The Best Video Games of 2021 … So Far

That many are still unable to get their hands on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X attests to the fact that the ninth generation of consoles is very much in full swing. And the improvements in technology that are accelerating—better framerates, graphics, and effects—have well served gaming experiences that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago. That’s evident in everything from Hitman 3 surpassing its predecessors in nailing the feeling of the living sandbox to Returnal using the haptic DualSense controller to make you feel as if you’re actually holding alien weapons. It’s even in the way that Before Your Eyes eerily uses a webcam to track your eyes and tell its story about a soul’s journey into the afterlife.

But when it comes to gaming, technology only ever tells half the story. Indeed, most of our favorite games this year aren’t beholden to 4K graphics or fancy ray-tracing abilities. A few smooth, ambitious co-op titles were content to emphasize the power of communication, which came to feel like a vital balm in the midst of an isolating pandemic. Other titles also caught our eye with their unique artistry, namely for the way they fully merged their narratives with their aesthetics, from Loop Hero’s grimdark pixels portraying a world’s struggle against nihilism, to Mundaun’s loving hand-drawn art bringing life in and around a remote, backward village to vivid life. As technology makes it easier for us to go anywhere, the journey itself, and the stories we choose to focus on along the way, become more important than ever. Aaron Riccio

Adios (Mischief)

In one of the earliest conversations in Adios, a slice-of-life game made up of 17 short, lightly elegiac scenes, a hitman (D. C. Douglas) and a pig farmer (Rick Zieff) philosophize about whether or not pigs know that they’re going to be killed. The game doesn’t answer this question. It does, though, invite you to draw your own conclusions about how such ponderings affect the farmer. Over the course of the day you spend with him, it becomes clear that his choice to quit the mob’s corpse-disposal business will lead to the deadliest of severances. And in a nod to this inescapable fate, the game largely restricts your options. With no control over your final destination, you find yourself fixating on the smallest of details. At one point, the hitman asks the pig farmer why he keeps a horse on the farm, and the farmer tells him that it’s because he couldn’t imagine a farm without a horse. The biggest compliment one can pay Adios is to say that after an hour in the farmer’s shoes, this statement—which isn’t about a lack of imagination—makes perfect sense. Aaron Riccio

Before Your Eyes (GoodbyeWorld Games)

FOMO has never been more palpable in a video game than it is in Before Your Eyes, which uses your webcam to literalize the notion “blink and you’ll miss it.” Players step into the disembodied shoes of one Benjamin Brynn, a lost soul who’s been fished out of a vast, limbo-like ocean. Your guide and savior is a boatman, a wolf, who offers to speak on Benny’s behalf before the afterlife’s judge, and what follows is a series of memorable slice-of-life vignettes from Benny’s birth to death. This is a quiet, contemplative game, but behind even the most mundane moment is the powerful uncertainty of what may come next. Is the phone call from Benjamin’s mother a routine one, or is it the last time you will hear her voice? There comes a point where you may start to dread the act of blinking, and while there are a few narrative choices that feel irrelevant throughout, that’s only because the past is always beside the point here. There’s only the present, and so when Before Your Eyes reveals its final trick—convincing you to close your eyes—it will leave you shook. Riccio

Chicory: A Colorful Tale (Greg Lobanov)

Every design choice made by the developers of Chicory is earned. Though it follows a familiar Zelda-like template—travel an overworld, gain new puzzle-solving powers to progress, defeat a growing darkness—there isn’t a single mechanic that isn’t speaking to the game’s emotional, earnest exploration of the pressures of being an artist. You don’t slay monsters with your paintbrush here, but rather help to bring color back into the lives of those beset by a colorless, crippling ennui. And you won’t have to take sidequests out of obligation, but because it’s a relief—given the protagonist’s imposter syndrome—to be able to help them. Every character matters here: When a meditating bug notes that when he first came aboveground he had to get used to the way you looked, that’s not a joke so much as the game once again reminding you of the importance of perspective. The through line of this artistic adventure is that “you don’t have to be perfect for anyone to care about you,” and it’s true. Chicory could’ve had puzzles that were half as clever, characters half as personable, and far cruder hand-drawn environments and it still would’ve earned our affections. As it is, it demands our love. Riccio

