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ArbitraryWater

Internet man with questionable sense of priorities

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ArbitraryWater's Favorite Games of 2022 (which didn't come out in 2022)

Buckle up fuckers it's time for another list and another dangling threat of a write-up. Don't tempt me. You know I'll do it. I'll probably do it. I played a lot of games this year and wrote a lot of paragraphs. Don't think I won't do it again, mister.

Anyway thanks to my bullshit streams I played a lot of real hot garbage in 2022 (which might be worthy of its own write up,) but also some good stuff. Perhaps even worthy of being on a list. To be perfectly honest, I think I might try and play more things that aren't shit next year. Maybe.

Replay of the Year: Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven. Runners up: XCOM 2, Quest for Glory 1

Games I'll get back to next year, I swear: Soul Reaver, Old World, Druidstone, Shadow Hearts Covenant, Return to Castle Wolfenstein

List items

  • I played multiple Ys games and I'm here to tell you Ys is the preeminent purveyor of lightning fast, frictionless, skill-based but also "numbers go up" action RPG design out there. I'm going to play more Ys games.

  • I'm not saying Breakpoint is a good game that's worth your time and/or money, but I *am* saying that Breakpoint is the most fun I've had playing a video game cooperatively in quite some time. Also I didn't have to pay any money for it. Like, there's a whole friend pass thing going on. You could theoretically have one person buy the complete edition and then have three friends mooch off of it. Anyway, it's good shit.

  • An incredibly pleasant surprise, one that feels authentic to the character in his various incarnations while also allowing for a lot of smart deductive reasoning. Most importantly, it lets the player be wrong. Put Frogwares on my radar in a way it hadn't been previously. Slava Ukraini

  • If Signalis didn't come out this year I'd be willing to crown Tormented Souls as the actual champion of the Survival Horror throwback. It's goofy and the puzzles are sometimes a little much, but it's easily one of the strongest things I've seen in this space

  • My competitive multiplayer hijinks machine of choice for most of the year before we all got sick of it and started just playing Darktide together. I like Hunt a lot. I find Hunt very frustrating.

  • If there's one game from this list which has absolute "you need to see this, this shit is wild" energy, it's Chernobylite. It's kind of but not really STALKER, with a very dream-like atmosphere and a Mass Effect 2-esque heist. The gameplay wears out its welcome before the end, but it's very much worth your time.

  • It's incredibly slow, a tad clunky, and more than a little obtuse, but Ogre Battle 64's status as a platypus among strategy games deserves mention. Just use a guide.

  • The obligatory "I played this Tales game for like 25 hours and then got distracted by something else" pick for this year. Graces F's story and writing might as well be an algorithmically generated Tales plot with stock Tales characters, but that combat. That combat tho!

  • The middle third of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl feels like the holy grail for the last fifteen years of Slavjank shooters.

  • Feels like the lower-budget B-team side game that it is, but it was also a wonderful reminder that the Batman Arkham series is kinda amazing. I don't understand the people who say this is the best one, but go with god on that.

  • VN of the Year: Barring some leaps of logic and unfair shortcuts near the end, Raging Loop is a very good, well-constructed time loop but also social deduction story. To say more would ruin a lot of the fun, but if you had any affinity for something like Steins; Gate it's a good 'un.
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