The 'First On The List' Award for Game That I Think Is Genuinely Special and Everyone Should Play It Please

As well as The Worst Review I Wrote This Year Award

I made the terrible mistake of making a one line joke review when I first reviewed this game and only added a real review after the fact so I assume most people didn't read it so I want to take this opportunity to reiterate just how genuinely good this game is. It's so sweet and such a lovely little thing that is about BDSM in a romantic relationship, about caring for your partner, about being sensitive to their needs. It's unlike any other piece of media I've seen and I think it deserves way more attention than it's gotten.

Best Game to Play with My Girlfriend

She's good at video games and carried me through two playthroughs of this because I'm terrible at making good or viable builds. I have a lot of little complaints about this game that make it feel kind of tedious but on the whole it was a good way to spend 140 hours with someone I love.

Best Hand Holding

I'm only partway through this game (maybe halfway? probably less) and, honestly, I'm feeling pretty apathetic about a lot of it. All the mechanical systems are largely fine but nothing special, the story seems fine enough, it's all well and good. But the real treasure here is how unabashedly gay this game is. These girls love other girls in a romantic way and it is core to the main plot of the game. The first Blue Reflection game left all the queerness as subtext - your 'friendship' meter is shaped like a heart! The two of you 'hang out' together at popular date locations! - but Second Light goes all-in on it. Your whole party is basically one big polycule and it's wonderful. Even if the combat is a bit of a grind and I haven't felt a strong draw to push through the game, I'm absolutely loving dating all these girls and holding hands while walking around our weird school-out-of-time.

Also, I just really fucking love the magical girl genre. It's so good. And it's wildly under-represented in video games. There's been a handful of games here and there but it's pretty dire overall. Enough gritty soldiers or sad dads or whatever, give me more magical girls.

Best Fate of a Landlord

Good game. Interesting puzzles, cute art, fun writing. Fuck landlords, every landlord should be turned into stew.

Best Game About the Pandemic

A lot of people made a lot of games about the pandemic, peoples' experience(s) in lockdown, etc, but this one was my personal favorite. It's good and it's personal and oh my god how is this pandemic still going on why is capitalism like this why are we living in hell why are people acting like this is all fine and normal oh my god we're doomed

Best Game That Technically Came Out Last Year But Only On Stadia So No One Cares Because No One Has Stadia

lol Stadia, remember Stadia?

This still isn't out on Steam even though it's been a full year since the Stadia release. Whenever it's out, I hope people check this game out, it's just some chill ocean explorin' and old derelict building climbin'. Great vibes, honestly.

Best Monsterfucking

It's a very touching visual novel about a woman who really wants to fuck some kind of supernatural creature man and the town that they live in which may or may not be trying to kill them. It's great and it's free and it's short and it's even voice acted. Play this thing, it's like not even an hour long.

Second-Best Monster Fucking

I did it. I finally did it. I finally played Bloodborne. It's really good. It might've had some of my favorite bosses in any of the Souls games that I've played and when I look back on it, it probably has the highest average experience. Like, the highs are high and the lows are not as low as other FromSoft games' lows, so the overall experience feels better. It's just... so good. Except for Father Gascoigne, he can fuck off.

Also wins the Best Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower Award, congratulations to Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower, the ultimate wife.

Best "Papers, Please"-like

Ever since Papers, Please came out, there's been a handful of games that attempt to go for the same "un-fun yet compelling" gameplay combined with a story that is both interesting to work through and has something to say about the world. I think most of the games that have attempted that have missed the mark by either making the game too miserable to want to play or having a weak message or a story that simply isn't worth engaging with. But I think Frick Frack actually strikes the balance relatively well. Initially, the actual game of digging into the ground was fun but I quickly figured out the 'best' strategy for it, repeated it every day, and it became a huge slog to keep doing. And while the story and money management aspects are pretty directly influenced by Papers, Please, it still works. 'If it ain't broke', y'know?

Best Cactus

Look at that little buddy. What a perfect little friend. I'm a fool so I keep buying puzzle games that are way too hard for my tiny brain to figure out and this is one of the examples to add to the pile. It's very cute and such a clever set of mechanics and it unfortunately seemed to fly under nearly everybodies radars. This cute lil succulent buddy deserves better than what the gamers have given them.

Game I Feel Very Conflicted About But Think About Near-Constantly

This game has stuck in my mind in a way that I really didn't expect. I've got a lot of love and respect for this even if I think it kind of misses the mark. I like this game. But also I think it's kinda bad. But also it's really good. You should play it. Or maybe you shouldn't. Fuck, I dunno.

I'm not too sure what else to say that isn't already in my review but I don't want to just link to the review (but I will absolutely do that anyway: https://www.backloggd.com/u/AlexaLily/review/145648/ )

Best Game with an Awful Ending

I really liked this game! It was a pleasant little surprise! Except for the ending! It's really bad! It's so bad that I've blocked it out of my memory and can't even remember what happened! But I sure do remember disliking it a lot!

Best Racing Game

I'm terrible at racing/driving games so really the ultimate example of the genre, for me, is a game in which you do no actual driving and just watch some cars scoot around, absorb the vibes. and eat some pears.

