The 17 best games of 2021

2021 was a year of self-reckoning for video games. Sometimes, that simply meant revisiting classic franchises, with Ratchet & Clank reviving itself after nearly a decade of hibernation, and Resident Evil launching one of its most ambitiously weird installments in recent memory.More often, though, games in 2021 reflected on themselves more directly, sending players Groundhog Day-ing their way through an enormous array of virtual time loops. These could run from the apartment-constrained action of Twelve Minutes, to the comedic violence of Arkane Studios’ Deathloop, to the far-flung space action of Housemarque’s Returnal. Given the long lead times on games production, it’s hard, as ever, to pinpoint why so many of the year’s games found themselves trapped in these cycling prisons—or to account for the wide variety of the end results. The latter of which is what we’re set to do here, in The A.V. Club’s ranking of the best games of 2021. We’re breaking with tradition this year, offering up a ranked list, instead of our more traditional format. Partly, that change is intended to standardize Games with our colleagues over in Film, TV, Music, and Books; it’s also in the hopes of taking a somewhat stronger editorial stance on what gaming got right this year. (Don’t be afraid to tell us what you loved this year in the comments, though.) And now, without further adieu: The A.V. Club’s Best Games Of 2021.

Sable got a lot of initial attention because of its highly GIF-able visuals, as well as its relatively high profile (and excellent) soundtrack. The real brilliance of Shedworks’ story of a young girl traversing a somber desert landscape is quieter, though, and altogether harder to define. It’s not quite an open world game, because that comes with ideological baggage that Sable relentlessly and powerfully resists. Sable asks you to explore a wide open space, sure, but there are no outposts to clear, no places to conquer. Instead, there is a warm exploration of self, of how one could, and should, join a community, and what it means to build a life. If there is a future for video games, it is here, in the red earth, in a diversity of identities, in play that expands, rather than shuts down. [Grace Benfell]

In this era of action-roguelike fatigue, no title comes closer to matching the moreish charm of the genre’s classics than Curse Of The Dead Gods. The shared secret lies in a particular brand of sadism that the genre’s modern emissaries have forgotten: the delectable anguish of game-altering life-or-death decisions. Passtech borrows its branching structure from peerless card-builder Slay The Spire, turning the journey up its trap-filled temples into a series of delicious dilemmas, each path a set of potential dangers and rewards shrouded in uncertainty. This tactical layer is complemented by a brilliantly fluid combat system that comes with its own agonizing choices, most tantalizingly in the titular curses: avoid their pernicious side-effects, or weaponize them against your enemies? Balancing on the razor’s edge between ultimate power and ultimate fragility, the dream of triumph beckons momentarily, then, impaled on some spikes or mauled by a jaguar, you’re back at the entrance steps, looking to scale those thrilling heights once again. [Alexander Chatziioannou]

It’s inevitable that Splitgate will continue to get compared to Halo, because, well: . It has the same guns; it has many of the same modes; it even draws from a similar aesthetic well. It just… added portals. That is, though, a huge change. Zipping across entire arenas, or getting a headshot through a portal, makes Splitgate’s colorful and lumbering armor feel light and freeing. Setting aside the visual flavor (garish action figure kitsch) and the monetization, Splitgate is daring in a way modern Halo cannot be. It’s simply refreshing to play a contemporary shooter that feels both slick and novel. Its joys will remain, even as the discourse surrounding rages on. [Grace Benfell]

If the first chapter of Toby Fox’s follow-up to his indie smash hit toyed with the original’s “cheerful memes barely holding back the darkness” formula—routinely throwing players’ lack of choice in their faces as they explored a whimsical kingdom populated largely by sentient playing cards—then the second installment proved that all that darkness hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Like Fox’s other games, Deltarune: Chapter Two is a funny, mechanically interesting spin on the automatic assumptions of violence in video games. It’s also (potentially) one of the darkest games we’ve ever played, a bracing nastiness that hits harder for being buried beneath a candy-colored, online-infused exterior. [William Hughes]

These days, it feels like Marvel’s media output, and the way the company constantly telegraphs things so far in advance, means it can rarely surprise. proves that notion wrong: After a rocky E3 showing, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix’s take on the cosmic band of misfits turned out to be surprisingly awesome. Comparisons between it and the films are unavoidable, but the game’s Guardians end up winning by the end. With equal chances to shine and stumble, the found family trope works overtime as Star-Lord navigates the team through a story that fills itself with humor, but rarely risks undercutting itself with a joke. These games will always stand in the megalithic shadow of their cinematic counterparts, but Guardians the game manages to blaze its own silly, affecting, and cosmically weird path thanks to its five leads… and a space llama. [Justin Carter]

