Happy New Year, everyone.
At the beginning of the year, sharing our memories of the game of the previous year has become a reserved program for the editorial board of the Tour Research Agency. The reason why we use the term "our game of the year" is because editors may not necessarily take the comprehensive quality of all aspects as the selection criteria for the annual game like the game awards, and more often they will choose the most important game in their hearts out of personal aesthetics and preferences.
As we all know, 2021 is a special year that can really be called a "game year", especially the number of blockbusters is too thin, so people have to want to fast forward to 2022, taste the "Eldon's Ring of Law" and "Breath of the Wild 2" king fried.
So in this "little year", our choices have become more diverse and individualized. A lot of the games that appear below may not be well known, but that doesn't stop them from being unique, and each of us has something to say.
Here, I would like to thank all readers and friends for their attention and support to the Tour Research Institute over the past year. I also wish you all the best in the new year to continue to enjoy the joy of playing games – playing games has always been an important matter.
Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy:
Again, it turns out that whether the game is good or not has nothing to do with how big the map is
Kong
Two Guardians of the Galaxy movies perform well domestically, and the main characters often appear in the Avengers, but the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy game, which was released at the end of October last year, was confusingly low-key. This game is like "Like Dragon 7", which has been played well, but those who have not played it do not seem to be cold at all.
The level of fighting and graphics is not much to say, and the strength of developer Edious has not pulled his crotch in this regard. One of the best things about Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy is that he knows his position and is content with it. It's a character-centric game that tells an adventure story, and all the designs are designed to serve that positioning. In fact, for the first hour or two, the interaction and dialogue between several characters did not stop at all, and it was the game with the richest dialogue I have ever seen. The interactive dialogue option is actually very careful, the plot not only respects the IQ of the player, there are many small branches, but the selection of branch options will not interrupt the progress of the game or cutscenes, making the whole play process particularly comfortable and smooth.
If you like the tone of the 2013 game version of Deadpool as much as I do, Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy can be seen as the ultimate addition to Deadpool. In the overall environment of 2021, this level of gaming is particularly valuable.
However, Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy gave me another thought. In the past, a common saying was that Japanese-style games were prone to face blindness, and handsome men and beautiful women were carved out of a mold. But after seeing the flesh version of Cortana and the soul-worn version of Cassandra in "Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy", I think this prejudice of the past should be changed: European and American realistic style characters, beautiful women's faces back and forth are just a few routines. It can be seen that the beauty of the beauty is similar, and the ugly monsters have their own strange things, which is the true truth of the universe.
It can't be said that it has nothing to do with it, only that it is exactly the same
"Submerged Disease":
The first course of treatment for deep-sea phobia
Shine on the moon
Diving Abyss is a 2D cooperative survival horror submarine simulation game. Players will control a nuclear submarine under Europa's ice and explore the deepest part of Europa under the threat of water pressure, radiation, alien monsters, and even some humans in order to expand the living space of human beings.
In addition to the campaign mode, The Hidden Nightmare also features a ghost-catching mode model modeled after Among Us. However, in view of the operation, maintenance and repair of submarines have a certain learning cost, the cost of mistakes may be huge, even if you do not set the internal ghost option, I soon found that I did not understand anything is the biggest "inner ghost" on this ship.
"Don't stuff welding oil tanks into wetsuits as oxygen cylinders", "Don't fill nuclear reactors with too many fuel rods at once", "Don't put inflammable and explosive materials such as sodium, magnesium, liquid oxygen and so on"... The lessons I blurt out now are exchanged for countless crew lives, and it doesn't matter if you can't remember them for a while, you can remember them a few more times.
This is enough to say how hardcore the game is. However, there are several ways to make the game less "jailed".
The crew of the submarine has different divisions of labor, from captains and security officers to engineers and doctors, with different responsibilities and need to be conscientious. Pulling a few friends over to role-play "go to jail together" can more or less alleviate the fear of the abyss.
It is better to eat with a two-dimensional mod
In the "Among the Ancients" version, which was updated at the end of October last year, the game also introduced skill trees for different classes, as well as the ability to inject monster genes to enhance their own constitution. With the cooperation of the two, the player can give up being a person and become a "Europa Superman" who is not limited by oxygen and water pressure, and does not fall behind in close combat with sea monsters.
