Top 10 of 2022
What a year it's been.
In the real world, I set a milestone for myself by tucking a few feature scripts under my belt, finishing my Master's degree, moving into a new apartment, and, at some point, managing to shake Guillermo del Toro's hand.
Oh yeah, and I also got a cat!
In the gaming world, holy cow! What a strong one of those we had, right? The closest equivalent I can think of in terms of quality was 2015, where developers had two years of separation from the launch of the consoles to get familiar with the tech and take advantage of what was possible for them.
… sort of.
It was also a year that saw the rise of smaller games, as my list will make obvious. But before I dive into those, I figure I should give a shoutout to the ones that couldn't quite make the cut. As before, the personal rule I set for myself like the rest is that only games I saw to completion make it onto my final list, but that doesn't mean I can't give a nod or two to a cool or interesting thing every so often!
Dipped into/Unfinished
I'm a simple man. I appreciate a good boomer shooter when one comes along. Even ones that don't feature a strong mechanical hook can wow me so long as it feels good to play. Prodeus offered that in spades thanks in part to its pixel/voxel/whatever you want to call it presentation. Another little touch I can appreciate is loading all the enemies with what appears to be three times as much gallons of blood as their bodies can conceivably contain. Every death a messy, little celebration.
Alright, there's no way to explain how unique this game looks, so the best thing I can do is throw an image at you because this is so...
Imagine getting an eyeful of this while playing it in VR, like I did. Suffice it to say, I needed a little reorientation after stepping back into the real world to make sure I wasn't falling into the near distance. Excited to dip back into it, though! I could play it without the assault on my eyes, but where's the fun in that, yeah?
Loved me the first two games. Nothing gets me o-...er,... cheering quite like a tall, vogueing lady flexing on a bunch of biblically accurate angels. So why is it that the last entry just kinda made me drop off?
Maybe the intro dragged its heels in the gravel moreso than before. Maybe the performance on old hardware is finally catching up to it, not being up to snuff like other character action games. Maybe because the story didn't quite grab me like before, and its cheeseball presentation isn't quite as antiquated as it once was in the early 2010s.
Or maybe it's because I had a big catch-up to do around the time of its release and had to put it down for more interesting stuff. Who can say, really?
I like the first rat game pretty decently and this one looks more of the same. No idea what direction it can take other than retreading old ground, judging from those first few chapters. I just hope I'm wrong and that it can surprise me in its later hours.
Man, Dark Seed 3 took such a wild direction for the franchise. Dunno why they made Mike Dawson a silent hero this time around, but I hope he can find Rita by the end of all this.
Maybe it coheres better as I trudge towards the later parts of the game, but one of those earlier puzzles really had me scratching my head for a good half hour before I gave up and looked online for a solution. It's unfair to compare it to the Playdead games even though it shares the names of a couple people on it, but I can't recall getting this lost in either Limbo nor Inside.
(waves around open palm at chest height)
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
As someone who played the original, I found that one, new hole, experienced that hole, embraced that hole, and became one with that hole. I set it down and said to myself “It can't get better than this.”
Honorable Mentions
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course
I regret to inform everyone that this will make your knuckles and thumbs tense for days all over again. But now you can play a cup lady with her own playstyle this time around! Big ups in my book!
This game agonized me, not because it was poorly made or anything. Had a decent time with the story and the novelty of playing as a cat in an abandoned techno city ruled by robot inhabitants had its charms here and there. It's just that the more separation of time between now and when I finished it for the first time made me look back and ask myself “Did I... not really like it all that much?”
I mean, yeah, we all got cuted to death around its launch window and seeing everyone's pet cat react to the onscreen cat was a nice few weeks on the internet, but I can't help but think how barebones the entire experience was. It never quite steered into greatness or abject terribleness. It did what it said on the tin and everyone seemed to move on.
In a different universe, there's a better version of this game that stripped out all the dialogue and fetch quests and let us actually be a cat futzing around in this world and putting the pieces together on our own. What we're left with made me feel a bit wanting, all things considered.
