Alex Zandra is a Canadian game designer, streamer, artist and light novel author. You can support her work directly on Patreon and Ko-fi, and read her books on itch. You can also find her on Twitter and watch her streams on Twitch.
Hey hi folks! 2022 has been a year of changes, for me and a lot of folks I know. Even this list is now in a different place! It’s been an absolute pleasure to write about my favorite games of 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 on Giant Bomb—check those out if you ever want to read Past Zandra’s game opinions—but since I insist on keeping up one of my favorite yearly traditions, this year’s list lives on over here.
And it’s been a year, gosh! My seemingly never-ending journey through intense trauma therapy is starting to bear fruit, which means that I’m slowly regaining larger and larger chunks of my day-to-day. More energy, more executive function, and above all else more self-confidence—something that had been in short supply for a while, turns out. But it’s never too late to work on yourself, as strenuous and surprisingly complex a task as that may end up being. I hope there’s been positive changes in your life as well, no matter where those can be found.
In between streaming every mega man game ever made and writing my latest book, I’ve managed to play a bunch of games; here they are, in that most arbitrary form that I’ve grown fond of over the years, despite myself. Time for the top 10 games that made an impact on me in 2022. <3
Mentions, Honorable & Otherwise
As time and numbers are all concepts that we more or less made up, let’s start with some games that didn’t quite make the cut, be it in a spatial or temporal way:
- I can’t believe it took me this long to finally play (and livetweet) Disco Elysium, but I’m so glad I did because it’s one of the most brilliant games ever made about the world’s biggest disaster of a detective and his dozens of headmates
- If you like mice and inventory management like me, Backpack Hero is a fantastic little roguelike that’ll make you smile
- Speaking of mice, I’m glad Pokémon Scarlet/Violet is filled with both wonderful rodents AND motorcycles, along with some legendary queer-coded heartthrobs (now please let the developers rest good gosh)
- My craving for tower defense is unending, which is why I’m so glad Isle of Arrows exists both on desktop and phone
- Vampire Survivors, a game so simple yet so well executed that in less than a year it spawned its own genre
- and now that the honorable mentions are done, let’s have a regular mention for Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga which takes something so mechanically inspired it’s hard to put down (Ogre Battle + Fire Emblem) but then sours it with such questionable writing and artistic choices that it’s impossible to recommend without adding a laundry list of caveats
Alright! Now that the entrée has been taken care of (because entrée means appetizer—I’m talking to you, Way Too Many English Menus That Misuse Loan Words), time for the main course!
10. Destiny 2: The Witch Queen + Season Pass
Ever since my good friend @PositronicWoman got me back into Bungie’s technically outstanding first person shooter a couple years ago, I’ve been spending a few hours every week touring the solar system with my warlock and participating in the seasonal activities. I was big into Destiny 2 when it launched originally, but soon fell off once I was done with the story content and the first raid, and just let the game gather dust on my PS4 hard drive until the Beyond Light expansion. And while the game remains borderline unapproachable to players who aren’t already familiar with it, the latest expansion—and its associated four seasons of content—were enough to glue me to my controller for more total time this year than pretty much any other game.
I’ve also started writing fanfiction about my warlock (Firebrand, or Fy for short) if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
Anyway! The Witch Queen year of content has done some really impressive stuff, both with the things they’ve added to the game, the worlds they’ve brought back from the Content Graveyard, and the writing which has just been getting better and better. Did you know they made an entire season about helping a bunch of the main story characters confront and process their trauma?? Destiny 2 continues to surprise me and I expect to keep playing it, especially considering their next expansion looks like it’s got far-future-cyberpunk vibes.
My vtuber children will also likely keep playing it, as they’ve grown rather fond of it: @zandrabot has been getting her grandmaster certifications thanks to Waypoint community friends @sparkletone & @sporkife, and @zandrabit is now a certified gambit monster.
9. Raft
Another game that’s seen a lot of vtuber play on my channel this past year has been a game about a boat you build on the fly with flotsam and jetsam—preferably with the help of a friend! My buddy @inurashii and I have had Caves of Qud vtubers for a bit (seeing hers inspired me to bring mine to life) and they escaped the confines of Qud’s salt deserts to come to a world with nothing but water. Genius bumpkin Bakooka Bilbapot (voiced by yours truly) and learned snapjaw Grahu-Rubufo (voiced by @inurashii) spent a lot of 2022 pulling together driftwood and making a giant embarcation out of it so they could tour the oceans and help some survivors along the way. And make some animal friends! Except Bruce. Bruce is a jerk.
