The best games of 2021 so far
Resident Evil: Village, Bowser's Fury, Hitman 3, and more fill out our list of the best games released in the first half of 2021
Games Lists Video games developed in Japan
Graphic: Natalie Peeples
2021 has been a bit of a ghost town for video games—and not just because one of the most prominent titles of the year took place in an escalating series of themed haunted houses. Although the steady rain of remakes, reissues, re-releases, and other all-purpose retreads continues to fall on the industry’s head, the slowdowns imposed by the COVID-19 lockdowns have led to a certain lightness on the medium’s release schedules in the first half of this year. Not even the ramping up of the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 (now sporting five whole console-exclusive games!) has managed to spawn much of a gold rush—especially since studios are as likely to divert energy toward next-gen updates of existing games than to develop expensive new projects of their own.
Still, though: The (relatively) low volume of releases hasn’t stopped 2021 from having some fantastic titles hidden in among the weeds. Indie horror games, big-budget murder simulators, and even—yes—a few remakes have all found inspiration in the quiet, while some of gaming’s most beloved franchises managed to top themselves with new innovations. As such, we’re celebrating our favorite games of 2021 so far, letting you know what were The Games We Liked—and why we liked them—in the first half of the year.
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Ive replayed RE8 about six times. Its one hell of a good game for the 25th anniversary. Although it might not work as well on subsequent runs, goddamn is the Baby reveal something. I’m so glad someone felt compelled to crib ideas from Silent Hills. Worst part is the sounds… human enough to be recognizable but twisted enough to seem not of this world. Bravo Capcom. Also yeah Lady Dimitrescu was a good character and all that Jazz. If you ever want to have fun look up her voice actress, Maggie Robertson. She’s perhaps the most entertaining person with one hell of a big heart. I’m glad this game gave her the spotlight.
It Takes Two was so good. Me and a friend of mine played a hour or so of the game every Sunday for about two months and it never had a dull moment.
I liked Mundaun because it literally hit close to home. Mundaun has a lot of things going for it: An absolutely unique artstyle (all textures were hand penciled by most-solo developer Michel Ziegler), an extremely dense atmosphere, which balances the uncanny with a grotesque sense of humor, and an impeccable sense of pacing, which put most horror games to shame. Yes, it is janky in some ways, but it’s really one of those — even in the indie space — rare gems that transport the idiosyncratic vision of its developer (who worked 7 years on it.) The reason why it was so, well, important to me, though, is another one: Its setting, a fictionalized part of the Swiss alps, chalets and ski lifts and everything included, is very similar to the place I grew up in. (Minus a few monsters.) I honestly did never expect to see “my world” (in which Swiss folklore played a certain role, too) represented in a game — and one which, against all my expectations, is ultimately a lot more than a unique art style: Mundaun is a genuinely good game.
Well written, I loved it too. Let’s just hope you don’t get a letter informing you that your grandpa’s barn has been burnt down.
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I wonder what took people so long to appreciate Hitman. It’s a great series. I was watching Problem Child 2 the other day, when I realized how much some of the gags Junior pulls are similar to Hitman “accidents.” In one scene, he sneakily electrifies a puddle, and in another he swaps a surgery chart in a hospital for devastating results. And there’s a BBQ trap that Hitman 2’s suburb level may as well have straight up lifted.
If the going joke is that Home Alone’s Kevin McCallister is like a young Jigsaw, then Problem Child’s Junior is a certainly a pint-sized Agent 47!
Controversial opinion: As much as the structure gets slagged, the episodic release of the first of the recent “Hitman” trilogy is a large part of its success. It gave players the opportunity — forced them, really — to replay each level over and over before the release of the next one. Having to do that shone a light on just how flexible and open-ended io’s sandboxes were, which in turn generated great word of mouth.
What I enjoyed so far: Elsinore, Mundaun, Cloudpunk.
Don’t bother with: The Shore
I feel Cyberpunk 2077 should not be missed. Yes, it’s a meme how poorly its launch was handled, it still basically being fundamentally broken in some ways regardless of platform. But for those of us who didn’t suffer the hype train or succumbed to gamer rage, AND played on a decent desktop setup (yes, we are a tiny niche) – we did get a pretty damn good experience. The narrative is superb, with some of the greatest interactive sci-fi writing ever committed to code. There were instances where I was moved to tears, and a certain religious themed quest line made my stomach drop when it came to making the final choice and then to see it play graphically out.Give CDPR all the flack for releasing a to this day still unfinished game, but it deserves at least some of that hype it built.
