2021. It was 2020 again, but weirder. On my side, I’ve been stuck in my house, working from home, since March 2020, I’m fine with that. Just working, working out, watching an unhealthy amount of vtubers and playing an unhealthy amount of video games. I had cataracts all of 2020 and early 2021 so I could barely see for a while, I got those fixed this year so that’s nice. I don’t really have much else to say on the non-gaming side of things, no big health emergencies in the family this year so that’s good. Not much activity overall. That said there was SOMETHING new… this website. I talked about this in the first post I made here, but I had a different site before this (called The Save Points, which originally was a group project but became a solo project fairly quickly), but ran into some DNS issues and decided to abandon the site I had built for the last 13 years. Switched how I did a few things, but yeah, having fun with this new site now. Definitely want to improve things a bit, I want to post more than I do.

As far as gaming, 2021 was actually pretty solid. I don’t know how it happened, but I constantly had something to play. Every month had at least 2 great games (plus a bunch of smaller decent games) which is not something that happens in most years. I didn’t even play all the games I was interested in this year, it was too busy. I didn’t even play too many stinkers, pretty much just Outriders, Axiom Verge 2 and NEO TWEWY.

So I have my own way of doing things for the GotY. Instead of being lame and choosing one winner, or being even lamer and doing a bunch of weird meaningless categories that have a ton of shitty nominations (made by people who hate video games), I just choose, like, 7 winners. I do put one winner on top of everyone else for maximum subjectivity, but yeah, 7 winners, the 7 best games of the year, let’s fucking go.

Since this IS an end-of-year post about the top games of the year, I do want to take the time to look back on some things, so I’ll rant about the console manufacturers a bit and whatever else catches my fancy, then select the 7 GotY winners. I also list a bunch of honorable mentions because I’m just a nice guy like that.

Oh hey I conveniently linked to the relevant sections if you want to skip my inane rantings. You’re welcome.

• Rant (seriously skip this part if you just want to see the winners)
• Games of the Year Winners
• Games of the Year Super Winner
• Honorable mentions

I will note before this that there are in fact games I haven’t played. So if a game you liked isn’t on the list, know that it’s either that I didn’t play it, or it sucked balls. It’s okay, you’re allowed to like bad games. Also I didn’t get a PS5 this year (for reasons I might rant about), so the one good exclusive on it is also a game I didn’t play. I’m sure Ratchet is great (impressions are basically all positive), I just didn’t want to buy a PS5 just to play that one game. I didn’t play Village (though I did analyze the gameplay from watching Gura playing it, it needs some help). I hear great things about Inscryption, I didn’t buy it. And there’s other games I’m interested in I didn’t play like Cruisn’ Blast, Super Robot Wars 30, Eastward and probably some others. I also literally just got a few other 2021 games that I will review later, maybe they’re good too.

Without further ado, let’s do this thing. 2021 Games of the Year let’s fucking go!

What is it with the “New” in the title? Why not called it Pokemon Snap 2? Or Pokemon Snap Switch? It’s only gonna be new for a short amount of time.

That said, people have really been waiting for a new one of these for a long time. The N64 Pokemon Snap was really fun. A bit short, but a cool experiment with mixing rail shooter gameplay with puzzle gameplay, adding a really interesting scoring system too. But somehow it never happened, for 22 whole years. I figured back in the Wiii era that the Wiimote would be perfect for a new one, but nope. So I was pretty excited to finally see this one popping up.

Let’s see if it lives up to the original… or if it’s even better!

So March wasn’t quite as busy post-wise as I was expecting, but that’s largely because some of these games took me a while to go through. I’m in the process of writing 2 reviews right now, for Cathedral and Bravely Default 2.

And I have some other stuff planned. I’m getting started on Monster Hunter Rise which is my first full-on try at an MH game (so the review will be from the perspective of a newb), I have some other games that recently came out I want to get (Kaze and the Wild Masks, Ghost ‘n Goblins Resurrection, a Record of Lodoss War metroidvania (might have to watch the anime too, I missed that one back in the day)… maybe some other stuff), there’s some older games I started playing (such as BPM and Remnant and Creature in the Well), there’s new games I want coming out in April… and I want to make every console fanboy mad so I am planning a series of posts about last-gen. Specifically the main post will be about the great games that came out in the generation, and I’m hoping to do 3 side-posts about why all the consoles sucked (the PS4 one is particularly spicy because people think that’s a good console for some reason).

So ANYWAYS, I need to stop talking about the blog for a second and actually to get to the real meat and potatoes of the post. April is in a few days and I need to do the monthly list of games coming out.

We’ve got: *12* multiplats, 2 Switch games, 1 PS5 game (whoa!) and a PC game. There’s several in there that I’m getting, just in case my current game list wasn’t big enough already.

*EDIT 03/29: ADDED A MULTIPLAT THAT LOOKS REALLY COOL*

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, small interesting ones I may notice and such. And of course I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.