2021 Game of the Year: The Impulse Purchase(s) That Defined My Year

Ever since joining this community, I've had my eyes opened to just how few games I get to in a given year. It's part of why I miss Quick Looks so much - I used to live much of the gaming year vicariously through the crew, and always selfishly wished they'd play deeper into games more often. The Nextlander crew has been focusing more and more on full Let's Plays it seems, which has been really cool! I never got into Twitch and I rarely watch even Giant Bomb live outside of E3, but I've always understood the appeal of watching people you (presumably) like play games you definitely like or wish you could find the time to play yourself.

That being said, after spending much of 2020 in a sealed echo chamber of work (in a restaurant), decompress (in a service industry-only bar), cry myself to sleep (usually at home), I was ready to freak out in 2021. Especially as the vaccines began rolling out and cases began falling off so significantly, hope was in the air and I was ready to put that stimulus money to work! I took a vacation to New Orleans that was incredible, and relevant to this discussion because I beat Hades for the first and still only time (run...47?) while waiting out a torrential downpour in the middle of the stay. I loved the hotel I stayed in (shoutout Old 77 Hotel & Chandlery!) but its decorations and overall aesthetic will partially remain engrained in my memory due to the rush I felt as I realized not only was I gonna beat Hades, it wasn't gonna be all that difficult. I know there's a Whole Other Game past that point, but I felt more than satisfied with just the one.

I came back home and, filled with consumer-lust after a spending spree down in the bayou - my usual M.O. being "oh God where am I gonna get my bills paid from this month" - that barely put a dent in my considerable savings, I set eyes on a PS5 next. I knew I wanted the digital edition - I haven't owned a physical copy of any media since inFamous: Second Son came alongside my PS4 - but wasn't having luck with either. That is, until I installed the HotStock app on my phone and realized just how often these things go on sale, even if it is still a mad dash with plenty of frustrating hurdles to clear seemingly at random on the way to a checked out cart. I wound up getting the disc-drive format from Wal-Mart, it arrived three weeks earlier than the shipping estimate (luckily I had a day off and stumbled into the box as I walked out of my apartment because it was not conspicuously packaged!) and I decided - why stop here?

So I pounced on sales, scooped up bunches of old games I might want to play again or always had a curiosity about. I played games in a way I never had before, dipping in and out of five or six at a time, dropping them like flies if they didn't suit my mood. MLB The Show and it's endless spring/summer grind has forever warped my brain and so I often found myself gravitating towards any game I could comfortably pump a podcast through the PS5 Spotify app while playing, which meant I often didn't do as much with certain story-based games as I'd hoped, but I did still play a lot of games this year if not necessarily new games. More and more it seems like people are accepting the practice of throwing an old game or two into their lists and personally I'm cool with it, so I've tried to hit ten actual games from 2021 with a few honorable mentions sprinkled in. Starting with...

Games I Put a Weird Amount of Time Into and Barely Remember

Madden NFL 20 - 11 hours played

Early in the year I came across a free month - or was it $0.99? - trial of EA Access and decided to give it a shot. Despite not caring much about football since, oh, 2013 or so (and especially after the Kaepernick debacle) I found this game weirdly compelling. I get why a lot of modern Madden players complain about this game - they all play Ultimate Team, and that mode sounds predatory in a supremely evil way - but I think the Franchise mode is actually pretty cool. I hadn't touched the mode since Madden NFL 14 or so, an era of Madden I would confidently describe as "dogshit" and was surprised to find a bunch of fun and sensible RPG mechanics tucked into the mode in addition to all the usual bells and whistles the mode has had for years. The game's got a good, dynamic commentary system thanks to using no-name voice actor dudes instead of established TV personalities (or that's the impression I get anyway) and the practice modes that give your players XP based on your performance are also really good at teaching football, something that's become way too complicated for the average person to understand.

These 11 hours were crammed into a little under a week, and when I dropped it I dropped it, because the knees on these players still look ridiculous and the running game still feels like a comedy of errors once the new graphic shine wears off, but my impression of this game was surprisingly pleasant given how down Alex Navarro has been on this franchise for, I dunno, most of his life? I used to almost exclusively play Madden and NCAA franchise modes as a kid while devouring new and favorite albums, and it was really refreshing to spend a week during the early optimism of Biden's presidency reliving a bit of my childhood.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War- 25 hours played

I wrote about my time with Shadow of War over on Backloggd (cool service!) so I won't say much here, in fact I'll just pull this quote from what I said there and let you who doesn't click through to read the rest of it do with the quote what thy wilt:

Suddenly I saw before the entirety of Mordor's landscape, constantly re-populating and endless, expanding towards the edges of knowable time. Was this a 200 hour journey I was embarking on? I realized I didn't want to find out; MLB The Show had arrived, and with it the One Podcast Game to Rule Them All.

