It has definitely been a unique and terrifying year, in a string of unique and terrifying years. At this point, the state of the world is such a belabored topic that it’s become its own joke of sorts. So rather than dwell on that, let us take a moment to reflect on the games that came out in 2021.
And as it happens, there was a lot to like in 2021, purely in the realm of games (and ignoring the horrific conditions in which they’re made for the moment). Remember that just because a game doesn’t show up on this list doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s possible that either I missed it or that it didn’t leave a strong enough impression on me to talk about. So without further ado, and presented in a random order, my highlights of 2021 are:
Metroid: Dread
While I’ve played my fair share of Metriodvanias, I must confess that up until this year I hadn’t touched a single game in the Metroid franchise. I knew some bits of the lore from osmosis, but the games themselves were blind spots for me.
This changed when I booted up Metroid: Dread for the first time, and it was love at first sight. I couldn’t bring myself to put it down, making fast progress through the campaign as I compared notes with my Discord friends, helping each other get unstuck and beat bosses that we couldn’t quite figure out.
The biggest two aspects of Dread worth shouting out are the EMMI fights and the parry system. Encounters like the EMMIs, nigh-invincible robots that need to be avoided until the player acquires the tool to beat them, can be frustrating if implemented poorly, but I rarely felt cheated or annoyed by them in my playthrough. Metroid: Dread takes great pains to make sure that players don’t lose an insufferable amount of progress if they are caught, even offering them an admittedly semi-random saving throw in the form of a parry window if they fail to evade them.
And while it is especially satisfying to successfully parry an EMMI, the same could be said of normal enemies too. That sensation of timing my counter and following up with a devastating riposte never lost its luster from the beginning to the end of the game. Shout-outs also go to the bosses that can be parried to both regain a significant amount of health and ammo and trigger a brief in-game cutscene in which the player is free to pelt the boss while safe from further attacks.
Despite the name, there was nothing dreadful about this Metroid game.
Deathloop
Well, this was certainly one of my most anticipated games of the year, for sure. Ever since Dishonored, a franchise that remains on my short list of personal favorites, came out, there has not been a game from Arkane Studios that wasn’t right up my alley. Deathloop is no exception.
Though it doesn’t do any one thing well enough to stand out, the uniqueness comes from how it effortlessly blends the kind of roguelike/timeloop nature of its world with invasion mechanics straight out of Dark Souls and a Dishonored-like approach to immersive sim level design. It’s the kind of game that’s difficult to explain on paper, but in practice almost instantly clicked for me. And with the conspicuous absence of Dishonored’s Chaos system, I was free to murder to my heart’s content.
This is all before we get to the glue which ties the entire game together, which is the performances of Jason E. Kelley and Ozioma Akagha as the lead characters Colt and Juliana. The personality and chemistry of the two characters as they take verbal and literal potshots at each other has made me laugh more than most other games I’ve played this year. They feel like genuine people, strengthening the attachment I have to them.
If I had a Game of the Year, this would be a strong contender. As it stands, it’ll need to settle for a spot on the list.
Neo: The World Ends with You
The fact that this game exists at all astounds me because I never imagined Square Enix would ever make a sequel to The World Ends With You. Though I do not hold the same love in my heart for it as I do the original TWEWY, that merely signals that Neo: NWEWY did its job in modernizing the concepts from that first game.
Being a game from 2007, The World Ends With You comes from an era where the internet had become a fixture in modern society but had not yet been plagued by algorithm-driven social media hellscape that dominates its more current incarnation. Despite being from an entirely different nation and culture, the central cast reminded me of people I knew in my teenage years. The protagonist Neku Sakuraba, for better and for worse, felt exactly like the type of disaffected asshole that I regret to admit I was as a teenager. And its lesson about opening yourself up to other people and the world around you is something I still carry with me to this day.
