The Highlights of 2022

It’s that time again when we all reflect on what’s happened over the course of the last revolution of the Earth around the Sun. This has been an interesting year. At first, I thought that given the continued impact of Covid-19 on game development, there would be fewer games on the list of what I played.

But as I compiled it, I realized that this has actually been a phenomenal year for gaming, just not AAA. Sure, there are games from major publishers that caught my attention, just not as many as I’m used to. I’d expect that would lead to me playing fewer games this year, but all that meant is that I turned my attention more towards smaller, bite-sized indie darlings and free-to-play games in the moments where I wasn’t taking on one of the bigger releases.

And with that in mind, this list of highlights of 2022 will likely reflect that mindset. Remember, as always, this list is presented in no particular order, starting with:

Tactics Ogre Reborn

This was a weirdly strong year for people who enjoy Tactical RPGs, and the remake of Tactics Ogre, one of the most legendary games in the entire genre, is one of the reasons for that.

Looking back on this game, now fully voiced, it’s fascinating to see the building blocks for the script that designer Yasumi Matsuno would later bring to Final Fantasy Tactics, a story that I consider the best in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. He has a sharp mind and pen, using both to such a strong degree even in this early exploration of the themes of power and greed.

And even more than that, the gameplay rebalancing for this remaster makes it the best version of Tactics Ogre on the market. Convenience features like the even spread of XP across all participants in a battle, regardless of what they did in a battle, are so transformative that I will consider it the expected standard for all Tactical RPGs going forward. And yet, balancing it by introducing a level cap for the party that raises as players progress does a great job of allowing players to stay slightly ahead without letting them overpower themselves.

Matsuno and his team are the Lords of the genre, and this remake accurately demonstrates that reality.

Cult of the Lamb

Who doesn’t love indoctrinating some poor fool they found while murdering other cultists and then forcing them to literally eat shit? Wait… is that just me? Is that really just me?

Well, that’s okay. There are other ways to have fun in Cult of the Lamb. I love the macabre style of humor that is fully embodied by this mix of roguelike and Animal Crossing. Neither side of it is mechanically fully fleshed out, but the way they blend together is what truly sets Cult of the Lamb apart from others in its twin genres.

More importantly, though, it made sure that it didn’t overstay its welcome. It took me about 15 hours from start to finish to play Cult of the Lamb. That’s exactly long enough to make its point and no more.

It’s a trait I’ve come to appreciate in games when I see it.

Sifu

There will always be a place in my heart for a game whose very foundations are grounded in the idea of replaying small sections of it over and over again in order to improve one’s performance, and Sifu is exactly that kind of game.

The feeling I had when I completed the entire first level without dying a single time, even if it was the easiest, was sublime. Now, I never repeated that again on any of the other five levels, but the feeling of improving with each run is exactly what makes Sifu great. 

Additionally, Sloclap brought a lot of DNA from its previous game, Absolver, into Sifu’s combat. A visceral edge to countering, disarming, and knocking out the various armies of the mooks and big villains made for excellent scenarios and boss fights.

They even later patched in an Easy mode for people who aren’t as much into a challenge as I am, so it’s far easier to recommend Sifu now.

Marvel SNAP

I have been playing Marvel SNAP ever since the game launched a few months ago, and I still regularly keep up with my dailies because I enjoy the act of playing that game. Second Dinner did an excellent job of distilling the absolute best aspects of card games into twelve-card decks and six-round, at most six-minute matches without sacrificing the kind of depth or strategy people like me expect from the genre.

And that has led me to sometimes spend hours jamming matches while in the middle of meetings at work or watching shows I’m eager to catch up on. It’s fun to unlock a new card like Cerebro or Deadpool and think of a powerful deck that can best take advantage of their abilities. I got lucky when one of my favorite Marvel villains, Venom, became an important part of one of my favorite strategies: Destroying my own cards for value.

I’m also genuinely surprised at how gentle the economy of this game has been on my wallet. So far, I’ve only spent real money on the Intro Pack and the Season Passes, and I haven’t felt like my progress has been unduly gated because of it. I’m well on my way to building up a collection, and I have several decks that I enjoy running. That’s more than I can say for many games in this space.