Source B station @ Europa Superman
"Dive Disorder" is actually a game released in 2019, which is still in the early access stage, but in 2021, it has achieved high attention Chinese the Internet. The Amway of self-media, the low price when the game is discounted, and the high freedom of the workshop have certainly promoted the growth of the popularity of the game, but the continuous update of the developer is the root cause of the blossoming of the old tree.
"Fireworks":
I hope that the film and television drama remake can also keep the core of the game
Liquor of white-clad liquor
Last year, the domestic horror game "Fireworks" achieved remarkable results, selling 100,000 copies in five days of release, and quickly announced the film and television in September... It is estimated that no one expected that this process is only 3 hours of small-grade games will be so lively.
Even if the Chinese horror game full of a large number of "feudal superstitious elements" has been like a carp across the river, "Fireworks" still has a unique temperament in it - after all, the male protagonist is a people's policeman, and this identity is probably enough for the ghost to retreat. And its main line of "starting from the investigation of a door-killing case" does not seem to be much special, but with the excellent narrative ability and realistic background of the creator Moonlight Cockroach, players can always be curious about the direction and development of the story.
Even in the case that everyone has already seen the direction of the plot, it can still bring people countless afterglows. Therefore, such a short work has also exchanged countless players' sincere essays in the Steam comment area.
I hope that the new works of this developer can also play so well. But now, like many "Fireworks" players, I am worried about the same problem - happy after the official announcement of the film and television, but considering that many of the content probably have to be modified, I don't know if its excellent narrative can continue into the film and television drama. Anyway, hopefully its most appealing core is still there.
Edgeworld - Culture DLC:
It feels so good when Christopher is
Jump
You may not know who "Christopher" is in the subheading, but he is:
In the movie "Truman's World", he single-handedly directed the program producer of the protagonist's first 30 years of life.
Then let's talk about Rimworld. This is a base-building sandbox game where players control a bunch of characters to survive in an otherwise desolate land, grow and thrive, and finally fly into space.
The developers of EdgeWorld define it as a "story generator" because a big part of the game's fun is actually looking at interactive stories between different characters.
In a white night talk half a year ago, I mentioned how unreliable the fun brought by this kind of "story generation" is - there are always so many events that AI can generate, and you will get tired of playing for hundreds of hours. So, after 1,000 hours of gameplay, I played Edgeworld in a different way: using the Story Generator as a Story Writer.
Here's a little background: I especially like science fiction, and I have to read dozens of books every year, and the new ones are not enough to read the old ones. I'm also a game editor, and every time I finish a science fiction novel, I think, "When will I have a game adaptation of this book?" and then I open Edge World and create a script with the same name as the science fiction novel I just finished reading.
The in-game script editor allows you to fully customize a game's backstory, starting resources, and map conditions. That is, it is possible to create a world in a science fiction setting.
And the characters in the novel. The "Well-Prepared" Mod can fully customize the characters that the player can control at the beginning of the game, including their names, growth experiences, personality, abilities, physical conditions, and so on. With this mod, I can perfectly recreate any character written in science fiction - Clockworks, Robots, Vampires, Aliens, Magicians...
I just created a group of Hyberian pilgrims
Next, I put these novel characters into the world of fiction. Let the pilgrims once again set foot on the land of Shanghai Berlian, let the exploration team of Blind Eye fall into the Rorschach I personally created for them, let paul and his son in "Dune" return to Erracus to experience the rise of the Freemans again...
All in all, I've created countless sci-fi fandom games with Edgeworld.
It's not so much playing God as it is playing Christopher's producer role in Truman's World—he built a small world for Truman, and so did I; he wrote the script for Truman, and so did I; he gave Truman and other actors limited free play, and so did I.
It's nice to be Christopher in the virtual world.
《Blacksouls》：
RPG can also be the most flavorful Dark Souls sequel
Windows
In fact, "Blacksouls" is a game released in 2018, but considering that the author has also diligently updated a large DLC in 2021, let's count it as a game in 2021.
Honestly, it's not easy to explain the charm of unpopular games to everyone, but fortunately, Blacksouls is not difficult. It's a fan-made RPG that carves the homage to Dark Souls, and if you can grasp the unique flavor of Dark Souls and Blood, then you'll have a rough impression of Blacksouls.
