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It's hard to come up with a list for 2021, the Year of No Games, but I'll give it a shot. Dishonorable Mention Twelve Minutes - In a crowded field, Twelve Minutes easily claimed the title of Worst Timeloop Game of the Year. A game that wasted a great setup, good mechanics and pretty solid execution on just an abysmally bad story. Honorable Mentions Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail - A solid RTS from the Ultimate General developers focused on naval and some land-based combat in the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars era, with a campaign culminating at Trafalgar. Does what it does well, worth a look if you're into that kind of RTS. DCS World  My most-played game of 2021, maybe because there was nothing else to play. I played this before it was even DCS World, back when DCS: Black Shark came out, and again when DCS: A-10 came out, but was never able to get as deep into them as I'd hoped. I picked up the F/A-18 this year on a sale and ended up really getting hooked on it (and then several other planes). It's crazy expensive and has all sorts of issues and there are just a lot of reasons not to recommend it, but if you're into modern military flight sims there's just nothing Far Cry 6 - It's another Far Cry. I think it's probably the best of the numbered ones, but like the others it doesn't do nearly as much with its setting or story as it could. Fun enough to play, but it's nothing at all unexpected or original and Mass Effect 1 Remaster - A solid update of the original. Even with the updates it's still pretty dated--the AI's pretty much nonexistent, it reuses levels and assets all over the place, there are a lot of busywork kind of sidequests, etc.--but it's still one of the foundational modern RPGs and does a whole lot of things right. I hadn't played the original since it first came out, and it was a lot of fun to play again. Top Ten 10. Lake  It's a slice of life game about a middle aged lady with a stressful job in the big city returning to her small-town home to fill in as a postal worker for her father while her parents are on vacation. It's exactly the kind of Hallmark movie story you'd expect it to be, but it stands out to me because that kind of story is something that games just don't really do--and I don't understand why not. One of the unique powers of games is that ability to live another life, and yet games seem to always decide that that other life must be something extraordinary--something involving lots of violence or superpowers or something somehow fantastic--and rarely anything where you play a pretty regular person facing pretty regular challenges. These kinds of stories are commonplace in novels and television and movies, but games, despite that unique ability to really put you in another person's shoes and force you to make the hard choices they're facing, never seem to use that ability to examine choices that common people actually face. Games need more of this kind of thing. Also, it's an extremely chill game. 9. Wildermyth  A fun game with a pretty interesting take on RPG storytelling, where random events can permanently alter your characters. Solid mechanics and design, fun writing, good all around, but lost my interest a bit once I started seeing repeated events. 8. Overboard!  Neat puzzle game where you try to get away with murder. It has a fantastic style, great dialogue and all. A small game, but a good one. 7. The Forgotten City  The second-best timeloop game of the year. I never played the original Skyrim mod and had no idea what was getting into. The game starts off incredibly strong, building a fantastic sense of mystery, but then slowly loses a few steps as you begin to unravel everything--like every other timeloop game, it starts getting a little tedious as you get late in the game and have to continually redo things. Despite that, the game has some great ideas and scenes, like discovering that the city is built on the ruins of an earlier city that's built on the ruins of an earlier city that's built on the ruins of an even earlier city. Great to see an indie game take an ambitious and crazy kind of story like that and do such a good job telling it. 6. Mass Effect 2 Remaster 5. Mass Effect 3 Remaster  Good enough remasters of the originals, though it would've been nice to see more improvements to both 2 and 3 (for example, completely replacing the endings in both with something better). I had also never played the DLC for either game, and some of those (Leviathan and Citadel especially) really were great additions to the games. After having not played the games since their original release, this was a great way to re-experience them. I'm having a hard time ranking 2 and 3 against each other--they both do a lot right and a handful of things wrong, and on balance I think they're pretty close--but I always thought that 3 got judged a bit unfairly just because of the ending, so 3 gets the higher vote from me this time. After all, 2's ending is just as bad. And, of course, Dragon Age was always the better series anyway. 4. 13 Sentinels  I started this after seeing all of the mentions in the GOTY thread last year and finished it this year. It's a great pastiche of sci fi stories, and told in a way where just about every 10 minutes there's some other ridiculous twist you didn't see coming, while still managing to be coherent and comprehensible the whole way through. The action gameplay didn't seem necessary though, and it has a bit of cringey anime stuff that it could've done without. Still a lot of fun. 3. Psychonauts 2  I had no faith that Double Fine would pull this off, but they nailed it. Great characters, great levels, great story. I wasn't a huge fan of the combat, especially when there were just waves of trivial enemies, but that's a relatively minor complaint. Overall, a perfect follow-up to the original, an amazing feat a decade and a half later. 2. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles  A really fantastic addition to the series (even if it was a remaster, I never played the earlier translations). The jury setup and the variation in the way cases were investigated were great twists on the usual flow of cases in the series, the characters are great, and with few exceptions the cases were excellent. This also gets my nomination for Witchiest Witch of the Year, in Madame Tusspells. 1. Deathloop  This is also my nomination for Best Timeloop Game of the Year. Look, immersive sims are the best kinds of games, and no one does them better than Arkane. The level design and worldbuilding in this are as incredible as they always are in Arkane games. The artistic style is just wonderful (and makes me want another NOLF even more). The gameplay, both in mobility and in combat, is perfect, and finally unburdened by the morality choices that accompanied combat in Dishonored, letting you use all the abilities without regret. My only major complaint is that the invasions were actually detrimental to the game and that their inclusion badly missed the mark of what makes e.g. Dark Souls invasions work so well. Invasions are a relatively small part of the game, though, and the strength of everything else more than makes up for that issue. This is also my nomination for Best Timeloop Game of the Year. Extortionist fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Dec 14, 2021 |
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Dec 13, 2021 11:38
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:38 |
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Rarity posted:Point of Clarification: I updated my post accordingly. I kinda thought they were fit to be listed as a single entry, but then splitting them up let me kick Far Cry out of my top 10, so it's for the best.
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Dec 14, 2021 09:21
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I finally played AI after it popped up on game pass and beat it a few days ago, and the godawful song from the ending has been stuck in my head since. I still can't decide if I like the game or hate it.
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Jan 8, 2022 20:42
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