Previous years I’ve tried real hard to get these writeups out by the 1st, or as close to it as possible. This year, in part thanks to pandemic brain followed by COVID brain (the family is fully vaxxed and symptoms are mild), I’ve been struggling to put this whole thing together and I’m staring down these 3.5k words with another 2.5k to go and thinking to myself, maybe this is the year I finally give myself the hard edit and cut all these sections down to 1 paragraph each. So that’s what I’m going to do. Here’s my 2021 in gaming in brief.
Best Old Game
Star Renegades
Star Renegades exemplifies what I love best about the modern era of indie games, when a game does well enough that the team has the freedom to keep building on their existing product rather than rushing off to chase a new moneymaker. Since the release in September 2020 all the way up until December of this year, the folks at Massive Damage have continued to put out meaty update after meaty update for their game, including new characters, encounters, and story content. Most impressive is the fact that each of these updates has altered the game in major ways without disrupting the satisfying balance that was there with the original release. The Prime Dimension update that just hit feels like it puts a pretty neat bow on the game so I’m guessing this is it for Star Renegades barring maybe a few balance tweaks or bugfixes, but the core loop of the game is so satisfying that I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it all throughout 2022.
Runners-up:Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Marvel's Avengers
Best Surprise
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy
When Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (GotG) was revealed in June everyone wrote it off, including me. The game was exuding a similar knockoff MCU vibe to the studio’s previous release, the lackluster Marvel’s Avengers. It turns out we were all wrong. The failings of Avengers can largely be attributed to it being a live service game, designed to string you along on an endless treadmill rather than provide you with a satisfying experience. With GotG, Eidos-Montréal has returned to their bread and butter, narrative-driven action adventures. The game is less a followup to Avengers and more a spiritual successor to the critically acclaimed Mass Effect series. If you have any fondness for those games I wholeheartedly recommend you give GotG a shot.
Runners-up:Library of Ruina, Resident Evil Village
Biggest Disappointment
Monster Hunter Rise
There is a careful balancing act to making a grindy game worth sticking with. What works best for me is the ability to focus on small attainable goals across a broad gameplay palette. Monster Hunter: World hit that sweet spot, and Monster Hunter Rise whiffed harder than any other game in the series. In World I felt compelled to maintain a large selection of weapons to better tackle different monsters, but in Rise the introduction of powerful switch skills flattened that experience. There was never any reason for me to use anything other than the same longsword for every fight. World provided compelling reasons to continue hunting a bulk of its roster all the way through endgame, but changes to the way loot works in Rise cut its endgame down to just a handful of the most powerful monsters. And for as much as people complained about certain drops being a 0.7% chance in World, if you're looking for a specific talisman in Rise, under the new system it's a 1/390,000,000,000 chance. Time will only tell whether World 2 will hew closer to the balance set by World or the new turbocharged paradigm of Rise, but my hope is for the former.
Runners-up: Deathloop, Metroid Dread
Best New Character
Alex Chen (Life Is Strange: True Colors)
Like many people, I often use my tabletop RPG characters to get the sort of representation I’m looking for in media, and so last year I created a character for a mini-campaign about magical girls based on the concept of what if Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) but a superpower. Fast forward to this year with Alex Chen, who may not explicitly be diagnosed with BPD but whose powers and issues certainly bear a strong resemblance to one of BPD’s lesser-known symptoms: emotional instability as a result of heightened empathy. It’s not perfect by any means, but being able to see Alex’s journey from being alienated from her emotions by her condition to fully embracing them was meaningful to me in a way no other media has ever been. Throw in the fact that she’s a queer Asian-American in one of my favorite franchises of all time and it’s sort of a perfect storm of made just for me.
StarvingGamer's Top 10 Games of 2021
10. Inscryption
Thanks to its fast-paced battles, short runs, and core gameplay design that allows for near defeats to turn into instant victories with a single well-placed card, Inscryption dodges the major issues that have historically made me not click with roguelike deckbuilders. It probably helps that the game is less a roguelike and more a mystery box wearing a roguelike’s skin. As the layers of the mystery peel away, the game manages to stay consistently fun, building on the core card game in unexpected and compelling ways all the way through to the end. It’s worth exploring for yourself, even if you aren’t a fan of card games. My only knock against the game is the way it squanders the narrative it was building towards the themes of grief, loss, and letting go, so it could have the shock and horror creepypasta found footage ending.
9. Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin
Sometimes you’re in the mood for some good anime vibes about believing in your friends and that’s exactly what Monster Hunter Stories 2 provides. It’s a game that borrows from the Pokémon formula of a kid traveling the world with their growing menagerie as they meet new people, overcome difficulties, and eventually emerge the champion. Unlike most Pokémon games, Stories 2 gives your plucky kid protagonist a canonical companion and builds the narrative around your growing relationship. It’s incredibly earnest and sappy with RPG mechanics that I could sink my fangs into, unlike Pokémon Shield which I fell off of after only a few hours (sorry Sobble).
8. Resident Evil Village (8)
Horror has always been a no-go for me, ever since I saw Alien in early elementary school and spent years suffering from occasional anxiety attacks over the possibility that I had a chestburster inside of me. I largely avoided the early Resident Evil (RE) series and wasn’t fully on board until RE4, when the games shifted from survival horror to action horror. Zombies aren’t as scary when you can just shoot them in the face. RE7 was lauded as a return to the series’s survival horror roots so I ducked that as well, but RE8 surprised me by immediately shifting back to action horror. The game itself plays like a love letter to RE4, interspersed with nods to more modern forms of horror games. The pacing is a bit uneven but the shooting is fun and the rogues’ gallery is an all-timer for memorable characters. The RE series has had two distinct eras, both well represented by RE7 and RE8. Now I can’t help but wonder if this means RE9 will finally take the series in an all-new direction, and I’m reminded that the first Devil May Cry originated as a prototype version of RE4.
