so since i basically never listen to new albums anymore and thus can't participate in the music year-end thread, i figured i might as well review some of the more memorable games i played this year (in no particular order).
Assassin's Creed Odyssey/Valhalla/Unity/Origins - yeah I played through all four of these in 2021, in that order. I actually started Odyssey around christmas 2020 after never having played a single AC game before. In hindsight, being a huge fan of sneaky assassin-type games like Deus Ex and Hitman, it's pretty surprising that it took me this long to get into the series. What did it was actually reading a review of Valhalla, and its description of how you could hang off the penis of a 100-foot statue of Zeus in Odyssey (and how there's relatively nothing quite like that in Valhalla) made me think "well i have to give that a try". Since then I've 100%ed all four games, except for the Origins DLC which I just purchased with a christmas gift card. Apparently I've spent about 600 hours combined on these four games, which should tell you how I feel about them, although at this point I'm definitely ready to put them aside for a while after I finish the DLC I just bought.
My rankings from favourite to least would probably go Odyssey - Unity - Origins - Valhalla. It'd be interesting to hear if anyone else has a ranking for these games.
Sable - this is one that I only recently playing but it is already really great. It's a story about a young girl from an isolated desert village on a strange planet, who is undergoing a coming-of-age ritual, where each young person from the village sets out on an adventure on their birthday to discover what they are going to do with their life. There are some puzzles and jumping around ruins and such, but no combat and no death. You're mostly zipping from place to place on your highly customizable speeder bike, solving puzzles and trying to discover your character's future. All the art is done in a very interesting modern-comic-book kind of style, and the excellent soundtrack was made by the band Japanese Breakfast (who i know is an interference fave). I have never tried Breath of the Wild but apparently Sable's gameplay is somewhat similar to that.
The Captain - this game just came out at the start of December so I'm still working on my first playthrough, but it is pretty easily my 2021 game of the year already. This is a really retro point-and-click adventure, with Monkey Island-style graphics (with modern touches added). You play a captain in earth's spacefleet who's ship gets flung out to the edge of the galaxy when a simple courier mission goes wrong. Your main mission is ostensibly to make it back to earth with your cargo, but you can actually completely ignore that task if you choose. There are dozens of planets to stop at, and all of them are gorgeously rendered with the 90s graphics style. Some of them are bustling city planets where you run quests for people, some of them are desolate uninhabited worlds where you have to solve puzzles, there's a galactic junkyard, I came across an abandoned genetics research lab hidden in a nebula once, etc.
The coolest thing about this game is that nearly every single character interaction, quest, and puzzle has multiple outcomes that affect other interactions down the line. For example, near the start of the game my ship was being boarded and I reacted too slowly to repel them, and the boarders stole an important piece of equipment from my ship. The game let me know that there were 3 possible outcomes to this boarding, and I received a "card" that shows I've played the "it was stolen" outcome. The next time I play a new game the cards will stay available, so I can play one of the other outcomes and get a different story. Next I got a mission to go retrieve the equipment on a certain space station, and that mission also had multiple branching outcomes depending on whether I was able to get my stuff back and on how I succeeded or failed. And there are these multiple branches for nearly every single important character you speak to, every planet you land on, almost any time you do anything. And to make it even wilder is that you can essentially play the entire game in any order, right from the beginning you aren't restricted in which planets you visit or what you can do, and the branching outcomes still all somehow work. It's really an amazing storytelling device that basically guarantees a totally different game every time I start a new one. I'll be playing this one a lot in 2022, and I massively recommend this game to anybody who likes adventure games, especially the 90s point-and-click style.
Papers Please - this one isn't from 2021, and I actually bought it a few years ago, but I finally got around to actually playing it this year. It is set in a fictional version of East Germany, and the government has just announced that the borders will be opened for the first time. You play as a new border guard who has to deal with checking papers and deciding whether to let people through. The restrictions and papers get more complex, so it gets harder as the game goes on since you have the same amount of time each day. It sounds simple but there are quite a few emotional moments as you go through the processing, as you might imagine there would be at the border of an impoverished dictatorship. I played it through in a couple of nights and it was well worth the time. I should have played this one when I first got it.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War - another one that I bought a couple years ago on a sale and never got around to playing until recently. This is a story about a part-German, part-French family that lives near the border between the two countries at the start of WWI. One brother is drafted into the German army and one into the French army and a lot of the fighting takes place near their family home. You play as several different characters of the family who are trying to survive in their own ways. This is a (mostly) side-scrolling puzzle game, where you have to figure out how to progress to the next screen. This is a story about the family's experience rather than a war game, with surprisingly little violence (though there is quite a lot of timing runs to dodge bullets and bombs, your character doesn't directly kill anybody) and surprisingly educational bonus content. It's pretty short as I finished it in around 10 hours but I don't think that it needed to be any longer. The story is fantastic - I can't think of any other game I've played in a long time that made me outright cry the way this game did at multiple points.
