Game of the Year 2021
Last year‘s intro to this list started with “This was the Pandemic Year.” Well, we all know how that went.
The continuing contagion aside, I had a great time playing video games this year. Ratchet & Clank and Returnal showed off the power of the new consoles. Halo Infinite brought back the classic feel of Halo games past, along with some smart new updates. Valheim showed me what lots of gamers already know—that playing cooperative online games with friends is enormously fun! And I also played some games from past years that have instantly become all-time favorites. Below are my favorite games of Pandemic Year 2.
5. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Released June 11. Played on PlayStation 5.
I played some of the earlier Ratchet & Clank games back on the PS2; they‘re cartoony action platformers where you shoot a zillion bad guys with a vast arsenal of often-wacky guns, like one that turns enemies into sheep. The games have always been polished experiences with fun humor. But technology has advanced tremendously in the nineteen years since the series started, and while the gameplay is pretty much the same (fun) experience as ever, the presentation of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is stunning—highly detailed character models, impressive lighting and particle effects, clever and varied use of the PS5 controller‘s haptic feedback, and a framerate that keeps everything smooth even as hundreds of objects are moving onscreen simultaneously. One of the biggest game-changers (pun ultra-intended) is the PS5‘s fast SSD, which essentially eliminates loading times.
Some of the exploration wasn‘t as satisfying as I would‘ve liked, but that‘s my only significant knock against the game. This became one of only a few games I‘ve “platinumed”—completing not just the main storyline, but also going back to tackle all the optional objectives and collectibles. For me, that‘s generally a testament to how much I enjoy a game‘s moment-to-moment action, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart totally delivered on that.
4. Deathloop
Released September 14. Played on PlayStation 5.
Deathloop‘s developer, France‘s Arkane Studios, is best known for the Dishonored series of games. The hallmark of those titles is that players have the freedom to complete missions of stealth and assassination in a wide variety of ways using both conventional weaponry and supernatural powers. I had to look that up on Wikipedia to be sure, because although they‘re very popular games, I‘m pretty much totally unfamiliar with them. My first experience with Arkane is Deathloop—which happens to fit the same basic description.
You play as Colt, who wakes up on a beach on an island, gradually discovers that he‘s stuck in a repeating one-day time loop, and makes it his mission to kill the leaders of the secret society that runs the island in an effort to break the loop. The ultimate goal is to line things up such that Colt can assassinate all of those leaders in a single day. (Also, the whole island has a 1960s–1970s spy movie aesthetic that the game commits to hard, and that I really enjoyed.)
What really captured my imagination with Deathloop was a mix of gameplay freedom with a fairly tightly authored story experience. You can approach the maps in multiple ways, not only based on what weapons/powers you have but also based on your preferred play style. For example, I generally dislike stealth in games. You could beat Deathloop by sneaking around, but it‘s equally viable to “go loud,” attracting the enemies‘ attention from your first shot and then eliminating them in a chaotic shootout before they can get you. The variety of guns and powers, as well as the multiple upgrade options for each, give the player creative choices, and I loved planning out my loadout for taking on a particular objective.
At the same time, the gameplay freedom does not really extend to the story. There‘s a pretty specific way you have to complete your kill-everyone-in-one-day perfect loop, and the game very methodically tracks all the clues and information that go into that plan and all the steps needed to get there. This isn‘t a game where you need to set down the controller and scribble down notes about how enemy X always appears at place Y at time Z—the game saves and presents all of that information for you in a clean, straightforward interface. This seemed to be a negative with some folks, but I liked it a lot; I could imagine easily getting lost or stuck without that guidance. And besides, while the story was satisfactory and the writing and performances were great, for me they were a vessel for the excellent gameplay, and being kept on the game‘s critical path was a bonus. Deathloop became one of those rare games where when I wasn‘t playing it, I was thinking about playing it. That said, it also became one of those games where once I beat it, I didn‘t really think about it any more. Still, I had a great time with it, and it earned the number four slot on my list.
3. Halo Infinite
Released December 8. Played on Xbox Series X.
I guess the theme of this list is going to be “games that felt great to play,” because like Ratchet & Clank and Deathloop, Halo Infinite felt delightful to play. This is the first Halo game I‘ve played a significant amount of since 2007‘s Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, and it retains that old-Halo feel while also incorporating some cool stuff that, while new, feels like it fits in perfectly. In the Halo series you play (mostly) as the green-armored super-soldier Master Chief, fighting aliens (often) on huge ring-shaped artificial worlds called Halos.
