2021 feels like it was a complete whirlwind of new games (...in addition to other stuff, I guess, but we’re just talking games here). By my count, I played forty-two games this year, more than half of which are from this year. And so, here we are with a year-end list of my favorite releases, all of which are worthy of a ‘top spot’ for a traditional GOTY award in my estimation. I still have a backlog of eight or so from this year I couldn’t get to – notably absent from this list are The Eternal Cylinder, Cruelty Squad, and Psychonauts 2, all of which I am highly looking forward to. For other odds and ends I didn’t mention, I recently started keeping a Backloggd account of my plays, as well. I also don’t have much to say about it but I want to give an honorable mention to The Forgotten City as well. So, with all that out of the way, let’s get on to the list, in no particular order!

Deathloop (played on PC)

One of the freshest FPSes I’ve ever played, Deathloop is a real tour de force, showing off in spades what a lot of AAA games want to have; yet it also feels like a AA game in a really good way – a bit scrappy, hungry, and experimental. It’s mostly an FPS immersive sim with a Groundhog Day setup, but it also has roguelike elements and some menu-based strategic planning to your ‘loops’, all of which plays very well together. The world design, and especially the guns, are joyfully kitbashed with vintage alt-history aesthetics, and the narrative presentation, as you come to understand the story you’ve been placed in the middle of, is just magnificent. The dialogue is unnaturally fast and witty to the extreme, and somehow that’s in a good way? I think there’s just enough handholding without feeling like the type of modern game that plays at nonlinearity but doesn’t actually allow it; and there’s a ton of open-ended solutions and puzzles that are just presented to you assuming you’re smart enough to figure them out (this is a great thing, to be clear). A really remarkable outing. Also I love wenjie evans WHERE is all the yuri art of wenjie evans

NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139... (played on PS5)

My favorite RPG ever. Music that is evocative beyond worldly description. A beautiful, incredibly tragic world with beautiful, incredibly tragic characters. Writing that elevates the trappings of RPG quest design with wit, heart, and profound empathy – the fact that Kainé and Emil are who they are and are written like they’re written makes my heart warble with deep happiness. There are constantly little twists on form and camera positioning added that help keep the game fresh throughout the whole runtime, 4 “playthroughs”* and all. And this remake brings with it combat that’s probably actually as fun as it probably was intended to be in the original 2010 release! The ultimate video game incarnation of “bittersweet” as the emotional goal.

*In case anyone reading this is unaware of or confused about the format that Yoko Taro-directed games often have with “different endings” and such, I’ll explain briefly: the intended story is larger than one playthrough of the game. One playthrough could be considered an extended theatrical act, or just one part of the whole story. In both Nier games, you’re intended to play several times to progress through endings A, B, C, and beyond to get the whole story, and to serve that, the individual parts’ stories can change drastically between playthroughs, with new or alternate gameplay sections and significantly altered dialogue and narrative framing in many cases. Sure, some bits are repeated verbatim, but often your character abilities persist across playthroughs and make those repeated bits simpler or trivial on the repeat play; or you apply some thought and figure out how much of that repeat stuff is actually required to progress through the main story. This is a feature, not a bug; as you re-watch a favorite movie, listen to the same song more than once, or re-read a beloved book and find tons of new things to appreciate about all of them, so too does Nier encourage you to review your journey and contemplate it as part of the experience rather than simply of your own volition. If you find your attention drifting during some lulls in the journey, try singing along to some of the music. You’ll enjoy it.

Unsighted (played on Switch)

I’m not one to ever invoke the idea of an “instant classic”, but the degree to which Unsighted burrowed into my heart and mind just makes me think of the phrase easily. It’s a debut title by a mainly two-person team with a complete kitchen sink of mechanics and systems, in such a way that I’d typically feel that many of those systems ought to be cut – not least for developer time and effort on making them all work decently together. There’s crafting, there’s guns and tactical reloads, there’s elemental melee weapons, there’s wall-jumping, there’s ludicrous methods of movement, there’s massively important time limits of narrative and gameplay experience, there’s exploration and puzzle dungeons in an open world, there’s unique takes on character ability customization and consumable items, there’s Estus flasks… and yet, it somehow all exists in harmony, with nothing really taking up more UX space than it needs to. This is, deceptively, a 2D action game, but the actual platforming and gameplay is basically a 3D experience. It’s a game you need to invest a little into, since it can be punishing like a good Souls game at times, but somehow it all sings together. Also, the soundtrack is full of absolute bangers. It didn’t quite burrow all the way into my tender heart, but I loved it all the same, like a close friend you can always talk to without tension.

