Top 10 Played for the First Time From Other Years: Darkest Dungeon Demon’s Souls Dishonored 2 Portal 2 Red Dead 2 Shadowrun Hong Kong Silent Hill 2 Spec Ops The Line West of Loathing Zelda: A Link Between Worlds Top Replays: Bloodborne Disco Elysium Final Cut Hollow Knight 2021 Only IN PROGRESS: Wildermyth Like playing a combination of like a settlement builder board game + a grid based xcom lite combat Randomly generated characters and sometimes storylines of varying degrees, really makes the characters and story feel like they’re YOURS Wizard infusing household objects is great great Wildermyth (Worldwalker Games) is unlike anything I’ve ever played. I often see games that are trying to capture the spirit of playing a tabletop RPG, but not many of them are able to actually get that same experience where neither you nor the GM know exactly what’s going to happen. The excellent Divinity: Original Sin series and Disco Elysium are based on their own custom rulesets, but you’re going to see basically the same game each time you play. Enter procedural generation, which is Wildermyth’s ace card. The game has several scenarios that all start the same way, but as the game generates decisions to make and characters to meet, your game will quickly diverge from the stories that other players experience, making it truly feel like this is your game. The game is split into two main modes- you first explore, capture and defend territories on a board game-esque map screen, assigning party members to specific tasks. When conflict arises, encounters play out on a grid with a cover system and one of the coolest ideas for magic I’ve ever played in a game. (In progress, but will absolutely continue to play) Completed: Before Your Eyes Blink mechanic Great potential for storytelling as you struggle to keep your eyes open for a few more seconds Tech troubles hampered emotional impact I have to applaud Before Your Eyes (GoodbyeWorld Games) for doing something truly special. Many games that focus on story opt for a first-person perspective due to the connection that it inherently creates between the player and the character in the game. Before Your Eyes takes that one step further, forging an actual physical connection between you and the character, who is reliving their entire life before moving on to the afterlife. The game uses your PC’s webcam to track your eye movements, and the story of your character’s life will jump forward when you blink in real life. This brilliantly sets up several moments where you are literally struggling not to blink so that you can catch a few more seconds of a scene before it’s gone forever. You should be able to guess where this is headed, but I do think that if you value creative ways to tell stories or just unique gaming experiences, this is one you have to play. Note- if you are going to use the webcam feature, and you absolutely should, make sure you are in a well-lit area. I had some webcam problems that really dampened the impact that the story would have had. (3 hours) Death’s Door Full episode coming in a few months Expectations vs reality A good 2D Zelda game, Would be in my top 3 Absolutely top level soundtrack and art design Death’s Door (Acid Nerve) was yet another lesson in expectations vs reality and how discourse and descriptions can misrepresent what a game is. The forbidden phrase “like Dark Souls” was used by so many in The Games Sphere, when in reality Death’s Door is just a difficult game and people don’t know how to describe how games are difficult anymore without invoking Dark Souls. What Death’s Door IS is a 2D Zelda-esque game, complete with dungeons, puzzles, an incredible soundtrack and even a hookshot! As far as that difficulty goes, Death’s Door is a tale of two modes. The designed combat challenges to open doors, etc, are all wave-based encounters, and I don’t think those are particularly interesting, especially since there are about 10 enemy types in the whole game. The big bosses, on the other hand, are a real delight and show that this developer knows what makes boss fights both fun and satisfying. Overall, I enjoyed playing Death’s Door, but it was a process to shake what I thought the game was going to be and appreciate what it actually is. (9.5 hours) Be on the lookout for a full episode on this game soon! Death’s Gambit Full episode earlier this month Hits the highs of 2D Soulslike and metroidvania for me Great creative tweaks to soulslike formula Gorgeous art, good soundtrack Death’s Gambit (White Rabbit) was originally released in 2018, but the Afterlife expansion was released in 2021, and I had been waiting to play this game until Afterlife dropped. And boy was this worth the wait. I have a very rocky relationship with 2D soulslikes, as the loss of that horizontal direction really makes combat a lot less forgiving, and as the frustration meter rises, the fun meter plummets. Death’s Gambit: Afterlife manages this wonderfully by giving your character no less than four defensive verbs, as well as adding several “choose your own difficulty” mechanics that we discuss in episode 8. Throw in gorgeous and colorful pixel art, smooth animations and a killer OST, and you have a game that you shouldn’t miss if you like metroidvanias and/or Souls games. Death’s Gambit is in my top 3 games of 2021 (11 hours) Disco Elysium Final Cut Full episode later this