2021 games in review

[SnowFire]

Yep.  What games did you play in 2021, the first year of uninterrupted covid worries?

Previous years: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and  2020.

[Cmdr_King]

17. Romancing SaGa 3 [Switch, 2019 (SFC, 1995)]

RS3 is just Prototype SaGa Frontier, and the places they differ suck so much of the fun of that game out of it.  SaGa I reliably find benefits from smaller, punchier games and Frontier taking the idea of multiple protagonists and just turning each of them into a mini-RPG with shared locations and sidequests to make it a coherent game overall adds way more to the overall experience than the simple mechanical improvements between these two games would suggest otherwise.
I will admit to just some sheer salt though.  Being a full length adventure means that the occasional jumps in difficulty basically every SaGa game has as a byproduct of the overall design is a much bigger and more frustrating wall when powering up takes so long and it happens multiple times in a playthrough, and that sucks so much of the joy out of the normal SaGa experience.  It’s a shame since, being an SNES game, RS3 is willing to be goofy as shit in a way that works for SaGa, but… yeah, every time the game got into a groove it’d last for like a dungeon/quest then violently stop in a burst of frustration.  Some of this is on me I suppose, but yeah.  5/10

16. Final Fantasy Legend [Switch, 2020 (GB, 1990)]

So yes hi hello original SaGa game.  It’s probably kinda weird to talk about two of these and spend basically the whole damn time talking about other games but… well, looking at how the mechanics of the series developed over time is what they’re giving me here.
Anyways so god damn you do feel the lack of certain features that became standard later in the series, especially just the ability to easily reorder your moves and equipment (and with it mechanics to actually hang on to randomly learned moves), and of course better inventory space because boy howdy that’s an issue.  All that said it’s also the most distilled form of the core SaGa appeal, seeing these modular tabletop campaign with the seams and all and just rolling right past the contradictions because who cares, it’s fucking fun that way.  Also probably the coolest meta but not commentary on the art of DMing made to that time really.  The fact it became a meme afterward just makes it funnier really.  5/10, but fascinating.

15. Ghostbusters: The Video Game [Switch, 2019 (Multi, 2009)]

I don’t think I have much to add about this one months on.  There’s a chuck-worthy moment or two I suppose but the seams where the game was clearly meant to be bigger are really visible, and it’s a fairly lackluster port.  5/10, moving on

14. Shovel Knight (Shovel of Hope) [3DS, 2014]

So let’s actually talk about this game.  The game frequently fires on all cylinders and god, it’s a damn good NES-evolved platformer.  The use of checkpoints is a bit lacking at times but you have lots of tools and the powerups both temporary and permanent are well-paced.  Bosses are a thoroughly mixed bag but only one or two are hard in the bad way.  But fucking a there’s a couple parts, especially in the end, where the game has absolutely no goddamned respect for the player or their time.  I just flat gave up on actually finishing the game during the big boss rush which just… is the meanest and least adaptable way you could handle that particular element and I have no idea what they were going for.  6/10 still, but fuck.

13. Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid [Switch, 2019]

I’ll never fully understand why I enjoy the occasional fighting game story mode playthrough, but it’s a thing.  This isn’t an amazing one of those but it was kinda fun to actually just do a power rangers thing honestly?  I dunno, there’s something appealing about dabbling in the broader timeline nonsense of power rangers.  6/10.

12. Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight [PS4, 2018]

My favorite of the three Dancing games.  P3 has a better opening and P4 has an actual story mode but god, this is the only one where I actually like a majority of the remixes and they actually give you decent access to the original songs too.  I think not having the glaring elephant in the room of the P3 game helps the fluffy SLink stuff land better too.  The core gameplay is still on the weak side but seeing as this is more of a nostalgia trip/cooldown for P5 player so whatever really.  6/10

11. Streets of Rage 4 [Switch, 2020]

Blaze is great.  Honestly I kinda like this better than what I remember of 2 and 3?  But also I’m not entirely sure that’s even accurate at this point.  It’s a game I distinctly remember enjoying quite a bit for an afternoon, and immediately kinda forgetting.  What I will say is it did have a real sense of responsiveness to it, and I really appreciated the way they built the fact it was a distant sequel into the presentation.  6/10

10. Tales of Xillia [PS3, 2013]

I feel like I might have loved this game if I hadn’t played it after Berseria.  Now I did pick up an old save I’d started in uh… 2013 for this run, which was like 2 hours into Milla’s route.  And I can see the places where taking the Jude route would have done more to flesh out the story and villain cast, so I get why people recommend Milla as a replay option.  But honestly?  She’s just the best part of the game by a wide margin, and I feel like if I had played the version where she’s sometimes not on-screen I’d have just spent the whole time asking “Where’s Milla?”  It’s just surprising the entire time how well they walk the tight rope inherent to this character, where she needs to be confident, vulnerable, unwavering, measured, divine and human in turn and still feel like one character, and… yeah, she does. 
The main issue is the rest of the game is… fine, mostly.  Very Tales, it tests Milla’s character at times but never to the real depths the next heroine of the series would see.  I do appreciate that the final bosses actually feel appropriately set up for the heroes being conflicted about the entire battle (even missing the context of Jude’s route) which in turn makes them just… surviving actually kinda work.  Like yeah, y’know what, I think they’ll actually try to make the world better now.  7/10

9. Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny [Switch, 2021]

God I keep forgetting I played this this year.  And as the position here firmly in the middle indicates, it’s not from doing anything wrong!  It just… I dunno, it was short and fluffy and pretty good at what it was doing but that’s all it was.  I do appreciate this going back to its roots and being a gag-take on anime of the day.  Isekai?  Oh we’re every Isekai at once!  And every character kinda operates on their own universe logic and the clash of that logic with reality… well, ‘reality’ keeps producing fun little moments all throughout.  I honestly can’t remember jack shit about how the gameplay flow went, like… I remember finding it a little more strategic than D5 I guess but that’s not saying much.  If I’m terribly honest the only Disgaea that’s an interesting strategy game is 4, and that’s more because the evilities of the main cast are so synergistic and really reward fucking about with positioning and the ability to take back movement and moves to maximize that.  D6... well I was using more than 3 characters and a healer, that’s something I guess.  But mostly the first thing, I remember it being funny but can’t remember any specific jokes.  So 7/10 feels right.

8. Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland [PS3, 2011]

I did it I played the Arland game I hadn’t all of Arland is done!  What I remember of it now is mostly the oddball pacing of it.  In Ayesha when I got stuck in a quagmire it was because I stubbornly tried advancing through regions that were slaughtering me instead of hitting the next main plot flag by going south instead of east.  In Meruru I feel like no, the game just really holds back on the materials to make the “travel and gather faster” items, meaning you’ll eat right through time much faster than you think you are.  And I still did… y’know, fine, got a respectable ending but was well short of getting a perfect ending, which isn’t bad for a minimally researched run with very little planning.  But gosh if it wasn’t kinda weird in some ways.  Mostly it makes me think I should blaze through Eschatology sometime because it’s the only Atelier game with a hard calendar system I haven’t finished yet, but on the other hand that sounds like effort and it’s probably the one I’m least ‘curious’ about among my stack of unplayed Atelier games.
Oh uh… like, Meruru is Atelier?  It’s very Atelier.  It’s not as gay as Lulua or as atmospheric as Ayesha and didn’t use its story hooks as well as Totori but it still had that nice Atelier vibe and at some level sometimes I just like that in my life.  7/10

7. Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark [Switch, 2019]

Mmm, FFT.
But nah I have to admit I don’t have any added insights for this one 6 months or whatever later.  It’s a bit dry at times but fundamentally it’s a very competent FFT game that actually does excel in some areas FFT itself did not.  It’s a smaller game in some ways, but also manages to feel more cohesive because of it.  Not having ally permadeath is just good for this sort of game, and letting characters who aren’t the hero actually have screen presence throughout is nice.  Anadine honestly kinda stands out just for being immature but like… appropriately immature, which is hard to do well I feel like.  Mostly it falls flat on the villain side.  It’s cool that there’s some obviously evil immortal vampires and all but the actual threat doesn’t quite land, despite them putting at least some legwork into the setting to try and get it there.  I dunno, I guess The Demons just works better when the politics they’re manipulating are so much more complex.  Weirdly.  Still, 8/10.

6. Jenny LeClue, Detectivu [Switch, 2020]

I wish I had a stronger grasp on the full game still, because what I can remember sitting here now is the ending and how… well, sequel hook it was.  Anyway, this was interesting because it had so many classic adventure game trappings but felt extremely modern in its sensibilities and aesthetic.  It has a vibe not unlike Night in the Woods in fact, although I don’t want to dwell on the comparison because it’s *mostly* the overall art style and presentation, not any actual themes or the like.  But no, the light layer of metanarrative over this also adds more than I might have expected honestly, I like Jenny pushing back against her creator, and doubly so when her biggest pushback is him trying to get her to be a kinder, more understanding person.  Admittedly this reminds me I’m actually a giant mark for Suzie, mad science girl hidden under a layer of girlie?  Perfect, no notes.  But yeah I haven’t played a game like this in a long time and it was just an extremely pleasant example of the game it was.  8/10

5. Super Robot Wars 30 [Switch, 2021]

So I could talk about the small ways 30 isn’t quite as impressive as its immediate predecessor, but that sounds mostly like nitpicking about a game I actually do like a fair bit.  It is however just really good at being an SRW game, and deftly manages to take quite a few things that seem like they should be annoying and makes them mostly effective.  Majestic Prince has a ton of stages and should feel like it dominates the plot, but honestly because of the way the game frames a lot of the Staple Series characters are being literally of an older generation?  Instead it really feels like these kids being given space to come into their own and handle problems they’re uniquely suited for while everyone else roots for them.  Tamaki and Randy being… a lot aside.  Ernie seems like he’d be borderline intolerable in his native setting and I have no plans to watch Knight & Magic, but here he’s endearing as hell and comes across as being rather savvy and empathetic and just kinda… filtering all that through a specific lens.  Meanwhile the sheer love this game had for Gridman had me play the first stage with it and immediately decide I had to binge ssss.Gridman before playing further, and that’s a good ass anime.
Much like this game is a good ass dumb crossover anime.  8/10

4. Persona 5 [PS4, 2017]

I played this game as though in a fever, multi-hour sessions nightly in a way I’ve not done in many a year, squeezing the whole of its 90-odd hours into a single month.  I did this not because it was the best game I’d end up playing in 2021, or because it was substantially better than any I played in 2020.  It’s a good game, probably the best of the 5 Persona games I’ve played if I had to give a definitive answer, but more for being a smoother, more engaging experience as an actual game than anything more specific to it.  It is certainly top to bottom jams, and has a slick, inviting aesthetic, there are many reasons it became a huge hit and is a decent enough game four years on to actually play.  In the important matters…
In the ways a game’s quality matters to me, Persona 5 is frustrating.  The opening act, the first Palace, are so very good, and hit so many themes I want both gaming in general and Persona in specific to tackle.  I wrote a whole thing zeroing in on how the game handles Ann’s story, but it must be emphasized that that’s a perfect microcosm of the game as a whole.  It starts so strong and goes so hard in the beginning and hits all the right notes, but as it goes is slowly loses all its confidence, falls back more and more on lazy series mainstays, and ultimately no longer aspires to say anything much at all.  I don’t want to say definitively that I would want to play 90 hours of a Persona 5 that went as hard as the opening 10, that would quite possibly be overwhelming.  But I yearn for a game that can start that hard and still hold tight to the core themes and stick a landing in the end, goddammit.
But still, I must admit I liked playing it and remember plenty of it being good still.  8/10

3. Great Ace Attorney: Adventure [Switch, 2021]

The Challenge now is to describe this game without comparing it to the second one.  Especially since I could as easily have rated them together, what with being sold in one collection and all, but honestly the fact they were released a couple years apart is palpable in the games themselves so let’s discuss them accordingly.  Bar none GAA has the best first case in the series.  They know they have an all new protagonist, and very ambitious concept, and that they’re gonna have to establish most of the characters very concretely because they’re incredibly important but won’t get much screen time after this.  It’s so weird to have an absolute marathon for a first case but… yeah, it is, and it works.  It’s tense the entire time, you can feel Ryunosuke’s dread the entire time, and the way they establish Kazuma and the relationship between the two from the word go is so effective it’s hard not to get sucked straight in.  And it never lets up really, I adore case 2 for daring to actually just be investigation and mirroring the case 1 norm of being just a trial, the despair at the end of case 3 is palpable, it’s great.  The multiple witness mechanic didn’t really work in its original incarnation, but toning it down for this game while also adapting it for use with the Jury system is wonderful, I love the juries and if they can bring this sorta energy to future games I’m all for it.  But yeah, this is just a great Ace Attorney game, not quite as satisfying stand-alone as some of them but… well.  8/10

2. Hades [Switch, 2021]

I feel like a main reason I’m doing the top 3 this way is to emphasize how close it is.

Anyway, Hades!  Good ass game.  It does have a few points of frustration, mostly bottlenecks in the quest pipeline and there being a bit of a wall when you’re fishing for the first clear since you’ve gotten all the unique prizes and can’t do much but slow grind abilities rather than having the steady rise in overall power you tend to get while clearing Tartarus and Asphodel for the first time.  But otherwise everything is great.  Hades is a finely executed “bad dad who knows he’s bad and can’t figure how to be good” which anchors the story progression properly, Zag is charming as fuck and it feels natural that everyone would want to help him out because he’s just this genuinely giving, empathetic soul, and the way all his relationships build through the game hooks you just as hard as the sense of “we’re doing it just one more run” can.
There’s a few things you can read into Hades, but the one I picked up on was family trauma.  The way that just a handful of dumbfuck decisions made by Zeus with more-or-less good intentions then getting hit by just one tragedy cascaded into a borderline cold war between the godly houses and all of those broken relationships just… sit there until Zagreus has to be the one to fix it?  Like Greek Myth itself, there’s something so fucking human about that despite the absurd scale of it all.  I admit that the undercurrent about the necessity of repairing family ties landed a bit weird for me, but at the same time Zag’s goal from the outset was to connect with the family that had been denied him, and in the end Hades is the one that breaks first and realizes he has to be the one that bends and that makes a big difference. 
And like… god I appreciate that the game just says “hey honestly it’d be weirder if you didn’t love multiple people” and lets Meg and Than be equal and non-exclusive relationships.  Zag doesn’t make it easy at first because he starts the game rather tunnel visioned but if you go for it you have to earn each step of the way, and that’s great.  8/10?  Yeah probably.