By contrast, Neo: TWEWT takes the concepts established by the first game and uses them to tell a new story aimed at a new breed of teenager, one who has grown up inundated by mass media and social networking. Rather than act the way teenagers from my childhood would, they act in ways more appropriate to the next generation, who came after mine. And it tackles the more interconnected nature of our society in comparison to the one that its predecessor was designed in. While it wasn’t quite meant for me, I still felt like I gained from the experience.
There’s a simple joy in exploring the streets of Shibuya enough to the point where once the story told me the district I had to go to, I already had a plan forming in my head of not only how to get there, but which shops to hit along the way to buy new outfits for my team. It hits the pleasure center of my brain in the same way that ordering “The Usual” from the burger joint at Scramble Crossing does, having built up my relationship with the staff. These little details give the player a sense of place and belonging that so many other games miss out on.
Maybe it wasn’t for me the way I wanted it to be, but goddammit Neo: TWEWY was a great experience regardless.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Cheers to Maurice Leblanc, because the only reason these games can even see the light of day is that his Herlock Sholmes character has finally entered public domain.
Frankly, it’s a crime that The Great Ace Attorney took this long to be localized in America and Europe. With the signature charm and humor that the franchise is known for, the Great Ace Attorney sets its sights on Meiji-era Japan, Victorian-era London, and how the latter, in all of its imperialist tendencies influenced the former and its development. It does so through the lens of Ryunosuke Naruhado, a Japanese foreign exchange student studying and practicing law in Britain. Though it doesn’t go as far as I would have liked it to, discussing these topics, including the racism of British society towards “uncultured” nations like Japan is bold in a way I can appreciate.
Credit also goes to the localization team for explicitly casting actors who, like the protagonist and his assistant Susato Mikotoba, were born and raised in Japan in their early years before migrating to England later in life. That authenticity is reflected in their performances, introducing an air of believability into the characters themselves.
Additionally, The Great Ace Attorney makes expert use of this setting to revitalize franchise mechanics in new ways. Since most of the cases take place in a British courtroom, where trial-by-jury is the law of the land, there will be moments where the jury will hasten to a guilty verdict. When that happens, we get to use the new Summation Examination mechanic to pit jurors’ contradictory opinions against each other to sway them into continuing the trial, adding a new variety to the traditional gameplay loop of finding contradictions in witness statements.
But by far, the biggest addition lies in the Investigation half of the game. At this point, it’s impossible to have a mystery game take place in Victorian London without invoking Sherlock Hol- I mean Herlock Sholmes, the great detective. With a flair for the dramatic, he’ll swoop in to make bold deductions about the scene of the crime based on the evidence at hand… except he’ll usually make more than a few blunders on the way to his conclusion. What follows is a masterful use of cinematography and presentation as we help steer the great detective back onto the Wright path by changing his objects of focus so that he can form a more reasonable and accurate assessment. If you don’t mind some spoilers, it’s worth watching one of these Dances of Deduction unfold with your own eyes, since my words would be able to do it justice.
If you have any interest in detective/mystery fiction, and you haven’t played any of the Ace Attorney games, the Great Ace Attorney would serve as an excellent jumping-on point.
Legends of Runeterra
I don’t have much to say on Runeterra, admittedly, but in a world where nearly every digital card game has annoyed or upset me in some way, I still enjoy logging in and completing my dailies. I will never have an interest in League of Legends, but I can offer no stronger praise to Legends of Runeterra than the simple fact that it’s the one digital card game client that I’ve yet to abandon in a sea full of ones than I have.
Persona 5 Strikers
This will be the first in two games that make me go “Wait, this came out in 2021!?”. By the time I got around to playing it this past summer, it already felt like a game that passed me by.
Over the past few years, I’ve had something of a rocky relationship with ATLUS in general and the Persona franchise in particular. By the time Persona 5 Royale came into the mix, I had lost interest in Persona, largely because despite all of the gameplay and quality of life changes in Persona 5, I wasn’t as attached to the Phantom Thieves as I was to SEES or the Investigation Team.