Cookies (Stef Pinto)

Imagine if Cosmo D, creator of surreal first-person adventure games Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite, was less interested in musically driven narratives than Lynchian, nightmare-inducing dark comedy. Such is the tonal register Stef Pinto’s Cookies, which astonishingly puts the player in the mind of a paranoid drug dealer wandering the walls of his dilapidated apartment building after evading the cops, seen here as literal trigger-happy pigs. The setting forms a unique open world where exploration leads to one of 10 different, and equally appalling, narrative threads, including working for a snuff film production company, escaping a psychotic meth-addicted clown, and discovering the secret behind a fast food chicken restaurant’s mystery meat. A permanent VHS filter and confined field of view (adjustable to avoid motion sickness, though that physical response is far from undesired) adds to the sensation of paranoia and nausea. Cookies is filthy, and not just in terms of its PSX aesthetic and grimy hallways. Every individual the player encounters is exploiting others or being exploited, cogs in an uncaring capitalist machine that despises outsiders and the lower class. Ryan Aston

Cyber Shadow (Aarne Hunziker)

As the cyborg ninja at the center of Aarne Hunziker’s Cyber Shadow, your goal is to slice through robotic foes across 11 chapters, all while contending with various obstacles, such as spike-filled pits. This action platformer, then, owes a sizable debt to Ninja Gaiden, as well as to other 8-bit sidescrollers of yore. But to commend the game purely in terms of retro fealty risks glossing over the considerable precision and craft that Hunziker, the sole member of Mechanical Head Studios, has put into each gorgeously pixelated gauntlet. The game is set in an exaggerated cyberpunk future, and each of its levels presents you with new mechanics, from enemies that send electric bolts between one another to a sky laser that targets you the moment you step out from under a roof’s cover. The piecemeal approach to your growing ninja arsenal lets the game subtly tutorialize, allowing you to hone each new skill that’s handed to you until it’s time for them all to come together as the game kicks into high gear. Cyber Shadow’s virtuosic brio is such that you will find yourself instantly hooked. Steven Scaife

Griftlands (Klei Entertainment)

With Griftlands, the Klei Entertainment streak of mirror-polished early access games shows no signs of flagging. Griftlands takes the card-based roguelike to new heights by seamlessly building a more authored, narrative-driven RPG around it. Alongside the by-now-standard decisions for what cards to include in your deck and what number constitutes too many for your play style, you take on quests and make story choices that manifest allies and enemies in equal measure whose feelings will, in turn, confer bonuses and penalties on the card battles. The game’s masterstroke lies in how it realizes that, by abstracting different mechanics into cards, negotiation becomes an arguably more complex “battle” in its own right, complete with its own health indicator and a second deck of cards with similar yet separate rules. As a result, the violent and nonviolent options in Griftlands evolve beyond simple player preference into calculations made out of desperation and necessity, where you weigh what energy you might wish to conserve against how long you think you can hold out and what can be gotten away with under the noses of your ostensible allies. Scaife

Hitman 3 (IO Interactive)

Agent 47 arrives at Thornbridge Manor tasked with taking out aristocratic matriarch Alexa Carlisle, only to find that one of the Carlisles has already been murdered. Fortunately, the PI investigating the matter is a bald white man, about the same height as 47. What a coincidence. A little bonk on the head and quick outfit change later and you’re down to more than just the business of whodunit. Hitman 3 doesn’t substantially change the tried-and-true World of Assassination formula, but it subverts the gameplay within fresh and unique scenarios that take the series outside the box. The game’s triumph is a level set at a Berlin nightclub, throughout which 47 is pursued by multiple assassins. Having 47 be the prey is an inventive twist, and with no Diana to guide them, players must use their wits and ingenuity to identify and take out his would-be killers. And Hitman 3 brings the trilogy to a close without losing sight of its organizing thematic conceit: that the elite rulers of the world may think that they’re safe regardless of where they go, but they can’t evade a bald, seemingly invisible arbiter of justice who knows how to weaponize their (and his) isolation against them. Aston

If On a Winter’s Night, Four Travelers (Dead Idle Games)

