Top 10 2022 Games (That Weren't From 2022)

As I've done in other years, while the top ten new games I ranked earlier might seem relevant to more people, I also enjoy reflecting on ten older things I played through. There are a few other things that I started but didn't finish (I'm looking at you, Disco Elysium) and a few things from previous years' lists that I'm still enjoying (I'm still doing the NYT crossword, for instance) that I didn't think really fit the spirit of this list, but suffice it to say these aren't the only old things I wanted to highlight, just the old things that were new(ish) to me.

With that out of the way, let's begin.

 

10. Fortnite

Ahh, Fortnite. I have such complicated feelings towards this game. Its monetization and shop are designed in a way to encourage impulse purchases and the battle-pass's designed obsolescence means that things you spent real, actual money earning the "chance" to attain are only ever around for a short period of time. I think a lot of this stuff is gross and while I know there are other F2P games that do similar things, I think those are pretty bad too and Fortnite is one of the biggest cash cows out there.

With that being said, it's also, frustratingly, a really fun game. I've dabbled in it a few times in the past; I remember playing a few games when it launched on PS4 and thinking to myself, "I hope they let you choose a skin instead of having one randomly assigned to you" which should tell you about how different it was back then. I didn't really vibe with it though and spent most of my Battle Royale time on PUBG so it sort of just became something I'd hear about pretty frequently in the news.

I did hop in a few summers ago to watch the movie Inception because 1) I love that movie,
and 2) watching a Christopher Nolan movie on a virtual theater screen while someone trampolines in front of you seemed like a funny way to spend a few hours.

I didn't realize until after it was over that my screenshots of the movie itself were blacked out (duh), so here's my view of the blank screen before it started

What brought me back in, though, was the fact that they added a "zero-build" mode which removes most of the, well, Fortnite stuff and just leaves in the guns and vehicles. While I did enjoy PUBG, something about Fortnite's aesthetic and pace, coupled with all of the licensed characters and what-not, suddenly made the game click for me. I don't have anything truly insightful to say about it, but it's just a really fun, casual shooter that doesn't feel as grim and clinical as something like PUBG.

I'd love to be able to rate it higher because I've had a lot of fun with it, but the free-to-play hooks it has still skeeve me out a bit so you should know that going into it.

9. Door Kickers

I remember hearing the name "Door Kickers" a long while back on some Giant Bombcasts and thinking it always seemed like a game I'd want to check out but for some reason I'd never gotten around to it. After I played SWAT 4 a few years ago, too, this was a game that was often mentioned in the same breath. When the game Ready Or Not hit Steam (that's a SWAT 4 inspired game that's been under a bit of controversy) it reminded me of all the praise Door Kickers got so I finally gave it a shot.

Door Kickers, much like SWAT 4, is a game where you're commanding a squad of police officers as they raid various criminal buildings. Sometimes you'll have a hostage to rescue, or evidence to collect, but usually you just have to kill the bad guys. The copaganda of it all is not lost on me but, well, it's a video game and I'm able to see that. Fundamentally what I like about it is that it's kind of a puzzle game.

While you can control each soldier individually and attempt to react on the fly to situations that arise and play it like a pseudo-Hotline Miami, the thing I found the most fun with this game was interacting with it without that direct control. At any time you can pause the game and issue commands to soldiers (go here, unlock this door, throw a flash grenade after the door's been breached, things of that nature) but you can also do that at the start of a mission. These plans, though, are effectively unlimited in their complexity so I would often spend a very long time fine-tuning a pre-planned method of entry that would be able to account for whatever variables that attempt's randomness might throw at me. It became a game of ordering my officers to sweep corners and follow a set of instructions to the letter while slowly working out what those instructions would need to be.

Lining up multiple squads of soldiers and having them trigger simultaneous breaches or having two men storm a room from different angles so neither would be caught off guard, all of that stuff tickles me so. Yes, I failed a lot and needed to do a lot of trials before I'd get to a plan that actually worked, but figuring out precisely how long I'd need someone to wait outside a door before going in or when to trigger the next phase of my plan is the kind of strategy that I love to toy with in games. 

I'm someone who plays Hotline Miami by doing basically the same thing over and over until it works and this game is like a distillation of that.

8.  Picross S2

Despite what I said at the top about only including things that are new to me, this is actually a game I've been working at for years. There have been many other Picross games before (and after), but for some reason finishing this one has been a white whale of mine. Even now I'm still not completely done with it despite having spent well over 80 hours on it.

For as much as I've played this, Mega Picross still makes me feel like a fool

If you've played Picross before you might understand why this game is so compelling, and if you haven't, well, it's like Sudoku or a crossword puzzle. There's a rhythm and a calmness to it that makes it so you can easily spend half an hour chipping away at a particularly challenging puzzle. It may not have any fancy gimmicks or graphics, but it's Picross and it's one of the first ones I picked up. I'll probably keep whittling this down until I finish it, at which point I'll probably just move onto another of these S games.

 Picross rules.

7. Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion

Earlier this year I played through the first two Splatoon games in preparation for the third. While enjoyable, they're both pretty bog-standard platforming games (albeit platforming games with excellent music and vibes). The Octo Expansion for Splatoon 2, though, is more than that. 

It uses the same core mechanics as Splatoon 2 but instead tasks you with completing puzzles and challenges. It's constantly doing new things with the mechanics and asking you to interact with the game in novel and exciting ways. You might need to escort a ball through a maze or snipe a certain number of targets during an on-rails segment. It's still, fundamentally, Splatoon 2 but this expansion felt like the first time that they made the single-player a priority.

