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Making a more full write-up for my top ten shortly but here's my top 2021 list among games that I rated at least a 3.5 out of 5.0. If you’re ranking this by the sheer volume of amazing games played, this is arguably the best year I’ve ever had playing games. My GOTY of last year’s list, Super Mario Galaxy, would likely place tenth on my 2021 list. Hades was my second best game of 2020 and would be…fifteenth here? Just a sheer wave of fantastic games to appreciate. 39. Timespinner – 3.5 38. Mario Kart DS – 3.5 37. Eastward – 3.5 36. Sable – 3.5 35. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond - 3.5 34. SLUDGE LIFE – 3.5 33. If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers - 3.5 32. Death’s Door – 3.5 31. Bugsnax – 3.5 30. ULTRAKILL – 3.5 29. New Pokémon Snap – 3.5 28. Everhood – 3.5 27. WarioWare: Get It Together! – 3.5 26. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – 3.5 Nowhere near as bad as I feared, this was an unequivocally better experience than Wind Waker. SS is great experience if you're the type of Zelda player to zip through the story, these dungeons are fun!, and less fulfilling if you’re the type to walk off the beaten path for side quests. You really get the sense of BOTW’s open world philosophy as a pendulum swinging away from Skyward Sword’s more linear form. 25. Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne – 4.0 Not a bad game at all but clearly surpassed by SMT IV, IV:A, and V. I can't imagine playing this game without following a guide, never a great sign when recommending a game. 24. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights – 4.0 23. Resident Evil 3 – 4.0 22. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 – 4.0 I spent an incredible amount of time in high school playing THPS2 on the PC (look up the keyboard bindings for a laugh, one of the most hand-cramping controller mappings you'll ever see) and, although this is the ideal next-gen port of THPS, feel a bit tired of the original two-minute formula. This game should likely place higher for other players, given my oversaturated experience. 21. Umurangi Generation with Umurangi Generation Macro – 4.0 The superior version of the movie "Don't Look Up" is the political attempt at Pokemon Snap. 20. Aviary Attorney – 4.0 19. Kid A Mnesia Exhibition – 4.0: Wonderful little 1-2 hour walking simulator around Radiohead's music and art styles, situated in a virtual museum. This isn't a disposable experience, the game did justice to the source material. 18. The Forgotten City – 4.0: Anyone who's looking for a new Outer Wilds experience should look no further, this is the closest approximation we've found so far. A little jankier and inventory-based than Outer Wild's information-based purity, but still prioritizes the best ideas of timeloop gameplay. 17. Cruelty Squad – 4.0: The most CSPAM day crew game is here, Rainbow Six-esq levels to hunt down bizarre targets in bizarre levels made by someone who learned that Freddy Kruger’s sweater had red/green stripes because of how painful the color combination is to look at. It works: This is likely the most complete answer to how a game's environment and gameplay supports an intended mood...this time for overwhelming dread underneath a garish bright superficial coat of paint. I'm not the biggest fan of Cruelty Squad's difficulty spikes, unintuitive progression, and motivation to replay levels over and over. LIke, the stock market system is a funny idea but you really can't call it fun. Cruelty Squad also harkens back to one of my most nostalgic memories of gaming, when Half-Life mods dominated and people built enormous and deep maps that captured a wide swath of gaming experiences. It didn’t matter that the graphics were rudimentary, the average player could make a singularly-focused game from scratch with a far lower barrier to entry. I’ll play a Cruelty Squad level and find a larger environment than expected, and more than any game I’ve played in years, recall memories of opening up Hammer or UnrealEd and building bizarre levels with hidden rooms everywhere. I should give a quick shoutout to The Beginner’s Guide which captures this same memory in a great walking simulator. Also, as obvious as the answer feels like to this forum's members, I wonder how many people playing Cruelty Squad would consider the game political? 16. The Procession to Calvary – 4.0: This may be lost in the overall list of game reviews but this is one of very, very few games to actually make me laugh out loud. Not breath slightly heavier through my nose or quietly think “that is funny” and move on, but actually laugh and stop playing. How many games describe themselves as funny and how many actually are? 15. NEO: The World Ends With You – 4.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv_yrqIi-M0 Just like the original TWEWY, the battle system breaks JRPG conventions by being fun enough to purposefully run into random encounters and overlevel significantly. Although the overarching story resonates well with players of the original game, the inter-day stories and can really drag on and get tiresome (Scramble Slams, ughhh). 14. Chicory: A Colorful Tale – 4.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n6m422t7H0 I have one "Before You Play" recommendation for this excellent 2D Zelda-like, and that is to play with a mouse/keyboard rather than a controller. The speed of the brush with a mouse compared to your right analogue stick is worlds apart, you will have far more fun and effectiveness in puzzles/combat. I really appreciate the trend of games that de-emphasize combat in favor of exploration and puzzle design, sometimes I just need a chill experience that supports how you want to play, no matter how lackadaisical or inefficient you may feel at the moment. 13. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury – 4.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGj-D890CbI This one’s unfair. 3D World is a solid 4/5 Mario game that anyone would be happy to play but would be forgotten afterwards. Bowser’s Fury on the other hand, is a fantastic refinement of the SM64 approach to tiny open-world levels and deserves to be in the same rarefied air as Galaxy and Odyssey despite it's short game length. I'm caught between wanting a full game of the same gameplay/environment or acknowledging that the short length kept the experience as amazing as it could go. A minor level pack would've been enough as an add-on for the 3D World Switch port, and they went ahead and added what's arguably the best Mario game yet (not my favorite Mario, just that you wouldn't flinch at the opinion). 12. Persona 5 Strikers – 4.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3cQWze0YRo It’s funny that people consider Persona's dialogue scenes fluff when it's exactly why I treasure the series so much. It's not filler, it's the reward! Strikers keeps the story momentum going by doing the smartest thing it could: cramming all the characters into a single van for a road trip. The bosses/dungeons aren't as quality as Persona 5's, in the sense that Kamoshida and his dungeon are better antagonists than anything in Strikers, but the new dungeons smartly give more development to your team and remind you that their lives are more than just the Phantom Thieves. The combat is the most frustrating part, not only for throwing players a dozen different systems to track simultaneously but for spongy bosses that take far too long to kill. I recommend turning the difficulty way down and enjoying the story first, the selling point of Persona to begin with. 11. OMORI – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzgYj_qCHLg OMORI’s dream world is the closest a game has reached to capturing Earthbound/Mother 3’s unique vibe. The game nails it in ways so many other games fail when trying: the wild characters and their weird desires, the vibrant adventures with your friends, and the silly side quests that build the world in bizarre fashion. You can tell OMORI was born as a devoted passion project and those games are the most rewarding to experience, warts and all. I'm more negative about the final chapters and real world scenes than most players, in a way that I'd love to drag through for a breathless fifteen minutes, but won't spoil the plot here and acknowledge that most players liked these aspects. 10. Yakuza: Like a Dragon – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ouq00ZJc7Q The Yakuza series was always a strange beasts of obvious-but-bizarre influences, especially Grand Theft Auto and Dragon Quest, so it's a fun moment of clarity that a step towards the Dragon Quest end of things created the most entertaining Yakuza game yet. 9. The Great Ace Attorney – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNNnDTaVO7E I've played every Ace Attorney mainline game and these are likely my favorite two entries so far. Not necessarily the absolute best cases, but they are consistently solid throughout. The sequel is a little better than the first game, but it really is a consistent and stellar level of quality between both. However, the problems that plague past titles around matching the game's logic and your personal logic are still here. Oh, and Herlock Sholmes is the greatest character in Ace Attorney history. It’s striking how the first GAA title tries to distance itself from the “normal” case setup. The first case you are accused of murder and your friend acts as the lawyer, the second case never takes place in a court, and the third case features no investigation and a guilty defendant. It’s surprising how few cases across the first game take the familiar investigate-court-investigate-court route from beginning to end without throwing a structural twist into the mix. It's like the development team was bored with the past and wanted to try new things, constantly. I wish the writers would trust themselves to write even more unique characters, since so many characters appear in two or more cases across both games while the one-off characters are incredibly memorable. Vilen Borshevik’s understated appearance on the 1-5 jury may be the best moment across both games. 8. Metroid Prime (Primehack) – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbbUv1hz6mE The game feels like the "right" way to bring Metroid into 3D, an translation of Super Metroid’s world with fairly easy moment-to-moment gameplay but taking advantage of 3D to emphasize the exploration and immersion. That's fantastic for me since I am an explorer junky: scanning things, all the time, to discover the world as much as I want to explore the map. It's one of the game designs I wish the 2D Metroid titles integrated more often. Even though I have a copy of the Prime Trilogy for the Wii, the mouselook/resolution benefits of Primehack are so obvious and rewarding that it's a clear first-choice for players. The downside is that the first Prime is clearly an early attempt at 3D metroidvanias, with some annoying backtracking/artifact-hunting in a genre that prides itself on intuitive map exploration. 7. Shin Megami Tensei V - 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B8FmThqiqc It's not that the previous SMT games are not worth playing anymore, just that mainline SMT games seem to only get better and better with SMTV as the greatest version of the series thus far. A massive step up in environments and graphics does a lot to place your character in the thick of the apocalypse, along with a refinement of the classic turn-based system. 