There are two big changes in Infinite. For one, this is the first open-world Halo game—that is, a game where the action takes place on one huge, connected, contiguous game world, rather than being broken up into discrete, segmented levels. This gives you the freedom to explore and to take on certain objectives in your preferred order and at your chosen pace. The second change is the Grappleshot, essentially a wrist-mounted grappling hook that you can use for both traversal and combat. Moving around in Halo games was traditionally pretty slow, especially in contrast with other shooter games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike. (Canonically, Master Chief weighs around 1,000 pounds with his armor on, so—fair enough.) This worked well for Halo, as the gunfights were paced much more deliberately than in those other games. You moved slowly, but you also could absorb a lot of damage, meaning you had time to take cover and reposition yourself, rather than getting knocked out the instant an enemy saw you. Master Chief still moves relatively slowly on foot in Infinite, but now the Grappleshot allows you to quickly close distances in combat, climb up sheer cliffs while exploring, snatch weapons from across the room, and even swing like Spider-Man from tree to tree, if your timing and aim are good enough. It feels exhilarating to use, and it allows for a ton of satisfying freedom in getting around the open world. The story was fine and the performances were good, but the plot is steeped in so much deep Halo lore that I didn‘t get especially invested in it. Still, the gameplay was so fun that Halo Infinite earns the third slot on my list.
Oh yeah, and the online multiplayer component, a Halo staple since Halo 2 basically invented online play for console shooters in 2004, is also great. There were some issues at launch with the experience and progression systems, and the rollout of some of the online modes was oddly slow, but Halo Infinite retains the classic fun of online Halo games past. The multiplayer maps are well-designed, and it‘s been fun to feel myself getting better as I learned both the maps and the guns. I finished the campaign in around ten hours, but I expect I‘ll be playing multiplayer matches in Halo Infinite for months to come.
2. Valheim
Released in early access on February 2. Played on PC.
Unlike the first three games on my list, Valheim is not a technical powerhouse, nor is the gameplay especially smooth or refined. In fact, the graphics generally look like a high-resolution PS1 game with nicer lighting, and the controls are fine but unremarkable. Valheim‘s power comes in the cooperative adventures it facilitates—the month I spent playing it online with other people was among my most memorable gaming experiences ever.
In Valheim, you play as a Viking warrior in a randomly generated gigantic open-world environment with forests, seas, mountains, and a population of trolls, goblins, and other supernatural foes. It‘s a survival game, meaning that you need to collect materials from the environment and craft them into the structures and gear necessary to stay alive. The steady ramp-up of the game‘s technology tree, where building things and gathering resources enables you to build more complex things and gather new types of resources, is extremely satisfying. You start with essentially nothing, punching saplings to collect wood to build your first tools. Soon you are clearing out trees to gather lumber and resin, breaking apart stone to build sturdy walls, and constructing simple huts to shelter yourself from the rain. Much later, you are mining copper ore, smelting it into copper bars, combining those with tin to forge bronze, and crafting bronze swords, armor, and arrowheads. It‘s super fun and rewarding to set up a production line for these complex chains of crafting—locating veins of copper, clearing forests to build a clear road back to your base, producing coal to fuel the forge, and building chests (labeled, if you want to get fancy) in which to store your raw materials and finished products.
All that would be pretty fun if Valheim were a single-player experience, but playing with multiple friends in a shared world was incredible. This involved renting a cloud server on which to host our game (a little work to figure out, but in the end fairly easy and inexpensive). Once that cloud server was set up, any of us could log into the game world at any time to contribute. This led to delightful situations in which I logged on to the game to find a new upgrade to our base, or a chestful of raw materials that had been gathered for communal use, or a freshly sown field or pen of tamed boars (which are also things you can do). For my part, I enjoyed putting on a podcast, clearing out paths through forests, and constructing roads to make later travel easier.
And then, if we were all available to play, or if we needed to team up to defeat a boss, we could all log on and work together. Or rescue one another. In one memorable instance, one member of our party had gone on a reconnaissance mission across the sea and far from our home base, and he found himself in a late-game area where enemies killed him with a single hit. I built a boat and went on a long, lonely journey to build a transportation portal along the shore where he died, so that he could warp back there to pick up the valuable gear he had dropped. Taking care to avoid goblins and the aptly-named Deathsquitos, I succeeded. This was not a mission programmed into the game; it was an emergent quest created by the game‘s sandbox and our own actions. But it was way more thrilling than just about any authored quest I‘ve played in an RPG.
1. Returnal
Released April 30. Played on PlayStation 5.
Normally I don‘t care much for hard games. I‘ve tried to get into the Dark Souls games, for instance, but tended to be put off by the slow movement, complex systems, and heavily timing-based dodges and parries. Returnal has gained a reputation for being very difficult, to the point where I didn‘t bother checking it out when it released early in 2021. When I finally tried it this fall, it grabbed me hard, vaulting past even Valheim to become my favorite game of the year.