Raft is one of those rare chill multiplayer crafting & exploration games that just brings everything together really well. It’s a delight to slowly build out the square platform you start out with into your own version of a rectangular ship as you triangulate the position of the next waypoint on your journey to find mankind’s last floating utopia. And, fingers crossed, ruin the day of a few impromptu despots along the way! And Bruce. Bruce’s day should also be ruined.
8. The Last Spell
My girlfriend Amber (@silverchangeling) showed me this tactics game a while ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I really got into it to the point of almost losing sleep because I needed to play just one more round. It’s one of those games. Mixing a bit of procedural generation and survival into the formula, The Last Spell stands out thanks to the sheer imbalance between the number of units on both sides of the conflict. You’re facing dozens and dozens of zombie stand-ins that crash against the walls of your settlement in waves while you only have a handful of defenders; three or four, more if you’re lucky. This makes every battle really intense.
It also makes every character you control really imposing! To compensate for the ridiculous number of opponents, your units have a ton of mobility and tools at their disposal. Instead of the typical methodical squad tactics you’d expect in this type of game, you have action hero characters weaving in and out of the enemy hordes while blasting and swinging every which way with wild abandon. It’s dangerous to be sure, and a lot of nights end with you having to rebuild your defenses and carefully manage your town’s resources the next day, but good gosh this game is a lot of fun.
7. Compound
You know what else is fun? VR! I’ve always been a big fan of virtual reality ever since trying one of those ludicrously expensive arcade machines as a teen, and while the home VR market has seen its share of ups and downs, last year had some really neat standout titles. Like this one! Compound brings roguelike run-based procedural generation to early 3D aesthetics reminiscent of Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem in a way that really struck a chord with me. The colorful, chunky-pixel visuals made me feel at home and the mechanically satisfying manual reload of each of the game’s silly sci-fi guns enabled the showoff in me. I want more games like this!
6. Last Call BBS
And while I want more games like Last Call BBS, it’s not going to come from noted puzzle game maker Zachtronics, as it’s literally their last title. A going-away present, it’s a fascinating time capsule of a game designed to emulate dusting off an old PC specifically for playing old games and going down memory lane along the way. Nevermind the fact that each of the games found here is excellent in its own right, it’s the copious amount of lore that gift-wraps the experience in a way few games ever pull off.
5. Elden Ring
From Software’s Souls game are certainly among the ones that do pull it off, though, and Elden Ring is no exception. I remember getting goosebumps from the original trailer all the way back when this game was first announced, so already I was primed to dive into the latest soulslike head-first.
You know what my favorite Souls game is? Dark Souls 2. Not an especially popular opinion; there’s certainly better games in the series. But I always really appreciated the direction DS2 went in, the wild abandon with which it decided what, exactly, a Souls game was and decided to blaze some new trails of its own. I was always a bit disappointed that DS3 ended up being such a parody of itself with the way it pulled back the reins on its predecessors’ scattershot innovations… which is why I was absolutely overjoyed to discover that Elden Ring is, in many ways, a love letter to Dark Souls 2. It’s Dark Souls 2-2, in all the best ways and all the worst ways. And I love it.
Powerstancing is back! Torches are back, better than ever! Instead of being a meticulously designed diorama that circles back in on itself in various interconnected ways, the game is yours to explore in whichever direction you see fit, for good or ill! The world’s so big!
It’s way too big. It’s gigantic to the point of constantly reusing bosses and dungeons, and seems to have been made for a seemingly fictional player that ignores most of the side content and picks a modest path more or less directly to the end. But there’s so much out there, why wouldn’t you explore every bit of it? Why wouldn’t you burn yourself out exploring every last inch of this immense world? I know I did.
4. Potionomics
And so did a lot of the memorable characters on Rafta, the witch-made island where Potionomics takes place. At first blush it’s a love letter to Recettear featuring a colorful cast of people from all walks of life, ready to work with you to help you turn a profit and pay off the mortgage on the potion shop you’ve suddenly inherited. But look beyond the incredibly polished appearances just a little bit, and you’ll find a bunch of queer disasters burnt out and crushed under the boot of fantasy-style capitalism.
