In the interest of full disclosure, I spent a good chunk of the summer and early Fall living in a hotel room because of Hurricane Ida, so between that and my first semester of grad school, I spent basically August through October blacked out. Maybe something happened. I dunno!
Game That Almost Won My Loyalty Off Slay The Spire: Monster Train
Alright, so, it’s a game that came out 2020, whatever, time is an illusion. Monster Train is all about invading Hell on your infernal choo choo and using cards to do battle. The gimmick for this card-based roguelike is there are multiple levels of the train to defend, so you have a lot of tactical thinking to employ in addition to the usual deck-builder gimmicks. You either like them or you don’t and this alllllmost got me to give up Slay The Spire, the highest praise I can offer.
Game I Only Got Around To In 2021: Paradise Killer
Just the blurb for this one sends me through all the stages of the Vince McMahon gif. It’s a detective game in a brilliant and bizarrely colorful world with a great soundtrack and incredible narrative. (Cue Vinnie Mac falling over). It’s not even a game so much as it’s a whole experience, man. Now I am going to smoke my cloves and be even more pretentious.
Game All My Friends Were Suddenly And Unexpectedly Playing: Valheim
Every year, there’s a game that suddenly explodes and all my friends are playing it. Valheim is that game for 2021. Suddenly everyone was being a Viking in Purgatory in a kind of janky but still interesting survival sim. Was I any good? No, I assure you I was not. Basically I just logged into the server and ran around punching things until something killed me. It was still fun.
Steam Release of Obscure Janky Game I Love: Stubbs The Zombie In Rebel Without A Pulse
Stubbs The Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse was an obscure but beloved game for The Original Xbox. For some reason, it got a Steam rerelease and somehow they still had the soundtrack, which featured The Raveonettes, Death Cab for Cutie, Cake, The Dandy Warhols, The Flaming Lips, and other “bands you’ve actually heard of” doing covers of 50s pop songs all while a zombie farts and bites his way through 50s style sci-fi dystopia. Does it “play well”? It’s janky as hell. Does it “look good”? It’s running the PC port of the original Halo engine. Is it still funny and full of farts? Hell yeah, man.
Preview Full of Beaver Jokes I Still Can’t Believe They Let Me Get Away With
Runner Up: Halo Infinite
I’d never been a Halo guy. I mean I played the first one on the Xbox when it came out and it was fine, but there were much better shooters on PC. It was okay. You know. For a CONSOLE GAME. (I become so large and smug I blot out the sun). I’d dabbled with the series over time, but it never really clicked when there were so many good games on PC.
But the Infinite multiplayer was free so I figured “Why not?” And then I became The Halo guy bugging all his friends about playing Halo, wanting to play Halo all the time, wondering why I wasn’t playing Halo at that moment. Actually, Austin and I, who usually hate everything, wouldn’t shut up about Halo. I finally got it.
I played the campaign like the Shadow Of games, sneaking up slowly then waiting for the bad guys to talk and then appearing like an angry god. Or just running people over in whatever vehicle I’d managed to steal. Sure, it did some dumb video game stuff I’d ordinarily hate and the end mission took about 20 million hours, but I appreciated the ride.
Am I good in the multiplayer? Absolutely not. Do I log in, grab the first vehicle I see, and drive around honking the horn and blasting We Built This City over voice comms? Absolutely.
Actual Game of 2021 And All Years: Lawn Mowing Simulator
“Why would anyone do drugs when they could play a game about freshly mowing a lawn?”–Hank Hill, True GamerI’m a lawn boy til I die and this is the best game ever made.
