I find myself in an odd spot this year.

On one hand, I don’t think 2021 was a particularly great year for video games. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that 2021 was probably the worst year for new video games since I’ve been making lists. On the other hand, 2021 was also the year I finally bought a gaming PC and I also got my hands on a PS5. It was a bad year for new games, but it was also one of the best years for games in general I’ve ever had.

So… yeah.

There are a few points to be made here. First of all, the toll the pandemic had on the games industry, be it a big budget game with a billion people working on it or a tiny indie game made by a single burnt out programmer, was probably incalculable. On top of that, AAA games didn’t have a lot to offer me this year. I’m not really a horror game guy, so I didn’t play the new Resident Evil. I wasn’t in the headspace for a challenging game for various reasons we’ll get into later, so no Metroid Dread. I didn’t play Far Cry 6 because fuck that. You could add a few more on top of that as well.

But even beyond the AAA problem, and honestly, the less time spent on that side of the industry the better, I look at the overall list of video games that came out in 2021 that I liked, and very few of them ignite passion in me. I love the games on this list, but I also can’t help but see it as kind of a bummer.

Now, I could make a big stink out of all this. But I don’t have the energy. The bottom line is that not every year can be great, especially not under these circumstances. Moreover, I don’t need to be catered to, especially not these days thanks to my massive backlog of games, my trusty PC, and all the older stuff I can finally revist.

So instead, I want to shout out two games I cut that I couldn’t quite justify having on the list. The first is ElecHead, a retro style puzzle platformer where every surface you touch gets electrified. It’s a masterclass in simple puzzles that make you feel like a genius when you solve them. The second is Ynglet, a physics based platformer where you jump between bubbles, gravity kicking in when you’re flying between them. It has a dynamic soundtrack that changes depending on what you’re doing, it looks gorgeous, it plays like a dream, and you can play it in one sitting.

Get both. Then read this list.

HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Runner-Up: Inscryption

I know I already did a spoiler warning, but I’m going to go relatively deep on this one, so I must restate: SPOILERS!!! And by “relatively deep,” I mean I’m going to fuck this video game.

Now, I was not as gaga over Inscryption as a lot of people seem to be.

Many have praised its subversive elements, as well as how it plays with your expectations. Many people seem to think these elements are genius. I thought they were simply clever. It’s not that these elements, and you know which ones I’m talking about if you’ve reached the further parts of the game, weren’t effective. It’s just that I played Frog Fractions back in 2012, and this kind of rug-pulling isn’t as novel to me as it is for many people.

That is, of course, a bit of a reductive point. And while we’re here, let’s give some praise. Though the first version of the game is ultimately my favorite, I liked how each iteration of the game changes just enough to feel substantially different, I like the execution of the various aesthetics, and Kevin Saxby’s performance as the punchable in-universe Youtuber is fantastic. However, these are tricks I’ve seen before, including in Daniel Mullins’s own games, and even if I’m talking out of my ass as far as the specific twists this game has to offer, I’m more than familiar with the sensibility of how it’s tricking you. I knew this was a Daniel Mullins game, so without being specific, none of the twists were a surprise for me.

That said, every year, there’s a game that grabs a hold of me purely on its mechanics and gameplay. A game that may not have spoken to me in any other department, but is so fun to play that it almost doesn’t matter. Inscryption was very very very much that game for me in 2021.

I would play Inscryption for hours and hours. Specifically, I have twenty five hours logged into it (which, for me, is a lot). I have as many hours as I do because I loved playing it, but even more so, because I’m terrible at it. Of those twenty five hours, about fifteen of them were spent in the first iteration of the game. Normally, I’d get frustrated and tap out, but I knew that every failure was, more or less, my fault. Or at the very least, I never felt that the game was being unfair, save for an enhanced battle or two. So I kept hacking away and I never got sick of it. It’s just so fun to play.

I eventually got through with a death card I named Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He did 3 damage, had 3 health, and as its sigil was taken from the Mantis God card, it attacked all three spaces in front of it. By the time I got to the final match, its health had been upgraded to a 6 and its attack to a 4. He was, indeed, the one-man army Ason.

I didn’t expect to like Inscryption. It’s a roguelike (at least in parts), a genre I’m increasingly sick of, and a deck builder, a genre I don’t give a shit about at all. (I am also a Grumpy McGrumpypants.) But I had a lot of fun with this game, and though it didn’t have the effect on me that it had on a lot of people, I’m genuinely happy that it’s the phenomenon it is. It deserves to be.