But apparently, all it took was for Strikers to go on sale one day for me to at least give the franchise another chance. Taking place over the course of a summer road trip across Japan (complete with yet another disastrous evil plaguing society at large), Strikers did a far better job of fleshing out the Phantom Thieves and their relationships with each other than their original game ever did, and what they see in their leader, Joker. Without social links/confidants, the group takes center stage and the game is honestly better off for it.
It’s also fun to see another take on the typical Persona formula, this time through the lens of a Musou game. Don’t make the same mistake I and many others did at first blush though, because this is a JRPG through and through, with a lengthy 40-50 hour campaign. The battles have been scaled up, but it’s still important to exploit weaknesses and go for those all-out attacks that the series is known for at this point.
And though series composer Shoji Meguro did not work on this soundtrack, having since moved onto greener pastures, songs like Daredevil leave me hopeful that future ATLUS games will still have the chops to maintain the high bar they’ve set themselves musically.
I went in with a vote of no-faith in the Persona franchise, and I came out convinced that the well hasn’t fully dried up despite ATLUS’s fervent milking of it.
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
It’s no secret that over the last year and a half, I’ve become deeply engrossed in the hit MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, with a free trial meme that has officially outlasted the actual free trial due to server congestion as of the time of writing.
For those who have been disengaged from social media over the past month, the latest expansion, Endwalker, has been released. And like the previous expansions, it represents an entire JRPG campaign. Unlike the previous expansions, this one resolves the long-running storyline that has been built up since the original shitty version of Final Fantasy XIV back before it was salvaged into the behemoth it has become.
This makes it difficult to talk about. For those who have been playing FFXIV, saying anything more would risk spoiling their experience if they’ve been unable to play thanks to the queue issue which has finally started to die down. And for those who have not given themselves over to one of the three Grand Companies of Eoreza, any attempt to explain what makes this expansion hit as hard as it does would seem nigh incomprehensible. Part of what makes it work is that there’s a massive body of story and lore established over roughly a decade that has been built up and is being cashed in on.
And while that’s the main draw for me, I’ve also had a blast with the new Reaper and Sage classes. Though I have some issues with the updates to my old classes, namely that Dark Knight got practically nothing and Red Mage’s Acceleration tweaks have been screwing with my muscle memory, I’m generally fond of where they’ve taken the classes I play. (Shout out to the new Astrologian.)
It’s a good time to be a Final Fantasy XIV player, especially if you’re like me and taking part in your first raid static.
Inscryption
Unfortunately, the nature of the beast limits what I can say without ruining the experience for others, but even if you have no interest in roguelike deck-builders I strongly recommend giving Inscryption a try. It leverages the medium in ways that are still shockingly new and novel despite how obvious they seem in hindsight. On top of that, there’s a well-made card game at its core, with some new takes on the genre that I genuinely believe more games should make use of.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
I will always be in the mood for another Ratchet and Clank game, but especially one which was built without crunching the team at Insomniac Games. Certainly, the game may be safe in many respects with its overall glow and structure, but with a formula as tried and true as Ratchet and Clank’s, there was little need to make major overhauls.
As someone used to long loading times in modern games, I couldn’t help but be impressed with how Rift Apart leveraged the new hardware it had access to, to accomplish such a technically impressive sequence as the end of the opening, where we’re teleported to almost every level in the game in real-time. Even more impressive on replay, once I recognized the full-level maps that we were transported to in that sequence.
I am also fond of the game’s writing. The series might lack the punch that it had back in the PS2-era, but taken for what it has become it’s still a powerful throwback to the kind of Saturday morning cartoons and Pixar films that I must have watched hundreds of times as a child. Especially in these times, having the video game equivalent of comfort food can help salve the aches and pains of the soul.
That’s what Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart was to me.
