Alex's Top 10 Games of 2021

God. Where do I even begin?

2021 is one of the nuttier years I’ve ever lived through. Where 2020 felt like an entire year in that Neverending Story depression swamp, 2021 was nothing but peaks and valleys. Highs and lows that bent around every possible angle to avoid anything resembling a middle. The first, ooooooh let’s say around five months of the year might as well be a blank space in my mind. Red Ventures took over Giant Bomb, but nothing really changed. COVID vaccinations kicked up, people started to tentatively venture back out into the world, but honestly, nothing really changed. I tried my damnedest to soldier on, making the content, putting in my appearances, but as the months wore on, and as we got closer to whatever would normally be the E3 period, it became abundantly clear that barring some major event jarring things loose, nothing was ever going to change so long as I stayed where I was.

The feeling that it might have been time to go peaked in March, when Vin and I spent one arduous–and if I’m being honest, a little bit cathartic–day packing up our old East Coast studio. That glorified broom closet CBS jammed us into so we wouldn’t disturb the ad sales people with our noisy gaming, the home we’d made for ourselves within its somehow simultaneously suffocating and entirely-too-thin walls, was to be torn down, dumped in boxes, then left at a storage facility God only knows where. Going through that process had a distinctly funereal feel, like going through your granddad’s belongings after he’s gone, and figuring out what stuff goes to whom, and what is going to be earmarked for the estate sale.

Then, sometime after that, Vinny told me he was going to be leaving Giant Bomb. In that moment, the unmistakable but as-yet-unaddressed feeling that it was time for a change became unbearable. I knew I was going to have to make a choice, and when faced with the possibility of being the only GB employee on the east coast, of never having another studio and continuing to do this same work for yet another corporation that may or may not even give a shit about our existence, I finally snapped. I said fuck it, and took the leap without knowing what would be on the other side. There wasn’t a plan, or even a specific hope. I just needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

Getting Nextlander off the ground was a lot of work, and a crash course in a number of things I had just never learned over the course of my professional life. I feel extraordinarily lucky that those lessons were learned alongside my extremely capable co-founders, and even more outlandishly fortunate that so many of you took the plunge and decided to support us. The months I’ve spent working on this project have renewed my spirit in a way I never could have expected, and while the rest of the world is still very much on fire–literally, in some regions–having Nextlander as a place to anchor myself has deadened a bit of that omnipresent anxiety. I’m endlessly grateful to our patrons, and even the people who just listen to our podcast or watch our Twitch streams. I will never take this outpouring of support for granted, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here with us.

With all of that said, games! That’s what you’re here for, right? I want to say here at the top that this list, like previous years, will have some notable omissions, games I either liked and just didn’t get the chance to finish, or never got around to at all. I feel like Sable would probably be on this list if I’d been able to put the proper amount of time into it. I did not like the card game aspect of Inscryption enough to stick with it, but everything that has been described to me regarding what happens in that game sounds incredible, and I’m glad it exists. JETT: The Far Shore damn near made my list as a purely vibes-based entry, but in the end I didn’t quite enjoy the act of playing it enough to knock any of these others off. These lists are never comprehensive in that way. I’m never going to have the chance to dig seriously into every game of note in a calendar year. But each one of these games stuck with me enough to feel like an important part of my year, and I think deserve recognition for that.

10. Old World

The sense I had going into 2021 was that this was gonna be a big year for 4x strategy games. Civilization VI was getting its last big update in April, and Amplitude Studios, the team behind the generally well-regarded Endless Legend and Endless Space games, were set to release Humankind, a game more or less billed as a direct challenge to the corner of the market Civ has had mostly to itself for years. In the end, though, the Civ VI update is something I played around with for a bit then mostly forgot about as the year wore on, and my time with Humankind ended up being extremely brief. Instead, Mohawk Games’ Old World ended up being the 4x game I planted myself in front of the PC for the greatest number of hours in 2021.