Inscryption (played on PC)

Extraordinarily good, formally experimental, a card game that’s a love letter to card games while also being its own great terror (not really horror, y’know? but heavily using terror) story. A lot of shades of Undertale in its sensibilities, including some great comedy. Best for one to experience without too much outside context.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC (played on PC)

It’s more Outer Wilds! It’s really, really excellent just like the original release, and the devs have kept updating the game over the years to address logical pitfalls that some players may fall into while trying to make their way through the puzzles of the universe – in fact, there’s already been a significant patch to change many potential pain points in this new DLC, which is great since my playthrough ran into several of those pretty harshly, which complicated my thoughts on the release quite a bit. But after I’d completed it and gotten some distance, I started to understand how the areas in question were supposed to work, and seeing that intent, coupled with the confidence that the developers would update the game to address those things in time, was good enough for me. And they did update it! It’s wonderful to see devs that pay close attention to the UX of their works, and are at a small enough scale that they can make decently large changes to make the experience better for future players. Outer Wilds is a beautiful game, and this DLC folds in perfectly to the rest of it, so new players also get to just experience it along with everything else in there – I highly recommend going back to play it if you haven’t already.

Hitman 3 (played on PC)

Not actually what I’d say is one of my “favorites” of the year without significant qualifications, but incredibly interesting so I want to talk about it anyways. There were clearly big limitations on the development of this installment, given the size and scope of Hitman 2 and the fewer maps and fewer ‘mission stories’ in this one, and it’s hard for me not to feel some… sympathetic pity? about it? The scale of Hitman 2, including its two post-launch maps, really was an incredible boon to its experience, and 3 just doesn’t feel up to that bar. However, it’s in such a way where I have to assume there were significant resource constraints after the first game’s initial poor launch, IO Interactive’s subsequently being sold off and then going independent, and then Warner Bros. publishing the second game, and then not publishing the third game – I could be completely making up a lack of resources for 3 that didn’t actually exist, though. Regardless of the context, Hitman games live and die on their collection of sandboxes, and this game unfortunately has two or three rather lacking locales among its offerings.

But on the bright side: Hitman 3’s narrative presentation was quite good this go around, and it also contains what I think might be the coolest Hitman map ever, if not just one of the top three maps of the triology. The game also lets you play all of Hitman 1 & Hitman 2 inside of it as they’re all based on the same fundamentals, which is fantastic stuff since all three games are very worth playing. And, for what it’s worth, even the lacking maps of 3 are fun for at least a few playthroughs with a few different mission stories to enact; it’s really only when comparing them to other maps in the series that they fall a bit short. Please don’t take all these caveats as a sign I don’t recommend Hitman 3, though; Hitman 2 is one of my all-time favorites, so it’s hard to match up to, and the modern Hitman trilogy is incredibly fun in so many dimensions that you really, really ought to experience this fantastic sandbox firsthand. Check out some speedruns and randomizer races too, or hey, try some of that out for yourself, too!

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (played on Switch)

The Ace Attorney series has been a staple of my favorites ever since I first presented a single piece of contradictory evidence in the first game: The music stops suddenly, and Phoenix Wright’s exclamatory yell rings out in the silence while its speech bubble momentarily takes over the screen. The narrative created by the witness’s testimony is shattered with aplomb, hereafter to be reassembled into truth by yourself as a thrilling but familiar music cue comes in to carry you forward. Mystery stories, I reckon, are a better fit for games than any other medium before them; a visual novel with input from a player is a perfect evolution of the classic detective novel. And here, 14 years after the release of the first entry in the series, the crown jewel of the series finally released in the rest of the world after its prolonged period of Japan-only availability.

Heralding the return of Takumi Shu (the series’s creator) after 7 years of absence from AA (that’s “ace attorney”, not “double A” in games industry terminology) releases, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is the most enthralling AA game I’ve played and perhaps one of the greatest works in the canon of mystery and detective stories. It’s split into two games more for formatting than anything else; it’s very much one whole experience, and the epic trek through the story puts cases in concert with each other in excellent fashion, which is doubly exciting for longtime fans who’re used to a much less interconnected set of episodes in each entry* – here, the macro- and micro- narratives are woven together perfectly. The pacing for such a mammoth script was quite good as well for my tastes, barring a few occasional case sections that get a little long in the tooth, such as this second game’s third case, but that comes with the territory, and didn’t hurt the rest when it moved on from those bits. That huge script sticks the landing and pays off, too. My sense of triumph at the climax of the whole affair was as intense as any I’ve felt in other games with… y’know, gameplay, for lack of a better word.

