Games of 2021
Nov. 30th, 2021 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walleye2021 was certainly my year of games if there ever was one (other than maybe 2015, which is when I first became a Gamer™). I played so many games by myself as well, and to completion, which I consider quite impressive because I am very much the type to get up and leave a game in the middle to never return. It's time...to discuss many of them! Sorry the formatting is kinda bad I literally hate it here.
For one thing, me and kevin got a switch this year which meant a.) I finally got my first console game! My parents were very strict about never buying me one so I’m happy I have one now b.) My game collection has expanded a lot! I played a lot of different switch games this year which i’d only dreamt about playing before so i’m quite happy. For the most part though, if there’s a game that’s available on PC vs on Switch, I’m usually gonna go with PC (unless there’s a switch deal that makes it cheaper).
If you have a Grouvee, add me! (made this after seeing that julia made one heehee). I’m trying to compile my game reviews here. I was going to discuss every game I played this year but that got tiring after the first review so for now I’ll only mention special games!
Games I played this year that I won’t discuss but feel free to talk to me about: Unpacking, Donut County, Vermintide 2, Valheim, Back 4 Blood, Valorant, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (I do mention it in the BOTW section).
Mentions
What Remains of Edith Finch: This game is quite short (only took two hours to complete) but i’d been hoping to play it for quite some time. It was a game that I watch-played with kevin (basically, he controls while i just watch/assist in other ways. <3) and i was really fascinated with the different gameplay mechanics! No spoilers, but I especially loved Barbara’s section. If you play you will see what i mean :) .
I thought the story was decent, but I don’t think it hit me as hard as it did other people.
This game was available on the xbox game pass! $1 for 3 months access to games...quite a nice deal.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons: imo the most controversial game on this list. I have a love-hate relationship with this game.
My acnh-sona
Things i dislike:
- Why do tools have durability in this game. It really stifled my-entire-island-is-a-field-of-flowers project when my water can would break so often. What makes this frustrating is that i think tools breaking needs to have a purpose. I.e. it makes sense in fighting games like botw because it adds to the urgency/frantic nature of the gameplay, which spices things up a bit. But in a game like acnh, all it does is slow the overall pace of the game to an even slower roll and that’s frustrating.
- The user experience could certainly be improved upon. I know this is a problem with all nintendo games but for acnh it’s particularly bad. I hate having to go through 50 dialogue screens just to sell one thing. I hate not being able to purchase multiple items at a time from the nook atm machine/from the clothing store/etc. I understand parts of the game are slow on purpose (like how in the beginning it takes forever to get however many resources you need to build introductory structures) but this is just. Why.
- I wish you could do more stuff when you visit you friends/they visit you. There should be minigames.
- The curly hair options are lacking >:(
- I don’t rly get what the point of things like Brewster’s cafe is. And i wish the boat rides/flights to random islands had more variety/things to explore there.
- I wish u could obtain stuff faster loool im still missing so much furniture i want!
- Punchy. Punchy is a cat on my island and he is my favorite. All he does is eat and sleep and talk about his grandma.
- The custom design portal. People are so talented!!! In awe and forever gracious to the users who contribute to customs designs (like the one who made my nice mushroom path for my haunted forest)
- The outfits are sooo cute...dream wardrobe
- The 2.0 update was what made this into an actual game, i’d say. Farming and cooking shouldve been there before! Same as the co-op on harv’s island. I stopped playing after 80 hours in the game until the update came around because there just wasn’t much to do...
Overall, i’m still glad to have the game. It’s nice to have an animal crossing experience, because i didn’t have one in my youth, and i do love slowly but surely working on my island. I never went so far as to look for good deals on the stalk market on reddit/crazy trading/etc but i like to think of it as a ad-free idle game.
Hey! It’s punchy! What’s he doing here!
I do have problems with how the game industry in general is moving towards a subscription based model. It’s frustrating that owning a game isn’t enough, if you want to unlock all parts of a game you have to pay more each month, but that’s a whole other topic of discussion.