Marvel's Avengers - 19 hours played

Similarly, I wrote about my time with this game on this very website! In summary: man, I sure wish they'd nailed it because I actually see a lot of potential in a Marvel game as service.

Detroit: Become Human - 12 hours played

And I'd have played it a second time, too, if it wasn't so damn stupid! This was the first David Cage game I found a lot to like about it, particularly the way my Connor arc played out. If you're familiar with the game, I actually highly recommend reading the Giant Bomb blog I linked back there if only to see how cool his story can become, something a surprising amount of players very likely aren't familiar with as many of my mid- and late-game outcomes hovered in the 3% to 20% range of outcomes across the player base.

That being said, what a dumb, dumb game.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - 39 hours played

If I were including non-2021 games in my list ( was surprised to find I had 10, even if I had to stretch the definition of game a tad to get there!) this game likely would've ranked as high as 3 on my list below. I loved this game, as I wrote over on Backloggd, primarily for all the reasons it should've been an abject failure. What an insane achievement, so glad for Jan, Chris Plante and some others to have advocated so vocally for it during their respective Game of the Year podcasts and awards.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 39 hours played

I'd like to get on to the actual lists and mini-awards here soon so I won't say much about this game other than the following - it is bloated beyond all belief, full of pitiful side quests no sensible person would ever endeavor to complete and large open areas with little excuse for their existence other "hey, Uncharted doesn't do this, ya jerks!" That being said, it's still rooted in the same core combat and exploration loop that earned the previous games so much praise, drenched in a graphical sheen so ridiculously impressive that playing it on my base PS4 in the middle of winter, I often wondered if this wasn't secretly the most outright gorgeous video game of the generation.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is quite lacking in the creativity department and plenty's been said about Lara's questionable role in her own stories, but that's also just what this genre is and it's perfectly fine to both acknowledge the cultural quandries of the swashbuckler without letting it dilute the core fun of the experience. I'd say that if either The Discourse or somewhat mixed critical response dissuaded you from giving this game a shot, keep an eye out for a sale! It's cool!

The Yakuza Series - 69-ish hours played

I say "ish" only because it's impossible to remember how much of my 80 hours with Yakuza Zero were contained within calendar year 2021, or how much more of Yakuza 4 I'll squeeze in before the calendar flips over! What a franchise! Like so many Giant Bomb users, my time with this franchise has seemingly been a long-time coming, my curiosity having been stoked by the Beast in the East series before finally getting the push it needed via constant, deeply discounted sales on the franchise as well as the inclusion of Yakuza Kiwami as a Playstation Plus game last year.

I've written about my time with Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza Kiwami 2 and Yakuza 0 (as well as Yakuza Kiwami) over on Backloggd pretty extensively so feel free to go get my full thoughts through those links if you'd like, but the bottom line: while it's clear that 0, Kiwami 2 and Kiwami are far more polished experiences than what I've seen so far from 3 and 4 (it's quite impressive how meandering and fat these games got in the PS3 era, even if it all feels a little empty and hard to extract substories from) I don't regret going all in on this franchise in the slightest, and I can't wait to see what's coming next. Some might say it's sacrilege that I listen to podcasts while playing these games and that I find the "gibberish" of the all-Japanese voice work easy to tune out beneath the English language of my pods (I do pause for the spoken cutscenes!) but this has been my ultimate, non-MLB comfort food for nearly two years now and never did I devour more of it in a single, gluttonous rampage than I did this year.

Just a Few Honorable Mentions Before We Get to the List (Yikes!)

NBA 2K22 - 34 hours played

Anybody who knows me knows that I never miss an opportunity to rant about how far this franchise has fallen, besotted by an addiction to MyTeam card pack sales and MyPlayer Virtual Currency sales that has left the MyGM mode in shambles and the core competency of the game - the simulation of the game of basketball - in many ways stuck in the halcyon days of its single player efforts, which inarguably crested a decade ago with the introduction of Michael Jordan and the Jordan Challenge in NBA 2K11 - though the mode's follow-up, 2K12's NBA's Greatest, was arguably more comprehensive and feature complete.

NBA 2K22 is still all of that - it's gross, it's opportunistic, it's most interesting mode for older basketball fans - MyTeam - is still more casino than card collecting video game and still more "Christ we have to figure out how to make Shaq relevant in the modern NBA" rather than "hehe let's see these scrawny modern centers deal with the size of speed of the man who once played Steel on the big screen!" MyGM hasn't seen a significant investment of resources since, I mean, since 2K12 if we're being honest, though they'll always pay their lip service. And the game ultimately still slips into a bit of a scripting trap too often, a legacy issue dating back to the Dreamcast days that stands out all the more after two decades of basketball gaming and the competition completely snuffed out. It's online performance is also still fucking trash - I really don't understand how anyone could enjoy playing this game competitively with the state of the input lag, but I suppose that's been going on for long enough who has time to care anymore?