Procession to Calvary - this game is fucking hilarious, by far one of the funniest things I saw in all of 2021 and the funniest video game I've played in a while. The creator basically repurposes (for lack of a better word) and animates renaissance artwork to create completely ridiculous scenes, characters, and locations for this game. Think of some of the crazier weird animations from Monty Python & the Holy Grail and you're in the ballpark. The gist of the story is that you are a knight of a kingdom that has just won a very bloody holy war against a neighbouring kingdom. Peace has now come but you have developed a bit of a taste for murder during the war, and now the king says you have to stop killing people. Except there is one guy in the kingdom who you actually are allowed to murder, so you set off on a journey to do just that. This game is extremely short - there are 3 different endings, and I was able to play them all and unlock every Steam achievement in under 5 hours. But, it's only $10 bucks to buy it, so you should get it and play it, you are guaranteed to be laughing your ass off within 10 seconds of starting the game, and you can finish the entire thing in an evening.
Jurassic World 2: Evolutions - I bought this one based off reading a good review, and noticing that it was on sale. Basically it's a park-management game, with the gameplay obviously inspired heavily by the Tropico series. You build and run a Jurassic Park, managing guest needs and desires, and researching new dinosaurs to breed and release into your park. Confusingly, the entire "campaign" is just a brief tutorial that only explains about half of the game. You're left to figure out the rest on your own in a series of scenarios that are each based on one of the Jurassic Park/World films. There is a sandbox mode, but aside from the most basic fences, dinosaurs and buildings, everything is locked and can only be unlocked by beating the film scenarios. So you're essentially locked into finishing these long scenario modes with specific conditions before you can do anything interesting just in a sandbox mode. That was annoying. The dinosaurs are really cool though. There are dozens of species you can research and create and they all have different complex needs for the space they live in. It's really fun to watch a herd of velociraptors chasing down the goats that have been released into their pen, or seeing triceratops fight each other, or seeing some of the bird-like species flock together around a watering hole. You can build an on-rails park tour ride and actually do the tour as it rolls through the dinosaur habitats, which is a cool feature. And it can get pretty intense when a hurricane blows in and knocks out the electricity for your fences and rips holes in them - the dinosaurs can get out into the park and can eat guests if you don't have a robust emergency shelter system set up. This is absolutely hilarious when it happens (although you then have to pay daily lawyer fees for the remainder of the game).
But other aspects of the management are very annoying and tedious. For example there is no way to automate the refueling of your electricity generators, and they only power a small area so you need a lot of them when you have a decent-sized park. They only hold 10 minutes of fuel, so in the mid-game you're constantly getting "no power" notifications and searching for which generator you have to immediately refill, and you have to manually do this 4 click process to refill every generator you have, one by one, every few minutes. You can eventually build a power plant in the later game to eliminate having to do this, but then you have to cover your entire park in giant electrical towers and sub-stations with industrial-sized power cables that look ugly as fuck and take up a ton of space. It's also really hard to maintain guest happiness and income in this game because the instant anything happens (something minor like a generator runs out of gas at the back of your park but nothing actually loses power, or a dinosaur randomly catches a cold), every single guest in the park's happiness plummets instantly and suddenly they all stop spending money. This takes a while to get back to where you were, and then something else randomly happens that puts you right back into the negative. It's frustrating and repetitive.
Unfortunately these irritating aspects couldn't be overcome by how cool all the dinosaurs look and how much fun it was to watch them just live their lives and doing regular dinosaur stuff. So I've given up on this one now. I only ever saw the first 2 films in the series so maybe a bigger fan would have a better time with this game.
Humankind - this was supposed to be the "Civilization killer", the one that was going to finally challenge the leviathan king of 4X games. I was super excited to play this game based on the pre-release previews and descriptions of the new features it was going to bring to the genre. But it turned out to be a whole lot of hype and not a ton of substance. It's an okay game, but it's not in the same league as Civ. The best part of the game is the Neolithic era, where you play as a roaming tribe of nomads, gathering food and education and exploring the map. This means that unlike Civ where you want to plant your first city on turn 1 if possible, you can actually spend some time building up your food stores and earning new scout units, so that your first city can start with a growth burst or can start creating buildings right away rather than settlers and scouts.
