Chris Dow's Completed Games of 2021 Part 1 (#1-20)
A few years back, whilst procrastinating at work, I found that the safe search filter employed by the school I taught at did not block the games message board Resetera.
It became a bit of a ritual to check new threads in between classes, chucking my tuppence in here and there to help me stay sane throughout the academic year.
One thread in particular through fundamentally helped me to learn to love games again in a way I hadn’t for some time: Wozzer’s 52 Games. 1 Year.
The post encouraged people to aim to finish the equivalent of one game a week across the calendar year. People were free to log their completions any way they wanted. A short review. A score out of ten. Number of hours it took to beat.
Contributing to this became a bit of a ritual for me. It made me finish games I otherwise may have dropped, and, when I first started this challenge in early 2018, actually came at a time when O3C did not exist and as such was a way for me to articulate my thoughts on a little of what I was playing.
I have succeeded in beating this challenge year on year, from 2018 to now. Whilst Resetera is sadly blocked by my current school’s firewall, I still dip in here and there to update my playlog.
And now, it’s here. Across multiple articles, sit back and enjoy my thoughts on a LOT of videogames that I completed this year.
The little ‘4’ on my 3DS Mii represents the fact I’ve beaten this silly 52 Games challenge for four years running!
1. Jumping Joe and Friends (Switch) - 01/01/21 - ~4 hours (100% Unlockables)
I assume this was a mobile game at some point.
Endless runner style tower ascension. Use either L or R to jump to the platform above and to your left or right respectively. Avoid obstacles, collect coins, Spin a wheel of fortune at the end of a run to see if you unlock anything special for your next go.
There isn’t an ‘ending’ per se, but there are several characters to unlock and upgrade, as well as two additional challenge modes that unlock once you hit certain heights in a regular arcade game.
Was fun enough to have on in the background whilst I listened to podcasts or watched YouTube. Controls are nicely responsive and allow you to get into a nice hurdy gurdy rhythm once you understand the challenges, obstacles and enemies you’ll come across. Probably cost about nine pence in a sale as well, so I definitely feel I got my money’s worth.
2. Can Androids Pray (Switch) - 01/01/21 - ~30mins (Credits x2)
An incredibly heavy visual novel vignette about mortality, consciousness, and religion. Proper existentialist stuff.
There’s a song by the power violence band Magrudergrind that samples this scene from Midnight Express, and even with Can Androids Pray pumping out its excellent soundtrack, it was this that played in my head throughout my two trips to the game’s 15 minute conclusion.
It’s a bit like the Subsurface games by Mike Bithell, but more focussed. One conversation that takes place in one place, between two beings.
Absolutely worth a play, but make sure you’re prepared for its short run length.
3. Guitar Hero (Caribiner LCD *Thing*) - 01/01/21 - ~1 hour (End)
My brother is good at gift giving. After realising I’d already bought myself a Mario Game + Watch, and returning the one he’d bought me for Christmas, he went back to the drawing board, and remembering my love for both Guitar Hero and Clone Hero streamer Acai, bought me this relative monstrosity.
10 ‘songs’ (read: 30 bitcrushed clips). I beat the game on the hardest difficulty, but only after a good few attempts to learn exactly how the game wants you to play it.
Hit notes early. I mean really early.
Don’t listen for the music as the notes don’t line up, and the truncated riffs mean its almost impossible to predict where notes will head next.
Whammy like your life depends on it with each held note as they will break your combo consistently, and so wailing for points becomes the only way to hit the score barrier of each song tier.
A great laugh.
4. Dadish (Switch) - 02/01/21 - ~4 hours (100%)
Bought largely on the strength of his central conceit - you’re a radish who’s a dad - this quirky, SNES style platformer is really great.
Quick stages that follow a logical difficulty curve, a hidden collectible on almost every stage. The only low point are the bosses - all involve frustrating timing that has you avoiding the enemy whilst triggering traps for them to jump on. One boss like this? Fine. All of them? Ehhh.
Looks nice, sounds nice, and has a good sense of humour in its writing to boot.
Dad-ish. A Dad who’s a radish. Dadish. Get it?
