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Undeadpool

New Mystery Science Theater 3000 is faaaaaaaaaaaaaanTASTIC.

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Game of the Year 2022

Well! IT CERTAINLY HAS been QUITE THE YEAR for this site hasn't it? I started my last GOTY list that way, rather foolishly assuming it wouldn't get any wilder this year. Strange year for my game playing as well, and I'll say: I haven't finished a few of these yet, or they'd probably rank higher. But if an unreleased game can win GotY, then so can games I didn't finish. Don't like it? Don't eat it.

(DIS)Honorable Mentions:

Normally I'm pretty positive about my honorable mentions, but while I liked most of the following games quite a bit, I'll say that each one had a fatal flaw or two that kept them off my list.

Cult of the Lamb: On-paper, a game combining Stardew Valley with Hades, two of my favorite games of the last ever, should be an absolute slam-dunk, but unfortunately: when you set the bar that high, it can be impossible to jump over. I'd have taken a latter-day Harvest Moon combined with Curse of the Dead Gods, but unfortunately, a great many glitches in an incredibly weak final act robbed the game of a lot of its simple pleasures for me.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers: Another fantastically wild concept, a 4v1 battle for survival against Dragon Ball's biggest villains where you play an "ordinary" person who can be gifted bursts of power to fight back. But the general rule is: survive and escape. Unfortunately the balance was nowhere close to what it needed to be and the lackluster tutorial tools and poorly explained currencies and mechanics felt far more at home in a free-to-play game, and certainly not a $40 one. To say nothing of imprecise controls and incredibly ho-hum graphics and sound design.

DNF Duel: This one's on me, I just don't have the brain for anime fighters any more, it seems. If I ever did. Even this "approachable" and "easy to pick up" game had me stuck at lowest ranks online, despite a suite of excellent tutorial tools.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes: After the one-two punch of "Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity" and "Persona 5: Strikers," I actually had fairly high hopes going into this musou take on the Fire Emblem: Three Houses world. And unfortunately, the game was simply "good enough." Good enough to play, good enough to engage with, but not good enough to stand out to the surprisingly high standard of licensed musou games, and I still can't believe I write that 100% without irony.

Warhammer 40,000 Chaosgate-Daemon Hunters: The tactics game I have spent the least time with, and still another in the long list of "XCOM-but-DIFFERENT," I find myself really enjoying it while I play it but rarely with the urge to return to it. It'll probably be my go-to PC game for the next year or so, but it doesn't really inspire me.

Vampire Survivors: I have really enjoyed this game, and have played a great deal and unlocked a great deal, but can't quite shake the feeling that it's a joke to which I don't understand the punchline. I enjoy it while playing it, but it doesn't quite vibe for me in the way I wish it did when I read others' takes on it. It feels like I'm playing Inscryption without ever getting to the last part of the Leshy battle.

List items

  • I cannot. Fucking believe. That in the year 2022, a year of futuristic significance for any scifi written before the year 2000, that my favorite game, the game that I simply couldn't put down, the game that I'm having to build barriers around so I won't just stare at my phone and waste away to the absolute thrall of "Just one more game" is a mobile card game with Marvel Comics licensing. It was Marvel Snap. It was always going to be...Marvel Snap.

    But it's more than just nerdy catnip, the game has a surprising amount of depth for only using a 12 card deck across 6 (or sometimes 7) round games. Battles take place across 3 locations rather than directly attacking the other player, though sabotage can and does happen, and the games only last 3-5 minutes. In other words: it's perfect for casual-yet-complex play and the meta if ever-shifting without becoming so dominant because the locations that cards are played across all have different effects on the game.

    5 minutes or 2 hours, this has been the game I've come back to the most since it came out.

  • Ah, now this is more like it. Open-world fatigue is real as publishers big and small cram as much STUFF into open worlds as possible. But while most of those eat like a bag of cotton candy: sweet, delicious, but ultimately empty and feeling hollow, Elden Ring combines the incredible gameplay, natural storytelling and hidden lore of FromSoft's most popular titles into a world that feels like it's constantly crawling with activity and things to discover and find. Strange things, wonderful things, dark things, useless things, sad things, joyous things, all there in a world that never feels like it's just "stuff for the sake of stuff." And there's just so much of it. At times overwhelming and at times deeply, DEEPLY frustrating, the journey to the Lands Between is still well worth taking.

  • And the award for biggest gulf between title of game and quality of game goes to...

    A tactics game with a truly mature and powerful story to tell, one that doesn't rely on the tropes nor easy crutches of either anime or dark fantasy, but uses both to incredible effect. One that asks the player about how they truly feel about things like utilitarianism, the role of leadership, and how far one will go to protect those closest at the expense of everyone else. And it does so without ever straying into the needlessly grimdark nor tonal inconsistency.