At first glance, Mrs. Winterbourne and Dr. Samuels have nothing in common. In the 1920s, the former, a rich white woman, lives a life of inherited privilege in an English estate while the latter, a talented black doctor, lives in a squalid basement apartment in New York City and faces constant discrimination from his peers. But they, two of the four titular travelers in If On a Winter’s Night, Four Travelers, are both haunted by the past, and this isometric adventure captures—in ravishing pixel art—the oppressiveness of depression. All your pointing and clicking suggests that darkness can be pushed back, that happiness can be restored by solving a puzzle. When Mrs. Winterbourne takes her laudanum, night turns to day, the sheets that cover the pictures and sculptures vanish, and the music shifts from Satie’s “Gymnopédie” to Dvorak’s “Serenade for Strings.” It’s an illusion—like that offered by all games—but that brief flash of hope is no less potent for it, and in coming to address the loss experienced by these travelers we can better understand our own life’s journey. Riccio

It Takes Two (Hazelight Studios)

Though It Takes Two focuses on two people trying to repair a broken relationship, there’s no unlockable achievement for doing so. The trophies earned in-game tend to be rewards for completing optional activities, a subtle bit of reconditioning that will have you focusing less on big-picture “winning” and more on the journey itself. After all, a good relationship isn’t something you can “beat,” but rather a feat that requires constant care. Though it has a lot in common with Hazelight Studios’s prior A Way Out, the game’s fantastical setting sets it apart. A visit to a pillow fort that doubles as a space station’s mission control introduces anti-gravity mechanics, and a sequence within a broken cuckoo clock adds time-warping powers into the mix. Each of the metaphorical levels in It Takes Two offers players the opportunity to practice the different ways—among them communication, collaboration, and respect—in which two people can work together to sustain a friendship, let alone a romance. In short, this genre-bending co-op platformer uses a smorgasbord of gameplay techniques, buttressed by a lot of attentive small touches, to set us adrift in the field of couples therapy. Riccio

Loop Hero (Four Quarters)

This ingenious, craftily addictive RPG asks us to manage what your hero accumulates through his journey, from the expected rewards of better equipment to cards that represent memories of the world that once was. Placing a mountain card on the blank map will create one from the ether and boost the hero’s health. Placing a grove on his path will let him harvest wood on each pass, one of many resources to be used in the slow rebuilding process when he returns to camp and the world beyond once again darkens and empties of everything you’ve built. By mingling the familiar setting of the fantasy roguelike with mechanics that emphasize a detachment and repetition, Loop Hero functions as a statement of persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable. Through repeated trials, you experiment and intuitively figure out some way to manage an ever-evolving situation. Loop Hero is a curiously hopeful game of adaptation and reaction, where you struggle to optimize a thing that rebels at the very concept of optimization: the world itself. Scaife

Mind Scanners (The Outer Zone)

In Mind Scanners, you act from a position of power within an authoritarian government, The Structure, and are tested to see how far you’ll go to make your protagonist a Level 3 Mind Scanner and reunite him with his daughter. Fail to cure enough people of what your Book of Lunacy condemns and you won’t be able to afford The Structure’s daily maintenance fee, and you’ll be exiled to the Outer Wastes. Misdiagnose or recklessly stress patients and you may incur additional penalties, or wipe too many personalities in the process—accidentally or on purpose—and Moonrise, a rebel faction that opposes the rule of The Constructor, may take issue with your methods. The game isn’t interested in debating the efficacy of current pharmacology or medical devices, and further abstracts things by turning the tools at your disposal into wacky minigames. All of this frees the game to focus on the morality of diagnosis, and how this power can be abused either by feckless individuals or controlling governments. These character studies are creative and well-written, and they come vividly to life via the mind scans you perform before declaring a patient sane or insane. Riccio

Mundaun (Hidden Fields)

