There was an expectation that 2021 was going to be the year that all the stuff that had its last-mile upended by Covid would finally come out . . and that hasn’t happened. Some good stuff did come out, though.

All my top games for 2021 were from not just Indie but incredibly ridiculously small Indie teams. Two were from straight up solo devs: SNKRX and Cyber Shadow. The other is from a partnership (though, heavily augmented by contractors): Death’s Door. These are all also games from VERY early in the developer’s careers. SNKRX is the first “big” game from that dev, where most others were game-jam ideas that he shipped because why not. Cyber Shadow was the dev’s first project. Death’s Door is the studio’s second game (following the boss-rush game Titan Souls).

It’s hard to rank these against each other because they’re so wildly different. Of the three, Cyber Shadow is probably my honorable mention, with SNKRX and Death’s Door as my Games of the Year.

What might be a last-minute addition? Well . . this weekend I’m going to be setting things up so I can play PC games on my TV, and the first thing on my list is Solar Ash . . interestingly ANOTHER early game from a small studio. And there’s also Not A Game: The Radiohead Kid Amnesia Exhibition, which I haven’t set up, because my VR setup is hosed at the moment.