Much like Six, I made the mistake of trying to cram as many games into 2021 as I could. I didn’t have the same, ludicrous goal of fitting in one game for every day of the year, but at some point, I was loading up demos from the Steam Festival, convinced I was in some asinine race. Well, I learned my lesson: never play games for the sake of increasing a meaningless number, and never race Six at ANYTHING.
In spite of this ridiculous experiment, I still managed to play quite a number of amazing games! Limiting myself to 10 was a challenge in itself, but since this is being written two months into 2022, it’s a solid look at the titles that truly stuck with me.
10. Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir/The Girl Who Stands Behind
After playing through the wonderful Portopia Serial Murder Case for my narrative gaming podcast, Novel Not New, I became convinced that I needed to check out more decades-old visual novels. And as luck would have it, Nintendo decided to release an updated duology of their Famicom Detective Club games on the Switch! The VN behemoths over at MAGES handled the remasters for both The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, giving the whole series a facelift and full voice acting to boot, while still preserving the way these games originally played. As a big bonus, this is the first time these murder mysteries have received official English localizations!
So, how did they hold up? To be honest, the moment-to-moment investigation can be a real pain in the ass: maintaining the original controls is both a blessing and a curse, as you’re often hammering the same 7-8 menu items over and over until you find one that moves you forward. But just like Portopia Serial Murder Case, the mysteries themselves hold up better than you’d expect, and some of the creepier moments still got under our skin. If you care about gaming history, or just want a solid, thrilling mystery to pass the time, you could do much worse!
And hey, if this piqued your interest, maybe think about reading The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo! It’s one of the novels that inspired The Missing Heir, and it’ll also help you get a few jokes sprinkled into the game. (This might be the first time we’ve recommended a game/book pairing on a Game of the Year list! Imagine that.)
9. Minute of Islands
In a year filled with gorgeous games, Minute of Islands’ storybook-gone-wrong aesthetic makes it stand out from the crowd. You control Mo, a young girl with a staggering amount of responsibility placed on her shoulders, and she takes that responsibility seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it’s had a negative impact on herself and her family.
By helping Mo awaken the slumbering giants that help keep each island running, you see the lengths to which she will push herself, denying others’ help while finding new, inventive ways to put herself down. It’s a fable about needlessly working yourself to the point of exhaustion, and how we must learn to let others in when we truly need help. And in a year when I had trouble being kind to myself, it was a much-needed reminder that others around me are more than willing to lend a hand.
8. Guardians of the Galaxy
If you told me midway through 2021 that Guardians of the Galaxy would be one of my favorite games from that year, I would have looked at you with the same, perplexed stare reserved for the most audacious of statements. Coming hot off the heels of Square-Enix’s embarrassing Avengers loot-em-up, Guardians had everything going against it. Each time they showed it off at presentations, it looked insufferable, and given that I was well-past-fatigued with everything Marvel at that point, I was ready to write it off entirely. And I did, until the game released in October, and “Holy shit, this is actually great” started spreading like wildfire through my social media circles.
I’m here to echo those opinions and tell you that yes, holy shit, this IS actually great. Eidos-Montreal pulled off the impossible, making a lengthy, quip-a-minute action-adventure starring Marvel characters that didn’t drive me up the wall! It’s true that the crew is filled with absolute chatterboxes, but the writing and performances never wore thin on me, and for a 20-hour game, that is a true feat. Peter Quill’s “fake it till you make it” approach to leadership is presented as threadbare and vulnerable, while also showing how he grows into the role and matures over the game. I spent real time learning about Drax, Rocket, Groot and Gamora too, and as they opened up to me about their rough-and-tumble pasts, it became impossible not to root for them. And soon enough, I went from moaning about James Gunn’s awful Vol. 2 take on the series to declaring my ride-or-die love for Rocket Raccoon.
As it turns out, as much as Disney soured me on Marvel characters of all shapes and sizes, I’m still a sucker for found family stories. And Guardians of the Galaxy is one hell of an explosive found family.
7. Metroid Dread
They made a new Metroid game! And I managed to beat it (almost) entirely by myself, without relying on too many pointers for where to go next, or the best strategy to fight X boss! As publishers increasingly move their cross-platform games to the cloud, Metroid Dread is proof that you can still squeeze plenty of love out of the (admittedly underwhelming) Switch’s hardware.
I’m something of a horror fan (as evidenced by another game on this list), and being chased from room to room by the E.M.M.I.s never lost its thrill: they turned out to be the perfect way to spice up your typical item-hunting, map-filling Metroid formula. These E.M.M.I.s could still wear on my nerves at times (alongside a number of Dread’s other foes), but I never found myself frustrated to the point of giving up. If anything, the generous checkpointing pushed me to try again and again, and even if I couldn’t slide through it as easily as Metroid veteran Six, I feel like the experience fostered some level of persistence that’s helped me take on other games of its sort.
It’s a bummer that Dread’s story was something of a wet fart, but you can’t win them all.
6. Resident Evil Village
The Internet lit up for months after Capcom revealed Lady Dimitrescu, but even after that furor died down, we were still left with a damn fine Resident Evil. It’s not the scariest of the bunch (though I screamed out loud several times during the baby sequence), and I doubt I’ll come back to it as often as Resident Evil 2 Remake or RE1 on the GameCube. But it’s a finely crafted adventure with some incredible highs, and even if the high-tech factory at the end drags, that’s how *every* Resident Evil goes. Above all else, I’m more than happy to trade the zombies for vampires and werewolves, if only for a single game.
