On Games 2021

I thought it would be fun to do a write up for 2021. Reading summaries and thoughts from other game developers and writers have given me a lot to reflect on. If you share this same curiosity, then this is for you! As a serial archivist, a snapshot of my thoughts for 2021 sounds interesting to revisit some day.

I’m reviewing some games I played this year and maybe a summary or something at the end. Onwards!

Valheim

While the multiplayer performance was a bit iffy at times. This game, played with ~4 people is a blast. From the way trees fall, the “skill based” combat, clear objectives to progress, and its unusual assortment of monsters the game is… an adventure! It’s always tough to go back and play a game like this and I slightly regret experiencing this game during Early Access rather than its finished product (15 years from now).

Anyways, you’re a Viking and it’s great. As I tend to tell people, treat Early Access like official release so Valheim was released in 2021 and I think its several million players would agree.

I think Valheim, while imperfect, explores game design concepts and has such moments of delight that it makes it my favorite game of 2021.

Spelunky 2

While Spelunky 2 was actually released in September 2020, its online multiplayer became available in December 2020 and I spent a lot of time exploring its nooks and crannies well into early 2021. This is a true sequel. What I mean is, the game is expanded in content, features, and scope together while maintaining the same DNA. I spent 80 hours in Spelunky but a whopping 190 hours in Spelunky 2. While this may not ring true for you, I’ve seen a lot of people (excluding the most hardcore) spend more time in Spelunky 2 than its predecessor. I think this is due to the decreased barrier to entry. While the punishing difficulty increased, the inclusion of multiplayer allowed a lot of teaching moments for players.

Hilarious cooperative situations, learning about its interlocking systems, and experiencing the madness of the game together was so great. There is no game I played more in 2021 than Spelunky 2, I highly recommend starting the game together with somebody else to learn and improve together.

There’s a lot to be said about Spelunky 2’s innate difficulty. Many may draw the conclusion that it is hard for the sake of being hard but it’s a delicate balance due to its replayable nature and maybe I’ll write about difficult some day but probably not. For now, you can read about the creator’s thoughts yourself.

Sable

There are few games I was excited to play this year and Sable was at the top of this list. As a fan of both Moebius’ style and Japanese Breakfast, I became transfixed with this intersection of art and video games.

A PC demo was released during a Steam event and… it was awful.

Sable (the character) would constantly have unusual movement related issues around ladders and climbing, the jetbike would constantly jitter, I could easily get out of bounds, and characters had unusual stilted dialog- perhaps it felt that way because I was taken so far out of the immersion from the game’s bugs.

I couldn’t get myself to buy the game until 3 months after its release date, where a small voice assured me that the game was more stable and the issues were all fixed. On top of this, I had upgraded my PC from a GTX 1060 to an RTX 3070 Ti so I was no longer concerned with framerate issues.

So again I dived deep into the world of Sable and it was… okay.
After the beautiful scene of exiting the early area and a little bit of cruising around I stopped for the night and couldn’t find the motivation to return. For now I guess it will have to remain a game that cruises around pleasantly in my imagination.

Inscryption

What a treat.

Legion TD 2

A pleasant surprise was this Warcraft 3 Custom Map turned standalone game by very committed game designer Brent “Lisk” Batas. A beautifully tuned PvP tower defense game with many interlocking systems.

While the balance and connections between these systems and the randomization at the start of each match really push their players to be creatively strategic, games with this high of a skill ceiling can be quite grueling.

The reality of the online PvP game kicks in. You need to learn the systems quickly if you don’t want to lose your first 100 games. This problem is prevalent in games like Counter Strike as well, but with considerably more systems to absorb (damage types, economy, mind games, unit placement), it may take quite a while to nab your first online victory. While the game is somewhat inaccessible due to these reasons, those who enjoy fast paced creative strategy games will find this arena familiar — especially if you’re reeling from Auto-Chess fatigue.

I don’t have the grit to become the best Pokémon trainer so I quit upon reaching my self set goal of top 2%. It was pretty fun getting there!

Climbing higher will be a long arduous journey. However, for the obsessive strategy gamers, the intricacies are there. Micro optimizations and theory crafting galore! Paired with fun fantasy graphics and gameplay which moves at a nice pace due to a in-game timer, this may be the perfect game for you.

The cosmetics drops and relative systems are garbage. I imagine the developers will be very defensive about their stance on it because they expect everyone to play 5,000 hours. In reality, they should make considerably more stuff.