Mundaun’s greatest achievement may be its setting, a settlement in the Swiss Alps that’s brought to life with tangible vigor via black-and-white, hand-penciled textures. As a young man named Curdin, you return home after receiving news of your grandfather’s death in a barn fire, despite the local priest’s odd insistence that there’s no need for you to attend the burial. His reason for keeping you away immediately becomes clear—in strange weather patterns, paintings capable of changing the world, and humanoid monsters draped in hay. Mundaun ends up more moody and strange than outright unsettling, particularly since its horrible sights come perilously close to someone’s idea of a joke for why the setting would be decidedly not scary, only capable of supplying things like evil beekeepers, walking hay, and a spooky cabin on a chairlift. But the power of the game’s art and atmosphere draw you in regardless, creating a sense of eerie wrongness that’s much creepier than any of the physical creatures you’re meant to fear. If Mundaun doesn’t totally work as a traditional horror game, it nevertheless proves that a vivid sense of place can be the most engrossing thing of all. Scaife

Operation: Tango (Clever Plays)

If you’ve ever watched a spy movie then you know how the agent gets to do all the cool stuff while the hacker flails at a keyboard, nervously providing comic relief. Addressing this rather slanderous imbalance in representation—and doing so in the exaggerated style of a visual internet interface straight out of a mid-’90s crime flick like Hackers—is one of the many things that Operation: Tango does right. Here, whether you choose to play as the Agent or the Hacker, you and a friend are going to have a blast in what are essentially asymmetric escape rooms in which players have to be as skillful in their communicating as they are in executing their partner’s instructions through gameplay. And the whole thing is so impressively executed, and rendered with such a colorful and sleek Overwatch-like sheen, that you might not even realize that there are no guns, and that the “action” is really just a series of timed logic puzzles—and clever ones at that. Riccio

Persona 5 Strikers (Omega Force and P Studio)

The opening hours of Persona 5 Strikers feel like a family reunion. The series’s tightlipped protagonist, Joker, returns to the Leblanc coffee shop and to all his favorite people, the Phantom Thieves, a tiny bit older, a tiny bit wiser, and with an entire golden summer ahead. Regardless of whether or not you see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, it’s going to hit you hard to see these friends together and know that the world is open to them, but this one scene would be meaningless if the remainder of the game didn’t sustain the stellar character development and world building previously established by Persona 5. Strikers takes place six months after the original ending to Persona 5, and many of the rules of combat—in terms of how collecting and leveling up Personas, magic, weaknesses, technical hits, and stealth work—are virtually unchanged. The difference is having to execute all of this in real time, against legions of cannon-fodder Shadows, and dozens of tiny smart decisions have been made to not only make facing those hordes feel fast, fluid, and gratifying, but to ensure that each Phantom Thief is distinctly unique in their own way. Justin Clark

qomp (Stuffed Wombat)

Atari’s video game classic Pong necessitates that the player control one of the two paddles, bouncing the ball between them. Stuffed Wombat’s qomp also simulates table tennis, but here the player controls the ball, which is on a fed-up mission to escape the confines of the dreaded paddles and the simplistic gameplay that was holding it back. Using only one button, the player can change the vertical trajectory of the ball to steer it through clever mazes and arenas while relying on walls to bounce off of and move horizontally across levels. Despite its minimalist approach, qomp boasts an incredible amount of gameplay variety, wordlessly introducing dozens upon dozens of new mechanics across its campaign, such as traps, keys for locked doors, and underwater areas, then building on these as players move their ball closer and closer to freedom. qomp is an addictive trip that ends on a note more satisfying than most AAA blockbusters. Aston

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (Insomniac Games)

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s dimensional gimmick is an impressive chance for the PlayStation 5 to flex, taking us across maps, worlds, and alternate realities at the push of a button, without a single seam or loading screen to be found, but it’s a small part of a greater collection of wild ideas, eye-popping galactic vistas, and delightful animations. The series’s usual gimmick of eclectic wacky weaponry returns here, though the wackiness has been reined in a bit in favor of utility, and a stronger shooter sensibility. The game is out for a bit of blood. There’s true challenge and tension here that you don’t usually feel in these games without upping the difficulty, and it’s a welcome shift. All of this would be meaningless if we weren’t surrounded on all sides by characters worth caring for, a smirking sense of humor, and worlds worth exploring in the wildest ways imaginable, and Rift Apart is packed to the gills with all of it, and with a surprisingly effective dose of seriousness as a cherry on top. There’s a quiet revolution at the heart of Rift Apart, and our gang of misfits figuring out how the good fight is affecting everyone across the galaxy reminds us that being light-hearted doesn’t mean being thoughtless. Clark

