Will Smith's Favorite Games of 2021

2 years 2 months ago
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This is the year that I went from playing games and talking about games to actually making games. I’ve been helping Stray Bombay (the makers of The Anacrusis) with comms, which means I finally understand how the sausage is made. At least for our game. Of course, I also co-host Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod with someone you probably know, and have been streaming PUBG, Returnal, Inscryption, The Anacrusis, and the occasional LEGO build on Twitch. (By the way, The Anacrusis came out in early access on Steam, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, the Epic Games Store, and Xbox/PC Game Pass on January 13. You should check it out!)

That’s just a long-winded way of saying I’ve been pretty busy this year. So I don’t have my usual offensively long list of games to run down this year*. What I do have are the 11 games that made a real impact on me this year. I tried to rank them and gave up, because while I love them all for different reasons none of them really stood tall above the rest of the pack. Each of these games brought me joy at different times this year and helped add some much needed variety to what was frankly a pretty depressing year.

As always, I remain very grateful for good, good games.

Inscryption

If you haven’t played Inscryption yet, what are you even doing? Please play Inscryption. The game goes places. Maybe I should have italicized places too. It goes places. Hrmm. Maybe it goes places. Yeah, that’s better.

Inscription is simultaneously a game about the eternal struggle between good and evil, the weird pre-history of videogames, a meta-commentary about the dangerous state of the modern content creator economy, and a stoat.

(As an aside, I had never heard of a stoat before, so I looked them up on the Internet to find out if they were real animals, like elephants, or something made up, like manatees and unicorns. Apparently they’re real, but I remain unconvinced.)

The game opens and closes so strong that I am totally willing to forgive the intentionally obtuse and often frustrating middle act. I’m glad I powered through to the big finish, but for me, the real high point of the game are the first-person head-to-head card battling sequences. The character bits, the occasional horrifying extraction and the, ummm, payoff sequences between acts came together in one of the truly unique games of 2021.

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Eco

If anyone ever invites you to play in a big game of Eco, stop what you’re doing, take time off work or school, ship your kids off to camp, and jump in. Eco is an early civilization simulator, originally designed to teach school kids about economics and labor, turned into a game/social experiment. I was invited to play on a friend’s server with a bunch of other streamers this spring, and the time spent there turning clay into bricks literally made me appreciate the interconnected nature of modern civilization more.

My job, which I chose mostly because I accidentally set up shop above one of the richest clay mines on the planet, was to make pottery and bricks for the server’s denizens. But what started out as a pastoral, cooperative game quickly devolved into chaos, as cartels and factions formed, governments rose and fell, and alliances formed between titans of business; all while technology marched inexorably forward. While players can choose to create governments and currency and laws, at its core, the main currency in Eco is calories–food that players turn into goods and services.

Ultimately, we came together to save the planet from both an impending meteor strike and ecological catastrophe. But the things I’ll remember more than that are the feud I had with a bad neighbor who wanted to set up an oil refinery in my otherwise pristine backyard, the hours spent making friends while I was mining iron ore, or late game deals we all made to upgrade our infrastructure from simple wood carts and hand tools into gas-powered excavators and bobcats.

I’ve heard that there’s a new game with a lot of the same crew starting this winter, so I’m excited to dip back into that world again.

Metroid Dread

I love just about everything everything about Metroid Dread. That free-flowing movement, the fights that force you to adapt and learn new techniques before you can progress, the skips that reward you with new cutscenes or easier boss fights, and the over-the-top anime endgame. I even loved the hand cramps I got after spending four hours learning to beat the final boss. Hell, I even liked the damn EMMIs. Sure they’re unjust and unfair, but they actually delivered the dread promised by the game’s title. And after sneaking through their areas over and over again, nothing felt better than killing one of those annoying bastards.

I really hope that Dread sold well enough that I won’t have to wait another 10+ years for the next good Metroid.

Returnal

I love roguelikes and roguelites but have never really enjoyed bullethell shooters. Which is why I was surprised the first time I saw Housemarque’s Returnal and I was completely smitten. A first-person shooter with roguelite level assembly and weapon distribution? Delicious!

This is quite literally the game I sought out a PS5 for and I’m really disappointed that I’m shit at it. I’m just really bad at the precision and damage avoidance needed to succeed at this game. I’m much more of a barrel into the middle of a fight and mess things up and get messed up at the same time player, and that playstyle does not work for Returnal.

But I really don’t care. I’m trying really hard, and I’m not going to give up. I typically do a run or two to close out the end of most streams these days, and those runs bring me joy. Even when the second boss kicks my ass for the nth time. I’m just hopeful that I’ll get good enough to move to the next biome before I run out of steam.

Clank! Legacy

It’s a board game! Big surprise, I know. Clank! Legacy told a surprisingly affecting story (set in Penny-Arcade’s Acquisitions Inc universe) using a combination of deck building and Legacy board game mechanics. It’s the next best thing to having a really experienced, top-notch DM run a custom game for you.

If you aren’t familiar with Legacy board games, they are board games that change as you play them. In Clank! Legacy, you place and destroy everything from paths and quest rewards to towns and dungeons. At the end of the 10ish games we played in the Legacy campaign, we’d built a couple of worlds, played through a bunch of fantastic stories, built characters that we loved, fought bandits and demons and dragons and more, embroiled the world in mortal peril, saved the world from mortal peril, lived a shadow life, and got a promotion at the end.

All-in-all, it was a wonderful way to spend about a dozen Saturday nights with my partner. Now I just want more Clank! Legacy games.

Author
Matt Rorie

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