Best Game to Play at 3am When You've Woken Up Way Too Early, Feel Kinda Sick, and Are Really Depressed

I got this for free on PS4 from some giveaway and it had been sitting there for literal months and then one day I woke up at about 3 in the morning, sick as hell and depressed, and played through the whole thing in one sitting and it was a fantastic experience. Fish are great lil friends and swimming around with them was a great time. BUT it didn't cure my cold or my depression, what the hell.

Best Game To Get Me To Fiddle Around With A Weird Emulator

I've never had a DS and this was the first year I played around with emulating it at all and this was, by far, my favorite DS game of the year. It's an absolute banger. Even though I had several moments of having to stop and figure out how the hell I was supposed to blow into the emulator's microphone or how I was supposed to close the DS lid without closing the emulator but thankfully whatever nerds made the emulator thought of everything and made a bunch of keybinds for every functionality you could think of. Thank you nerds, shout outs to nerds.

Best Grandma

This is the ideal grandma. You may not like it, but this is what peak grandma looks like.

Best Game About Delivering the Mail

A surprisingly contentious category this year, Postbird is a shining example of the genre from a student team. You talk to people, you collect bits and bobs, and sometimes you even deliver some packages to people.

I like to think that "Postbird" is actually Post-bird because you play as a humanoid bird person, as if you have evolved past the stage of simply being "bird".

"They Nailed It" Award for Absolutely Nailing It

Something that's always on my mind when I play a game is to try and figure out what the developer was aiming to do with the game and how close they got to it. Some games that's pretty easy or simple - sometimes the developer even says what they were going for - and other times it's more oblique. In the case of Eight Thirty, Nowhere, developer Nat Clayton plainly stated that she "wanted to create a frighteningly massive environment, sparse, largely empty, with more focus on being a tone piece than anything." and I think that they've been very successful in that specific goal. You might think that just aiming to make a big place and then doing exactly that sounds simple but this game is more than that. It's hitting a certain tone and vibe, one of desolation and loneliness that it feels like few games do a good job of evoking. There isn't much actually to the game but I played it for longer than I expected to and even went back to it a few times this year when I just wanted to walk around for a while. At a time in life where simply going somewhere and existing is more complicated than it previously had been, that was an important thing.

The Game I Love So Much I Don't Know How To Talk About It

Black Book is incredible. Black Book is fantastic. Black Book is ... ?

I feel like it's a pretty common thing for people (myself included) to struggle with describing things they like beyond vague hyperbolic terms, especially compared to how easy it is to talk about a bad thing and all the ways it's bad. Black Book is absolutely one of those things where I have trouble articulating why I like it as much as I do. It's all just vague "yeah the music is good" and "the vibes are immaculate" type shit. That said, I'm gonna do my best here. But maybe just take it on faith that I know what I'm talking about and that you should play this game because it rules.

I don't play card games. At least, not since I played Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid and had a breakdown in a card shop because twenty-somethings that hung out there were mean as hell. I tried one of the Magic games (2014, I think?) at one point and didn't click with it and have never really bothered with anything else since then. Until this year, that is when I played Black Book and suddenly I found that it wasn't some broad thing about cards that I didn't like - it was just the format with which I was asked to interface with them that made me bounce off of them. It turns out what I needed was a linear RPG story-centric game and not a competitive ladder or a run-based roguelike/lite. Building decks is cool. Drawing cards is cool. All the thinking and strategizing involved with how you play each turn is so much fun. And then there's just enough RNG to keep you on your toes - will you draw the card you need? What will your opponent do next? So you take all that, wrap it up in Russian folklore and mythology, give me a cool witch to play as, and make me listen to one of my favorite soundtracks of the year, and you've got an absolute banger of a game.

Also, this part is not an Original Alexa Lily Thought™ and in fact is from Scott Benson of Night in the Woods fame: the way this game utilizes the folklore isn't just to give a mechanical game paint job in an attempt to achieve an aesthetic. This game is, through and through, to the core, all about culture and folklore and mythology and the way it all effects actual peoples actual lives. Just check out his short twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/bombsfall/status/1454898455915245569 He references how NITW also has a similar thing going on and I swear I'm going to get around to that game because it sounds like it is absolutely my jam, I have bought it twice so I'm definitely going to play it someday eventually.

The Game I Really Needed Right Now

2021 was rough. And it looks like next year is gonna continue to be rough and probably just straight-up worse. My mental health, which was already precarious in the pre-pandemic times, was in tatters for most of the past twelve months. That's not unique and I'm willing to bet that if you're reading this list you can probably relate, at least a little bit, to that. And then Sable came along. And for a few days, my depression was healed. A new world to escape into that wasn't just another big open world full of Things to Do for tiny dopamine hits everytime I heard the "good job you completed something" sound or saw a completion number get closer and closer to 100%. A world to explore, to take in, to experience. People to meet, to talk to, to learn about, to befriend. A game about finding what makes you happy, what makes you content, about finding a place to belong. Sable is such a special thing and it came at the right time. I think it'd be hyperbolic to say something like 'Sable saved me' but it hit at a really dark time and it got me through it. Maybe next year will be better than this year. The bar is low but so are my expectations. If nothing else, hopefully I can find another Sable.