Bravely Default 2
Perhaps my favorite games in the Final Fantasy series are FF V and FF Tactics: The War of the Lions. Between them, the commonality is that they have flexible job systems that allow me to mix and match the strengths of various playable classes to create powerful combinations that can wipe the floor with my enemies. Harking back to that tradition is part of what kept me hooked on the original Bravely Default and Bravely Second.
In theory, a game that builds on that by anticipating my attempts to break it and forcing me out of my comfort zone, making me adapt, would only serve to frustrate me. And yet, as one of the early bosses hit me with “Counter Martial Arts”, punishing me for my overreliance on the Monk skills that devastate all of the random encounters, my thoughts instead turn to what other possible skill combination I could use instead, or whether or not it would be possible to just soak the counterattacks and beat them in a DPS race.
It is rare for turn-based combat to routinely engage me as much as Bravely Default 2 did. Building on the systems of the previous games, the development team clearly went in with increased confidence, and the final product is all the better for it. Where the previous games felt like traditional Final Fantasy games that had an additional layer of turn management overlaid on top, those same turn management mechanics feel integrated into the core of Bravely Default 2’s combat. Not only have enemies finally learned that they are also capable of storing and using additional turns in the same way as the player, but they have abilities that bank of the use of those turns to make some truly harrowing matches. Taking an even bolder step forward, players can make use of these extra turns, in the form of “Brave Points”, and spend them in the same way they would spend HP (another very fascinating method of allowing players to use their resources) and MP to initiate even more powerful attacks.
If you often find yourself bored of traditional RPG combat, Bravely Default 2 would be worth trying for how it plays with that formula in bold and surprisingly innovative ways.
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
Always looking out for new murder mystery experiences, it was only natural that I would turn my attention to Frogware at some point. After playing The Sunken City and some of their Sherlock Holmes games, they’re a team I know I can trust to give me exactly the kind of genre fiction adventure game I need to satisfy that itch, to pretend just for a moment that I’m the type of great detective I love reading about.
Unlike many others in the genre, there is no one way to solve each case. It is up to the player to ponder the facts and arrive at the conclusion that resonates most strongly with them, even if doing so means that they can sometimes arrive at the wrong one. For that reason, arriving at the truth feels all the more satisfying.
I also appreciated the way they characterize Sherlock through the relationship he has with his imaginary friend Jon, in this prequel that takes place before he lived at Baker Street with Dr. Watson. His playfulness both contrasts and highlights the more morose and dour personality of Holmes himself. It goes a long way towards humanizing the character while toeing the line mandated by the Doyle estate (see: the entry on Great Ace Attorney).
This is all an elaborate way for me to say “Please play this game and support Frogware. I love this dev team and the games they produce and they keep getting screwed by publishers.”
The Forgotten City
This is one of those games that took me by complete surprise. Time loops became something of a theme in gaming this year, and The Forgotten City made strong use of the time loop mechanic in its own right.
The premise is that we are a modern man, thrust into an ancient Roman city that has one rule. Known as “The Golden Rule”, the law states that if anyone in the city sins, then everyone dies. We’re charged with figuring out who will break that rule and stopping them from doing so.
One of the most interesting aspects of the game is that it tackles the uncomfortable implications behind its setting and premise by the horns. Because ancient roman society is so vastly different than our own, our systems of morality clash with that of one the world we’re transported to in fascinating ways that call both into question. Additionally, the idea of what constitutes a “sin”, and how subjective that can and must be, becomes vital to the web we’re tasked with unraveling.
It may have started its life as a Skyrim mod (a fact that becomes obvious once you start the game), but it’s since grown into so much more. Considering the size of the team, I can’t help but be impressed by The Forgotten City.
Psychonauts 2
Like Ratchet and Clank, Psychonauts 2 brought me back to those early days of my childhood with its charming art style and platforming.
