The Best and Worst of 2021

<< 2020 | 2022 >>

As last year, but not quite as bad, maybe. I did at least start this blog, even if I only published like a quarter of the posts I've had in mind. I finally played SMB, as well as giving the original SMB a better go, and also replayed SMB. If you're not sure what to name a game, that's a pretty solid acronym to start with! I continued my quest to play some classic arcade games which is my favorite backlog project I've done (also by far the biggest which may be why).

I got into visual novels and detective games a bit, which are tricky due to how much longer it takes to determine the quality of narrative compared to other aspects, plus storytelling standards in gaming are awful as always. I also started seriously watching films, which has been a lot easier to navigate, and have added a list of non-games at the end to get a bit personal and that jazz.

Here's a playlist of songs I liked this year to go along with the lists.

Best Games 

Selected from all the games I enjoyed this year. No replayed games unless I previously didn't have a solid opinion on it. I did play some games that actually came out this year, but didn't quite finish so Echoes of the Eye and Yugo Puzzle will have to wait until next year.

1. Super Monkey Ball (GameCube, via Wii)

Highly dynamic platform racing through a variety of routes, skips, warps and smaller optimizations with each their associated cost or risk, held together by the strong structure and scoring system. EX levels (eventually you'll have to reset at very small mistakes), Expert's level design (lots of gimmicks, very long without warps), and farming bananas (score from bananas just shouldn't carry over between lives, top level high scores are degenerate) bring it down a notch.

2. Return of the Obra Dinn (PC) 

Really tight mystery-solving with some cool mechanics and restrictions to facilitate it. Stellar music and a neat aesthetic too. Like NAM-1975 for shooting galleries, or Super Monkey Ball for racing games, this gives me faith in its genre's potential for sublime interaction despite the popular output. Detective games can be more than just vehicles for mystery plots!

3. Dujanah (PC)

A gallery of bizarre, funny, playful and personal vignettes. Throughout it all it is wonderfully and tragically human, especially in some of the characterization. Tacky and janky in the best of ways, with amazing music. The Caves of Al Dajjal is just a solid masocore game. The strawberry-filled mind of a child is still wondrous even after my first playthrough ended with an hour of being lost in there. There's a lady that talks about a play then about referencing broadly, to make a point that she's here to love and will find love in improper places, then quotes her mother on the nature of truth - just derailing into progressive meaningful tangents with no intent of returning.

4. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PS4)

Tropey, even cheesy, as it reshapes the familiar to humanise love and evil. Constant developments of mysteries that reveal this greater narrative, remarkably paced and structured. Meh gameplay and characters, storytelling that never quite earns emotional moments, and a slightly forced final twist. After Outer Wilds I thought it was unavoidable for a big multi-faceted mystery to be less interesting by the end than during it, but here waning mysteries are filled in by unveiling overarching themes which makes it work a lot better.

5. Glittermitten Grove (PC)

Exploring the world is quite interesting, and it has some real neat gameplay ideas. Slow midgame, but it comes into its own. Solid managɐment game. I don't really have that many thoughts on it, but almost anything is a spoiler so I might write a dedicated post anyway just to be able to communicate more than a vague hint of my opinion.

6. Girl Adventure (Web)

Very awkward and limited controls that makes seemingly easy things hard to execute, requiring you to rely on unconventional strategies like tactical deaths to create spawn points. Delightful progression of mechanics and levels to explore those, always intuitive yet many surprises.

7. The Sea Will Claim Everything (PC)

Exploring the childishly imaginative, culturally rich setting is delightful, with incredible music and flavor text oozing from every surface. Some powerful narrative moments, and a lot of charming characters with their own things going on.

8. My Father's Long, Long Legs (Web)

It hits that sweet spot in tension between the seen and unseen, known and unknown. Always unsettling, even puzzling, and sometimes truly terrifying.

9. Pushing It (Web)

Puzzlescript has been mastered, twisted, pushed to the limits, but never so thouroughly subverted and broken. Ponkyban tested the waters for the utter absurdity of this fiddly, janky, delightful trip. I still can't believe that this is even possible. I am almost more willing to believe Jack bribed Stephen to host the game on the puzzlescript site but it's actually another engine (the available code only covers object display in the 64.000 lines that show up).

10. 80 Days (iOS)

Very impressive web of interactive nonlinear fiction in an evocative alt-history setting. Not just individual random bits, the structure joins them together into a grand adventure never seen before.

Worst Games

Usually "most interesting bad games", as I stop playing most properly bad games quickly, but this year I actually played some real trash.

1. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania (Switch)

Disgraceful. I kind of wish it didn't exist, or that it wasn't possible. If companies couldn't butcher their history for profit, maybe they would make more of an attempt to preserve it. This is also here in honor of Demon's Souls, another soulless remake / reimagining whose better version is only playable (without official servers) on 20 year old hardware. Thank god for emulation.

Anyway, the game in question. The physics suck, see in depth look at that here. Add to that a janky camera, diagonals being killed (a small but positive part of the original's higher level optimization), and inconsistent collisions. Then they removed lives and scoring wholesale, defeating the point of the challenge mode. There's a speedrun mode which is a welcome addition, but not a replacement for the main mode of the arcade original. They removed the local multiplayer, a big selling point for me and my friend who wanted to play together competing. To top it all off, the GameCube controller to Switch adapter I bought for this don't work for this game, the one game that makes most use of those joystick notches. A complete mess.

2. The Danganronpa Trilogy (PC)

At its best there's some silly anime fun, with nice music, style and interactions, but it rarely gets there. On one hand is the poor pacing through all the flashbacks, recaps, repetitive dialogue and interactive elements, and on the other are quality issues with awful mystery plots, bad translations, illogical minigame solutions, idiot plot, contrivances and unresolved elements. While the ending brings the nonsensical worldbuilding and set-up for the game into focus, figuring out the truth of its central murder is actually decent.

For the second game, they improved the cast and mysteries a bit, it's the most consistent and enjoyable moment-to-moment. While the minigame solutions make sense this time, the plot does not and the ending is a huge mess of contradictions or pure nonsense.

V3 carries on this tradition, lampshading issues with 1-2 while itself having very similar ones (e.g. swapping out pseudophilosophical despair/hope babble with pseudophilosophical truth/lies babble). Like 2, it explains nothing well while leaving a bunch of contradictions unaddressed. Like 1, the worldbuilding and set-up makes no sense. Comfortably the worst game here when you add in the murders that don't even make physical sense, the game lying to the player to force a plot twist, and 3-5's writing being probably a series worst in its complete abandonment of a decent plan without giving a single reason why.

3. Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube, via Wii) 

Disappointing technically (camera, controls), structurally (water refilling, hp, lack of freedom), and moment to moment (level design, water movement, gimmicks). Inferior to 64 in many ways while failing to improve at all. The lack of focus on platforming is especially offensive, tons of gimmicks and large empty levels. In the middle of this, before giving up, I had to go back and play 64 again. Even on original hardware and a wonky controller, it is far superior.

4. Dream Daddy (PC)

So I kind of gave this a positive review, but not the whole game. Similar to Horizon: Zero Dawn or Spider-Man 2, it's possible to single out certain parts that are worthwhile on their own, while the average quality is lower. In this case, much lower. Craig is sweet, but even that storyline struggles a bit with gimmicks, structure and memes. The other romances are far too short to do much with their narratives, at best having some nice characterization (like Robert), and have a lot of issues; terrible minigames, constant randomized moaning with poor audio quality (not the sexual kind mind you, this is for straight people to feel good about themselves, can't have eroticism), grating music and sound effects, and dialogue options that encourage you to pander to whoever you want to get in the pants of rather than be yourself.

Then there's the main storyline that you have to skip through every time you replay the game, which has one good moment and a ton of puzzlingly bad stuff (even continuity errors). Your daughter is the one you spend most time with, but she's one of the weaker characters individually and interpersonally. Despite all being dads, most of the characters are really immature, as if the dad thing is just a gimmick.

Most negative is the general framing and tone of the game. It's often (rightfully) dismissed as a meme game and can't take itself seriously too long at a time. It buys into this western mainstream idea of dating sims being a genre for degenerate perverts, the only big companies making them are doing so as April Fools' jokes, and even many indies fall into it by being parodies whose best bits are when they're "ironically" mimicking more earnest work. Tim Rogers covered this in detail in his greatest video yet. When part of the appeal is to represent a marginalized community (something this does not really do), I think treating the whole thing as a joke works especially poorly. I played a bunch of (gay) romance games for pride month, and there's genuine porn games that have better writing, plot and characters than most of what Dream Daddy offers, with better production values as well.

5. Saya no Uta / Song of Saya (PC)

Speaking of porn games! It's a weird one. I avoid straight-up porn in public but this gets really close. It starts off with some neat parallel scenes showing how fucked the main character is, and Saya contrasts the horrid landscapes with her innocent, normal human appearance. Their intimacy - quite vividly described, voice acted and shown, at that - is awkward and comical with how blatant it is, but serves to bring attention to that contrast. As it continues however, the sex scenes become more indulgent and pointless, while we learn Saya self-described herself as a "lifeform that requires the seed of males". This was the point where I doubted whether it should be on the blacklist.