I mentioned “the rest of the world” – the first of the Great Ace Attorney games released in Japan in 2015, so this official collection has been a long time coming. I played the first game in 2019 through the Scarlet Study fan localization; I felt that they did a great job on that and I want to mention their work here, as it really was meaningful. I would have gladly played through the second game through their efforts had this official release not happened; though happily, this official localization is also very good. And before I forget to mention the presentation of this game, the art is amazing – the 3D animation in the more recent games has gotten stunningly good, to the point where I’m fully satisfied with it even as someone with a huge fondness for the GBA- and DS-era sprite art used in AA games 1 through 4. Every artistic discipline on this game really, really did knock it out of the park. Sublime.

*Although, I must give kudos to the 6th regular series game here; I felt that the odd-numbered cases in that were also quite well-done, constructive with each other, and up to the bar of quality set by Takumi’s contributions to 1 through 4. I hope the 7th main series game meets that bar as well!

Destiny 2: Year 4 (played on PC)

I say this every year, it feels like, but it’s ludicrous how much Destiny has improved in the last year. Year 4 (Seasons 12-15) has been, once again, the best the game’s ever been. Instead of recapping, I’m going to now try my best yet at explaining why I love the game so much.

Destiny has always been a game that requires investment, and gives back in spades for those who appreciate magic. I use such a vague word because the appeal of Destiny is impossible to nail down – for one, there’s the mechanical FPS gameplay, which is world-beating in sumptuousness and smoothness while remaining tactile and pliable; for another, there’s the ridiculously large and great library of literature that exists in concert with the game, shading in character personalities with short fiction passages and building entire books’ worth of simultaneously thoughtful, complex, humorous, and devastating writing. There’s the visual presentation of the game, which unceasingly presents evocative and beautifully realized worlds of sci-fi, fantasy, and everything in between; and then there’s the lovely inventory experience of finding fantastical new weapons and armor with perks and mods and personality – little flavorful fragments of the world with yet more little assortments of randomized gameplay additions and power fantasies to experience, bonded together with those clothes and props. This taps into the slot machine aspect of many modern games, but without monetized pulls and rolls and whatnot. Instead of having the mental joust of figuring out how to build a party in a real-money gacha, which is often genuinely satisfying once past the “do I spend, and if so, how much?” battle, you can just play Destiny. You accumulate piecemeal your hoard of solutions with which to solve problems of combat (and fashion) from the large selection of play experiences the game has to offer, which drop shiny new items into your hands at a good pace.

Every one of these facets comes together into a fantastically compelling essence that reaches into your artistic mind and reconfigures bits of it into excitement-shapes, sometimes frustration-shapes*, and often pure pleasure-shapes. There simply is no other game that thinks like Destiny, and its mode of thinking is erudite, esoteric, and visionary. To be moved into a fictional, beautiful world by profound artistry in every creative avenue conceivable; that is magic.

*As with anything as complex as this, there is friction and difficulty in understanding its workings; and yet often in Destiny I find that this can be as metatextually rewarding as gameplay success. For one example, the in-game item management of your hundreds of weapons and armor pieces you craft into builds is woefully inadequate. There are people who understandably think the game has a broken artery here; how could anyone work with this? Then you search online – how DOES anyone work with this?? – and dip your toes into community resources, where excellent utilities exist created by other fans using the deep interfunctionality the game allows with outside applications. You log into Destiny Item Manager (DIM) and discover that the people playing the game solve problems, and already have solved problems, sometimes in ways that are better than the developers might think of, or more often, far more realized than what the developers could reasonably implement into the game itself. As you realize that this symbiotic system perhaps works better in some ways than what other games might do, you accrue a new mode of thinking, an orthogonal solution to an open-ended problem: you’ve taken a step towards being Destinybrained. The internet’s global brain is often greater than the self, and both of those things can learn, and have learned, to play Destiny like the ensemble of instruments that it is.

So with all of that said, and all these games mentioned, that’s the list. I suppose 2021 has been a year of embracing metatextuality in games for me. The messiness of interactability can, and does, make these works multiplicatively more complex than that which came before them, and embracing that with empathy and an open mind will do wonders for your understanding. You (both the protagonist and the player) may not always be the most important part in these worlds, only a guest – yet you are always a participant. Participate constructively.