1. Great Ace Attorney: Resolve [Switch, 2021]

I did have one big disappointment with Resolve, and that’s so few of the trials having juries.  Juries are great, love me some juries.  But otherwise… god damn, y’all, they manage to actually carefully deny the progression of the story for two whole cases but I kinda don’t mind.  And okay so.  Partly.  PARTLY.  That’s because ‘Ryutaro’ is great and I mean.  Yes.  But also giving the supporting cast a chance to shine on their own in case 1 and then doing some really cool things in case 2 in terms of twists and moral complexity lets the slow build of needing to know what will happen next be more of a tension building tool than anything else.
I’m not entirely sure how to really talk about how good the rest of the game is because, I mean, this isn’t an in-depth review that gets to assume you played the game too, y’know?  The best I have is an analogy.  The original trilogy games were a series of episodes that sometimes called forward ideas from previous ones to have well integrated season finales, and a stunning movie to cap it all off.  Great Ace Attorney is akin to the best sort of serialized television, where most episodes have a satisfying plot but also put down seeds for future storylines or advance others until it all ties up in the end.  These games were actually written together and seeing where things existed for themselves and where they go forward into future twists is great.
Otherwise well... there aren’t enough juries but what we get is great, the Dance of Deduction achieves its final form, there’s only a couple new characters but they’re great, and the music game is stunningly on point.  I think I’m inclined to err low but yeah, these are just… well.  Great Ace Attorney. 8/10

[Ranmilia]

Last Year's This Year
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Hades

Everyone already knows Hades is good, it topped basically every list last year.  So I am not going to measure it in this year's personal top 10, despite it surely deserving one of the top all-time spots.  It gets this special category instead.

Hades is close to being a "perfect game," everything in its place, doing exactly what it sets out to do, no more and no less.  I only got around to playing it this year, and could not stand playing it as much as I wanted to due to arm injuries, but could not stop once I started.  Gameplay?  Great.  Story?  Also great.  UI, gameplay loops, music, everything I can think of, great.  Especially notable is how the game eschews previous Supergiant tendencies towards minimalism and cryptic protagonists: Zagreus knows exactly who he is, and is not afraid to spout thousands of voiced lines at every situation.  There are still mysteries to uncover, of course, but the profound moments now marry a true sense of accomplishment to the major story beats.

Walking out into Greece for the first time immediately became another one of those gaming moments that makes me tear up.

In terms of gameplay, I had fun crunching it out, and finally realized I had achieved a sense of system mastery: at last I understood what I was doing, when to dash, what attacks were what.  The entire game crystallized from "vaguely mashing buttons" to "I know exactly what I am doing and can see into the matrix."  Haven't gotten that strong of a sense of mastery since the old days of learning Touhou bullet hell shooters.



Ongoing Multiplayers
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I Want This Genre To Be Good - Asymmetrical Horror-ish (Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th, VHS, Propnight etc)

This genre continues to evolve... very slowly, shackled as it is by DBD and the untimely death of F13.  Behavior's forays into NFTs and mishandling of Pinhead, along with the slowly worsening gameplay and matchmaking, seem to have finally turned the corner on DBD's market dominance.  Slowly, people are leaving.  Slowly, new games are coming in.  One of them will have legs, eventually.  It probably won't be Propnight (too buggy and inaccessible).  It might be VHS, but too soon to say how people will take to a much more directly skill based, combat based game.  But someday it will come.

MOBA Gameplay That Doesn't Suck - Eternal Return: Black Survival

This game... probably has legs, but it is a long term project and hasn't quite found them yet.  A hybrid crafting/itemization/survival/battle royale/MOBA, I discovered it around last December and enjoyed watching while unable to play anything.  It brought in many of the good parts of traditional MOBAs while getting rid of things I didn't like.  Unfortunately capitalism is a killer and development seems to have stalled into endless loops of making new characters and skins and minor tweaks.  Major gameplay improvements are quite slow; overall the game is in much the same place today as it was a year ago and a lot of the people trying it out slowly dropped it.  Including me, for now.  It remains in the back of my mind for future years.


:funeral_classy: - First Class Trouble

The success of Among Us energized a new generation of social deduction games.  Project Winter, Dread Hunger, etc etc.  They're all.. fine, none of them have really broken out yet.  FCT seems like the best of them currently, hewing close to "Among Us but in 3d and Roaring Twenties retro-spaceship-cruise aesthetics."  It has its share of glaring flaws as development continues, but nonetheless is playable and creates tons of memorable experiences with a good group. 


Twitch dot TV slash dumbdog, skadj, karacorvus, chilledchaos, pastaroniravioli, and more - Modded Among Us

Definitely more of a "watch streamers play" than "play myself" here.  As time rolls on, people got good enough at Among Us that the vanilla "serious" game was pushed to the limit of what it could be and still be fun to play.  Solution: mods that add more flavorful roles.  The serious deduction aspects take a backseat to a big box of variance and hopefully-fun roles that do a ton of crazy things, some with new win conditions, others more classic but with new options.  Role madness mafia setups, in other words.  I wouldn't want to play these without a group that was very experienced... but for groups of streamers/youtubers/vtubers who do have that experience, it's fantastic entertainment, especially when you're able to watch multiple perspectives on the same game.


This Should Actually Be On My Top List But It's Here Instead - Storybook Brawl

Just recently easing into this one as a comfort game/timesink brain pleaser.  An autobattler based heavily on Hearthstone Battlegrounds, but with cleaner aesthetics, tighter gameplay, and made by a group of ex-MTG pros whom I (mostly) respect and don't mind supporting.  Like most autobattlers it is a drafting game at its core, and therein lies the way to my heart: make better decisions, get rewarded.  Or sometimes not, variance is a thing. 

The game is highly skill based, much more so than what I've heard of others.  Climbing the ladder recently has really driven that home, lobbies in legend+ are MUCH more difficult than the lower casual ranks, you see very different strategies and boards and start to really feel your opponents as people.  I got into a lobby with Matt Nass once and his board absolutely obliterated me.  A fantastic experience.

Anyway it's both engaging and cute and fun socially so - quite a good one.


The Hall of Disappointment
-----------------------------------
Free Taiwan/Hong Kong/the Uyghur - The Yawning Abyss of Riot Games Taking Over Every Genre And Everything I Love

I will never play a Riot game.  There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all people make their own choices, this particular one is mine.

-12/12: 12 Minutes

This game started out with a promise of greatness, big budget narrative experience, surely my type of thing?  And then turned ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL.  Wow this game sucks.  I almost don't want to talk about exactly how.  Let's say that the people calling it Murder Your Wife Simulator are not far off *and it gets worse from there* in both gameplay and "story".  Don't play this.


More like Meh-troid: Metroid Dread

Well, Metroid Dread is a lot better than 12 Minutes, don't get me wrong here.  It's not Other M bad, either.  But Dread still clocked in as a disappointment to me, which... highlights a lot of the ways I feel weird and out of place compared to "normal" people, most of whom have this in their top 5 or so for the year.  The good points about it are good, but they are not the things I like or want to be good.  Controls, sure.  Boss fights, sure.  Some of the plot, sure, continuing from Fusion worked out pretty well.