10. Toem

For obvious reasons, I needed cozy games in 2021. We all did really. I started writing this article on the 26th of December 2021, and I finished Toem on the 21st. So in this case, Toem specifically stopped me from obsessing about Omicron for a day, and this is just the end of 2021. Needless to say, this isn’t the last cozy game represented on this list.

Preamble out of the way, I wish I had a less obvious point of entry when it comes to talking about this game. But I don’t, so I’ll make the comparison I’ve seen many people make at this point, which is comparing it to A Short Hike.

I liked A Short Hike an awful lot, but I didn’t entirely love it and I was never really sure why until I played Toem.

In A Short Hike, you’re walking up to the top of a mountain, and you’re not sure why. On the way you meet various people and do chores for them or play with them or do various things in between, and after a while, you finally reach the top and it turns out your goal was to get reception to make a phone call. All of this takes place on one island, and the only thing that changes between the areas you’re going to is the temperature as you reach higher and higher points on the mountain.

In Toem, you’re told immediately where you’re going. In this case, you’re leaving home to go experience a natural event called the Toem. You’re not told what the Toem is, but given the color palette of this game, I had a guess. In Toem, everything you do is in service of helping the people around you. It’s a rather obvious device, but damn if it isn’t effective, as everyone is grateful and it made me feel good. Rather than being in one open world environment, the game is sectioned off into levels. As such, Toem can be much more diverse in its environments. You get the woods, like in A Short Hike, but you also get a beach town and city and a mountain town and so much more.

A Short Hike is a hangout. You can see the end if you want to, but you’re more than welcome to just chill out and goof around. You can interact with the people you find, or you can go straight to the top of the mountain. Toem, on the other hand, is a linear experience. Everything you do pushes you forward, yet it doesn’t lose the relaxing elements that make A Short Hike feel like A Short Hike. Toem finds the balance between hanging out and actually having a goal to work towards.

It also doesn’t hurt that taking pictures is a lot of fun, it’s funny, it’s gloriously Scandinavian, and it’s endlessly charming.

I played Toem in one sitting, and I played it in a bit of a daze, as not only is the Omicron stuff happening but I’m also horrifically jet lagged. On top of that, it’s not designed to be a substantial experience. It’s an easy-going game that’s supposed to mellow you out. But even if I do forget it, that just means I get to play it again someday with fresh eyes. So in a weird way, I hope I do.

9. Sable

I became obsessed with Sable the moment I saw the E3 trailer in 2018.

I can’t tell what hit me harder, the visuals or the music or the general tone of wonder the marriage of the two brought for me. I also, for the most part, take pride in not being susceptible to this kind of hype. That said, this trailer came out about halfway through 2018, so while it didn’t spark my decision to finally buy a PC, it may have accelerated that sparking.

Or maybe it didn’t, because at some point, I stopped thinking about the Sable trailer. (And I stopped being bummed out that there wasn’t a commercial release of the song in said trailer.) Then, one day, it was here, and I thanked god I had my PC and a Game Pass subscription.

Now, look, I’m not going to pretend that the state of the game on its release wasn’t a huge bummer. It was. In fact, it’s probably the reason it’s not higher on this list. I’m also not going to pretend that this game is perfect even if it wasn’t broken and buggy on release. Some of its mechanics are frustrating, some of the missions are repetitive, some of the hoops it makes you jump through to get upgrades are a pain in the ass, and while we’ll be talking about the visuals in a more positive light in a matter of sentences, it was very frustrating to be in an interior location at night because I was barely able to make out my form against the background. (Particularly in the temple where you begin the game and return to a few times.)

All that said, when this game is firing on all cylinders, it’s exactly what I wanted it to be.

First of all, there’s the aesthetic of this game. This would normally be where I’d throw some screenshots at you and tell you to look at it for yourself. However, trying to narrow it down to just three or four is a recreational impossibility. So here’s a link for a Google Image search for “sable screenshots.” Go nuts.

The landscapes. The architecture. Whatever third noun you can think of. Everything about the look of this game is stunning.

But on top of that, I wanted wonder, and I found it. It was a more melancholic wonder than many gamers probably wanted, but it was one that resonated with me pretty deeply. That feeling of being out there in an impossibly huge world, all on your own, meeting people and trying to help out when you can. Then moving on.

Sable was not the game I dreamed it could be when I saw that teaser. But it’s close enough, so I’ll take it. Also, soundtrack of the year by a pretty substantial margin.