6. Hitman 3 – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13OBTgoE1yU I fully expected this to be my GOTY when it came out at the start of this year and, for most years, it would be. It’s the best Hitman title yet but I can’t help but feel fatigued of the gameplay loop. After three titles, the same micro-challenges to distract guards or enter a fortified building has finally gotten repetitive. Not stale enough to significantly hinder my enjoyment and there’s plenty of unique love across these levels, some of the best levels the team's ever built, but I’m okay closing the Hitman book for now with arguably the best video game trilogy of all time. 5. Deltarune Chapter 2 – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72tHaw7Hxgs I don’t think Toby Fox will ever top Undertale’s cultural impact and novelty but the latest Deltarune chapter is the best game he’s ever made. The tone and direction of the humor is virtually identical to his past games, and I don't understand how it only gets better and hasn't gotten repetitive yet. As a giant fan of Deltarune's current output, the only real downsides are the future scope of the total game: Can this story keep up for another five chapters? Are there enough new wells of humor to remain fresh? Will we finally find a genocide route that we get bored by or feels like a retreaded idea? Are we going to wait too long for the next chapter? The good news is, the answer is "not yet at all" for Chapter 2. 4. Deathloop – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8q5d7AUKbY Arkane’s main output can do no wrong. Deathloop rightfully lives up to the pedigree of Dishonored and Prey with a rogue-inspired gameplay loop to permit running-and-gunning. I still had a transition period of sneaking around every corner and systematically taking down guards silently but, once I let myself use all the tools available instead of hoarding, had the best FPS experience in a very long time. 3. Psychonauts 2 – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxJzlRDetBc Tim Schafer is still a man who’s life goal is a big-budget animated Netflix comedy miniseries but happens to give his attention over to video games in the meantime. This is the pinnacle of Double Fine's output across all fields they specialize: in humor, in art design, and in characters. The combat is bland and the puzzle-solving can be trial-and-error, but the rest of the experience is so stellar, it more than makes up for it's minor downsides. 2. Metroid Dread – 4.5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA0v3EcxDbo I was a fan of Samus Returns despite the mixed reaction and Dread feels like the right amount of refinement to Mercury Steam's initial attempt. This is as tense and action-oriented as Metroid's ever been, which is a welcome change from the admittedly hamstrung shooting gameplay of past titles. Debate if the map is too linear, I would agree since Super Metroid remains the standard, but the fighting, movement, and bosses have never been better. There’s more story here than usual but intelligently shows-not-tells (incredible it took this long to see Samus act as a confident fighter) except for one unfortunate time-for-exposition cutscene. Dread marks the end of the threadbare Metroid 2D overarching story but I can't imagine Nintendo wouldn't approve a follow-up, and I'll be there to see if the sequel finally adds Prime's best features. 1. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - 5.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oq9utTsAMg 13 Sentinels is a celebration of plot twists. 100+ scenes and every single one throws a twist at you that energizes how you comprehend the game’s world. So many AAA games with massive budgets and staff end up with cutscenes that are too long, with weak characters, on a story beat I just want to end (Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, and Fallout 4 came to mind quick). It’s refreshing to see a game like 13 Sentinels throw every bizarre sci-fi plot together and actually have the chops to bring it all together and keep the story propelled. Good writing isn't just prose, it's the ability to juggle a wide swarth of characters and plot twists without losing readers. It also doesn’t hurt to have a gorgeous eternal-sunset painterly art style and an incredible soundtrack. The best visual novel of all time, if you happen to classify it as so, and the most successful "lots of individual stories with partial perspectives, piece together the truth yourself" hyperlink media in recent years. DMCrimson fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Jan 4, 2022 |
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Dec 13, 2021 18:11
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Waffleman_ posted:
I bought 13 Sentinels after seeing where it placed on last year's GOTY thread. No regrets!
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Dec 13, 2021 18:34
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Rarity posted:Less than 24 hours and we already have over 100 unique games listed! I drafted a write-up of my top games list in preparation for this thread being opened, I look forward to it every year!
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Dec 13, 2021 18:58
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Rarity posted:71. CHICORY: A COLORFUL TALE Such a great take on combat-deprioritized Zelda-likes. I loved the dungeon designs so much.
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Jan 8, 2022 16:54
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