As you might gather from the title, Old World keeps its timeline set to the ancient world, letting you take control of civilizations like the Babylonians and Persians, and tweaks the traditional Civ formula by adding a healthy dusting of Crusader Kings inspired successive intrigue. You begin each game with a particular leader, but over time that leader will sire children, and it will be up to you to determine lines of succession and figure out things for your other family members to focus on. Over time those family members will develop their own personality traits and quirks, depending on decisions you make throughout the game. It’s a terrific twist that does just enough of the Crusader Kings thing without getting nearly as overwhelmingly dense as that franchise is generally known for. I’ve always wanted to like a Crusader Kings game, but I’ve just never been able to parse the vast majority of the things I need to in order to have any fun with those games. Translating that into a 4x style of strategy game proved far more successful.

Old World isn’t perfect by any means. It’s a first attempt that gets way more things right than not, but it does have a few issues with pacing and its UI tries its best to sort a lot of information on a screen that maybe can’t handle all of that at once. But if nothing else, Old World feels like a terrific foundation to build off of. I see some real long-term potential for this series, and I hope they get to make more of them down the road.

9. Forza Horizon 5

I want to make one thing very clear about Forza’s inclusion on this list: I liked it fine, but if I’m being real, this is more a testament to the sheer number of hours I dropped into this thing than its overall quality. Forza Horizon 5 is a very good one of these games. It is not special, or unique in any particular way. Forza Horizon 4 was probably my favorite one of these, and 5 is basically that game except set in Mexico. Mexico is a very good location for one of these. There are a lot of cars and it is comically easy to collect all of them. It looks very pretty. That’s it. That’s what I’ve got for Forza Horizon 5. Anything else I might write about it would effectively be a rehashing of what I wrote about 4, because it is the same damn thing.

Granted, that same damn thing is still enjoyable enough to me that I have now completed almost every single map objective there is, and there are a LOT of map objectives. I still periodically boot it back up to do the seasonal challenges, not because I care all that much about the rewards, but because I like driving my embarrassment of vehicles around this world, wrecking into every fucking thing in sight. I get a borderline sociopathic level of joy from obliterating whatever setting these games pick, which is perfect for a festival populated with some of the most cheerfully awful people you’ll ever meet. I hate them, I hate most of the music they listen to, I hate their clothes, I hate how insanely rich they appear to all be. The world would be better off if we nuked the Horizon festival and all its participants from orbit. Instead we’ll probably just get another game exactly like this one set in Iceland or the Galapagos or something. There’s still plenty of famous geography we haven’t rammed a bunch of Broncos into yet. And I’ll be there to ram those Broncos each and every time out, because I’m a goddamn sap.

8. Mundaun

One of my favorite surprises this year was Mundaun, a decidedly folkloric horror game set in a remote region of the Swiss Alps. Your character returns home after receiving word that his grandfather has passed away, albeit with a warning that he should not come back under any circumstances attached to that notice. Of course it wouldn’t be much of a horror game if you didn’t ignore that sort of warning, so you go back to the sleepy mountain village of your youth, only to find that things have gotten extremely weird up there.

More than anything else, Mundaun is a triumph of atmosphere. It employs a pencil sketch style of visual art, giving everything a nightmarish storybook quality. The whole game is spoken in Romansh, a language primarily spoken by roughly 60,000 people worldwide, and it’s a brilliant choice. It always drives me a little nuts when developers feel like they have to have an English dub in order to get people to pay attention to their games outside of their native countries. Having these rural Swiss folk speak like Americans would have yanked me right out of the story, and I’m glad they didn’t go that route.

Mundaun’s gameplay isn’t particularly inventive, and some of its puzzles are definitely on the opaque side, but the story is worth pushing forward for, and the vibes are straight up immaculate. I can’t see what Hidden Fields does next.

7. Lost Judgment

Oh Lost Judgment, I almost loved you. I still really liked you, but I almost loved you.