But more than that, it deserves mention for the extremely gentle hand with which it handles the mental health issues that it addresses in the course of its campaign. It doesn’t judge its cast for their PTSD, hypersensitivity, or in one particularly touching case alcoholism. Rather, it empathizes with them and allows the player to do so in kind, and a touch of Double Fine’s signature humor to help the darker bits go down more gently.
Although it deserves praise for much more than that, like how much more fun the moment-to-moment gameplay is here compared to the original Psychonauts and how they don’t have a level anywhere near as painful as the Meat Circus, my big takeaway is that I can hold it up as an example for how to address mental health in fiction.
Lake
When I think of Lake, the words that come to mind are “pleasant” and “quaint”. We assume the role of a 1980s tech worker named Meredith, who takes time off work to go back to her small, lakeside hometown in the middle of the US and assume her father’s role as the town’s mailman for a few weeks. Every day, we get our packages, drive around town, and deliver them while making small talk and afternoon plans with the people in town.
That’s about it. There aren’t any bodies to find or demonic cults slowly taking over the town. Here, the issues are far more mundane. The local park ranger wants to stop an apartment complex from being built on forested land, the Blockbuster is going the way of the Blockbuster, maybe a bit of illegal gambling and office politics, but nothing that would raise an eyebrow. It’s weirdly bold and impressive that the developers didn’t feel the need to raise the stakes in any way beyond “will they or won’t they” between us and some of the townsfolk. Nor is there a time limit on our deliveries. We’re free to take as much time as we want before the day comes to an end.
It was exactly the kind of game I wanted to play this year. Not the game with world-ending stakes, but one where I could just loosen up, slouch in my chair, and deliver mail while a beautiful mountainous lakeside forest fills the background. Sure, my character may be going through something of a mid-life crisis, but they seem to be handling it well enough that I could make time to take my old neighbor’s cat to the vet between deliveries.
If my PC was closer to my bedroom, I could probably have played Lake to wind down before going to bed, and that’s the experience I wanted from it.
Guardians of the Galaxy
From just watching the 20-minute reveal in the Square Enix press conference at E3 2021, I was fully prepared to write this game off as another mediocre game in the mold of Marvel’s The Avengers. Up until it came out, I saw nothing that compelled me to change my mind.
Then something weird began to happen, and people whose opinions I respect started to talk about how much they liked the writing and storyline. Then randomly, my friend and former Interactive Friction co-star Sam Callahan and I started chatting one night, and he too started to tell me that he had been not only playing the game but having fun with it, which surprised him more than anyone else.
One impulse purchase later, and I’m sitting with a controller in hand, assuming the role of Peter Quill trying to beat my teammate Rocket in a shooting competition while working together hunting a big space monster in the vague hopes of getting paid. Even more surprisingly, I find myself genuinely laughing as the team encounters Mantis for the first time and she enumerates all of the many, many universes in which the Guardians all suffer excruciating deaths while insisting that we’re “probably” not in one of them.
And yet, in almost the same breath I’m grieving alongside Drax as we dive into his head to truly understand how much he misses his family, further exploring how that grief can be warped and twisted to deceive others into believing obvious falsehoods. There’s a genuine soul to Guardians of the Galaxy that, as someone suffering significant MCU fatigue, I didn’t think was possible.
I fear for this game, because after The Avengers so many people will treat it as I was prepared to, as nothing more than a disposable MCU tie-in game. It’s so much more than that.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes
Even since Supermassive Games started releasing their Dark Pictures games, I look forward to the next installment coming out every Halloween so that Chris and I can play it together. This year, we even went the extra mile of going through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer mode, where the second player sees events that the first will never get the chance to see and vice-versa.
Out of the three, this one is by far the best of the set. When I was told it was going to be set in the Iraq War, I admit that I was a little nervous at first, but the game managed to thread that needle, giving the subject its due without letting it dominate the story they wanted to tell. Without spoiling it, I’ll say that I didn’t expect them to go in the direction they did, which again pleasantly surprised me.
If you’re ever in the mood for a spooky game, and you’ve got a friend to come with you on the adventure, you can do a lot worse than House of Ashes.
