Hi, I’m a sometimes contributor to the ever-excellent Sword Chomp series of podcasts, Josh Mcmullin, aka THE Bebopman! I got asked to do a top ten list for the site and here I am. Look at me, ma! All joking aside, let’s get one thing straight, okay? There was A LOT of talk during the year that 2021 just had no games and that everything important was being pushed back due to COVID still being a thing. While I agree that several big highly anticipated titles were pushed back, that doesn’t mean that 2021 lacked good or even great games. As evidence, I tried my hand at a little challenge that one of my co-hosts set out for my own podcast. The challenge in question was to complete 20 games that we had never beaten before. I rarely play games to completion unless I really like it and this year, I hit that challenge. I played 31 games this year and completed 20 of them. What’s even better is that outside of my top three, which just flew up my rankings upon their launch, I had an incredibly hard time ranking most of them because they were all so good. That’s a long way of saying that 2022 was a great year in gaming and the games speak for themselves. So, without further ado, let’s talk about my top 10 of those games.
Ray McGill's Top Games of 2021
2021 was a shitty year for sure, and I am not heading into 2022 with much confidence. However, while society falls apart, video games have been pretty great. That was a depressing, yet also probably trite sentence to write at the end of this year. While society continues to grapple with sickness on unprecedented scales, it becomes more the role of video games to make our lives feel more normal, more fun. In a year where I had only recently been to a movie theater, and where I don’t feel comfortable at things like bars, the stories and experiences we take in come increasingly through a screen at home. Whether that be a television, computer screen, tablet, or phone, we need to have fun, and be able to remind ourselves not everything is doom and gloom all of the time. That being said, maybe don’t use the television to watch the news…