5. Gunman Clive HD (Switch) - 06/01/21 - ~4 hours (100% No Damage)
I like this game. I liked it back on the 3DS a million years back, and I liked it in its HD form on the Wii U. When it popped up on the eShop for the Switch, heavily discounted (of course), I was always going to pick it up again.
I beat the main game’s 20 levels in about an hour? It then took about 2 or so hours of grinding to beat each stage without taking damage. I was drawn in by the little star you get on the overworld map to represent your achievement, and assumed you’d get something at the end for your efforts. You don’t.
I might go back at some point to try one of the other characters - they all change up the game significantly, so there’s decent replay there, but equally I might move on to Gunman Clive 2. Or, y’know, another game entirely.
6. Stilstand (PC) - 09/01/21 - ~1 hour (Credits)
We need a name for this genre. Part graphic novel, part interactive narrative experience, part micro games. Florence fell into this category, and Stilstand does too with its hour long tale of a young woman’s depressive episode.
The art is fantastic. All scribbled biro lines or rushed pencil work. The interactive elements actually take away from the art as opposed to draw you in, as there’s suddenly a clear disconnect between the thing you are moving or controlling, and the curated backdrops. It’s really nice to look at though, and the recurring theme of an entirely scribbled in black background to represent the real pit of her despair feels incredibly tangible as a result of being hand-rendered.
It doesn’t have a rounded, happy ending, and nor does it need it. Sometimes life is about living through something, and sometimes that something doesn’t have a neat stopping point. We want to enact change to allow things to get better for the protagonist, but, we’re mostly passive in this story and have to hope that the change comes from within, supported by the persistent friends in her life who keep attempting to extend a hand even when they find themselves mostly rebuked.
It’s good.
7. V.O.I.D.+ (Switch) - 10/01/21 - ~2 hours (‘Ending’)
Ploids Saga on the Switch collects together 4 games by developer Nape Games. V.O.I.D.+ is the first in the series. It’s not very good.
50 odd levels, each which can be played with one of two characters. One has a blaster (a la Mega Man) but can also bounce on enemies to dispatch them. You have a health bar and can take several hits before death. The other has no weapon, but can triple jump (!!), and dies in a single hit. This essentially sets the difficulty of the game at ‘incredibly easy’ or ‘impossible’. I went with easy.
Confusingly, when you finish the last level, there is no final story cutscene like there has been in between every other world, no fanfare, no credits, nothing. You’re just plonked into a really confusing world select screen, in case you want to go back and do some of it again?
The game also lets you select “UNLEASHED MODE (All levels unlocked)” or “UNLEASHED CLASSIC MODE (All levels unlocked in classic V.O.I.D. gameplay)”. No, I do not know what either of these mean.
8. Humanoid 37 (PC) - 11/01/21 - ~45mins (Credits)
Flash is dead. But with BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint archive project, long live Flash?
On a podcast episode way back when, we debated what were the ‘weirdest’ games we’d played. Good old Minty Booth offered Humanoid 37, a weird point and click / escape the room Flash experience that made the esoteric solutions of traditional adventure games make sense by way of ensuring that nothing made sense.
It’s absolutely great. A quick, snappy experience with fantastic hand drawn art, and droning music and audio that puts me in mind of Thumper.
There are nearly 80,000 games and animations currently archived in Flashpoint. Even if only 10% of that number is as good as Humanoid 37, hell, make it 1% if you’re being conservative, there’s some truly good shit to dig through and find.
9. Advanced GTA (GBA) - 13/01/21 - ~5 hours (Credits)
When the GBA launched, I remember reading about this game on Eurogamer. I don’t know why it’s lived in the back of my head for so long, but there we go. I’ve made an effort to beat it a few times, but always tailed off. Not this time though! Over the course of a few hours here and there, snuggled up before bed, or whilst half watching stuff on TV, I’ve finally got through to the credits.
The game is a surprisingly fun racer, with great handling for the handheld, and a nice visual style that mixes mode-7 style scaling tracks, with diddy, digitised cars that are scaled and rotated a la the sprites in Doom.
It’s also a surprisingly tough game, following the Ridge Racer model of starting you almost a full lap behind the pack leaders in each race. At first I could make up the pace pretty easily, but very quickly it becomes a real test of your abilities to reach 1st place.