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
At the time Echoes of the Eye was announced, I was skeptical. It wasn’t that I doubted the skill and ability of the team at Mobius Digital to follow up their incredible indie darling, but rather that I felt that Outer Wilds was already a complete experience that didn’t need an expansion. I felt that it stood alone on its own merits, and still do.
Echoes of the Eye does an excellent job at integrating itself into the base game without feeling intrusive. More than that, it serves as a counterpoint to the pioneering spirit showcases in the base game, opting to explore the same premise from a more conservative and fearful viewpoint. To say anything more would be to ruin the experience if you’ve not played it yourself.
What I can say is that my fears this expansion would be nothing but superfluous filler weren’t realized. It’s as much a companion piece to Outer Wilds as it is a true expansion, and fans of the base game owe it to themselves to play it.
Shin Megami Tensei V
For a long time, I wasn’t even convinced SMT V was coming out, since we had no real word on it between 2021 and the announcement back in 2017. Suddenly, it was out in the wilds for everyone to play.
Ironically, despite being made by the same company, using many of the same designs, and possessing a similar mechanical focus on exploiting weaknesses to press the advantage, Shin Megami Tensei comes from a completely opposing JRPG tradition to its sibling Persona series. Where Persona focuses heavily on its story and characters, spending most of the running time either in cutscenes or hanging out/dating people to strengthen your relationships, Shin Megami Tensei places the combat and world exploration center stage.
It’s a grindy and crunchy game at its core, one that expects players to be prepared and adaptable unless they wish to go to an early grave. Having played Nocturn among many, many other SMT games before this, I went in fully prepared… until I saw that the DLC I purchased included ways to easily grind out experience and cash. I’m not ashamed to admit I made use of those options in place of grinding the old-fashioned way, and I still had a great time with the game.
That’s because even though the story isn’t the main focus, what is there was worth sinking my teeth into. For once, this isn’t a JRPG where we attack and kill God. No, by the time we hit the scene God has already been killed. We, a fusion of human and demon known as a Nahobino, are one of the few capable of claiming his throne and reshaping the world as we see fit. And as simplistic a construction as that may sound, it was enough to make me ponder how the world in-game reflected upon our world, with the lucky few privileged as they are to do what they wish, the rest of us pawns upon which to build their ideal paradise.
If you’ve ever been curious what draws so many die-hards to the SMT franchise, this is probably the best opportunity there’s ever been.
Boyfriend Dungeon
I confess that when I first heard about Boyfriend Dungeon, I was ready to let it pass me by. I’m an asexual and aromantic person, and as much I like to crack crude jokes on the subject, the truth is that sexual relations and romance in games do very little for me. One of my most vivid memories of romantic relations in video games was the time when, during my first playthrough of Mass Effect 2, I chose all of the top options in almost every dialogue. And as a result, I accidentally convinced the game that I was in a romantic relationship with Miranda when all I wanted to do was be nice and not hurt anyone’s feelings.
What sold me do Boyfriend Dungeon hearing that if I wanted to stay true to myself and remain aromantic, that was a valid option. I could befriend all of the available options while making it clear that I like and appreciate their company, but have no interest in pursuing anything more than a friendship. It’s rare that I see a game go so far out of its way to cater to explicitly me and people like me, and for that alone, I had to at least try it out.
And while that was true, there was a tension between that reality and the story on offer, which compelled me further than I would have presumed. That’s because the story being told is one about figuring out how to live with and deal with unwanted affection, and what it means to be the victim of a stalker who can’t take no for an answer. My dates understood my choices and were content to be friends with me knowing that romance was completely out of the question, but my stalker could not accept that and hounded me all throughout the story. In theory, this should have bothered me as it did many other people (understandably so), but I instead couldn’t help but dive further in.