Unfortunately that isn't really a viable strategy if you're playing on anything other than easy difficulty, because of the culture switching mechanic. As you progress through the ages, your civilization changes cultures. So you could be in the ancient age as the Egyptians who can build powerful industrial buildings, and in the classical age change to Greeks who have great universities, then in the medieval age maybe you're in a war so you switch to the English who have strong archer units, and so on. The problem with this is that the cultures are really unbalanced - in the ancient era, there are two in particular that get an enormous and permanent boost to food production, which jacks up the population of your cities to such an extent that if you don't pick one of these two cultures and your opponent does, it can be hard to catch up in later eras. So due to the brutal balancing, the best strategy is indeed to beeline your first city and pick one of those two cultures before anyone else can.
Stuff like this is just the tip of the iceberg. Some unique culture buildings bonuses stack, and some don't, so you could be building the same number of universities as your neighbour but they have literally 20x more science than you do because of the bonuses they get from their unique building. And because you and all your opponents are constantly switching cultures, they all have generic AI personas that are hard to distinguish. There's no variety whatsoever to any opponents, aside from what clothes they're wearing which tells you their current culture (oh look, she's wearing a kimono now instead of a feather headdress - i guess the Aztecs are Japanese now). The cities don't really change, so you could be the leader of the USA in the modern era and the city center of your capital is a bunch of mud huts surrounding an ancient Shinto temple. It's really incongruous and makes every single playthrough almost exactly the same, even though it was intended to have the opposite effect. There are mechanics that can be ignored completely (the religion and civics mechanics have almost literally zero impact on gameplay) and some that are so broken that you're better off just avoiding them completely (the war support system is so bad that it's never worth going to war).
A lot of these issues are things that can be fixed with balancing patches and reworks, so I won't write it off completely and say that this game sucks and is un-fixable, but in the state it was released, I would suggest avoiding it. If you're interested check it out later in the year to see if the issues have been fixed, and get it on sale.
Old World - this was actually the 4X game that really stole the show this year. The lead designer is the same guy who designed Civilization 5 and has since left Firaxis studios to found his own studio. So a lot of the aesthetic is carried over from Civ 5. But where Humankind falters in its vision being probably a bit too big, Old World shines because it is more restricted in scope. You play as one of the famous civilizations of the ancient near east (Babylon, Greece, Egypt, Assyria etc) from the founding of your first city for either 200 or 300 turns. Most of it is pretty standard 4X stuff, build and improve cities, build armies, go to war etc. But the best part of this game is the inheritance and character system. Instead of playing a faceless leader, you actually play as the ruler of your empire. So for example the first leader of Rome is Romulus, and he'll stay alive for a few dozen turns (each turn is one year), getting events and increasing his skills in generalship, administration, diplomacy and such through events. He'll have to get married and have a kid to be his heir, because when he dies you switch to playing as the new ruler. This mechanic borrows heavily from Crusader Kings but man oh man does it ever work great here.
The leader mechanic means that in addition to managing your territory and cities, you also have to manage various noble families who will have expectations (and demands) of you, and the rulers of other empires will also have personal opinions of you that affect what you can do in terms of diplomacy. One of my favourite moments in this game was a time when my emperor was hosting a delegation of foreign ambassadors for a feast, and they asked me if I thought their king was a good ruler or if I thought his son would eventually be a better king. I said I thought the current king was cool, because he was a long time friend of mine and I wanted to improve relations with him to open trade routes for his olives. I had no idea that the crown prince was plotting to have the king murdered though, and since he hated me for publicly praising his father the former king, as soon as he took the throne a couple turns later he declared war on me and razed a couple of my frontier cities. You don't get anything like that kind of diplomatic flavour in any 4X game that I know of, and it gives the game a much more human feel. My only real complaint about this game is that at all difficulty levels, the AI spams out military units like crazy, to the point where I haven't figured out yet how it's possible to keep an army large enough to actually defend my borders without my cities falling behind in other kinds of production. But that's it. If you like 4X games or strategy games and haven't played this one yet, it's a must-buy.
TL;DR - everybody needs to play Procession to Calvary asap.
and that just might be my longest interference post ever.