The 10 best gifts to buy video game fans this holiday

From Nintendo's best new (old) games to the must-have subscription game service, we run down all the best gaming gifts of 2021

By William Hughes  |  November 26, 2021 | 12:00pm
Games Features Bowser
The 10 best gifts to buy video game fans this holiday
Clockwise from top middle: Ratchet & Clank (Photo: Insomniac Games), Deathloop (Photo: Arkane), Hitman 3 (Photo: IOI Interactive), Monster Hunter: Rise (Photo: Capcom), Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury (Photo: Nintendo)

As the holiday season rapidly approaches, so, too, does the most overwhelming urge of all: Filling out your (and others’) catalog of games, gaming supplies, and other gaming ephemera, via the holy communion of commerce.

Tragically, studies show that there are even more games out there in 2021 than there were this time in 2020—and all indications suggest that the trend is only likely to continue. Luckily, The A.V. Club’s Gaming Gift Guide is here to help you sort the digital wheat from the virtual chaff, ensuring that, whatever 2021 gaming products you plonk down in front of the grateful consumers in your life, they’ll be happy with the bounty.

So, please, dear user: Enjoy this cornucopia of ludonarrative delights, covering some of the best (and most purchasable!) offerings in games in 2021.

Hitman 3 + All Access Passes

IOI Interactive’s Hitman 3 is a very good video game, an inventive spin on the “Find 30 different ways to beat this level/murder this guy” approach first pitched in 2016’s Hitman revival, and then refined with Hitman 2. And you don’t have to take our word on that, either, since one of the cleverest options IOI threaded into its trilogy is the ability to play the excellent Hitman 1 and 2 levels in the improved engine of Hitman 3. Taken as a whole, these three sets of levels amount to one of the finest works of the last half-decade of gaming. (They’re also, if you own a PS4 and a PSVR, a shoe-in for the best VR game of the period, since the access passes allow you to play the entire trilogy as .) An incredible value, especially if you can put your gift recipient’s collection together piecemeal as the various pieces go on sale—starting with Hitman 3 itself.$23.99 for Hitman 3 ( through Nov. 29), plus $90 for both expansion passes in most major gaming storefronts

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium is, depending on who you ask, the finest game of the last several years. (For instance, if you asked us, that is what we would say.) Funny, heart-breaking, mind-bending, and compulsively playable, the game combines , a little The Hangover, and a whole bunch of persistent intrusive thinking into the kind of detective story where “What kind of graffiti should I paint on this wall?” and “Why does my neck-tie keep talking to me?” can be as important to unraveling its mystery as “Who shot this dead guy?” The fact that this unabashed masterpiece is now available on everything from its native PC to the humble Nintendo Switch—courtesy of this year’s Final Cut, which also added new conversations and full voice acting—is a minor miracle, and one that demands to be taken advantage of by inserting some pure excellence into a loved one’s life.$39.99 in

The Initiative

The majority of legacy board games—i.e., those titles, codified by Pandemic: Legacy, where the game changes, permanently, over time in response to player actions—are understandably grim affairs. Stop that virus, destroy that enemy army, go that particular kind of mad thanks to another damn Betrayal At House Of Haunted Hill.Unexpected Games’ The Initiative defies that trend, instead tasking players with unraveling the mysteries surrounding a brightly colored comic book. Here’s Samantha Nelson, :The 14 bite-sized missions take about 30 minutes each, but my play sessions were long because I kept wanting to do one more, or tackle the between-level puzzles because they were so clever, building on the ones I’d already solved to make me feel like I was really learning codebreaking. This is a game that can only be played once, but I can’t stop recommending it, in the hope that others will enjoy it as much as I did.$59.95 from

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury

The only major Mario game of 2021 might seem like an exercise in retreading, taking Chris Pratt’s iconic red-suited plumber and his (excellent) Wii U adventure and reprising them for the far more popular Switch. (And, really, even if that’s all it was, you’d be getting your money’s worth; Super Mario 3D World is a great port of a great game.) But the real reason to pick up this bundle is , an ambitious, beautiful, and appropriately breezy attempt to boil the quest-solving appeal of the 3D Mario games into their most pleasantly elemental form. Whether playing solo, with a partner, or in a chaotic crew of four, 3D World + Bowser’s Fury is likely to scratch anyone’s itch for gaming’s favorite .$59.99 from

