GOTY 2022
I spent two whole months assembling this list and then totally forgot to write it. So yes, this is my GOTY list for the year 2022 of the Common Era. There's a few big names I'm definitely going to swing back around to at some point—Xenoblade 3, Stranger of Paradise, and Trails from Zero top a pretty big wishlist you can find halfway down here—but on the whole if I'm writing a GOTY list with twenty bangers it was probably a good year. (Well, maybe ten bangers and ten decent efforts?)
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Plenty has been written about what an undertaking Elden Ring proved to be, answering the hype of a George R. R. Martin-infused Dark Souls successor and finding additional unexpected mainstream success besides, that even though the game might have more to see, climb, collect, and slay than even the average Elder Scrolls game there's very little left to cover. Elden Ring is unmistakably 2022's most important game, even if personal choice might place your favorites elsewhere, and reiterates on this very odd recent development that Japan has become the masters of the open world format. Consider the likes of Metal Gear Solid V's greatly expanded stealthy-boxy gameplay or Xenoblade's oodles of features and quality-of-life touches and impressive vistas and then measure that against whatever iterative business Ubisoft just farted out for the eighth time this year. But I digress.
There's plenty to dislike about Elden Ring. Many of its little optional dungeons do run the same after a while, there's way too much recycling, and the less said about the quality of the story boss fights towards the endgame the better. But there's so, so much more going in its favor. Hell, the addition of a jump button alone changes so much of the typical exploration and boss fight strategies of the Souls franchise, but then coupled with how the open format allows you to temporarily put a pin in boss fights that have proven too tough or offers a huge variety of items and spells and weaponry to use as new tactical options or how you'll soon end up with a dozen-plus map notations for areas of interest to visit or revisit means it's a game that will ensnare you for months and still be engaging a hundred hours of gametime later. I ran into something similar when playing Ys VIII a few years ago where I could've sworn the relative linearity and compactness of those franchises were two of their strengths, yet it turns out when you expand the size and scope several times over it's somehow still every bit as compelling and possibly even more so.
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Tinykin and its 3D platforming indulgences is just pure gaming comfort food for me, and to have something this ambitious, slick, and sharply designed coming from the Indie quarter instead of a Nintendo or a similarly monolithic company is very impressive. Though there's not a whole lot to its progression the way each room in this enormous person's house has been so thoroughly thought out from its conceptual role in the story to the zigzagging of its many shortcuts granting you quick access to any part of the area no matter how high above ground level it may be just makes them an absolute joy to explore for collectibles and side-quests and anything else that might draw your attention. I also loved its civilization of sapient insects and the individual personalities of its named NPCs and the slowly unpeeling mystery regarding the owner of the house and their current location.
That they made all your cute little Pikmin ersatzes invincible so you don't feel the pain (and inconvenience) of their loss or that they gave you a bar of soap to ride around on at rapid speed to alleviate travel times are just two of many examples of how the developers prioritized above all else a chill game experience with no lulls and little frustration. Just a really smartly made game in a sub-genre I love that most companies, Indie or no, have struggled to do right by in the decades since it began with Mario 64.
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Next are a couple of menial labor sims I couldn't separate since both proved so darn addictive. Shipbreaker has you taking apart ships piece by piece, but every job has a level of risk to mitigate so it never turns into a mindless autopilot sort of thing; it'd be like trying to play a serious flight sim without the focus required to complete every necessary step for takeoff. Even once you become well-versed in the game's rhythm there might be something to trip you up like a sudden reactor meltdown or the ship careening out of control because you didn't depressurize the interior sufficiently before cracking into it with your laser welder.
The game looks super sharp on top of all this, so there's no feeling of abstraction that you'd expect from a game where you take apart spaceships—a job that, as far as I'm aware, has yet to exist—and every mishap feels entirely legitimate and earned rather than the result of a screwy physics engine bugging out. Extremely polished, thanks in part to a long tail in early access, and just a conceptually fascinating game that delivers on its premise.
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I spent an unhealthy amount of time playing Viscera Cleanup Detail because at first I was fascinated by the idea of humble custodian work being the crux of a video game and then stuck around because there was something so rewarding about chasing that full 100% completion rate, enhanced further by a subversive if unintrusive sense of humor about cleaning up the remains of scientists and space marines undone by their own hubris and left to be removed by a clean-up crew who should probably be paid more than they are. PowerWash hits the exact same beats but in a different arrangement, having you wash random peoples' homes and vehicles with a high-pressure hose before escalating to bigger and stranger targets with stronger and shinier waterguns.
The developers knew exactly what they were doing with all those little dings and shimmers every time one piece of your target was fully clean.
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My god, this thing. Taking the RPG power fantasy trip and condensing it into a mere half hour by starting out getting swamped by mooks and ending with a light show powerful enough to kill a god. It's a slow ramp to competency but the view at the top is magnificent.
