Nate Schmidt's 2021 Games of the Year: The Santa to Krampus Continuum

Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor

I thought that I spent most of this year playing older games for comfort, but when I look back at the list of games that I spent the most time on, hour-for-hour, I realize that this seems improbable. Breath of the Wild, which I still haven’t beaten, is definitely a warm blueberry muffin comfort-food of a game, notwithstanding the postapocalyptic ruins dotted with deranged killer robot spiders. That was about as comforting as it got. I spent a lot of time in Bloodborne’s pandemic-ravaged neo-Dickensian hellscape, and I got really into the Amnesia games because I’ve watched all the horror movies on Netflix and I still need something else to scare me spitless right before bed. Most of the time, I wasn’t so much assuaging my isolation-driven pandemic anxieties as I was looking for safe ways to work out and deal with ugly feelings.

The tension between the comfort that assuages and the fear that commiserates plays out in the 2021 games for which I did manage to find time. In the spirit of the holiday season, you might think of this as the difference between Saint Nick, who brings tidings of comfort and joy, and his counterpart the Krampus, the spirit of fear and vexation. Rather than arbitrarily trying to assign some scale determining which of these games was the best or the worst, I’m going to tell you where it falls on the Santa-to-Krampus spectrum, which unlike all the other phony baloney year-end lists you’ll see in December is 100% accurate and objective.

1. Mundaun (Hidden Fields)

Why did your grandpa’s barn burn down? And why is his body still mouldering away in the charred ruins? Somebody needs to bury that guy! I give Mundaun a full Krampus for refusing to let up on the creeping feeling that, whatever you’ve seen so far, the worst is lurking right around the corner. When you like to write and think about indie games, you start to get used to seeing a certain number of recognizable Unity assets from game to game—which is fine! There’s nothing wrong with a cool remix. But all the hype about Mundaun’s hand-penciled textures really is merited. It takes the well-known format of first-person indie horror games to a whole new level, thrusting the player into an expressionistic fantasy-world worthy of Brecht and Edvard Munch. Also, Mundaun plays with the trope of a long-delayed homecoming in a way that makes even the most familiar things, like your old childhood bedroom, feel sinister and uncanny. It’s a fantastic reminiscence on the demons of the past. And it made me terrified of haystacks.

2. Kid A Mnesia Exhibition (Arbitrarily Good Productions / Namethemachine)

Radiohead made a video game, and that was really all the information I needed, but the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition still exceeded my expectations. (I have to ask, though—does this technically make them Videohead now?) Released in celebration of the twenty-one-year anniversary of the Kid A album (and the twentieth anniversary of its follow-up, Amnesia), the game was almost going to be a physical exhibition, and while I still see no upsides to the ongoing pandemic, all of us who don’t have the time and funds to travel to England to look at Radiohead crap in a gallery really lucked out on the chance to experience this virtual exhibition space together. Rather than a reluctant rumination on what might have been had the band gotten to do the thing they originally wanted, Kid A Mnesia sets the bar for atmospheric horror about as high as it’s ever been. As a band, Radiohead are known for doing creeping dread better than almost anybody out there, and as a game, this exhibition plunged me into a captivating nightmare from which I wouldn’t have dared to look away. Kid A is also high on my list of my favorite albums ever, so if the music comes across as high-minded malarkey to you, this game probably won’t be the thing that changes your opinion. But if you need to spend some time with conceptual unease in a decaying techno-dystopian hellscape in place of the all-too-real unease that’s become part of waking up in the morning, this game was a fucking boon. It’s mostly a Krampus with a note of Santa’s peppermint magic, because a new dive into music that I thought I already knew intimately was a real gift. It did remind me a few times, though, that the computer I bought when we started this website is already “my old crappy laptop,” so I’d keep an eye on those hardware specs or borrow your rich cousin’s PS5 for a day if you choose to dive into it.

3. Dorfromantik (Toukana Interactive)

Over on the full Santa side of the spectrum, I offer you Dorfromantik. I played the board game Carcassonne for the first time only a year or two after it first came out in 2000, and its world of bucolic tile-laying delight is still one of my favorite go-to picks for game night. Dorfromantik keeps the pastoral atmosphere and the tile laying from games like Carcassonne, but takes away the competition, creating one of the most relaxing solitaire puzzle experiences you’ll come across this year. Historically, I have struggled to get into time-filler games like Candy Crush that burst across the screen in polychrome ecstasy like the unholy lovechild of Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons. Dorfromantik dials this back, combining the relatively low stakes of puzzle solving with just enough dynamism in the tiles to make you feel like the little world you’re building is alive. You increase your stack by laying a certain number of similar tiles together without disrupting the flow of the rest of the map, and the game is over when you run out, which means that “losing” is just an opportunity to step back and admire what you’ve built. Building these little landscapes gave me so much joy in a year when so few other things made sense. 

4. Book of Travels (Might and Delight)

So, this one is still in early access right now, which is fantastic news for me, because it means I will have even more time to think about it and write about it in the new year. For the moment, though, I have to give this one a full Santa, early access or no. A self-described “TMORPG” (Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG), Book of Travels puts the utterly delightful world of The Braided Shore at your fingertips, ready for hours of contemplative exploration. Build fires, sail on boats, uncover exciting and unpredictable secrets—it’s everything you’d look for a in a fantasy MMO, but with the peace and quiet of Earthsea rather than the militaristic bombast of Middle Earth. Book of Travels puts as much detail into making tea as other RPGs put into their entire combat systems, and that is a very good thing. The dev team has been so quickly and thoroughly responsive to player feedback, and each new patch makes the game even more of a joy to explore. While I eagerly await the full release, this game already took me the to places I needed to go this year, and I can’t wait to see what the next leg of the journey holds.