Hypnospace Outlaw: everything about this game exudes so much love for the late 90’s early-internet era that i wasn’t a part of but playing this game made me feel like i was! I was very bad at this game (needed guide help a lot lol) but a big chunk of the enjoyment was just exploring. It was so fun to discover a hidden page, and the soundtrack POPS OFF. Chill it Right by Fre3zer. Need i say more? I would just spend five minutes dancing to the music once i reached a new page. My one issue with the game is sometimes the text is really hard to read because it’s in that one font. U know.
What a vibe, what a vibe. Slightly hard to read vibe but, still.
I think what impresses me the most about this game is that the in-game history and culture created is so immersive. There’s newspaper articles and reports and internet blogs and u can tell this game was created with a lot of love and care and attention to detail and i really appreciate that in a game. Had so much fun playing and i recommend it a lot, the story is actually quite touching too in a way i did not expect...literally unprovoked.
Favorites
Breath of the Wild: did you know this is the first rpg i’ve ever played to completion! 100+ hours in this game and i want more! I’m so excited for botw2 this game truly rocked my world. I loved the gameplay (even though in the very beginning i was too scared to do anything. Too scared to fight enemies to scared to fight bosses too scared to do anything but i think i was able to overcome that fear, in time). The gameplay was just so versatile, i love a good open world game with more than one mechanic to defeat enemies. The characters are SO charming and every time the champions came on screen i was in tears. Their stories are all so touching and all i can think about is them fighting for their people till the very end. GUH!!!!
Daruk as a ghost cheering Yunobo on and meeting him for the first time but being confident that the future is gonna be alright in Yunobo’s hands! Mipha every time she says “I’ll always protect you” when you use her ability. I love Urbosa’s spunk and how she’s always watching out for Zelda (Zeldas mom x Urbosa theorists unite) even in the afterlife. All of these characters, even Revali, care so much about their home and it makes me so (anguished screaming). Fighting Ganon in his two forms was also sooo much fun, that final hit of him in his boar mode...satisfying! i'm still not super zelink but i do see it more now...
Things I dislike about the game are the weird Zora vs Hylian aging differences that let them have that creepy ass Special Delivery quest and the racist Gerudo culture setup. These also seem to be general franchise problems though hhh wondering why people at Nintendo can’t just use their brain...
i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i love u i
Anyways. Overall a very solid game, excited for more! I did play Age of Calamity to fill the Mipha-shaped void in my heart. 1.) she is SOOOOO top tier in this game 2.) AOC is kind of a bad game with weird camera angles and constant drops in framerate and a dumb story that retcons BOTW and i wish there were less timed quests so i could just kill enemies at my own pace but the hack and slash genre is always a classic for me and doing combos and getting weak point smashes in is SO addicting. As of writing i still have the last story quest to complete, but i’m gonna take a bit of a break from the game for now.
Return of the Obra Dinn: this is the game that helped me find other cool games i loved (like outer wilds <3) because as soon as i finished it i looked up “games like return of the obra dinn reddit”. This genre of game needs more love. I think my favorite kind of puzzle game is the variety where there’s a long thread that covers the entire story and it’s your job to untangle it. Particularly in a way that doesn’t give you any info, but rather, in a way that requires you to find the info needed to untangle. To clarify further, it’s a game that doesn’t give you any hints or tell you how something is meant to be used. You just have to recognize what you’re seeing and determine what is useful and what isn’t, and then decide what to do with that information. It’s not hand holdy and thus it makes you feel PROUD once you’ve made some progress. The style of the game is really interesting too. I played this game one weekend when me and kevin were snowed in and as such always associate it with being cozy and eating snow.
Oh my! skeleton!!!
Disco Elysium: Many of u know how crazy this game (read: Kim Kitsuragi) makes me. Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Never in my life did i think that I could be obsessed with middle aged men but here it is.
This game has a lot of reading, and is a bit full of itself, but I think it has a right to be.
Things that i LOVE about this game:
- Remember in the Hypnospace Outlaw section how I talked about how much I love a game with a deeply entrenched and complete history? This game has that to the extreme—entire cities/artworks/personas built from the history of this world that are just so fascinating and well put together. If I could take a history class on the world of Elysium I would.
- Being able to play in conversation with multiple facets of your personality is so fascinating. You make choices to define yourself, but parts of you will always lean towards other causes/fields of thoughts and it’s up to you to decide what to do with these impulses. The character study of Harrier Du Bois.
