Board 8 > pumpkin's top 10 games of 2021

(+) Yeah! (+)

i was going to make this list after I finished the great ace attorney chronicles... but that game is very long, and its february.

2021 was a pretty good year for games, but there wasnt much that resonated with super strongly - i ranked it from 1 to 10 as you do but it still didnt look quite right. a lot of great games, just not a lot that jumped out as a favourite. there wasnt a whole lot separating some of the list from what missed the cut and as such, there will be a bunch of honourable mentions. here are all the games:

Astalon: Tears of the Earth
Backbone
co-open
The Forgotten City
Inscryption
KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION
NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139...
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC
Psychonauts 2
Sable
Scarlet Nexus
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
Townscaper
Tres-Bashers
Unsighted

it was also a year in which i had game pass, and a little over half this list is stuff I played through game pass. some of which i would have bought anyway and some of which i might have dismissed otherwise, but either way idk, im a bit ambivalent about a single service dictating such a large portion of my playing habits or taste.

there will be write-ups, but its been too long and ive forgotten how to write so they wont be as insightful as they could be.

first, the honourable mentions:

Tres-Bashers (ondydev)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNNYFIT0fBs

Tres-Bashers is a metroidvania in which you play a little mouse kid beating up cryptids who have taken over the school. Everything just looks, sounds, and feels really good in this game from the chunky pixels, to the banging soundtrack, to the crunch in all the sound effects. The controls are responsive and have quite a distinctive feel. Theres a dash that you really have to commit to, and carries a lot of momentum. One of the first mobility upgrades you could get is a backflip that lets you jump higher and it involves dashing in one direction then jumping while pulling in the opposite direction, which feels weight-y, and a bit frantic during combat. Its not a scary game, but it has a cute-spooky aesthetic that especially carries through in one of its major mechanics, which is your flashlight. A lot of monsters hide in the shadows and cant be attacked until youve shine a flashlight on them, so youll run through a room catching a glimpse of something or hearing some scuttling in an unknown direction.

Its a relatively short game (took me 6 hrs to do everything) with a small scope, but its packed nonetheless with secrets, and weapons variety. I also really like that there are a finite number of monsters, which makes it satisfying to clear an area. I dont really consider myself a metroidvania person, or at least not to the extent a lot of people are. Its not a structure that inherently appeals to me, and its a malleable enough term, that I never quite knew which were the ones for me. Ive played a decent amount of modern ones, but I credit that more to how every 5th indie game being recommended is a metroidvania so Im bound to hit a few. This year, two landed for me and yeah, Ive forgotten that I quite like filling in little squares on a map. I should have known since I did really love the GBA and DS metroids and especially the vanias once upon a time, but there are so many of them now that a lot if it has washed over me, and I should definitely look into a few more of them.

Scarlet Nexus (BANDAI NAMCO Studios, Tose)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdWzjJbc-78

So Scarlet Nexus is just pretty good however, theres something to be said about a game being pretty good all the way through. Its a slick, streamlined experience without much fat on it. The general rhythm involves running down a corridor, doing a lot of fighting between comic book style dialogue scenes, then returning to base to do bonding missions, give gifts, and upgrade weapons before opening up a menu to start the next chapter. Its a tidy structure, and I mostly played it a chapter a session. Theres not much in the way of exploration, but the corridors you run down are decorated with dilapidated industrial sprawl that gives a sense of the state of the world, though earlier outdoor environments like Kikuchiba and the highway have a lot more going for them than later stuff like the sewer tunnel that looks like a dozen sewer tunnels youve been through in other games. Your squad uniforms are slick and stylish. The monsters (Others) that you fight have creative designs with a lot of animating parts, and some QTE kills that pull them apart in cool-looking ways. Combat isnt super complex but it looks cool and feels pretty good. You start with the basic rhythm of combo-ing hitting things with your sword and throwing objects with telekinesis, managing meter for the latter, then it layers in environmental QTEs and dodging, then support abilities from your squad which are all on their own meter, then as your bond goes up with them you unlock other squad commands. Theres a lot going on, but prompts are plentiful and its pretty easy to take advantage of everything at your disposal. Its a breezy game that goes down easy, and is just consistently good enough without dragging much.