The dev also lucked upon a model of game that benefits greatly from the usual stream of content additions more common to the "Games as a Service" ilk due to how it's already built for incremental playthroughs and has an addictive quality that keeps you coming back every so often to murder Castlevania monsters in their tens of thousands, whether you main the Alucard clone or a moonlighting Bayonetta or a skeleton man or a tree.
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I'd only seen a few hours of this RPG before placing it here but after several more tens of hours it's justified this spot and then some. This is an RPG that's never afraid to throw a whole mess of options and features at you, and deep enough to make it all work and synergize properly. It's one of the most complex and feature-rich 16-bit RPGs since Final Fantasy VI came along and squeezed every byte it could out of the SNES cartridge.
Super polished too and though the story is a little generic it's doing plenty to flesh out its world beyond the heroes and the villains that take center stage. Combat's also fantastic, using an "Overdrive" system to make you carefully consider your next few moves on top of the current turn. The one odd thing is that it's really attached to Final Fantasy XII references for some reason; a retro RPG like this would usually look further back for inspiration.
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I assumed Norco's positive press came from a certain amount of social awareness, creating a game set deep in the Louisiana bayous to make a statement about the hard livin' folks that dwell there and how ongoing climate change, hungry alligators, and hungrier corporations are all out to make those livelihoods all the tougher.
Turns out it's just a really frickin' weird narrative and presentation that constantly has you questioning what you're seeing and why it exists. That surreal narrative thrust makes it a real joy to play too, turns out, even if most of the time you're just solving traditional point and click adventure puzzles and the occasional simplified mini-game. I'm not even sure who I'd recommend a game like this to, but I suppose part of its appeal is that it kinda defies a cookie-cutter elevator pitch and goes about doing its own distinct thing.
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Citizen Sleeper isn't so much a single story but a series of vignettes about a malfunctioning corporate android looking to survive after escaping captivity, the human owner of the personality they were imprinted with having long ago fallen for a bogus bill of goods and is sitting in a vat underneath a skyscraper somewhere. Each of these little tales involves helping someone out in exchange for information or supplies to ensure your continued survival, but the player has a significant role in how these stories play out both through decisions they make and decisions that are made for them by the game's random diceroll feature; spending dice to perform actions, with lower numbers meaning a lower chance of success. Do you use this turn's high dice rolls on your job at the shipyard to guarantee you make enough money to eat, or put them towards making certain that your new friend succeeds in their present mission?
For a choice-heavy game with a lot of luck involved, the game is exceedingly generous so don't get spooked off by decision anxiety.
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Tunic has its issues, especially with regards to its absurd boss difficulty, but is a frequently inventive Zelda-like buoyed by an ingenious repurposing of the old game manuals that had information necessary to beat your favorites, at least at a time where games wouldn't just surface all that information via tutorials buried in the UI somewhere. The manual explains much you won't be able to glean on your own, including integral features and mechanics, so finding a new page in the wild almost always unlocks a new world of possibilities or at the very least leaves you with even more questions than before.
In many ways Tunic is the best parts of Fez and an Indie Zelda like Oceanhorn merged with the less best parts of a brutal Soulsian RPG. A game with a protagonist this cute probably shouldn't be this punishing, is all I'm suggesting.
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Signalis takes the hook of presenting a low-poly survival horror built like PS1 genre mainstays such as Resident Evil (similar survival mechanics) and Silent Hill (similar amount of screwing with the player) and uses it as a launching pad on its journey off to cuckoo land. Much of Signalis trucks along on some real bad vibes and artsy cutscenes that say plenty but explain little. It's the sort of horror game that wants to burrow into your head and stay there like a squatting earwig, sticking around long after the visceral gore and corridor jumpscares have faded and leaving only the unease that permeates every inch of the Signalis experience.
In other words, it's damn good at what it does. I just wish I cared even a little bit for having to cart key items and priceless supplies back and forth to a storage box every five minutes because my gynoid protagonist doesn't have any pockets on that skintight uniform of hers.
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The best '20s reimagining of a 1989 arcade game a studio could feasibly make, Shredder's Revenge is chock full of fanservice for both proponents of the '80s cartoon and for the many video game brawlers made in its image released in the years since. However, it doesn't just rest on its nostalgia laurels and instead ensures a thoroughly modern game experience is sitting just under the hood by giving you a decent array of moves to pull off, new abilities to learn as you gain levels, stage-specific challenges to pursue, and many places around Manhattan to visit as you take the fight to Krang and Shredder and their mutant goons. This game has "ardent fan letter" written all over it, and not the creepy kind people keep sending to April O'Neil because they think she's the other one.
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While a little too eager to retread old ground, the most recent visit to Monkey Island sees the franchise back on form as a future Guybrush narrates his most important adventure to a tinier version of Guybrush, also called Guybrush. The puzzles are thoughtful, the writing funny, the characters old and new still thoroughly done with Guybrush's wishy-washy personality and not-so-secret mean streak, the visuals are given a very distinctive and chaotic style that gels well with the humor and with the adjacent Maniac Mansion series (a similar reboot for which I hope will soon follow), and man if I haven't missed adventure games where you go out of your way to ruin someone's whole life because they have some random piece of trash that you sorely need to assemble some improbable MacGuybrush shit. That's the essence of point-and-click right there (after the pointing and the clicking, of course).