- The plot is good. It really makes you realize, solving murders is HARD. The climax of the game actually made my heart stop in my chest, it was that impactful. The way that simple decisions ends up having a meaningful impact highlights how much planning was put into this game and even though people complain about the ending, I think it meshes perfectly with the landscape of the world and Harry’s life.
- When you’re allowed to make your own choices...you’re really allowed to make your own choices. Like balls to the walls kind of choices.
- The interactions between Kim Kitsuragi (your partner) and Harry make me (clenches) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Tender and soft moments written beautifully, being able to learn about Kim over time and pick up the nuances of his behavior. I’m obsessed. The “would die for each other” type of relationship hits Hard.
So many moments of wonder and beauty and solidarity in this game. Feeling like life is hopeless and gloomy but you’re still a part of something, a part of history, and it’s up to you to decide the role you want to take on in the world. When you play this game PLEASE talk to me about it because I’m literally going insane.
Love how the DE community on ao3 solely writes multichaptered fic that’s 30k+ words. Still got a few tabs to go through.
Outer Wilds + Echoes of the Eye DLC: (Travelers by Andrew Prahlow starts playing). Ah. :’) Welcome to my FAVORITE GAME PLAYED IN 2021!!! It was honestly very hard to pick but something about OW just STUCK with me. It was one that I watch-played with kevin, though some parts i couldn’t watch because the motion of being in space tends to make me very dizzy and nauseated (like i couldn’t play lucio in overwatch because he made me feel ruh roh). But if you are stronger than me PLAy THIS GAME (if you’re not, watching someone play it will suffice).
I found it by looking up “games like obra dinn reddit” and this was the most agreed-upon answer.
Things I lovedddd about this game:
- The premise. Try to stop a timeloop that ends each loops with the supernova of your sun! It’s frightening and interesting! Unlike other time loop games i’ve seen ahem ahem.
- The soundtrack is gorgeous. It really makes me feel like I’m a part of something. Love listening to it while doing work that needs focus <3
- Gameplay of deciphering notes and recordings and deciding what to do with that information (like Obra Dinn. Which is why it showed up in those reddit posts, huh). If you play DON’T LOOK STUFF UP. The “next step” feels very natural when you think about it for a bit and it’s so satisfying to discover things on your own.
- This game really encourages curiosity (since, well, you can never really “die”) to the point where doing “dangerous” things is in fact required to progress. I appreciate how brave this game makes me feel.
- Just. The whole concept of learning how a past civilization lived and died while you’re on the brink of your own civilization’s death (its death that’s happening over and over and over again). Putting together who loved who and fought with who and missed who and imagining who these Nomai individuals were based on just fragments from their best and worst days is enough to put me in a frenzy. Sorry I’m thinking about it again and feeling very emotional. Oh my god the message Kousa left for Foli. The one Plume left for Keek. Oh my god TT_TT
- Most of all this game has taught me to be curious and to take care of one other.
Bongo chert.
I know people like the DLC less because it’s too scary and that’s understandable because ...scarie. However, I’d argue that people who claim that EotE being against everything OW stood for are wrong! It’s about being brave and facing your fears! I think making another game that just followed what Outer Wilds did would have been boring if there wasn’t a new game mechanic involved. So thanks to the developers for being brave on that front heehee.
unhinged tweets i made upon finishing the game <3
Thanks so much to this game for making my life infinitely better!
Currently Playing
Fire Emblem: 3 Houses: So far I am really enjoying it! I’m starting off with the Blue Lions, per jess’s recommendation, and already i would do ANYTHING for annette. Looking forward to getting to know all the characters better (will pay special attention to hilda as well, thanks to kaia for the pointers hehe). The gameplay reminds me of Divinity: Original Sin 2 (my favorite game played in 2020) and even though i’m really bad at it, i'm having a good time. I didn’t expect there to be fishing in this game but i love fishing minigames so not a problem LOL. i am finally excited to Get It (It: the true Meaning of all of jessica’s fanart hehe).