That said, the number's right there: 34 hours, honest as can be. For all its faults, NBA 2K22 is a great showcase for the newest consoles, MyTeam's abusive attitude towards players can't obscure that baseline dopamine hit of collecting even your least favorite favorite players from your childhood, and in the parlance of Deadspin (R.I.P.) Remembering Some Guys, while the on-court product might not look or feel exactly like basketball looks or feels these days but thanks to a new locomotion and animation branching system at least doesn't feel like giants stomping through a mud field anymore.

In other words, NBA 2K22 is still kind of terrible - but if you're a basketball fan, it's alright? Ugh.

"Deathloop" - 7 hours played

I wanted to like this game. I bought a huge Arkane Studios bundle - Dishonored 1, 2 and Prey plus all their DLC packs - for just $25 as a way to dissuade myself from jumping on the hype, a decision I felt better about as audience scores began rolling in with a vastly different reaction to the game than many critics. And yet, here I was in, the me of 2021, somewhat of a hypebeast, looking for something new to play, a new conversation to join in on. On the other side, there was Bethesda, already discounting the game to $40 on PSN just weeks after release. Why not?

I should've listened to myself. I think this game has a really awesome look and I actually think the guns are pretty cool. I just don't think the gunplay feels all that good and I've always been what you might call a fucking idiot when it comes to first-person stealth mechanics. Pair both of those things to a Shift ability that feels bizarrely worse than it did during my time with Dishonored: Definitive Edition, some other abilities that just seem kind of pointless, a bunch of environmental puzzles I'm actually not that excited to find the solutions to and bosses that, once you find them, you just kinda...shoot in the face a bit?

"Deathloop" is a game I'd deeply, deeply like to like - especially considering I spent that hard-earned cash on it all impulsively. It's not even the core thing I see getting complained about the most - the on rails type nature of it - that bothers me. That's actually, maybe, my favorite part! I like icons on the screen telling me where to go, I want to accomplish things and get moving - it's part of what has never allowed the Hitman franchise to click with me, after all, all that wandering around and studying and so forth. It's just that, y'know, I get to that mission icon and then there's either nothing all that interesting there, the thing is kind of interesting but linked to another thing I either don't know about or am not currently that interested in, or I just get shot a lot / do a lot of shooting then go back to the tunnel and start the loop again.

Yea, it doesn't help that I'm probably terrible at this game and have no patience for half of it's gameplay design - Matthew Rorie, I see you! - but dang am I a little bummed out how much I like everything about this game except for running around in it, trying futilely to make something interesting happen.

Hey Y'all, Let's Crown a Game of the Year!

10. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION - 2 hours played

I recorded myself playing about an hour of this game, including starting with it's stunning center piece installation of "How to Disappear Completely" / "Pyramid Song" / "You & Whose Army?". Let's just say, much like P.T. never left my PS4, this will likely never leave my PS5 in case I need to introduce some woeful soul to this incredible experience for the first time. While Radiohead is in a unique position with essentially infinite money and a fandom of basically unrivaled voraciousness, I wouldn't be surprised if this is something that more and more artists pursue as a promotional tie-in to their album release advertising. I wrote a bit more about this, as did some others, on the forums a bit earlier this year.

9. The Forgotten City - 7 hours played

Obviously, as with KID A and a few other games on this list, time played actually isn't all that important to me - I've just never owned a console that kept track of it for me before and find it a really interesting statistic! The Forgotten City doesn't aspire to much more than single sitting from its players, though there are some more obscure quest lines and trophy requirements for the completionists out there. While I think some critics got a little carried away with their praise for this game (I get it, 12 Minutes was a weird time in their lives) I'd still rank it among the most memorable experiences I had with a 2021 game in 2021. The writing is universally engaging and it's clashes between modern and classical philosophy a bit refreshing compared to a year otherwise defined by pretty blunt, pop experiences, while the world itself is a fun little puzzle to figure out.

Not that there's really that much figuring - the map is fairly tight and once you've stumbled onto one mystery you tend to find yourself barreling toward its conclusion unless you intentionally veer off the path. The game also intimates a sort of Outer Wilds-like timing structure that's either not present or essentially inconsequential, a bit of a disappointment considering its roots as a Skyrim mod and all that could imply about NPC behavior when you're not looking.

Minor quibbles aside, however, this is just a neat little experience with a finale that, whether you love it or hate it, fuckin' goes for it in a way only video games and comic books really can. I'm not a huge fun of the way this game wraps up, and I'm sure there are cultural critics out there who could wring a lot of Problematic Material out of its underlying argument concerning purpose and divinity, but during my time with The Forgotten City I wasn't there for that. I just wanted to track down the sinner, figure out the unlock conditions for the various endings and learn as much about these charming, lost Romans as I could. Just a simple little pleasure in a year that demanded such comforts.

8. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - 21 hours played

Let's get these things out of the way, because when I look back at my 2020's Game of the Year blog I'm always a little disappointed that I spend a lot of time complaining about some of the lower games on the list. While the game is a graphical stunner, I actually find the art direction itself, shall we say...hideous? Everything just looks weird and weirdly soft, sometimes at the same time. There's lots of goopy and gloopy and floppy things in this game, platforms and mounds of material that look like firehoses but are brain...matter... and a bunch of really bad outfits. Yes, they nailed a certain '80s aesthetic in those flashbacks - no, it does not look great! Also put my firmly in the Maddy Myers School of Won't These People Just Shut Up Sometimes, fueled in part by the many, many sequences in which the game hasn't been designed around the dialogue, resulting in the player having to consciously take a moment to stand around waiting for a conversation to end or just plowing right through it by walking through a doorway or over a ledge.

Oh, this is important: Star Lord is one of the great mis-cast actors in a very long time. His accent never crosses the rubicon into endearingly awful. It's just plain bad - which sucks to say, as you'd imagine Jon McLaren considered this a breakout role when he scored the part. He made some choices here, almost none of them good. Bummer.

In other words, so much of Guardians was A Little Too Much that it was genuinely exciting how often that didn't matter to me. The combat system is a bit impossible to translate from eyes to brain to fingers, and yet I dig the core loop of waiting for ability cooldowns, triggering said abilities and watching them do stuff. I might not understand exactly what I'm doing most of the time the way I might in similar games like last year's Final Fantasy VII Remake or Ghost of Tsushima, but I do know bad dudes are dying and that's enough for me. Likewise, I felt a lot of the branching narrative stuff was ultimately a tease the way so many of these things tend to be, with anything of consequence generally cresting on a hand-wave conclusion that's more about the journey than the destination.

But then, more and more I'm finding: isn't that most video games? People don't finish these things, and when they do that dedication is often met with a resounding thud. Terrible final bosses, messy and convoluted narrative conclusions, inconclusive and bland non sequiturs in anticipation of DLC - games often end like a wet shit and I might be done expecting any grand conclusions from all but the most proven storytellers in the medium. Likewise, while I might have my complaints with how pretty much every story arc in this game ultimately wraps up, their beginnings and middles are often full of charm and intrigue and Eidos Montreal has conjured up a pretty messy, detailed adventure that never stops never stopping. This is one of those games where if you don't like what you're doing - so long as it's not the gunplay, of which there is admittedly more than enough of - just wait 45 minutes and you'll likely be teasing out the next adventure.

I don't think it's accurate to consider Guardians of the Galaxy any sort of surprise - this is exactly the game Square showed far too much of during their press conferences prior to its release - so much as a revival of the kinds of surprisingly fun licensed action games that used to pop up every so often in the PS2 and PS3 era. It borrows from everything that's ever existed and doesn't do any of it better, let alone as well as, the sources it's aping from, but neither does it really embarrass itself in its pursuit of becoming the crossover generation's definitive action adventure game. It's just a really good one of these for those in search of a really good one of those, and that's good enough for me.

7. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - 13 hours played

I really, really, really, really, really liked this game.

I wanted to love it.

Ratchet & Clank 2016 revived something in me I thought was long dead: my love of the simple, 3D platforming collect-a-thon married to the unique and imaginative minds at Insomniac when it comes to weaponry and environmental design. I beat that game and then I leapt enthusiastically into New Game+ to collect the few trophies I'd missed the first time around as well as fully upgrade Ratchet's impressive arsenal. Not even the laughably bad story - lifted from the much-derided computer animated film released that same year - could keep me from falling head over heels for that game.

But perhaps that was as much time and place as the quality of this game? Hard to be sure, and I'd rather not interrogate it. The game is absolutely a powerhouse graphically, all the better for an animation style that's always favored bright shiny things and all the ways they can go boom and break apart. So many combat sequences in this game feel like a real "fuck you" to Knack and Knack 2 as the particles and effects fly all over the screen as if it were the second night of the Rolling Loud Festival or something. The guns remain effortlessly fun and the primary/secondary action of the L2 trigger is fun throughout, while the gameplay does a terrific balancing act of being approachable for kids but complicated enough for adults.

Essentially, this is just a grand new console showcase that doesn't break what doesn't need fixing, and while I might not be as over the moon about it as I was its predecessor that's no knock on this game. Highly recommended for anyone who can get their hands on a PS5 in the future and loves platformers, probably for as long as it takes for another one of these to come out.

6. Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - 49 hours played

I simply cannot get the above image out of my head. As you can see, I've played a fair amount of this game and yet have a handful of facts to present:

• I have never solved the case

• I have never seen the above scene

• I have never seen more than just a couple of scenes you can find in a quick Google image search for The Final Cut, or at least the particular contortions of either the environment or the player character

• I'm not sure how much of what I haven't seen I ever will see, because this game scares me

All of this might lead a reasonable person to assume I should just go ahead and make some assumptions myself: that this game is more intricate, more detailed, more lucid, more hallucinatory, more interesting, more conversational, more intellectual, more more more than anything else on this list. You're probably right. Disco Elysium is confounding and stupendous and well worth the recommendation.

