As we near the end of December, game-of-the-year lists and awards are starting to trickle out, and people are looking back at the list of titles they played throughout the year. Due to the haphazard nature of releases this year, which saw many major titles pushed back from their initial release dates, people's lists are looking a bit different than usual. Because of this, even the discourse surrounding games released seems to have changed. There's a line of thought that, because there weren't many tent-pole releases in the vein of God of War or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, 2021 was a down year as far as games are concerned. In reality, that's incredibly far from the truth.
With movies, the giant blockbusters are rarely nominated for major awards outside of technical categories, but that's usually not the case for games, as the big hitters are usually the ones cleaning up come December. The end of the year did see Halo Infinite earning raves, but, largely, there wasn’t one new game in 2021 that ended up dominating the conversation online. And because there weren't many giant releases to suck all the oxygen out of the room, a lot of space was left for smaller games to grab the spotlight and shine.
To really get a sense of this, look no farther than The Game Awards that aired a couple of weeks ago, which saw Josef Fares and his team at Hazelight Studios win Game of the Year for It Takes Two. This comes after years of multiple acclaimed works from the director, including titles like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Of course, smaller indie games have slowly but surely made a name for themselves over the years, as they continue to garner more attention from both the press and the public. Titles like Journey, Hollow Knight, Disco Elysium, Hades, and many more have found themselves in the spotlight over the last few years. However, blockbuster titles will often still overshadow even the greatest games that the indie scene has to offer.
This year, however, along with It Takes Two, other smaller-scale titles were also able to grab the spotlight for themselves, and really shine a light on the truly spectacular products that ended up being put out. Games like Chicory: A Colorful Tale and Death's Door offered exciting and varied gameplay experiences of completely different styles. There were also titles like Valheim, which lit up the Steam charts early in February and continued to do so for months as it sold millions of copies. Among many others, these games were all able to occupy different spaces in the industry without being overlooked.
There were also games like Kena: Bridge of Spirits, the first game from Ember Lab, which gave players some of the closest visual fidelity that you could get to a modern-day Disney or Dreamworks animated title. Bringing together puzzle elements, a touching story, and punishing gameplay, Kena was a game that surprised audiences when it debuted at the PS5 showcase, and the end product was able to live up to those expectations. Ember Lab would go on to win Best Debut Indie Game and Best Indie Game at The Game Awards.
There were also some longer-running series with small but devoted fanbases that released new entries this year. A prime example is Life is Strange: True Colors, which ditched the episodic release format and saw Deck Nine take over the mainline series. This new release format no doubt brought in an audience who might otherwise have stayed away, giving audiences a taste of the greatness that the series has offered for years now.
In Metroid Dread, longtime fans of the series saw a canceled Nintendo DS game from the mid-2000s revived for the Nintendo Switch, as Samus Aran had her first game release on a home console in years. Other long-running franchises like Shin Megami Tensei V finally launched after being unveiled at the Switch reveal event all the way back in 2017, giving hardcore JRPG fans something to cheer about. Halo Infinite returned to praise after a year-long delay which had many fans and journalists skeptical. There were also great surprises like Guardians of the Galaxy, which helped redeem a portion of Marvel Games after the major misstep that was The Avengers.
For gamers, this was really the first year with the new consoles, and, even though there weren't many next-gen exclusives, games like Returnal would end up showing off what the new systems can achieve, as Housemarque pushed the PS5 early on to showcase the console. Once a developer with a primary focus on the arcade genre, Housemarque, with the help of Sony, was able to create one of the most addicting and responsive action games to come out in a long time. With the more “barren” landscape that this year offered -- and with it being one of the only true PS5 exclusives -- Returnal was one of the standout titles of the year.
The changing video-game landscape was undoubtedly caused due to delays by the pandemic, which saw a number of developers pushing back titles that might have otherwise been lined up for a 2021 release date. 2022 looks to be filled to the brim with heavy hitters from almost every major publisher. We’ve already seen games scrambling around with February release dates, all because Elden Ring got pushed back to its current launch date. This likely will continue to happen as release dates are revealed for games that don’t currently have them. By comparison, 2021 felt refreshing in that many smaller titles were given time to breathe without these huge games breathing down their necks.
And that's what made 2021 such a compelling year for gamers. With those aforementioned tent-poles absent, there was a little something for everyone. There might not have been the usual amount of most five-star, triple-A games, but there were certainly a lot of lower-key, quality titles to sink time into. Sometimes in "off years," it can be easy to dismiss those "good but not great" titles as disappointments, but 2021 has had its fair share of wonderful titles worth looking into. 2021 might not compare to 2022 on paper, as games like Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarok, Starfield, and Horizon Forbidden West loom, but there were plenty of interesting, smaller titles released to celebrate this year.