The Aggie Awards – The Best Adventure Games of 2021 page 14
The Silver Aggies
Every year there are some excellent games that fall just a little short of reaching the podium for various awards, either finishing as a runner-up or barely missing the finals entirely. With so many awesome titles to choose from, it’s easy for these near-misses to fall through the cracks, and that would be a shame. So while our Silver Aggies may not have precisely the same lustre as our golden statuettes, these bonus categories are another chance to hand out some much-deserved hardware – impressive new releases, all, that are no less worthy of any adventure gamer’s attention.
Best Game No One Has Played: Slice of Sea
Slice of Sea has “best kept secret” written all over it. A wordless, exposition-free sojourn through a dreamy watercolour landscape full of strange creatures, inscrutable architecture and inexplicable hints of a history that’s never spelled out, it’s as difficult to describe as it is to forget. The work of solo developer Mateusz Skutnik, Slice of Sea appeared with little fanfare and almost no marketing, and that may be for the best: this is a game that all but begs to be discovered unwittingly, a diamond in the rough waiting patiently for increasingly goggle-eyed newcomers to discover its secrets and wonder how on Earth such a singular and enchanting vision flew under their radar. It almost seems a shame to blow the lid off its obscurity by singing its praises here, but – as you’ll know once you take our advice and play it – some things you just can’t keep quiet about.
Best Multiplayer Adventure: Operation: Tango
Hard to believe this is even a category, but co-op adventuring is becoming popular fast, and there was real competition for top honours this year. Your mission in Clever Plays’ asymmetric two-player spy thriller Operation: Tango, should you choose to accept it, is to recruit a fellow operative to join you in the fun. While one of you plays an athletic operative in the field, the other assumes the role of a top hacker behind a computer desk. Together you’ll pass information back and forth, infiltrate secure locations and even more secure computer servers, and save the world as we know it from a dangerous cyber terrorist. You’ll need to keep your lines of communication open, keep your cool under pressure, and keep laughing at your shared panicked moments that lead to high-speed hilarity.
Best VR Adventure: Maskmaker
No, not those kinds of masks! The ones you’ll craft in Innerspace VR’s Maskmaker aren’t for concealment or protection, but will transport you to magical 3D realms instead. A workshop features tools for carving, painting, and bedecking these Carnival-like facial disguises. When placed on your face, they spawn adventures in locales ranging from misty beaches to icy cliffs, mountain meadows, and a giant, tangled mangrove swamp. The environs are locked in an eerie stasis, and you must explore and exploit them to gather up natural elements – coral, feathers, fangs, shells, crystals, and flora – to ornament more masks. Making your way along treetop pathways, waterways, and mine shafts, you will also repair machinery, channel streams, charm a snake, and mimic fancy VR dance movements. Gradually unearthing the conflict between the guardians of these lands and a powerful king, you will, in the end, attempt to return vigour, healing, and balance to your surroundings. For allowing us to revel in this ingenious, engaging, artful masquerade, Maskmaker snags the honour of top virtual reality adventure.
Crazy Good: NUTS
Sometimes adventure gaming takes you to the farthest reaches of the world, solving the most incredible mysteries and encountering the wackiest of characters on an epic quest of daring and intrigue. And sometimes it drops you in the middle of the woods to look at some rodents. Noodlecake Studios gave us an unexpected gem in early 2021, a quiet little surveillance-camera mystery called NUTS. You start a job in the vivid Day-Glo scenery of Melmoth Forest, setting up video tripods with one simple goal: find out what's going on with the squirrels! To learn why they’re behaving so strangely, you’ll set and reset the cameras each day, peruse the footage in the evening, and report back to your boss on what you've found. It's gentle and pretty and tells a surprisingly intriguing story. Plus, the entire thing is punctuated by immersive sound design and a brilliant soundtrack. You'll feel captivated and relaxed, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself never wanting to leave.
Sure to Love: Half Past Fate: Romantic Distancing
A spin-off of the original ensemble romantic comedy Half Past Fate, Serenity Forge’s Romantic Distancing takes players on a more intimate journey, focusing on just one couple who must adapt their dating life to accommodate a pandemic lockdown. Instead of venturing out, we’re taken inside the nooks and crannies of Robin’s and Stephen’s homes and their day-to-day routines, ranging from trying to connect to the internet just to make online calls, to using their phones to view each other’s music collection and see each other "face to face." It’s a bittersweet little love story that illustrates the pains of a long-distance relationship, and it’s entirely realistic how each of their personal choices impact their relationship when physically separated. With a colourful bird’s-eye pixel art presentation and laid-back chiptune music, it’s an incredibly charming aesthetic but you’d be surprised by how much depth and emotion is packed into a short 90-minute playthrough that makes it well worth your time.
