powerwash Simulator’s meditative hum

I’m autistic, which in my case means I enjoy chores and repetitive tasks that non-autistic people typically find boring. I’m often recommended games from the simulator/simulation genre: Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, etc. For whatever reason, none of them particularly appealed to me (except for Train Simulator, which I’ve never touched for the same reason I’ve never touched heroin. Like I said, autistic.) But this year, I started hearing about a game that seemed like it might offer repetitive satisfaction without awakening a life-destroying trains obsession: Powerwash Simulator.

I grew up in the country, in a house built in the middle of a huge, dry riverbed. When it rained, the sand and clay would splatter, creeping up the outside walls, there to be baked by the south Georgia sun into long, forking fingers that threatened to grab the house and drag it under. One of my many country-boy chores was to haul out the pressure washer and break their grip. A pressure washer, as a brief aside, is basically a powerwasher but not heated. I loved it. The dull hum of the machine drowning out all distraction, the nigh-supernatural power of pointing at dirt forty feet away and watching it disappear, the satisfaction of seeing pristine emerge from filthy with a relative minimum of effort…it all coalesced into an immensely satisfying and meditative experience. As it does in Powerwash Simulator. The greatest compliment I can pay Powerwash Simulator is that it feels like powerwashing.

Conventional wisdom says games need power progression, so of course cleaning the vans, houses, and skate parks is not just its own meditative reward. I begrudgingly earn money that I use to buy soaps and upgrades to make the powerwashing go quicker. It’s an old trick, this dopamine rush: offer a repetitive task, then offer some upgrade that makes it go faster. There’s also an artificial scarcity to how many soaps can be purchased, encouraging that they be saved for when they’ll have the most impact. With every gamified element added, I feel myself getting further from the true soul of powerwashing.

But as the dirt falls away, so too do my worries, and I am lost once more to the hum.

Inscryption’s Infinite Abstraction

Daniel Mullins’ games exist at the intersection of Mark Z. Danielewsky’s House of Leaves and a haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge creepypasta. Mullins seems to enjoy stacking his games with layers of narrative abstraction, here defined as a step of removal inserted between the media and the audience. In Mullins’ games, the player often plays as a person playing a game within the larger game being played by the player themselves, a conceit Mullins seems to have honed in his game jams (and previous release Pony Island).

Inscryption, his latest performance, begins at one layer of abstraction–the “new game” button is grayed out, with “continue” as the only selectable option. We are not playing our own game. We’re continuing someone else’s. Doing so opens to a first-person perspective shot of a hand holding several cards. A shadowy figure across the table unspools a style-heavy tutorial for a tabletop card game. So we’re already playing a game within the game–and then one of the cards starts talking.

The game pulls back again, the card game revealed to be connected to a separate gameboard/map. Branching paths on the map leading to story encounters/games played against a cast of characters (all played by the same shadowy figure wearing a host of wooden masks, another layer of abstraction).

One encounter/game asks the player to make a prediction based on three cards drawn from their deck; another is a game of chicken that lets the player strengthen a card at the risk of having it eaten. These games muddy the waters further: is the card game supplemented by the choices made on the map, or does the game being played on the map merely feature card games? Is the shadowy figure across the table our opponent in the card game, or a gamemaster simply playing that role? All of these layers of abstraction are already dueling for supremacy before the player is able to stand up from the table and move around the cabin, complicating things further. And that’s to say nothing of what happens within Inscryption when you lose–or if you win.

Inscryption’s metagame/narrative abstraction layers extend beyond the boundaries of game itself, raising the question of whether Inscryption itself is just a piece of the larger Inscryption ARG that played out on Mullins’ discord server, featuring clues hidden in Mullins’ old games and in custom cards he made for an entirely different card game. At every expected endpoint in this branching, there’s another another layer to peel back, another recursive plunge inwards. It’s a truly impressive effort that both encourages interpretation and resists simple answers, a narrative puzzle with shifting pieces borrowed from other puzzles. The more you zoom in, the more the game pulls back, the metanarrative equivalent of a vertigo shot.

Oh, and yeah. The game itself is really fun to play!

Resident Evil: Village’s power progression

So, spoilers for the first half of Resident Evil: Village. No way to avoid them, sorry. But man, I love the way this game handles power progression! You start off so weak, just trying to escape from scripted combat encounters. You’re hounded through a snowy village by infinitely spawning enemies, only to be inevitably bound and captured, forced to listen passively while the Four Lords argue over who gets to kill you. You crawl and scrape through Heisenberg Jigsaw’s mean bean machine, then sneak around the lavish Castle Dimitrescu, barely evading the seemingly-immortal vampire ladies keen to prey on you.

And then you’re caught again, and you just barely slip away, again, by ripping apart your own hand. But then, oh baby! You ever-so-gradually get more resilient and better-equipped, killing your captors one by one, the first almost by accident, the subsequent ones with intention. The hunted becomes the hunter! You get to know the Duke, breathing easy in his impregnable pop-up store as you spend the vampires’ treasure to upgrade your weapons. By the time you fight Lady Dimitrescu, the game’s first real boss, the power progression has inclined so gradually and steadily that your victory over a vampiric centaur-dragon seems only natural. You’ve gotten pretty strong now. You explore the village, much better-equipped than you were earlier, capable of killing anything you encounter. The helpful Duke points you towards your next goal: the Beneviento manor. Just a house! Not even a castle! How hard could it be?