I enjoyed it just fine, with reservations. My gaming PC isn’t top of the line, but once I cranked the settings to “decent last-gen spectacle”, it ran perfectly (granted, I didn’t pick it up until after Hotfix 1.2). Honestly, my biggest reservation has more to do with the games industry as a whole. The current trend of open-world AAA game design is just an unsustainable beast. There is no reason for all this unnecessary scale and feature bloat in an industry that is burning out its employees with overwork just to get the games shipped on time. Sure, it results in games with “hundreds of hours of content”, but how much of it is worth doing? I think the AAA games industry needs to learn to focus in on the most compelling parts of the game and forget the frivolous stuff.
At some point, I need to write a piece on Cyberpunk’s ending (specifically, Temperance, which is what I picked—sorry, Panam) and the sheer amount of emotion it pulled out of me. There are a LOT of things you can ding CDPR on, but they’re one of the best studios going when it comes to stillness and melancholy. (When Cyberpunk actually lets itself quiet down, anyway.) I was genuinely moved watching the characters try to move on in that ending—at least, until the game crashed right as the last video calls were rolling in.
(Also, for the sake of my own sanity, reminding myself that it’s technically a 2020 title. It didn’t make our list then, either, but I think the critical re-appraisal is going to eventually be kind to it.)
Technically it should have been a 2022 game 😉
It is nice when games can bounce back from a shaky launch. After a few months’ worth of patches, Fallout: New Vegas went from being a cautionary tale to setting a new standard in flexible game design. When Mass Effect 3 added the Citadel DLC, the baffling resolution to the Reaper conflict seemed less important. Heck, the entire Reaper conflict itself seemed insignificant after that character-based coda.
I’m still holding out hope that the world at large will finally recognize that Star Control 3 is a hidden gem that just had an impossible legacy to live up to.
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No, it does not. It was a thoroughly mediocre game. And, in order to get past the gate you’re trying to keep: played on PC, Ryzen 3600, GTX 3070, M.2 SSD, and dedicated sound card. At best, it’s a middling Far Cry game, with worse mechanics. Perks that don’t make sense, or break other parts of the gameplay, in a city that is as broad as an ocean, and as a shallow a pool of piss on pub toilet seat. But mostly, it’s a poorly-written (and re-written) narrative, with thoroughly unlikeable, one-dimensional characters throughout (absolutely no one in this game is likeable), plotholes…oh, and a completely deleted second act.It’s so obviously cobbled together by a bunch of people who barely had any idea what they were doing.
Good to see somebody else mention Far Cry, because that was the closest comparison point I could come up with, too. About the same level of interactivity here as there is in those games. I didn’t hate Cyberpunk, but did feel like it was fundamentally unfinished, and a massive step back from The Witcher 3.
It came out last year. I also thought that it was a pretty mediocre game outside of its ray-tracing effects and a handful of very good missions (the heist, the finale, that crucifixion quest you mentioned), but y’know, opinions and all that.
I share the love for Mass Effect 2 and never quite got the hate. I just finished up my Mass Effect play through on the Legendary version and am currently waiting for the install to finish up so I can get to my favorite of the trilogy.
My big problem is it felt like A) they jettisoned a lot of the RPG elements in favor of making it more of a shooter, and B) the mood is a lot more “dark and gritty” than the semi-hopeful space opera of the first. Having to work for a suspicious crypto-fash human solidarity faction is a weird plot point, all the landscapes are full of rubble, you don’t get to really explore planets anymore (even if the Mako had… problems.) Like it may be strictly better from a design standpoint but it feels like some important stuff was lost.
Working with Cerberus and for The Illusive Man after touching on their experiments and discovering Admiral Kohoku’s body in ME is a choice I wish they hadn’t made, for sure. Shepard was alive and it’s almost like they spaced her purely to give Cerberus a way to join the plot. I totally agree it’s a weird and jarring point, especially if you play Paragon, as I primarily do. The dark and gritty vibe works for me, but that’s just me.I only got through to Freedom’s Progress last night on Legendary Edition and was dismayed to remember my Vanguard has a different skill set on ME2 than she did hours before in ME. I should have chosen a different class. Biotic Charge is fun, but I’d be better off as an Adept with my playing style, ie, I’m not a great shot.
Vanguard really comes into its own in ME3, where you can chain Biotic Charge with Nova (which ME2 doesn’t have; it’s a player-centered AoE) ad infinitum and clear out a battlefield pretty quickly.
