hey all! wow, 2022 huh. big year, lots of great games, and i’m going to do my best to tear through all of my favorites and give you a little peek into what i enjoyed this year. i couldn’t get to everything!! i couldn’t finish everything. so there’s a few notable omissions that are difficult for me to talk at length about since i’m waiting to finish them up. but i’ll do my best!
this is also the first year i’ve done my list on my own. giant bomb has gracefully hosted my lists for the past several years, but now cohost exists! i’ve been having a great time getting back into more long-form posting, and so now i can use this platform to bake a large conclusive game blog retrospective for the year! it won't be THAT long-form though, i have a LOT of games to get thru & want to boil down my thoughts to like a paragraph at most
i’ve decided to change up my format this year as well. instead of simply doing a countdown of my top 10, i’ve broken things down into smaller unordered lists. it’s always impossible for me to rank things against each other, so you’ll just have to battle it out in your own deliberations! the way i’ve split it up is:
- ‘Narrative Games’ for games that primarily work on a narrative level & whose major mechanics are in service of progressing the narrative…
- ‘Technical Games’ for games whose primary purpose its to deliver a fun experience in their mechanics alone, while also optionally doing story good.
- ‘Games That Didn’t Release in 2022’ because i am weird and want to focus on this year’s releases, BUT also finally got around to some extremely impactful titles that were from prior years.
and so…
6 Great Narrative Games
Norco
twitter isn't good for a lot of things, but it is great at times for yelling into my ear about a game i wouldn't have otherwise played. that's norco, and thankfully a lot of friends i trust yelled loud enough about it that i got to trying it out on day one. incredible story full of juicy near-future cyberpunk bad times. i've written a fair bit about extrapolating future technology from our current tech trends, and this one really goes headfirst into a terrifying and beautiful glimpse at what may lie in the future of this small town outside new orleans. extremely worth playing if you love thinking about big picture ideas, hyper-localised science fiction, and psychedelic brain fog
Citizen Sleeper
i never played in other waters, the debut game by jump over the age, but i had seen it at a distance & known enough people who raved about it to trust their thoughts on this new one. i also hadn't played disco elysium, a game i eventually played after beating citizen sleeper, but enough people told me it did a similar thing with dice rolls being an interesting way of board gaming your way through a world for me to be interested. either way!! incredible space, incredible characters. the way you see the space station at a distance and yet feel so close to everything that goes on even at such heights. it's possibly the most minimal depiction of a city block game, and yet i wanted to keep living there forever. enough so that i never made any decision to leave, never let the game end, until i found the right place to take my sleeper's journey. a game of many poetic feelings.
OPUS: Echo of Starsong
i've written about this one here. i don't need to say much more, only that it still gives me chills to think about. i absolutely loved my time with this one, and you should too.
Goodbye World
short and sweet. the narrative of goodbye world follows two indie game creators in a story that hits just close enough to home for me to feel almost uncomfortable playing through it. i watched creator yo fujii post WIP gifs of the game for years before its release, and so i was really excited to check it out. while there are little platformer segments between narrative scenes, it really is the full combination of those examples of game design interacting with the scenes and the story they all tell that make it one of my favorite bite-sized games of the year.
Signalis
how do you talk about signalis? it is a game about art just as much as it is about humanity, and iteration. it's a story in conversation with the art its characters engage with in their attempts to relay their experience of existence. it's about love. it's about the terrifying problem of consciousness. there's also cute robots on stilt legs.
Pentiment
pentiment is also a game about art, but in a much much more concentrated and historical way. it's really hard to get into it without taking away from the experience of understanding exactly how it comes to the points it does. but it examines the way art and history intertwine, in the storytelling, and recollection. what parts do you speak about? what parts to you cover up only to peel back later? but more than anything, the game makes its setting of tassing (presently Tüßling, where i feel a strong urge to visit now) feel like home, in a way only citizen sleeper manages to come close to this year. through its revisiting the same people and places over time, you get a depiction of a place as character in a way that made me heartbroken when we needed to wrap up its story.