But it's also got kind of a horrible map, across three saves with very different characters I've found it a little too easy to get stuck in some pretty bland ruts depending on your build, and most importantly the PS5 version doesn't seem to accept I'm fine just reading the text (as accomplished as the voice acting is) simply because I read much faster than these actors would ever speak and I'm the sort that hates closed captions specifically because it spoils vocal performances. This is a personal pet peeve I wouldn't really knock the game for specifically.

In any sense, plentyofotherpeople have gone to great lengths to describe this game's baffling greatness in ways I don't have the energy to right now. All I could do at the moment is complain about the little things that nag at me, that cause me to restart the game on a new save every few months and gladly twist and turn through its political intrigue all over again.

Again: 49 hours, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface.

5. Returnal - 15 hours played

I'm such a damn jerk. I watched this speed run earlier this fall after getting my PS5 and constantly waffling over whether I should make a move on Returnal. On the plus side: PS5 exclusive! DualSense examples galore! So pretty! Great for listening to podcasts! On the negative? $70 price tag. No saves. Hard as fuck. The negatives constantly outweighed the positives until I watched that video. I thought: that's it? I can do that! Who said this game was hard? Certainly not Bloodborne players.

Shortly after, the game went on sale for $40 and Housemarque patched in-game saves so it was a no brainer: I was gonna buy this game and kick its ass.

I have not, so far, kicked its ass. But I have had an awesome time! In fact, the inspiration to buckle down and write this post was just a few hours ago, as one of the best runs I'd ever had in this game ended with an ignominious fall down a pit after another of my patented Jump-Dashes Into Hell I've come to know myself so well for. It's, like, my absolutely favorite game within a game to play. I couldn't tell you when in the run I'll accidentally end it by falling into a pit of nothing thanks to my own panicked inputs, only that it will happen and I will laugh maniacally in frustration. Like a FromSoft game, that has been this game's most magic gift: I just today played this game for nearly two hours, excitedly collecting some very interesting sounding power-ups, some very useful feeling weapons and conquering some typically seemingly insurmountable challenges.

But more than anything, Returnal is always an emotional experience. Tension, fear, elation, anticipation, giddiness, trepidation, total sadness. It's all in there. See that clip I posted above this paragraph? I nearly cried when I died there. I felt the tears welling up. I booted up these forums and started writing this blog to quell the pain. I really can't tell you how exasperatedly I shrieked in fear when I arrived at the bridge (which leads to the boss) only to find that waiting for me - sometimes, after all, the bridge has no enemies guarding it at all.

If I were any better at this game (and, again, check out that clip: I'm such a fucking wimp) it'd easily be my Game of the Year. The music, the set dressing, the bullet hell, the sound effects, the enemy designs. This is an absolutely remarkable game that I'm just not fully cut out for yet and may never be.

I can't wait to play more.

4. Hades - ~35 hours played

The tilde because the Nintendo Switch has that oh-so-Nintendo "30 hours or more" descriptor and I've put another 5 in since the game came to Playstation.

This will be the slightest blurb here because this game was so widely praised last year, both by Giant Bomb, its guests, other publications and most importantly the users of this very forum. Who cares what I have to say about it - not me! All I'll say is I was gifted a Switch in January by the benevolent bar manager of the bar that'd gone mostly service industry-only during the worst of the pandemic, a watering hole for those of us who had no choice but to go outside and make the most of it.

Day after day in 2020, we attempted to claw our way out of a very real hell in order to be seen by the real world as more than just our occupation or position in society.

Finally playing Hades in 2021, I saw a lot of myself in Zagreus. Well, apart from the cool boons and the knowledge I'd emerge from a pool of blood fully prepared to do it all again should I die by any number of hell demons and their variants.

3. Psychonauts 2 - 22 hours played

We'll find here mostly meaningless distinctions between three and one, as well as one typed-out Nodima, so allow me to attempt to be succinct for once. As we wrap things up.

Psychonauts 2 was the most singularly stunning experience of 2021. Given its long, bizarre road to digital store fronts and aspirations to revive a style of game long thought dead through an intellectual property that was never more than a minor cult classic in its own time, the deck felt pretty stacked against Tim Schafer and crew for most of Psychonauts 2's production. Especially given the game's original director left halfway through production, there was no reason to expect the most heartwarming, intelligent, thoughtful storytelling of the year to come out of Double Fine's perpetual joke factory.

