Obviously we have a lot of Qt3ers missing the funnest, funniest game of 2022. [Edit: Removed my High on Life vote due to the Roiland controversy. Sad for the folks at Squanch who made a great game, but not appropriate for an award until the accusations are resolved.]
Going to keep thinking about this but so far I’ve got:
I need to pick that one up, but this is the perennial problem for me with the Quarterlies. I’ll know what my favorite game of 2022 was sometime around 2025. About the only thing I can guarantee is it won’t be Elden Ring.
Not true! You can vote for anything you want!
j/k I get it, you can only evaluate stuff which you have personally experienced, thus other stuff that was released but you haven’t experienced will be omitted.
Except on Boardgamegeek, where unreleased games get 10/10 for sounding cool!
Exactly. Me? I’m voting for Red Alert.
Ah, that’s annoying, but the 1.0 was such a stealth launch and the 2.0 in October corresponded to the game getting a lot more attention than before… Practically a launch, even if technically just an update. I say let it count!
Lemme just say out loud how this is gonna work. Just to be straight-up, as we used to say in the 'Nineties. Or maybe it was the 'Eighties. If you vote for some game that gets three votes, chances are that I’m not going to ensure that it qualifies, because I’m going to write it on an 8 1/2" x 14" legal pad and likely won’t come back to it until I verify that it is in 144th place. For example: Elden Ring, no one has played it or even heard of it, the company that released it couldn’t be bothered to correct the typo in the title, no one cares. But if the game starts getting a decent number of votes, I’m going to check and make sure it’s not because one of these Russian troll farms is trying to get an ineligible game to win this prestigious award. So you guys have some leeway, but I wouldn’t try and use it to take advantage, cuz that ain’t lowkey bussin, no cap.
This felt like a quiet year for games until November and December rolled around, and then it felt like a deluge. At least in the indie space. Were there any big epic AAA releases I missed??
My top three are rearranging every time I consider them, but here’s a snapshot:
Pentiment (PC)
“The past is a foreign country,” and when it comes to one 16th century Bavarian town, Pentiment is your obsessively meticulous tour guide. It’s my favorite game of the year because it is obsessed with many of the things I am: The development of culture, the role of religion in people’s lives, the nature of being an artist. (Not to mention other fascinating topics like handwriting, food, and the history of the Holy Roman Empire.)
Strange Horticulture (PC)
You’re running a plant shop, but this isn’t a management game. It’s actually a deduction game: Use a sketch, a written description, and your own observations to determine the species of 70-some plants. But that’s only half the game. The other half is using stories, clues, and riddles to track down special spots on a map (usually spots where rare new plants can be found). Along the way, the game evocatively draws out the macabre contours of soggy, supernatural England.
I Was A Teenage Exocolonist (PC)
This was an lovely surprise. I thought it was going to be an intense survival experience or something–and it can be intense–but it’s really an open-ended, extremely nuanced career simulator wrapped in an intricate story about settling an alien world. The game loop just pulled me along, and let me shape my character how I wanted to over 10 formative years. And then it gave me a strong reason to start all over again.
Butterfly Soup 2 (PC)
The most perfectly executed game I played this year (helped by the fact that it’s a visual novel), Butterfly Soup 2 carries on the comic high school adventures of four queer Asian-American girls by showing more of their home lives, new relationships, and just as much totally true-to-life goofing around as the first installment.
TUNIC (PC)
I tolerated–and eventually mastered–the combat in order to continue discovering the rich mysteries woven into this game’s world. Does TUNIC recreate the secrets of classic video games of the 80s and 90s? No, actually, it invents a totally new approach to puzzles (pioneered by Fez, I suppose) that recreates how those secrets felt to us.
The rest of my top 10:
Honorable mentions:
Games I wish I’d had a chance to play:
Here are my picks:
Right? It had me wondering what I was doing spending the money I did during the sales, when this $5 ate up over 40 hours of December.
tiny tina voice (whispering? not sure what she is doing there :)) - “Gearbox”
I finally started playing again this weekend after not touching it for years, and saw ~20 hours disappear. I think the graphics made the other bits more bearable as I continue to learn and re-learn things.
Pentiment is on the gamepass play later list. Hopefully it will get played soon.
Tunic makes it by virtue of being the fifth game I played a substantial enough amount of but didn’t really love. I’m just starting Pentiment. Hopefully I get to come back before time runs out and put it in there somewhere and knock out Tunic.
Edit: Shit fire, Immortality was 2022. That’ll knock out Tunic quite nicely!
As usual, I did not play enough games to make up a full list. In fact, had I not bought Expeditions Rome on the last day of the most recent Steam Sale, my list would have been limited to two. As it is, my list is
Okay, I suck trying to do stuff on my phone. :)
<chef’s kiss> I love the breezy elucidation of such a perfectly pitched view of grace and order. Fair warning: I might be swooning.
not many 2022 games, I played older stuff.
Edit: Swapped Recursive Ruin with Vampire Survivors because I’m an idiot.
I tried to keep it to genuine 2022 releases, but 13 Sentinels ended up changing the perspective of my whole gaming approach for the rest of the year, so I included it.
I didn’t have time to play Astlibra, Treasures of the Aegean, Jack Move, Persona 5 or Witch in the Holy Night yet, all of which would probably end up kicking the above games out my little list. Aw :(
The game documentation is rather murky – something I usually loathe. But here it works, at least for me. There are two levels of muddy lore. One involves the game itself, the nations and families and tools at your disposal. The other involves intense community lore about the game, theories and opinions as to what works and why it works. Taken together, the lack of clarity has ended up being a positive for me, as I play the naive Denam figuring out the ever widening world, piece by piece.
In a strange way, this game works for me much as Caster of Magic does. Both update games that allowed experienced players to become god-like by midgame. Which, for me, makes the second half of a game feel like a tedious chore of mopping up. Reborn – like Caster – transforms the experience such that you have ways to become overpowered, but only temporarily. Then a new enemy shows up with a counter to your godly powers, and you need to develop a new super strategy. I would not want to take the comparison too far, these games come from different genres, but each succeeds in maintaining tension into the late game in a similar way.
Map design is superior, too. But I have to admit that the camera view of the map is the game’s Achilles heel. Still, one of my favorite games ever.
A huge gap to #2
Nerdle Wordle was good, but we tired of it after a few weeks. Nerdle and coffee remain the way each day is supposed to begin.
Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga Half of a great game. (The first half. After that, it’s a mop up operation.)
Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia High tension battles marred by a high click interface.
Victoria 3 Not sure if this qualifies as a game or a simulation. But even if a simulation, it is thought provoking.