Best (& Worst) Games of 2021: Part Two
RUNNERS-UP
#11
Perhaps the coziest game that I continually returned to over the course of the year. Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book DX is a new deluxe release of Atelier Sophie, a game first released in 2014 which kicked off a trilogy. You play as the young alchemist Sophie, and the gameplay moves between exploring the local village, trying out new recipes, and gathering ingredients from nearby locales and roaming monsters. It's a nice game to toy with and live in, with plenty of goals and sidequests to be explored at your own leisure. It's welcomingly comfy, and only narrowly missed out on being in my top ten games of the year.
#12
My favorite new Pokemon release of the year actually wasn't the remakes of gen 4 that released in the fall. Instead, I spent significantly more time with New Pokemon Snap, a Pokemon photography game that's a sequel to the original Pokemon Snap released for N64 in the late 90s. The game is calming, yet also incredibly beautiful, and there's tons of stuff to explore, find, and collect.
#13
Everything is a game I've wanted to design for years - and it looks like somebody else did the work for me! It's a game in which you start from the perspective of a single creature on Earth, but you can adjust your focus to anything else in the environment - and there's fewer limits than you might expect. You can become a single blade of grass, or a mighty mountain, or even a full planet. The game uses lectures to enhance the experience, with philosopher Alan Watts talking about how everything is connected, and how the division between humanity and the rest of the world is an illusory one. It was a beautiful experience, but not quite as transcendental an experience as some others I've had this year, and it didn't really teach me anything I didn't know. Still, it was a lovely experience.
#14
One of my favorite games, and a foundational game of my childhood, received an updated edition this year, fully remade from the ground up with current gen technology. Myst has been remade several times at this point; first in Cyan's in-house Plasma engine for RealMyst, then in Unity for the remaster of RealMyst, and now the game has been built in Unreal. I've played this game countless times, but dang, the way they built Myst this time really gave me a new appreciation for the game. The Selenitic Age in particular, although barely changed in basic architecture, gave me a completely new experience of the island just based on the presentation alone. What a gorgeous game, and how nice it is to see it standing the test of time.
#15
I revisited Resident Evil 7 this year, and even though I remember that game pretty well, I'd forgotten how scary it can get. Resident Evil Village is sometimes scary, but it generally has different ambitions: Resident Evil Village is strange, and campy, and sexy, and a ton of fun. It did freak me out sometimes, but it was a much different experience from Resident Evil 7, and I loved it.
#16
I could not have guessed that PC Building Simulator would work for me at all. The idea of using a computer to simulate fixing a computer sounds like more of a tool than a game. But lo and behold, PC Building Simulator is a lot of fun! It's actually about repairing and upgrading people's PCs, and managing a repair business, making sure you take enough jobs to make rent. The music and the tasks are simple and repetitive, but also somehow cozy. Who knew that simulating a job could be a fun game?
#17
I tried to sample a few Annapurna games this year, as they're one of my favorite publishers. Donut County is a game in which you play as a hole, and try to swallow up everything in a town, in an escalating series of levels. It's all a means to tell a funny story about a mischievous raccoon and his friends, and there's a ton of really good little jokes in it.
#18
I would have loved to have finished Outer Wilds this year. I played some of it early in the year, wandered off, then decided to wait for the Switch port to complete it. Unfortunately, the Switch port hasn't released yet. But I still had a fantastic experience with the game, so it ranks highly. Outer Wilds haunts me, but in a good way. I think about its world, its music, and the questions at its core mythology a whole lot. I can't wait to return to that small little solar system.
#19
No game has better captured the feeling of being on a college campus for me than Life is Strange. I haven't actually gotten that far into the game, so I haven't seen its controversial ending yet, but I'm excited to finish it in the new year, and what I've played so far is a surprisingly compelling story with some fun puzzles.
#20-21
I had similarly great experiences with Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury and Super Mario Odyssey. Most of the Mario fandom was excited about Bowser's Fury, a strange new open world take on the 3D Mario formula, but I was just happy to get another excuse to play my second favorite game of 2020, Super Mario 3D World. I worked pretty hard to 100% the game, and was not quite able to make it - the last two levels were too hard for me. Similarly, I wasn't quite able to 100% Super Mario Odyssey this year, in my first replay since the game's release. But I got a lot closer than I got last time, and I had a great time getting to know the world and getting better and better at the expansive platforming mechanics.
#22
This was the last year when updates to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate were regular events, and maybe it'll be the last year like this for Smash Bros. ever, or at least for a while. I'm going to miss the reveal events - but what an incredible game all those releases have left in their wake, with two dozen new playable characters and dozens more represented via Mii costumes. I'm going to treasure this game for years.
#23
Of all the Lego games I played this year, Lego Star Wars was easily the best one, but Lego Batman: The Videogame was a pretty solid runner-up. It had some missions where you played as Batman and Robin, and other missions where you played as Batman's extensive villain line-up, which is a good way to handle that breadth of characters. It felt a little repetitive since it wasn't a direct adaptation of any particular canon, and since it presented its missions in an episodic TV structure, but it's still a fun time.
#24
I fell off of the battle royale craze pretty quickly; PUBG, Fortnite, and Super Mario Bros. 35 couldn't hold my attention very long. But towards the end of the year, I found myself growing addicted to Tetris 99, which uses new skins and daily challenges to incentivize playing a few games of (mostly) competitive Tetris every day - a health amount of Tetris, in my opinion.
#25
Finally, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition was the very first game I tried on Xbox Game Pass. I didn't play a lot of it, but it was a really nice experience to return to a game that I loved when I was younger.