Oh So Close: Almost My Floor
Husband-and-wife Russian team Potata Company came out swinging this year and caught us completely off guard with the wonderful Almost My Floor, a comic book-styled horror adventure that takes place almost entirely in a single apartment complex. Players control two separate characters over the course of the game: Alex, a young man struggling with a recent break-up who is unsure if his building is overrun by demons or if he's just going crazy, and Adam, a detective who's on the trail of Alex's missing ex-girlfriend and unraveling the chaos the young man leaves in his wake. While Alex must fend for himself in a surreal and increasingly horrific reality filled with demonic creatures, Adam sees only the “real” building in its naturally crumbling, decrepit form, which makes for a unique experience from two different perspectives. Blending puzzles, simple action sequences, and key choices between (literally) good and evil, the game will leave you as amazed by its bold and creepy artwork as you are immersed in its fast-paced story.
Never Fails to Deliver: Lake
Where many games delight in sending us to far-flung, exotic locales, Lake takes us to rural Oregon in the 1980s. And instead of fighting space battles or tracking down the Illuminati, we're simply delivering mail. There's barely a puzzle to be solved, leaving players to embrace the peaceful rhythm of life in a beautiful lakeshore town. That may sound mundane, even boring, but in today's increasingly hectic world, with too much to do and not enough time to reflect, the idea of taking a step back and slowing down for a while is seductive. For Meredith Weiss, taking a much-needed break from the crunch of software development to fill in for her father as mail carrier in her former hometown for a couple of weeks, it's a chance to reconnect with old friends, catch up on gossip, and decide what she actually wants out of life. Likewise, as you wrestle the mail truck down winding country lanes, with just the radio for company and autumn sunlight dappling the leaves, it's easy to get drawn into Lake’s peaceful world and leave the modern one behind temporarily, emerging calmer and a little more relaxed.
Time Well Spent: Not Another Weekend
Most adventures involve some sort of heroic quest. Not Another Weekend… not so much. But sometimes being bad can feel oh so good, and this offbeat pixel art offering from Animatic Vision and Dead Blue Friends is just such an occasion. Disgruntled bellboy Mike Melkout is looking to rid the hotel he works at of all its guests and employees before the weekend is through. Why? So he can enact a mysterious ritual commanded of him by an ancestor’s brain floating in a jar of fluids and hidden behind the wine cabinet in the cellar. If that sounds overly grim, don’t worry – brief excursions into horror notwithstanding, this game is every bit as whimsical as it looks, jam-packed with colorful characters and nods to 80s action flicks, music, science fiction, and of course the adventure genre itself. With its vibrant visuals, zany throwback charm, irresistibly irreverent humour and a smooth stream of interconnected inventory puzzles, this game is one of the best ways to relax, have some fun and maybe blow off a little steam in your spare time before Monday rolls around again.
The Cat’s Meow: Inspector Waffles, Milo and the Magpies
As far as animal detectives go, Waffles has always been reliable. Like any cat in the city, he has his faults: a fondness for strong milk and occasional disregard of procedure. But lately things have gotten worse and he's been coasting. Can he land on his paws when Cat Town calls on the sharpest feline instincts in the CTPD? With a quirky cast of funny and adorable characters and a crime jazz soundtrack that's extra jazzy, Inspector Waffles delightfully delivers on its premise, finding just the right place between sweet and serious, moody and cheesy, and occasionally even getting away with being a little saccharine. Several different species live all-too-human lives with animal particularities, which sets up a very enjoyable quest in the best tradition of the genre. It has big pixels, a lot of heart, and it's packed with puns about cats, dogs and other dorky creatures (including a platypus) all in one neat, intuitive classic adventure game mystery. Well done on your debut title, Goloso Games!
Another sterling debut, Milo and the Magpies similarly features a feline protagonist, but this cute critter is of the garden variety. Which is where most of Johan Scherft’s short but utterly charming game takes place: the backyards of a working/lower-middle class neighbourhood, where people go about their daily lives in the ways that suit them best. This is a well-crafted, easygoing point-and-click adventure with a hint of magical realism, about an hour in the charmed life of a cat en route back to his loving home. The naturalist setting is gorgeously captured in the hand-painted scenery and subtle animations of its inhabitants. A gentle soundtrack weaves musical themes and ambient sounds into these environments, where each screen represents a puzzle to be solved before continuing on your way. If you're looking for a little enchantment in a gloomy time, this game comes highly recommended, particularly to fans of cats and clever, cozy adventures.