5 Great Technical Games
Elden Ring
you knew this one had to be here, eh? i played elden ring for uhh...... steam tells me 222 hours. that's so many!! i played......basically everything. i beat every single boss i met, played with friends, built up my character, even started a 2nd character for a bit. i checked out the true multiplayer mod with my wife & we roamed around the lands between for a bit. it was a community game. it was a worldbuilding puzzle game. it was a frustrating game. it was a discovery game. when it released, my wife and i were going through hell. our apartment situation was in shambles, we desperately needed to move out, find a way to canada after putting off the move for years due to a global pandemic. we needed a distraction, and at the time elden ring was the perfect balm at the end of a stressful day to unwind and lose our minds at how ungodly huge the game was. i can't think of another experience where my friends and i have dug this deep into collective investigation of a space together. what a cool period of time. despite all the stress.
Neon White
speaking of community games. i didn't beat neon white, but i did engage in one of the most fun casual competitions with my friends when the game dropped & we all began zooming through the first several sets of levels. it was such a rush to find new routes, cut out fractions of seconds, and edge up the leaderboard. it didn't last super long. eventually the levels got a bit too long and complicated to keep up the competition. but for a moment in time it was really sick.
Marvel Snap
i'm not really a big marvel person anymore. i was, a little bit, before the big bad mcu came along. i'd read a few comics here and there, but mostly as a kid i collected marvel trading cards. i had a big red binder full of my favorites, and i loved parsing through all the characters & making up stories about them. why didn't i actually go out and read the comics they were from? well, i was a kid, and i spent all my money on video games and magic card packs, so the rare set of marvel card packs i got were about all i could afford. anyway. marvel snap rekindled that feeling for me, specifically because it's a VERY well-designed card game. i've been playing for 3 'seasons' so far, and i'm not at the top of the rankings at all, but with 10-card decks & a lot of very easy to understand strategies & synergies between its mechanics, it's honestly been the most fun i've ever had in a ccg. magic, yugioh, runeterra, hearthstone, etc. etc. are all so ungodly complex and require a LOT of digging into how everything works to really feel like you're on top of your game. but 10 cards? i can do 10. i'm psyched to see how it develops over the months to come.
Splatoon 3
splatoon is just so cool. i love the art, the fashion, the music. until 3, though, i really couldn't get into how it played. it hadn't clicked for me. so i was super overjoyed to finally feel like i was competitive playing a multiplayer shooter. the singleplayer was also a whole lot of fun this time around, too, having learned a lot of lessons from 2's octo expansion. i still can't play salmon run to save my life, but the rest of the game is sick as hell and i'm excited to play more once i'm not quite as stressed in my free time.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3
is this where it goes? i think this is where it goes. it could also be in narrative game. but you do a LOT of technical things to get there. anyway. i am sadly STILL NOT DONE. I'M REALLY CLOSE. IM FEELIN IT. but....fuck, man. xenoblade. i love everything tetsuya takahashi has ever helmed. even the extremely weird xenosaga episode 2... this game deserves its own post once i finish it (likely very soon within the new year) but.... ugh it makes me emotional to think about the lineage of these games and how strong they are. xenoblade 3 manages to tighten up on literally every aspect: the storytelling, the gameplay, the music, the world design. it creates a space for its stories and just goes for it. takahashi never holds back, and i love him for it. i don't think there's any other creator that i understand quite as thoroughly.
5 Games That Didn't Release in 2022
Xenoblade Chronicles
SURPRISE, it's more xenoblade. can you believe that it took me until 2022 to beat the original xenoblade?? it took starting it over for the....3rd? 4th time? i vowed to not get distracted by side content that i WAS going to push through until the end. i followed a completionist guide to unlock maps & get through as much of the game as i possibly could with someone holding my hand to keep my motivation going strong. and i DID. i beat it. i was SO DETERMINED to do it after the surprise announcement of xenoblade 3....i'm so so glad i did. absolutely remarkable game that, like i said for 3, fires on all cylinders. it has a LOT of jank, and unnecessary content, so 3 stands above it as a better game, but man am i glad i saw it through. (also: melia is so much fun to play, i love her weird playstyle & i'm glad the dlc features her prominently)
as a side note, i also 'finished' xenoblade 2 before 3 released......by which i mean to say i tried to grind thru it myself, but as the days grew shorter i eventually turned to a commentary-free let's play to round out the experience. thank you youtube.