Perhaps the game could have been longer, but honestly, I’m at a point in my life where I can respect and appreciate a game that does not feel to bloat its runtime with pointless filler. Boyfriend Dungeon stays as long as it needed to, and I appreciate it for the time I spent.
Hitman 3
As I write this, it still doesn’t feel right that Hitman 3 was released in 2021. I’ve spent so much time playing it on stream, and the pandemic has gone on for so long, that in my mind it must have been out for at least two years already. Yet, the fact remains that as of the time of writing Hitman 3 is not even a year old.
Like its older siblings, Hitman 3 became a regular fixture in my life, to the point where I’ve long since run out of things to say about it. However, this highlights list would feel naked if I didn’t at least mention it given that I’ve played almost every Elusive Target and Escalation contract released so far, and completed each of the new maps Silent Assassin, Suit Only.
All I can say is that we already know that a whole new year of content is coming, including brand new maps and targets, and I look forward to extending my time in the World of Assassination.
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Unfortunately, not every game can live up to its potential. For a multitude of reasons, there are games that just make me sad when I think about it. This section of the list is dedicated to them: My Disappointments of 2021:
Magic: Legends
As Magic: Arena continues to suffer under the weight of one of the worst economies I have ever seen in a digital card game, I continue to seek ways to engage with a game and a brand that has brought genuine, much-needed joy and stability to my life in an era dominated by… the exact opposite. I’ve made friends and relations through Magic that I intend to hold fast to in the long-term, and those people know who they are.
I tell you that so that you might understand exactly why I’m so frustrated with Magic: Legends and how it was treated by its developers and Wizards of the Coast. The translation of the world and fiction of Magic from a card game into a Diablo-style multiplayer dungeon-crawling action RPG should be an exciting and wondrous event. I would have frankly been happy with a mediocre game than nonetheless brought to life the creatures and spells I cast nearly twice a week with my playgroups.
It wasn’t enough that the game was insufferably dull and ran horribly despite not appearing to push the graphics department. As I’ve now come to expect from Wizards of the Coast, Magic: Legends has one of the most predatory business models I have ever seen in a video game. I discuss it in the stream I ran to actively discourage people from playing it. Everything, from costumes to spells to new classes, is acquired through the purchase of overpriced packs unless players want to buy them from each other for real money at incredible prices.
Fortunately, the game has since shut down since I was far from the only one to drop it the moment I understood what it was. Good riddance to this steaming hot pile of garbage.
Back 4 Blood
This is less a disappointment with the game itself and more a disappointment with me. I love Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Although it is much rarer now than it was back in the day, I still have people I can ask to join me for a round of either game and they would be quick to reinstall it so that we can enjoy an evening of each other’s company. The drop-in, drop-out ephemeral nature of the game made it easy to just pull up a random map and get started with almost no fiction.
From what I can gather from my time with the beta, there are traces of that DNA woven in the core of Back 4 Blood. And yet, the new mechanics added to the game introduce just enough friction that what I like most about Left 4 Dead has been smothered out. The new deckbuilding system encourages players to acquire cards and build decks of perks and abilities means that players no longer start on the even footing they once did. It is entirely possible to drag your team down before the match even begins because your deck is just not good enough to pull your weight in comparison to theirs.
I didn’t pick up the final release of Back 4 Blood, not because I didn’t want to or that I didn’t enjoy what I played of it. On the contrary, I had fun with that beta. The problem was that I knew if I couldn’t get a consistent group together to play and remain at a similar power level. And without that, I was destined to start falling behind other players who would stick with it far easier. There was no universe in which it clearly slotted into my gaming time, so I couldn’t pull the trigger.
That hurt more than I thought it would because I was eager to jump back into a game like it. In its current state, Back 4 Blood just inspired me to reinstall Left 4 Dead 2 and share an evening with one of my friend groups as we talked about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Twelve Minutes
There exists a timeline where Twelve Minutes is my game of the year. On paper, it had everything going for it. A time loop game taking place in a small apartment over the span of 12 minutes, where we try to figure out why a hitman disguised as a police officer has come to kill us and our pregnant wife is such an intriguing setup that I couldn’t help but throw myself into it without a moment’s hesitation.