Insomniac Games has been one of Sony’s hardest workers for decades now, and Ratchet & Clank some of their most enduring works. After the underrated PS4 remake of its original game (in 2016), it seemed the series would be forever shelved in favor of . But shows that the sci-fi duo hasn’t lost a step after a prolonged absence. If it’s not the charming cast (featuring new winners in the form of our heroes’ dimensional counterparts, Rivet and Kit), it’s an array of excellent weapons and worlds brimming with life. For as much as Sony’s big budget output tries to echo blockbuster movies, Rift Apart succeeds without trying too hard—it lets its characters do the talking, the guns do the shooting, and is all the better for it. The series always knew it had the goods, and Rift Apart confirms that it still knows what to do with them. [Justin Carter]

, we noted a number of disappointments with the title—including its deliberately unlikable, asinine characters, and its determination to do all the hard work of solving its temporal mysteries for the player, rather than with them. The fact that we still couldn’t keep rival assassins Colt and Julianna off this list, then, speaks to just how incredibly good Arkane is at producing violent, beautiful sandboxes for players to sneak and kill their way across. Lifting liberally from its earlier series (including what is still, hands down, the most satisfying teleport in the business), Deathloop is all killing, all the time, with no pesky morality system getting in the way. The addition of a genuinely thrilling multiplayer mode, which posits that no enemy could ever be as deadly as another real person hunting you with your same powers, only cements Deathloop’s place as one of the best games of 2021—despite itself. [William Hughes]

could have easily rested on its laurels, building on the back-to-basics success of the previous Monster Hunter: World. Instead, Rise takes its subtitle seriously, adding a thrilling vertical exploration element to the series’ rock-solid lizard-pummeling combat, one that makes learning its lush jungles and frozen icescapes as important as the attack habits of a raging Rathalos. Meanwhile, additions to the series’ mounted combat rules only made the visceral thrills of climbing onto the back of a giant raging spider all the more compelling: There are few things in gaming as satisfying as zipping across one of Rise’s beautiful landscapes, hijacking some primordial beastie, and using it to beat another, equally majestic and monstrous creature’s head in so you could turn it into pants. [William Hughes]

isn’t interested in proving how smart it is. Rather than chase the self-serious aesthetics of straightlaced prestige dramas, it uses cartoon slapstick and kid-friendly psychedelia to tell its story of intergenerational trauma. Bursting with creativity and visually restless in the best sense possible, it’s also surprisingly sincere for a game about exploring the brains of psychic spies. Psychonauts 2 is good-hearted, intelligently written, and a consistently inventive trip that manages to engage with theoretically grim depictions of mental health crises (and, for good measure, the failures of ’60s counterculture) while somehow managing to crack legitimately funny jokes in the process. If video games want to figure out how to present stories that really get inside their characters’ heads, there are worst ways to go about it than by doing so as literally as Psychonauts 2. [Reid McCarter]

Metroid Dread is, sadly, not as good as Super Metroid—a genre-defining masterpiece that stands as one of the best video games ever made. But nearly two decades after the release of the last mainline entry in the Metroid series, isn’t any sequel better than no sequels at all? That’s the case Metroid Dread makes, and while it loses a bit of its spark in the transition from old 2D pixel art to regular 3D polygons and whatnot, the core bones of Metroid are still so strong (and so well-articulated by developer MercurySteam) that Dread feels fantastic even when it looks a little uninspired. Also: Dread has , with series protagonist Samus Aran’s silent “this guy again?” reaction to certain boss fights saying more about her character than any amount of actual spoken dialogue ever could. [Sam Barsanti]

Deeply human, and that belies the base simplicity of its central “strong emotions equal colors” metaphor, Deck Nine’s second take on the Life Is Strange franchise (after 2017’s Before The Storm) is easily one of the series’ best. As psychically gifted, socially stunted heroine Alex Chen, players explore the almost sickeningly nice town of Haven, Colorado, solving its ominous mysteries, and battling a sinister mining company along the way. But it’s in the personal touches—Alex’s relationship with her brother Gabe, her love of music, and especially her relationship with the pain of her past—that True Colors pushes past melodrama into something genuinely beautiful and moving. [William Hughes]