The thing I really want to talk about though is your party, not because theyre interesting characters, but theyre almost remarkable in how unremarkable they are? Yuito is the mildest motherfucker ever. A former teammate tries to kill him and his response is just well Im sure they had their reasons. As a whole, everyones just really polite and considerate of each others feelings. Theres like one asshole in the other squad, but hes like a harmless asshole. Oh yeah, theres another squad that you come to blows with a few times because the game is split into two paths running through the same events (Ive only played the Yuito half). Even though you fight out in the field, you still have bonding missions with the other team where you hang out 1-on-1 at a cafe, which is a cute touch that is emblematic of how little friction there is in this game. All the characters have their handful of traits, but theyre all kind of marked by self-awareness and being communicative about what their whole deal is. Yuito generally comes off like a counselor conducting interviews and offering advice. If I described the plot of this game its actually pretty fucking wild, but its muted in-game because everyones a level-headed professional that catches on quickly and moves through it immediately. Its funny, because youre learning deep dark truths about the nature of the world as well as each other in ways that re-contextualises everything you know and yet your bond with your team never feels anything above saving the world with some coworkers that you get along with pretty well.

Scarlet Nexus great game

you summed it up pretty well!

co-open (lowpolis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4LiBa-oddI

Co-open is a cute adventure game where you play a kid on their first ever solo grocery shopping trip. Its store page describes it as containing immersive sim gameplay, which in this case means that it takes place in a coherent space that feels tangible and connects together sensibly, its open-ended in how you explore it, and most importantly, you can get around by crawling through the vents. Grandma Mila drops you off at the Vorogda Community Store, a cozy local store full of local residents who pretty much all know you. Her only instructions are to get what you want and to have fun. If you want, you can immediately end the game by paying for anything at the register. Theres no shopping list; youre ostensibly there to get ingredients for dinner but you can walk out with 6 Sudoku books and go hungry if you want.

Of course once youre there, what kid can resist the urge to explore. You can poke around the adjacent floors, chatting with friendly neighbours, and discovering secrets. Its a mundane space, but with a bit of surreality like the snow cave behind the warehouse or the glowing cats that seem to defy gravity. All the NPCs have little problems you can help them with, like your school friends on the adjacent roof who lost their ball over the fence or the snow skating teen who cant find a rare snack. There are phone numbers you can call for little messages, found on bulletin boards, posters, and such strewn across the environment. When youve had your fill and ring up at the register, grandma picks you up and theres a cute ending where on the walk home she comments on each individual knick knack youve picked up as quest rewards, as well as on what youve bought (ie. about how she didnt realize you were so into Sudokus). I dont know, not much more to say about this one! Its a warm, relaxing time.

Only game I played here is Astalon, although I have Unsighted on my wishlist and I'm curious about a couple others.

Backbone (EggNut)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=034f3KSaWb8

Backbone currently sits with a Mixed on Steam, and theres a lot of sentiment that it fell short of expectations. This was not a game that I actively followed through development. There was a prologue that came out in 2019 but I only played it last year (though in the end it was included as part of the full game anyway). Nonetheless I was aware of it, because it would crop up now and then for looking gorgeous, and it really does. You play as Howard Lotor, a scruffy raccoon private eye in a noir dystopia. It has a 2.5D-ish look, with cityscapes of densely detailed pixel art, layers of depth with parallax scrolling, dynamic lighting, and nice water effects. Lighting in particular is essential to capturing any noir aesthetic and they nail it. A big part of why I like adventure games is that I like good pixel art landscapes, and this game is worth a look for that alone. On top of that, it has a suitably atmospheric jazz soundtrack, and occasionally some nice illustrated art in the interstitial between locations its a game with incredible style.

From what I gleaned, a lot of people were disappointed because they expected more detective gameplay. The Prologue has you gathering clues, solving puzzles, has multiple solutions to get into a place, and even some stealth. While there is a bit more sleuthing in later sections, most of the game is very linear, and more visual novel-like, as you spend most of your time going from location to location for new dialogue trees. Fortunately, the dialogue is engaging; characters have complex moralities, and it manages some dense world-building without losing personality and feeling like just an info dump. It also has the confidence to leave the player confused and in the dark, but your mileage may vary on whether thats good.

