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42 games released in 2021 and reviewed here, best first.
42 reviews
A card-based deckbuilder that spends its first act convincing you it's a horror-tinged roguelike, then spends the next two acts proving that was never the whole game — a genre-shifting puzzle box from Daniel Mullins Games that has held a 96.8% Overwhelmingly Positive rating across 134,000-plus Steam reviews for nearly five years, even as a consistent minority feels misled by its own store page.
9 / 10
A hacking-themed incremental where the automation you'd normally unlock with currency is automation you write yourself, in real JavaScript against a real API — free, open source, and still getting rewritten out from under its own players five years after launch.
8.5 / 10
A deckbuilding auto-battler where the hero fights entirely on their own and the only real decisions are which terrain cards to lay down along the loop, and when to stop being greedy and walk the loot home.
8.5 / 10
A RuneScape skilling menu stripped of everything else and rebuilt as a proper idle RPG — twenty-nine interlocking skills, a free version that isn't a trial, and three expansions that never once ask for a subscription.
8.5 / 10
A Viking survival sandbox that gates its whole progression behind biomes, each one resetting your sense of safety from zero. Five and a half years into Early Access, with a firm 1.0 date finally on the calendar, it's worth asking how much of that reputation still holds.
8.5 / 10
Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, genre-blending horror-action sequel to Resident Evil 7 — beloved broadly, but facing a real, consistent identity debate from series fans who miss the tighter, scarier tone that came before it, plus a launch-week DRM performance problem that's echoed the franchise's reputation years later.
8 / 10
A small Paris studio built a turn-based CRPG on Dungeons & Dragons' free 5.1 rules document rather than a paid brand license, and the result plays closer to an actual tabletop session than any of its bigger-budget rivals — verticality, light and darkness included — while looking and sounding like exactly the smaller production it is.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, thematically serious entry in Bandai Namco's long-running JRPG series, built around six-character elemental combat and a slavery-and-liberation story that earns its weight. The game underneath is excellent. The launch-day decision to sell costume DLC that unlocks combat Artes and stat bonuses, advertised at every campfire, is still the thing its own playerbase brings up five years later.
8 / 10
A procedural storytelling tactical RPG that follows the same handful of heroes from their first pitchfork fight to old age, generating genuinely moving personal arcs — until enough playthroughs reveal the same event templates repeating underneath the charm.
8 / 10
A god-game sandbox where civilizations of humans, orcs, elves and dwarves grow, fight and collapse almost entirely on their own while you throw lightning, plagues and dragons at them. Nearly five years into Steam Early Access, it's still one of the most purely enjoyable toyboxes in PC gaming — as long as you never expected it to have an ending.
8 / 10
An open-world zombie survival game with a genuine cult following that grew after release — launched on PC in 2021 with one of the most severe, best-documented data-collection controversies this library has seen, since resolved with an opt-out but still shaping how the game is remembered.
7.5 / 10
Blizzard's remaster of the 2000 original finally landed on Steam in February 2026, bundled with the first new class since 2001. The classic game underneath is exactly as good as it ever was — the question is whether Steam buyers are actually being sold the classic game, or something more expensive.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation game whose endgame isn't a bigger number but a visible megastructure eclipsing a star. Five years into Early Access, the premise is still the best in the genre — the question is whether the game around it has caught up.
7.5 / 10
A deep, genuinely meditative agricultural sim that reviewers describe finding real therapeutic value in — held back for years by the same specific, franchise-wide complaint about hired-worker AI, and a biennial release cycle some longtime fans feel delivers too little new for the price.
7.5 / 10
A superb remaster of one of the best sci-fi trilogies ever made, wrapped in a DRM requirement so unpopular it dominates the negative reviews almost completely — a single-player game bought on Steam that still won't run without a separate EA login.
7.5 / 10
A demon-infested crusade that hands out nine ways to stop being human, wrapped around the most tabletop-faithful, least newcomer-friendly ruleset the CRPG revival has shipped — and a strategic army layer a large share of its own audience wishes it could turn off.
7.5 / 10
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
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 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 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
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
