Although I would say this past year has been a phenomenal one in the realm of video games, the sad truth is that not every game can impress or amaze. Some of them aren’t great, but many are just shy of being gems, with a critical flaw keeping them from greatness.
This list is to bring attention to those games. The ones I played, and may have even enjoyed for a time, but couldn’t quite go the distance with. Presented once more in no particular order, the disappointments of 2022 are:
Dislyte
There is a period of time when almost every advertisement on YouTube was about this game. To top it off, the artists I follow on Twitter and FurAffinity kept posting a ton of fanart of Drew, Freddy, and Xander among characters. I knew it was a gatcha game, but I was curious enough to try it out. In fairness to the game, it had its hooks in me for a long time. I only spent money on Battle Passes, but never in excess.
I hit a point in my lifecycle with Dislyte where I realized I was simply “going through the motions”. Sure, there were characters that would have made my team better, but I had already completed the story mode and acquired the ones I wanted on my team through grinding. I started to see the treadmill for what it was, and I haven’t put any time into the game since.
My understanding is that it’s one of the more gentle games among its contemporaries, but at the end of the day, it was still a gatcha. Realizing that the only reason I was playing was to increase the numbers was the death knell. I still can’t quite bring myself to uninstall it from my phone out of some naive idea that I could be brought back one day, but I haven’t even opened the game in months.
Shovel Knight Dig
I adore Shovel Knight, and I love roguelikes, so in theory, this should have been a game right up my alley. And yet, I don’t know what exactly caused me to bounce off it as heavily as I did. I had only truly played the game for a few hours.
It just wasn’t grabbing me the way I wanted it to, leaving me with little choice but to move on. Maybe in the future, I will give it another try, but I just don’t see myself playing the game with the same fervor I would a Hades or similar roguelike.
Resident Evil: VIIIage: Shadow of Rose
I don’t think this was a bad DLC for Resident Evil: VIIIage. I was more than happy to make it through Shadow of Rose. For me, the problem stemmed more from a lack of understanding of what this expansion was supposed to be than anything else.
When I heard that Rose was going to be a playable character for this, I expected that they would pick up after the final scene of the base game, when she’s come into her mold superpowers and started using them to help Chris Redfield deal with all the spooky, evil shit that happens in the world of Resident Evil.
From that perspective, it was profoundly disappointing to discover that not only is this DLC a mold-induced fever dream mandated by the plot, but that it is the lead-up to the Rose that we saw in the epilogue to VIIIage. She’s in the middle of developing her mold powers, and she hasn’t quite reached mastery of them yet.
Had I been paying attention to the press coverage of Shadow of Rose, I would have already known that. Capcom was transparent about what this DLC was. Even knowing that it still makes me wonder whether or not Capcom knows what it plans to do with the series going forward.
Tunic
It hurts more than a little to put Tunic on this list because I don’t even think the game’s bad. In a just world, I would be rightfully praising the way players have to find and piece together pages of the manual in order to discover how to play the game, or how it cultivates a sense of wonder and exploration with its systems and mechanics that few other games can claim to have.
While all of that is true, it’s all tinted by the underlying fact that I would have beaten this game if it were not for the fact it has an invincibility mode in its accessibility settings. After a certain point in the game, almost every boss fight felt like it was cheating me in a way that felt unearned. I hesitate to call them tough because I know deep inside my heart if I kept at them I would have been able to eventually take them down “fairly”. However, there are only so many times one can be killed by an awkward timing window or an enemy that simply refuses to offer a decent opening before their stamina and desire to persevere is exhausted.
I dislike that the combat grew so sour for me that I had to skip it entirely just to get back to the parts of the game I enjoyed, but that is my experience with Tunic, and I am far from the only one who had this experience.
Abermore
People who know me know that I am the first to heap praise upon games that follow the Looking Glass traditions of games like Thief and Deus Ex. As a title that takes heavy inspiration from the former, Abermore might have even been one of those games in another circumstance, despite the number of technical issues that I had with it.
Sadly, it is the only game that I played this year where the game soft-locked on me. When I went into the mission select in order to see what jobs were available on one of the final days of the game, I found that there were none whatsoever. When I looked inside myself to ask if I was willing to replay the eight-and-a-half hours that I invested in order to start over and maybe beat the game, I found I was completely unwilling to make the attempt.
