Construct's Top 10 of 2021

     In a year of intense personal growth, I've also made plenty of time for my favorite hobby: playing video games. Here are the ten games that struck the deepest chord with me this year.

   Halo really hasn't changed all that much since Bungie's debut title shook the foundation of console first person shooters twenty years ago. Myself, however, I've changed a lot. To look at my relationship to the overstuffed space saga staring a stalwart power-armored man is to look at the way I've changed around it. Halo is, and has been, at it's core a story of a monotone power fantasy player stand-in and his digital holographic wife solving every problem with the business end of a gun. Whether a consortium of religious zealots trying to exterminate the entire galaxy, an unimaginably horrific parasite come to consume all sentient life, or the return of a highly advanced race come to take their "rightful" place at the throne of the known universe, power armor man Master Chief is here to shoot his way to victory, all while dropping the occasional one-liner to be remembered and repeated ad-nausea by teenagers the world over. 

    Since first stepping into the boots of the Master Chief, my personal politics, world outlook, taste, and general feeling towards a military power fantasy have changed irrevocably. Where I once saw a vast, mystifying sci-fi universe filled with endless potential, I now see a hastily slapped together pile of cliches, drenched in neon NERF-adjacent aesthetics with a healthy scooping of military fetishism that would make an NRA member blush. Despite this, Halo is still so damned fun, its core loop so meticulously sharpened to a razor sheen, that I can't help but love it. The thing that sets aside Halo, for me, from other games of its ilk, is Halo's insistence on bombarding the player with so many interesting decisions from millisecond to millisecond that I can fight the same battles, the same multiplayer modes, the same maps, over and over and over again and it never grows stale. That 343 studios has stripped out almost all recognizable tools (guns) from the Halo universe and put it all back together in such a meticulously crafted sandbox of carnage is nothing short of a miracle. No weapon is out of place, no decision is a wrong one, and every single second of Halo Infinite is a triumph of the core of what made Halo great in the first place all those years ago. 

    Video games have always had a sick fascination with violence. Conflict takes so many forms in our day-to-day lives, in books, films, etc.. But for video games, that conflict is so often boiled down to "how can we let players murder this other human being in a way that feels morally good but also in a way that makes covering the environment in realistically rendered blood and guts fun?" Hitman III is the final part of a sort of soft reboot trilogy of the classic Hitman franchise, a series that, for most of its runtime, has been about infiltrating a mind-bogglingly complex stage, murdering a select target (or targets), and exfiltrating with the rest of the population none-the-wiser. I love Hitman III for a lot of the same reasons I love Halo Infinite, in that it takes a long running idea and polishes it until it is the prime vision, the omega of an idea that was already great so many years ago. What I find most fascinating about Hitman's puzzle-box-murder-man simulator is that, on paper, it's a cruel idea. While killing is so much of what we do in video games, there's not a lot of games that wear the title "murder man" on their sleeve. We want violence to be a means to an end. In Hitman III, it's the entire point. However, IO Interactive has created a world in which you are a Man With A Gun, set loose into a massive area of unsuspecting enemies and civilians, and covering the walls with blood is the absolute least interesting thing you can do in any given stage. The true triumph of Hitman is making the player feel as though they are smarter than the stage, a ghost moving through a web of potential failure points, using social stealth to get as close to a target as they can, and then executing silently, efficiently, and, in its best moments, in a sort of ironic punishment, acting like some kind of vengeful god rather than a wetwork expert. It helps that a lot of the targets are billionaires, too. 

     From the moment that Adios begins, you know how it's going to end. Things can only go one way. The next few hours are soft, contemplative conversations by two characters on opposing sides of a moral conundrum, peppered with innuendo and subtle clues to their greater relationship in every word. Adios contains some of the finest voice acting in any game I've ever played. It feels simultaneously like a playable Tennessee Williams script and something wholly original and all its own.There's little "game" to Adios, but the activities peppered throughout the experience exist as a perfect vehicle for the relationship between the game's two major characters. Ever since the days of Dear Esther or Gone Home, the term "walking simulator" has been used to deride games that are more interested in allowing players to explore a space rather than present a mechanical challenge or a physical conflict. While these kinds of games have found their own niche and audience, Adios performs a magic trick that puts it in conversation with recent titles like What Remains of Edith Finch. Unlike Edith Finch, Adios does not use varying mechanics as metaphor or allegory, but rather as the sort of stage for the tone and type of conversation between the leads. The activities are just complex enough to keep the player engaged with what's going on, but simple enough that there's no chance one would become more distracted by the "game" part to lose track of what's really important here. After I completed it, Adios lingered in my home with me for days afterwards. I'm still thinking about it.