Sonic Frontier

I would have never believed them if someone told me that I would genuinely have fun with an open-world Sonic the Hedgehog game in 2022, but here we are. I won’t say it’s a perfect game, but I have never been one to shy away from good jank in a video game.

In many ways, it is a traditional open world in much the same way Ubisoft has become infamous for. Normally, that would spike my fatigue. However, there’s a ton of novelty in the way they’ve adapted that model to Sonic specifically, and the unique forms of gameplay he has become known for over the years. Despite the moments where systems don’t fully work together, there’s a strong skeleton that can be reiterated and refined in future games.

It shouldn’t work, but it does. That’s more than I could have expected.

Triangle Strategy

This was another of the three tactical RPGs I gorged myself on this year. Though it does not reach the heights of my beloved Final Fantasy Tactics, it holds its own when taken on its own merits.

Much of that comes down to the world and story they built for themselves, which revolved around the politics and relationships of three countries embroiled in a conflict over salt. Verbose as the script may be, it nonetheless held my attention over the course of the entire campaign and the New Game+ run I made afterward to get the best possible ending.

More interesting than that is the way Triangle Strategy presented the moral choices and divergent paths of the plot. Rather than have the player decide on their own, instead their party members are tasked with voting for whichever action they support the most. To get their desired outcome, the player needs to convince a majority of the group to side with them. In practice, this is functionally the same as making a choice yourself. However, it does require the player to consider each character’s opinion, what they’re voting for and why, and what might compel them to change their mind. It’s a system I would like to see expanded upon if a sequel or spiritual successor ever gets greenlit.

It’s not perfect, but then no game is aside from Final Fantasy Tactics.

Card Shark

Does cheating at card games make one a bad person? Probably, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to swindle Enlightenment Era French noblemen out of all their money and then some.

I’ve always had a fascination with magic tricks and the craftsmanship that goes into perfecting a good illusion or fakeout, and in many ways conning people at gambling halls is similar in how much stagecraft and skill are involved in pulling it off. This is where Card Shark shines the most, by highlighting and mechanically recreating many of the well-documented and studied methods that fraudsters would use to tilt the odds in their favor when they’ve found a wealthy mark.

The individual motions are never too complex, simplified both in the name of player accessibility and the limited number of inputs on a controller, but they do a great job at simulating the experience so that honest folk like you and me and still feel like we’re getting one over on the king of 17th-18th century France.

And really, that’s less theft and more reclamation.

The Case of the Golden Idol

I’ve never made it a secret that I love all forms of detective fiction, even and especially detective games. While The Case of the Golden Idol isn’t that in the strictest sense of the phrase, it performs an excellent job of capturing the essence of what detective work and deduction are on a mechanical level.

Golden Idol is broken up into scenes depicted as a series of still images depicting a death or the aftermath of a body being discovered. As the player, our job is to explore the scene and uncover clues, keywords, and other useful tidbits of information. With all of our hints, our goal is to piece together the sequence of events that lead up to the murder by filling in the blanks of who, what, and why on a solution board.

It sounds simple, and it mechanically is, but it forces players to truly think about every single clue at their disposal to see how it all fits into the grand scheme of things. I often found myself staring at the screen, looking down at my notes, and then staring back at the screen for fifteen or thirty minutes just trying to figure out what small piece of the puzzle I had incorrectly placed. Towards the end, I eventually needed to start bringing information in from previous scenes and derive conclusions in later ones, each piece building on top of the other.

Culminating in a strong finale that ties everything together in a neat denouement, there’s not much more I could ask for.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

I suppose the RNGods have decided that we are getting all of the big tactical RPGs I played out of the way early because this is the last of them on my list. You can also add it to the “Brandon likes janky games list”, because I’ll be the first to admit that this game is rough, and needed another pass of polish and technical improvements to truly shine.

Midnight Suns is the fusion of four entirely different concepts that sound like they don’t belong together. Imagine X-com, but with some elements of roguelike deck builders, where we hang out with our units in the moments between missions like in Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Persona 3/4/5, and it’s all set in the mystical/magical segment of the Marvel Comics Universe and our units are all Marvel superheroes.