I do remember that combo from the ME3 online play, which both my ex-husband and I played almost obsessively, and it was magnificent. I never did finish up the storyline for ME3, but will definitely slog through the whole thing on this newest playthrough. Unfortunately, I don’t get much free time to play these days, so it will take me upwards of a month before I get to dip my toes back into ME3.
What hate? I thought ME2 was pretty universally beloved. It’s 3’s ending that a lot of people hate.
People who really liked the first game were (and to some extent still are) down on the second one because it changed so much; I think that it was a solid improvement over the first (which tried to do too much, and ended up doing most of it not very well) and was easier to get into, but in some ways oversimplified things, with the third game counter-correcting for ME2. The first game gives the impression that BioWare had no faith that there would be a second game and tried to cram everything, including the bulk of the worldbuilding, into it, which resulted in a fairly clumsy interpretation; ME2 was lighter on the plot, but vastly improved the characterization.
I really like Cozy Grove because even though part of me wants to play in 8-hour chunks, I appreciate that the game won’t let me.
I also really like games that are about helping instead of killing.
It just came out but Mario Golf is awesome. More fun & replayable than most of these.
My favourites of the year so far are Hitman 3, Adios, and It Takes Two. Hitman 3 and It Takes Two have been discussed at length elsewhere, so let me just take a couple of moments to sing the praises of Adios. It’s a brief (~2 hours) first-person narrative adventure set on a farm. It’s wonderfully atmospheric, extremely well voice-acted, and adept at evoking emotions in the player. I don’t want to spoil anything more about it, because it’s best if you go in blind.
Good to see If On A Winter’s Night Four Travelers get some shine. Robert W. Chambers and Silent Hill are two flavors that unsurprisingly go great together – even when they remind you just how slow Silent Hill was to play back in the day. And the Calvino mixed in there is cute! I’m not entirely sure what it’s doing there (IOAWN4T doesn’t seem to be “about” reading the way the novel it takes its name from is) but it’s always refreshing to read when it does come up.
Yeah if on a winter’s night stood out to me too, that sounds great! Even if the Calvino allusions are confined to the title,Lovecraftian point and click adventure sounds lovely
That instructional video for The Initiative could have been a limited series on HBO Max.Seriously though, I’m getting that game asap.
I finished the new Ratchet & Clank yesterday and it was by far the most fun I’ve had playing a game in ages. It looked stunning on my PS5. Never played any of the other entries in the series, but this was an all around joyful experience that I didn’t want to end.
Feel exactly the same. I thought this was the best PS5 game to come out yet — miles ahead of anything else in terms of pure fun. I hadn’t played the Ratchet series either, so nothing felt stale and everything looked stunning (the portal falls! wow!). And the shit-eating grin I had on my face when everything starts going tits up in the level when you meet the ‘Fixer,’ was when I knew the deal was sealed. The weapon selection is wild, and I’m happy I played on a hard difficulty because the limited ammo/larger hit pool meant I was constantly switching up weapons on the fly easily and joyously to see most everything. Sorry topiary sprinkler.It was everything I wanted out a shooter that I didn’t get from Returnal. I dug Returnal well enough, but my god the second half just becomes haphazardly dodging an endless array of heat-seeking missles and praying to RNJeebus that this time you’ll get a halfway decent weapon, but no. After spending the first few hours slamming my head against the boss with only a pistol or a shotgun (or whatever the starters are) I already knocked it down a letter grade, so praying for fun weapons while mostly not getting them meant was a game-ender for me after a few days of no-joy.R&C all the way.
Board GamesJust finished our first campaign of Sleeping Gods and it was everything we hoped it would be. To me it felt like an RPG videogame brought to life (in the best way possible). It’s definitely a heavier game and the rules could have been more polished but I still highly recommend it to everyone who loves adventure games.We finally received our copy of The Search for Planet X and after a disastrous first game in which we both messed up our deductions, the second game was a lot smoother. My husband solved the puzzle wayyy ahead of me, but hopefully that was just a one time thing. Video GamesBought Contradiction in the Summer Sale and it was a blast. Storywise there were some loose ends and the contradiction system itself could have been better, but the acting alone made up for it all. Fingers crossed for a sequel.I watched Christopher Odd’s Let’s Play of Resident Evil Village and that proved to me again why I’m so glad Let’s Plays exist. No way in hell that I would’ve played that game myself, but this way I could still kind of experience it and it was great fun.
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