It’s rare to find a game so open about the real-life struggles so many of us face. And it only serves to make the cast more relatable! I share the exhaustion of Luna, the moth girl marketer burning the candle at both ends to fulfill the staggering amount of work she piled on herself in the hopes of satisfying expectations. I relate to Mint, the people-pleasing adventurer who constantly feels under pressure to stand out among her peers. I appreciate Quinn, the loner tradesperson whose lifetime of trauma has taught them to keep their defenses up at all times. I feel a rare kinship with Muktuk, the craftsman who grew up in a society where everyone else got a handbook on how to accomplish their life’s goals, but not him—leading to a crisis of faith in his validity as a person and an artist. And I try to be kind to myself the way carpenter witch Saffron is, building a house of mindfulness and self-care on top of foundations that were ravaged by loss so many years ago.
Potionomics shows us a world not unlike our own, where the true adversaries we face are not fantasy monsters so much as real-life evils like false advertising, patent trolling, and the single greatest enemy of them all: one-day delivery. To face these foes, what we need isn’t to work harder—it’s to stand together. Because the bonds we forge teach us things about each other and ourselves that we could have never learned on our own. If life is a card game, then each milestone on the way to getting to know someone better represents one more card we can add to our deck.
And at the end, we get to kiss! :D
3. Sylvie Lime
What’s going on this time? You should check out little green Sylvie Lime.
I don’t want to say too much about this game, so I won’t.
Go play it.
Just go play it. I promise, it’s worth it.
This lovely little platformer is so brilliant in the ways it goes beyond genre conventions that it’s best to go in unspoiled and unprepared. Go give it a shot! And please, absolutely turn on as many of the fun difficulty-tweaking options as you need to, because the 100% completion ending is worth every single second spent bouncing around as a tiny pixelated lime, making friends and gaining incomprehensible powers while transcending time and space.
2. Live A Live
Because time and space are relative, it turns out. What’s the difference between a million years ago, a couple thousand years ago, today, and a few hundred years from now? All of them can coexist; all of them can be connected. There are things, concepts, emotions even, that can trace a singular line through the entirety of human history, collapsing in on itself in a singular point:
This game.
This old, twenty-eight year old JRPG, which received middling reviews for its dated looks as it came out late in the life cycle of the SNES. This cult classic, which might possibly be the best remake of a 16-bit game I’ve ever played. Thank goodness my girlfriend @Aura convinced me to check it out.
Live A Live (whether you like to pronounce it “live a live” or “live a live”) is a masterpiece. It’s not perfect, to be clear, but it’s such a breath of fresh air considering it’s almost three decades old! What if you took the basic concept of a JRPG—a lone hero and their buddy, fighting against a bunch of jerks led by the world’s biggest nihilist—and applied it to a bunch of settings that aren’t typical medieval fantasy? And gave it a really clever, tactics-adjacent combat system to boot?
I’m not surprised it didn’t end up getting localized back when it came out in the mid nineties, but gosh how impressive it would’ve been to Teenage Zandra if it had. And while I want to go on further about this game, there’s something that remains a mystery at first, something the material hints at but doesn’t say outright, that becomes much clearer once you dig deeper into what’s there. (Something that, incidentally, Square Enix has been wiping off the face of the VOD earth for the time being.) This is a game worth your time. This is a game that has a lot to say (sometimes in very poetic ways) about tropes we take for granted even now.
It’s also staggeringly gorgeous! I was already a big fan of Octopath Traveler, but Live A Live takes the HD-2D concept to the next level in ways that put the original game’s pixel art on a pedestal, revered instead of glossed over or blurred out. It’s just tremendous. If the team that worked on this remake can do the same for Final Fantasy 6, I don’t think I’ll ever shut up about it.
But in the meantime, we have this game. We have a wonderful multi-genre tour de force that decides to be more than an RPG. We have a sneaking mission. We have a spaghetti western. We have a fighting game. We have a shounen anime. We have a sci-fi thriller.
We have a tale as old as time, about the evil that lurks in each timeline, no matter how remote. Because as long as there are people, there is the potential for hate. But as long as there are people, there is the potential for them to overcome it; the potential to come together, no matter the distance between them.