Music?  Meh.  Unmemorable.  Visuals?  Areas are pretty cookie cutter themes and literally "named" A through H or so in order.  Ew.  Of all the things they appropriated from Hollow Knight, the matte black walls everywhere is one I wish they hadn't.  All of the game's environmental elements look tiny and unimportant.  I kept waiting, thinking "well the music and area visuals are pretty meh so far but I'm sure they get better in later areas"... and then they never did and the game was over.  Yes, the whole game really does look that way.  Yes, the game manages to have absurd load times even though there are no backgrounds or complex features that would require it.  Yes, boss arenas are mostly empty rooms.  Yes, the EMMI is better than the SA-X but it's also just the SA-X again.

The world design... you never get lost.  You never CAN get lost.  The teleporters take you exactly where you need to go.  Again it's not as bad as Fusion's hyperlinearity, at least they don't lock you into rooms where the AI tells you where to go in a 60 second unskippable cutscene, but... I want to get lost in a Metroid game, I want to explore.  This is a standard tension in metroidvania-style games, there are plenty of videos and articles out there about it, go look up "Why you never got lost in Metroid Dread" on Youtube if you want an in depth analysis. 

The story... was mostly okay until the end.  The end has a patriarchal figure grab and overpower Samus, while specifically stating that her gender is the reason for her weakness, until plot contrivances save her. 

Heck right off with that.  This isn't the Samus I want, this isn't the Metroid I want.  Give me back Super Metroid's silent, lush world and a hulking bounty hunter who takes no nonsense and doesn't run around looking like a supermodel in blue skintight spandex. 



FINALLY IT'S HERE ok I don't like it - Tsukihime Remake/Melty Blood Type Lumina

So the Tsukihime remake finally arrived. 
Sort of, anyhow.  1/3 of it, just the Arc and Ciel routes, with the rest to come in another package... sometime in the far future... maybe. 

In tandem with the previous entry, these are perhaps fine games for people who aren't me, but for me lost a lot of what makes the originals tick.  I'll let the creators speak for themselves, from translations of interviews:

"Nasu: I understand the feelings of the people who just want to see the original, not new things. For that reason, Arcueid's route is mostly unchanged. Arcueid's route is formatted as the same Tsukihime everyone knows and loves.

Takeuchi: But we have to admit the Tsukihime remake changed one major point, and the fans who are really attached to the old Tsukihime might be disappointed by it. Still, I want you to understand that every change has a meaning behind it."

I mean.  I guess!  Arcueid's route is bland though.  Another interview gives their take on removing the character of Chaos and replacing him with a new vampire; loosely translated "Chaos was a weird vampire and the new one is a more normal Dracula type vampire, in line with what people expect."  But that character being so weird and unexpected is exactly what I liked.

Wow I'm a super hipster this year.  It is what it is, the new content leaves me cold.  Melty is the same way, it's, a game that exists I guess, it's fine, but most of the cast is gone and I don't prefer the new gameplay (shield clash RPS stuff, managing two super meters, no damage numbers). 


The Actual Top Seven
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7. The Binding of Isaac: Repentence

Every so often, in gaming or other media, a title comes along that Changes Everything.  Nothing is the same in its wake, EVERYTHING in the genre is influenced by it forever after, even if the title itself was fashioned from pieces of previous works.  Street Fighter 2.  Super Metroid.  Mario 64.  Ocarina of Time.  Final Fantasy 7.  Grand Theft Auto 3.  Dark Souls.  Harry Potter, in a non-gaming example. 

And The Binding of Isaac. 

It's been a bit over ten years since the original Isaac released on Steam, in its poopy irreverent naked child glory, and almost every other game on this list owes an incredible amount to it.  The concept seems simple enough, a mashup of twin stick bullet hell shooter and Zelda 1 dungeon rooms, with randomly generated floor maps, item pickups that provide permanent upgrades to change the course of your run, and gradual unlocks of more items and upgrades to expand the game over multiple runs.  But no one had really made a game like that before this.  No one had ever really succeeded as an indie game on Steam before this.  (The more cynical may say it's still nearly impossible, but nearly is not the same thing as totally.)  Today?  "Indie Roguelite" is its own entire flourishing genre now. 

I spent a lot of time with the original Isaac, and a lot more on its successive remakes and expansions.  300 hours according to Steam, but much more than that across multiple computers, multiplayer with brothers and IRL friends, and watching streams and racing leagues and all sorts of other things.  (BOILER, the original Binding of Isaac League Racing, was one of the earliest major speedrun-style competition organizations, parts and people from it flowed out to the future in the form of SRL, Speedgaming, randomizer racing leagues, GDQ marathon segments and setups...)

All that having been said, the canonical game tended to become worse over time, like the developers didn't understand their game.  Major bugs went unfixed for years, interactions were broken, gameplay was degenerate.  Mods solved some of these issues, but navigating tons of mod installs and patches was a challenge all on its own (even with Steam Workshop). 

There was one particular very ambitious mod, Antibirth, that released as nearly a direct competitor to the poorly received but "canon" Afterbirth+ expansion.  Antibirth was closer to a total conversion than a simple mod, adding not just new characters and items but entire new zones, complex game-spanning mechanics and secrets and an entire new original soundtrack.  Virtually everyone who played it said the same thing: "Wow, they should buy these people's work and make THIS the new official expansion!"

Then there was radio silence for years, both from the Antibirth team and the official team.

Until suddenly: Repentence.  And so it was done.  Repentence includes not only the great majority of Antibirth content (though not the soundtrack, sadly!), but far more than anyone ever imagined would come to the game again.  ANOTHER separate endgame route.  Not just the few new characters from Antibirth, but an ENTIRE NEW ROSTER of 17 "tainted" characters, all with their own unlocks for all the various routes.  And, blessedly, a full overhaul and rebalance to just about every item and gameplay system. 

Finally, Isaac is good again.  And all of this on the Switch version as well.  What an amazing definitive edition - and one most people thought we'd never, ever get.

Obligatory mention: Nicalis is a terrible company, Tyrone Rodriguez is a terrible person, Edmund McMillen is at least complicit by association, these things can and do darken the game for many people and that's fair.  Likewise with the themes of toilet humor, religion and child abuse - and gosh there is some very uncomfortable child abuse stuff in the leadup to the final ending, though the ending itself goes out on a much more positive note.  It's not a game for everyone in and of itself.  But if you can deal with it, game's great, and its broader effects on the industry will keep going for decades to come.

6. The Dark Pictures Project: House of Ashes

Now this I didn't expect to be making my list.  This is another entry in the anthology-style collection of co-op cinematic "QTE and occasional choices" horror games from the makers of Until Dawn.  Until Dawn itself was pretty great, but their subsequent entries, well... Man of Medan was a rough experiment that showed glimpses of potential, and Little Hope was just terrible and gross on several levels.  The trailers for House of Ashes looked to be loaded with cringe potential, so I almost skipped over checking it out.  Glad I did, though, as the final product here is FAR better than the last two and back to Until Dawn levels of quality.

