GOTY 2022
Honorable mentions include Pokémon Violet, Return to Monkey Island, Rogue Legacy 2, and Splatoon 3.
List items
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Elden Ring is the most impressive open world I've ever explored in a video game.
As a huge fan of Bloodborne and the Souls series, that style of game set in an open world sounds like an automatic recipe for success. But that ignores the fact that open world design has become increasingly rote over the years. What was once an impressive display of ambition has become a buzzworthy back-of-the-box bullet point for large AAA productions. Repetitive environments, uninspired quests, and overbearing map icons are commonplace in a lot of open world games. It would have been easy for developer FromSoftware to fall into the same trap. Instead, Elden Ring feels like a group of designers feverishly jotting down a breadth of captivating ideas, locations, characters, and bosses, and somehow managing to include them ALL in the final product. Every corner of its massive world has something noteworthy to explore, fight, talk to, or simply marvel at.
In fact, massive might be an understatement when describing the scope of the "Lands Between." The first time you get teleported to a new location only to open the map and find that it's zoomed out is a jaw-dropping moment. When it happens again, you can't help but find the nearest person - whether they care about Elden Ring or not - and excitedly blather about how impressive its open world is. I didn't feel fatigue at any point; instead, I lost myself in its world. Few game developers establish a sense of place like FromSoftware, and Elden Ring showcases the company at the top of its game. Somehow From's attention to detail doesn't falter in the face of Elden Ring's larger size and scope. Even after playing 80+ hours and getting every achievement, I'm sure there are entire areas or questlines I missed along the way. And somehow after all those hours, I'm excited to dive back in and make new discoveries.
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Tunic is a game in which I spent just as much time thinking about it and looking up community theories as I did play it. It completely consumed me for the 2-3 weeks I spent with it after its release back in March. On the surface it seems like a competent, isometric Zelda-inspired adventure with challenging combat. That's true... to a degree. When you peel back the layers, you find a mind-bending Rubik's cube of a game that requires pen/paper and a nimble brain.
A lot of Tunic's wonder and discovery is fueled by the incredibly clever, cute, and highly detailed in-game manual. When I say highly detailed I don't mean highly informative though. The manual pages are mysterious and cryptic, with subtle visual clues and unknown symbols. It's the player's job to piece things together like a mental jigsaw puzzle. I was fully on board the whole time, uncovering all its mysteries while I frantically scribbled in my notebook. The pinnacle of the Tunic experience was when I wrote on pieces of paper, cut them out, and rearranged and assembled them on the floor of my office. When a game inspires that kind of behavior, you know it's special.
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"Game feel" can be such a nebulous concept, but it's Neon White's greatest achievement. As a game built around time trials, it aligns its core mechanics with two straightforward philosophical keys: fun and speed. Whipping around the camera to shoot a couple of enemies and then discarding a card to double jump or ground pound feels euphoric. Every time I pulled off a move like that I felt so damn cool. I was also inspired to shave off seconds with each new run in a level. The fact that it feels so good to play only reinforces the speed element of Neon White. I play so many different games that I typically don't master the mechanics of any one game, but I really tried to improve and learn with each new attempt in Neon White.
The leaderboards certainly helped as well. I'd argue Neon White is secretly the best mulitplayer game of 2022. Any time I saw someone on my Steam friends list ahead of me in a level, I immediately jumped back in an effort to best them (often by mere milliseconds). Plenty of games feature leaderboards, but it was hard to avoid the constant pull of competition in Neon White.
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Signalis absolutely nails its PS1-era survival horror aesthetic. But it also presents it through a modern lens, with strange, dreamy visual transitions and abstract storytelling segments. There are some incredible audiovisual cues that manipulate perspective, point-of-view, and sequencing and in turn stand out as some of the most memorable game moments of the year. The narrative can be obtuse and cryptic, but not so much that it loses its effect. It's almost Lynchian in a sense, requiring the player to piece together ideas of identity and character relationships.
Signalis also builds that classic survival horror tension with strict inventory limits, limited ammo, and enemies that can only be killed permanently with thermite flares. I have to applaud one particular area that provides no map whatsoever, challenging the player to mentally (or physically) chart out the environment in an effort to truly learn and internalize it. I'm sure that section proved divisive, but I can't help but appreciate the game's bold, forward-thinking ideas in a familiar genre.
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This year featured some of the best video game writing I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing, and Citizen Sleeper is a prime example of that welcome trend. Its sci-fi world is so well realized, with beautiful, almost poetic descriptions and a memorable cast of characters that stayed with me well after I finished the game. It's a story of survival in more ways than one, and in turn hits emotional chords purely through text and static art.
I love that the narrative compliments the dice-rolling mechanical structure as well. For a large portion of the game resources are thin, and as a result the player has to make tough choices about which characters to help or quests to complete. This isn't a game in which everything can be completed in a single playthrough, and that tension mirrors the struggles of the characters and the game's themes on capitalism, work culture, and transhumanism. It's a shame that the resource economy skews heavily in the player's favor near the end of the game, because the constant push/pull of where and how to spend your time is when Citizen Sleeper is at its best.
