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AggroCraig

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Games of 2022

Hey, I finally had the bandwidth to write a full list out before the year was up! That's great. And the year's games were definitely worth it, too, there were some real bangers this year.

Some honorable mentions that I just didn't finish in time, but I bet would have been real contenders: Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, Pentiment, Live A Live, and Marvel's Midnight Suns.

Close calls that I felt really bad leaving off: Weird West, River City Girls 2, Shovel Knight Dig, and Kirby and the Forgotten Land

List items

  • This game worked for me on every level. It’s a beautiful piece of sci-fi, cyberpunk, whatever you want to call it, with a story that has resonated with me over the months since I played it. At its core, it’s a relatively simple game that exists somewhere between a visual novel and a video-game adaptation of an awesome tabletop RPG. Each cycle, you wake up with a set of dice that have been rolled, the values of which you can then apply to a whole host of actions throughout the station on which you live. The number of dice depends on your condition at the time, how well you’re taking care of your disintegrating mechanical body, slowly falling victim to planned obsolescence built into its design by the company that made you. There was something resonant about these systems themselves, the very real understanding that you wake up on any given day feeling different levels of ready to deal with your many responsibilities, but you have to make the most of what you have to offer to try to either accomplish what you can or at least set yourself up for the next day to go better. The various actions you spend your dice on can either earn you resources, advance various “clocks” that represent different goals you may be trying to achieve or people you may be working for. At first you’re just trying to make enough to afford the next dose of the medicine you rely on to survive, and if you’re lucky enough to get stability on your needs, you can start pushing towards your wants. The residents of the station that you meet throughout the game’s many cycles are incredibly well-realized, each with their own goals and struggles, and who you choose to spend time with, to bond with, and to help with their various aspirations is up to you. I gravitated towards the characters I felt a connection with, and the ending that I got felt like a perfect reward for the effort I had put in. The game’s themes come across incredibly well throughout these interactions, through the various worldviews that people share, how they react to you and your interactions with them, and whether they even see the robotic player-character as a person or not. Citizen Sleeper is a truly special game, one with a strong visual and musical presentation, brilliant writing, and a message that rang true. In keeping with the running game-of-the-year theme of “I beg of you to play this game,” not only do I want anyone reading this to give Sleeper a try, I also very much want to hear about the experience you had with it, the characters you got to know, and the choices that you made. It has so much to offer that I wouldn’t be surprised if your experience is totally distinct from mine.

  • I’ve been looking forward to Tunic for years, seeing it pop up at PAXes or seeing little bits of it on Twitter throughout its many years of development. However, all the time I spent anticipating it was accompanied by the expectation that it would be a cool little Zelda-like where you play as the cutest fox guy ever. All of this is true of the game, but on top of that it’s also one of the most cleverly-designed games I can remember. The gameplay itself is relatively simple, with the fox having a straightforward moveset and a typical Zelda-esque collection of tools that can be used in combat and exploration. The masterstroke that ties everything in the game together is the sense of mystery that is shot through the whole thing. So much text in the game is in its own (initially) indecipherable language, which makes so much of the game a process of discovering what things actually do and mean while adventuring through the world. On top of that, the world has a host of collectibles that take the shape of manual pages, brilliantly evoking classic SNES-era game manuals with adorable art and screenshots/diagrams explaining how to play the game, but all written in that same in-game language. The way these pages are meted out throughout the adventure layers on revelations about things that your character could do since the beginning of the game, had you as a player just known how to do it. Each time one of those happens, it recontextualizes every area you’ve been through thus far, leading to more wanders around the world using this new knowledge to find even more secrets (and very likely more new knowledge that will start the process all over again!) Playing through this game, collecting all of the manual pages, and getting the true ending was immensely satisfying, and finding some of the more obscure secrets on top of that was super cool too, even if I needed some internet help to do some of those. Solving the Golden Path is my favorite moment in video games this year, I’ve never seen anything else quite like it. My respect for Tunic grew even further when I saw a Twitter thread about the sound design in the game where individual notes and chords in the soundtrack/ambient soundscape correlate with the game’s language, revealing that the game is, in its own way, talking to you and guiding you through its world all along, if only you could speak that language. Unbelievable attention to detail. Bravo.

