Brad's Top 10 Games of 2021

Well, what a month/year/decade it's been. If I started in on all the changes and goings-on that took place in 2021, both for the three of us as a business and myself personally, we'd never get to the video games. So let's just get to the video games! I thought back to 2014 a lot this year, also known as "the last dry-spell year for games that happened right after new consoles came out,” and 2021 feels like it’s right up there in terms of a relatively sparse release calendar. That’s hardly surprising and entirely forgivable when developers are wrestling with the demands of both new hardware to develop for and the endless issues of working through the pandemic. 

Obviously there were still a ton of great games, as shown by the list below, but most of the ones that stuck with me were indie or bite-size or less traditional than the big triple-A new-console showcases you expect when fresh hardware is on the scene. But hey, a great game is a great game, and I tend to prefer games that experiment and attempt things I haven’t seen before, anyway, so it was actually easier to fill out a top 10 than I expected. Here is that top 10--and endless thanks to everyone who has supported us so far and made this list, and everything else, possible!

10. Metroid Dread

Metroid Dread couldn’t not be on my top 10 list, and it also couldn’t be any higher than 10. Once I’d started it, it was all I wanted to play, and yet pretty much every time I sat down to play it, I ended up turning it off in frustration. For everything it gets right–extremely tight, satisfying basic controls; surprisingly engaging storytelling; lushly rendered environments–it has just as many elements–inelegant, restrictive level design; finger-twisting button combos for special abilities; the interesting-in-concept-infuriating-in-execution EMMIs–that ended up grating on me in a way that a first-party Nintendo game rarely does. I've never gotten lost or felt like I was at a dead end so many times in the history of the franchise. Still, I couldn’t put it down till I finished it, and at any rate, the first brand new 2D Metroid game in nearly two decades is a big deal all on its own. I suppose that much like bad pizza, a middling Metroid game is still pretty good.

9. Back 4 Blood

Look, Back 4 Blood isn’t amazing, but then… maybe it’s better than it had any right to be? The shooting feels great, the movement not as much, and the levels are awfully linear at the end of the day. It’s fine. It’s fine! I admit a lot of this game’s inclusion here is riding on pure Left 4 Dead nostalgia, but it really does nail that exact same vibe with the team of four ragtag, quipping survivors, the safe rooms, the wall scrawlings, the whole shebang. And as clichéd as it is for every game to have cards and loot these days, the cards and loot actually add a ton of variety and let you min-max some interesting builds and abilities on your characters, mixed with the satisfaction of going from green to blue to purple guns on every run. Add in the modifiers that change up the enemies and environments in each level and there’s a surprising amount of staying power here. It’s pretty meat-and-potatoes, but then, who doesn’t like meat and potatoes?

8. Returnal

I’ve been a big fan of Housemarque’s arcade-y downloadable games for ages, so it was a pleasure to see how well their unique sensibilities translated into their first big triple-A third-person shooter. The sleek visual design, neon glowing projectiles, fast-paced, tight action; it’s all very Housemarque, and I had to laugh the first time I saw how well they’d pulled off their trademark brand of bullet hell in a 3D space. Also, it was pretty novel to see what is essentially a straight-up roguelike implemented in a big full-priced console shooter, actually only the first of two of those in 2021 (and hey, they turned out to be right next to each other on this list). Now that this game has a proper save system that will ensure you don’t lose your progress to the PS5’s notoriously flaky rest mode, I plan to slowly chip away at the rest of the game’s punishing levels over the coming weeks and finally see where its unusual story goes.

7. Deathloop

This was a real rollercoaster for me. Throughout the protracted tutorial, it took a while for me to get my head around what kind of game Deathloop even is, but once I did, I was white-hot excited about its mix of rogue-like mechanics, wry banter between Cole and Julianna, and trademark Arcane play-it-your-way action. I then proceeded to try to exploit/break the game as much as I could by finding visionaries I could speedrun over and over to max out my weapons and powers. That might have been too much of a good thing, since by the time I got back to charting my path (which turned out to be the only path) through the required assassinations and saw that it was all going to end up being a bit less freeform than I’d hoped, some of the shine and novelty had worn off. But Deathloop is still wildly original and more than deserves to be recognized here, especially with the cool Dark Souls-inspired invasion multiplayer. It’s certainly the most an Arkane game has ever stuck with me before.

6. Unpacking

This is such a delightful little morsel of a game that works on two levels: as a repetitive day-to-day-life busywork simulator, and also as a vehicle for a spare but touching coming-of-age tale that’s told wordlessly and about a person whom you don’t even see. It was a great time hanging out on the couch with my partner, debating where the unseen protagonist would hang their wall art, or whether they were the type of person to leave their DVDs all over the place or tidily shelved. There’s just something gratifying and serene about pondering the mundane details of daily life, even if it’s not your life. The artwork and sound design are some of the best I’ve seen (and heard) in ages; the game renders period detail like old PC hardware and video game box covers remarkably well, and it’s impressive how many details about the main character you can pick up from objects that can’t be more than a few pixels high.