    The curse of being a fan of horror video games (and horror media in general) is the inability for most things to scare me anymore. It's easy to see the seams in horror games when you've experienced enough of them. You can get a "feel" for when there's a legitimate threat to your character's safety vs. a scripted event, when the game intends for you to run vs. when to fight, and in some circumstances, how to exploit the game's AI behaviors to avoid or bypass certain encounters. Mundaun's great accomplishment is the sense that you're never quite safe. Returning to a quiet mountain village that your character is familiar with but will be entirely alien to most people playing (Mundaun takes place in the mountains of Switzerland, and all characters speak Romansh, a language that has fewer than one-hundred-thousand speakers based on census data), gives Mundaun an incredible feeling of displacement. The entire game is presented in black and white, with everything hand drawn by director Michel Ziegler. Mundaun offers very little in the way of telegraphing upcoming scares or danger. At one point, you are walking around a small village investigating the death of someone from your past, the next you are being stalked by folkloric hay monsters or hiding from deathly bee-keepers. Mundaun expertly mixes the familiar and unfamiliar, both thematically and in its presentation, giving way to an incredible sense of unease that follows the player throughout the experience. 

    The Black Iris is so short and sweet that to tell too much about it would be to ruin it for those that wish to experience it. The pitch is something very familiar to horror fans -- investigate a strange research site and the disappeared or dead people who worked there. Find out what happened, and hope that you can make it out alive. What sets The Black Iris apart from other independent horror of its ilk is the tendency towards cosmic horror psychedelia. Quoting the visual language of directors like Panos Cosmatos , Richard Stanley, and even 2001-era Kubrick, The Black Iris is a captivating delve into the connection between the human Id and the infinite. 

    It's a good year for horror, but I personally could have never guessed that Nintendo would put out something this close to horror from an internal studio (the closest you could say is the last Metroid game, chronologically speaking, Metroid Fusion, or perhaps the Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, only published by the iconic gaming juggernaut). Still, rather than deal with horror directly, Dread is more concerned with atmospheric tension rather than outright terror. Sure, there are invincible robots hunting the player through certain sections of the map, but they're more a nuisance than outright terrifying. To play Metroid Dread is to experience, like Halo Infinite and Hitman III, the absolute peak of classic Metroid design. Dread doesn't reinvent the wheel, but what it does do is provide the most satisfying power curve of any entry in the series to date, the tightest gameplay, and the unease that fast, unrelenting death is awaiting around every corner. Throughout the game, protagonist Samus Aran is reminded by her AI companion that she is hopeless unprepared and under-powered for the challenges ahead. The player must push through anyway. The joy of this game is to be told by all metrics that you, the player, are not only doomed but cannot hope to even the odds, and then doing it anyway. It's the closest I've ever felt to Samus as a protagonist, as this is the only entry in the series to give her character the nuance that it deserves (while she remains a mostly silent protagonist) by simply putting the player and Samus in the same hopeless headspace. Developer Mercury Stream has triumphed here.

    I've already spoken at length about OMORI  here , but despite it coming so early in the year and having so much time to mull the game over, it remains one of my absolute favorites. Much of the writing about OMORI has done the game a disservice, I believe, in comparing it both to Earthbound and to Undertale, the latter being a game that likely came out while OMORI was already well into development (the project took developer omocat nearly seven years to make). OMORI is a game with an identity all its own. I personally feel it is more in conversation with subconscious horror games like Yume Nikki and Strange Telephone, more interested in the inner workings of the mind, trauma, and intimate relationships than the more universal themes of Earthbound and Undertale. The game not only has a fantastic sense of place, but rather places. Each section of the world feels completely different, yet wholly realized. OMORI's ability to tone shift from moment to moment is masterful, and the game excels at being more than just "about trauma" but rather about healing, and the strength and work it takes to heal.