Metroid Dread

The atmosphere of loneliness on a planet is maintained even if they didn’t need to. Cutscenes are done infrequently for a AAA game and the direction for those cutscenes are pleasant, with only 3 or so cutscenes having any text/voice at all.

I’ve beaten Super Metroid (SNES) and Metroid Prime (Game Cube) and found the smooth transitions between rooms a humongous upgrade from its predecessors. From a technical stand point, the game generally loads an entire “zone” into memory so walking offscreen into another one is an instant transition without any wait time. There’s a very minor transition at times, especially for special rooms that need to load/unload cutscene videos or especially atmospheric background rooms (the game is 2.5D).

The rate at which you gain power ups goes from Normal -> Slightly Slow -> Fast -> Extremely fast -> Final Boss. This pacing was a bit unusual and I wonder if it has to do with how I specifically played the game? A lot of the areas are streamlined so that things with visual interest generally help you progress through the main storyline. Backtracking sort of feels like a waste of time until the very end because almost each area has 1 or 2 things that can only be accessed after getting the last 10% of upgrades. However, if you were to have trouble on a boss, going back and getting some of these bonus items could allow someone to tank 2 or 3 more hits.

The art direction is maintained and enhanced extremely well. I’ve never felt so Samus Aran. There’s a visual upgrade from the pixelated versions and the longer transitions between zones (remember, each zone is loaded into memory) are very much on point, dare I say… perfect?

Boss fight timings are quite precise. With each encounter (excluding the last boss) taking roughly 2-10 tries. Loading and retrying is quite trivial in comparison to say — Dark Souls due to its rest site positions so death is a non-issue.

After playing through Hard Mode rather quickly, it’s clear how the level design points you in the correct direction to progress and the movement is so smooth with its auto-vaults. However, the modifier buttons can get a bit annoying to bake into your muscle memory.

Great game! Maybe the only game I don’t regret paying $60 for in recent memory.

Takeaways

These days I’ve been thinking a lot about “exploration”. This doesn’t need to be open world or whatever. Diving deep into how a system works or even deciphering a world by analyzing unusual monsters is a delightful experience.

In 2020, I experienced this with Noita with its wand system and trying to configure it to deal with the absolute madness of its spontaneous threats. This year, Valheim took this cake (I wanted Sable to). Norse mythology isn’t anything new but Irongate’s take on how it’s presented, how you interact with it, and that first encounter with the giant blue troll. Bravo. Maybe designers will finally realize that graphics and immersion don’t need to be hand in hand. Anyone who has played Silent Hill should be fully aware of this.

While Metroid Dread didn’t exactly overexplain things and had a lot of unusual creatures, I couldn’t get myself to be invested in its universe. I didn’t care at all about a timeline, the relationships between species, why a monster was chained to a wall, and all that jazz. I’m not entirely sure why.

I felt that many games are haphazardly becoming open world and the potential of open world games will get lost in the chaff of AAA nonsense.

Open World Games, Elden Ring, and You

On the subject of open world games in the future, Elden Ring will no doubt be a hot topic for many. I fear that Elden Ring will be a really great game with not-so-great open world mechanics exploration. This in turn may fuel other developers to publish open world games which once again don’t explore the potential of the format. I’ll explain more specifically.

FROM Software has incredible boss design, progression systems, world building, and silly characters. But let’s say that the level design is about going from one point of interest to another, hacking and slashing at bosses, unlocking new areas via narrative progression and gearing up like the Souls series.

Multiplayer, if in the same vein as other FROM Software games would involve players invading others or summoning friends. Summoned friends don’t really progress whatsoever, it’s merely a help-based co-op and not really a mode to “play the game together”. This is great but it’s just Dark Souls with a fresh coat of paint (I said it). Other developers will parse that this is what open world mechanics should be like. This to me is devastating as it would lead to the stagnation of open world design exploration — at least in the AAA scene.

Bye bye

Alas, there’s always more to write about. Death’s Door, Splitgate, Super Auto Pets, Deathloop, Call of Duty: Warzone, Forza 5, Back 4 Blood, It Takes Two, Storybook Brawl, Luck Be a Landlord, Darkest Dungeon 2, Crab Game, Samurai Gunn 2, New Pokémon Snap, maybe even SNKRX? Some hot takes will just have to stay in the oven.

Until next time, have a nice day.