The hell-year of 2020 actually did have one shimmery silver lining: great games. We might have been stuck inside coping with the stress and worry of a global pandemic, but at least we had welcome diversions with great new video games dropping almost every month.
And now that 2020’s almost in the rear-view, it’s time to start thinking about what’s next.
The 2021 lineup is already looking stacked, with some serious heavy-hitters arriving in January and February and plenty more to follow in subsequent months. There’s sure to be even more as winter, spring, and summer give way to additional announcements. But here’s what we’re most looking forward to playing right now as a new year dawns.
The Ascent
Set in a cyberpunk, sci-fi world beset by hyper-capitalism, The Ascent looks like a refreshing take on the hack-and-slash/dungeon crawler genre with its neon lights, futuristic city scapes, and gun combat. With the option to play either solo or co-op, The Ascent has players blasting their way through a world where the corporation that owned absolutely everything has just collapsed, and it’s up to you to survive, thrive, and figure out what happened. The Ascent is coming to Xbox consoles and Steam.
Deathloop
From the studio that brought us the Dishonored series and 2017’s Prey comes Deathloop, a time-twisting game of creative murder with a pulpy, colorful look. You play as an assassin tasked with taking out eight targets in a single night as they attend a party on a remote island. There’s just one catch: The day of the party is stuck in a seemingly eternal time loop that only you know about (apparently). So you enter each new day armed with more info about your targets’ movements and behaviors than you had before. That premise, along with an additional multiplayer mode that sees one player defending the timeline while the other disrupts it, means there’s a lot to like about this Bethesda Softworks-published action-stealth game. Deathloop is coming PlayStation 5 and Steam on May 21, 2021.
Garden Story
Quite possibly the cutest game coming in 2021, Garden Story puts players in the shoes of Concord, a delightful little grape hero who has been selected to rebuild a village inhabited by equally delightful characters, go off on little adventures, fight against the incoming Rot, make new friends, and craft items to progress through the world. Garden Story is coming to Nintendo Switch and Steam.
Gotham Knights
At long last the Dark Knight returns to video games. Sort of. In Gotham Knights, Batman is apparently dead when the story opens, as is Jim Gordon. The city’s police department is a snake’s den of corruption, and so it falls to the Bat’s crime-fighting colleagues — Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin, and Red Hood — to pick up the slack. This game for one or two players is a little bit Arkham-style action/stealth, a little bit loot-driven role-playing game. It looks to mark a new direction for Batman games, but one that fans should find appealing, with its clear inspirations in the Arkham series and a story dealing with the Court of Owls. Gotham Knights is coming to PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, and PC sometime in 2021.
Hitman III
The Hitman series delivers the best murder mousetraps in video games, and developer IO Interactive has really been on a tear since 2016’s series reboot. Hitman III follows both that and the 2018 sequel, introducing a whole new set of environments for you to plan and stage elaborate assassinations in the midst of Agent 47’s still-unfolding story. With the added ability to import all the levels from the previous games plus the addition of virtual reality support, Hitman III looks to build on the successes of the past four years while giving fans exactly what they love. Hitman III is coming to PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, PC, Stadia, and Switch (via cloud-based streaming) on January 20, 2021. ♦
(The story originally published by Mashable India)