Again, not terrible. Just O.K.
You're not fooling me, NVIDIA! Those subliminal 4090s you sprinkled throughout the game ain't making me rush to get it into my cart just yet!
Consider this the #11 of my official list.
While not quite eloquent in some spots, and with the gameplay loop flaring up my PTSD brain to maintain the hell out of my little cult town as the inhabitants drop their poo everywhere, I gotta give a nod to how cutesy the presentation of the whole package was.
Swapping back and forth between town development and Binding of Isaac-esque randomized dungeon crawling, Cult of the Lamb showed us just how well-done you can do pacing between different styles of genres.
The endgame made me realize how little there was to get worried about in the long run though, so I gotta knock it down a peg from my own list. Sorry, game! But you couldn't quite convince me to play poker with that weirdo on the outskirts of my cult.
Got Recc'd; Haven't Played
AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative
We cool? Good. Here's the objectively good games of the year.
10. Norco
Sometimes a game is so gritty, disgusting, and paints a grim portrait of the future that you can't help but appreciate the craft that went into its world-building. Fortunately, Norco had a good sense of humor and weirdness about it to alleviate a lot of its grim setting.
After the beginning hour of a slow walkthrough of my player character's childhood home, recalling all the painful memories of her family and strained relationship, all it took was dipping into the backyard and casually conversing with the household's butler robot to get me all-in on the emotional whiplash of its story. Faltering ecosystms, the gig economy, and uploading a human being's life into digital data are just a few of the factors touched on in this urban Louisiana adventure game. All the while, the game is ready to pounce on you with a cult of Garrets holed up in an abandoned mall with an entire hierarchy. Oh, and who can forget that deep dive (literally, sometimes!) into the bayou settlements that got driven into obscurity thanks to industrial developments.
9. Iron Lung
This game isn't even an hour long and yet it has some of the most rock-solid tension you could ever get your hands on.
It isn't even that complex either! All it asks of you is to walk between two panels: one that controls where your submarine is at the bottom of an ocean of blood on a derelict moon in a nightmare era where planets and stars disappeared, forcing the populace to scrounge for what's left on space stations as the lights go out, and a second panel that takes pictures outside of said sub.
Shoutouts to the sound design in this one. In an era of horror games that pull out all the stops to have a monster jump in your face shouting “Abloogie woo!”, all it takes for me to be on edge in Iron Lung is to hear something brush past the little craft I'm piloting. Was it just a current that buffeted against the wall? A lifeform that doesn't need eyes at depths like these? Something... bigger? Oh, God, please don't make me take a pic right now!
8. Neon White
For a time when I was a young lad, I would sneak down to the entertainment room in the middle of the night to catch the anime block on Adult Swim. Whoa! All these cartoon characters are swearing. This ain't like Pokemon at all!
Fast forward two decades and I look back on younger me with an almost nostalgic reverence. There is literally nothing that would have separated the characters of Neon White, with their crew of cringe children and weeaboo references, from 12 year old me.
Anywho, the game itself is rad and drives that gut feeling in me to just try over and over again and perfect that one run. I even liked the downtime with the social relationship bits, having me hunt down all those hidden presents just to see what crazy things these teenage mentality assassins would spout next.
7. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
If there was anything to mark for this year, it was me breaking out of some of my comfort zones. Some for bad effect, like attempting an MMO and realizing I just don't jive with its repetitive feedback loop. Sorry, Final Fantasy XIV, you did it to yourself!
But then there were the highlights, like the job simulation genre that had players check into a routine and plow away until they were in the green. While I can't say I haven't quite reached the dad game genre quite yet, what with the Farming Simulators doing quite well without my help (and how I'm not an actual dad), there was something absorbing about how Hardspace: Shipbreaker managed to draw me in.
