Best of 2021: Josh's Picks

As the year winds to a close, it's time to once again take a look at my favorite games of the past year. As is our tradition, these will be games I played for the first time in 2021 rather than games released in 2021. Likewise, these won't be in a ranked or ordered list (outside of my Game of the Year) so that I can focus on what made the game great rather than trying to decide who belongs where.

Best Sense of Wonder / Game of the Year: Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is, at heart, a detective game, but the mechanics, mystery, and backdrop all make it so much more. You play as an alien astronaut exploring the solar system. The sun is about to go supernova, but (fortunately) you find yourself stuck in a time loop, replaying the last 22 minutes of existence. Using your wooden spaceship, you seamlessly travel from one planet to another, collecting clues and unraveling the mysteries of a dead alien civilization. The planets are wonderful to visit, each having the feeling of a National Park (the campfires from your fellow astronauts probably feed that feeling). Play this game - there's truly nothing else out there like it.

Best Writing: Wildermyth

Wildermyth combines deep tactical combat with storylines that span generations of heroes. Interesting concept, but what really makes the game shine is the quality of the writing. Whenever an overworld quest line would start for one of my characters, it was always worthwhile to follow it through and see what strange situations they would get into. I've had heroes turn into crows, uncover spellbooks of forgotten gods, and be inducted to an order of magical turtles. You never know what's going to happen next in the best possible way. The combat system (the other half of the game) seems simple at first, but it grows in complexity as your heroes and foes unlock new powers and tactics. A great chocolate-meets-peanut-butter kinda game.

Creepiest Collectables: Inscryption

Inscryption is a fourth-wall-busting masterpiece from Daniel Mullens. The initial story is that you wake up in a creepy cabin and play high-stakes card games with your murderous host. There are card battles interspersed with escape room sequences as you learn more about the card game. There's a lovely dash of creepypasta-esque horror to the whole game, but the game's greatness ultimately comes from the strength of card battle system. The mechanics are the good kind of simple, and the roguelike structure to the encounters will have you coming back again and again. And you will need to come back again and again.

Best Heroes of Might and Magic III: Hero's Hour

Ah, HoMM III. Many an afternoon of my adolescence was whiled away wandering your maps. Unfortunately, the HoMM genre did not get the attention that it deserved. In the past two decades, we've only seen a few forgettable sequels and the King's Bounty series take up the flag planted by HoMM. Luckily, the indie-sphere is wide and developers of niche games can find their niche audience. Hero's Hour is cut from the same cloth as HoMM, but it comes at the genre with fresh ideas that make the game a worthy successor. Real-time battles are the most obvious departure, but the randomized build trees and skill trees make each game enjoyable. Even more enjoyable is the magic system, which builds on the real-time battle system to offer deeper strategic choices and fun meteor-as-bowling-ball moments. Nothing like ending a sea battle early by knocking half the opposing army into the watery depths.

Best "Your old man still beats you at pickup basketball": Metroid Dread

Metroid is a video game series that's older than I am, so you might expect it to show its age. It's hard to stay relevant, much less enjoyable, after all that time. Anything you created (like being half of the "metroidvania" genre) will be done by younger, hungrier developers and done better. It's a real problem. I played Super Metroid for the first time three or four years ago and bounced after two hours because others have done it better. So I was delighted to be delighted by Metroid Dread. It had enjoyable combat and platforming, memorable bosses, and an interesting destructible terrain system that meant navigation wasn't solely limited by your upgrades. Good job, old man, you win this round.

Best Mood: Paradise Killer

Much like the game, this choice is a bit of an oddball. The soundtrack is banging, but has to be experienced within the game to get the full effect. (In our cast, I mention that I listened to the soundtrack on its own and it didn't really do anything for me.) Much the same with the architecture and color choices and art direction. Any given screenshot may not look impressive on its own. But taken together, everything blends smoothly into a perfect cocktail of gonzo demon cult murder mystery. It wears its mood on its sleeve so well that you might as well call its genre "vaporwave" instead of "detective game". The underlying detective gameplay is strong, making Paradise Killer well worth picking up.

Best Action: Control

Control was almost a platonic ideal of third-person shooter combat. Delving into a Twilight Zone of a bureaucracy under siege from an unknowable entity, Remedy's combat was a buttery smooth mix of gunplay and psychic powers. The powers felt, well, powerful, and the brutalist architecture offered plenty of concrete chunks to tear out from the walls and smash into foes. Small touches like having your gun's ammo automatically regenerate between battles made genre conventions like a reload button feel like antiquated relics. The sharp focus on combat made exploring the concrete playground of the Bureau of Control a joy and a pleasure.

Best Genre Distillation: The Battle of Polytopia

The wonderful Civ-in-miniature Battle of Polytopia managed to pull off an impossible-sounding feat: compress the fun of a game of Civilization into a 30-minute package. I've written up an article about its design and mechanics. Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of it.

Craziest Design: Katamari Damacy

Feels weird having a decades-old game on this list, but it's an exquisitely weird game. The "plot" involves an alien prince being sent to Earth to clean up after his father's cosmic drunken bender. The prince must roll up everything from cockroaches to skyscrapers in his ever-growing and all-hungering katamari ball. It's crazy, it's crazy fun. If you also have spent the last two decades missing out on this game, pick it up for the Switch and enjoy one of the strangest games I've ever played.

Best Road Trip: Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero is a tour-de-force of a game. Released in five chapters over eight years, the game always kept you guessing. It starts off as a traditional adventure game, but only stays there for five or ten minutes. It sprawls across characters and storylines in a mystical and mythical version of the Kentucky backwoods. You never know where it's going next, whether it's watching a play in an inter-chapter interlude or selling your soul to a ghoulish distillery. The game rewards a close reading, and a repeat playthrough. That's a check I'll be sure to cash in the coming years.