The best games of 2021 so far

2021 has been a bit of a ghost town for video games—and not just because one of the most prominent titles of the year took place in an escalating series of themed haunted houses. Although the steady rain of remakes, reissues, re-releases, and other all-purpose retreads continues to fall on the industry’s head, the slowdowns imposed by the COVID-19 lockdowns have led to a certain lightness on the medium’s release schedules in the first half of this year. Not even the ramping up of the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 (now sporting five whole console-exclusive games!) has managed to spawn much of a gold rush—especially since studios are as likely to divert energy toward next-gen updates of existing games than to develop expensive new projects of their own.

Still, though: The (relatively) low volume of releases hasn’t stopped 2021 from having some fantastic titles hidden in among the weeds. Indie horror games, big-budget murder simulators, and even—yes—a few remakes have all found inspiration in the quiet, while some of gaming’s most beloved franchises managed to top themselves with new innovations. As such, we’re celebrating our favorite games of 2021 so far, letting you know what were The Games We Liked—and why we liked them—in the first half of the year.

I liked Bowser’s Fury because it felt like watching the Mario series evolve in real-time. It would have been very easy for Nintendo to slap a few (cat) bells and whistles onto its re-release of underplayed WiiU title Super Mario 3D Land, hook in some online multiplayer, and call it good. Instead, the endlessly innovating publisher crafted Bowser’s Fury, a near-perfect distillation of everything that makes 3D Mario games great, minus all the bloat and frustrations that tend to creep in around the edges. Merging ideas from Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Galaxy, and even a little of the open-world hostility of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, Bowser’s Fury cuts down on the size of the world our plucky plumber (and his temporary partner, Bowser Jr.) are exploring, but never skimps on the series-high running, jumping, and stomping action that make this a bite-sized-but-thrilling experience. [William Hughes]

I liked Fantasian because it includes one of the smartest innovations in role-playing game history. Fantasian, exclusive to the Apple Arcade and developed by Mistwalker (the studio founded by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi), is more or less a standard turn-based Japanese role-playing game where you travel around a world and fight monsters that randomly appear. It’s a lot like Final Fantasy, in other words, but with one twist: Rather than getting interrupted by the random fights when you’re trying to walk around, you can save the fights for later and then take them on all at once at your leisure. That means you won’t get stuck fighting some stupid bird or whatever while you’re in a waiting room (or, you know, on the toilet), because you can just bank every stupid bird for when you have more time. It’s a perfect phone-friendly twist on long-standing genre conventions. [Sam Barsanti]

I liked Hitman 3 because it rewards pathological perfectionism. Part of the appeal of IO’s recent Hitman trilogy is the sheer volume of assassination methods; the games are vast playgrounds of simulated murder, teeing up (literally, sometimes) elaborate, hilarious “accidents” that you can trigger like Rube Goldberg devices of doom. But among the more baroque views to a kill, there’s also a route for the hopeless precisionists out there: the classic “suit only, silent assassin” challenge, in which the player is tasked with completing an assignment without getting spotted, killing anyone but the target, leaving behind evidence, or changing into a disguise. It’s an approach that requires an almost complete memorization of each level, as well as immaculate timing—a control freak’s paradise, in other words. So while yours truly got the intended laugh out of tricking some snooty aristocratic terrorist into stepping into an industrial grape crusher, it was no match for the trial-and-error satisfaction I felt after finding the only blindspot on my target’s preset walking path, where I did the dirty deed just beyond the sightline of a few dozen NPCs. [A.A. Dowd]

I liked The Initiative because it kept surprising me. The legacy board game (published by Unexpected Games) uses a puzzle-filled comic book to tell a sweet story about four kids who are, themselves, playing a board game, and your successes help them get through emotional crises. The actual board game starts off simple but keeps changing things up with the help of ingeniously hidden components that reveal new rules and mechanics. 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. [Samantha Nelson]