Let me back up. I love Ryu Ga Gotoku’s games. And I can say that in totality now as I FINALLY played Binary Domain this year. But more specifically, I adore all the recent Yakuzas, and the first Judgment game was my favorite of 2019. What I love about them is their sense of place. I love exploring Kamurocho, and whatever other neighborhoods the developers create. I love that as time and technology have advanced, RGG has fixated less on making larger and larger environments, and more on building out the existing spaces with more places to explore and interact with. And I love their stories, too. Even when they go all the way off the rails–which they frequently do–I’m usually on board for the nonsense. Lost Judgment has a lot of these things that I love, but it’s also maybe a little too much of that stuff gated behind a little too much gameplay that doesn’t quite work.

For those who don’t know, the Judgment games follow Takayuki Yagami, a former lawyer-turned-detective who over the last two games, frequently finds himself taking on cases that appear initially small in scope, but inevitably branch out into the uppermost reaches of Japan’s legal system. In this game, Yagami initially finds himself investigating both a rash of bullying incidents at a Yokohama high school, and helping out his old pals at the Genda Law Office when they’re blindsided by one of their clients in the middle of a trial. The client, a former cop arrested for a groping incident on the subway, declares during his sentencing that there is a body somewhere in Yokohama’s Ijincho neighborhood, identifying the victim before anyone even knows the murder has taken place.

It’s a terrific set-up that unfortunately takes a little too long getting around to where it wants to go, winding a few too many plot threads around itself in the process. Specifically, if you’re like me and primarily enjoy the substories of these games, the side-missions that generally run parallel to the larger mysteries, Lost Judgment unfortunately puts a few too many of these behind minigames, maybe half of which are actually fun. Most of these are built around the aforementioned high school, where Yagami becomes the advisor for the Mystery Research Club, headed up by a plucky girl detective in the Nancy Drew mold. There’s some good story in there, but not enough of it to justify the sheer number of hours you have to dump into those associated minigames. Which is to say nothing of Yagami, a man in his late 30s who is already teetering on the edge of being the most midlife crisis protagonist in AAA video games, becoming the hyper-cool all-purpose advisor to a bunch of high school clubs by taking up skateboarding, becoming a Virtua Fighter 5 esportsman, and teaching a bunch of girls some sick dance moves based on his various kung-fu styles.

Look, I like Yagami a lot, but over the last couple of games, it’s become clear that RGG’s sole mission with him is to try to make him into the coolest guy who has ever existed in video games, and in Lost Judgment, it all feels like a bit much. Kiryu was certainly the most unfuckwithable fighter around, but he was also a huge dork who often didn’t understand the world around him, and Ichiban is essentially a raging nerd who isn’t afraid of looking ridiculous at any given moment. Yagami is missing a bit of that vulnerability in this game, vulnerability that he had more of in the first Judgment, maybe because that game was more explicitly about him and his own trauma. This game is more about Yagami crashing into a case that initially has nothing to do with him, and it never quite figures out how to make him anything but the knight in shining leather who solves every single thing with a deft hand.

OK, so with all of that said, why is this on my top 10 list? Because I still enjoyed my time with Lost Judgment enough to spend 60 damn hours on it. As I said, I love these neighborhoods that RGG create, and even the least interesting of these games’ stories are still more textured than half the stuff that comes out of AAA development. Parts of Lost Judgment’s central mystery straight up don’t work, and I was nonetheless enraptured throughout the whole process. There’s also maybe a little bit of fear baked into that, fear that we’re never going to get another Judgment game. That fear is based on the apparent stalemate between actor Takuya Kimura’s talent agency and Sega over the possibility of releasing PC ports of these games. This would not be the ideal note to send this franchise off on, so here’s hoping we get at least one more to round things out, if not a full continuation of the series. There’s more to be done with Yagami and the gang, and I’d like to see what a now Nagoshi-less RGG would do with it.

