Don Everhart's 2021 Games of the Year: Wish You Were Here
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
Last year, I said that I planned to play more independently made and produced titles. I accomplished that in 2021, while somehow also playing more games than in 2020. To my surprise, a large amount of those turned out to be new releases. It turns out that this year was pretty good for videogames. It was so good, in fact, that I’m going to only discuss games that had a release (or re-release) this year. Consider it a list of games that I would recommend you play.
Don Everhart’s Games of 2021
1. Devotion
2. Moose Life
3. Mundaun
4. Metroid Dread
5. Hitman 3
6. Returnal
7. Resident Evil: Village
8. Unsighted
9. Monster Hunter Rise
10. JETT: The Far Shore
Hopefully, you will be able to pick some of these up in the future. There should be no rush. I want everyone to play these games, though I know that’s hardly possible because of videogame business practices and platforms. As much as I love games, when I look at that list of my 2021 favorites I can’t help but reflect on how difficult it can be to play them, at all.
Case in point: Devotion is a game that reached into my chest, wrapped several claws around my internal organs, and squeezed. It accomplished that by being saturated with Taiwanese cult religious iconography and a well-told story of familial desperation and disintegration. Everything from its worn and lived-in spaces to its passages of hallucinatory, dislocating terror comes together. Every horror fan should be able to experience it, but I know that it’s still not within reach for many.
I feel lucky to have played it myself. When Devotion was originally released in 2019, the People’s Republic of China censored and dissolved its initial, Shanghai-based, publisher. That resulted in a game so hot that platforms like Steam still won’t carry it. Luckily, Red Candle Games began self-publishing and distributing Devotion this year. Unfortunately, that’s still a relatively limited release, considering that many banks and credit companies won’t allow transactions to their website.
The only game that came close to providing such an absorbing, affecting experience was Moose Life. It’s a completely different game in just about every respect from Devotion, and can be found on a variety of platforms. Made by Jeff Minter and Giles Zorzin, it’s an ode from Llamasoft about Llamasoft. I don’t have much more to say about it than I did in my review of it for this site, but know that my love for its astounding capability to transport players inside of an 80s arcade cabinet remains undiminished.
But here’s the thing about Moose Life: it’s best in VR. And while this year, that aspect of the games medium became just a tad bit more accessible in the form of lower prices on headsets, it’s still not exactly widespread. That doesn’t seem to bother Minter and Zorzin – from the sound of it, Llamasoft is all-in on virtual reality. While I will eagerly follow them to their next explosion of color and voxels, I know that others aren’t going to be able to encounter the dream of Moose Life in that form. And while the game is playable “flat,” it loses a lot of its effervescent charm when simply played on a screen.
Then there are the “platform exclusives” on my list. For those who haven’t been poisoned by decades of discourse and console wars, owners of videogame platforms like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft often produce games from their subsidiary studios that are only playable on their devices and through their software platforms. They also contract with third parties to produce games that may only be sold in a similar way. I had a blast playing Monster Hunter Rise with friends this year, but in 2021 it could only be played on a Switch. Similarly, I consider Metroid Dread to be as good as any of the other Metroid games that I’ve played, which is to say that it’s a lot of fun. As a first-party Nintendo game, it’s also only available on Switch.
Returnal is in a similar position, situated as the best reason I can think of to play the very bad massively multiplayer game called “try and beat scalpers for the opportunity to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing a PS5”. Unlike the experience of securing a PS5, Returnal is a fantastic game with wonderfully responsive motion and fluid action. It’s a confident expression of Housemarque’s ideas, full of vast, brutal landscapes that are rendered in bold colors, suffused with deadly encounters with glowing, tentacled behemoths. And while Housemarque stumbled when it came to balancing all of its procedural components, all of that washes away while in the grip of its gameplay.
Want to know which games on my list are more widely available? Look to Mundaun, Hitman 3, Resident Evil: Village, Unsighted, and JETT. While a bunch of those also have had some form of deals struck with platform holders (JETT with Sony and Hitman 3 with Epic, at least on PC), they’re more widely available than the other games on my list. And they’re excellent games! JETT, while having difficult and occasionally obtuse gameplay, is ambitious when it comes to big themes and storytelling. Hitman 3 is the pinnacle of the series, with each level drawing inspiration from a different game, film, or genre. Resident Evil: Village is as close as Capcom has come to recapturing the original’s mixture of horror and camp, all wrapped up in satisfying gunplay and big characters. Unsighted is a thoughtful blend of contemporary game design and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, offering something new in how it ties the persistence of every character to its in-game clock.
Mundaun is available on just about every platform. In addition to being easy to find and play, it’s also the game that I would most recommend for everyone. It’s a unique game, from the way that Michel Ziegler mapped hand-penciled textures to its open Alpine landscape to its Romansh-language voice acting. All of those pieces of craft and culture contribute to one of the year’s best stories, a classic yarn about devilish bargains, buried secrets, and confronting the past. Mundaun takes a folkloric approach to horror, familiar in tone to those who have told ghost stories in the night or read works collected by the Brothers Grimm. I hope that you can give it a try in 2022. For the others that you might not be able to play, well, I wish you were here.