8. Chicory: A Colorful Tale

After I bought my PC, there was a fun period of time where I was buying all the accessories that go along with it. Heating pads. Lap desks. A PS5 controller, then the new Xbox controller when I found out that the PS5 controller wasn’t compatible with a lot of what I wanted to play. (The new DuelSense is as marvelous as everyone says it is, but I gotta say, I love that new Xbox controller just as much. No real reason why, it just feels so good in my hands.) This also included a new mouse.

As I’ve had Macs since the end of my senior year of high school, I hadn’t used a proper mouse in what felt like forever, and I didn’t really know what I was looking for in a mouse anymore. Naturally, my first impulse was to go with something with a trillion buttons and as many LED lights as possible. One thing I’ve fallen in love with since buying a PC is over-the-top gamer LED bullshit, and I thought it would be funny. Then I realized it would only be funny for a week at most, and then it would become incredibly embarrassing. So I ended up going with something simple: The Logitech M720 Triathlon Multi Device Wireless Mouse.

It does everything a mouse does, and it feels great in my hand. But the relevant detail here is the mouse wheel. (Or whatever the technical name for it is. We’ll just call it the wheel from now on.) When you spin the wheel, it turns like normal, the mechanism inside interacting with the grooves in the wheel stopping it from spinning out of control. On this mouse, however, you can click a button and turn that mechanism off, allowing you to spin the wheel incredibly fast.

Spinning the wheel is one of the ways you can change the color of your brush in Chicory, a game that allows you to paint every environment you enter however you see fit. Thanks to how fast I could spin my wheel, I could change colors unbelievably fast.

The point of all this: I fucked that map up. And I mean fucked that map up.

Chicory is a game about the ties between mental health and the creation of art. Our relationship to fame, and the fine line between lauding artists and treating them like they’re above humanity. (The characters in Chicory are anthropomorphic animals, so “humanity” may be the wrong word, technically. But you get my point.) It covers territory that’s beginning to feel a little trite in the indie space, but it’s affective, it’s funny, it’s charming, and the gameplay does a great job of honing the power of that story.

Yet, when I think about this game, I think about going nuts on the world with my trusty paintbrush. I filled spaces with big broad strokes that were constantly changing colors, or I’d get bored and make my movements smaller. Part of me felt like I was making a mockery of the game. Part of me felt like I was doing exactly what it intended. Either way, I felt like I was doing what I wanted. Many games, particularly open world games, try to make it seem like you have true freedom. Some do and some don’t, but either way, after a while, you become aware of the parameters being set and the forces locking you in. Even in Chicory, I was aware that I was being limited to certain colors and brush styles.

Yet I would enter a new place, a new town or somewhere in nature, and within seconds, I covered every inch in color vomit. If I was trying to do something more refined, maybe I would’ve felt locked in. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. Instead, I was free to make chaos, and that feeling, to me, is Chicory’s greatest accomplishment.

7. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Once again, we’re talking about Outer Wilds, and once again, I’ve run into the brick wall where you can’t really talk about it without ruining what it has to offer. That didn’t stop me from talking about Inscryption, but what ya’ gonna do.

So I’ll just say this: The lore Echoes of the Eye adds to the narrative is outstanding, the new area is really goddamn cool, and it successfully scared the shit out of me. (I don’t think revealing that this game has horror elements is a big spoiler, as I knew that going in and the promotion around the game was pretty upfront about it.) I will say that I think the way the horror is executed runs contrary to what was special about the base game. Namely, Outer Wilds is a game about exploration, and that impulse may lead you down some bad roads when things get tense in Echoes of the Eye.

But that doesn’t technically remain true throughout the whole experience. (There’s a particularly good “gotcha” moment that I had to give it up for.) At its best, it’s the Outer Wilds you know and love, plus some tricks that play with what’s come before that make the world feel bigger. Plus, it’s more Outer Wilds. You gotta love it.

6. Hitman III

Hitman III is the game that came out in 2021, but really, you could put the whole trilogy here.

Back in 2017, I finally bothered to play the 2016 Hitman, having spent a great deal of time that year watching others play it on various gaming websites and streaming platforms. I finally tried it myself, and because of the episodic nature of the level releases, I felt that the best way to play it was to force myself to see every possible thing there is to see before allowing myself to move on to the next map. I had to perform every kill, I had to play out every encounter, I had to see every corner of the map, I had to do everything.

