Our indie games of the year, 2021

This is the first year we sat down as a group and argued our way to a list, so consider it the origin point of a tradition that got more heated every December after. 2021 was a stacked year for small games, and narrowing it down took longer than any single game deserves.

The ones we kept mentioning

Unpacking turned taking things out of boxes into a quiet story about a whole life, and it wrecked a surprising number of us. Loop Hero was the year's great "just one more loop" machine, an early warning of the obsession we later wrote about in full in our roguelikes piece. Death's Door was a tight, gorgeous little adventure with a sword and a crow. Wildermyth quietly generated stories about its little heroes that we still tell each other.

Our winner was the one that kept lying to us: Inscryption.

Game of the year: Inscryption

Inscryption starts as a dark card game and then refuses to stay one thing for even an hour. To say more would ruin it. It was the game that had the whole chat messaging each other in all caps at midnight, and no other game in 2021 pulled that off. It won going away.

We did not review most of these individually, but this list is the best snapshot of where our taste started. You can see where it went in the 2022 list and across all of our reviews.