    I love Inscryption. Everyone loves Inscryption. To play Inscryption is to watch a master magician at work, to see a magic trick performed, deconstructed, then rebuilt into something new entirely right before your eyes. Lead designer Daniel Mullins is simply one of the most exciting voices in the games industry. His ability to have his finger on the pulse of player expectation to such a specific degree makes him feel like some sort of mind-reader rather than a game developer. There's not much more I can say about Inscryption that has not already been said, ad nauseam, by writers and critics much more deft and precise than myself. Play this game.

    Like OMORI, I've already written about Fallow at length here. Fallow is a bleak, dreary, yet hopeful game. If OMORI is about the work healing requires, Fallow is about that work explicitly. It's about the terror, the isolation, the missteps, and the confusion that comes with building something better for yourself and for those around you. I've already greatly admired designer Ada Rook as an artist and musician, and now she excels as a game creator and director as well. Much like Rook's solo work and with Black Dresses, Fallow takes something spiky, hard to look at, hard to swallow, and puts it in a familiar context. For Black Dresses, that can be pop and rock hooks. For Fallow, it's the spirit of classic Game Boy adventure titles from the childhood of many an adult that might play it these days. I played through Fallow over two late night sessions, deep in depression, alone in my bedroom as my dog snored gently beside me. To watch the credits roll, take off my headphones, and stare out into the loud night of Brooklyn renewed with a terror and vigor of building a new life was an experience I'll likely never have again.

    Cruelty Squad is about as punk rock as video games can get. There's nothing appealing about this game. It's an eyesore. The music is grating and abrasive. The controls are awkward, the game is blisteringly difficult and obtuse. Core mechanics are never explained. The menus are difficult to parse. The list goes on. However, these aspects of the game are grating in a way that betrays mastery, not incompetency. Cruelty Squad is not ugly in a way that implies that developer Consumer Softproducts has poor taste, but rather, that they know exactly what works and exactly how to smash it to pieces to rebuild it into a shambling golem that exists fully as critique. Cruelty Squad is ugliness with a point.

    To call Cruelty Squad a "satire" or a "critique of capitalism" or "a dissection of video game violence" is to simplify what has been achieved here. Cruelty Squad is a depraved mirror, a furious screed so scathingly written that it feels as though it hates you the player nearly as much as it hates the systems in our world that would allow such a grotesquerie to exist. My first session with the game lasted about four hours and I uninstalled it thinking that I had had enough. I went to bed and spent the first hour tossing and turning, unable to stop thinking about it. Cruelty Squad casts a sick spell on you, daring you to peel back its disgusting, pus-covered layers and delve into grotesque repetition. To master Cruelty Squad is to spend the first several hours painstakingly checking corners, hoping that the laser-accurate enemies don't end an otherwise perfect twenty minute mission in seconds. The player will then spend the rest of their time in the game flying through stages as a whirlwind of body-horror-carnage, swinging from a rope of their own intestines and propelling themselves via jet-stream of biowaste to master murdering some executive in record time. 

    I spoke earlier about video games' complicated relationship to violence. Hitman III uses violence as a fail-state, a crutch to lean on when things have gone awry. Cruelty Squad demands violence. It hopes that you, the player, will commit atrocious violence, again and again, replacing your natural flesh with more tools to commit more robust, puke-splattered carnage, all while becoming more and more desensitized to it. Cruelty Squad's first seconds feature the player character, blankly staring at the bathroom wall in a shower. Their boss calls. "Hey. It's me. Did I wake you from your depression nap?". Then you're shown a corpse in a car, head exploded open, blood painting the interior. Whether or not you choose to skip it, this intro plays every time you launch the game. Wake up, commit atrocious murder of atrocious people, rinse, repeat. It's an ugly, fascinating game, and I can't imagine something more of the moment than Cruelty Squad.