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Few games truly establish a place and community like Pentiment. The entirety of the game takes place in one location, and as a result, you really get to know the townsfolk and their relationships with each other. The protagonist Andreas quickly goes from visitor to accepted resident, and in turn I felt the same way. I became a part of this small community and made assumptions (whether correct or incorrect) about these people's motivations and interests. Though it took roughly 15 hours to beat Pentiment, it felt like I had spent 50+ hours with it.
The RPG elements in which you can craft the backstory for Andreas are great, but for the most part Pentiment plays out like a visual novel that happens to take place in 16th century Europe. The setting and historical accuracy of its portrayal will certainly appeal to history buffs, but it also provides a great canvas for realistic characterizations despite the centuries-long gap between its time period and present day. Though I may not agree with some of the characters' thoughts on religion and socioeconomics, I can see their humanity and understand their motivations. The second act twist and third act are incredibly bold from a storytelling perspective; some might consider the last section of the game boring, but it effectively cements the game's themes in a thoughtful and mature way. Pentiment is a triumph of narrative writing.
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We all thought we were getting XCOM with Marvel superheroes, right? In fact, director Jake Solomon said in interviews that was Firaxis' original plan with Marvel's Midnight Suns. But it doesn't quite make sense if Iron Man dies permanently or Captain Marvel takes half cover. These are SUPER-heroes after all. So instead we get a marriage of card battles a la Slay the Spire and social links a la Persona.
It sounds like a strange mix, but it really works. Midnight Suns leans in the Persona direction far too often, but I'm starting to warm up to the social elements more as I continue to play. Having a movie night with Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange is, well, strange, but also oddly charming. The card battles are why I truly love this game though. Into the Breach is an apt comparison, as the combat focuses on positioning and environmental effects more so than anything else. You know what enemies are going to do every turn, so it's your job to figure out the puzzle of each fight. All the superheroes have distinctly different cards, so depending on which three characters you decide to use, encounters can play out in different and dynamic ways. I've only scratched the surface in Midnight Suns, but its first impression was strong enough to put it high on my GOTY list.
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NORCO is such an original, weird, and deceptively funny game. It's a point-and-click adventure that features a sci-fi bayou setting, a cult of men dressed as Best Buy employees, and a puppet show about a vengeful crocodile. It's a stew of wild, out-of-left-field ideas that somehow all work together. The brilliant writing bolsters the experience, and clearly the designers were influenced by southern gothic literature. Video game stories don't often reach the highs of great literature, but NORCO is one of a few games this year that absolutely achieves that feat.
NORCO also addresses heavy, oppressive subjects like strained familial relationships, broken homes, and even the crushing grip of the oil industry. Though it leans heavily on trippy narrative beats and visual moments, at its core it's a grounded and mature narrative that explores ideas rarely seen in video games. It's the kind of story that really showcases the ever-growing limits of storytelling in the video game medium, and I can't wait to see how developer Geography of Robots pushes those limits further in its next project.
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Somewhere out there someone is going to make a great video essay about the psychology of playing Vampire Survivors. Or maybe that video already exists and I just haven't come across it yet. When I think of this game, the word "dopamine" comes to mind. That should honestly be one of the user-defined tags on its Steam page (someone get on that!).
Vampire Survivors is a stellar example of a simple concept executed to perfection. You run around and absolutely obliterate your enemies while picking power-ups along the way. That's kind of it. Every weapon auto-attacks, and the only real controls are moving around with WASD or an analog stick. But everything about it gives that aforementioned dopamine hit. Picking up orbs to level up is satisfying. Opening pachinko-esque treasure chests is satisfying. Watching the game drop to single-digit frames amidst a Jackson Pollok painting of bullets, axes, and skeletons is satisfying. It's just so hard to put down when all of that clicks (especially if you're playing on a Steam Deck).
It would be easy to describe the design as predatory, but somehow it all feels genuine and thoughtful. And beyond the simple mechanics is some real depth, with plenty of hidden, unlockable characters, levels, and weapon evolutions. As I type this I have 126/159 Steam achievements, so clearly I still have some work to do.
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Turn-based strategy fans are always looking for the next Final Fantasy Tactics stand-in, myself included. Triangle Strategy doesn't quite fill that void, but it's a valiant effort. My favorite part of Triangle Strategy is how each character features distinctly different skill sets. I'm sure there's dozens of character tier lists out there, but I enjoyed figuring out what party I wanted to send out for each fight on my own. Do I take Anna who can attack twice in a single turn? Hughette for her flying ability and vertical traversal? Frederica for her strong fire magic? No two characters play exactly the same, and that's a large part of the fun.
Triangle Strategy might have been higher on my list if not for the fact that it's too narrative-heavy. The characterizations are all very one-note, and the "scales of conviction" mechanic feels underdeveloped for something that was touted so much in marketing. But I come to tactics games for the tactics, and Triangle Strategy does a commendable job on that front.
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