The Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2021

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee recounts the five best, worst, and blandest games of 2021.

Prologue: Existentially Challenged
I've got a new book available on Audible.com from December 9th; it's called "Existentially Challenged", and it's a hilarious supernatural murder mystery set in a world getting to grips with the British government having declassified the existence of magic. To answer all the anticipated questions: yes, it's a sequel to Differently Morphous, yes, it's only an audiobook at the moment, yes, it's read by me, yes, a print version will be out next year sometime, and no, I don't still wear this hat in real life.

Transcript
Feels a bit inappropriate to say "Happy New Year" these days; we should just say "New Year". New Year, internet. "New Year, Yahtzee!" The cosmic odometer has, indeed, ticked over again. 'Tis the season of writing the wrong date on all our official documentation for the next couple of weeks; many indifferent returns. If I sound a bit unenthused in this, the intro to the Best, Worst, and Blandest Games of 2021, it's because picking the best games of 2021 was like picking my most acoustically satisfying bathtime farts. Most years have at least one thing that jumps out and takes me roughly by surprise and reminds me why I'm still doing this bullshit, but I struggle to think of anything that excited me in 2021; no Undertales, no Obra Dinns, no Spiritfarers. Well, there was one thing, but, well, we'll get to that.

5th Best
(sound of a champagne bottle being uncorked and poured)

We'll get to it right now, as it happens! There was only one game that took me by pleasant surprise, as it transitioned from "bland hipster navel-gazing" to "psychedelic cosmos-spanning rock odyssey direct from the subconsciouses of all four of the Beatles while they were on one of the less harrowing drugs":  The Artful Escape , that I must sadly relegate to Fifth Best because this is a top five list of games, not of things where you just hold right and occasionally repeat some notes back to it like you're playing on a Simon machine powered by a very inefficient exercise bike.

5th Blandest
(sound of a water cooler bubbling)

As always, blandness is the opposite of both good and bad, like a coin with a yin-yang on one side and a dead blobfish on the other, and that sums up my feelings towards  Resident Evil Village  pretty well: I don't particularly like or hate it. Some bits were good; the rest was all over the place and full of too many rehashed ideas, like a dream that I thought was getting sexy for a while, but then I got lost in my old high school and woke up when I realized I was late for the bus.

5th Worst
(sound of a toilet flushing)

The trouble with these rankings is the lack of nuance. Is it really fair to call  Twelve Minutes  the fifth worst game of 2021 if I was somewhat liking it right up until the end? In this case, yes, because that ending undermines everything leading up to it; if you get dragged into an alley by an angry chef and disemboweled with a broken bottle, your subsequent Yelp review probably isn't going to focus on the restaurant's lovely filet mignon.

4th Best
I hope you'll forgive some self-indulgence; my Fourth Best is a game intended mainly for fans, but I'm a fan, and it's my list. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that, in a functioning democracy, if a man likes  Persona 5 Strikers , it is his duty to rebel, even if he believes himself the only one, just as it is everyone else's duty to say they thought Guardians of the Galaxy was better? (Paraphrasing, obviously.) Yes, Persona 5 Strikers; it's got energy and life, and the soundtrack's really fun to put on while you're kicking a homeless man to death.

4th Blandest
You know, it's bad enough that AAA games are a constant parade of bland open-world swill, but it's really taking the piss when indie games get profile boosts for aspiring to be the same fucking thing. "Ooh, come and join the popular kids' table, Kena: Bridge of Spirits ! You'll fit right in, with your bland world design and Disney Pixar characters and unspecific, vaguely spiritual theme that's slightly environmental, but not so much that it offends our investment company that's also got shares in Oil-Drenched Seabirds PLC!"

4th Worst
Again, calling this game one of the worst leaves no room for nuance, and I'm as confused as to whether I like it as I am by most of the qualities of SWERY games. Ultimately, The Good Life  is, by every imaginable measure, an almost inconceivably badly-designed game, but it's still got a certain charm. I wonder if it's more a "because" than "in spite of" situation; if SWERY took a fucking game design lesson one of these days, he probably would get a lot less interesting.

3rd Best
With its wealth of ideas and somewhat astonishing depth of gameplay variety that's simultaneously very tightly-designed and very accessible, small wonder that  It Takes Two  was The Game Awards' upset Game of the Year, but I just can't rank it any higher for its weak connecting plot and excessive bad dialogue. I refuse to lower my standards, industry! I still aspire to a better world where video games can have strong writing and good design, and every home has an extra tap in the kitchen sink that dispenses lager!