It sounds like a confused, disjointed mess, but it all blends brilliantly into a distinctive and unique whole. Bringing together classic heroes like Spider-man and Iron Man with more recent or less known characters like Magick or Robbie Reyes’s Ghost Rider does a lot to demonstrate the love and care that the team at Firaxis has for the Marvel universe. Once I got my hands on the game, I never questioned why, after completing a mission, I was attending a book club with Blade, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and Wolverine.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, and that’s something I can’t help but admire.

Neon White

Everyone who enjoyed Neon White has an OrangeCreamsicle in their lives. No, I’m not referring to the tasty summer treat, although those are delicious. Rather, I’m referring to the guy on my Steam friends list whose times were always glaring at me, daring me to try each level in Neon White one more time to try to get that much closer, and even occasionally beat him.

OrangeCreamsicle is a good guy, one that I was happy to talk shop with once I had beaten the game, but OrangeCreamsicle’s *times* were a huge asshole! Fortunately, I can be a stubborn enough mule when I want to be, so the challenge only made besting one of them all the sweeter.

That was the experience of Neon White for me. While I enjoy any story that gives Steve Blum more work, I was much more enraptured by the quest for mechanical speed and precision to shave just another second of the run for each level until I finally received my Ace medal for it. I never had the bravery to challenge dev times, but I hope that I was for someone else what OrangeCreamsicle was for me.

That jerk who kept posting these seemingly impossible times!

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

I’ll be honest, I completely forgot that The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe edition was announced until I saw it on the Steam front page and people started talking about it on Twitter. Had I remembered, I might have been concerned that anything the team could add to it would merely dilute the package.

It is fortunate then that I didn’t remember, because such fears would have been unfounded. Davey Wreden and William Pugh are smart, and they know what it means to make a new edition or sequel to The Stanley Parable. The Ultra Deluxe edition interrogates that very notion with more wit and finesse than I could have expected, remaining constructive while still criticizing many of the worst industry practices that are still dreadfully common in game development.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus

At long last, after trying for over fifteen years, Game Freak has finally made one, and exactly one, good Poke’mon game. Okay, even I have to admit that’s hyperbole, because both of the previous Poke’mon games I played prior were fun, even if I left them feeling like they were flawed or dated.

This is the first Poke’mon game that really captured, at least for me, what the franchise can be in the context of modern game design. A smile crossed my face as I captured Pocket Monsters without fighting them, using my wits and positioning to take them by surprise. I vividly remember how I felt when I took down and caught the Alpha Snorlax in the first reason, which would go on to carry me through much of the early game.

Beyond the more open-world and exploration-focused nature of Arceus, it was also fun to take on the research challenges of each Poke’mon. It felt like I was an actual scientist studying the wildlife around me in order to form a stronger understanding of the world itself, and that’s something that felt lacking in other games in the series.

Arceus serves as a strong blueprint for what I would want to see from Game Freak as they continue to iterate on a formula that feels like it’s been largely stagnant for at least a decade. I can only hope that it’s a strong sign of things to come.

Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series

Though I never played the Klonoa games proper, I have vivid memories of an old demo for the first one back in the days of the original PlayStation. I played it a lot, though I don’t believe I ever came across a copy of Klonoa in the wilds when I looked for it. And by the time the sequel came around, my younger self was already more focused on other things.

So for me, this remaster of the two games was a chance for me to go back and replay games I knew I would love, but just never got around to. Despite, or maybe because of, their age, both games held up very well. Even better for me, this new version added an Easy mode where lives are infinite and damage is reduced, introducing modern conveniences that I’ve found tough to go without when returning to other platformers of the era.

There are a lot of games like this that I wish I played but never got around to, and I hope the success of this one leads to more of them for me.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

After spending about two hundred hours with Fire Emblem: Three Houses across three of the game’s four routes, it was only natural that I would take to its Musou-inspired alternate universe sibling. My boy Claude is a master strategist, but he’s never played a Musou game before in his life so I knew I had to back him up through all this.

Okay, that might be a bit of a fib. It’s true that I do happen to like the odd Musou game, and this is no different. But really, Three Hopes was little more than an excuse for me to return to a cast of characters I fell in love with back in 2019 without having to replay White Clouds in Three Houses again after doing so thrice already. To that end, it accomplished its job splendidly.