5. The Forgotten City
I missed the boat on The Forgotten City back when it was an Elder Scrolls mod, but given the sheer level of polish on display from a 3-person team, sometimes arriving late to the party works out splendidly! You’re traveling back to an ancient time, tasked with looking for the one sinner that will send this place to hell by way of angry golden statues, but the city itself is the real mystery you’re solving. And what a city it is! As I dove under each layer of cobblestone and tried (often in vain) to get every citizen to play nice, I absorbed a compelling tale of cultural erasure, and the ways in which cruelty can be excused or exacerbated through creative rule-bending. It’s astonishing that something of this scale was made by such a small team.
4. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut
Yes, I finally got around to Disco Elysium, and yes, it was just as on-point as everyone claimed. But this game’s existence is still a wonder to me. A proper, isometric CRPG laser-focused on conversations and exploration came out in 2019, and it did incredibly well for itself. It then had an expanded release in 2021 with full voice acting and more quests, was published on every modern platform under the sun, and became an even bigger hit! Never let anyone tell you that even a single genre is dead: they may fall out of style, but they’re always out there, waiting for the right game to re-emerge in the public eye.
I don’t know if it’s possible for me to say anything new about Disco Elysium. As a critic, the one downside of playing a hit that captured everyone’s imagination is that others have written exactly what you’re about to write, and with more skill than you could ever possess in your pinkie finger. But it hit me at just the right time, when my frustrations with the world around me were at their peak. We’re living in an environment broken three ways to Sunday, and Disco Elysium is candid about capturing this through an amalgamation of despotic, capitalistic governments. But it also believes in people, and it believes in our ability to team up together and accomplish great things. And in a moment in time when even grade school students are marching out of their classrooms to fight unjust systems, Disco Elysium gave me the exact mix of bleak realism and hope for a brighter future that I needed.
3. Hitman 3
Above all else, Hitman 3 is an *accomplishment*. It’s a curtain call for one of the most impressive series revitalizations I’ve ever seen. It offers minor tweaks to the formula that ripple through the rest of the games, including a graphical overhaul that looks stunning on a proper 4K TV. It’s also the moment when IO Interactive did something truly audacious: they went back to the well of Hitman Absolution, the game that almost killed them, and said “Hey, maybe we could make tightly scripted missions that focus on the story again?”, which turned out to be the right way to cap off this trilogy.
Hitman 3 is a joy in nearly every respect, but it’s also proof positive that Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2 weren’t a fluke. IO truly came back better than ever before. The weird, niche studio that pumped out cult classics and stinkers in equal measure has never looked this bold, this brave, this beautiful. The underdogs are now standing on top of their well-deserved pedestal, and as a long-time fan, I couldn’t be happier.
2. Psychonauts 2
Against all conceivable odds, Psychonauts 2 came out in 2021. On some level, even when I had the game downloaded to my Xbox, it didn’t feel real! Psychonauts, the ambitious first game from Double Fine, tied to a failing publisher in a market that was growing tired of quirky 3D platformers, somehow came back from the dead and brought a sequel to bear (technically 2 is the third game, but did YOU play Rhombus of Ruin? Do you even own a VR headset? Since most people don’t own VR headsets, there’s a good chance you didn’t!). And to make things even stranger, once you hit Start? You could swear that you were playing a long-lost sequel that simply sat on the shelf.
From the goofball writing to the figment-hunting, Psychonauts 2 feels like it was thrown forward in time. Rather than falling into the same trap as other long-awaited sequels and spending all its time going “Man, it sure feels good to be back, eh?”, this game is aware that it’s working with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it focuses on living every moment to the fullest. You get to meet Raz’s family, lend a helping hand to the psychics that existed as mere campfire stumps in the first game, and even go on thrilling missions ripped straight from a spy movie! As something of a Psychonauts fangirl, some of these moments feel like Double Fine dove right into my brain, back when I was pining for a sequel I’d never receive.
Seeing Double Fine return to their wonderful, psychedelic universe is exciting as-is, but what truly makes it special is the level of empathy they bring to serious topics, like alcoholism and severe anxiety. This is a sequel that proves Double Fine never lost their sense of wonder, combined with the level of maturity one should expect from writers returning to the same material over a decade later. Psychonauts never left: it spent all this time learning how to be its best self. And that is something to celebrate.
1. NieR Replicant
I know what you’re thinking: wow, the girl who bought 9S accessories and wrote a love letter to Drakengard 3 is head-over-heels for the NieR remaster? shocking. I freely admit that unless they well and truly fucked this one up, I was sold on revisiting NieR as soon as it was announced. Luckily for all of us, NieR Replicant is far more interesting than a simple remaster. The script has been reworked, every line of dialogue has been re-recorded, and cut content has been slotted into the 20-hour campaign seamlessly.
That “seamless” element is a big reason why this second shot at NieR is so special. In most RPGs, DLC and extended content sticks out like a sore thumb: maybe the old actors’ VA clashes with brand-new moments read out by a different cast, or the added side-quests don’t mesh with the original game’s tone at all. But the decision to rebuild the script from the ground up paid off in spades. Not only does it feel true to the original game: the new moments are woven in so skillfully that for the longest time, I was talking to a brand-new character, convinced they had always been part of a game released eleven years ago. That simply doesn’t happen with a simple re-release, especially for a world as gruff and memorable as NieR’s!
I don’t want to talk at length about the ending, at least not in a list like this. But I’ll say this much: I’ve never seen a remaster start a conversation with the original in this way before, and some of the things it addressed left me sobbing out loud, in front of my TV. It’s a one-of-a-kind gem, an experience I’ll remember for as long as I live. And that’s why it more than earns its spot at the top of my list.