6. Unpacking

Sometimes a game only needs to do one thing extremely well to work. Unpacking is about the process of moving. Specifically, the part where you take all the things you’ve accumulated since your last move out of boxes and place them where you think they should live in your new space. It’s the only part of moving that doesn’t suck, and in the process of turning that into a game, Witch Beam found a way to turn environmental storytelling into something beyond cliche.

There’s no narrator in Unpacking, nor even much in the way of text telling you anything about the protagonist or her life. Instead, you learn about the beats of her life through each move, taking note of the various things she accumulates, and the spaces she takes up residence in. From childhood to adulthood, you’re there as she goes to school, moves in with various partners, and finds herself a career, all the while tracking what things she keeps and what she abandons through the years.

It’s a terrific concept executed about as well as you could for something like this. The gameplay is slight, but engaging, and for me personally, spoke to a long-dormant organizational part of my brain that rarely manifests in real life. My real life spaces are often as chaotic and messy as my own brain, and being able to cleanly set up this woman’s life time after time almost got me to the point of wanting to clean up and reorganize my own living and working spaces. Emphasis on almost, mind you.

Unpacking is also a triumph of foley work. Every item in the game–and there are a lot of items–makes a different sound depending on what surface you set it on. It’s one of those little details most people won’t even notice right away, but is wonderful to have. I spent half my time in the game just plinking and plunking different things on different spots to see what sound they’d make. Was that the best use of my time? Of course not, but I didn’t get into video games because I cared about making the best use of my time.

5. Hitman 3

It is still very weird to me that Hitman 3 was a 2021 game. You can attribute that feeling, I think, to the fact that 2021 felt like five distinct years jammed into one. Everything that happened in January felt like it might as well have happened in 2007, so as I sit here trying to come up with words about my time with the last game of the modern Hitman trilogy, I am struggling a bit not because I didn’t have a blast with this game, but because it feels like I’m trying to access some distant memory buried beneath the rest of the year’s worth of bullshit.

Here’s the thing: Hitman 3 is not the best of this trilogy’s games, but it’s a terrific ending to what Io built up over the course of those previous games, and it has at least two or three of my favorite maps in the series. The Dartmoor map, which gets all Agatha Christie with a built-in murder mystery that’s actually fun to solve, and Berlin, which does my favorite thing in the world of letting you stalk around a blisteringly loud dance club killing dudes left and right, are all-time greats. And while it’s the most straightforward map in the game, the Argentina winery level has maybe my favorite murder method anywhere in the series (helloooooooo grape press).

You can certainly feel the ways in which Io had to scale back certain aspects of the production, especially in the cutscenes, but I didn’t mind that as much just because I’m really here for the murderin’. And the murderin’ in Hitman 3 is very good, plus you once again get access to all the previous Hitman maps you already bought, which is the way I wish more games approached this sort of thing. Hitman, like Rock Band, is basically a platform in this way. And while I know Io is onto the next big thing with their upcoming James Bond game, I was extremely heartened to hear that there will be more content for Hitman 3 coming this year. The Bond thing could be very cool, but selfishly I just want as much Hitman as I can wring out of this studio. I don’t need another big trilogy of Agent 47 lore, but more maps, more targets, more stuff is absolutely welcome.

4. Guardians of the Galaxy

I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier to be wrong about my initial impression of a game than I have been with Guardians of the Galaxy. If you watched any of our conference talk-overs this year, or just asked me what I figured this Guardians game would be, you would have heard me essentially let out a big old fart noise in response to it. Frankly, those early trailers and demos did this game no favors. It looked apocalyptically annoying in just about every way, and I am so, so glad I misjudged this thing, because it turned out to be a terrific surprise.