Final Fantasy XIV: The only MMORPG i’ve played in my life is Gaia Online: zomg which was “fake” to many for a lot of reasons (it was a browser game...) but real to ME! But i haven’t picked any up since because u either have to pay a lot or they just suck. So imagine my surprise when kevin comes around like “dude u can play ffxiv if u have a free account” and im like “but we just got an xbox game pass and what about back for blood.” and then he said “PLEASE” so here we are playing ffxiv and it’s a great time. Omg.
There’s a bit of busy work/side quests that annoy me/weird mechanics that are cringe (that i don’t remember gaia zomg having ;-) ) but i am still having a lot of fun. I think the game has a lot of good quality-of-life features (like being able to change classes easily) and honestly. It’s just Good. I forgot how much fun i had spamming my buttons and deciding which spells i wanna cast before others to optimize my mana and the cooldowns and and and...I haven’t paid much attention to the story because in games like this i don’t rly care about story (except dos2 which surprised me with the depth of its plot but LOL separate discussion). However, kevin has told me it’s good, so i believe it. Dungeons are also SO FUN. i was really drunk when i went into the first dungeon but the environments and enemies are really cool and working cooperatively with people is a lot of fun. The ffxiv community is actually so nice....
Overall i’m excited to keep levelling up and playing this game and u might just see me subscribing to it so i can level up past level 60 now. I’m in it.
My dragon girl thaumaturge Beetle Vulgaris <3
Want to Play
Ace Attorney games: Thanks to suggestions from risa and jess, i now own the ace attorney trilogy! I plan on getting the great ace attorney chronicles when that goes on sale, and once i’ve finished more of the games i own. I look forward to it because i’ve always seen so much AA media and i wanna get what it’s about. teehee.
Kentucky Route Zero: This game seems really ~minimalism~ which normally I don’t like in games but i’ve seen it raved about so much and it showed up on my search of “games like Outer wilds” so i feel as though i must try it eventually.
Gone Home: I believe this is THE walking simulator game of walking simulator games.
I really need to stop buying games and finish the ones I have so the next time there’s a steam sale i have permission to go crazy.
Conclusion
Posting this in early december because I think FFXIV/FE3H/ACNH will take up most of my time so I don’t expect any new additions.
Thank you everyone for reading, it means a lot <3 especially because this is very much a flow of consciousness type post. if you have any game recs (perhaps u are able to judge my tastes by now) please let me know!!! Wishing you all a very gamer 2022. :-)
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Date: 2021-12-01 06:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-01 04:14 pm (UTC)omg kaia. PLEASE PLAY DE AND TALK TO ME ABOUT IT!!!!!! I'm going insane!!!!! it is literally an experience....and yeah hypospace is rly crazy idk how the experience would be on switch because it feeeeels like it's meant to be played on pc but there's def a switch port available (;-) as i know u are a switch gamer heh).
i think it's easy to be intimidated by games (i am too...all the time heh) but you are certainly a Verified Gamer (for better or for worse adlkfjasldfj) esp since i feel like FE3H is kinda intense and u got to the time skip in 5 days which is WILD and admirable. as for fishing...i will keep that in mind thank you for all the fe3h tips <3
thank you for reading and commenting it means a lot :') <3
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Date: 2021-12-03 03:42 am (UTC)ok let me be quiet now but this was a fun read<3 i rly want to play outer wilds at some point too but i need to finish smt5 and also properly get into ace attorney first :"| but i will!!! also if u've never played persona 5 you should do that. ok <3
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Date: 2021-12-03 04:34 am (UTC)LOL i also thought about being a total asshole in the game but i saw some people play it and the way kim's heart just breaks over time kills me too much i could never do it. tho maybe i'll try and be a lil more crazy, the first time i played i thought i'd be super wild but then i realize i was entirely until kim's control.
PLEASE PLAY OUTER WILDS THO!!!!!!!!!! ITS NUTS!!!!!!!
omg i haven't played persona...i've been kinda daunted by the franchise (cuz tbh i don't really know much about it/what the gameplays like and every time i try n look it up i get distractedadfadf) but i will def check it out. thank u for the recommendation hehe
thanks for reading this nice to meet u!!! i'm isha btw i assume kaia told u but alkdfjasldkfjalf