There are many games that are related to the flavor of the "Soul Series", and the number of large and small before and after is uncountable, and the colorful cartoon style of "Blacksouls" goes inside, which is inevitably a bit of a drama compared with other gloomy styles that are blackened in death. The game is set in a fairy tale, a black fairy tale with a bright appearance but rotten.
Probably in this style
And what players can do is to take a step-by-step adventure in the fairy tale world that struggles on the edge of decay, and watch the world in front of them fall apart little by little. On the way, you can encounter a group of non-human neurotics to talk to you about the worldview of this game, and you can encounter all kinds of unreasonable and difficult encounters. One second may still be a sunny sunny day, the next second may be a big face that does not eat much in your face, and the two words of malice are vividly expressed.
The above should be a complete disadvantage in the eyes of some friends who can't match the radio waves, but you don't have to say that for players who are good at this mouth, this Mindfuck game with a bad taste on it is really quite appetizing, and it is a Mindfuck in every sense.
The core gameplay of the game is the RPG Doujinshi game set produced in RPGMaker, but after putting on the core of Dark Souls, everything has a familiar strangeness. Whether it is the treasure hidden in the corner or the short path of the peak circuit, when I stand in the end and look back at the past, the indifferent sense of loss in my heart is the same as when playing Dark Souls.
Although there are so many written above, I still think that this kind of 2D pixel RPG game still pays attention to a fate after all, and the fate does not have any effect on the amway of other people's heads, and the fate is enough to one sentence: this is probably the most flavorful Dark Soul spirit sequel.
Star Frontier: Echoes of the Eye:
"Memories will reverberate"
Lushark
Echoes of The Eyes is the DLC that Outer Wilds released in October.
The game itself was released in 2019, which was a year of frequent indie games, and "Bliss Disco", "Goose Drama" and "Baba is you" were all from this year. Star Frontier may not even be well-known in comparison, and many people will even confuse it with The Outer Worlds of the same year.
Star Frontier is a game about "exploring the unknown", there is almost no guiding content, there is no common "thrill feedback", only pure curiosity drives players to explore around, and thus is buried alive in the caves of desert planets again and again, tornadoes that cross ocean planets over and over again, and being thrown into the endless space by being alone... And all that can be rewarded is to figure out what's going on in the world.
This makes the work destined to be niche, but the experience it brings is unique.
Gravity is a space disaster movie I love, and Star Frontier gives me an immersive experience of the scene
Star Frontiers satisfied almost all my fantasies about "space romance", it was so inexhaustible but so subtle that I didn't expect it to launch a new DLC two years later, and this supplement called "Echoes of the Eye" also fits in with the original, which is the icing on the cake.
Revealing that any scene in the game may affect the experience of new players, so it is not accompanied by pictures (most starship players know this, so it is difficult to recommend this work to others, which is another reason why the game is destined to be niche)
I'm not a fan of puzzle games, and occasionally I'm going to search for answers to puzzles in this kind of game that I can't solve with all my brains. But when I rushed to experience "Echo of the Eye" for the first time, there was obviously no ready-made strategy on the Internet.
When I encountered a bottleneck, I went to the frequent game forum to discuss with my friends, where a few players shared the clues they found and pieced together the direction of advancement; even after the puzzle has been solved, everyone is careful when leaving hints, as far as possible to guide the latecomers to uncover the mystery themselves.
Explorers in different time and space are helping each other while carefully maintaining the experience of others discovering the truth. This is something I have not been able to experience when playing the main body, and after two years of accumulation, it has given the domestic fans of "Star Frontier" such an opportunity to gather together.
And that's exactly what the game itself wants to do — "We're 280,000 years apart, from different planets, but curiosity makes us meet at the end of the universe at this moment... It's a wonderful feeling, and I hope you don't mind me taking you as a friend. ”
Mitterrod: Survival Fear:
Old wine is hard to sell
Algae rises and sleeps
Originally, my 2021 game of the year was supposed to be an indie game like previous years, and masterpieces such as Evil Meditation, Genesis Noir, and Caged Dreams made me hesitate for a long time.
But coincidentally, there's now Mitterrod: Survival Fear.
I've talked a lot about the game content itself before. What I want to say this time is that the game is great and well worth a try, but there is still a threshold, and this is what I realized after hitting a wall with my friend Amway games for two months.
Old players are familiar with the road when they first start to survive fear, and may feel that some are too "one way to black", not too addictive. But for many new players, the threshold of the game is real.