The game follows a group of US Marines in the midst of 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom, as they break into an ancient temple excavation suspected to be one of Saddam's hidden chemical weapon stockpiles, and clashing with Iraqi Republican Guard there as they -

Hey!  Come back!  No, no, seriously, it's not that bad, I swear.  It's... it's still PRETTY CRINGE at points.  But not.  That.  Bad.  The Iraqi soldiers are treated with actual respect, easily the most interesting characters, and the obligatory drama is played up for great effect specifically to serve the purposes of the "who will live or die in your playthrough" gameplay.

As you can guess from this being a horror game, what's sealed in the temple turns out to be a lot more than just some chemical weapons.  The game's tone shifts into an homage to various classic 90s action horror movies, starting with The Descent and moving on through Predator, The Mummy, various Lovecraft pastiches and finally all-out James Cameron Aliens.  Rather than shy away from its inspirations, it leans hard into them and revels in homage and melodrama, and this is exactly the right call.  It's cheesy, it's cringe, it's ripping off dozens of things in any given scene, and it's incredibly fun. 

Especially with a friend using the coop system, which deserves special mention.  There's a decent array of accessibility options, you can take turns for local couch coop with a single controller, or split control of various characters, you can turn QTEs on or off, or on for specific players or characters but not others, or set the whole game to cinematic mode and just watch if participating in the horror elements is too much for someone's taste.  Finally, the promises made in Man of Medan are paying off.  Overall a great time and I'm back to looking forward to what Supermassive will do from here.

5. Inscryption

This year's Halloween hit, Inscryption probably appears on a lot of folks top lists this year, with good reason.  A high polished blend of Slay the Spire-like deckbuilder-roguelike and 3d escape room, Inscryption offers up a flavorful and well produced challenge...

... and then things get weird and the surprises start coming, as expected from the developer of infamous metanarrative games.

I... don't have a ton to say about Inscryption, it deserves to be played for itself and not spoiled.  You know there'll be twists.  They're good.

One thing I can say is that the entire game, in addition to all the things it is on the surface, is a love letter to card games and specifically to trying to design card games.  Anyone who's ever dipped their toes into the design end of things and tried to create their own Magic cards, much less a full game, will recognize a ton of details and inside jokes and shared sympathies, from the difficulty of balancing resource systems to how much a game can or should cheat against or in favor of the player.  There's a (https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/4_mana_7/7).  There are duel discs.  Magnificus is literally a magnificent ficus.  Long Elk is long, and Longer Elk is longer.

It brings the smiles and sparks the joy.  Well played.

4. Jupiter Hell

Lawyers shut down the Doom Roguelike, but they couldn't seal it away.  It's back, with a vengeance, the serial numbers knocked off, optional fake CRT scanlines and an ASCII mode coming soon.

This is exactly what it says on the tin, a Doom inspired turn based classic roguelike, built to appeal to classic roguelike fans and pull no punches while still being accessible to modern sensibilities.  There's a spectrum of 6+ different options to customize the exact level of profanity you like in the voice acting (and none of them use slurs or gendered insults).  The gameplay is swift and responsive.  Mouse control is optional but now fully functional.  1.0 release was November, and the long tail of development promises new features and bosses to come.

Classic roguelikes are very fun and rewarding, if they can overcome the initial hurdle of aesthetics, and notquite!Doom is certainly good enough for me.  Music's great, gameplay's great, I can sink into a run and pick a build or play to what I find, and every run learn something new and improve my understanding and decision making.  Compared to Hades, the story is not as good but the gameplay is better and deeper.

I tuned in to watch one of the current best players tackle Nightmare on stream.  He asked how old the viewers were.  The average age was over 30.  That's how you really know roguelikes are where it's @.

3. Deltarune Ch.2

Another entry that everyone already knows is good and most people will have already discussed to death, I'll try to be brief again.

Undertale was great.  Deltarune is shaping up to be even better.  A mental game I play with myself sometimes is "what if this game you like had been made earlier and been a hit in the 16 bit era (or whenever), how would things be different?"  Undertale is fun to imagine in that space.  Deltarune ch. 1 was about the same. 

Chapter 2 is different, though.  This time, Toby Fox's world is not timeless, but exquisitely, painfully, emotionally dated to the current moment.  I cannot imagine this installment having been made even 5 years ago, let alone ten or more.  The cyber's world, Queen, Spamton and Berdly are all touching on ideas that exist in the now, in the age where we can recognize Facebook and Twitter as having turned into anxiety nightmarescapes, Elon Musk as both Person of the Year and Worst Person of the Year, Kris can use they/them pronouns and that carries a meaning beyond being a player avatar, and we can feel simultaneous sympathy and antipathy for a huckster puppet.

Undertale touched on some themes, like the separation of player and character avatar, but never did much with them beyond hints and bits in obscure endings.  Deltarune is gearing up to take all of this and run with it.  It's no longer subtext that the player is an alien entity possessing Kris's body, that the Knight is probably right in our faces as simply K-ris at NIGHT, that both Ralsei and Kris are in on a plot trying to manage the player, or that all the characters are incredibly traumatized and the story's real title is "What Happened to December Holiday?"  We still don't have all the details, just the ghosts of outlines, but things are a lot clearer than they were at this point in Undertale... and a lot murkier.

When the light is running low
And the shadows start to grow
And the places that you know
Seem like fantasy
There's a light inside your soul
That’s still shining in the cold
With the truth
The promise in our hearts

Don't forget:
I'm with you in the dark.

... the lyrics were with us in chapter 1.  We didn't realize, even with that, how sinister they could or should be read.  Well, Toby Fox is a master.

2. Blankspace (https://nobreadstudio.itch.io/blankspace)

Hey, you know what genre's doing very well, flourishing with the exact amount of support modest Kickstarters are able to provide and actually work out?  Small to moderate scope indie visual novels.  Love em.  Here's Blankspace, one such that features Zero Escape series style escape room puzzles.  I wouldn't expect anyone to have heard of this game except via my recommendation, it's not popular like Your Turn To Die... but if I were to put YTTD into this year's ranking it'd be below this, because the quality of the writing stood out and the story stuck with me all year.

There's a heart that shines through the writing and makes me crave more of it, something different from most "game writing."  For all that it seems modest (or immodest, if you're talking about the fanservice), it's... different.  The sort of different that I churn through these sorts of small projects to find.  The diamond in the rough, to go all Aladdin.

Definitely more of a "me" entry, and I can't say it's "objectively better" than Deltarune or whatever else, and I can't write a bunch more paragraphs without delving into hard spoilers... but it stuck with me.  Check it out if you like.

1. Escape From Tarkov

... the shooter thing?  What?  Really?  Seriously?  Ran, are you okay?

Yes.  (except maybe that last one, but watchin some tarky makes it better.)

Tarkov is a russian-developed (and very russian mindset) looter/shooter/FPS/survival game, in which you alternate playing an ex-private military contractor trying to gather resources and complete quests, with RPG-ish stats and progression (but if you're killed you drop everything you're carrying except for a small valuables pouch), and runs as one-time generated "scav" characters, who spawn into maps at random times with random (generally bad) gear but are encouraged to work with one another to scavenge what they can and avoid or ambush any cheeky PMCs.

It is very complex and very in depth, with heavy attention to detail and realism in gunplay.

This game should not exist.  It breaks every rule of design.  Nothing is proceduralized.  Nothing is safe.  Time to kill is zero.  You can and will spend 30 minutes crawling through a raid and get one-tapped by someone you never could have seen and lose it all.  It's fantastic.