Given all of the above, most of the ire for this game is for its final act which kicks a lot of it up a notch. Without spoiling too much, Backbone starts as a missing persons case then spirals into a conspiracy that goes higher and darker, entangling issues of race and class. The last act takes an abrupt turn into cryptic fever dream, weird science fiction, and body horror. The plot becomes more confusing and rushed. It has the mark of a game that ran out of resources, as you spend a lot of time scrolling through text on a static screen. Little happens, nothing is explained, dialogue gives way to more of a hazy tone piece, major characters are dropped, and plot threads are left unresolved. I found it fairly bold and stark, but I also didnt see it as a huge departure from the more grounded events prior. A lot of noir is about futile action, and anxieties over the borders of identity. Howards fate is sealed, but was it ever otherwise? Throughout the game there is the constant foreboding sense that what youre dealing with is way above your pay grade, and the final act escalates this. Confused action shoring up confused individualism as prospects grow bleaker. We change but we change nothing.

suddenly i think i need to rearrange the next few

Townscaper (Oskar Stlberg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqq25n6cQqo

Townscaper is simple: You click on a square on the grid to make a building. You click on a square next to or on top of that building to make a bigger building, or you place a block of a different colour and make two buildings next to each other. Your only actions are to place a block or erase a block, and everything stems from that. The closest thing to an objective is figuring out how to get certain architectural features to show up, because you dont plop down a garden or church door as you please, but instead place and delete blocks a certain way for them to show up. As you become more familiar with its algorithm, you can maybe better aim for what you want, like knowing how to get a balcony vs a roof. As you build, small details like flocks of seagulls, bunting, and coin-operated binoculars would pop up, and maybe someone whos played a lot of this knows how to build for max seagulls, too. Or you can just click around on a whim and at random, because itll make something cool regardless. The limitations are what makes it work for me. Townscaper cant move at a faster pace than one block at a time, so theres very little in the way of planning. Instead youre shaping it as you play, and theres an element of surprise and discovery as you lay a block down, see how you like it, delete a block, see how you like it, and so on. Its art style is intuitively suitable for making a quaint seaside hamlet or Mont-Saint-Michel, but you can also build super high and delete the lower blocks to get a ton of metal stilts for something sort of industrial-looking, then mess around with the lighting to get your town at different times of day. You can even make it night time, and the windows will light up! Its all very charming.

Theres a browser version of it with a reduced grid:

https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/

Also some cool art out there from people who paint over their Townscaper screenshots.

10. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC (Mobius Digital)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9M6WumjtE

A lot of what made Outer Wilds an awe-inspiring accomplishment is present here in the DLC - the sense of discovery, the assembling of a narrative through disparate pieces, the eureka moments, the sublimity of the environments, etc. Echoes of the Eye takes place in a new location and is primarily a standalone adventure within the world of the original game. Its enthralling immediately, from working out how to even get to it, to the exuberance as you look up and take it all in, and then that music is playing, and Im being vague for now, but Ill get into some specifics later.

But first the negative, and a fairly common complaint from what Ive seen. A core strength of the original game is its open-ended structure, and how for most of it, you have a lot of different leads to chase. Sometimes you come to a revelation for one puzzle while working on something else entirely or you want to switch it up because youve hit a wall, but either way you have options. For EotE I was there to play EotE, which meant each loop began in the exact same way flying the exact same route. Theres plenty to explore in the new location, but as your possibilities narrow, more successive loop starts to run down the same path, going into the same building, picking up the same object, and so on. This coupled with a specific frustrating mechanic in parts, made for more anxious runs. Repetition and even some frustration were, for me, valuable to the experience of the original. Part of what sells the timeloop is how many attempts I took on the Sun Station jump or Dark Brambles or even having random loops 15 hours in ending prematurely with me flinging myself into the sun, but the same possibility for disaster or distraction isnt there in EotE, and increasingly the opening of each loop felt unnecessary and tedious. Despite that though, the new stuff plays on the themes of the original game beautifully and it is enhanced by existing within the same space, and subject to the same structure. Its unreasonable to ask for the same breadth through the DLC, not least of all because this is intentionally a different thing with a deliberate contrast. EotE is a forensic tragedy about the fear and entropy dialectically inherent in the drive for progress and expansion of technology in the original game. Some spoiler-y rambling ahead.