By the final cup, I was having to attempt some tracks maybe 50 times each before I could even register a third place finish. Luckily, the credits roll as long as you can come in the top 3 in every challenge, and so, even though I didn’t complete it 100%, I’m happy.
I went on to talk about this game with Jeremy Harvey on the Podcast Advance show. Give it a listen!
10. Sonic R (PC) - 13/01/21 - ~1 hours (100%)
I love this game. I attempt to justify why in an old episode, here.
11. Paratopic (Switch) - 16/01/21 - ~2 hours (100%)
Late last year I beat MacBat64 and felt it was one of the best examples of a developer mimicking the aesthetic of Rare titles on the N64. Here we are in 2021, and Paratopic is the best game I’ve played that mimics the cursed PS1 aesthetic by a long way.
The only thing it eschews is the warping affine textures normally present on geometry, BUT it makes up for it by doubling down on this effect on facial models.
This is a weird narrative title, essentially a walking simulator, which cribs from the jumpcuts of 30 Flights of Loving to tell its story of 3 characters linked by mysterious videotapes.
The look is great, the writing is good, the elements of interactivity lift this above many ‘hold forward and let the story happen’ games that fall into this genre.
A weird, Lynchian nightmare. Absolutely worth a play.
12. Cycle 28 (Switch) - 18/01/21 - ~6 hours (100%)
This is a strange top down space shooter that uses a momentum based control scheme like Asteroids. Your character is caught in a groundhog day style time loop and the game uses this premise to justify the push to increase your high score on each play. Story is drip fed to you after each death, and upgrades are unlocked to help you on your high scoring quest each time you beat your personal best.
It’s aggravatingly difficult, yet I was compelled to go back again and again. The control scheme is nuanced and movement can be really tough to nail, but when you start to be able to consistently drift between projectiles and circle around enemies by feathering your throttle and braking using the kickback of your weapon it feels pretty special.
There aren’t any achievements in the Switch version of the game, so I based my completion on those on Steam. I get the impression there are still a few hidden treasures in the game as it’s loosely tied to an ongoing ARG, but I can’t be bothered to get sucked into all that.
13. Awesome Pea 2 (Vita) - 20/01/21 - ~2 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
I beat the first Awesome Pea last year and really enjoyed it, even if it was a bit unpolished in places.
The second game is smoother, with level design that I’d say is better overall. Quite a few stages seem to be built from the same chunks as others though which makes it feel a bit lazy - a real budget experience.
The difficulty ramped nicely though, and I did enjoy the experience overall. I sometimes get annoyed by games that rely on double jumps to cover the cracks of poor stage design, but here the arc of a double jump is part of the route through a stage, and it was fun to master the momentum and weight of the little pea for a second time.
Awesome Pea and its sequel, as well as two other games from the same developer were immortalised on a physical Switch collection by Premium Edition Games. We spoke with JP, one of the founders of this relatively new boutique publisher at the start of season 3.
14. Spoiler Alert (PC) - 21/01/21 - ~2 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
I do like a gimmick game. Create a weird mechanic, then squeeze it for all its worth in a short sugary hit of a game.
The premise of Spoiler Alert is that the game has been beaten, and you’re running backwards to retrace your steps to the start of the game - unkilling enemies, replacing coins you picked up, being inversely launched by bounce pads, etc. Think the ending of Braid but without any of the symbolism.
The game is pretty sloppy which does let it down. Input is smudgy at best, meaning that you’ll often miss jumps that you know you should have nailed. BUT, it’s cheap, stages never last more than about 12 seconds at full tilt, and the central premise is fun enough that I didn’t care too much when I got hung up on a stage for a few minutes.
15. Go! Fish Go! (Switch) - 21/01/21 - ~4 hours (100%)
Another endless runner style game. Nowhere near as mechanically fun as Jumping Joe though. It’s from the same developers who put out Miami Rush, a game that I played last year, and that was way more enjoyable as well, as the gameplay itself was just a bit more expansive and nuanced. This is incredibly simple ‘choose one of three lanes to avoid oncoming obstacles’ and that’s it.
There’s an in game achievement system, unlockable characters, blah, blah blah. I did it all for some reason whilst listening to podcasts.
16. Reed Remastered (Vita) - 21/01/21 - ~1 hour (All Trophies[PSN])
A really nice, 50 stage ‘punisher’. That is, a platformer with tricky obstacles, instadeath, the works. A Meat Boy-lite?