Time will tell if I like Fire Emblem as a whole, or very specifically Three Houses, but until I figure that out I’ll gladly remind Hilde that she needs to get out there and show the enemy how tough she really is.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Master Duel

I thought my days of playing Yu-Gi-Oh were long behind me. I have not owned a physical deck since Goyo Guardian and Stardust Dragon were the big-name cards to be afraid of. Nor have I played any version of the game proper since the Pendulum era, before Link Summons were a thing, so at first, I didn’t pay Master Duel any mind.

But then friends of mine started playing it, and the nostalgia googles appeared on my face, and the next thing I knew I was knee-deep in Yu-Gi-Oh content relearning the game and trying to understand how it had evolved since I stepped away from it all those years ago. It’s not the game I loved anymore, but the game it’s become is not bad if you’re willing to forgive a few of its flaws and find the fun.

As far as entry points into the game go, once I taught myself how modern Yu-Gi-Oh is played, I couldn’t help but notice that the F2P economy for Master Duel is one of the most generous I have ever encountered in the digital TCG space. Thanks to the odd quirk of how Yu-Gi-Oh handles card design, a lot of the value of certain decks lies in “staple cards” that can be ported over between archetypes. For that reason, once I built up my collection of those staples, it became extremely easy to pivot between different archetypes without using up too many resources crafting the cards I needed. It’s not entirely without time gates for a free-to-play player, since certain decks do rely a lot upon Super Rare and Ultra Rare cards that aren’t so easily moved over, but those decks are in the minority. 

I can’t say I’ve kept up with Master Duel over the past few months, but I can say that I’m now interested in Yu-Gi-Oh again, and that’s not something I ever expected to say in 2022.

Elden Ring

I don’t know if there’s anything left to be said about Elden Ring at this point. Even people outside of the gaming sphere I inhabit were talking about this game and comparing notes about their various adventures. This was to 2022 what Animal Crossing: New Horizons was to 2020: An international event that lasted for several months without growing tired or dull. Whether it was the first time any of us found our way down to the Siofra River, our meeting with Blaidd and his ward Ranni the Witch, or learning that she is Malenia, Blade of Miquella… and she has never known defeat, we’ve all shared those stories with each other.

I don’t have to tell you why Elden Ring was a highlight of this year. You already know, even if you never played it for yourself. And if you haven’t, you probably should.

Live-A-Live

Although the original version of Live-A-Live never made it to the states, I had heard about it second-hand, spoken in tones of great reverence. Seeing that it was ported to the Switch and localized into English, I had to take the chance on it.

What surprised me about Live-A-Live was how modern it felt, despite being a game almost as old as I am. Much of that comes down to the HD 2D presentation popularized by Octopath Traveller, and an updated script, but most of it was already baked into the way the game explores the conventions of traditional JRPGs in order to tell stories in other genres.

None of the tales are terribly complicated, but the idea of presenting an Alien-style horror movie, a Western, or even a stealth game, using turn-based combat and the 2D navigation typical of old Final Fantasy dungeons still fascinates me. And without spoiling it, even though it’s been months since I touched the game, I still think about the game’s major villain and how its presentation sells his descent into madness despite the limited technology they had access to at the time.

It’s both a time capsule of the old SNES era, and a modern take on what the JRPG genre can do, and that duality is something that rests firmly in my thoughts on Live-A-Live.

Vampire Survivors

This game may unironically have been my driving impetus to finally purchase a Steam Deck for myself, such was my desire to play it on my couch or in my recliner chair.

Rarely do games pump my brain full of feel-good chemicals the way Vampire Survivors does. Even though I’ve completed all the achievements in both the base game and the DLC, I still occasionally turn the game on just because I’m in the mood for a run.

I would call it insidious if it weren’t for the fact I’ve only spent $5 on it in total, but if you somehow have not touched Vampire Survivors, you need to fix that immediately. It’s well worth your time and the meager price of admission.

Brok the InvestiGator

I went into Brok with almost no expectations whatsoever. All I had heard about the game was that people in my orbit had liked it, and I had seen were fanarts that crossed my Twitter and FurAffinity feeds. A couple of screenshots made it look like a traditional point-and-click adventure, but I had no further context for what the game was.

