Top 10 2022 Games

Well, it's that time again. One year has ended another one has begun. I'm over a week late but by now that's a bit of an intentional decision on my part. If the Oscars are allowed to happen in March I should be allowed a little wiggle room too.

In the past I've had long Twitter threads where I'd try to condense my thoughts but I wanted to try something new this year so I'm leaving it here. I played a number of games last year, both new and old, and I wanted to begin with my favorite new games from 2022. I'll have another post in a few days compiling my favorite non-2022 games I played last year, but for now here's the new stuff.

Before I get started, there were a number of other games that I enjoyed playing but which didn't quite make my top ten, so I wanted to name some honorable mentions (in no real order).

• Sniper Elite 5
• Marvel Snap
  
• Endoparasitic
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land
  
• Norco
• Who's Lila
• Immortality
• Vampire Survivors
  

 

Now, onto the main event.

10. Nintendo Switch Sports

I'll admit, I didn't stick with this game for as long as I thought I would, but for the few months that I was playing it I loved it. Maybe it's nothing new or revolutionary, but Wii Sports with online multiplayer was something I never knew I'd wanted until I had it. (I know there was also a Wii U one that had online multiplayer but I, uh, didn't have that console.)

I would have loved to be able to rate this even higher, but the progression became a slog after a while and the game, while fun, was not as rich with features as I'd have wanted. Given the price I was hoping for something with minigames and some singleplayer challenges, so something closer to Wii Sports Resort, but the end result here is relatively barebones. You have a handful of sports and the option to play online or against AI, and that's about it. You can unlock outfits and appearance options for your "Sportsmate" but as I mostly just wanted to use my Mii a lot of those were sort of useless, and as I mentioned earlier the pace at which those get doled out started to make unlocking things feel like work after a certain point.

Still, it's Wii Sports but online and Wii Sports was great, so this is great.

9. Spark The Electric Jester 3 

 

I haven't played either of the other Spark games so I don't truly know what sets this one apart, but I had a really great time with this one. It's an indie game that attempts to follow in the footsteps of Sonic Adventure in a lot of pretty obvious ways while still adding enough of its own flavor to keep from feeling like a pure fangame or a knockoff. There's a melee system that's more complicated than I'd initially expected and a story that goes off-the-rails at the end, but the basic moment-to-moment gameplay, the high-speed platforming, is where it shines.

As I said, it's kind of just more 3D Sonic. You've got railgrinding, but you've also got faster linear segments that feel like they could have been stages in Unleashed or Colors. As someone who's enjoyed a lot of the later Sonic games I appreciated the fact that this game which, while on a surface level appears to solely be an Adventure homage, still incorporated some of the changes and quality of life features that happened after those games.

8. Hardspace Shipbreaker

Have you ever wondered what Isaac Clarke's life might have been like before Dead Space? Well, this game is as close as you'll get to finding out. You play a "shipbreaker" tasked with, well, breaking down spaceships. You have a magnetic grapple gun and a device that is effectively Dead Space's Plasma Cutter and you need to use those to dissasemble each ship and sort its components into the proper disposal areas.

There are hazards and complications that develop as you progress into the game and you gain a few more tools and upgrades as you get deeper in, but the fundamentals are that grapple gun and the not-Plasma Cutter. Maybe you need to destroy AI nodes hidden around a ship, or you need to be careful about disconnecting fuel lines before cutting so you don't blow up a chunk of your salvage, or you need to deal with a reactor quickly so it doesn't blow. There's always enough going on that each ship feels enjoyable to deal with, and if you choose the "free shift" mode there isn't any sort of time pressure to worry about so you can move at your own pace.

It might sound tedious or boring, but that's the fun of it. This game scratches an itch for me that I think other people get scratched by Powerwash Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator. That is, the zen and calm you get from doing a task, and doing a task well. While there is a story that plays out over the course of this game, this was always a game I'd start up when I just wanted an hour or two to focus my mind on other things. It's like doing yard work or any other menial task, but it's in space and there are sometimes explosions.

7. ADACA

I don't remember exactly how I stumbled across it, but over the summer I played the demo for this game and was immediately hooked. From what I remember, that demo encompassed the early parts of the game (at the time of writing this it seems to still be available on Steam) and immediately after starting it something about the feel of this game just seemed right. 