First and foremost, Guardians is a game with a surprising amount of heart. As much as these are the wisecracking, cranky-ass characters you know from the comics and MCU movies, Eidos Montreal spends a lot of screen time digging into the relationships between them all, and the things that brought them together. Star Lord’s origin story on earth is given a bit of time to establish itself, but not at the expense of the larger plot, which centers around an old flame of his who works for the Novacorp space cops, her precocious daughter, and a suddenly overwhelming religious fervor taking root around the galaxy. It’s a nice balance of stuff you know and stuff that makes this Guardians adaptation distinct, and unlike the MCU, where interesting character stories sometimes get knocked off course by the necessity of some kind of last-act CG monster battle of varying degrees of quality, the developers use the greater length of the game to let the story breathe and develop naturally. When it finally gets around to establishing its big bad and the path toward defeating it, it feels earned.

There are aspects of the game I don’t think fully work. There’s maybe a touch too much of the in-game yelling between your teammates–-it is impressive how much there is, but it sometimes overwhelms, periodically even interrupting itself. This is also a very on-rails game. It’s a bunch of big set-pieces and fairly straightforward (if chaotic) action in the vein of an Uncharted game. But those setpieces are also incredible, capturing the colorfully weird spirit of the comics and creating a host of bizarre and beautiful worlds to explore. And the dynamic between the teammates is very reminiscent of another highly successful space game in the Mass Effect series. Obviously this isn’t an RPG, but the time you spend wandering around your ship, chatting up your crewmates and making some choices that will be important down the road, is evocative of Mass Effect’s Good Shit. This is like Dirtbag Mass Effect, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

Also, while I think the combat isn’t the best, those huddle-up moments that inevitably lead to some great ‘80s bop playing over all the punching and shooting are a hoot. They’re frankly half the appeal of the combat. These fights practically beg for Bonnie Tyler or Wang Chung to kick up in the background. It’s a shame that our current DMCA dystopia makes streaming those kick ass tunes a real minefield, but that’s hardly Eidos’ problem to solve. That said, it sure would be nice if somebody in 2022 solved that problem. Maybe a large platform holder like Twitch, for instance? Just a thought.

3. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

I think Rift Apart is the first game on either of these new-ish consoles that actually made me feel like we’d made some kind of leap from the last hardware. Which, I realize, is a strange thing to say about a game that feels like it could have been designed in the PS3 era. This is a Ratchet-ass Ratchet game through and through, but the few PS5-specific accouterments it does have make it feel like the marquee PlayStation 5 experience among all the launch window-y games.

I mean, just look at the damn thing. That PS4 remake of the original Ratchet had a whole lot of stuff going on on-screen, but Rift Apart is like an explosion of stuff. Bright, colorful stuff just splayed out and flying all over every corner of the game’s various worlds. Not to get all “they made a game what looks like a Pixar” on you here, but this looks like a really solid computer animated film. If this game’s job was to sell me on the power of the PS5, then boy howdy, mission accomplished.

Apart from its technological feats, this is just a really solid story and a really solid-playing game. The addition of Rivet and Kit as primary characters is a welcome one, and the story of Kit in particular is one of the better stories any of these games have tried to tell. The characters it introduces, including some new riffs on old favorites, are all delightful, especially the Morts, a bunch of fuzzy Minions who all talk like middle-aged midwesterners. The gameplay, while an entirely familiar mix of shooting weird guns and copious rail grinding, is as finely tuned as one of these games has ever been. Rift Apart is just a joy to play from start to finish, and unlike some other big games this year, doesn’t feel like it drags itself out for the sake of adding length. I have nothing but appreciation for a game that knows what it has, knows how long it should be, and doesn’t try to stretch itself too thin.

2. Psychonauts 2

It’s weird to say given how big a fan I was of the original Psychonauts, but my expectations could not have been lower for this sequel. It’s not that I distrusted Double Fine’s ability to continue making great games or anything, but between its long development cycle, the buyout with Microsoft, and somewhat middling showings at trade shows, I just didn’t know if the creative juice was there to make something even comparable to the original. And I don’t think I was ready to have my heart hurt by a less-good sequel to a game I loved as much as Psychonauts.

Wonderful, then, that all of that doubt proved to be for nothing. Whatever happened in that time period between when Microsoft bought the studio to release, they brought this thing together in a way that not only exceeded my meager expectations, but resonated even harder with me than the original.