This was, as you could probably tell, a stupid way to play that game, and it caused me to burn out halfway through Marrakesh. It’s also the reason I didn’t play Hitman II, and I only got around to it in the lead-up to playing Hitman III.

I always thought these new games were fun, but that fun was being lost in the way I was choosing to structure how I played it. So when I booted up Hitman II for the first time, I decided on a new strategy. I was only going to give myself two or three runs per level, then I was going to move on. I’d do the opportunities that looked the funniest, I’d pursue two or three of them, then it’s on to the next level.

This is how I finally got it. How I fell head over heels in love with these Hitman games.

Of course, some levels are better than others. Some are so good that I broke my “three passes” rule to play it six or more times. (Mumbai, Mendoza, Argentina, and Dartmoor stand out to me personally, among others.) But unburdening myself from the need to see everything allowed me to relax, and to actually appreciate the levels instead of growing increasingly resentful at them for reasons that were entirely my fault.

Now, much discussion has been had over Hitman III’s decision to lean into its narrative elements. It’s an interesting choice, as this requires you to have a deep investment in the stories of the first two games, which I did not. I can’t say it was the best decision they’ve made, as it leads to many ill-defined proper nouns being thrown around, a character arc or two that doesn’t quite work, and some of the weakest levels. (Mainly the concluding train mission and, in my opinion, Berlin.) The lesson to be learned is that narrative is something you have to build towards, and choosing to suddenly have it as your centerpiece, despite what came before it, may lead to ineffective results.

I may not have liked the story this trilogy has to offer, but I’m very happy IO made the game they wanted to make. After the shake-up that happened with Square Enix, the writing on the wall must’ve been ominous. But damnit if they didn’t pull through. I love what this company has done with their independence, and I’ll happily play whatever it is they make next. As long as they’re not fucking about with lootboxes or any of that stuff.

5. Deathloop

Deathloop has proven to be the real wild card on my list this year. The highest it’s been on this list is in the number three slot. The lowest it’s been is number eight. It has also occupied every slot between the two as well.

There’s plenty that could arguably keep it off the top half of the list. For starters, there’s the narrative aspects. Clearly, a lot of creative energy was spent on the characters. Their backstories and how to properly show their influence visually out in the world, particularly when it comes to the Visionaries. Alexis’s gaudy wolf party and Charles’s sci-fi game rooms contrasted with dreary emptiness of Egor’s research section or Harriet’s industrial warehouse cult. Not only that, but their dialogue patterns and their dress and how badly you want to choke out Alexis and so many other aspects. But the actual beats of the plot fall apart in the end, and the ending of the game, to me at least, felt incredibly abrupt.

On top of that, there’s a certain lack of progression in the gameplay. Or rather, a certain violent acceleration of it. I have about twenty-one hours logged into Deathloop, and I would say I became an overpowered deity of a man within those first three. This isn’t to say I was infallible or that I wouldn’t die. In fact, every time I entered Alexis’s party, it would end in a total shit show for me and everyone around me. However, by that third hour, I could teleport, I could link multiple people, and I had a silenced SMG. I had everything I needed to conquer the game.

That that said, for every argument I could make to keep it off the top half, I had just as many reasons to keep it off the bottom as well. Mainly, to borrow a term from my beloved Giant Bomb, the styyyyyyyyyyyyyyyle. You take that drugged-out ‘60s retro-futurist mod style that drips from every corner, combine it with the slinky psychedelia of the soundtrack, and you get a video game world I would happily spend dozens upon dozens of hours.

Moreover, even though I was overpowered quickly, it was still fun as hell. I remember a lot of complaints about how stupid the AI bodyguards are, but I actually loved that everyone on this island was a hungover partying idiot who had no business holding a gun in the first place. I loved sneaking up on them, kicking them off cliffs or putting a bullet in their head from too far away with my SMG. I loved finding out when and where to kill the Visionaries, and even though they were occasionally annoying, I loved Julianna’s visits as well.

Moreover, all the praise in the world should go to Jason E. Kelley and Ozioma Akagha for their performances as Colt and Julianna respectively. (And really, everyone else as well. Also, shout out to Michael Croner, who played Josh on my beloved Review and currently plays JP on my beloved Craig of the Creek. Did not recognize him at all as Alexis.)

I love this game, but not as much as I wanted to. I think it’s a disappointment, but it’s not an egregious one. Really, it’s games like this that expose the pointlessness of list-making. So as of now, in the middle for the middle’s sake seems about right.

