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83 games released in 2021 and reviewed here, best first.
83 reviews
A narrative RPG that plays out across a lifetime, from birth to death, built around a genuinely subversive idea — your choices are gated by the stats your earlier choices built, whether or not that matches how you actually want to roleplay — that reviewers alternately praise as a brilliant deconstruction of choice-based storytelling and criticise as breaking the promise of meaningful choice altogether.
7.5 / 10
A base-building, Factorio-flavoured action RPG that launched in October 2021 to strong acclaim, then spent nearly four years failing to deliver a promised co-op mode -- and finally did, in August 2025, bundled with a loot rework substantial enough to spark a fresh wave of complaints from the veterans who'd waited for it.
7.5 / 10
A charming, Pikmin-inspired storybook fantasy adventure about two runaway children commanding a herd of forest spirits -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam for its art and atmosphere, with a consistent, specific complaint that its combat and controls never match the genre giant it invites comparison to.
7.5 / 10
Build a working CPU from NAND gates upward — a genuinely singular idea, sold as education, and 57 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews say the teaching is the part that doesn't work.
7.5 / 10
A Warcraft III mod with over five million downloads gets rebuilt from the ground up as a standalone tower defense, elemental towers and all — Very Positive on Steam, but its own community is now its biggest bottleneck.
7.4 / 10
A reverse dungeon crawler where you play the dungeon, not the hero — stock traps, hire monsters and watch a party of "heroes" die across a career measured in in-game weeks. Steam's 1,604 English reviews call it fun but thin, and the three post-launch DLCs are the corpus's single biggest sore point.
7.2 / 10
Read review of Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager
A Kickstarter-funded "date your weapons" dungeon crawler from the Moon Hunters team -- Very Positive on Steam for its style, music and genuinely distinctive premise, and shadowed since launch week by a specific, heavily-upvoted complaint that its story talks about consent far more than its mechanics actually practice it.
7 / 10
A soft reboot that keeps the Brave and Default battle system and Asterisk job system that made the series' name, wrapped around a new cast and a story a meaningful share of its own Steam reviews call the weakest part of the package.
7 / 10
A solo-developer's loving, NES-styled cyberpunk ninja platformer published by Yacht Club Games -- Very Positive on Steam for its pixel art and soundtrack, with a specific, years- consistent complaint that its controls and difficulty never quite match the genre touchstones it invites comparison to.
7 / 10
A gorgeous pixel-art adventure with some of the most detailed, distinctive sprite work and sound design in the genre, wrapped around a story a large and consistent share of its own reviewers say loses the plot somewhere in its middle stretch.
7 / 10
A menu-only farming MMO that has quietly run since 2021 with no ads and a genuinely optional shop, propped up by a community wiki so thorough that half the game's actual strategy lives outside the app.
7 / 10
A stylish hybrid of deck-building and turn-based tactics staged as John Wick-style action- movie fight choreography -- Very Positive on Steam, with a consistent balance and replayability complaint against genre giants like Slay the Spire, and a recent, specific monetisation grievance from its most invested players.
7 / 10
Playground Games' open-world racer remains Very Positive across nearly 279,000 Steam reviews nearly five years after release, still receiving weekly content updates today — undercut by a real, specific, dateable complaint that Playground introduced paid car-pack microtransactions roughly two years after launch despite Premium and Ultimate edition buyers having already paid for a "car pass" that was marketed as covering exactly this content.
7 / 10
A hand-drawn roguelite about drilling planet cores and ploughing the profits back into a growing mining corporation — a genuinely addictive loop wrapped around a confusing interface and a late game that never quite finds a second gear.
7 / 10
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Pixar-adjacent debut from first-time studio Ember Lab that launched on PlayStation and Epic in September 2021 to near-universal praise for its visuals -- and a just as consistent complaint, across years of reviews, that the combat and story underneath don't quite match them.
7 / 10
A first-person survival sandbox about hunting, farming and building a village that eventually runs itself, wrapped around the promise of a multi-generational dynasty that almost nobody who owns it ever actually reaches — a Very Positive, 42,000-plus-review Steam favourite that has spent the last two years answering "what's missing" with paid cosmetics instead of the content its own late-game silence keeps calling for.
7 / 10
A budget soulslike built around a genuinely inventive hook — inhabit the bodies of dead warriors rather than levelling a character of your own — that's spent five years since launch as a genuinely divisive game, with real, still-current complaints about content thinness and unfixed bugs sitting alongside a devoted fanbase, just days ahead of a sequel's official release.
7 / 10
A genuinely unsettling psychological horror story about grief and identity, praised even by its critics for atmosphere and sound design, undercut by one specific, near-universally disliked mechanic gating its true ending — an apple-picking replay loop several fans single out by name as the game's one real flaw.
7 / 10
A free browser incremental where the resource you're actually optimising is your character's lifespan — age through a job and skill web, die at seventy unless you've trained around it, and rebirth into a faster run. Small in scope next to the genre's marathons, and handed to the community as public domain, which explains why it's been forked well over a hundred times.
7 / 10
A stylish "brain punk" action RPG from Bandai Namco with two playable protagonists and genuinely striking presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, though a large share of even its own positive reviews describe a game that runs out of ideas well before the credits, and a cloud-save bug that reviewers say has gone unfixed for years.
7 / 10
A relentlessly demanding, meditative off-road trucking sim that reviewers describe with genuine reverence and dark humor in equal measure — undercut for years by unreliable multiplayer and crossplay stability, and an extensive DLC roster reviewers say pushes toward $200 for the full experience.
7 / 10
A sci-fi skating-platformer from Heart Machine, the studio behind Hyper Light Drifter -- Very Positive on Steam and genuinely loved for its movement and art, but shadowed across years of reviews by a consistent verdict that it never quite lives up to the pedigree that sold it.
7 / 10
