10 best gaming surprises of 2021 (and 5 terrible ones)

2021 was a pretty solid year. Well, for gaming at least. Especially for Nintendo fans like myself who got to see a massive wave of new games, remasters, and add-ons appear. So what I’m going to get into here is my top 10 moments in which I was pleasantly surprised by video gaming in 2021. And, on each page I’ll bring up two great moments and mention one moment where I was fairly disappointed.

Let’s get into it. Oh, and these are in no particular order.

10) Great Moment – Unpacking Turned Out to Be a Brilliant Experience

When I first saw a trailer for Unpacking, I wanted it. Immediately. I loved the graphics style and a puzzle game about unpacking boxes one at a time and find room for everything seemed like something my neurodivergent brain was going to dive right into.

Then the game came out, I got it, and sure enough, I loved it. The game was calming, fun, and…emotional. The last bit was not something I expected this game to hit me with but it did. See, while there isn’t a heavy story, as you unpack the same character’s items as they move around over the course of their lives there are some stories that are just obviously told through this medium.

For example, as you move from place to place, your character makes friends in college. She moves from her tiny dorm room to an apartment with her new friends. It creates an interesting moment because she has to move her stuff into a place that clearly has other people living in it so you’re mixing your kitchen stuff with other people’s stuff. But they let you move their stuff and, eventually, you get this really cool fun place set up. You even get your degree up on the wall in your own little corner of the place.

But at the following stage you move again. This time to some dude’s apartment. You can tell it’s a straight-up bachelor pad. The shelves in the living room are filled with things like martini mixing kits and sports stuff. There’s really bad art covering the wall and a guitar on the wall in a way to suggest it’s only there for decoration. And, in a moment that made me and my wife audibly gasp in horror, there’s a part where you try to find a place to plug in your character’s beloved Gamecube only to find that most of the entertainment stand is taken up by a…sorry for sensitive readers… an Xbox 360.

The gut-punch of this is when you realize that, unlike in your friend’s place, you can’t move a lot of his stuff. There’s nothing telling you you can’t, it just won’t move. You feel him imposing over you somehow as you try to squeeze your items into someone else’s unbudging landscape.  The real twist of the knife comes when you get to your diploma. This thing has hung proudly in every place you moved, but here, there’s only one place in the entire house where you can put your diploma…under the bed.

What you think is just a simple and cute puzzle game becomes an emotional journey as your character progress from childhood to college to adulthood to finding themselves and it’s absolutely a journey worth unpacking.