I liked It Takes Two because completing it is fundamentally insurmountable without sacrifice. The title of this colorful two-player co-op is more than a mere navigational instruction, as the game increasingly requires you and your partner to compromise and trade off in letting the other shine. Directed by Josef Fares with his team at Hazelight Studios, It Takes Two is equal parts delightful, vibrant adventure sequences that thrive on smooth, inventive gameplay, and heartbreaking cutscenes that cause a genuine existential crisis about divorce’s devastating effect on children. Some of my favorite level designs include the innards of a jukebox, a mold kingdom in an abandoned greenhouse, and a palatial ski resort within a snow globe. The game is chock-full of winking references to classic video games of yore like a Mario Kart Rainbow Road homage race, a dungeon crawler level à la Diablo, and even a cameo by The Legend Of Zelda’s green rupees. My domestic partner and I played together while he was away on a work trip, and having these hilarious, imaginative, thoughtful worlds provide the settings for our daily check-ins proved to be one of our favorite game experiences to date. We laughed, we cried, and the gorgeously-written underlying story made us promise to continue sacrificing for each other. We’ll never forgive Fares for Cutie the elephant, though. [Liz Arcury]

I liked Mass Effect: Legendary Edition because Mass Effect 2 is still one of the best games ever made, and the other two entries in the series… also exist. The basic structure of Mass Effect 2 is brilliant, and ever since it originally came out in 2010, I’ve been hoping for literally any other game to just straight-up rip it off. Apparently, though, I had to wait for Bioware to rerelease a higher-definition version of the Mass Effect trilogy, because there’s still nothing like that second game. Basically, Martin Sheen gives you a suicide mission to save the galaxy, and your odds of succeeding get better as you assemble a team, level them up, and complete special story missions to get to know them better. It’s great, there are real (video game) stakes to failing, and even after 11 years nobody has managed to properly copy it. [Sam Barsanti]

I liked Monster Hunter: Rise because it made me look at more than just the big, beautiful monsters. As a fairly recent convert to the Monster Hunter franchise (after falling in love with 2018's Monster Hunter: World), I was initially underwhelmed by the series’ transition to the Switch. But what Rise lacks in graphical flashiness, it makes up for by adding new depths to the games’ beast-bashing combat—and by making exploring its world feel absolutely vital to success. Granting players a ready-use grappling hook not only changes how you fend off a giant fire dinosaur (the better to turn it into pants), but also how you stalk it across the map, lending depth to the still-thrilling boss battles that make up the core of the series’ appeal. [William Hughes]

I liked Resident Evil: Village because AGGHHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?? Twenty-five years in, Resident Evil still knows how to keep fans on their toes, at least periodically—by, say, ditching the walking dead for a mob of townsfolk that just keep coming or relocating to a Texas Chainsaw bayou glimpsed through a freshly first-person perspective. Village isn’t a complete reinvention like those prior triumphs; in fact, it basically combines the two into a wacky greatest-hits adventure. But the game throws plenty of curveballs over its intense few hours of gothic action, including a brief detour into… wait. This house is weirdly quiet for a Resident Evil location. More like something out of that other famed survival-horror series. Hey, what happened to all my guns? Shit, why did the lights just go off? And where’s that crying coming from? And… hold on… I see something in the darkness, it’s moving into the light it’s… it’s… WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? OH MY GOD! BURN IT WITH FIRE! OH SHIT, OH GOD, IT’S COMING INTO THE ROOM! CAN IT SEE ME UNDER THE BED? WORK, ELEVATOR, WORK! WHY THE FUCK AM I PLAYING THIS ALONE AT 2AM?? AGHHHHHHHHHH! [A.A. Dowd]

I liked Returnal because it was a perfect blend of form and function. Housemarque’s sci-fi riff on death, madness, and the appeal of shiny spooky tentacles was, hands-down, my favorite game of the first half of 2021. Partly that’s because the Resogun studio did a damn fine job of crafting an action game that imports the mechanics of the now venerable roguelike movement—focused as it is on the rhythms of trying, failing, and then trying again—into the bloodstream of big-budget console gaming. But it’s also because the game’s obsession with repetition perfectly ties into the story of astronaut Selene, who finds herself dying, again and again and again, on the soil of an alien planet where guilt can be as lethal as the wildlife that roams its surface. While other PS5 exclusives felt big this year—most notably Ratchet And Clank: Rift Apart, which just barely missed our list—Returnal is one of the only next-generation games to feel truly, invigoratingly new. [William Hughes]