Disco Elysium
it's honestly pretty unfair that i played disco elysium this year, because if it had released in 2022 it would have been top of my list. an astonishing work of fiction with some of the most incredible character writing i've come across regardless of medium. the definitive edition's full voice acting also adds so so much to the game that i can only imagine that i bounced off the game before because it wasn't there. i finally gave it another chance because of how much i adored both norco & citizen sleeper, games that took a lot of great lessons from disco and stand alone in their own style of storytelling. but what's done in this game is honestly a masterclass in games writing & choice. what a goddamn masterpiece.
Final Fantasy 2
the pixel remaster release of ff2 is, hilariously, the first time i've ever played the game to completion. i've always given it a little nod of respect for being just plain weird among the early final's fantasy, but honestly? after finally playing it through, i might like it head and shoulders above most of them! i'm not even joking. i think it's really fun, and while the melodrama of the snes era of games made the way for my favorites in the ps1 era, ff2 is this weirdo little black sheep that i had more fun with as a game.
Omori
i felt i owed it to myself to give omori a shot this year since it shares so much heritage with the kinds of games i love & the kind i make myself. i came away from it having pretty mixed thoughts! i think a lot of the 'rpg' side of it is a bit weak, especially traveling around in the dream world areas. i actually put it down multiple times before finally reaching the first 'real life' section as sunny out and about in his hometown. it finally clicked for me in those moments of subversion, and i really hoped that the rest of the game would follow that setting. ultimately it did duck in and out of the 'actual rpg' world, but i kept with it because the rest of it was compelling enough to see through. ultimately i'm glad i gave it a shot! it's still on my list of cool things despite not all of it working for me. the core crew is such a solid group of friends, and the final moments definitely hit hard.
OneShot
also among games that share heritage with my faves, i still hadn't played oneshot. (sorry nightmargin 🙏). funny enough i had waited because of a weird technical issue. on my 1440p monitor, oneshot runs in windowed SO TINY that i wasn't able to fully enjoy it on PC.....however!! (and this part did release in 2022), the world machine edition released on switch and let me finally enjoy the game. and what a game. i don't think i've been that emotionally compromised in some time. i absolutely love the whole cast, and am so glad i finally got to spend time meeting my new best friend niko.
2 Games I'm Still Playing
(THATS RIGHT WE'RE NOT DONE YET)Chained Echoes
i've only just begun this game, but it's already shaping up to be an incredible rpg. while most people cite its inspirations from chrono trigger, cross & xenogears (still accurate!) the thing that struck me the most was how much the game is in love with final fantasy xii (my favorite of the final's fantasy). the cast is already an extremely strong ensemble in its opening chapter, and the battles have me fully dialed in. i can't wait to get back to this one in the new year!!
Mother 3
getting my hands on an analogue pocket transformed my life into a 'big mother 3 fan excited to finally play mother 3' meme. i actually was a bit of a late bloomer on the mother series. i only played earthbound to completion last year, since my teenage obsessions were chrono & xeno flavored. but, again this is a running theme, but i felt a need to connect with the modern indie rpg heritage. and so, thanks to the fpga gba core on the pocket, i'm finally playing mother 3!!! it is extremely good!! i also get to experience it with the proper rhythm timing on hardware since emulation has left so many people unable to play it correctly. i'm only in chapter 2, since i have shifted focus 100% to xenoblade 3, BUT.... 2023 will be my year of mother 3. count on it.
OKAY NOW WE'RE DONE HAPPY NEW YEAR I HOPE YOUR 2023 IS A WONDERFUL ONE FULL OF GREAT GAMES, MUSIC, LOVE & LIFE