Realism is explicitly prioritized over gameifying elements in the shooting.  No auto aim.  Intense physics simulations with diagrams for things like minute improvements in bullet dropoff and how they impact various materials and helmets and armors.  It shouldn't work, these things are gameified for reasons.  And yet - every realism update they've done makes the shooting MORE fun.  It's winning awards for best FPS combat of all time. 

The latest patch adds in world VOIP chat.  This should be a disaster that everyone will immediately want to turn off, right?  Full of trolls and spammers?

No.  Almost universally positive experiences.  Players going out of their way to turn VOIP on because of the moments of cooperation it creates.  Some bemoan that the game is slowly becoming less of a deathmatch free for all, but then, in the Grand Plan, it was never supposed to be.  There are a million things that are barely or not implemented yet, coming in slowly over the course of years, and they all sound like awful ideas that will ruin the game, and every single one has been a fantastic improvement.  Even as it is, the design and attention to detail is spectacular.  The Terragroup and EMERCOM logos bring movie horror stylings to mind.  You could drop a Predator in here, if they got the license, and it'd be a better Predator game than anything has ever been.  But so far they have resolutely stuck to mundanity.  Can't wait for when the radiation and toxin counters are actually used for something though.

Learning about Tarkov's existence and experiencing even a little bit of it almost immediately ruined multiple genres for me.  Every other shooter on the market compares unfavorably.  PUBG, Apex, Super People, ain't got nothing on Tarkov gunplay.  The looting is better than most dedicated looter games.  Farewell Borderlands, farewell Diablo 2 remaster, the flea market and digging through jackets for keys has all of you beat.  Inventory tetris, heck yes I am here for inventory tetris.  The questing is more to the point and thoughtful than most MMO questing - take this one with a grain of salt, I'm not an MMO person.

But it may not be a poor comparison.  As Tarkov slowly evolves over time, the community aspects of it resemble an MMO more than anything else - in some respects.  The admiration that my FF14 friends have in their voices when they talk about Yoshi-P, I hear the same in Tarkov players when they talk about Papa Nikita and his grand vision.

Oh, the grand vision?  It is to do away with all of the menus and connect all of the maps (most of which are already the size of PUBG or Warzone's battle royale layouts) into a single gargantuan fromsoft/metroidvania simulation, to put everything in world and have the ultimate challenge be to complete all the quests and escape from all of Tarkov without dying.

This might take another twenty years.  I think they might actually do it. 

[Dark Holy Elf]

9. Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (SNES, Nintendo/Intelligent Systems, 1996)

Oh look I finally got around to this.

There are cool things about this game. The game uses its maps as part of its storytelling which is neat if not always fun. The first half of the game is a bit of an unusual story in that, well, the player character is kind of fucking things up, despite good intentions. There are some polish features which went missing from the series for over a decade like repairing weapons. And of course it's Fire Emblem so the core strategy RPG gameplay is good.

It's also a very frustrating game. Everything about it takes too long (watching enemies move, moving across giant maps yourself, arena grinding is expected as part of the base gameplay). It's poorly balanced. The writing is bad, and its characters generally aren't worth much, with the playable cast of the second half of the game being particularly bland and forgettable.

Since it's a Kaga Fire Emblem we have to talk about gender. In the game's defence, the love system and the decision to make the second generation anchored by brother-sister pairs ensure that there are actually a decent number of women in the game (and it extends to the antagonist cast too). On the other hand women are hardly ever allowed to do anything important, and the two most important ones (among others) exist to be plot devices who get kidnapped; at least one gets to plot-kill the final boss?

Only Thracia left for me to play now! Of the other four early Fire Emblems, this one is the most ambitious (and to be clear, that's a good thing), but it's not the most fun to play, that's for sure.

Rating: 5/10


8. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Switch, Nintendo/Koei Tecmo, 2020)

The third Warriors game I've sunk significant time into, and probably the weakest of them overall.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good game. As a 3D action game it's quite solid, and I have a lot of love for all the boss-type enemies you encounter; they're great fights. The mixing in of the offensive items into the gameplay works well, the characters feel different and are fun to individually learn and master.

But I do think the series has steadily de-emphasized the map elements and I'm not sure that's really a great thing? The best part of Hyrule Warriors 1 was when you are feeling pressured to defend bases and NPCs, and we just don't get that feeling any more. Some of this is the liberation of being able to switch between multiple PCs in different spots on the map but even then, I feel the harder difficulty should be able to challenge me on a map management level. This reduces Age of Calamity to almost pure action game, and while it's solid at that, it's also not on the level of something like Bayonetta.

The other thing that's a bit disappointing about this game is its aesthetics. Maybe Breath of the Wild players feel differently, but for me this game was much less vibrant in terms of colours and character designs, and had a much less memorable soundtrack.

Also giant beast sections are terrible.

Rating: 6/10


7. Dark Deity (PC, Sword & Axe, 2021)

In which Elf realizes he likes Fire Emblem more than other games and seeks to play Fire Emblem games without the Fire Emblem name.

Dark Deity is somewhat a backwards-looking game, channelling the GBA era of Fire Emblem. The sprite style is very similar, as is the enemy phase emphasis on combat. It also channels the Fire Emblem era of uninteresting stories, but oh well. It does a better job than most Fire Emblems with its supporting cast, though, not just due to the large support system but also making most of them feel part of the main story, with just one or two weird exceptions.

Where the game tries to iterate on Fire Emblem, it has some mixed success. For the most part it takes existing Fire Emblem ideas and makes them... bigger, I guess. Where Sacred Stones had two promotion branches per class, this game has four (with four more later in the game). This works well because it lets you build different PCs quite differently; there are 24 different classes by Level 10 so you won't have overlap unless you choose to. Much less successful is its decision to replace the weapon triangle with an interaction of eight damage types and four armour types which never became intuitive for me, even by the game's end.

The game's two biggest weaknesses are first, that it makes the mental math of Fire Emblem impossible to do by hand (both due to the aforementioned armour system, and to a "ignore part of enemy's defences" stat which seems to exist to make the math more complicated for no gain). And second, that it has a gaggle of polish woes. I played the game early and it sounds like some of these have been fixed, but there were definitely a bunch of bugs and interface clunkiness.

Recommended for Fire Emblem fans but it's not gonna displace the actual good Fire Emblems.

Rating: 6/10


6. Zero Time Dilemma (Nintendo 3DS, Spike Chunsoft, 2016)

Four years, four Uchikoshi games, four writeups.

Zero Time Dilemma is the third game of the Zero Escape trilogy, and also the weakest overall. The chief reason for this is hard to go into without spoilers, but essentially the overarching plot is much less clever than the other games (particularly the brilliant Virtue's Last Reward), and the game's major twist feels like the writers cheated.

Obviously it's still a good game though! The two biggest reasons for this are the good character work (for both the returning and the new characters), and the way the game effectively raises certain moral questions (particularly about this game's mastermind, who is a very different type than the previous) and encourages the player to think about them.

As with all Zero Escape games I don't have a huge amount to say about the gameplay; it exists, it fills time, it's not why you're playing the game but keeps your brain working and breaks up the story revelations well.

Rating: 6.5/10


5. Banner of the Maid (Switch, Azure Flame, 2019)

The second Fire Emblem clone I played this year, and the better one.