Things didn't seem great at first when the in-game job timer meant I had to scramble much for much of my shift and resulted in a lot of hurried and accident-prone work days, then it dawned on me how intentional it was to the design and themes of the game itself. Of course a company with zero regard for its workforce would want to put them in more debt than they could pay off in several lifetimes. It's immensely helped by its addition of a smartly-written story around its edges, with talks of worker solidarity and corporate mismanagement being a recurring through-line.
Now, if only I got better at depressurizing these ships without setting off a nuclear reactor at the other ends of the hull...
6. Pentiment
I should have paid more attention in high school history class...
At least Obsidian certainly did their homework and a half for this one! I liked how the player character, Andreas Maler, can hail from so many backgrounds and disciplines, spicing up the possibilities for the dialogue and interactions with its colorful cast in 16th century Bavaria. I liked how Andreas' perceptions of certain individuals could change the format of their text on the fly. Speaking of, the dynamic text had no right to go as hard as it did. All the letters gradually getting spelled out, sometimes correcting as they go, lent so much weight to how reactive the base game was.
I would also be remiss to talk about how the story culminates all its mysteries, wherein the theme of passing along stories and accounts within time periods are never perfect but the folks who write it do their best anyhow. I may never know if I found the correct culprits or right calls in its investigations, something that normally would have eaten at me in any other games, but Pentiment was the reassuring hand on my shoulder telling me that it's okay to stumble and be at fault every once in awhile. We are made by our failures and aspire to dust ourselves off and try our best despite the circumstances that are stacked against us.
No other game landed on its feet quite as eloquently as this one.
5. Tunic
In the night I got The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap, I played through a quarter of that game into the wee hours of the morning of a school day, eyes still glued to the screen hooked up to the GameCube's GameBoy player. My only companion to this whole adventure was the box and manual that came with the game and my only source for a guide before I turned to the internet back when. Both of which are now buried somewhere in a box at my folk's place back home, but I'm too busy to unearth it to prove my point. It was the first instance where I jotted down little scribbles in the Notes section at the back of the manual keeping track of all those kinstone pieces.
If there were any game that recaptured that feeling, complete with the radiant glow of the CRT television as I poured over the guide, Tunic snagged it with ease. It's one of those rare games that comes along and demands the player find the clues to the world on their own, making discoveries oh-so more delectable. You may happen to find a repeating pattern of this design philosophy later on this list, but I'll just say that having something click for me does the game miles of favors instead of having the main character mouth off what I should be doing next.
4. Signalis
It happened everyone! A good Silent Hill game came out this year! We can be rest assured that the scales of balance can, at the very least, remain at neutral if that remake of 2 turns out awful next year.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Between the save rooms lifted directly out of early Resident Evil and enemies that may rise again at a moment's notice, usually when you're unprepared with limited ammo, Signalis demonstrated how much room for growth there was in the survival horror space. The abstract form of storytelling excels at getting the player to question what monstrosity is around the next corner and keeps them on their toes for a conga line of unique encounters. Did you know there's an enemy that can only be defeated by futzing around with the radio? Kinda nuts how ripe the genre is for little mechanics that make the player panic and fumble for the solution on top of creating a thick and dreadful atmosphere.
3. Vampire Survivors
Here's a game so strong that even the clones and rip-offs of it were pretty dang good!
I don't even know what I can say about this that millions of others have already said. It's like digital crack, without all the microtransaction-laden strings attached, that offered tons of replayability and depth to whatever build you feel like popping off after booting it up. In any case, it was the perfect podcast game to zone out and watch as the hours evaporated in real time.
I suppose it's the perfect answer to when big, triple-A games exhaust by trying to keep too many plates spinning in the air, the only solution for folks is to seek out simplicity. Just... make sure you go all in on garlic at the start, yeah? Garlic Gang represent!
2. Citizen Sleeper
Every so often a pleasant surprise comes along that is so straightforward it reminds me of the things it didn't have to do to pull me in:
It didn't implement an insidious progression system that sucked the life out of its world and make the experience a dreary mess, it didn't make big promises that its multiple choices matter only for them to drop the ball and amalgamate into the same tired versions of itself, and it especially didn't even need to dangle the promises of rare loot or items as if the experience was constantly trying to tailor itself to my playstyle.