Right at this moment, when nothing seems like a real threat anymore, the game pulls the rug out from under you, taking all of your weapons and forcing you to creep around again. You’re taunted with jumpscares and creepy notes from beyond the grave and forced into an extended lights-out escape-room segment where guns would be useless even if you had them. Suffice it to say you’re back on the bottom of the food chain.

By functionally resetting the power progression halfway through the game, Resident Evil: Village avoids the survival horror power creep that’s so poisonous to maintaining an atmosphere of dread. Following the Beneviento manor segment, the slow, steady incline established in Castle Dimitrescu resumes, culminating beautifully at the end of the fourth act. You do, in fact, get strong again. But Resident Evil: Village keeps the tension high by peppering in the odd high-health miniboss or unbeatable fish monster, reminding you regularly that it’s their village. You’re just visiting.

Psychonauts 2’s empathy

I was raised on Tim Schafer games and Jesus, but Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango made a deeper mark on my soul than anything in the Bible (Except the plagues. I couldn’t get enough of the plagues. Be careful what you wish for!). When Psychonauts came out in 2005, I was one of the several dozen people who bought it. I absolutely loved it, but, as we all know, the game didn’t do very well initially. I abandoned my faith in the god of Abraham that same year. I’m not saying they’re directly related, but, well. You can connect the dots. The pale march of time vindicated Psychonauts, however, allowing for a full sequel, all these many years later (At least one of my teenage belief systems paid off!).

I went into Psychonauts 2 with loud enthusiasm and quiet doubts. As excited as I was to pick up where things had left off…things had left off in 2005. The world’s moved on substantially since then, and the best of us have moved with it. In this particular case, we’ve evolved in how we depict mental illness. It’s easy to forget just how much of a punching bag the neurodivergent were in the comedy of the 1990s and 2000s. This is somewhat true, unfortunately, in Psychonauts. The back half takes place in an abandoned mental institution and the minds of its mentally ill former patients. While these characters are sympathetic, and ultimately healed by Raz, the basic nature of their mental illness is still played for laughs–look, this crazy guy’s in a straightjacket, so he has to play the board game with his teeth! Hilarious!

Just to be clear, this isn’t some decade-and-half-late, bad-faith callout post for Psychonauts. It’s ultimately a game with a lot of empathy for those suffering mental illness, especially considering the climate it was released in. That said, I was still a little nervous about it going into Psychonauts 2.

I needn’t have worried. Psychonauts 2 is an extremely kind, empathetic game, with an even more nuanced conception of the relationship between trauma and neurodivergence than its predecessor. In “Hollis' Classroom,” an early Psychonauts 2 level, Raz, the main character, changes some things around in his teacher Forsythe Hollis’ mind in order to get her to let him go on a mission, and the results are disastrous. After the damage is undone–which takes some time, as it takes a lot more work to heal a mind than it does to harm it–Hollis and Raz have a conversation about how violating his actions were, and what a betrayal of trust they represented. The wild thing is, entering people’s minds without their permission and changing things around to get past real-world obstacles was the entire premise of the back half of Psychonauts! This shift is all over Psychonauts 2–just as another example, Raz always gets permission from people before he first enters their mind through his psycho-portal, whereas in Psychonauts he mostly just sneaks up and dives right in.

This resonated with me most deeply in “Bob’s Bottles,” the level set in the mind of Bob Zanotto. Bob is an alcoholic mourning the loss of his husband, for which he blames himself. He’s withdrawn from the world completely, locking himself in a greenhouse and drinking himself into isolated, self-loathing oblivion.

I’m also an alcoholic, though fortunately I’m one in recovery. Alcoholism is a disease. Like most diseases, it’s not something you do to yourself. It’s something that you catch, something that germinates inside you, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. It usually stems from what’s called a “root”--some past trauma that causes us to turn to alcohol as a comfort, or an escape, or a means of self-medicating something else. Bob’s root is his aunt, who, like Bob in the present, dealt with the pain of losing her husband by isolating herself in a greenhouse and drinking to numb the grief. When she died herself, Bob entered her greenhouse, and his addiction and psychic powers blossomed.

Alcohol addiction is complicated. It can make you cocky, make you believe you’re in control of something that’s in control of you, like Bob’s severed head believing he’s in control of the bird that’s carrying him by the hair. “Caught?” Bulb Bob asks, rejecting Raz’s offer of help. “I got this feathered ferry service right where I want him.” At the same time, it can make you believe you don’t deserve love. It can poison your ability to accept help from people who care about you, even when you do realize you need it. Bob’s mental projections of his friends and family members all say awful things about him. But they’re mirroring his own self-hatred, not reality. As Raz points out, Bob’s mental image of his niece Lili has a totally different voice than the real Lili because Bob’s never met her. He doesn’t think he deserves to.

But alcoholism can be comfortable in the short term. It can seem easier than the alternative. The moth that represents Bob’s drinking problem spins him into a safe little cocoon, tucked away from the world, warm and numb. That can be a hard cocoon to break out of. Ultimately, it takes Bob’s mental projection of his husband saying something Bob knows he never would to shake Bob out of his detached oblivion. We call this a “moment of clarity.” It’s not just the recognition that you have a problem, but the sudden awareness that you’re the only one capable of fixing it.

I’m almost six years dry as I write this, but, like Bob, I’m still an alcoholic, because it’s not something that dies when it’s starved. It just stays hungry. It’s always there, watching, waiting for weakness. The past couple years have not been especially easy, but I take them one day at a time. Or as Bob says, once he’s back on the road to recovery, “Inch by inch, row by row..."