I've heard Splatoon 3's single player takes a lot of cues from this so I'm still excited to play that. Despite really loving that game last year I haven't even touched the campaign but if it's anything like this I know I'll be in for a good time.

6. Umurangi Generation

This is a game I probably should have played a few years ago. I've constantly seen it recommended in the circles of the internet I hang around in and I've even had it installed on my PC for quite some time. I've just been putting it off.

Regardless, I finally got to it late last year and thought it was great. You play as a photographer roaming around a number of futuristic locales and you're tasked with photographing certain things. There's an element of Pokémon Snap to it but it mostly plays out as a game about exploring spaces without engaging in any combat.

I hear the phrase "environmental storytelling" thrown out a lot to describe things like Fallout's toilet skeletons, but this is a game that truly imparts so much information about its world through the objects and art placed within it. Seeing the way a city is laid out or how deep the military's presence goes or even how people compose themselves gives you the impression that these could be actual, lived-in cities.

Your video game "objective", as I mentioned earlier, is to photograph very specific things, but because you don't know where those things are when you first arrive somewhere you naturally start to explore. There is a light time pressure, but given that I played through each level at least twice to get all of the collectibles and optional objectives I never stressed too hard about it. This game's setting could seem grim or cynical if it were presented any other way, but instead this is a game about appreciating the little things and stopping to smell the roses.

5. DEATHLOOP

DEATHLOOP is incredibly rad. I'm someone who poured a lot of time into Dishonored 2 and both of those Adam Jensen Deus Ex games (I still need to go back and give the original another shot...) and DEATHLOOP distills that formula into something that (vaguely) resembles a roguelite.

Your goal is to kill an entire group of enemies who are never all in the same location at the same time and you only have one day to do it. You need to do a lot of preparation and exploration, finding safe codes and keycards and power sources and whatever else you might typically do in an immersive sim, but it lets you use that exploration to effectively plan out your own HITMAN routes. 

You know where certain people will be at certain times of day, and you know how they might react to events at other locations, so putting together a perfect plan using information and tools you've acquired along the way is a really captivating hook. It also plays like a faster, more action-y Dishonored so you have loads of fun abilities to play with. I really dug this game.

4. Cyberpunk 2077

When this game got announced, oh, close to a decade ago, I was immediately intrigued. I used to love cyberpunk as an aesthetic as a kid (mainly due to Spider-Man 2099 and Samurai Jack, if I'm being honest). Anyway, the notion of a big budget cyberpunk RPG is something that I think I've always kind of wanted.

So, when this game released to mixed (at best) reception, I was obviously a bit sad. I kind of forgot about it until early last year when it went on sale after it's 1.5 update. That update allegedly fixed a lot of issues people had with the game so by the time I got to it I really enjoyed it.

While I was initially put off by the in-your-face excess of so much of the game's setting and saw it as a bad attempt at GTA-style satire, I eventually realized that that was kind of the point. There is good writing and sci-fi in this game but it's set in an exaggerated future America so it'll have exaggerated American advertising.

Maybe when the DLC for this comes out I'll write about my feelings on this game with a bit more focus, but suffice it to say this game eventually grows into something really enjoyable if you're willing to engage with it.

3. Resident Evil (1 and 2)

I already wrote in detail about both of these games so their inclusion on this list probably shouldn't come as a surprise. They were both very enjoyable games to someone looking at them with fresh eyes but, as with any game of this era though, I felt no shame about playing this with a guide. Sure, maybe I could have eventually figured out where to go on my own, but that's one element of old-school game design that I'm glad we've largely moved past.

While they are influential and noteworthy from a historical perspective, each game has enough horror and fun gameplay in it that the games themselves are absolutely still worth seeking out.

2. Silent Hill

I don't know that I have much to say about this that I haven't said already, but the original Silent Hill is excellent. Where Resident Evil captures the vibe of a good, sort-of campy horror movie, Silent Hill plays everything straight enough that its scares and unsettling tone aren't ever undercut by a bad line reading or a weird puzzle.

There are weird puzzles, but so much of this game is set in a dreamlike haze that the sort of nonsensical logic required at times feels less ridiculous than, say, Resident Evil 2's police station. The story and presentation still work today and, like I had heard constantly from fans of this, the low-poly characters and short-draw-distance-necessitated fog make even the "safer" areas in the game feel off-kilter and uncomfortable.

1. Half-Life 2 (and Episodes)

Like the previous two entries, I've talked in great detail about this game in two separate blog posts so I guess it's time to praise it for a third time. Half-Life 2 was an incredibly influential and impressive game when it launched in 2004, yes, but it was also an extremely entertaining FPS campaign in 2022. It carries with it a kind of momentum, moving you from one dramatic setpiece to the next so there's never really a dull moment. Sometimes there's a vehicle segment, sometimes there's a puzzle, sometimes there's a boss rush, it is a video game that's focused on being a good video game above all else.

The story and presentation are good too, though, and City 17 is an impressive locale (I get why Arkane hired Viktor Antonov to design Dishonored's Dunwall). As a teen I was obsessed with basically every other Source game so I truly don't know why it took me so long to get to this, but if for some reason you haven't played these I highly recommend it because this might be one of the best linear single-player video game campaigns out there.