2021 was a weird year. There were games, and there were good games, but there’s a sense that a lot of what was in development in 2019 and probably slated to come out this year has been delayed or altered as teams spent 2020 adjusting to how to work in what seems like our new normal. The physical challenges of remote work and supply chain disruption are only half the equation - how do you make what are essentially expensive children’s toys when we face shifting monthly realities about the world we live in? How do you feel about releasing that game where the streets are eerily empty and silent after some kind of unforeseen airborne illness? I’m not saying developers shouldn’t make those types of games; I’m saying we’re living in a world that’s been changed since a lot of titles went from concept to alpha to nearly shipped, and we’ve ALL faced a lot of change since then.
Still, games are cool. They can be fun, they can challenge your dexterity or your way of looking at a problem or thinking about the world in general. Or they can be an outlet where your fake Washington Nationals beat the living tar out of every opponent instead of…whatever the hell it was the real Nats did this season.
All that said, here are my Top 10 games of 2021, plus a significant chunk of honorable mentions. I also want to point out that no games from Activision Blizzard were considered for this list in any way given the ongoing stories of abuse, harassment, and a toxic culture driven by the CEO on down throughout the organization. Solidarity to those seeking to organize their workplace at ABK, and elsewhere in the industry.
Honorable Mentions
Group 1 - Big Games I Just Didn’t Play Enough Of: Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Mario Golf Super Rush, Psychonauts 2, Guardians of the Galaxy
I will play more of these games, but right now the best thing I can say is I’ve played a few hours, I liked it, and I want to play more.” I generally believe that you can have an opinion on a game without finishing it - you know pretty well if you’re enjoying your time with something or not, and it’s incredibly rare that a game’s ending is so good or bad as to change your entire opinion on the experience. With these games, I’m still early enough that I could go either way, but things are promising so far.
Group 2 - Smaller Games I Just Didn’t Play Enough Of: Axiom Verge 2, Loop Hero, 12 Minutes, Lake, To The Rescue, Everspace 2
Mostly the same as the group above, but with smaller titles that I would go as far to recommend even with not having played as much as I want. They’re all very different, but my favorite from among the bunch so far is To The Rescue, a dog shelter simulator. Also intriguing is Everspace 2, a 3D space combat game with strong Diablo influences that I just grabbed on PC Game Pass in their version of Early Access. I’m eager to see how it changes as they get ready for an official release.
Group 3 - Re-releases: Skyrim Anniversary Edition, Mass Effect Legendary Edition
It’s an updated Skyrim and all 3 of the main Mass Effect trilogy games. They’re 3 of the greatest games ever made, and Mass Effect 3 got a bum rap for an ending that was good and made perfect sense in the context of the story. Being able to play them with slightly better textures and frame rates and quality of life improvements is awesome, but I had 10 other games from 2021 that deserved more love this year.
Group 4 - The Hodgepodge: Deathloop, Magic: The Gathering Arena
Magic, a digital collectible card game, is going to be one of those games that’s in contention for a spot on my final list most years by virtue of it being a ;ive service game, with new content available multiple times a year. This year’s sets were some of the most fun to play with in years. Deathloop is an amazing thing - an immersive sim from the people at Arkane who made Dishonored and Prey, but Deathloop is a distillation and refinement of the mechanics used in those games, with some of the immersive sim elements rounded off a bit to make them more digestible and understandable to newer players. “Immersive Sims” are system heavy games where player choice dictates how you accomplish a task, and then ripples throughout the world. In Deathloop, those choices and ripples are more guided and contained, allowing for repeated exploration and experimentation. I’ve loved what I played, want to finish, and had a hard time cutting this from my final Top 10.
So here we go…
Matt’s Top 10 Games of 2021
10. Wildermyth
Wildermyth is a turn-based tactics game with procedurally generated relationships and scenarios and is just rad. I don’t know why the idea of allowing emergent story-telling to live in this style of game in a more official way that the head-cannon you build up when playing something like XCOM never caught on before, but it’s exciting. On top of it all, the game is fun and smartly written. With more time in the year, this might have moved up on my list.
9. Halo Infinite
I like the Halo franchise a lot, even if I’ve never been good at the multiplayer, and enjoy the single-player story even if I don’t hoover up every bit of lore around the series. Infinite takes some big swings and mostly hits with the more open style, borrowing from the “Ubisoft-style” open world format where taking over a tower exposes more activities on the map, while keeping a narrative framework that makes sense with a more traditional story-based campaign. And it’s fun as hell. I may rue the overuse of “combat puzzle” that Halo has inspired in writing about first-person shooters, but Halo does it best and has done it here.
8. Bravely Default 2
This is a JRPG-ass JRPG. Melodrama, slow-as-molasses story telling, a main character with amnesia, almost endless grinding to level up characters and skills…it’s ALL here. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’d love this game as much if it didn’t come out in the middle of a global pandemic where I could look at a game that asks for this kind of time requirement was a comfort, and I’m pretty sure the answer is ”Oh hell no.” I’m already happier that Guardians of the Galaxy is a tight 12-ish hour thing. But there’s always going to be an appreciation, if not a desire to play a game like this. Bravely Default 2 scratched a very time-specific itch.