Unfortunately, the fun of a timeloop game is in poking and prodding at the setup and scene, to see how it may be best manipulated to your advantage. And it is in this act that Twelve Minutes starts to unravel. The number of times I had to watch “Wife”, played by Daisy Ridley, slowly, uncomfortably, agonizingly, violently get choked to death by Willem Dafoe as “Cop”, just to acquire a new piece of information to take with me into the next loop, began to raise eyebrows.
Though I never did it myself, I have seen players who chose to have the protagonist “Hubby”, played by James McAvoy, do the deed themselves with a kitchen knife. Hubby is not immune to his own gruesome deaths, yet it seemed strange the degree to which they linger on her demise as opposed to his.
Normally, this is where I would say I want to avoid spoiling the experience for you, but the “truth” at the crux of the time loop, which brings the game to its conclusion is so stupid that I cannot fathom how the game came to exist in this state. Hubby and Wife are half-siblings, with the same father. While Wife thought she killed their father, her half-brother Hubby, who she never met, actually killed him while they were arguing about his incestuous love for her, his half-sister. So he hypnotized himself into getting amnesia, and later remet and fell in love with her again. Cop wants revenge on Wife for killing her father despite the fact the real killer was Hubby all along.
How does this resolve the time loop? How does this cause the time loop? I don’t know, and I’m not sure the writers did either. The star-studded cast of talented actors turning in mediocre performances for a bad script lends credence to the idea that this game seems to exist as the industry’s equivalent of “Oscar Bait”. Further, I don’t understand how this has been in development since 2015 at least. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Don’t play this game. Don’t shake its hand. Don’t look it in the eye.
Backbone
This is one of those smaller indie games that I backed on Kickstarter, so it pains me deeply to include it in my list of disappointments, doubly so since it has such a strong start. I’m a sucker for noir stories, and this was shaping up to be a good one.
The problem came with the big twist of the second half, where our raccoon detective gets bonded to an eldritch horror that the company he was investigating was experimenting on. From then on, the game shifts from the story of a noir detective in a furry world caked with a thick layer of discrimination into something of a cosmic/body horror story. I don’t hate that genre, but I came in expecting a detective story, and I couldn’t help but walk away more than a little disappointed.
I don’t necessarily regret backing the game, but at the same time, if I had known this was the intended direction, which has since been confirmed by the dev team, I don’t know if I would have backed it. This is exactly the reason I don’t call this list the “worst games of 2021”. It’s not bad, it just hit me the wrong way.
New Pokemon Snap
People I know have always talked about Pokemon Snap with reverence, the kind one gives to the staff of legends. Back in those days, I didn’t play Pokemon games. As a PlayStation kid, it was one of the experiences that passed me by. While I never bothered to try to go back to the old version, the new one coming out on Nintendo Switch seemed like the perfect chance to see what all the fuss was about.
I gave it a solid six or seven hours to try to grip me, but I found myself quickly slipping off of it and getting bored of the affair. I can see why others wanted this game but for me, the idea of having to rerun the same course time, after time, after time just to try for those few high-scoring shots that would unlock the next track just got under my skin. It felt like a form of padding and grinding, and I just wasn’t having it.
And that’s a shame because otherwise, I did enjoy the time I was having. It was fun to engage with Pokemon in this more passive manner, observing them as they existed in their native biomes with naught but a camera and a handful of other tools. The enjoyment just started to slip after I missed a few shots and needed to rerun an entire 5-10 minute track just to take another shot at it.
At the end of the day, I value my time more than that.
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And there you have it. Despite a couple of clunkers, a world on fire, and a fundamentally corrupt industry, there were a lot of strong games this year. Hopefully, as time marches on we start to address those problems and move on to a world where even better games.
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