Underground Highlights: The Best Outlying/Experimental Games of 2021- Intro & Part 1

As we put 2021 in the rearview, I wanted to pivot a bit from the traditional ‘Best Of’ list and instead shine a spotlight on some titles that I feel are further beneath the usual radar. I’m going to be looking at ten of the most interesting/experimental-leaning titles that probably slipped through the cracks, two at time in a five part series.

My thought is to go through them roughly in order from likely familiarity/relatively known, gradually moving through the more obscure and ‘out there’ ventures, and culminating on the two that I think most exemplify the category of game/style/mindset I wish to focus on in this series, delving into them with the deepest analysis. These are, I propose, the most creatively engaging works being made in the industry right now, and the goal is to attempt to outline why I feel that’s the case, and share and spread the word about them.

By nature, they are all from fairly new/smaller/unknown studios. I’ll provide a brief overview and some details about the developers as well before jumping into my analysis and breakdown. So with all that out of the way, let’s get to it:

Part 1: Freshly Familiar

Don’t let the subtitle mislead, these first two here are great games. It’s just as I said in the intro, they’re probably the highest visibility entries and thus can serve as a good starting point. So let’s start with almost certainly the most well-known title in the mix by now—The Forgotten City.

This one started life in 2015 as a Skyrim mod meticulously handcrafted by a dedicated solo developer. It rapidly built up reputation within the community, garnering much praise and attention. This culminated in being recognized with wins in both the Australian Writer’s Guild and Game Developer Awards. With renewed interest and a (slightly) bigger team/budget, Forgotten City was heavily reworked and revamped over the course of the next 4 years into a fully polished standalone. The final version dropped back in Sept 2021, exposing a new and larger audience to its fine-tuned experience.

In the new and improved incarnation, City takes its core premise—a story and character centric time travel mystery—and sets it in a picturesque Roman-styled city. You as the PC are then thrust into this place, where it is made apparent that the seemingly serene hamlet is haunted by an ominous ‘golden rule.’ That rule, if broken, will kill all its citizens, and you by extension. To prevent this, you must uncover the root of the strange edict and unravel how and why it’s happening, luckily quickly enough gaining the ability to reset the loop if/when events go awry. Armed with this power, you can now repeat the day, filling in the general rules of the loop by meeting NPC inhabitants and learning their personal history/routines/motivations, gradually acquiring knowledge to follow/solve leads and opening further threads.

These are the main activities the gameplay consists of. A majority of your time will be spent going through dialogue trees and exploration/puzzle solving. This is occasionally broken up by brief sections of combat scattered in. A valid enough criticism may be that combat could’ve been utilized a bit more/expanded, but it still very much works as is with a firm grounding. Besides, that aspect was never truly the main focus, as the actual star is the narrative itself and its robust components. It’s all kept engaging as you uncover more clues and retain info/items across iterations, thus making it more manageable and usually adding a new piece or two of the puzzle each time. There are multiple solutions and endings, each varying in degrees of narrative resolution, but all coherent and complete. While I will admit (trying to avoid spoilers) the ‘true reveal’ wasn’t as shockingly clever as it may have wanted to be, your mileage may vary on its use, but again it nevertheless made sense relative to what preceded it.

The true greatness of City is its attention to care and detail in the world and storylines, and how it melds . There are moments when you’ll discover a new interaction or useful item hidden away, which opens up possibilities while filing in more knowledge that can be exploited later down the line. Also in the course of its presentation, you’ll notice copious intelligent nods to ancient history/culture/philosophy from which it takes inspiration. NPCs are written extremely well, even though notably the models do show their stiff Skyrim DNA animation-wise. But this is greatly made up for by excellent voice acting and personalities, which goes a long way to selling the characters and the believability of their situations.

Throughout it’s roughly 15 hours Forgotten City showcases a creatively woven combination of elements. And it pulls these off with a satisfying flourish, bringing its own take and commentary on established templates. The whole endeavor deserves much credit, setting the general tone for titles to come, and is why I chose it as the leadoff entry.

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The second title I’ve picked here is Death’s Door, the sophomore release from Titan Souls developer Acid Nerve, published by Devolver. Released in June 2021, it unabashedly shows its source influences (i.e. Zelda et al.) but with an updated and wonderful presentation. Nostalgic-tinged retro may still be all the rage, but there is an important distinction between merely repeating the past as a prop, and using it as a springboard to interject more modern ideas.

Death’s Door manages to do just that with an almost perfect balance. And again the reviews and response reflect how well it does so. Combat is fluid and tightly satisfying, the story compelling, and the art/level design absolutely stellar. It starts from familiar ingredients but refines them to various degrees. Door understands precisely what its predecessors were, and exactly why they worked. It then takes those time-tested structures and wraps them around its own strong sense of world-building and earned confidence in gameplay.

Your role in Door is a bipedal weapon-wielding soul-collecting crow who works at the “Dept. of Death” in a fantasy afterlife of Kafkaesque nature, complete with its obscure rules and regulations, clearly analogous to real bureaucratic institutions. Even grim reapers have to punch in, and shit goes wrong on the pipeline sometimes. Which is why, after such a mishap, your nameless crow must set off to navigate a series of locales/dungeons in search of a stolen soul and the reasons behind its theft. It’s a pure darkly-leaning fairy tale setup, but one of distinction in a rather muddled mess of games doing the same. It is pleasingly charming in its exploration of somber subject matter juxtaposed with some absurd humor. Both are handled well, and themes of loss, grief, the afterlife, and finally hope/acceptance in the face of all those are touched upon throughout the journey.

The vision and feel of the world is where Door truly shines, entwined with the aforementioned design, to impart a lovingly crafted series of environments. (Side Rant: I think perhaps at this point a term can be coined for the use of diorama-like perspective Unity art, as has been done in a number of titles both in and out of this specific genre. Like a famous quote goes, “you’ll recognize it when you see it.”) It also throws in familiar-feeling but equally thoughtful puzzles, sprinkling in upgrades and other secrets throughout for the thorough-minded explorer.

All this while constantly battling an increasing bestiary of inventive monsters with some quite tense encounters, especially when it comes to the main bosses, where the Titan Souls influence/evolution shows most strongly. There are a handful of weapons and abilities to work with, each unique and different enough functionally so that none feel redundant or unnecessary, in addition to the above mentioned extra and hidden upgrades.

Death’s Door is immediately accessible, but not a simple breeze either. Similar to many of its other aspects, it contains what approaches to be the perfect challenge curve. There’s of course a secret ending/epilogue requiring more adventuring/exploring post-credits (or if one is extremely meticulous it is possible to achieve in the first playthrough.) But the main storyline is entirely satisfying unto itself, and the process from start to finish never gets dull or repetitive. There is always something very cool to see, fight, or find every step of the way. It’s modern Zelda-like done damn right by those who know precisely how to do it, and gets a heartily enthusiastic crow caw for that.