1. Signalis
Even if that distance is very, very great.
I don’t usually play horror games. But, as I’ve said earlier, it’s been a year of changes, and I’ve gotten to a place where I can engage with stories that can scare me, even in existential ways. And Signalis is an especially existential kind of horror game.
My list this year contains a lot of love letters, and this one is no exception. Built using modern tools to pay homage to a bygone era of games, it summons the spirit of a PlayStation 1 Resident-Hill-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off action thriller in the body of a modern title. And it doesn’t rest on its nostalgia laurels; it leverages it as a story conceit, another way to draw the player into its setting of space exploration and cyborgs, of state-of-the-art human replicas coexisting with analogue tapes and cathode ray tubes. Technologies mix together in ways that don’t feel quite right. Which, considering one of the very first actions you perform in Signalis is pick up a copy of The King in Yellow, is a portent of things to come.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I played Signalis. And, technically, I didn’t—my vtuber robot daughter @zandrabot played Signalis. But, since we share memories as if we were one and the same, for all intents and purposes, I did.
Fitting, in retrospect.
It’s hard to describe Signalis without giving too much away, and honestly, I’m not sure I can. This game is like one of those movies where you leave the theater with more questions than you had going in, and feel compelled to discuss it with others who saw it too. I still have so many questions. I need to talk about it. I need to hear what others understood. I need to know if they saw the same things I did.
I need to play this game again. And maybe again, after that.
But suffice it to say, for the same reason I’m still playing Destiny 2 after all these years, Signalis is so mechanically rewarding. I’ve gotten better at playing it. I’ve grown more skilled at managing the unfairly restrictive inventory, the make-every-shot-count combat system, the out-of-place puzzles that make more sense in retrospect. I want to show the game how much better I am now. I want to get a higher score. I want to perform the same actions again and again, because I enjoy doing them. Because maybe, just maybe, this time the outcome will be different.
Signalis is about a crashed ship. Signalis is about a mine underneath an outpost. Signalis is about things that have gone horribly wrong, set against an oppressive backdrop that gives you no choice but to keep pushing further onward and inward because while there are bad things before you, there are worse things behind you.
Signalis is about an empress. Signalis is about a rebel and her legacy. Signalis is about a handful of women, elevated and multiplied, made demographics unto themselves, so that their every quirk or flaw becomes such an expected mundane norm that people write books about them. Signalis is about the things that keep every one of us grounded as the person we have become, lest we fall back into the person we were before.
Signalis is about leaving the world behind to be with the person you care about. It’s about the lengths we go to in order to be reunited when circumstances beyond our understanding draw us apart. It’s about remembering the promise we made, no matter what.
Signalis is about cyborg lesbians kissing in deep space.
It’s about accepting the outcome of your choices, no matter what. Because every action, every decision, is witnessed. Every zig or every zag is seen by an unblinking eye, to be judged at the end of the journey. Sometimes this knowledge is comforting. Manageable. Sometimes we convince ourselves that once we control every variable, we can bring about the outcome we desire, or avoid the terrible fate we fear will happen.
But chances are, the scale is beyond our understanding. Chances are there’s no possible way to account for every eventuality, that the pressure we’re putting on ourselves to be perfect, just this once, is too great for any one person to bear. Chances are the little voice that’s telling us we can prevent the coming catastrophe is wrong.
We’re not trying to avert disaster.
The disaster already happened.
It’s trauma. It’s memories filed in the wrong places, causing us to react to the past while thinking it’s a future we can still change. But the events already took place; the scars are already there. We need to see them. We need to accept the wound is there. It’s the only way we can begin to heal from it. Otherwise, we’re doomed to remain in this cycle forever.
And forever can be a very, very lonely place.
Above all else, that’s what the past year has taught me. A different kind of keeping score; a different kind of getting better. A different kind of moving forward. But in life—just like in an impossibly-shaped metal wedge hurtling through space—it’s easy to stop noticing how fast we’re already going. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we’ve come to a standstill, or started sliding back. Let’s recognize the progress we’ve already made, the speed we’ve already been maintaining without realizing it. Let’s give ourselves the credit we deserve.
And once the credits are over, let’s keep going.
Let’s look forward to a better future, one we can build with each other.
Let’s keep making wonderful things together. <3