Oddly Overlooked: Life Is Strange: True Colors, Strangeland
Not only a worthy edition to the Life Is Strange series but arguably its best since the original, Deck Nine’s True Colors wisely keeps most of the hallmarks of the earlier games – the choices, the well-written drama, the characters you grow to care about – while also making it feel like a breath of fresh air. The plot is full of surprise twists and turns, and the new protagonist Alex Chen is both likeable and believable, superbly voiced by Erika Mori. Exploring Alex's unique powers as an empath (essentially being able to read people's thoughts and feelings) allows for all kinds of interesting insights and entertaining side quests, as well as posing some big decisions to make as you hunt to uncover the mysterious circumstances around the death of Alex’s brother. And on a more personal level, having players choose whether to have Alex pursue a relationship with either a male or female friend is a natural step for a series that's always supported diversity. Throw in a beautiful mountain setting and, as always, a strong soundtrack bursting with new and licensed hits, and True Colors cements its place as a high point in the franchise for Life Is Strange fans and newbies alike.
Fittingly weird and strikingly enigmatic, Wormwood Studios’ Strangeland demonstrates that some of the best horror tales aren’t about exorcising demons but confronting them. The setup is simple: an amnesiac wakes up in a straitjacket and finds himself trapped in the titular surrealist carnival, looking to rescue a woman with golden hair. But Strangeland, the place and the game, lives up to its name with a gorgeously macabre cast of characters, environments and situations – as one person describes it, a “masquerade of metaphors” – and a slickly animated visual style that falls somewhere between H.R. Giger grotesquery and an 80s heavy metal album cover. The journey through this otherworldly setting is wonderfully written and equally well-acted, with compelling gameplay to match. The emphasis is firmly on discovering, interpreting – and in one case, literally dissecting – its darkly emotional themes, so fair warning: at times the experience may leave your nerves as raw as the protagonist’s. On thing's for sure: Strangeland will remain with you long after the nightmare’s over and the clowns are out of sight.
Out of this World: Henry Mosse and the Wormhole Conspiracy, Lacuna
Sometimes one galaxy is not enough for an epic interplanetary adventure. As the eponymous teenaged star of Bad Goat Studios’ Henry Mosse and the Wormhole Conspiracy, you’ll have your chance to explore two, and have a whole lot of fun doing it. There are multiple alien worlds to investigate, a large and diverse cast of characters to meet, and some nicely complex puzzles to solve, all presented like a vivid hand-painted hi-res cartoon and complemented by full voice-overs. Add to that Henry’s eternal optimism and his adoptive mother’s desire for thrills, along with some practically moustache-twirling villains behind a cosmic conspiracy, and you end up with a thoroughly enjoyable outer space experience that makes a fine addition to any 2D point-and-click fan’s library.
DigiTales Interactive’s Lacuna proves that planet Earth isn’t the exclusive domain of compelling noir mysteries. When a diplomat is murdered, hardboiled detective Neil Conrad is assigned to investigate – and prevent an interplanetary conflict in the fallout. It’s not just space terrorists you’re dealing with, either, but Conrad’s family life as well, and your decisions matter in both. Whether you accidently accuse an innocent person or just tell Conrad’s daughter she can’t go to a party, there is no going back once you’ve committed to a choice, the story diverging down different narrative paths accordingly. It also matters how good you actually are at your job. While most games ignore the seemingly mundane aspects of paperwork, this side-scrolling pixel art thriller embraces it and even manages to make it fun. But whether you Marlowe or Clouseau your way through Lacuna’s retro-futuristic environments on your way to one of multiple possible endings, this sci-fi case is sure to be one you’ll want to return to again.