The Nomai you learn about through tracing their footsteps on your own journey along with translated passages in branching spirals that read like a chat log. They exist like a constant companion, their spirit of adventure and excitement in dialogue with your own. In contrast, The Strangers inhabitants are an isolated society which resisted discovery. Their language is unknown, and your mode of uncovering them is through pictorial reels, presented as a definitive history edited or redacted aggressively with fire. There is a narrowing of vision compared to the playful, communal expansiveness expressed through the Nomai. Like the Nomai, The Strangers inhabitants sought after the Eye of the Universe except they manage to reach it, and gazing upon it they saw their own fear. They saw the anxieties of death and decay inherent in experience as a conscious being, and they saw the omnipresent entropy of time. In response they tried to freeze entropy, block out the Eye and retreat from time. Primal fears are exacerbated by technological innovation as our lives become more entwined with it, and it allows us to overwhelm the present with the future. The inhabitants went after the Eye with a religious fervour, developing their society to facilitate it and it has forsaken them, but theres no going back now. There is a haunting moment with layers of unreality as you witness an inhabitant sitting in a simulation of their home world, flickering through a film reel of their home world. Not only can they not go back physically, they cannot un-know what they know.

Whats re-iterated constantly through the time loop is that the universe is deterministic, and it is determined by material processes. You may start the time loop as a detective, seeking the culprit to save the universe, but as you explore the world you find more and more contingencies pointing towards the end as entropy enacts on everything. There is no such thing as segmented time as it is always part of and based in material processes. The inhabitants in their attempted shelter will still have their flame extinguished by the breaking of the dam eroded by time. So like in the main game, its too late. You sift through the lost past and collapsed future simultaneously and repeatedly. As you discover more about the Stranger, it becomes increasingly characterized by pain and sorrow, but think back to the exuberance and beauty of the initial encounter. As the Prisoner says, they werent always like this. Pull back from what went down and you see an expressive people with a great love of art. Instruments, murals, and film reels lie everywhere within the Stranger. Theres the bind. As John Berger put it, without a pictorial language, nobody can render what they see. With one, they may stop seeing. The inhabitants fall into their own representation free from the changing world, and in isolation they lose art as a tool of social production. In the end, the protagonist brings the Prisoner back into history to the gathered procession around the fire, their instrument heard for the first time in ages.

9. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (Strange Scaffold)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRZdhuALMo8

As it says in the intro, "you are an ORGAN TRADER. A supplier of meaty demand with a moral flexibility ranging in the parsecs. You BUY organs. You SELL organs. You take on client REQUESTS, and FULFILL them, and use THEIR money to fuel YOUR future."

Trading day takes place over a handful of tabs, and spans a nerve-wracking 2 and half minutes. The Buy tab is a rapid scrolling list of organs for sale with up to 3 other traders engaged in the same process, often snatching organs you want from under you, so you need to be able to parse information fast. First order is to know each organ type by sight, then if you work at it, be able to read the string of numbers and letters that denotes size, rarity, quality, etc. (I never got to this point), so youre not pulling up the full description every time. Often youll buy the wrong organ through misclicks because the list is constantly moving. At the same time, you need to keep in mind how much space you have in your initially very small cargo hold, so you dont end up unable to purchase a rare organ you need in a crucial moment. In the frantic pace, its also easy to lose track of how much money youve spent. There are bad deals in your Request tab, and sometimes its hard to discern them in a second, or youve started jumbling details of different requests while buying. Sometimes youre fulfilling a request just to clear it because you can only have 5 requests at a time in your Fulfill tab, and you start selling at a loss to free up space or funds. All this happens in the same 2 and half minutes. You cannot accept or fulfill requests after its over, until you initiate the next trading day. In the downtime you check your accidental purchases, consider if you can afford to hold on to them or just sell them off immediately, or upgrade your cargo hold for more space, to keep organs fresh for longer, or protect against corrosive material, or you can buy and sell on the stock market. Most of all, you can wind down from the last trading day and steel yourself for the next.