To be a bit reductive, it's somewhere between an homage to Half-Life, an homage to Halo, and an homage to Stalker. You effectively have the Half-Life 2 gravity gun, but you also have some gimmicky (I mean this in a good way) alien weapons to play with while you're exploring a hostile, vaguely post-apocalyptic world overrun with zombies and monsters. It may seem at times like a hodge-podge of multiple influences but it mixes them well enough that it feels like its own cohesive thing.

When you get into the flow of this, you're telekinetically pulling an enemy's weapon out of their hands and then using that gun to shoot someone else, dodging one faction of enemies while running into a different, also hostile, group of bad guys. It's not an incredibly long game (though it also has an additional open-worldish mode that seems way more fleshed-out than I expected) but I loved loved loved my time with it and I wish more people would play it because I think it's, frankly, very cool.

6. Pokémon Legends Arceus

Let's Go! Pikachu was not a perfect game, but one of the most interesting parts of it was its decision to draw a distinction between Pokémon battles and wild Pokémon encounters, and this game doubles down on that. In this game, ideally, you might never even need to fight most wild Pokémon. You can lure them in with bait and throw a Pokéball at them when they're offguard or skirt around them because you know exactly where they are and they aren't obscured by tall grass. If anything, you are often the one lying in wait in tall grass. The interactions you can have with wild Pokemon are still relatively limited, but it feels like a true evolution of the Pokémon formula and I loved that.

It has some technical flaws and may not be the prettiest game (something that I've heard is even worse with this year's other Pokémon releases) but the core of it all is refreshing and enjoyable enough that none of those nitpicks matter here. I was a bit let down by Pokémon Sword but this game delivered on what I wanted out of a "modern" Pokémon release, so I hope they make another Legends game (or something else in this vein) in the future.

5. TUNIC

TUNIC is a frustrating game. I would frequently get lost and spend far too much time running in circles not knowing how to progress, and there were certain fundamental mechanics that I simply did not understand until I was incredibly deep into the game. It's not a particularly inviting game and I actually gave up on it for a time because I wasn't sure if it was for me. I reinstalled it later though to give it another shot and something about that second try made it click for me.

At a first glance this seems like an homage to classic Zelda games, and it's not not that, but it's so much more. The combat and rhythm of the game has shades of Dark Souls, but more importantly there's this pervasive feeling of mystery and depth that I haven't really experienced since I played something like The Witness or FEZ. As I mentioned earlier, there are certain key mechanics and, heck, control-bindings that are not overtly explained and that can at times seem needlessly obtuse. 

The thing that kept me coming back to this, though, was that whenever I did have that "aha"
moment it was incredible. Realizing I had a new way to interact with things I'd spent the entire game around was exhilarating. Taking screenshots so I could stitch them together outside of the game to solve a puzzle hearkened back to (what I imagine) playing through an old inscrutable NES game must have felt like. It's a really, really cool thing.

4. Splatoon 3

While I did play a bit of Splatoon 2 a year or two ago, most of its community had dwindled by the time I got to it so it never grabbed me the way it did some others. Earlier this year though, in preparation for the third game, I ran through both original Splatoons' campaigns and started to see what all the fuss was about.

At a very fundamental level it's another team-based shooter, but so much about the aesthetics and framing of everything manages to avoid the common anxieties or vitriol you normally get with those sorts of games. It hands out awards after each game (similar to Overwatch) so even if you're not the player with the most KOs or the most points, there's often still something that the game can acknowledge you accomplished, so even an otherwise "bad" game will almost never feel like a complete write-off. And while defeating enemies is still what most of the games revolve around, that's honestly only a secondary objective. Your goal is to ink as much ground as possible and, yes, destroying enemy players helps with that a fair amount, but there are additional ways to contribute if you're not someone who feels like they're going to win every one-on-one showdown.

I think the thing that keeps me coming back to this, more than maybe anything else, is just how short a given game can be. While I do enjoy my Call of Dutys and whatnot, there's something incredibly appealing about knowing that any game of Turf War is only going to be a three minute commitment.