4. Death’s Door

A question that pops up a lot in my head when it comes to evaluating art, let alone video games: How much should innovation matter? How much should we value a game doing something we’ve never seen before? You invent the Nemesis System for your reskinned Assassin’s Creed LOTR IP game, and it was indeed a game changer. But at the end of the day, it’s a new system in a very iterative game. (And you patented the Nemesis System, so it really wasn’t a game changer at all.) How much does invention elevate something that’s just alright?

The obvious answer is that it depends whoever you’re talking to, and you’ll get a different response depending on who you ask and when you ask them. For me, it depends on what that innovative mechanic or story device is, and in what kind of game it’s being placed. I have no answers here.

I mention all this because Death’s Door doesn’t have much to offer in the way of inventiveness. It has a unique story, one that revolves around the bureaucracy of death and the ways people try to cheat it, and it’s also quite funny and charming. But at the end of the day, it’s very much a game we’ve played before. The navigation of a Zelda game. The isometric view of a Supergiant game, as well as the combat of one. (Actually, the combat reminded me a lot of Hyper Light Drifter.) Some ideas from Souls games. Some aesthetic inspiration from Ghibli movies. You get it.

But what about pure craft? What about something made so well that it’s special for its own sake, even if it doesn’t have anything new to offer? I ask because honestly, the only complaint that I have about Death’s Door is that it would’ve been nice to have a map. That’s it. Also, the final fight is a bit much, but that may be my own lack of skill talking.

Other than that, I think it plays beautifully, I think it looks gorgeous, I think it has a great soundtrack, I think it has an engaging and affective story, I think it’s able to find a balance between being difficult and being punishing or cruel, and I’m into just about everything this game does. And I like that it’s got a guy with a pot for a head named Pothead.

As a result, I don’t really have much to say about it, so I’ll conclude with a dumb point of comparison. You’re looking to purchase a thing that you don’t know much about. You spend a lot of time researching which version of said thing you want. You go on Wirecutter and CNET and you read user reviews and you find write-ups on niche websites and so on and so forth. Eventually, you settle on which thing you’re getting, and you fork over the money. It arrives, and you love it. It doesn’t change the world, but it’s made well and it works, and you feel content.

That’s the feeling Death’s Door has to offer. Something clearly made with skill and love that serves its purpose well.

3. Unpacking

I have moved a grand total of three times in my life. Four if you count moving from one apartment to another in the same complex, but I don’t because both of those apartments were furnished.

The first time was when I moved from the east coast to the west. My dad and I loaded up all my stuff and we drove across the country. Everything else was provided by my aunt’s boyfriend, who used to live in LA and had a storage unit filled with shit that he said I could just have for free. This included couches and tables and really, all the furniture I needed. Some of it was my style and some of it wasn’t. (Fucking love those tables.) But I took all of it regardless. I ended up living in that apartment for two years.

The second time was moving from the first LA apartment to the second one. The second place was about three and a half miles down the road, but it was a significantly smaller apartment. I was going from a one bedroom to a studio, and I had to get rid of most of the furniture that was given to me. But I kept most of the smaller things, and now I was in a position where I had to buy some of my own furniture and find out what my tastes in such things. My tastes in such things, as it turns out, is “Whatever’s at IKEA that’s cheap and not ugly.” However, I also learned that I am insanely picky, as I went to a Living Spaces with a friend and rejected everything there. Make of that what you will.

This was also the apartment where I decided that I give a shit about what I used to cook, and really, cooking in general. As a result, all the cooking stuff I had previously bought at Kmart (there was a Kmart in walking distance of the first place) and Target weren’t up to snuff anymore. So all that stuff got replaced. I also acquired a bookshelf, a couch, and so much more.

Now I live in my third place that I share with my roommate. We have very different tastes in things, but I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as opposing. My roommate simply bothered with more actual decoration than I ever did, as my idea of aesthetic mostly means displaying the physical media I own. Books and blu-rays and CDs and stuff like that. She’s also into plants and refrigerator magnets and stuff like that. As a result, were you to enter our place, it would mostly scream my roommate. But you can still see my presence. My bookshelf is in the corner of our living room. What was once my TV stand is now a bar in the back corner. Plenty of my cooking shit can be found in the kitchen. I am very much there.

All of this to say that I was positioned to really get what Unpacking, a game about, well… unpacking, was going for. Really, so is just about everyone else who’s graduated college or left home or even moved into a dorm.