    Oh and there just so happens to be a deep and multilayered tactics game on top of all that! One that allows for a great number of different styles and a wide variety of strange an wonderful characters with bizarre abilities to take center stage in any given battle. This could have been my #1 and it's really to the credit of the two games above it, and not anything this one did wrong, that it's not.

  • I really enjoyed Supermassive's outings, including the Dark Pictures Anthology thus far. But "Until Dawn" was something special, and "The Quarry" definitely returns to that. Interestingly enough, a game that takes the tone of a schlocky B-movie, complete with excellently rendered fake VHS titles that refer to storylines in the game, is at its best when it's taking its time and developing its characters. Unlike a great many B-movies, the game lets you get to know these people and even start to care about them, or dislike them, making their deaths mean something to you. Or their survival, if things work out well enough.

    Staggering and stumbling in the final act where people and pieces seem to fall far too neatly into place, the game nevertheless gives another excellent taste of the truest version of "an interactive movie."

  • Never one for perfectionism and speed-running, Neon White allowed me to engage with both using the simple trick of sharp controls and even sharper writing. Intentionally cheesy in the best '90s anime dub way possible, the story is a simple one, but told through splendid voice acting and beautiful artistic direction, but the gameplay is one of the first to make a real argument for early-3D/PS1-era graphics and why they can be usable on modern consoles. The lack of load times, consistent frame rate, and breakneck pace make up for any flaws in the writing or story, allowing one to lean on the other. Simplicity has rarely looked better or been more entertaining.

  • Now things get complicated: this is low on my list because I simply haven't finished it yet and refuse to rush for the sake of a list I'm writing for fun. But what I've played so far has given me some truly jaw-dropping moments, both in terms of battles and in-terms of emotional heft. Though at times tonally jarring, and at times characters need to shut up and let me enjoy the silence, the people I'm on this journey with have grown, and continue to grow, and the puzzles and tribulations they go through are still worth seeing through to the end. Or so I hope.

  • The first game had absolutely no right to be as good as it was. No seriously, one hears that Mario is crossing over with the Rabbids and the mind immediately goes to the bad old days of Hotel Mario and Mario Teaches Typing, but it turned out to be a fairly robust, delightfully witty and fun take on the 'tactics shooter' model. The tactics. Shooter. Model.

    And now the sequel's back, and while I personally found a great deal of the puzzles more frustrating than satisfying, the combat was always fun and the writing was especially delightful. Nothing blow-away or spectacular but it doesn't have to be with how much pure consistency it brings to the table. And making Rabbids talk somehow made them LESS insufferable. That alone deserves praise.

  • Another one that I haven't had a ton of time with, but the combination of Charmed, Harry Potter, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a coat of Marvel comics paint is enough to hook me in and keep me going. To say nothing of another XCOM-like tactics that actually gets incredibly far away from that gameplay-wise, and includes an interesting, sometimes frustrating, card/deckbuilding system. The action and sound is always satisfying and the writing hits far more often than it misses, much more like a TV show than a movie. The OC DO NOT STEAL even comes off as charming and likeable rather than a player-insert cypher. Would probably be ranked higher if I had more time with it.

  • And the award for something completely different goes to...

    A plate-spinning game where the top floor is a tailor's shop and the bottom floor is a diner, but the top floor provides for the bottom with a Sweeney Todd-like system wherein the husband murders customers to the tailor, steals their clothes to re-sell them and the wife "disposes" of the corpses for dining both fine and foul. Darkly humorous and ludicrously over-the-top in terms of violence and gore, the game actually gets at the heart of the dehumanization of meat processing the way the play it takes inspiration from also did. Eventually one falls into such an efficient "stab-plunder-process-feed" rhythm that the violence ceases to even be funny, and that revelation can be more disturbing than expected.

  • I really thought this would be a longer-term game. I really did. I really wanted it to be, even. Smash Bros. but with an eye for competitive play right out of the gate and with the breadth of characters that come with the Warner Bros. catalog (giving us truly strange sentences like "Velma really compliments Jake the Dog, but LeBron James needs a buff. And Shaggy can go toe-to-toe with Superman but struggles against faster characters like Finn and Rick") was almost worth it. But a lack of updates and sluggish balance patches took a lot of the wind out of my sails, and a meta that was shaken up far too often and fundamentally made it hard to get invested in characters. I still have a ton of respect for what they did and continue to do, it just felt like it wasn't quite for me in the long-term.
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