As perfect a dose of bite-sized 3D Mario action as Nintendo has ever produced, —lumped, somewhat unceremoniously, in with the company’s Switch re-release of the also excellent Super Mario 3D World—takes everything good about games like Mario Sunshine or Galaxy and distills them into their purest forms. Like all good Mario games, Fury relies on tapping into every single possibility of its hero’s basic moveset: Mario runs; Mario jumps; Mario turns into a cat. And he does it all in a (very small, but very beautiful) open world, filled with engaging, lovely challenges, and regularly plagued by the titular Koopa King’s titular tantrums. As a game, it’s pure candy from moment one. As a possible future direction for the franchise, it’s an optimistic, shining star. [William Hughes]

In a year absolutely buried in video games about time loops, Modern Storyteller’s is one of the most memorable. Built from the bones of a former Skyrim mod, the game tells the story of an ancient Roman city trapped by a horrifying curse: If one person breaks a single law, ever, everyone inside the city will die. Investigating the nature of the affliction—and, as a consequence, the nature of laws, morality, religion, and more—makes up the core of the game’s action, as you, a modern interloper in the city, desperately attempt to unravel its mysteries. If The Forgotten City was only about a clever timeloop, it would still be a better game on the topic than Deathloop (or, god help us, Annapurna Interactive’s ). But by daring to actually be about something, presenting numerous perspectives on the truth of the curse and the twisty ways people trying to circumnavigate it, it stands above almost all of the endlessly repeating pack. [William Hughes]

Name another non-Nintendo franchise that, eight installments in, keeps not just reinventing itself, but consistently delivering supremely enjoyable blockbuster fare in the process. is not the seismic shakeup of the Resident Evil template its immediate predecessor, , was. But it’s no less irreverent toward series tradition, and a lot more playful to boot, taking inspiration from every horror vein Capcom had hitherto left untapped, from classic Hollywood to Hammer Studios. That it manages to unify such disparate influences into a (mostly) coherent whole, held together by stunning art direction and the most riveting set pieces the series has seen in decades, is remarkable. That it has the audacity to take a mid-game break from such gripping action to deliver the scariest sequence in Resident Evil history in the form of a walking simulator (of all genres!) during the hallucinatory, breathless , is nothing short of mind-blowing. [Alexander Chatziioannou]

Best kill options of Hitman 3: Detective hijinx, à la Clue, in fog-shrouded Dartmoor. A winery grape crusher in sun-baked Mendoza. Parachute sabotage inside a towering skyscraper in Dubai.With higher stakes for Agent 47 than ever before, somehow manages to provoke the player to deeply empathize with the inner life and emotions of a near-wordless killer with a bodycount in the hundreds (if not thousands). While sending players cavorting through the most gorgeous and expansive physical surroundings the World Of Assassination trilogy (kicked off with ) has ever offered, Hitman 3 infuses intimate anxiety. Can 47 truly trust the only people who have ever shown him love? A thrilling final assassination mission on a moving train in the Carpathian Mountains stands out as a strategic design feat. Uncharacteristic of the lush, labyrinthine locales the franchise is known for, 47’s range of exploration is severely limited to a single narrow line of train cars. Yet the momentum and creativity maintains the manic adrenaline—and payoff—of a grand finale op. The game is an artistic triumph, and offers a dynamic, murder-y escape tour around the world. [Liz Arcury]

In video games, as in real life, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen next once a playing card with a stoat on it starts talking to you. Daniel Mullins’ complicates expectations of what, exactly, a digital card game can be right from the beginning, and continues to do so as it progresses from one format-breaking twist to the next. Though a few of the ways it demonstrates its own cleverness distract more than they compliment a generally eerie tone, Inscryption’s insistence on gleefully surprising its player at regular intervals works far more than it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt, either, that it’s the closest video games have come to replicating the thrills—and, at times, the camp—of M. Night Shyamalan at his goofily devious best. [Reid McCarter]

is a testament to the magic that can sometimes happen when small studio values get their hands on big publisher money. Returnal, the story of a haunted woman trapped and forced to die, over and over again, on a hostile alien planet, is many things: A deeply moving treatise on guilt and grief. A ridiculously engaging, blisteringly difficult action game. A prog rock poster of neon bullets and hypnotically glowing lasers. One of the finest platforms for the Blue Oyster Cult that video gaming has ever offered. And at the core of all of it is an astounding confidence from studio Housemarque, which has crafted a universe as melancholy and beautiful as it is compulsively playable. Not even a series of launch bugs (and a now-corrected bullheadedness about letting people quit their damn game mid-playthrough) could dim the sheer glory of the accomplishment here, a marriage of the best of indie roguelike design and immaculately refined visuals and play. Nearly a year on from its release, Returnal’s cruelest beats linger yet, endlessly cycling in the mind. Do you see the White Shadow? [William Hughes]