It's also, importantly, an amazingly beautiful game. While the XBox Series X experiences certain benefits the Playstation 5 does not and both consoles can make the Playstation 4 version look like a discarded chunk of coal at times, no matter how you gave this game to yourself you were greeted with some of the most confident art direction in years as well as the most imaginative level design of the entire generation, full-stop. In the same way DmC: Devil May Cry shamed so many third person action game designers with its explosive, propulsive ambition and design madness so to is Psychonauts 2 an experience that never lets its foot off the gas. While the gameplay isn't always the most satisfying the same can never be said about the environments you're enacting said gameplay within nor the story you're chasing down every last morsel of.

And the writing, holy shit! From primary cutscenes to random NPC banter while scanning for a clue where to go next, this is Schafer and his writing staff's most potent, clever, hilarious script since Grim Fandango, easily. I'd square Psychonauts 2 with anything in his catalog to be honest, and I could be convinced it's the best work he's ever done. Psychonauts 2's characters are just a delight to listen to and watch animate, so full of life and personality in a way that's almost overwhelming.

So much for being brief. I'll just let every other person that's going to rank this game over the coming weeks say whatever I haven't.

2. Kena: Bridge of Spirits - 15 hours played

I'll probably write something more verbose and definitive about this game at some point. Been mulling playing it over on a harder difficulty for the Platinum for a while now. I said I'd be succinct about Psychonauts 2, and if there's any game on this list I go on and on about forever it's this one, but all I've to say for now is this:

This was my Spiritfarer, this was my Florence, this was my Invisible Inc. This is the game for which I cannot understand there isn't universal praise, that single handedly grasped the power of video games to challenge and please in equal measure that no other game this year quite put its finger on. I had a great time, I had a hard time, I struggled and I succeeded and by the time I was done I wanted a sequel so immediately and so badly I could have leapt out of my desk chair and caught a train directly to Ember Lab's offices in California if only I weren't so stuck in my chair, stunned that the credits were rolling and that was all I could have for now of this incredible game.

A sequel might not be in the cards - first of all, the game's ending doesn't exactly beg for one nor does the general public seem to be clamoring for this game the way every last one of you should be - but no matter what, Ember Labs is on my radar in a way almost no first-time studio ever has been in my thirty-plus years of gaming. What a lovely, lovely surprise.

1. MLB The Show 21 - 703 hours played

And that's the least amount of hours I've played The Show since MLB The Show 16. Yet I accomplished more with less friction and more efficiently than in any previous year of Diamond Dynasty. Where so many Ultimate Team modes are finding more and more ways to antagonize their players and goad wallets out of pockets, Sony's San Diego Studios have zagged and searched furiously for ways to give the players what they want. Yes, of course, there is the grind of all grinds at the core of MLB The Show, but at the periphery is none of the bullshit, none of the gambling mechanics (packs, sure, but trust me when I say no reasonable person spends a cent on this game's packs and it's designed for that to be the case) and none of the obfuscation.

San Diego Studios has built an incredible baseball sim purely on presentation and gameplay, then built this mode designed entirely around taking advantage of players' nostalgia and desire to watch meters go up while card collections swell in size...only to focus exclusively on how to make those goals more achievable and constant for players. What they're doing should be one of the biggest stories in modern gaming, bucking every trend in its field and garnering unheard of positive sentiment as a result. This has been going on for years now, and has played no small part in how much time I've been willing to give this franchise - 900 hours into both 17 and 18, 800 into both 19 and 20 - year in and year out.

It is the perfect podcast game, it is the perfect barely pay attention and read the news game. You can treat it as a clicker if you want to or an insanely competitive, the best players in the world succeed three out of ten tries online competitive experience if you want to. MLB The Show 21 is the rare game that wants to cater to everyone and for whom reaching everyone is their one and only design goal. I haven't played less and less of this game over the years because I don't want to play it as much as I'm used to or am exhausted by a formula that's only seen slight alterations over the past five years. No, I'm playing the game less because San Diego Studios has made their game more and more accessible, easier for players to set long-term goals for themselves, achieve those goals and then accept that's the end of that year's grind.

Baseball is a beautiful game, and over the past five years The Show has reminded me of that. After several years listing it somewhere in the middle of my lists on this website out of deference to the annual sameness of it all, in a year in which I couldn't decide between two truly exceptional throwback titles, it's finally time to give San Diego Studios and their exceptional sports sim its due as the one game as a service that truly wants nothing more than to satisfy its fanbase no matter the cost to its overall value on an accountant's spreadsheet somewhere. Thanks for everything, SDS. Here's hoping you keep it up into the next generation and beyond.

What an evocative list. Awesome job.

Great list. As someone who used to play a lot of sports games back in the day it was nice to see them get a point of view on them in a goty context.

According to the Xbox app, I put in 91 hours of MLB The Show 21 this year, easily the longest I put into any one game. While it won’t end up making my top 10, I agree 100% with your assessment about it being a perfect game to chill and experience other forms of media while you play. I got really frustrated with some of the rubber banding because I wasn’t really looking for challenges, I just wanted my stupid jerk Orioles to win a World Series for a change. However, it’s easily my favorite sports game since that Madden where Michael Vick was stupidly broken.