This is a phenomenal looking and sounding game, which really sings as a quick handheld experience. Suits the Vita down to the ground.
I have to give Ratalaika credit for being one of the last bastions for Vita ports and releases, but I have to pipe up about their trophy implementation - something I'd already whinged about on an O3C episode. Easy trophies? Fine, fill your boots. But it really devalues an experience like this when your trophies actively stop you wanting to finish a game. As I mentioned, Reed Remastered has 50 stages. The platinum trophy requires you to get to stage 44 only. Why?
Genuinely don't know why this decision was made. 45-50 took me an extra 5 minutes at most. Why on earth would Ratalaika implement a system like that that would make trophy hunters just uninstall the game 5 minutes before the end? Before the story wraps, before the credits?
This has been in the case in several of their ports that I’d beaten over the last few years: League of Evil, Milo's Quest, Metagal, Peasant Knight. Play a bit, get your reward, then if you fancy, just uninstall.
A real shame as ALL of those games, and Reed Remastered too, deserve more love. Great indie titles that are a great fit for the handheld.
17. Reed 2 (Vita) - 21/01/21 - ~90mins (All Trophies [PSN])
So, I cannonballed straight into the sequel.
It still looks great, even if it loses some of the shader and effects work from the first game. It’s harder overall, I think? Probably due to the levels requiring you to find multiple ‘keys’ before you can exit instead of just one which extends their size and playtime.
The trophy system is still stupid - platinum unlocked on level 29 out of 49 this time - but the game itself is good, and again, fits the handheld really, really well. These sorts of quick, punishing platformers became ten-a-penny on the console in its final years, and although people complained they weren’t playing the next Uncharted spin-off, games like Reed and Reed 2 are arguably much better fits for a pocket sized handheld.
What’s next?
18. Lewdapocalypse (PC) - 22/01/21 - ~5 hours (All Achievements [Steam])
Would you believe me if I said this was a good game?
Stand in place, and shoot oncoming zombie hordes in a weird parody of Resident Evil 3. Think the type of storyline whacked in an adult parody film, and you’re most of the way there.
It’s decent though! There’s a sort of adolescent charm to it all, and it’s wrapped up in a perfectly serviceable shooter.
NSFW in any capacity though, obviously.
19. Epic Word Search Collection (Vita) - 24/01/21 - ~2 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
I enjoy a wordsearch now and again, I mean, who doesn’t?
I did not enjoy this particular implementation of the wordsearch though. Multiple puzzles smacked down next to each other, each so over-filled with clues, that to play it normally would take even a seasoned pro about a hundred years to beat properly.
The main problem, is how little of the whole puzzle you can see on screen at one time. Maybe 1% of the entire board? In the same way jigsaws are usually pretty miserable when made digital unless grossly simplified, this sort of puzzle just doesn’t work digitally at this scale.
I know I complained about Ratalaika’s implementation of trophies a few games ago, but I’m actually grateful that the developer here has mandated that you only need to 100% one chunk of each of the four boards, then find specific key words spread out over the remaining puzzles as otherwise this would take about a billion years to finish legitimately.
There is absolutely no way, even with the in-built hint system, that I would have persevered much further than this point, so props to the developer in this case for making the game both beatable and reasonable.
20. Pinstripe (Switch) - 01/02/21 - ~3 hours (Credits)
This was a nice surprise! A narrative, platform puzzler. Beautiful art, some excellent voice work, and a reasonably satisfying metaphorical adventure which all becomes clearer as you work towards the game’s climax.
A very Tim Burton-y aesthetic makes it a real joy to look at, and the music is similarly strong. That the entire game was developed by one person over the course of five years makes me appreciate it all even more, although finding out at the credits that one of the voice artists was PewDiePie kinda soured me a little on its production.
There are extra bits and bobs you can unlock in a second playthrough, and I think I’d like to go back at some point. As soon as the credits rolled I did restart to try and mop things up, but in my haste rushed past a collectible, and then realised you can’t restart a playthrough, only persevere to the credits or wipe your whole game at system level. Whoops.
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Pop back in a few days for the next thought splurge, with numbers #21-40 on the beaten games list!