I do wonder whether or not some of the beats resonate with someone who hasn’t taken any of these steps. I don’t mean that in a judgy way. Given the one-two punch of the 2008 financial crisis and COVID, my generation will probably have to work for the rest of their lives and one could argue that leaving home is an actively bad idea. What I mean is whether they can be as quick to identify certain elements that stand out to me as outright text. There is, for example, a level where you’re moving in with a man. Based on the stuff I knew I was going to unpack and based on the stuff he owned, I could tell that this relationship was doomed pretty much immediately. Every object I took out of a box and tried to make fit only solidified that feeling.

I think the game is trying to telegraph this to you, and I think it does so pretty clearly. However, would a high schooler pick up what the game is putting down? I don’t know. But the fact that this game was made knowing that this nuance may exist only makes it more impressive and real. It’s an entire game built around specific-yet-worldwide experiences. Yet somehow, it’s also cozy and comforting. What that says about me, and us really as I’m far from the only one who found this game relaxing despite the fact that just saying the word “moving” gives me Vietnam flashbacks, I’ll probably never know. But of all the games on this list, this is probably the one I’ll go back to the soonest. I don’t know what that says either.

**2. Last Call (CW: Domestic Violence)**

Last Call is a game by Nina Freeman about her experiences with domestic violence.

You enter the living space in which she and her partner used to live. The space is dark and cramped, the light exaggerated just enough to feel like a nightmare, but not so much that it doesn’t feel like a believable space. You’ve come here to pack up all your things and move them out. As you go through each box, you see not only real things that Nina owned (or I’m presuming they’re real, as I’ve played other autobiographical games she’s made before) and you find letters. The letters each contain a stanza of a poem that tells you in heart-wrenching detail everything she went through with this person.

Before you move on from each letter, you close your in-game eyes and you have to say a phrase out loud into your microphone. For the first half, you can choose between such phrases as “I’m listening” or “I follow” or “I relate,” and later, as things take a turn for the worst, they become more specific. “I understand.” “I see you.” “I believe you.”

A human being is directly describing their experiences being abused and traumatized, so of course, it was going to resonate no matter what. However, Last Call made me realize something important about myself. Every time I hear someone coming forward with a story about domestic violence or sexual assault or anything in between, my instinct is to believe them. But I’ve never actually had to say “I believe you” out loud. Nobody has ever told me something like that directly to my face, and I’ve never been called upon to react appropriately or to simply be there and listen.

At one point while playing, I remember thinking to myself how extraordinarily lucky I was that nobody in my life has gone through events like the ones described in this game. But the vast majority of my friends are women. So in the next moment, I asked myself if I can really say that. What if there was a sign I failed to see? What if there was a signal being sent my way that I didn’t know how to recognize? What if I was needed?

As Last Call is a game about domestic violence, it will assuredly resonate with at least some people who have gone through similar experiences. But I can’t help but feel like Last Call was designed for people like me. Someone who will probably never experience what Nina Freeman went through, and someone who needs to understand to the extent that he can. It’s a game that asks you not just to simply believe women, but to actually acknowledge them as well.

This game broke my heart, but I’m glad it exists, and I thank Nina for making it, even if I wish with all my heart that she didn’t have to.

1. Emily is Away <3

I already wrote at great length about the Emily is Away games here. I just want to add a quick little epilogue to that article.

In that post, I mentioned inviting a female friend of mine to my college campus, a person whose friendship meant a lot to me, and still very much does. After freshman year of college, that person moved out of NY and I lost contact.

After writing the article, I reached out to her. I probably should’ve done this before writing said article, but… I don’t really have a joke here, yes, I should’ve reached out before writing anything. She got back to me, and since, we’ve reunited and we’re now on texting basis again.

Thanks in large part to this game, a person I care about deeply is back in my life. Can’t really beat that, can I. And I asked for her permission to talk about her this time. Because I finally can.

Honorable Mentions

Before Your Eyes
Bowser’s Fury
ElecHead
The Forgotten City
Imposter Factory
Life is Strange: True Colors
Loop Hero
Overboard!
Psychonauts 2
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Ynglet

Didn’t Finish

It Takes Two
Wildermyth (Not so much that I didn’t finish it so much as I didn’t spend enough time with it.)

Will Play Someday

The Artful Escape
Cruelty Squad
Genesis Noir
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
Metroid Dread
Returnal
Solar Ash
I’m sure there’s more.