As usual, a significant amount of my gaming time this year was spent mopping up the greats of the year gone by. That I played any 2021 releases at all can largely be attributed to Game Pass — and my fear of games leaving the service before I’ve had a chance to play them.

Here are my top 5 for 2021:

  1. NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… (PC)
  2. CrossCode: A New Home (PC)
  3. Psychonauts 2 (Xbox Game Pass)
  4. Deathloop (PC)
  5. Twelve Minutes and The Forgotten City (Xbox Game Pass)

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to play Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Inscryption or Tales of Arise before writing this list. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is missing primarily because of the issues plaguing its launch; at time of writing, I can only really review its login screen.

NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487…

NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487… managed to achieve the seemingly impossible: it was exactly the same game that I remembered playing on the Xbox 360 eleven years ago and yet also better in every way.

I remember the original NieR as a somewhat clunky game with a great story, interesting characters and a phenomenal soundtrack, marred by tedious fetch quests. None of this has really changed, but improvements to Replicant‘s combat make for a smoother and overall more enjoyable experience.

CrossCode: A New Home

I first stumbled across CrossCode when it was in Early Access, and was blown away by its crisp pixel art and how good it feels to play. It was my GOTY in 2018, and the CrossCode: A New Home DLC only narrowly missed out on the top spot this year.

Picking up where the original game finished, A New Home adds some new areas to explore, a large final dungeon, and ties up the story’s loose ends (previously, the game ended with a “To be continued…”). Now is a great time to pick up CrossCode if you haven’t played it before.

Psychonauts 2

The first thing that I noticed about Psychonauts 2 is that it’s genuinely quite funny. Attempts at humor in games usually don’t click for me, but Psychonauts 2 elicited several laughs. Of course, that alone isn’t a strong enough reason to grace this list.

Each of the “levels” in Psychonauts 2 represents a different character’s brain, giving Double Fine the freedom to experiment with environment design and mechanics in a way that many games don’t. Spaces warp and connect to one another in non-physical ways, and individual “levels” somehow manage to weave together different environments (e.g. an office block and the inside of a mouth) without it ever seeming too strange. That there are around a dozen brains with their own distinct look and feel is even more impressive.

Deathloop

For reasons unknown, 2021 saw the release of many games featuring protagonists stuck in a seemingly endless time loop, reliving the same day over and over… Several such games appear on this list, but Deathloop edged out slightly in front.

Deathloop is basically a roguelike version of Dishonored set in the 70s: the powers and weapons at your disposal are basically the same, and the core gameplay mechanics are unchanged. Where Deathloop innovates is in tasking you with killing all of your targets within a single day — something that you cannot do without first familiarizing yourself with the game’s locations and its characters’ routines.

Twelve Minutes & The Forgotten City

My experiences with Twelve Minutes and The Forgotten City were similar enough that I find it very difficult to rank one above the other. Both are largely driven by their narrative, both rely on learning something in one loop and utilizing it in the next, and the mysteries at the core of both stories are engaging enough that my wife and I completed them over the course of a single weekend.

Neither is a game that I can imagine myself revisiting any time soon, but they’re well worth playing through — especially while they are both available on Game Pass!