@nodima: very interesting and well-written list. I enjoyed reading this and may just pick up Kena. Thanks for all the effort you put into writing this.

Thanks to @wintermute, @allthedinos, @heelbill and @jeremyf for the kind words! I wanted to follow up on my No. 4 game on this list, Returnal, if only because I'm increasingly unsure why it doesn't deserve being No. 1. Ultimately I can't really turn my back on all the warm fuzzies Kena made me feel even if I still can't quite articulate it, nor can I ignore how fresh and pleasant Psychonauts 2 was, but Returnal...

Let's Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Rouge-Lite/Likes

Returnal is not a nice game. If you've read anything about this game you know this. I think it's also important to note in a way some people forget that Housemarque does not make nice games. It's sort of funny to me that, despite a first-party stable that has generally been aimed at as wide a consumer base as possible, Sony has opened three consoles in a row with a Housemarque game centered around bullet hell and a small amount of levels wrapped around both your mastery of their static mechanics as well as your adaptability to their randomized elements. Returnal feels unique because games that look like this never - almost never, or truly never? - play like this but it is definitely in direct lineage with the rest of Housemarque's catalog.

But I think that unique feel for a bullet hell is significant because it's a unique feel for a bullet hell - but it is not in any way a roguelike. Or else we've neglected to recognize that this is the most comprehensive genre of all time. When you play a Contra or a Gradius or whatever, you Press Start and buckle up for whatever the game is about to throw at you. You might want the spread shotgun or the homing missile or whatever - same as you certainly never want the laser rifle, no matter what game you're playing - but you don't know it's coming. What you do know are coming is a certain pattern of ships a certain amount of minutes into a level as well as a Big Bad at the end of the level that essentially tests you on everything you'd learned during that level.

These are the sorts of games Housemarque has been making for almost 30 years now and they didn't shy away from that here. We just got distracted by the lack of a level select.

Returnal is a fearsome example of how games release these days

If you're the level of dweeb that regularly logs on to Giant Bomb Dot Com while paying them a yearly fee to avoid Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed on their wonky little webpages, but cuts over to the forums rather than the video pages to see what's what in gaming, you know most of what I'm about to say. I don't know exactly how this game presented itself in the summer of 2021, but from the various reviews I've read and vague remembrances of podcasts I've listened to, I get the impression that not only was the PS5 (or perhaps the game itself) a less stable device/software situation at that time but Returnal had no interest in offering players a peace offering.

A take I've come across over and over again - at least, should the person opining has made it this far into the game - is that Act 1 can range wildly from far too unforgiving to far too easy, only to lead into an Act 2 (for those who might've read this far without playing the game or wanting to know much specific about its progression - that's all I'll say! For this whole post! Swear!) that can border on the abusive. Again, I can only speak to my experience with this portion of the game (and, importantly, couldn't speak to this second act at all when I already considered this the 3rd or 4th best game of 2021) but I don't find that to be the case at all.

I love to brag about how bad I am at most games about as much as I love to point out the rare times I enjoy one on its hardest difficulty, and I certainly haven't had a turbulence-free ride with Returnal. But this is not a game that crashes (nor a console that crashes, for what that might be worth) and more importantly this is a game I suspect learned just how few of its players were making it past the third level (or the second, or the first...) and re-calibrated its expectations of the general population. That's not to say that it's more forgiving - and why should it be, when S-tier gamesmen like Kirk Hamilton can complete this game in seven deaths or less? - only that it seems to thank you for persevering, with a second act that pairs a gauntlet-like, Grecian myth level of suffering with a huge, almost overwhelming smattering of quite helpful items, neat weapons with neater upgrades and about as much health items and upgrades as you can imagine early adopters begging for.

How does one square that when rating a game? I'm not sure people will ever answer that question. I am sure those who primarily game on PC and wade in the waters of mods every day of their lives ultimately don't consider it much, but even half a decade in to a life dowsed in patches and broken launches it still feels weird to wonder: am I playing, in some ways, a very different game than the people who dove right in? Am I playing the baby version?

I Think This Game Is a Bit of a Magic Trick

So why does this game get confused for a third-person action RPG roguelike exploration game with walking simulator elements? Well, because you could get that verbose with it! Again, this game's been out long enough now that if you want to know why that information is out there, but in wrapping around the the original point: I think if you suck at the very first level (and I really think you're a weird and talented fuck if you don't) it's easy to get caught in that reminder of early Rogue Legacy, early Dead Cells, hell early Hades. But think of all the first levels in games that are hard, including Housemarque's own: I certainly hope I'm not alone in this, but I probably put 20 hours into Super Stardust HD and never unlocked the third planet.