It's not even my main problem with it, however. The tragedy also becomes more indulgent and loses the mystery and tension it possessed earlier. Much of it is the main character going from suffering with his delusions and trying to get by (even if he is a weird asshole, e.g. thinking oral sex is sexist), to gladly causing immense misery upon people, suddenly viewing them as monsters even though he was previously aware that it was his delusions causing that (it would have been stronger if what he saw was the truth, and humans were blissfully unaware while he decides Saya's kind is superior due to lookism).

The plot and worldbuilding doesn't really go anywhere, anything that isn't left entirely vague is mundane, not much in terms of cosmic horror. Despite that, it fully buys into its own Lovecraftean nature with so much droning on about how the truth will totally make you insane, bro. Too self-absorbed and pretentious, without any of the mystery of Lovecraft's own stories. Another overrated work from Urobuchi.

6. Metroid Prime (GameCube, via Wii)

So it's a low FoV, single stick FPS with tank controls and no vertical camera control while moving. Sounds like a terrible idea, and plays even worse with low visual clarity, enemy design and defensive gameplay akin to hitscan shooters, and constant pacing slowdowns due to scanning. I wanted to try PrimeHack, and perhaps put that in the best list above, but didn't get to it. I would like to explore these spaces with less awful controls. [edit: I did get to that, functional controls aren't enough to make it good though.]

7. Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation 3)

Fourth wall breaking, wow! If only it, you know, made any kind of sense. Why can't Mantis read the second controller port? Why does that port work to control Snake during the fight but stops working right after? Why do people talk to the player directly but still refer to you as Snake? Why is Meryl's number on the CD case (which, for the digital version, doesn't exist)? There's no attempt to integrate it and make sense of it in the world, just to tack it on as an oh-so-clever gimmick.

Beyond this, it wants to be an action game really badly but is never good at it. The best boss is Sniper Wolf who forces you to backtrack for 15 minutes and then gives you a simple battle of attrition. Other forced combat includes a run up the sniper tower after this, where waves of enemies chase you and offscreen enemies shoot you from above; one of the worst gameplay sections I've played in a long time. While the stealth mechanics are decent, it never really focuses on that, 10 hours in there's been almost zero usage of the mechanics taught in the tutorial (I only learned later that you have to download vr missions separately, which go harder on this). Some campy fun story, though it can be slow when crawling through vents or sitting through some torture. It sure is a Kojima game and I sure look forward to playing 7-8 more of those.

8. 3D Zelda: The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword (Wii)

I got a good first impression of these due to the stand-out visuals. The Wind Waker has a lovely homey yet adventurous atmosphere, great character design and art style, and neat visual humor and other details. Twilight Princess is less striking stylistically, but the colors and lighting (particularly during twilight) are beautiful with that trademark bloom and blur of the era. There's also some neat things beyond visuals, TP has slightly more to its combat and I like the feel of motion controls in Skyward Sword.

But each game struggles a lot with pacing, at least relative to Ocarina of Time (Majora's Mask is really slow, it just has more to make up for it). I don't mind cutscenes or running around the villages (especially when optional like in WW), but then it drops you in a huge empty ocean with minutes between anything remotely interesting. The next game doesn't even let you roam, forcing you through a load of gimmicks, overwrought tutorials and fetch quests interspersed between slow village story stuff. The same goes for Skyward Sword, which never stops forcing exposition and repeated information down your throat via the only properly bad Zelda companion in history. I'm not a fan of OoT or the general 3D Zelda formula, with shallow combat, riddles that solve themselves and a marked lack of freedom and exploration, but at least it's remotely focused and gets to the point.

9. Advance Wars

I enjoyed much of this; learning is fun enough to outweigh that what I'm learning is poorly designed systems. Here and there, and increasingly past the mid point though, it goes over to challenge you on those systems, making use of what you've learned, which is where it falls apart. Fun tutorials, boring gameplay is a hell of a dichotomy but that's how it feels. I could be missing some higher level nuance but for a single playthrough I'm not sold, and I'll never like the fog of war mechanics or the missions that force you to rely on an allied AI.

It mostly comes down to being a swingy attrition game with poor feedback, harder maps requiring you to do better at unit management and AI manipulation without the game communicating the information necessary to do so conscientiously. When positioning isn't highly constrained by playing around choke points (which abuses the AI's lack of larger strategy, it only thinks about one unit at a time so it won't move back units blocking a big tank that could blow through my blockade), it faces late-game Fire Emblem problems of huge movement / range units being guaranteed to kill something. Since your units are disposable here, the counter to that is sending in 10 targets so while they kill one you can still overwhelm them, coming down to numbers rather than nuanced positioning or target prioritisation.

10. Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (PS3)

The emergent stories through pawns are neat, and it’s got great game feel. Shame it’s so often tedious and imbalanced due to quests, rpg scaling, carry weight, vast fields, saving, aggro, classes, and healing. Even past it all combat and level design isn’t great, quite chaotic and shallow (stats and pawns matter more than action skills).

Other Media

No ranking here, though with how these thoughts have progressed they will be conveniently ordered. A bit of a focus on less popular things and a variety of different things (I watched a lot of movies, this would be swarmed by them otherwise).

Gospels of the Flood (audio drama)

So well written, acted and composed moment to moment, while the greater narrative delivers resonant positivity in the midst of so much (both textual and not) doom and gloom. I love Road to Gehenna too much to call it Kyratzes' best work, but damn is it close.

Puparia (anime short film)

The only piece of art in the world I think every human should experience. 3 minutes of some of the best animation out there, with sublime ambience and visual storytelling. The longer something is, the more of a chance it has to leave an imprint; most of the arcade games I've played are short, unmemorable experiences in their own right, but as a whole I'm immersing myself in culture and history throughout a long period of my life, and it has already changed me. Nonetheless, the 3 minutes I spent with Puparia will never be forgotten either. Also check out the making of.

Kino no Tabi -The Beautiful World- (anime series)

Really nice vibe, thoughtful and beautiful. Some solid action and plot like coliseum, and just so many evocative, interesting, poignant scenes, moments and themes. The first movie has a different concept, more about exploring Kino’s character with some great storytelling (the pronoun change as they overcome their trauma panic attack is neat). The second movie is in line with the series structurally, but diverges stylistically to feel very different without losing the unnerving and mysterious atmosphere.

The Little Mermaid (cartoon film)

An amazing return to form, combining the old guard's live action reference with the looser animation of silver age films. As a combination of efforts from voice actors, physical reference actors, animators, writer-directors and allstar Howard Ashman, the characters feel more alive than ever before. While the original tale has a distinct soul and this is a lot more child-friendly, it still comes together very well in its own way, with the sea king bound by his domain's rules while Eric as an outsider can just skewer the iconic squid. Edit: Finally finished my review of the whole catalogue, featuring a bit more writing on this beauty.

Reprise (film)

The tangents of past and possible futures are so touching. Returning to places of the past, but everything is different. The uncertainty and vulnerability of every life story.

Final Fantasy VI review by Tim Rogers (article)

More an autobiography than review, it concerns this mysterious growth that I wonder at myself. I may be a bit of a mess now, but at least I have some faith in and understanding of my current self. I can’t say the same of 15-year-old me, who didn’t know where to go or what to do to socialize so, ill wanting to appear as alone and awkward as he felt by sitting at his desk, he spent every recess in the toilet. I'd eat my lunch, and sometimes defend the door from some prankster trying to force it open, but mostly I'd be on my phone. My first two hand-me-down phones had slide-out keyboards and a pretty feature-heavy version of Word (without any games of note), so I'd write self-insert fantasy stories or emo poems.

I even shared these online, though thankfully the site has gone down and all that remains are the backed up, private files themselves. One that actually went somewhere was finished just after my 15th birthday, a vague depressive poem called Nightshine (my old online nickname) about my owl plushie of all things. This was submitted, in a more polished and even vaguer form, to a culture contest. I recall standing on the side of the stage, a classmate of mine leading the show with, he would relay to me afterwards, a sick speech ready to introduce me. At the last minute, my stomach about to burst, I was called back. I had said I didn't want to present, and they’d found out just in time, but even in that moment of utter relief I knew I should have done it (now I’m less sure, recognising just how suicidal that poem reads).

Anyway. I don't know how I got here, how that boy was on a path to me. But I'm glad I didn’t stray too far.

Call Me By My Name (film)

I watched this on the last day of 2021 and haven't processed it entirely, but one thing is sure: I haven’t been as affected by a story in ages. So rich and beautiful, resonating with my most fundamental self. I'm taken back to my childhood by Elio's nose starting to bleed out of nowhere (while eating is the worst time, except maybe waking up from it), the dreamy setting reminding me of the house my family rented on a vacation in France. And when Elio says "I know nothing", I don't need to be transported to the past at all. I've been in a pretty bad place recently and I'm not sure if I was particularly sensitive or if this film would always have the impact it has had already. Regardless, I will consider it my favorite film at least until I watch it some more.