7. Powerwash Simulator
The “X Simulator” genre has expanded from highly technical sims like Farming Simulator or the Eurotruck series, which require detailed management of activities and economic concerns, to more relaxed games like Powerwash Simulator. This is almost a Zen state simulator - you get a powerwasher and things to clean. Then I derived an unreasonable amount of satisfaction from seeing the simulated water remove dirt and grime. You don’t have to worry about water supplies or waste, just choose your nozzle width, upgrade your gun power-wise, and maybe buy some cleaning liquids specific to the surfaces you’re cleaning up. There are momentary bits of frustration when you can’t find the one remaining spec of dirt on a surface to fully clean it, even with their “dirt vision” to highlight what’s left. Even with that, it’s been a relaxing, immensely satisfying way to pass the time and calm my mind.
6. MLB The Show 21
As I alluded to above, the 2021 Washington Nationals season was not a thing of beauty. Thankfully I was able to spend time in MLB The Show’s Diamond Dynasty mode building a team made up of Nats present and past like Juan Soto and Bryce Harper, plus legends like Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle and Johnny Bench. Sony Sand Diego Studios just killed it by releasing a ton of content throughout the year for people who played multiplayer and single player Diamond Dynasty modes. In fact, as of this writing (12/10/21), we’re still getting new players and things to do despite being in the middle of a lockout. I’ve played a ton every year since 2018, this year was no different, and I’m guessing next year won’t be either.
5. Forza Horizon 5
Despite liking F1 racing a lot, I know nothing about cars. I can’t tune them to save my life in games like Gran Turismo or the original Forza Motorsport series. The Forza Horizon series keeps a little bit of the sim racing bones from the Motorsport series but also asks “What if we put you in a big open world and gave you access to a ton of different styles of cars and encouraged you to drive off the sides of mountains and do cool donuts and go fast?” That’s my style of car game.
4. Unpacking
Unpacking has you doing X things: you open a box, you take things out, and you put them somewhere else. That’s it. It’s still one of the most fun things I’ve done this year, and not because I’m some neat freak - far from it. You do have to put things in a “right” place (Don’t put your toaster in the sink, for example), but you can still make the spaces yours. And the intriguing part of the game is how you make these spaces your own over various moves and times throughout a lifetime. What children’s toys go on a shelf vs in a cabinet in your first room? What posters go up on your dorm room walls? How do you find space for the things that are important to you when moving in with someone? Unpacking is a shorter game, but I’m glad I didn’t blast through it. Each segment pays off if you take your time to consider what you’re doing and then what you’ve done. It was almost as satisfying as Powerwash Simulator but more thought provoking and introspective in the long run. Also, the sound design is amazing. When you set any object down on any type of surface, it really sounds like those two materials coming together. A+ attention to detail.
3. Inscription
To say too much about Inscryption is really to ruin the experience of playing Inscryption. It seems like a rogue-like deck-building game, and it is fr a chunk of it, but it is so much more. Just go play Inscryption and don’t look up anything about it.
2. Kid A Mnesiac
The “what is a game” discourse bores me. This is pitched as “an interactive Radiohead experience” and I experienced it on my Playstation 5 so I’m calling it a game. It’s like a walking simulator, a la Gone Home or What Became of Edith Finch, except instead of walking through a narrative, you’re wandering the halls of a Radiohead museum, with art and music and video and esoterica from or inspired by their time making the albums Kid A and Amnesiac. Those are easily among my favorite albums ever, so this being my number 2 game was a no-brainer.
1. Hitman 3
At the 1988 NBA 3 Point Shooting contest during All-Star Weekend, the two time defending champion Larry Bird told the other entrants beforehand ”I just want you to know you’re all playing for second place.” Then he went out and won the contest without taking off his warm-up jacket. And thus we’ve come to possibly the least surprising Game of the Year reveal I’ve ever done, naming Hitman 3 as my 2021 Game of the Year. It’s the third game in a series that has grown more confident in its execution and storytelling and challenge as it’s progressed since the 2016 reboot of the Hitman franchise. Developer IO Interactive was confident enough in its core competency of creating clockwork worlds of murder simulation that it said “Let’s take on of these levels and make it possible and highly encouraged even to recreate a Knives Out-like murder mystery.” And then nailed it. They made a final level for the series that turned the series formula mostly on its head in the name of concluding a story they’ve clearly been dying to tell, and then cracked the door open for a return, because of course someday they’ll return to their most successful property. They found a way, three games in, to ramp up the tension in a story mission with the new concept unveiled in the Berlin mission that had me literally on the edge of my seat with sweaty palms while playing it for the first time. And this didn’t weigh in my decision at all, but the game is poised for an unexpected second year of support with new maps and missions and game modes, which IO had previously all but shut the door on in favor of making their new licensed James Bond title. Even without the news earlier this month that we’d be getting more Hitman, I knew Hitman 3 was a thing I’d be returning to over and over to try new strategies, revisit old tactics, and see familiar game worlds in a new light. It was easily my favorite game of 2021.