7. Final Fantay VII Remake INTERmission
As an add on to one of my favorite games of last year, INTERmission is a substantial experience. It provides some much-needed characterization for Yuffie, one of the more underdeveloped characters from the original game despite her popularity. The new content also has started folding elements from the numerous spinoffs that released after the original game into this reimagined world. It’s a bittersweet bit of storytelling with exciting implications for the future of the series, and the much more dynamic toolset they gave Yuffie in combat makes me wonder what upgrades the rest of the cast might be receiving to make sure they don’t fall behind the white rose of Wutai in Remake 2.
6. Bravely Default II
The original Bravely Default game recaptured something I felt had been missing from console RPGs for a while, a deep and flexible job system that rewarded clever builds with overwhelming power. My memory of Bravely Second is that the designers had sanded off some of those extremes. It probably made for a more balanced experience overall, but I was less interested in spending time figuring out clever builds if they were only going to provide me with minor advantages. Needless to say, any doubts I might have had going in to Bravely Default 2 were unfounded. The designers have once again captured that feeling of seeing a set of abilities align just right to multiply the power of one of your characters several times over. The gradual ramp up from humble beginnings to unstoppable godhood over the course of the game is well-paced, and I was constantly finding even more unfair ways to push my numbers higher and higher and higher all the way to the very end.
5. Forza Horizon 5
There isn’t much to say about Horizon 5 other than it’s the perfect checklist game. I can hop on if I have 5 or 10 minutes to play, point myself at a goal, and check it off my list. It has a very satisfying rhythm, and the way the game is designed makes chasing those small serotonin hits nearly frictionless. The weekly playlists have kept me coming back even after I completed all the core game content, and I likely will continue to check in throughout 2022. Also as a random aside, the game has introduced me to the third song ever that manages to elicit an emotional response from me without needing any external context. Joining the ranks alongside “Empty the Pocket” by Maaya Sakamoto and Yoko Kanno and “Amaranth” by Nightwish, I’d like to welcome “New Heartbreak” by Sad Alex.
4. Psychonauts 2
Platformers have never really been my thing, and I probably would have skipped this game if it weren’t included as part of my monthly Game Pass membership. I had never played the original Psychonauts, and historically Double Fine games have had far stronger narratives than gameplay. And while I’d still say Psychonauts 2 has a far stronger narrative than its gameplay, that’s because while the game plays solidly the narrative absolutely won my heart. Despite its endearing but cartoonish aesthetic, the writing is thoughtful, and feels modern in a way that reminds me of the best kids' cartoon shows out there. It may be a little messy with the ways it handles things like consent and trauma, but it’s clear that the game’s heart is in the right place. Now if only we could find that pesky brain.
3. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy pulled off the miracle of out-Mass-Effecting Mass Effect. The game takes the core Mass Effect space adventure and refines it, with stronger combat, careful application of painful choices with major consequences, and a narrative that is entirely written-through. For the entirety of the game’s 12+ hour playtime, the characters never shut up, and outside of a handful of combat barks none of it is filler. On this game, the writers worked in lockstep with the gameplay and level designers, so the narrative always flows naturally and reflects the situation at hand. At any moment characters might reference the fight you just had or the room you just entered, and use that as a jumping off point to have deeper conversations. The other characters even needle you for lagging behind if you tend to thoroughly explore areas like me, and the insults are always bespoke, never recycled. Because they're so well realized, I have a far better sense of these characters than their MCU counterparts, or companion characters from most other adventure games and RPGs I’ve played. I only hope Eidos Montréal continues with this philosophy of inter-department collaboration in whatever they make next.
2. Library of Ruina
Last year Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children was the weirdly crunchy, initially confounding but ultimately rewarding Korean game that I discovered courtesy of Austin Walker. This year that game was Library of Ruina, a tactical collectible card game RPG. As a defender of the mysterious library against would-be adventurers and treasure seekers, your only glimpses into the outside world are through vignettes that show what each guest is doing just before they arrive. The game slowly reveals the truth about the dystopian City and the library itself in an ever unfolding mystery. The card game and cardpool are incredibly deep, with so many ways to build, tweak, and optimize your decks. I probably spent twice as much time laboring over my deckbuilding than I did in actual battles. If you have any love for card games and gruesome anime dystopias, you should give the game a shot. Just be warned that the game can get particularly body-horrory, itself being the sequel to Lobotomy Corporation, a horror sim inspired by things like SCP and Cabin in the Woods.
1. Life Is Strange: True Colors
With Life Is Strange: True Colors, Deck Nine have proven that they have the chops to carry the series forward. From top to bottom, the game exemplifies lessons learned from the successes and failures of the previous Life Is Strange games. Deck Nine have mastered the devastating one-two punch of emotional highs followed by devastating lows. Their new method for animating faces captures extremely nuanced microexpressions that make the characters feel incredibly lifelike. The script and acting are both top-notch, and they’ve finally written in two equally viable romantic options instead of one good one and one terrible one. I do wish the game did a better job of addressing the invasive nature of Alex’s powers, maybe by better illustrating how violating it can feel to have your emotions so at the whims of others, and how empowering it must be to be able to take that violation and try to turn it into something positive. More than anything, though, the game nails its ending by giving the player time to reflect after the climax and make one final decision about Alex’s future. I’m not sure what comes next for Life Is Strange, I’m guessing I don’t luck out twice in a row with a representation jackpot like Alex Chen, but I’ll probably end up writing another one of these blurb about the next game the year it releases.
Log in to comment