To get its weaknesses out of the way first, Banner of the Maid's biggest flaws are its poor translation and somewhat incomplete story (it's sometimes hard to tell where one begins and the other ends). Which is a shame because the game's story, weird though it may be (alternate reality French Revolution), shows a lot of potential.

Gameplay's pretty great though. The game's class quadrangle works very well for shaping battles without feeling like total destiny, and helps make it feel like a wide variety of characters can contribute in different ways. The game's got a skill system which further differentiates characters and is fun to tinker with. The game's very open with its information to the player; you can calculate everything, reinforcements are very fair. Just a very solid Fire Emblem game, which is obviously a good place to be!

The game's got nice character designs, too. Actual characters are held back a bit by the translation and lack of support system, but are memorable enough at a surface level.

Rating: 7.5/10


4. Bravely Default II (Switch, Square Enix, 2021)

A good game which is definitely too long-winded. Stop me if you've heard a Bravely game described that way before.

In terms of pure gameplay this is probably the strongest Bravely game. CTB is just more interesting than the Dragon Quest style the other games use, and particularly opens up a better space for boss design; I really enjoyed most of Default 2's bosses. Otherwise there's still a fun class system to play around with, and I liked tinkering with a wide array of equipment options.

Definitely a disappointing game on writing though. The story has its moments and I liked (but not loved) a couple of the characters, but overall it's way too backwards-looking, hand-waving in a JRPG story in without trying to say much of value. The game still has lots of dialog and clearly thinks its writing is better than it is.

Soundtrack is great! Best of the year for me without much question.

Rating: 7.5/10


3. Cthulhu Saves Christmas (Switch, Zeboyd, 2019)

The best game about Cthulhu saving Christmas ever made.

Also very clearly the best Zeboyd game. Cosmic Star Heroine had a cool idea involving abilities which could only used once (until you spent a turn defending/recharging), as well as a predictable set of "hyper" turns you could use to make your actions (damage, healing, or status) extra effective, but it didn't really have the encounter design to make good use of the system, in part because the game boiled down to an algorithmic setup for maximum damage, and in part because the "survive for one turn at negative HP" mechanic meant that there wasn't much enemies could do to disrupt your plans. This game solves both of those issues; its encounters are lovingly designed, its enemies use predictable actions, and keeping your PCs alive is the name of the game.

Another interesting ripple is the fact that while you can choose four of your abilities for each PC, the other three of are randomly chosen. What at first seems like a bizarre decision ends up feeling ingenious as it avoids the "the best strategy is always the same" feel. It also shows off the abilities you may have chosen not to set, and helps the player discover interactions she might have missed. In general, battles feel highly tactical for a non-grid-based RPG; I was often thinking several turns ahead in terms of what ability I would use on future turns, due to the interaction with using up and recharging abilities, hyper mode, the how the game handles status (with the insanity mechanic returning from Cthulhu Saves the World and now also governing which types of status effects are more or less effective).

Just a really fun, crunchy gameplay experience. Writing-wise I'm inclined to say it's Zeboyd's best too; they lean into the surreal comedy side (breaking the fourth wall frequently) and this lands a lot better for me than their attempts at semi-serious writing.

The game has no exploration at all; the only thing between dungeons is a series of r'lyehtionships scenes which are chosen from a menu, are generally reasonably funny, and give you a piece of equipment. Fine by me.

Rating: 7.5/10


2. Hades (Switch, Supergiant, 2020)

It's good, everyone knows it's good. Someone out there probably dislikes this, right? It's not me though.

I don't care for the roguelike model. It doesn't matter because at its core, Hades is just a lot of fun. And there's this feeling of progress on two fronts which is very satisfying; some of it is that you do get to keep certain things between runs, which means even a failed run doesn't feel wasted, but some of it is just getting better at the game.

I don't have the head to remember specifics that some of the game's fans do, but I really liked the different weapons and powers, and getting some of them randomly also made every run through feel different, which is neat.

None of this would matter if the action weren't fun, but it is! I've personally never played anything else quite like it; in some ways it's mechanically closest to overhead 2D Zelda, if that series had spent the last thirty years on improving its action gameplay credentials instead of... whatever it is Zelda does.

It's not a game I'd play for writing but what's there is competent enough. Mostly Zagreus and Hades themselves are both pretty compelling to watch, and the story of an estranged family trying to reconnect as a good one. Hades in particular straddles a fine line of being a flawed parent, but not an unredeemable one.

Rating: 8.5/10


1. Metroid Dread (Switch, Nintendo/MercurySteam, 2021)

Outstanding game. Like Hades I'm really happy to see this game winning awards and such, because it definitely deserves it.

The core Metroidvania design is a good one, which is why it keeps getting imitated. This game certainly lives up to that. Getting a bunch of new abilities that let you progress further is good fun. Metroid Dread goes the extra step of making most of them feel useful in their own right, and not just for progress; you get that satisfying feeling of being more powerful, and also getting steadily more options to use in combat. And goodness is combat in this game a joy.

Metroid Dread has some of the best controls I can recall in the genre, and using them in boss battles is a wonderful feeling. The game has that Mega Man X energy where bosses are tough but you learn them and get better. I died a lot but I always felt like I was making progress and improving. The game hits that zone that the best 2D games manage where boss fights just feel like beautiful dances and I'm here for it. I'm also here for the fact that if you die to a boss (which you probably will, a lot), you get to start again, without a trek back to the boss or a long load time. (The game does have too long load times in other places, but not here.)

The game also mixes in the EMMI sequences which were pretty great. They're pretty transparently trying to recapture the feel of the SA-X, but y'know the SA-X was great and I can't blame them. The treks through the rooms of increasingly dangerous killer robots were fun, and I think having some stuff you can't just easily blast to death really adds to the atmosphere Metroid is going for. Speaking of atmospheric stuff, while I'm not sure it quite hits the high notes of Fusion, a certain section of the game where bad turns to worse (in admittedly predictable fashion if you've played previous games) was very well-done.

Otherwise it's a Metroid, it's good stuff. The exploration feels very lovingly designed, often getting you to poke around your environment but without that annoying feeling of getting lost or not knowing what to do, which is pretty much perfect for me. I don't think it has the absolute best exploration in the series, but those are high standards, and every weakness I can point at about the game on this front (such as the teleporters which make the world feel less coherent) are made up for by advantages elsewhere.

So it's in the conversation for the best Metroid game. Considering it's been nearly two decades since Fusion, the last game in that conversation (at least for me), this feels like a game that's long overdue.

Rating: 9.5/10

[SnowFire]

Weirdly enough, I may have been even more stressed out in 2021 than 2020.  Did not play that many games, and the games I did play I randomly stopped in the middle (had a Fell Seal DLC replay that got 3/4 of the way through for stat topic purposes and just randomly flickered out again).  So this will be a short list.

Okay (6/10)

5. Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (Steam, 2021)
It's an indie metroidvania done by the same team that did one of the Touhou metroidvanias.  It's fine for what it is!  Low score isn't really a disrecommendation, just there's not a whole lot there.  Game is pretty short - you'll do some combat, some archery puzzles, some boss battles, and then you'll be done.  Platforming isn't really that hard with the main gimmick being an elemental attunement system where you can switch between red & blue (er, fire spirit & water spirit?) which adjusts whether you get hurt by certain projectiles or barriers or not.  It's fun.