3rd Blandest
I recently published a video essay arguing that video games may have already peaked at a point between ten and twenty years ago, and when commenters ask, "Ooh, how can you say that?", I point to games like  Back 4 Blood , and everything else with no greater ambition than to remake shit from the afore-specified era under a rice paper-thin disguise: at Ubisoft announcing the Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell remakes, at basically every indie game looking like it belongs on the PS2. And then I point again and make a sort of mad, starey face.

3rd Worst
And even when all they're doing is regurgitating old shit, the modern industry still finds ways to fuck it up. Abe's Exoddus was a fairly low-key, quirky stealth puzzle platformer, and  Oddworld: Soulstorm  is about as much as you'd expect from a reimagining of it that thought the most logical additions to the formula would be a crafting system and the occasional giant robot fight.

2nd Best
Like anyone who dressed up like Robert Smith in the 90's, video gaming must never be allowed to forget its dalliances with trends, and so I felt one of the time loop games from this year should be acknowledged. Deathloop? No. Twelve Minutes? "No" in an even more contemptful tone of voice.  The Forgotten City , then; all the slightly janky uncanny valley skiing holiday fun of a Skyrim quest, except with incredibly solid writing and more than two voice actors.

2nd Blandest
Always a struggle picking my Bland Five, having to think back and remember the games I least remember things about. Number Two instantly earned its place when I was going down the list of reviews, and my eye very nearly skipped straight over it like a limousine over a homeless man's foot; it's  Outriders . It was a third-person shooter, it was post-apocalyptic; I'm pretty sure there was a skill tree in there somewhere, but at that point, my mind's eye slips off it and starts thinking about pies instead.

2nd Worst
So often, games are bad because they're hackneyed or lazy or cynical or end with incest pregnancy drama, so the games that have the best of intentions, but are bad because of pure ineptitude are the kind I still prize the most highly; some games just come out on stage, try to hike up their belts, and rip their trousers right off. My second worst game:  Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood . Just refreshing, plain and simple bad game classic, with more subtitles than redeeming qualities.

1 Best
This probably won't come as a surprise to anyone who noticed I was kind of reaching for things to complain about in my review, but fine;  Psychonauts 2  is just as engaging and imaginative as Psychonauts 1, and is the good kind of sequel that expands upon rather than wallows in its predecessor. It is, however, still a sequel, and I can't be as enthusiastic as I would've been for an original IP, although it might prove my earlier point, since it's a sequel to a game from the PS2 era. I'm making the mad starey face again!

1 Blandest
Guess what? Blandest Game of 2021 is a shooter. Double guess what? It's a World War II shooter. Possibly not the one you're thinking of, because while blandness hangs off of World War II shooters like nipple tassels on your mum when she's working nights, that blandness is thrown into even sharper relief when paired with new technology. Yes, it's  Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond . Thanks for coming to join the VR party, World War II shooters; now leave the wine bottle you brought and piss off!

1 Worst
But our Worst Game of 2021 is a rather unique vintage that combines its mystifyingly bad design choices with an unflinching earnestness that makes it car-crash fascinating, like a chorus line dancer with a compound fracture, spraying blood from their exposed shinbone over the front row with every high kick and trying desperately to smile. Yes, it's  Balan Thunderpants . This may very well be the sort of thing SWERY would make if he took a game design lesson, if it was a lesson given by a slug in a burning dumpster. In the middle of a busy road. Who... doesn't know anything about game design.

Addenda

 * Believe it or not this is *after* he took a break: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
 * Do bear in mind that I have been in a negative mood a lot lately because my lucky underpants finally became too torn and disgusting to continue wearing
 * And unspecified deity of choice acknowledge us every one

Honorable Mentions
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights

+ Good gameplay

+ Good story

- Bit rough on the eyes

- My therapist told me to cut down on Souls-likes

No More Heroes III

+ A return to form for the series

+ All around good fun

- Combat's a bit spongey

- Suda might be overdoing the self-indulgence bit

Metroid Dread

+ Perfectly good 2D Metroid game

- Repetitive boss fights

- Not exactly brimming with new ideas

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

+ Playable enough

+ Story has its moments

- Too much copy-pasted bullshit

- Positively drenched in corporate cum

Halo Infinite

Oh for fuck's sake why are you still here