David Jaffe, the original god of war producer, was stuck in an early room while playing Survival Fear live. Although there are multiple hidden guides such as bait to attract shooting, enemy soldiers hinted at by the partition wall, and hints of map details, it still does not allow him to find the passage hidden behind the bricks.
Multiple locations guide the player to "accidentally" discover the design of hidden bricks
Similar designs actually appeared in the original "Mitterrod", and were regarded by many developers as a model of level guidance design, but Jeffe, as a new player, will still not develop the corresponding thinking card level. His hard mouth, outbursts, and a series of outbursts eventually made the map famous at home and abroad with different mocking names: "God of War Ceiling" and "Jaffe's Room".
Compared to the puzzles that need to be thought about, the clearance process in this game is more of this "intuitive" design. Temporary card level many newcomers will encounter, but can quickly find a way out, survival fear in taking into account the new and old players have actually done a very good job,
But Mitterrod is, after all, a 35-year-old series with a 19-year history of the last orthodox sequel. Especially when I replayed Super Mitterrod, I found that the cross key was much better than the joystick, and I really felt the feel of the hard tooth after the time filter, and there were still many shadows of these "classic" settings in the new work.
However, if you can cross this not very high threshold after a short period of adaptation, I think the unique exploratory charm of "Mitterrod" is enough to make most players indulge in it and truly become "the first Mitterrode of young people".
At least in the mouths of many indie game developers I follow, survival fear is a fun and worthy of reference. If this grandfather of galaxy-like games can inspire more excellent indie players again, then it is worthy of the name of this game of the year. Not to mention its own quality, it is also worth it.
Temple of Heroes:
Facing death is the first lesson in Viking architecture
Halle Kwain
Although I never opened The Temple of Heroes after a hundred hours, I finally decided to make this game, which is hard to say where, one of the most satisfying experiences of 2021.
"Temple of Heroes" has many outstanding qualities, such as its game difficulty curve is very good, players can smoothly transition to the next growth node; for example, although the low-poly graphics can not withstand close scrutiny, but with different styles of scenes and weather performance, the sense of adventure in the game is very strong. Whenever I think of "Heroic Temple", I always think of a group of people who have just woken up in the harsh morning sun, the campfire crackling, ready to pack their bags and go on an adventure.
But for most of the game time, I wasn't the warrior with the torch, but the logistical architect at home who built a base for the people brick by brick.
Therefore, in addition to being chased by trolls and knocked unconscious by a fallen tree, most of my causes of death were due to climbing too high when building a house, and because of thrift and thrift, I forgot to eat, and eventually lost my footing. Therefore, my friends who live in the room I have built will always sleep with my corpse.
"Heroic Spirit Temple" gives me a lot of unforgettable memories, I remember the heroic moments when I went to sea with my friends on a rainy day, and I also remember every thrilling expedition to a new map, when we first stepped into the swamp, we clumsily held bronze weapons, helpless in the face of the pursuit of two-star zombies, and the exploration was difficult, but after thinking about it carefully, these did not seem to be "irreplaceable experiences".
The reason for choosing Temple of Heroes may be more because the character I play in the game feels like enough to be needed. After the development of pre-technology, I once went to the server of other editing teachers to help the poor, and when I landed, these two poor people were starving and living in a tightly covered pigsty on the roof, and this poverty alleviation experience made me very satisfied, although after I built a decent little hut, these two teachers were never online again.
In the end, in The Temple of Heroes, I built a sea-view room for myself and my friends in the Northern Plains, and built a room for each teammate. When I write the names of everyone's room and hand it over, it feels as fulfilling as I was a cook for five teammates in Famine, and stuffing food into the mouths of teammates one by one.
I seem to have a hard time discerning whether such an unforgettable moment should be attributed to the Temple of Heroes or to the friends who slept with my corpse.
"Trip for Two":
You can still have *companionship*, can't you?
Air
Everyone knows that "Two-Person Trip" is very good, so this option is somewhat unremarkable.
But looking back on the whole of 2021, it was the happiest time playing with friends. Tomorrow will get better or worse is unknown, and after putting down the handle and turning off the power button, there will always be more important troubles to face. But at least on the screen, we can switch to another body and accompany the important person.
I wish friends who have not yet played "Double Trip" can have someone to play together tomorrow, and there are more fun new games to play this year, Happy New Year!