What works about this game is that its all UI, and that UI is difficult and unpleasant to use. Every step of the trade requires you to give your whole screen over to a different tab while time and the market continues to move. Playing it involves reciting a list of organs like, mythic lung... giant heart... nerve cluster... kidney... gallblader... over and over while flipping through the organ list, until you overpay just so you can recite one less thing. The limited number of requests means an unlucky one can block your trading until you start cancelling them or burning organs on bad deals because youve overfilled your cargo. Its unpleasant, and as it should be, because the organ trade is a vile business for scumbags. Theres a lot of narrative information in how the UI looks and functions. Theres a grungy, abrasive aesthetic to how everything looks and sounds, from the squelching flesh to the aggressive scam pop-ups to the scuzzy, ancient, green digital display. Theres no glamour to this business; no ones making an attractive front end for this thing. This isnt some NFT scam with lofty promises about the future and tech; you dont go into it thinking its cool or cutting edge. Theres no idealism or illusions, just a cargo hold of rotting flesh and the understanding that hey, people need organs; people will always need organs. Each request you receive is accompanied by notes revealing details about the world: mad science, agonised existential robots, necromancer cults, and your biggest source of business, the perpetual war. You mostly catch glimpses of this world from your impersonal position, but it's got an anarchic 2000AD-ish bent. Occasionally your organ is going to an altruistic doctor and you can feel good about your role, but at the speed that trading day moves, you know youre only skimming all these messages for the numbers. Whats a soul worth, anyway? Well

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/5/AAHtIeAAC7NB.jpg

Some of this makes it sound like its more a good concept than a good game, but there really is a fun, compulsive loop there. The thing is, sometimes you have a bad trading day and thats fine, because you can always bounce back in the next one. Apparently Ive played this for 6 hours.

8. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION ([namethemachine] x Arbitrarily Good Productions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNUzGew1EN4

KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION was originally conceived of as a physical art exhibition celebrating the reissue of Radioheads Kid A and Amnesiac but was cancelled due to the pandemic in favour of this virtual exhibition and they leaned the fuck into it, making a space that would have been impossible otherwise. A massive brutalist edifice of winding corridors through eerie, beautiful, oneiric rooms of bespoke aesthetic experiences. Its like a high budget walking simulator, though not in the broad application of the term, but in the vein of a Bernband or Wilbler Park, where youre purely walking and looking at things. I suppose the closest thing to progression is when you loop around to the surface back to where you start, but that just facilitates you heading back in and going down a new corridor, which youll have to because the game is packed with stuff.

Whats especially cool is that it isnt just a visualizer you can move around in, though there are moment that more resemble that, which are nonetheless visually and aurally arresting. As you travel around, isolated stems from songs drift in and out re-contextualised around your movements, presenting the material in new ways, and making the soundscape a part of the physical landscape. There is kind of an interesting reconciliation of how two art forms, painting and music, are typically experienced. Music, which as a form is ephemeral, is given a materiality as a thing of manipulable parts tied to place. Elsewhere rooms resemble an abstracted museum for paintings, which as a form emphasizes physical presence in a single location, but rendered as fluttering pages in motion, floating in an obscure corridor, or adorning liminal spaces. The museum form makes sense as youre often looking at archival artifacts, with pages of sketches, notes, artwork, and video footage that were all produced back then, yet everything is rendered with an unruly materiality, as much present in the moment of experience as it evokes the past. Abstract as the imagery gets, it still wants you to feel the weight of a physical space, which is also helped along by the presence of other patrons making it a palpable public space. Everywhere there are these funny little guys who go about their business, but who also turn to look at you when youre near.

Anyways, its stunning. More of This Sort of Thing, Please.