Objection! Ruth Cassidy Asks What Even Is a GOTY, Anyway? | Winter Spectacular 2021
I’m putting it out there: the Game of the Year is a fundamentally weird beast. For all the things you can recognise in a game – technical innovation, a compelling story, personal resonance, sheer vibes – the idea of picking one and holding it above all the rest is a strange ask.
Credit where credit’s due, Umurangi is still probably the most stylish games of the year.
It’s also an uneven one. Of the new games I’ve loved this year, the Switch port of Umurangi Generation might technically excel, with the way you use the handheld to frame your photographs – but it feels wrong to call that “the game of 2021” when the PC release already drew critical attention last year. Overboard! is a witty narrative puzzle, and feels exemplary of inkle’s particular craft, and Wildermyth recreates both tabletop D&D banter and chaos at home. Does it make sense to ask them to compete with each other?
What’s more, it’s strange to try to establish the stage they’d be competing on. At the time of writing, I’ve played relatively few games that released this year that weren’t ones I played to review. I’ll admit, it’s bad innings, for a critic. It’s not to say that I haven’t played novel or interesting games, but unless it was my job to play it, few of the games I enjoyed in 2021 were 2021 releases.
Me every time I invest in any piece of media:
Even with professional levels of access, it’s difficult to keep in step with the churn of attention for new releases. For the months and years that go into making and publishing and marketing a game, media attention flares up and moves on at a rapid pace. Remember that two-week period in February where all anyone could talk about was Valheim? Is anybody in the games press still talking about Valheim? I still have yet to play Valheim.
When keeping up with new games is an impossible task, I’ve found myself instead filling in the knowledge gaps of missed experiences from gaming past. In a year that's felt itself a little displaced from the passage of time, I've been playing games out of time and place. Playing your first Souls game after playing various Souls-inspired games was an odd one to grapple with recently. Retrieving blood echoes after you die? That feels like Hollow Knight to me.
All this to say that while compelled by the concept of Herlock Sholmes in The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, my Game of the Year for 2021 is Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney… the one from 2001 – and, while I’m breaking the rules, the rest of the original trilogy is also my Game of The Year! It’s all the same file on my Switch, after all.
If you ever need a lawyer, you better make sure they are this thorough.
The lawyer-led detective game starring fledgling defense attorney Phoenix Wright has to be my pick simply for sheer joy and satisfaction it has provided me throughout the year. (And if that description concerns you, it’s a world where murder trials must be wrapped up in three days due to a backlog. Lawyers scouring crime scenes for evidence is the least concerning legal precedent Ace Attorney sets). It isn’t perfect – Justice for All has an uncritical child marriage subplot that could only really exist in media of the early 2000s – but almost everything about it is charming, from over-the-top villain confessions, to the evolving dynamics between its central cast, even the rhythm of its text and animation.
LANoireDoubt.jpg
As much as Ace Attorney is itself worthy of praise, it’s partly my Game of the Year because of how and why I played it. While it's true that I felt it was valuable to visit an earlier place in the canon rather than jump straight in at The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles – the exact same reason the release of Yakuza: Like a Dragon led me to boot up Yakuza Kiwami – it’s also true that Ace Attorney is exactly the kind of character-driven game that I’ve always loved long before I was a critic. It’s been on my wishlist for years, solely due to second-hand awareness of daft, iconic lines about cross-examining parrots and “unnecessary feelings”.
“Pain equals bad.”
Like a good book, I chipped away at the trilogy for half an hour at a time in the evenings before I went to sleep, drawing the series out long over the late Summer months. Despite talking about it publicly and frequently, it was easy to forget that I’d played it when I was thinking about games I’d played in a professional context. The baggage imbued with that – the strange mingling of leisure and labour – simply wasn’t there. It became that rare thing for a games journalist: a game I didn’t think about for work.
I’ll likely spend the next few weeks playing several games from 2021 that I’d otherwise miss. As much as I want to fill in more of my critical backlog gaps, I can’t afford to miss what’s new and changing either. The weird phenomena of ‘Game of the Year’ means I don’t know that I’ll ever not feel like I’m catching up – but if this year’s anything to go by, I don’t think that it's a bad thing not to be current on all the latest and greatest. Sometimes it is much better to just vibe with something you missed.