What I was treated to was an almost cyberpunk-esque tale of discrimination and class warfare wrapped in the guise of a cartoon art style reminiscent of the shows I used to watch on Saturday morning over a bowl of sugary cereal. And one with a relatable cast that kept me engaged through all of my 25+ hours to reach every single possible ending.

It has an undeniable charm that kept me hooked in ways I didn’t expect. In truth, I thought it was little more than furry bait, and I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

I first took interest in Hardspace: Shipbreaker when Renate Price over at Waypoint described it as a game about “the joy of manual labor”. And while I’m guilty of borrowing her language when describing it myself, her summation is dead on the money.

The title accurately describes what the game is about. We play as an employee of a company that takes decommissioned ships, breaks them down, and scavenges them for parts. This sound like it would devolve into a dull and repetitive task, and one would be incorrect for assuming that. As ships become more complex and varied over the course of the game, what struck me most is how intensely satisfying it became to master the craft.

Stepping out into the yard, I stopped seeing these ships as esoteric black boxes and started breaking them down into procedures and component parts in my head before I was finished flying over to them with my toolkit. Yes, it’s absolutely dangerous to pull a reactor core away from the ship, because I have only a short time to collect it and stabilize it before it detonates in my face. However, I knew every time I attached that tether to it that I was completely safe. The dangers had already been nullified because I knew enough to create a clear, unobstructed path for the reactor to travel before I ever touched it or the cooling rods surrounding it.

It feels powerful to travel down the tube of a thruster as it starts to burn up and meltdown, knowing that all I had to do is reach the end to pull the lever shutting off the fuel lines, and then that salvage was ripe for collecting.

Those moments of mastery of a dangerous job exist at the heart of this game, and I’m glad I took the time to experience them for myself.

Citizen Sleeper

The coolest aspect of Citizen Sleeper is the way blends together its role-playing mechanics with its narrative structure seamlessly, creating a whole that far exceeds the sum of its parts. As the result of a human mind simulated in a degrading semi-mechanical body, the player character of Citizen Sleeper escapes the corporation that owns them and has to forge a new life for themselves in a space station known as the Eye.

Each day, our character rolls a certain number of dice in accordance with how stable their body and mind are. Using their results, the player has to procure the food they need to survive and the medicine their body needs to need itself going while forging relationships with the other people living on the Eye. Like us, each person here has a story of their own, and the game goes to great lengths to show the humanity of everyone who falls within the player’s sphere.

Early on, the tension of whether or not we’ll be able to keep ourselves functioning is always at the forefront. Though I never truly ran out of food, money, or medicine, the resource loop is so tight that even the player starts to feel that they’re living day to day, barely scraping by as emergency after emergency strips them of their safety nets.

That starts to change as we form connections with the space and its people. As I completed quests and became true friends and allies with characters like Feng the Engineer or Riko the Botanist, I could feel the game’s grip on me loosening up. By the end of my time with Citizen Sleeper, I had multiple reliable ways to keep stocked on food, money, and medicine, enough that I stopped having to worry about my own needs, freeing me to finish the questlines for all of the other characters that I wanted to learn more about.

After all, they helped me, so it was only right that I pass my good fortune along to the next person in need of it.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins

Everyone clowned on this game when we first saw the trailer of average-looking white dudes with modern, led by an angry man who couldn’t seem to talk about anything other than his desire to kill Chaos. When the demo came out, and we were treated to this gem of a scene, the core concept only grew that much more laughable.

While that campy charm was certainly there, what I didn’t expect from Stanger of Paradise was a video game that played well, taking the mission structure of Team Ninja’s Nioh in the realm of Final Fantasy in a way that complimented and highlighted the strengths of both of them. Yet here it was, in all its glory.

And to top it off, I laughed for a solid five minutes when the credits started to roll to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s My Way. Few games have that degree of brazen audacity, and I couldn’t help but appreciate it even if the story they wrote didn’t wholly land as intended. They took a swing and hit the board, if not the bullseye.

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And that takes care of the highlights of 2022. Remember, just because a game wasn’t listed here doesn’t mean it was a bad game. In all likelihood, I wasn’t able to find the right words to give it its due.

Last year, I tried to bring together the highlights and disappointments list, and I think I did both of them a disservice as a result. So this year, we’re splitting them back up again. Next time, we’ll discuss the disappointments of 2022.