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willin

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Game of the Year 2021

Video games in 2021 are in a weird spot. New consoles are out, but no one can get them, high profiled games are being delayed frequently, and the few high-profile games that are released are often in a broken state. Still, a year has reached its end, and while I don't think this year was an especially standout year for video games, I managed to find ten games to fill my annual Game of the Year list.

As always apologise for the games I did not play, mainly Hitman 3, It Takes Two, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Psychonauts 2, Life Is Strange: True Colors, Deathloop, Lost Judgment, New World and Guardians of the Galaxy.

List items

  • Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is not just the best video game I played in 2021. It might be the best video game I have ever played. There is something about Disco Elysium that makes it feel like less of a piece of media to entertain yourself with but a work of art. Like, Disco Elysium is something you hang on the wall for people to discuss and debate the meaning and purpose. It is a classic book dissected and studied for years by scholars and students. It is a film that a university dedicates an entire semester to analyse. It has something that puts it on another level that no other game has ever shown me.

    However, it is almost reductive to call it just a piece of art. It is not just a well-written story (I mean it is), but it is also an enriched RPG system to help the player genuinely create their version of a character, a graphical style that makes it look nothing you've ever seen before, voice acting that puts all other voice acting to shame and a soundtrack that place you in a place instantaneously. The fact that an independent studio's first attempt resulted in such an amazingly dense game puts every other video game studio, independent or otherwise, to shame. I have not stopped thinking about Disco Elysium since I played it. That makes Disco Elysium my Game of the Year for 2021. Maybe even every year before that too.

  • Halo: Combat Evolved was perhaps one of the most important video games of my life. It made me a lover of video games and the Halo franchise. However, I have not been too happy with the output 343 and Microsoft in the last few years. Between the middling Halo 4, the nearly unplayable Master Chief Collection and the actively bad Halo 5, I had all but lost hope for Halo Infinite. But they managed to pull off the turnaround of the decade. Halo Infinite is the best playing video game in a very long time. Pitch perfect controls, expertly crafted level designs and the single greatest inclusion of a game mechanic in the grappling hook, Halo Infinite has managed to restore my faith in the Halo franchise.

  • Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is tied with the best expansion pack I have ever played (Wrath of the Lich King is right there with it). The culmination of a decade worth of story and Square Enix knocked it out of the park. Everything in Endwalker is top tier: writing, music, mechanics, graphics. Even with the absolutely abysmal launch issues, Endwalker managed to be so good that it was worth waiting in a queue for three hours. You cannot say that about almost any other game.

  • Cruelty Squad is a perfect video game. I am not saying that it does not have flaws or bugs, far from it. I say that Cruelty Squad is a perfect video game because there is not one god damn thing that I would change about it. I would not change the confusing storyline. I would not change the immersive sim gameplay structure that rewards stupid strategies. I would not change the soundtrack, which I can actually describe as gross. Most importantly, I would not change the game's look even slightly. It has the aesthetics of someone knowledgeable of visual language and did everything they could to make it as unpleasant as possible. I will always love Cruelty Squad's fucked up weirdness.

  • Persona 5 Strikers was so good it did what I thought was impossible: It made me like a Musou game. It did this by not shoving the characters of another franchise into a Warriors clone *cough* Hyrule Warriors *cough* but actually fusing the two systems together to compliment the other. Persona 5 Strikers should be the goal for every Persona spin-off with a surprisingly deep combat system, trademark style, and the best writing and voice acting in franchise history. Atlus, I hope the seven different spin-off games you got planned can live up to Strikers.

  • Mass Effect is easily a top-five video game franchise for me. It is my favourite trilogy of entertainment, so naturally, a remastered version of all three games is going to be excellent. Mass Effect Legendary Edition is the standard of how to do a remaster: keep what makes the originals great while adjusting to meet modern standards, and I would say Bioware has done precisely that. A collection of games so good it made me slightly optimistic about the franchise's future. Bioware, PLEASE do not fuck this up. I can't take another Mass Effect Andromeda.

  • Sometimes you just feel like a highly concentrated dose of anime in your video games, and BOY does Tales of Arise deliver. As someone new to the Tales series (played the tiny bit of Berseria), I was able to slip into this gorgeous JRPG and engross myself into the world. The action-packed combat system, breathtaking visuals, excellent voice acting and my favourite video game ending in the last few years, Tales of Arise, made me a Tales fan.

  • Here's a weird one. I didn't much care for Undertale. I thought it was good. Just good. Besides the soundtrack, nothing really stood out to me. However, Deltarune is an entirely different story. Toby Fox made an excellent foundation for a fantastic RPG but filled it with the charm and care of Undertale to create something exceptional. Many people look at Deltarune as a slightly different Undertale, but that slight difference made all the difference. Now, I cannot wait for Part 3 though (?).

  • Forza Horizon 5 continues the long-running tradition of being the only driving game on the market worth paying attention to. There is nothing quite like speeding around the Mexico desert in a multi-million-dollar supercar with an anime girl on the sides. By removing the few issues that I had with Horizon 4 and polishing the hell out of it, Forza Horizon 5 became one of my favourite driving games ever.

  • Unpacking was the best experience I had playing a game this year. Booting up the game, streaming it to Discord and having my friends debate and argue about what goes where and how to organise a room was so much fun. While not the most relaxing experience for playing what is supposed to be a relaxing game, Unpacking was still one of my favourite game experiences of the year.
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