  • I’ll admit that I wasn’t super excited for Elden Ring through its development. The team had no shortage of ambitious ideas, but the connection to George R.R. Martin was something between meaningless and a negative to me, and I had bounced off of the two most recent FromSoft games I had tried (Sekiro and Dark Souls 3.) Given all of that, I was ready to ignore this one and move on, but the buzz around Elden Ring from reviewers was far too effusive for me to not at least give it a try. Of course, given where it is on this list, it’s no surprise that I’m glad I did. Elden Ring is an achievement in open world design that I haven’t seen since Breath of the Wild: the act of random exploration is rewarded with no shortage of little discoveries that feel worth the time spent finding them, making wandering feel good all on its own. The world design of the Lands Between is outstanding, with the major areas all feeling distinct and featuring plenty of awful things that will make you regret stumbling into them. In fact, the game even has one big advantage over BotW in that its “major dungeons” are well-designed areas that invoke the spirit of areas from old Souls games, complete with varied and killer boss fights at the end. My only real beef with the game is that some of the side areas are a bit repetitive, especially the catacombs, but at least they were individually quick enough to not generally overstay their welcome. Overall, I had an outstanding time making my way through the game, I thought the ending that I got was a good one, and I’m impressed knowing that there was even more major stuff that I just never got around to. Maybe I’ll give those things a shot whenever the inevitable expansion comes out.

  • I thought that God of War (2018) was a pretty good game, but I definitely didn’t like it anywhere near as much as most folks I talked to did. The characters and story were good enough, but I found the combat to be stiff and limited, at least until midway through the game or so when the Blades came into play. At that point, it felt like Kratos’s moveset was more or less completed, and I found myself wishing that more of the game took place after that point. Well, with Ragnarok, I got my wish and then some. The combat in this sequel starts where that game left off and builds from there, adding another weapon and multiple sidekick characters to make a system that already felt well-developed even more so. Combine that with a smartly-structured campaign that wove open-world sections with side quests to do in between more-linear major story missions, with sections switching out the main playable character thrown in for good measure, and I found this game so much more enjoyable to play moment-to-moment. On top of all that, the story worked really well for me, the new major players introduced in Ragnarok all pulled their weight and then some. These characterizations of Thor and Odin are some of my favorites I’ve ever seen, and the performances are top-notch. My only major beef with the game is a lack of variety in the puzzles to be solved, with the Nornir chests that bored me in the previous game being back in full effect, and an overreliance on what I found to be a really clumsy mechanic in the sigil arrow stacking all over the game. Those sections dragged for me, keeping the game from reaching the heights it could have, but I still found it to be a great improvement over the last game.

  • I’ll get this out of the way right up front: If you bounced off of this generation of Pokemon games because of their massive raft of performance issues, I 100% get it. These things run like garbage and it’s ridiculous that they do. None of that changes the fact that I had more fun with Violet than I have with a Pokemon game in many, many years. The structure worked perfectly for me, wandering around the world progressing the three parallel story paths whenever I felt like it, and seeing what Pokemon I could catch or items I could find in weird corners of the world when I didn’t feel like progressing. I ended up a bit overleveled in general, but I don’t really come to these games for the challenge, so I didn’t really mind. I thought the crop of characters here, from friends and rivals to gym leaders and Elite Four members, were all great. The little gym challenge things in this game added a goofy little dimension to the process of going through the same badge-getting structure as always, and it also gave the leaders’ personalities more time to come through. I was surprised by how much time was spent on the story, and the last section of it is way more serious than I expected a Pokemon game to get, and I thought it was presented well to boot. It’s a game that needed a ton more optimization work, but I was having enough fun that it didn’t matter to me.