In Returnal, you play as an astronaut who crash-lands on an alien planet and tries to find a way home. (That sounds pretty cliché, but there‘s a ton more to it that I won‘t reveal here.) It‘s a third-person action game in which you use a diverse selection of guns to take out aliens and progress through randomly generated levels. (Randomly generated in the sense that there are a bunch of pre-constructed rooms that are assembled in a random order and populated with random enemies and items.) Like my favorite game of last year, Hades, it‘s a run-based game—you get as far as you can until you die, and then you‘re sent back to the beginning to try again.
Within moments of starting the game, you can tell it will feel great to play. The player character, Selene, moves extremely quickly and responsively. Aiming and shooting are smooth and easy, with the PS5 controller‘s resistive triggers being used cleverly to activate an alternative firing mode for the guns. Then the first enemy shoots at you, shooting a geometric pattern of slowly-moving glowing projectiles, and you realize that this is actually a beautifully polished, big-budget, 3D bullet hell game. The paramount focus, as with that classic genre, is basically to use your character‘s mobility to avoid getting hit. Shooting back is important, but generous auto-aim means you don‘t need to be too precise. Exploring the environments is useful, but a detailed map that always shows you where to go next means that you don‘t need to spend time exploring every nook and cranny of an area. Ultimately it‘s pretty simple: moving around in Returnal feels great, and your main objective is to move around, so Returnal works perfectly as a pure gameplay experience.
There is more to it, though. Time loop system have the potential to become frustrating, since when you die you generally lose a bunch of the gear you found on your run. You do gain knowledge and practice each time, which is nice, but Returnal smartly also includes things that do carry over from run to run. A currency that you keep enables you to unlock new items, after which those items begin appearing in your normal runs. And using weapons levels up their abilities, another form of progress that carries over. Underlining it all, again, is the simply pleasurable gameplay, which in itself makes death less of a hassle—you want to keep playing Returnal just to keep playing it.
Other Notable Stuff I Played This Year
Hypnospace Outlaw
This came out in 2019, but I just discovered it this year. If I were the kind of person to put old games on a current game-of-the-year list, this would be vying for the number one slot. It‘s essentially a late 1990s web simulator, and more specifically a Geocities simulator, which, as someone who grew up right in that wonderful era of the internet, is extremely up my alley. Your role is to enforce the rules of Hypnospace (the fake internet), including such infractions as copyright infringement and harassment. The interface is a virtual computer desktop—you can open a browser to explore Hypnospace (and seek out violations to report), use an email client to receive messages from your supervisors, open up a music player (that is basically Winamp, complete with skins—incredible!), and change your desktop wallpaper. The writing and design of the websites in Hypnospace is sharp and funny, and the music is fantastic and spot-on. (The game creator invented fake bands, then commissioned multiple fully produced songs for those bands. Then you can download those songs through the Hypnospace browser onto your virtual desktop, and listen to them in the pretend Winamp. Yes, this game rules.) Hypnospace Outlaw plays with the computer-interface concept in a ton of clever and unexpected ways, and the story, while simple, takes some interesting turns. The best part of the game, though, is just exploring Hypnospace itself and absorbing the super-accurate 1990s Web 1.0 feel of it all.
Inscryption
People love this game, and I‘m digging it so far, but I haven‘t finished it yet. Right now it‘s a deck-building card battling game; I understand that the game goes to some different places later, but even in the early game I‘m enjoying what it has to offer. It‘s begun to get meta in some intriguing ways, and I suspect that will continue and deepen. Sometimes it gets frustrating when you‘re literally dealt a bad hand and there seems to be no way to win, but in general the deceptively simple strategy of the card game has been fun.
Forza Horizon 5
I‘ve enjoyed the Forza Horizon games all the way back to the first one, and Forza Horizon 5 is basically the same thing again, with smart refinements here and there and a terrific audiovisual presentation. At its heart it‘s still an arcade-style open-world racing game with a mix of pretty standard road racing events with wackier challenges, like racing planes, trains, and other non-automobile things. This was a great podcast game for me—it was fun to catch up on podcasts while driving around the beautifully rendered Mexican landscape completing objectives and earning new cars—but it didn‘t quite merit a spot in my personal top five.
Ghost of Tsushima
Another old game, and by old, I mean it came out in 2020. I played Ghost of Tsushima early in 2021 and had a blast. It‘s an open-world action game with a cool setting: Japan in the 1200s during the Mongol invasion. The graphics are beautiful (and, importantly, paired with stunning art direction), the game design is smart, and the storyline is genuinely compelling. As with Ratchet & Clank, this was a game that I platinumed, mostly to continue experiencing its world after completing the main storyline. Had I played this in 2020, it definitely would have found a place on that year‘s list.