Resident Evil: Village (Capcom)

Where Resident Evil 7: Biohazard owed much of its concept and aesthetic to the down-and-dirty grindhouse nastiness of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, Resident Evil: Village is indebted to a more classical brand of horror: Grimm fairy tales, Universal monster movies, and Japanese ghost stories, even the Hammer films and gialli of yore. A lot of ink has been spilled about Village’s breakout antagonist, the nine-foot-tall glampire Lady Dimitrescu. Her sheer popularity, charisma, and unique physical presence obscures what’s actually a delightfully freaky ensemble of horror villainy, allowing Village to vary its approach to the supernatural throughout the campaign. This is a game that never stops feeling like it has such sights to show you. No callback to a horror subgenre is allowed to outstay its welcome or become rote, which works to fix a long-running Resident Evil problem. By hour 10 of most of the games in the series, you’re already sick of the zombies. By hour 10 of Village, we’ve moved into gonzo Tetsuo: The Iron Man terrain. Clark

Returnal (Housemarque)

Returnal is meant to be unfair. Life and, by extension, death often are, and there’s a sense that ASTRA space scout Selene Vassos’s time on the forbidden planet of Atropos is a punishment. That’s hardcoded into every element of her journey across the campaign. And it’s a credit to the developers at Housemarque that regardless of what weapons you find yourself equipped with, it always feels pleasurable to strafe around neon-bullet-filled arenas, taking down turrets, Groot-like fungal monsters, dive-bombing bats, and so many tentacled monstrosities that you may think you’re living inside an H.P. Lovecraft novel. The game is so immersive that it’s viscerally hard to walk away from it—and not just because it eschews a title screen and uses the haptic feedback of the DualSense controller to let you feel the patter of raindrops and fully-charged weapon abilities. The more you learn about Selene across the game’s gripping campaign, the easier it is to relate to or, at least, agree with her observation that “I deserve to be here.” That line is also more than a little apt, as it perfectly sums up just how simultaneously rewarding and punishing it is to live in the world of Returnal. Riccio

Subnautica: Below Zero (Unknown Worlds Entertainment)

It might appear as though Subnautica: Below Zero has lost the thread of what made the ocean-scavenging survival of its predecessor so distinct. Its map is a little more condensed, and its story unfolds a little more conventionally, complete with another human character and a partner AI as your new, now-speaking protagonist searches for the truth about her sister. Considerable effort has also gone into expanding your options above sea level, in the long stretches of frozen wastes whose fluctuating weather and overall bitter cold might kill you, just like a dearth of oxygen in the unforgiving ocean. But Below Zero consistently demonstrates the solidity of its concept, measuring a measly player character against the formidable scope of an underwater world. Now, the freer movement and wider danger of the dominant swimming segments become a foreboding counterpoint to above-ground traversal, which leaves you less exposed at the steep expense of your underwater maneuverability and your established strategies in a game that readily preys on anyone who’s impatient and ill-prepared. The game somehow becomes about appreciating what you had, even when what you had was a daunting, airless abyss occupied by things big enough to eat you. Scaife

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury (Nintendo)

When it launched on the WiiU, Super Mario 3D World felt like a revelation, for indicating that Nintendo was beginning to seriously chart a new path forward for its bread-and-butter platforming franchise. The game is a veritable amusement park of novel ideas and mechanics wrapped into kinetic puzzle solving. Perhaps inevitably, it feels all the more at home on the Switch alongside Super Mario Odyssey, which all but perfected its already winning formula back in 2017 before taking it to the stratosphere. The icing on the cake? The inclusion of a new game, Bowser’s Fury, that finds Nintendo again pushing the envelope of Super Mario Bros. in exciting directions. Across Bowser’s Fury’s short campaign, Mario isn’t beholden to the rules of each stage, but rather the world is beholden to him, and the player by proxy. By removing the boundaries between levels and pitting you against an ever-present threat, the game forces you to look at its world as an interconnected network of challenges. Even an aimless traipse around the island never feels without purpose. Whether you find yourself making a beeline for the nearest Cat Shine or simply hanging out with the family of cats who live on an impossible ledge, the island paradise of Bowser’s Fury is a joyous invitation to wander. Clark