  • A game so nice I’ve played it thrice, Vampire Survivors gets the award for “most platforms played” with time spent on PC, Xbox, and iPhone by me this year. On top of all that, if/when this comes out on Switch, I’ll be starting all over again. All of this is to say that Vampire Survivors must be doing something right. On its surface it’s a pretty simple game, wandering around each level autofiring at bigger and bigger waves of enemies and stacking/upgrading weapons until you’re a whirlwind of hot death killing everything (until the reaper shows up and murders you instantly.) It’s fun to see what weapons synergize together and unlock evolutions of other weapons, mashing things together to see what happens, and unlocking more characters, weapons, and levels to try out. I already thought this game was sweet based on all of this stuff, but then I happened upon some stuff that gave me a real “say what” moment, and it took on a whole other life. I’ll be playing this well into 2023, seeing what else it has to offer, exploring the recently-released DLC, and just having a good-ass time.

  • If you see this entry and say “why put a remaster of an old game on your list,” you really owe it to yourself to see what Stanley Ultra Deluxe actually is. It was great to revisit old endings from the original Stanley Parable, but where things got truly memorable is when the extra content unique to this game comes into play. I really don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling things, but the level of quality on display is at or above everything from the original game and had me dying all the way through. It’s a fantastic experience, and whether you’ve played The Stanley Parable or not, you really should play Ultra Deluxe.

  • Infernax is a relatively simple and straightforward game, but the execution on its concept is so strong that I had a great time with it throughout. The developers look to have drawn heavy inspiration from Simon’s Quest, but did a lot of clever work to add a ton to that classic formula, while also making things a lot less randomly obtuse than CV2 was (with one pretty major exception that really sticks out if you’ve played the game.) I’d say that the greatness is really in the details here, with the excellent sprite design (especially on the larger enemies and bosses, which have really intricate detail for the retro art style) and the way the character’s moveset develops far beyond the older games that inspired it. On top of all of this, there’s a whole good/evil split here based on choices made throughout the main and side quests which can lead to a host of different endings, making there a lot to see here. If you’re going to check out Infernax, be warned that this game can be a real motherfucker, and you might find yourself frustrated, but it’s a great time if you stick with it.

  • Kitty game good! Stray was a game that caught a lot of attention at the PS5 reveal, and I was looking forward to it finally coming out. Wandering around a robot-populated city as a cute little cat, appreciating the lovely worldbuilding, trying to piece together what happened that led to things being the way they are makes for a fun time. The gameplay isn’t particularly complicated, mostly just focused on exploration and a bit of puzzle solving, but it was enough to keep me going. The little action sequences that are mostly chase scenes with little Flood-like guys were just stressful enough, mostly because I didn’t want my cute little kitty to get hurt (I think I only died once or twice in my playthrough, but the emotional damage in each is massive.) There’s more environmental variety than I would have originally expected the game to have, with special shoutouts to the little treehouse city. Overall, I wouldn’t say that any one thing about Stray is world-changing or anything, but I had a consistently good time with it and thought it was just charming as heck. Also, one of my cats was obsessed with the TV cat and kept trying to paw at it, which was a big bonus. Final point in its favor: the cat looks so cute riding in the little buckets. It’s great.

  • Before Immortality, the only Sam Barlow project that I had played to completion was Her Story, but I heard so much buzz about Immortality (and of course the wonder of Game Pass) that I had to give it a shot. Similar to Her Story, its obtuse structure can lead to some confusing moments, but I appreciated that this time around there was more in place to allow me to sort of click around until I stumbled into something new if I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Combine that with the “what the hell” moment of the first discovery of one of the game’s many secrets, which proceeded to broaden the possibility space of what could be found even further, and I think this is the most successful work in Barlowe’s catalog. The performers here do a great job of embodying their characters, both in front of and behind the various cameras, and extra special credit must go to Manon Gage for her role as Marisa Marcel. The game wouldn’t work at all if her performance wasn’t strong, and it’s fortunate that she’s really going for it. There’s one other role that’s played extremely well, but I’ll have to leave that one nonspecific for spoiler purposes. I’m limited in what I can say here, but if you’re looking for an off-the-wall story that takes a fair bit of poking and prodding to find, give Immortality a shot. If you do, I’d love to talk about what you make of it.
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