month Top tier writing and emotional intelligence Kim Kitsuragi GOAT side character Character writing never takes a break, great character development throughout Hitman 3 Still the same quality as the previous games, but with much more variety in the levels and what they’re trying to accomplish Some levels are really story heavy, some are the clockwork puzzleboxes we know and love, some are straight up departures for the series Feels like a practice run for the 007 game Hitman 3 (IO Interactive) feels at the same time like the end of the trilogy that it is, while also feeling like what is possibly the beginning of a new era for IOI. The Hitman World of Assassination Trilogy has slowly been transitioning from emphasis on the tightly designed clockwork puzzle levels with a vague story full of secret society proper nouns (Hitman 2016) to a much greater amount of focus on the story and its core characters in Hitman 3. To me, Hitman 3 feels like killing two birds with one stone. The story of Agent 47 comes to the an end, and as IOI turns their focus to their shiny new 007 game, I can’t help but wonder if this was at the same time a test run for IOI will make a game based on a series that has always been known for larger-than-life characters and self-contained storylines. As a result, Hitman 3 has some levels that remind you of the previous games in the trilogy, and some that feel like levels from older Bond games remade in the Hitman engine. The result is not going to satisfy Hitman die-hards, but I enjoyed this game enough to give me full confidence that IOI will make a fun Bond game. And hey, if you want to play the old Hitman levels, you can import them into the beautiful Hitman 3 engine, with raytracing enabled so you get those sweet sweet sunbeams reflected off of 47’s dome. (25 hours). Be on the lookout for an episode as Scott Danielson and I conclude our HItman episode trilogy Metroid Dread First of all, very smooth and snappy feeling game, which is important for a game where most of the time you’re moving, platforming, exploring, etc Boss fights hit and miss EMMIs suck, no sugar coating I was skeptical but they made a good one I’ll be honest, my expectations for Metroid Dread (MercurySteam/Nintendo EPD) were pretty low. In the months leading up to the release, I played Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion and came to the conclusion that I like different things about Metroid than others. Super Metroid is my least favorite of those 3, by far, due to the way it feels to play. Atmosphere can only go so far. Almost by definition, metroidvanias are built around backtracking, and if movement isn’t fun, it’s an automatic demerit in my books. So it was a huge relief that Dread feels the way it does. It’s smooth, fast and even stylish at times. So when Dread tries to shake up the formula by adding in the slow “stealth” EMMI encounters, it takes a biiiiiig swing. And it misses badly, in my opinion. The EMMI encounters feel so frustratingly unlearnable that success or failure really just depends on if the EMMI randomly decides to go in a room far away, because in my experience, if you were in the same room as the EMMI, you have basically no shot. The boss fights are better than old Metroid boss fights, but that’s not saying much. They are now learnable with patterns and windups (yay!) but they last a long time and Samus is very fragile unless you’re an extreme collector (oh no!). All in all, this is a confused game that still ends up being a lot of fun to play, even if I :loud cough: Dreaded the EMMI sections for all the wrong reasons. (10 hours) Be on the lookout for a full episode in the next few months. Operation Tango Co-op where one person is a secret agent moving through a building and the other person is a hacker/voice in the earpiece Both see different things so communication is vital to make progress Played a few levels but my unreliable nature for co op games means I never finished Good fun, reminded me of keep talking and nobody explodes It’s almost become a meme at this point to say a game makes you “feel” like (character). Spiderman games make you “feel” like Spiderman. Arkham Asylum made you “feel” like Batman. Newt’s Day Out for Nintendo DS made you “feel” like Newt Gingrich. Ok one of those is maybe me trying to manifest my dream game, but the point is: Operation: Tango (Clever Plays) actually makes you and your co-op partner feel like a badass spy-and-handler duo. The thing that this game does really well is vary up your interfaces wildly between levels. The spy and handler both have information that the other needs to get past a barrier. Think “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” but with much more variety. This was given away for free on Playstation Plus at some point during the year, and not even my extreme aversion to multiplayer games could keep me from having a good time with this one. Returnal People say it’s hard, and it is hard Steep difficulty curve, but it will click Difficulty spikes for me, the first boss, the 5th and 6th biomes (not bosses) Enjoying the mystery of the story but I have no idea what is happening right now The first thing that people will say when you start talking about Returnal (Housemarque) is probably “Oh I wish I could find a PS5”, but then inevitably they will also say “I heard that game is really hard”. And I