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It's Vampire Survivors, but with Vtubers! Beyond the paper-thin facsimile much thought has been put into the game's mechanics and it almost operates more as a successor than a freeware fan-game clone, building on the VS blueprint with important additions like character-specific active and passive abilities, a special move that is the only tool the player is allowed to activate on command, and a means to lock your firing direction for the weapons that could sorely use it. That it's also an amazing fangame full of references and in-jokes for the whole of Hololive's stable of talented streamers is the cherry on top, provided you have any familiarity with them of course. I don't, because I'm not some simp weeb (if I say that, maybe Kronii will think I'm cool).
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A procgen action-RPG that you enhancing different character classes by completing ever more specific challenges with them, the utility of which is that they also teach you how best to employ that class's unique strengths. While the dungeon-crawling part of the game is fairly repetitive, discovering each of those individual forms and bouncing between them to complete objectives means you always have some target to pursue besides the primary story quest and many sidequests, and DrinkBox filled the game with their usual offbeat charm and gross-cute visuals (very Invader Zim-esque).
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This gentle 3D escape room sim isn't going to tax your gray matter too hard, which is probably why it's chosen to make every room a timed affair: you usually have thirty minutes to solve whatever needs solving, quickly taking in the room's contents and the order of objectives to complete. Honestly, for as much as I don't care for being timed when doing puzzles, it works to motivate your thinking muscles (especially the level where the water level is constantly rising). Visually it's not much to write home about but the simple polygonal graphics at least remove much of the ambiguity about what you can interact with or what elements of the wall art clearly contain some kind of code or other visual clue. Like the real thing, it offers a breezy fun exercise that you can do with friends or alone like a weirdo.
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A gorgeously hand-drawn adventure game that operates like a visual novel with its many wrong routes that, because each contain information you might need, are a compulsory stop on the path to the game's true ending. Using a system of "charms", each of which contains a single-word concept or verb, you can direct the story at pivotal moments and see how your choices play out. It really could've done with a whole lot more of that story manipulation since there aren't too many branch options—it would have been funny if more options just immediately led to a game over—but I liked the writing and the characters and that was plenty of motivation to see this tale to its end. It's cute, though occasionally pretty dark, and inventive enough to be worth a look.
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An explormer that goes back to the Metroid drawing board of making your main antagonist be the planet itself, its corridors full of hostile lifeforms and environmental dangers. Great combat system that has you alternating melee and ranged weaponry along with some really strong atmosphere and worldbuilding are the game's stronger points, though its open-structure is mostly fallacious (you're quickly given five objectives at distant points of the map but can't reach most of them initially) and there's way more backtracking in this than most games of its type, with odd decisions like forcing you to walk back to the hub on foot instead of the fast-travel whenever you find one of the story-critical items just so they could throw a couple extra enemies at you along the way for the suspense. Great style, so-so substance.
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A retro explormer in a grim world inspired by Castlevania II for NES, Infernax splits its content between two routes via a dumb morality system that has you choosing to be a religious zealot or a psychotic piece of shit and no middle ground. The combat's good but gets pretty easy fast once you've acquired enough upgrades to your healing capabilities while the platforming remains tough throughout due to strictly abiding by an archaic NES-style limitation on extra lives. There's plenty to like about Infernax, from its heavy metal attitude, boss designs, and humor to its concise controls and a content-rich world full of NPCs to talk to and upgrades to find, but just as many flaws.
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This is just darn cute, between its N64-era Rare character designs and in broader terms how compact and unassuming it is as a total package. A mere wisp of a 3D platformer, it has a handful of platforming challenges for you across eight short stages—most of which are made easy by the Kiwi's versatile move set—and then mostly just bows out after that. There's some slightly meta secrets to find for the truly perceptive but on the whole this'll probably take two hours tops to see in full. Still, these bite-sized morsels might be just the thing if you needed a Banjo-Kazooie fix and didn't want to commit to a Donkey Kong 64 length playthrough.
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I admire what Immortality is doing, much like I did with Barlow's earlier FMV adventure games that has players piecing together a mystery plot through achronological breadcrumb trails, but it feels with each successive one of these that the storytelling ambition grows while the actual enjoyment value as a game diminishes. Throwing out the option of selecting between several prompts for each "hint item" in order to find the scenes you're missing and replacing it with just a random selection instead is a pointlessly annoying change for completionist types and carefully manipulating the film speed to find its secret footage is a lot more trouble than it's worth, especially if you're playing with mouse and keyboard (and why wouldn't you? It's a point-and-click game). The parts where Immortality is a movie (or three) are impressively done, from the performances to the era-appropriate costumes and film stock used, but as games these are getting less engaging each time.