Maybe this last point is petty, but a lot of multiplayer games out there feel cold or clinical and this game is far from that. You have fanart in the hub area you load into, you have lots of ways to customize your squid/kid/octoling, and it's all incredibly colorful and bombastic. It's an energetic setting that's appropriately silly and I kept wanting to come back to it all year.

3. Teardown

Teardown is a rad game. It's effectively a game about planning a heist and then executing a heist, and as I loved Quadrilateral Cowboy (another game about setting up heists) I immediately dug this. 

Each level sets you loose onto a map with a handful of things you need to do. Paintings to grab, cars to deliver, computers to nab, stuff like that. You then need to use whatever tools are at your disposal to make your (eventual) heist as smooth as possible. You can move props into position, tear down (get it?) walls to make your getaway faster, and place vehicles so you can get out of dodge fast. The amount of property damage or noise you make is (mostly) inconsequential so most maps end up looking like crime scenes before the actual theft even happens, but once you've got things in position you get to the fun part.

When you trigger the first objective a countdown starts (usually one minute) and you have until the end of that countdown to do as many objectives as possible and, more importantly, get out. For as relaxing as the destruction and prep work is, there's always some stress when you see that countdown finally start because you know that it's go-time. There's something incredibly satisfying about seeing how your hardwork paid off or, if it didn't, loading a save (I was very liberal with quicksaves) to tweak your approach to see how you can make your next run more efficient.

2. Citizen Sleeper

 

 

This was a late addition to my list and as I was compiling my rankings there was a part of me that was worried I was too caught up in some sort of recency bias to view this accurately, but then I remembered how I felt during this game and I pushed those feelings aside because it really was that good.

I'm not entirely sure how to describe this game because I feel like I haven't played anything exactly like it, but I guess I'd have to say it's sort of an RPG, sort of a visual-novel choose-your-own-adventure thing. You play as a new citizen aboard a space station and need to use a relatively limited action economy to decide how you want to spend each day. You have certain resources that need to be maintained and certain deadlines you have to meet, so it's a constant balancing act of choosing when to go to work to earn money to pay rent, when to explore the station to find better money-making opportunities, and when to prepare for the dangers that you know are only a few days away. There's a real strong feeling of working paycheck to paycheck and feeling like you're only ever just barely scraping by that kept me from ever getting too relaxed. 

Throughout the game you'll meet a handful of characters with their own sidequests and jobs on offer, and each of these vignettes is accompanied by some beautiful character art and some strong, occasionally surprising, writing. There was a moment deep into the game (I don't go into specifics but you can skip the rest of this paragraph if you'd rather not hear) where I was offered a choice between two outcomes, one that would (seemingly) end my character's story and one that wouldn't, and despite the fact I chose the latter the game still rolled credits. That forced me to think about what I'd just chosen and made my choice, on immediate reflection, feel significant and like the climax of my personal narrative. It was oddly affecting. The game eventually resumed and I went on to complete more of its content, but that first "ending" has stuck with me ever since.

1. Elden Ring

 

While so much of this list has been in flux all year (each of those honorable mentions at the top were close to making the cut), nothing's been able to top Elden Ring for me. It's an uneven game, I think the back third is a bit of a slog, and some of the difficulty is straight-up mean at times, but holy cow is this game something else.

It feels a bit old hat to say this by now, but I haven't really felt this sense of awe or true breadth since Breath of the Wild, and in many ways this blows even that out of the water. The world is massive and through the dozens of hours of gameplay that encompassed my first playthrough I was constantly discovering new stuff. New dungeons, new bosses, new enemies, new items, mysterious connections between locations, characters and places that fleshed out the world, it was a constant barrage and I loved it.

The gameplay is pretty much the Souls combat you either love or hate at this point, but despite my on-and-off relationship with their other games this game never lost me. Maybe it's the fact that I could choose to do something else if I ever hit a dead end but while every other first attempt at a Souls game I've had has ended after a few hours, I played nothing but Elden Ring for close to two months. 

Those early days, too, were specifically cool because this was my first time going through a game like this before it had been fully broken open by the datamining hive-mind of The Internet. I was able to tell friends about a cool interaction I'd had that they had never knew was possible, and likewise I found things out through discussions. I don't think I've had that sort of experience since I was talking about, like, Pokémon at recess in elementary school. It was refreshing to feel that sort of wonder towards a video game again.