5. Hitman 3

It’s still remarkable to me how far the Hitman series has come since that first episodic release in 2016 kind of came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s minds. Considering all the ups and downs IO has been through since then, that easily could have been it, but instead here we are two games later with a fine wrapup to the trilogy that dabbles in a ton of successful design experimentation, from the well executed murder myster in Dartmoor to the thrilling inversion of the Hitman formula, making you the hunted, in Berlin. They even turned it into a full-on shooter at the end! Hitman 3 feels a little reduced in scope and polish from the previous games, but it sure does go some places by the time it wraps up–and as a final frontend for all of the maps and content across the entire World of Assassination Trilogy (I can’t get enough of that phrase), it’s one of the single best values in video games. (If anyone from IO is reading this, please put the over-the-shoulder camera toggle back in! EDIT: It seems this ability is still available as an optional toggle in the gameplay options. Christmas is saved!)

4. Boomerang X

Boomerang X is the closest game to perfect on this list. I can’t really think of anything I’d criticize or change about it. It so acutely nails the feel of the mouse look and character movement in Quake, without actually being a Quake-style shooter, exactly. There are so many wild twists on that formula here. Giving you a boomerang instead of a gun forces you to manage your offense by being aware of the return time before you can attack again. Centering the damage model around big glowing weak points on the enemies–some of which are pretty damn hard to even get a line of sight on–recalls the Contras and other action games of bygone consoles. And giving you the ability to slow down time and warp to your boomerang midair eventually turns the game into this breakneck, aerial dance of death that’s as exhilarating as anything I’ve played in a first-person game in ages. The game is short, tightly designed, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and I turned right around and started over on new-game-plus when it was over. For me that’s really saying something.

3. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

Super Mario 3D World is one of the most underrated Mario games out there, although let's be fair, no game released on the Wii U ever really had a fighting chance. It's great that the zillions of Switch owners now have a chance to play it, but having myself played it back in 2013, this entry on my list is entirely about Bowser's Fury. Nintendo's mainline Mario games have contented themselves with a “Mario 64 + one extra thing” formula for 25 years now (Mario 64 + firehose, Mario 64 + planetoids, Mario 64 + costumes), but I’m so hopeful Nintendo will take the series in a more open direction next time out. Bowser’s Fury is a strong experiment in that direction, with all these bite-size Mario levels scattered around one giant map with a lot of little challenges in between them. Also, while Nintendo’s house style for recent Mario soundtracks hasn’t always been my favorite, the broad range of styles on this soundtrack is a total joy. It’s weird to feel nostalgic for a game that only came out like 11 months ago, but I look back on my time with this game really fondly for some reason. I guess a lot has happened since then.

2. Valheim

Valheim almost hits the perfect sweet spot between the emergent, resource-fueled stakes of a survival game and the endless theme-park sprawl of an MMO. In the end it turned out to be more the former than the latter (at least in its initial early access form), but there were definitely moments when I was running around with my little viking dude, coming into a beautiful clearing in the meadows or veering haphazardly into the black forest, when that World of Warcraft-esque sense of atmosphere and discovery was strong. I had a great time running a server and playing with a group in our shared world for those streams we did, building up a little village and going on sailing voyages, and then just as great a time playing solo and having a bunch of unique, tense moments in a pitch-black rainstorm when I didn’t know if I was going to make it back to my secret forest camp with all the loot I’d picked up. Like Bowser's Fury, I've got some kind of weird nostalgia around the time when this came out, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this game evolves as it approaches some kind of 1.0 release; I’d love a good reason to convince some friends to join me there again.

1. Inscryption

I know I’ve talked this game to death across various podcasts, but no other game captured my imagination so thoroughly this year as Inscryption did. The level of atmosphere, intrigue, and plain old panache just in that first act in the wood cabin–with its talking cards, escape-room mysteries, and sinister pair of eyes glowering at you from the darkness–would probably have put this game at my number one if it had ended there. Act one of Inscryption seriously has some of the most perfectly considered presentation I’ve ever seen in a game. But then of course there’s the FMV and all the other places it goes that I won’t belabor again here, in case you haven’t played it. But you should definitely play it. The card game underneath the whole thing was also really satisfying to me, which makes me very excited that Daniel Mullins is now working on turning the cabin into its own endless mode, a proper rogue-like rather than a bizarre and off-kilter story masquerading as one. While not every part of the game is as strong as that first act–and frankly, few games are–Inscryption sticks such a moving and memorable landing that I walked away feeling like I’d just finished a true classic. I just can’t think of another game like it.