Instead, what it did was make me emotionally engage with it. Weird how it takes a little heart to really grab me.
Within the doldrums of sci-fi fiction that apply a cynical lens to what sorts of people reside in a futurist Utopian society, scrounging for whatever they can and leaving others to rot, its refreshing to play a game that has you not only look for the helpers but also play as one yourself.
It might sound a little cheesy, but all I know is that it had me hooked for almost its entire runtime after sitting down for a day to unpack its story. Hours later, I got to the end of the character subquest involving an overworked refugee trying to secure passage off the station with his adopted daughter, and I won't lie when I say it moved me to tears.
Herein lies one of Citizen Sleeper's greatest strengths: it tempered its everyday struggles with humanity, held up by the believable supporting characters you meet along the way.
Also the lo-fi soundtrack straddles a good line between peaceful and stressful. I mean, just listen to this.
I'm honestly surprised this game managed to claw its way up my personal list, supplanting the spot originally held by Vampire Survivors. But looking back over the whole year, I just for the life of me could not give up the game that clung onto the #1 spot all these months later.
1. Elden Ring
Call it obvious, call it indisputable, call it whatever you like. Just know that there was really only one game this year that pointed everyone across a vast, inspired world to forge an adventure of their own, rocked watercooler conversations for months on end, and kept those talks up to a feverish degree throughout the year. The mad lads at FromSoftware really had to go and make Dark Souls 4, 5, and 6 into one package!
I could rattle off on how many times I got wowed by all the big discoveries, taking that looong elevator ride down into the Siofra Depths, poking my head out into the red, decrepit wastes of Caelid, or facing off in the all-out war known as the Radahn Festival, but you probably heard all those ad nauseum before. Instead, I wanted to highlight Elden Ring as my second example after Tunic as games that trusted its players to connect pieces of the world together for themselves.
In the past decade of open-world games, it seemed like the big publishers often got scared when their flagship staples don't showcase all the money they poured into it onscreen at once. Your Assassin's Creeds, your Far Crys, your Horizons. Too often than not, I would open the maps to those games and dig past all the icons spewed across its contours to find where it wanted me to go next, when it dawned on me: these games are telling the players “Here. We already discovered everything for you. Now piss off and grind the map to 100% completion like we know you will.”
Elden Ring, and to most extents The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, took the opposite approach and made folks find those cool moments for themselves. It's a design principle that I can't help but appreciate a thousand times more after losing my patience with its peers. It's kind of beyond comparison really, and I hope the philosophy that the devs shouldn't lose sleep over missed, optional content gets replicated going forward.
I salute you, Elden Ring. Can't wait to play From's next Souls-like called, uh... (checks notes)... Armored Core. Ooh! Sounds neat! It's got armor right in the name! Can't wait to see what sort of drip my character can put on.
Old Games for Next Year
I guess the next big check on my to-do list is to look forward to the future, and what better way than looking back at older titles that captured my interest. Whether I'll finish them in a timely manner or not, I've got my playtime cut out for me after the new year gets ushered in.
Alright, I'm already breaking my rule in that I already dipped into this one. Did some of the early goings and finding how to get into the basic loop of the vast ocean sprawled before me. Look, I don't have thalassophobia, but Subnautica came really close the first time I dove beneath the surface of my emergency sub to take a looksie around.
I made it as far as hitting the first major plot beat by getting onto an island. If you know, you know! I'll have more to say on it once I get back into the survival rhythm and plunder the depths of its alien world.
Wait, the reins of Silent Hill are being handed to a guy who made some well-liked visual novels? And he has the repertoire for writing stuff that's empathetic towards individuals with mental struggles? Did Konami just... accidentally make all the right decisions for their upcoming Silent Hill game? Not that I'm complaining, really. Just gotta get through his body of work just to know what to expect in the meantime.
Though I will say that this being plastered across my Steam library will haunt me well into the new year.
Right, and stay safe in 2023, folks!