The developers took a bold swing when making Abermore, and they were so close to hitting the mark. It just so happened that this time they missed. I hope they get another chance at it.
Magic: Spellslingers
Although we already have Magic: Arena, this game is fundamentally different from traditional Magic the Gathering. Instead, what we have is a hybrid of Magic and Hearthstone, rebalancing and redesigning classic and iconic MTG cards and characters around the fundamentals of Hearthstone, including hero powers, mana that accumulates on its own over the course of the game, and randomized effects.
To its credit, it also has a very generous economy in comparison to many of its contemporaries in the digital card game space. Before I stopped playing, I managed to collect a playset of every card and every “Spellslinger”, this game’s term for the iconic Magic planeswalkers that each have their own color combination and hero power, without spending a single dime.
The problem was that I wasn’t particularly fond of the gameplay, especially since the only real options were Ranked play and matches against idiot AI bots. If anything, it reminded me exactly why the randomness and “wackiness” eventually caused me to drift away from Hearthstone. Too many times I lost because my opponent got lucky enough for one effect or another to randomly trigger in exactly the right way to give them lethal on a board I would have otherwise won, and I just could not take playing it any longer.
There’s an audience who will love this game, and I thought I might have been among that audience, but it turns out I wasn’t.
20 Minutes Till Dawn
It’s no surprise that in the wake of Vampire Survivors, other games would come along to try to imitate its formula in the hopes it would be as successful for them as it was for the one that popularized it. 20 Minutes Till Dawn is one of those games, where we kill enemies and power ourselves up in the hopes of winning by lasting the full time. Except it has one critical difference which absolutely ruins the formula.
In Vampire Survivors, when players aren’t choosing what upgrades they want for their character, they only have to worry about movement and maneuvering around enemies and obstacles on the map. To distinguish itself, 20 Minutes Till Dawn introduces a gun as a form of base weapon, that players have to manually aim and shoot while moving around the map.
This slight additional complexity is enough to dramatically throw off the entire game. It’s just one thing too many to ask players to keep track of when confronted with a swarm of zombies and monsters that are out for their blood. My best builds in this game were always built around auto-firing adds and familiars or making the spread for my gun so wide aim was no longer a factor.
If anything, this game shows how delicate a balance Vampire Survivor achieved, and how a single change can transform it from a great game to a frustrating one.
Bayonetta 3
Even after all the pointless drama that Helena Taylor maliciously stirred up before release, I never imagined that Bayonetta 3 would turn out to be such a profound disappointment. It’s easy to take potshots at the game’s plot because it’s bad, but that’s not why people come to Bayonetta.
We come to Bayonetta for Platinum’s on-point and skillful level and enemy design, and that was largely absent for most of the game, except for a couple of levels. The new mechanic to summon and control demons to fight on our behalf was interesting in concept, but in practice, I found that the monsters were, more often than not, just combo finishers by another name. I rarely used them for more than that if I could avoid it because Bayonetta herself was left wide open whenever I did.
Unfortunately, Bayonetta isn’t the only character we play this time around either. Aside from many of the wholly unnecessary gimmick stages that make up all of the game’s end-of-chapter boss battles, we’re treated to series newcomer Viola. I think Viola has a cool design. While I like the character, I have no further desire to ever play as her until they give her entire kit a complete redesign from the ground up.
The strongest aspect of her moveset is that she can summon and fight alongside her demon, Cheshire. Except, while Cheshire is out, she no longer has access to her sword, and her Witch Time does not activate on dodge as Bayonetta’s does. Instead, she has to use her sword to block and parry attacks to do it, which she can’t do if Cheshire is actively attacking. Even divorced from the fact that my muscle memory from playing as Bayonetta kept me hitting the dodge button instead of the block on accident, it made almost every level where I played as Viola a miserable experience.
We didn’t realize it, but when he wished for Bayonetta 3, the monkey’s paw curled in on itself.
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And so, that’s my list of the biggest disappointments I played in 2022. Next time, we’ll talk about the games I played this year that did not come out in this year: My Non-2022 Gaming in 2022.
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