Best Casual Games: Down in Bermuda, TOEM
Thirty years ago, a young pilot named Milton crashed his airplane on a lonely tropical island. At long last, with your help, he may finally be able to escape the many vivid, cartoon-like locales in Down in Bermuda by Yak & co. The isometric view reveals brilliantly colored corals, clamshells, and starfish; mysterious stone monuments; massive crystals and abandoned pirate ships. Lively Caribbean music enhances Milton’s encounters with puffer fish, ancient turtles, a giant spider, and even a lava monster with its minions. Gameplay includes familiar environmental tasks like dragging levers, flipping switches, lifting hatches, and rotating pathway tiles. But there’s much more here to tickle a puzzle lover’s fancy, such as leapfrogging sheep, bopping mushrooms, foiling a furious sea worm, flinging Milton from seesaw to seesaw, and trundling a cannon down a track rimmed by objects begging for creative destruction. Better yet, all these whimsical challenges are brought to life by charming animations and cunning sound effects throughout, making for a delightful few hours of casual island getaway fun.
What’s as much fun as solving puzzles? Hitting the road with a brand-new camera and taking snapshots! Something We Made’s TOEM is a black-and-white isometric animated cartoon that sends players on a whimsical trip to photograph the mysterious titular phenomenon. You control a cute little anthropomorphic-sheep-type character wearing headphones and a balaclava, and at various stops you’ll need to replenish your bus card with stamps by exploring and helping out the many quirky characters you meet along the way, such as an ex-pirate queen who lost her hat, or a ghostly horse who wants to remember what he looked like in life. Sometimes this is as easy as finding missing items, but the most entertaining challenges involve taking pictures that meet required criteria. The main story is over far too soon, but thankfully you can take your time and capture the local wildlife on film to fill up a compendium, as well as collect various accessories and lo-fi music tracks to accompany your journey. It’s never particularly challenging, but the relaxing pace and variety of locations and characters make the experience an unfailingly charming casual treat.
Best Puzzle-Platformers: A Juggler’s Tale, Unbound: Worlds Apart
Puppet shows are often amusing, whimsical displays, but kaleidoscube’s A Juggler’s Tale has a much darker, deeper side, exploring the nature of one’s free will when someone else is literally pulling all the strings. Abby is a performer at a traveling circus who longs to explore the world beyond. But as a marionette she’s trapped in more ways than one, her movements seemingly her own but in actuality constrained by the unseen storyteller whose moral authority cannot be defied – at least at first. Making inspired use of this device in terms of both gameplay and metaphor, the riveting narrative of this side-scrolling adventure sees you cross gorgeously detailed environments bolstered by a cinematic score and the captivating voice work of a narrator whose story isn’t progressing the way he envisioned. It’s also a compelling blend of genres: a puzzler that unfolds like a platformer, with level designs and even “boss fights” that test your reflexes but have more to do with deductive skills than the nimbleness of your fingers. From start to finish, it is a delightful experience, taking a classic fairy tale aesthetic and exploring it with great wit, beauty, and emotional resonance.
Adventure fans not used to modern metroidvanias may have missed this charming little side-scroller from Alien Pixel Studios last year, but this amazing hand-painted magical game is certainly worth venturing out of your comfort zone. Unbound: Worlds Apart tells the story of Soli, an adorable little monk who stumbles into the power to open portals to other dimensions immediately around him. He must then use these circular gateways to other realms to navigate sometimes-twitchy puzzle-platform challenges in order to free his broken world from a demonic invasion. Portals manifest different game physics when used in different places, like reversing gravity or shrinking Soli down to half his size, giving each unique setting a different feel. You’ll travel back and forth across a few beautifully distinctive maps by completing goals and acquiring new powers that unlock previously inaccessible locales. There's more than enough story and puzzles here for an adventure gamer to sink their teeth into, numerous platforming challenges to appease an action fan, and an abundance of amazing artwork to leave any player in awe.
Best of the Rest: Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One
Elementary, my dear Aggie. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective returns in Frogwares’ latest outing, Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, but here he’s unlike you’ve ever seen him before. This is an origin story in which you’ll get to freely explore the large open-world Mediterranean island of Cordona, where Sherlock spent part of his childhood when his mother was ailing. Returning as a young man in his early twenties, Sherry – as his imaginary friend Jon calls him – discovers that her death when he was a boy may have been due to more than natural causes. And so the game is afoot! The visually impressive environments on Cordona reveal myriad mysteries great and small for Sherry to unravel. With ongoing conversations between the brash protagonist and his dissociative alter ego, disguises that impact how the locals respond, a specialized concentration mode for greater focus on important detail, the ability to eavesdrop, and even a little (optional) combat, there’s no shortage of things to do in your quest to uncover the truth of Holmes’ past.
Next up: Best Non-Traditional Adventure... the envelope, please!