Mentioned it in WGAYP, but as far as a nostalgia tour of Lodoss villains to fight in boss battles, the game is fine.  A little disappointed that Deedlit is written as rather clueless though.  She was hardly a genius, but I don't recall her being dumb either?  Suffice to say it is very, very obvious to the player that she is stuck in some sort of twisted Lodoss nostalgia adventure funhouse from the very start, but rather than give her no dialogue, she instead gets dialogue where she swallows the apparent reality of the situation whole and keeps acting surprised that this villain we already beat before is back for no reason and wants to fight.  I hope she was lightly mind controlled or something.

Good (7/10)

4. Brigandine 2 (Switch, 2020)

I played a *lot* of Heroes of Might & Magic II as a kid.  A whole lot.  Brig II sorta kinda scratches that itch again, although it's very much its own game.  As a grand strategy game, it's not much - controlling territory simply doesn't matter that much and can actually be counterproductive if you're not careful, and inflicting losses on the enemy is more about gaining XP for yourself rather than draining out enemy resources (although sniping high-level monsters is still good).  The quest system is also very simple and slightly busted, and most of the items aren't that "interesting" in the sense of radically changing how you fight a battle, rather than just giving you More Damage and the like.  But all that clearly is more like a side layer; the real focus is on the tactical battles, and those are interesting enough.  And you certainly get to do a lot of said tactical battles on your way to continental conquest.  I'm a little worried that I've loosely "solved" them vs. the AI (defeat tanky heroes by baiting and killing their monsters piecemeal, defeat frail mages by diving them with fliers and shooting them with ranged attacks), but maybe mixing up teams will help on that.

Slight point of annoyance while I'm here though: I remember Elf & others noting that a turn or two of autobattle helps speed things up; this is sort of true, but also dangerous if you have a team with mixed movement capability.  A lot of the tactics of the battles comes down to keeping formation and using zones of control, like the advance of a Greek phalanx, so I often felt a bit obligated to micromanage even some of the advances when not that close to combat.  And certainly for the Phantom Knight battles in the postgame that start your team spread across the map, a bunch of pre-fight positioning is rather important.  Alas.

Great (8/10)

3. Cyber Shadow (Switch, 2021)
It's an indie sprite-based platformer, and I thought it was better than last year's Bloodstained Curse of the Moon 2.  I'm not actually that huge a fan of the original Ninja Gaiden on the NES.  It's too finnicky and sadistic.  It was a pleasant surprise that Cyber Shadow was so good, then.  It manages to combine the proper amount of uncompromising horrific death traps without being sadistic about it.  A fairly extensive checkpointing system helps, of course, along with a money system that helps you out the more you get stuck, so even in death you'll get some minor advantage in the long-term.  The biggest thing is just that despite the evilness, the game is fundamentally fair: as you learn what the heck is going on, you get better and better at killing stuff and avoiding all the instant death pits and making the tough jumps.  I enjoyed the ride enough that I'm tempted to go back and try a more efficient run that either tries to low% the pickups or just speedruns for a sub-2 hour time.

The soundtrack also serves for a special callout.  Rather than just having "stage 1 theme" or the like, the composer actually changes up the stage music a little bit as you proceed through, or a lot bit if the tenor of the area changes mid-stage.  All the plot scenes & boss battles get their own themes (although repeat fights against the same boss will get a remix, of course).  And it's excellent, I've definitely listened to it since playing.

2. Bravely Default II (Switch, 2021)

The old classic JRPG formula still has life in its legs and BD2 showed the places it can go.  The job system is very cool, with all the classes having their own thing to offer.  It's a good sign when multiple people play the game and each find their own separate "yeah, ability XYZ was so broken".  The bosses fight back, too, which helps make the powerful stuff you can do with the classes actually matter - certainly a problem with some older JRPGs where pushing the limits of the system also forcibly stuck you into easy mode.  Speaking of which, I appreciate the game shipping with 3 classes of difficulty, too.  I'm not a super huge fan of how important raw level is, and the XP gain is weirdly very flat, so it's fairly easy to either fall dramatically far behind or to power-grind to stompy mode, but I guess that's where encounter control & difficulty levels come in.  Finally, I liked the PCs, and I liked the arc villain plots in Chapters 1 & 3 well enough.

Also, the music is fantastic.  They brought Revo back and composed a lot more music than BD1 had; the main issue BD1 had was slight overuse of some themes (only 3 dungeon themes in BD1, whyyyy), and this was largely fixed.  There's like 6 boss themes and they all rock.  Just the right amount of remixes & callbacks to the BD1 soundtrack, too.

Overall, I really liked this game.  Despite this, I'm erring on not giving it a 9/10 for two reasons:
* The dungeons are just too long and grindy in parts.  Chapter 4 & 5 are particular offenders here - we're in the home stretch, let the player get to the finish line (C6 & C7 are better on this).  Relatedly, there's some very uninspired side quests that don't tell you what their rewards are that are mechanically very boring: run around looking for plot coupons, play courier between 3 towns, go hunt 10 Woozles for Woozle pelts, etc.  Just pure filler in a game that absolutely doesn't need it - cut 2/3 of the lamer sidequests and let players see the reward for doing them in advance.
* Some script / plot ideas are annoyingly half-baked.  To be clear, I'm not necessarily talking about nitpicky plot holes here.   I'm more talking that the overarching ideas just aren't as cool as they should be.  BD1 had plot holes galore too, but generally set up a decent and interesting melodramatic struggles in its chapters, and had a pretty great twist villain, so I'm willing to forgive a lot.  BD2 is either incomplete (if a sequel plans on explaining more) or just full of fairly major "Insert plot here later" missing parts.  The parts that were mostly complete just aren't that interesting - a would-be world-conqueror that was okay and an insane eat-everything monstrosity.  Serviceable but not really enough for a truly memorable great antagonist.

1. Great Ace Attorney Chronicles? (Steam, 2021)

Or, alternatively, GAA: Adventure for the first game of the two - although the version we got localized just dumped both games on us at once as a combined game, which was probably the right call since game 1 ends with major plot points left unexplored.  (The "rival" character only bothers to explain themselves a bit at the very end of game 1!)

This is a bit of a provisional rank, but I'm expecting it to be around here.  Could earn itself an upgrade to 9/10 if the final plot ends up cool enough, we'll see.

Anyway, the plot is just shockingly solid & fun so far.  What is kinda the point in a game all about plot, right?  I was kinda skeptical from what I heard of the JP version, but thankfully that hasn't been an issue.  Case 2 was kinda weak, but the others have managed to both be fun to play, to make about as much sense as an Ace Attorney case can make, and be a good use of the setting.  The main complaint - and I understand this is even worse in the second half- is probably budget, where the fancier models from modern graphics mean that just plain fewer characters get animated than the oldest games originally for the GBA before the DS port.  This has some knock-on effects - fewer suspects mean that it's a bit harder to pull off uncertainty about the identity of the criminal, but so it goes.  Good times.

Unfinished:
* Shin Megami Tensei V - Still in progress, but way too soon to say.  It's got some cool parts, and parts of it are..  yep, that's more SMT, by which I mean calling pointless time wasting difficulty.  Oh well.  Tentatively does seem solid enough so far.