Deathloop

2021 actually had a ton of time-loop games, a fact that’s easy to prove because 2021 actually had a ton of time-loop games. (2021 actually had a ton of time-loop games.) Arkane’s was one of the best, combining the running, gunning, and gutting-dudes action of the studio’s Dishonored games with a fascinating multiplayer system that stole a page from Dark Souls by making your fellow players the biggest threat around. Deathloop isn’t perfect—its narrative has some shaky twists, and it’s not always willing to take full advantage of its temporally fascinating structure—but even when it lets itself down a bit, it’s an enormously interesting failure.On sale for $29.99 (through Nov. 29) in

Splitgate Battle Pass

Of all the various “free shooter supported by selling ugly gun skin” projects we played in 2021, 1047 Games’ was easily the most enjoyable. The game’s dumb-brilliant premise—take the rock-solid multiplayer shooting of a Halo game and then gift every ersatz Masters Chief with a knockoff version of the Portal Gun from Portal—is exactly as fun as it sounds. (Our personal favorite move: Slapping a portal on either side of a wall, then shooting the hated Red Team right through it as though the obstruction weren’t even there.) As such, this recommendation is purely selfish: We’d like 1047 to keep making and supporting this absolute blast of a game, and selling more of its cosmetic-item-only battle passes is the easiest way to accomplish that goal.900 “Splitcoins” (i.e., about $10) from all major gaming storefronts 

Monster Hunter: Rise

Look, we know: Every installment in Capcom’s Monster Hunter series of action RPGs gets billed as the “super-accessible one,” the player-friendly installment that will turn mere admirers of the series’ big honkin’ dinosaur battles into actual zealots for the capturing and carving cause. And, if we’re being wholly honest, the Switch-exclusive (for a few more weeks, anyway) is a little less newbie-friendly than 2018’s Monster Hunter: World. Even so: Rise might be the series’ best installment, hands-down, incorporating vertical exploration and more fluid move sets into the franchise’s already rock-solid “hunt the monster, use its parts to make better weapons, hunt some more loop.” Buy it for your favorite Hunter now, or wait for the PC release, but either way, it’s a massive dose of excellent extinction-event-sized content.$59.99 in

Ratchet And Clank: Rift Apart

isn’t quite the must-play system-seller Sony was probably hoping for. But it is a dang fine Ratchet & Clank game, putting our heroes and their alternate-universe counterparts (and the still-nascent PlayStation 5) through their paces admirably. If this is your would-be giftee’s first R&C game, Rift Apart might be the easily accessible entry point they’ve been dreaming of. (Rest assured they won’t be lost; these are basically Saturday morning cartoons with much cooler guns.) And if they’ve been missing everyone’s favorite Lombax-bot pairing, Rift Apart will give them exactly what they were hoping for. As a bonus, Rift Apart is one of several games that took serious strides this year to improve accessibility options, making it far easier for a wider array of players to dip into its space-shooting action.$49. 69 (on sale through Nov. 29) in

An XBox Game Pass subscription

Comparing last year’s big console releases, the PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X and S, can mostly feel like a game of semi-pointless Duelin’ Tech Specs. But there’s one arena where Microsoft has pretty much stomped Sony over the last year of each console’s life: digital game subscription plans, with the XBox Game Pass blowing PlayStation Now out of the water with its far more diverse and current library of content.Obviously, buying into either of these plans means accepting that a gaming library is less a “library,” and more a semi-shady Blockbuster Video that has the right to recall any and all of your DVDs as it sees fit. But the fact remains that gifting someone a year of Game Pass is gifting them access to a huge number of often-new titles, allowing them to broaden what they play immensely. By treating the subscription model as more than just a dumping ground for the hottest games of yesteryear, Microsoft has made Game Pass a heck of a potential gift.$14.99 per month, via Microsoft

 
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