If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, this is the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
We love a good surprise. The industry can be so terribly predictable, after all. Sometimes these surprises come in the form of games we didn’t know existed, and sometimes they’re games we’d written off only to realize how wrong we were. These are the best surprises we had in 2021.
The Winner
Guardians of the Galaxy
The surprise just doesn’t stop. What is this game doing here? Who let this on? Oh. Oh I did. Because apparently it’s actually really good? This isn’t like our runners-up, who came out of nowhere and brought us joy. Guardians of the Galaxy we saw coming from a long way away. It took up the majority of the Square-Enix E3 presentation, and was miserable. It was the followup to Square’s The Avengers, a garbage game no one wanted. And if anything this looked worse. Who the hell cares about the Guardians? What annoying characters!
Well damn. Here we are. They nailed it. They more than nailed it. Guardians of the Galaxy is fun, smart, charming, and so many more weird positive qualities that don’t make any sense. This game really should suck. And it extremely doesn’t. What a nice surprise.
The Runners-Up
Inscryption
Ok, so I like roguelikes. But deckbuilders are tedious. And horror is just… no. So naturally you’d think this horror roguelike deckbuilder that came out of nowhere and Twitter seemed to love was gonna be as big a miss for me as Slay the Spire. But, uh, no. No, this game is sick as shit. It’s so imaginative, with an impeccable atmosphere and a small world that has more in it than you can guess. Talking too much about Inscryption risks ruining it, as it’s a game with surprises layered on surprises. But what a great thing.
Petal Crash
Tetris. Puyo-Puyo. Bejeweled. Panel de Pon. There are certain puzzle games that are fundamental- they’re the foundations that other puzzle games build upon. And I feel I could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve pretty much made all of those we’re gonna. People are just going to take games like Tetris or Bejeweled and tweak them to make new things. And that’s fine with me! I love Lumines, Super Puzzle Fighter rules, I’ll fight for the honor of Money Puzzle Exchanger. But it’s done. It’s just variants now.
Nope. Wrong. Petal Crash is not just a new puzzle game, it’s a new foundation. Its nucleus is apart from the rest of the genre, simple and elegant and joyous. That they found a whole new road for puzzle games, and did it so damned well, makes me proud to put them on this list.
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Surprises don’t make games inherently better, of course. Just because a game is a nice surprise doesn’t elevate it above its peers in quality. But with the routines of the industry, isn’t it nice to be pleasantly ambushed now and then? We think so. That’s why we do this category, year in and year out.
We’ve got two more awards for you today, so don’t miss them! Next up is Biggest Disappointment! Oh… that’s a bummer one, actually. The ONLY bummer one.
A big thank you to daanboii (@daanboii on Twitter) for our Game of the Year art!