am here to tell you that yes, this game is hard. Every bullet hell game that I’ve ever played is hard. But unlike say, Enter the Gungeon, I actually beat Returnal, and I think I can attribute this to two things. First, that third dimension adds a lot of safe space on the screen that traditional 2D top-down bullet hell games simply don’t have. But moreso than that, this game is a fucking blast to play. It makes no apologies for being a video game-ass video game. The main character, Selene, moves extremely fast, jumps high and dashes far. The guns are creative and fun (Electropylon Driver MVP), the bosses have a sheer spectacle factor that makes them incredibly memorable, and there are no fewer than 29 and a half theories circulating around the internet on what the hell is actually happening in the story. Good-ass game, and recency bias be damned, this is in my top 3 games of the year. (27 hours) I have a full episode for Returnal planned in the next few months, so stay tuned! Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury An absolute joy to play, fantastic Well paced, never needed to grind for stars Bowser’s Fury is the modern version of Super Mario 64 and it’s incredible I think this total package is the best 3D Mario Nintendo deserves, and receives, a lot of flak for their propensity to package up favorites from the past, change very little, and sell them again for full price instead of bringing back Virtual Console. So when Super Mario 3D World (Nintendo) was ported to Switch along with some tacked-on thing called “Bowser’s Fury Not Furry”, I admittedly scoffed and moved on. 3D World is a very very good game, but I played it on Wii U and was not going to pay $60 for it. But then a family member let me borrow some Switch games, and that was one of them. And as I expected, 3D World is still very good. I like it more than most 3D Mario games, including Odyssey. But the real shock was the realization that Bowser’s Fury is, in my opinion, the best 3D Mario game. All of us who grew up playing Super Mario 64 will instantly recognize the “open world” with smaller open levels inside of it, only this time there are no loading screens to separate them. Oh and every 5-6 minutes, a corrupted kaiju Bowser appears and you have to either run away or use an item to become a kaiju cat Mario and fight it. And the boss fight is pretty good! This isn’t “grab Bowser by the tail 3 times”, this is a true boss fight with health bars and a set of attacks to learn and avoid. And when that’s done, you get the joy of exploring this open area and the tightly designed little snacks of levels throughout the world. This is an absolute joy to play, and it is firmly in my Top 3 Games of 2021. (8 hours in both games, 16 hours total) Unpacking Whole game is unpacking boxes as the character moves from home to home Storytelling via the things we take with us when we move, where we display them in the house, etc Story took a different turn than I was expecting, maybe my brain is broken Very satisfying, lots of references to the era that I (and the game developers, apparently) grew up in If I was moving and my boxes got mixed up with somebody else’s, we would each open the boxes and see the story of somebody else’s life inside. I’ve often found it interesting to think about why I’ve chosen to bring some of my possessions through my many moves, one of which included putting all of my things in two suitcases. What do those choices say about me and what’s going on in my life at that time? These are the questions that Unpacking (Witch Beam) seeks to answer. In a reductive sense, what you’re doing here is literally unpacking boxes as your character moves from home to home throughout their life. You pick where you want to display things, and make sure you do so in a way that leaves room for everything. But when you start to see those sentimental possessions appear, move after move, you start to realize that the things we choose to take with us can tell our story. And while I think this game could have used a few more chapters, it accomplished the goal it set out to accomplish. Oh and if you’re under 25 years old playing this, that thing is a GameCube, an ancient game console. It goes in the living room. (3 hours) Webbed Tiny indie 2D platformer where you play as a spider Lots of time spent swinging around, webbing things together to solve physics puzzles Lots of charm, very cute, nice soundtrack Sometimes there are games that slip past your, ahem, web of things you’re exposed to in The Games Sphere, and you miss out on cool indie games because your Twitter feed is 80% console warriors and 15% people freaking out about Horizon: Forbidden West because you liked ONE tweet about it 6 months ago. But sometimes, sometimes you’ll see some people talking about a cool indie game where you play as a cute little spider, swinging around on a quest to save their little spider boyfriend, and that’s what Sbug Games have created. Most of the game is spent swinging around, meeting the other insects of the game world, and doing physics puzzles built around the mechanic of tying things together with webs. It’s not a very long game, but it is a cute, cool little experience that ended up being a fun way to spend a lazy Sunday. After all, isn’t that what we’re looking for? (3 hours) Top 3 for 2021: Death’s Gambit: Afterlife, Returnal, Bowser’s Fury