Psychonauts was always one of those games where the platforming was more of a mechanism to get you to the story and audio/visual components that were the real draw. I think that’s somewhat true here too, but the platforming is also loads better than the original, and this is, to my mind, one of Double Fine’s best playing games. The real inventiveness is in the level designs, which continue the tradition of creating elaborate physical worlds out of the psyches of the game’s main characters. Each one is its own little pocket universe with unique gameplay ideas, and even the worst ones among the bunch here are still a bunch of fun to explore. The big highlight for me was the Psi King’s Sensorium, a psychedelic trip that both reveals that Ford Cruller used to be the Les Claypool of psych-rock violin alongside the other members of the Psychic Six, and  introduces an unexpected Jack Black singing moment that’s probably one of my favorite moments in any game this year.

It’s not all just colorful visuals and fun music, though. Psychonauts 2 is doing a real high wire act trying to balance its goofball tone with some fairly heavy storytelling around mental health. Various members of the Psychic Six, Raz’s longtime heroes, are all broken in pretty significant ways, and the game deftly manages to avoid veering too far toward either frivolous or maudlin territory. The stories of these old friends who, like a lot of self-exploring hippy types in the ‘60s, both overtly and inadvertently hurt one another, are pretty heavy, but never so much that it drags down the mood. It’s a real tough line to walk, and Double Fine pulled it off brilliantly.

This game just made me really happy. Happy that it exists, happy that it’s so good, happy that we get to have more Psychonauts. If they decide they want to make more, I’m all the way in for it.

1. Fights in Tight Spaces

At some point in February, Alexander Sliwinski dropped me a DM asking if I’d like to check out a new game that Bithell Games was helping out with. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but little did I know that the thing he was pitching me on would become my obsession for 2021.

Fights in Tight Spaces combines the de rigueur design trope of deckbuilding, run-based gameplay with the close quarters martial arts battles of a great action movie. As a rule, I’m usually a bit less enamored with the former, but love the latter, so I was happy to give this a shot. Within a week I was playing this thing pretty much every day. For most of those months when I was still at Giant Bomb, there was a decent chance that any free hours I had during the day were being soaked up by this thing as I bobbed and roundhouse kicked my way through the game’s early access campaign. Though I did drop off a bit in frequency by the time it hit 1.0 in December, I was still playing at least a run or two a week, and to be honest I’m currently staring at my Steam window and itching to jump back in for another run as soon as I finish writing this piece.

The progression is pretty simple. There are four main campaigns, each with a different set of enemy types, and then a final shorter, tougher mission. The game randomly generates battle scenarios using those pools of enemies, and throws in some special events as you progress as well. You start out with one of several types of decks, each geared toward a particular fighting style. The aggressive deck includes a ton of attack cards, defensive deck involves more blocking and dodging, and there are specialty decks for knife perverts and suplex enthusiasts too. As you beat each battle, you’re rewarded with choices for new additions to your deck. It gives you a good amount of flexibility for how you might want to approach these fights, but in the end, the key thing is that you will be kicking the ever-loving shit out of a lot of people.

The thing I keep going back to with this game is my love of 2018’s Into the Breach. Obviously that game didn’t have a card building element, but it scratches a similar turn-based battling itch in my brain. The runs in Fights in Tight Spaces are substantial without ever feeling grueling. The game is tuned pretty tough on the default settings, but bombing out after a couple of hours isn’t horribly dispiriting. I almost always had that immediate instinct to fire up another run after finally getting my ass kicked. The number of games I can say that about are extremely few. I’m an easily frustrated person, and it takes a rare kind of game to get me over that hump of not wanting to experience that kind of failure over and over again. Into the Breach did it, and Fights in Tight Spaces did it.

There were plenty of bigger and more important games in 2021, but all I really wanted to do last year was kick some people in the face. Fights in Tight Spaces had my favorite face-kickings. Game of the Year.