Returnal has a live. die. repeat. aspect to it, but at every milestone it provides some kind of checkpoint akin to the old Game Genie password systems. A common criticism of this design is that, while Returnal offers those olive branches (and, more crucially, moreso in the first act than the second) it doesn't incentivize them at all because you're going to want to re-roll your weapons, your item drops and your maximum health on every run. Of my nearly 60 runs in Returnal - and I'll say here less than 10 have been in Act 2 - I'd wager at least a fifth of them really sucked, and perhaps a tenth of them had me feeling like I was invincible until I reached that one room that really fucked me up.

But, if I can reach back to Kirk Hamilton's experience with this game (again, seven deaths for him - sixty for me) the trick here is that Returnal is fast. It runs pretty much exclusively at 60 frames per second and the bullets come constantly. The dash is smooth as fuck (especially given Bloodborne is one of the few truly hard games I've played) and the jump feels incredible. Pretty quickly this ingrains in you this sense that you need to constantly be doing stuff but that's not really true - this is a game about assessing rooms, managing adds and wondering what the fuck is going on. In other words, you need to go full Neo and see the game for what it is, at which point it's mostly a visual spectacle obscuring a design hoping you'll spend as much if not more time navigating the environment and kiting enemies around as you are actually aiming and shooting at them.

And yet you always want to be dodging towards enemies. You always want to be firing at them. It's a fool's errand to hesitate.

In Summary, Returnal Is Rad

This game has cool lore. It has amazing particle effects. It has some truly player-favoring, enemy-fucking upgrades. And you'll have to play it a lot to get anywhere. But I think it's self-obfuscating in a way that doesn't really clue players in to what it wants out of them. That's the actual puzzle you're supposed to solve. Watch any of this game's bosses on Youtube, or even it's more unforgiving challenge rooms, and when viewed passively you almost immediately have this feeling that you could improve on whoever you're watching play the game's strategy or execution. It's in holding the controller that you realize Returnal doesn't want to hurt you, it just doesn't have any other choice. It's a Housemarque game, after all.

Returnal really wants to see its players succeed, it just waits forever to reveal any of that. Once it reveals that desire, or perhaps hope is more accurate, it's new trick is to give you 45 minutes of confidence followed by 5 minutes of absolute misery. Even more than that, it hits a much more concrete loop than its early levels, simultaneously widening the scope of the player's possibilities while tightening the variety of what the game will throw at you. It becomes less about why the fuck am I failing as it is how the fuck can I stop failing, and that's a hell of a feeling to get from a game. You get got, but you always feel got by the getting you didn't give, if that makes any sense. That's probably a shit sentence.

In any case, this has been a lot of writing for what ostensibly serves as an addendum to a game I still haven't beaten and likely still wouldn't consider the best game of the year had I done so. But I'm fully convinced it's really not as unfair, mean, rude or however you'd like to describe it based on the reviews that came out at launch or from those who (again, like me!) really struggled with the early biomes. Once you crack into the back half, not only do the new weapons unlock fully new options for fun but the old weapons gain access to some truly game-breaking buffs that feel like mainlining Ethiopian coffee bean espresso, four shots all at once. And again, it becomes more about this dance you do with the various yet predictable rooms and the enemies within them than slamming your head against them as quickly as you can in the hopes of seeing some new bit of story or finally encountering a new boss. It becomes an old school bullet hole game; the likeness of it's rogue-ness is quite beside the point.

And I won't even get into how its outward similarities to standard third person action games, particularly from Sony first party studios, can be an even sicker trick than the previous segment. You look at this game visually and can't help but think it's one way the same as you would mechanically, which Returnal almost continually delights in subverting.

Lastly, The Game Sounds Sick

Like truly, disgustingly sick. The sounds coming out of the DualSense are awesome, the 3D audio sampling is conveyed even through a simple 2.1 bookshelf system and the music, especially in the 4th level and leading up to its boss is just a wonderful example of how self-improvement and level progression is such a specific joy that only video games can provide. Like Death Stranding, I've often found myself so frustrated by the previous 10 or 20 minutes of gameplay only to finally arrive at my goal and then go back to collect leftover items or at the very least my new bounty and feel a stupendous crush of excellent sound effects. I love the sound design of this game and I wish I had better verbs and nouns for why.

Just one last thing: I did buy this game for $40, and I get that $70 feels like a huge ask for a game whose approachability is relatively impossible to measure without putting one's hands on it. But I wanted to end with the sound design because this really is important: Returnal looks, feels, sounds and acts like a step forward for video game production. It doesn't always actually look, feel, sound or act like that's true, but in the aggregate there is so much to praise here. Sometimes it's as simple as turning off your AC/heat, all the lights, throwing on some headphones and getting fucked up by some random fodder enemy you thought you had fully solved. Just listen to all the different sounds extracted from Selene's feet as she traverses the various surfaces of this game.

Oh, I almost forgot: fuck the purple bats.