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.

——

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.

Even when I’m not streaming it, I am often playing Legends of Runeterra on the side, getting a run of the Path of Champions complete during my lunch break while grinding what quests the current event has for me. Lucky for me, this current event brought someone into the Path that I couldn’t pass up.

That’s right. My boyf-, I mean favorite champion, Nasus, is now a playable champion with his own deck and abilities, and I just couldn’t pass up the chance to play him on stream.

Although it has been some time since the jackal-headed ascended has seen competitive play in Constructed, as a Champion he is well-suited to the Path of Champions. That’s mostly because he awards us for doing the thing we will always have to do anyway: Kill our opponent’s units.

No matter what our strategy is, we are always going to need to remove threats and make strong, favorable swings in combat that will take care of our enemies while minimizing our losses. With his abilities and kit, Nasus has the tools to do just that. My build even has items on it so that he strikes the strongest enemy and deals one damage to all others when he hits the board, making him a potential removal spell that can’t be responded to.

His deck also has access to support spells like Quicksand and Exhaust to manipulate combat both defensively and offensively to make swinging in for that last chunk of damage, or to get rid of a difficult unit, easier. Most of all, his signature Siphoning Strike is almost always useful, especially in games where keeping the opponent off of dangerous champions is our way of making sure they don’t overtake us.

There’s another strength to the character, but we’ll get to that next time.

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.

Turns out our girlfriend was actually a robot this whole time, and Rufus Shinra needs her so that he can fire the laser on his solar-powered kill satellite.

So Acharky and I are off to space to stop him. That’s just what one does when they’re The Bouncer. After all, Bouncers put their life on the line every day of their lives!

If I’m being honest, I’m still not convinced that I have any idea what was going on at any moment in the plot, but all of the bouncers are back at the bar and Sion’s girlfriend is doing alright so I guess it’s all fine.

That said, I can appreciate this game for what it is, even if I could never recommend it in good faith. It’s dumb, rough, and janky. But it’s also charming for almost those exact same reasons.

It is also the last time I will ever play it. I got the experience I wanted, and have no desire to repeat it.

Our Cerebro deck has been a lot of fun to pilot, and the games are only going to continue from here.

We’ve already discussed the core of this deck with Cerebro and Mystique, and the synergy with Blue Marvel, but there are other pieces that this deck needs before it comes together.

The two cards I consider crucial to this deck are Mister Sinister and Brood. Both of them create a number of 2-powered bodies On Reveal, which will all receive the boost from Cerebro for extra power. Additionally, both of them are on rate of their power in terms of total stats added to the board, so there’s no loss in tempo as a result of including them. Thankfully, Minister Sinister is a card everyone will acquire early on, and once we each Series 3 it’s not a mistake to buy Brood with our Collector Tokens (like I did) because the card also works in Patriot and Silver Surfer shells for similar reasons.

The rest of the deck can be filled in with whatever utility cards we have access to when deckbuilding. Iceman, Yondu, and Scorpion and all low-cost 2-powered creatures which have the potential to disrupt our opponents, while also acting as potential curve fillers. Minster Fantastic only provides one body but is otherwise a good way to cheat out 6-power in a deck that only wants to run cards with 2-power.

On the other hand, we only have two cards in this deck that Goose shuts down by hitting the board, and only in the lane, he’s in. That means we don’t stand to lose as much as our average opponent does when he’s out, and he’s another good curve filler in the worst case.

Since she’s also 2-power, there’s no reason not to run Storm in this deck. While she can lock down a location with her ability, she can more crucially remove a location that will adversely impact our power on board to make playing Cerebro a smoother experience.

And lastly, our final tech choice is Hobgoblin, which can represent an 8-power swing without compromising our Cerebro playline by flinging himself onto the enemy board. In the right setup, this can also drastically disrupt our opponent by filling in a slot they were saving for a powerful Wong play or some other similar synergy.

I don’t know if it’s the most powerful deck around, but playing with it has been a ton of fun. And with Brood finally in my collection, there are a ton of other decks I’m looking forward to building along these lines.

Our martial arts master was apparently Rufus Shinra’s bodyguard, and taught him how to fight or something. Also, our former best friend was part of some genetics experiment?

Whatever the case, our girlfriend is still kidnapped (and apparently Rufus Shinra’s sister), and only The Bouncer can save her.

If you thought the earlier sections of the game were janky, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen this bizarre escort mission. It’s like they didn’t have any animations created for the eventuality that the robots would take damage, so instead, they just freeze up for easy stun locks.

And to top off, we don’t even have to fight any of them. We can easily just run around them and keep going almost completely unfettered despite the awkward auto lock-on slowing us down.

Even in a game as janky as this one, it’s such a strange decision. At least the section doesn’t take too long to zip past once we know where the staircases are.

Some kid’s girlfriend(?) has been kidnapped by the Shinra Electric Power Company, which is also building a solar-powered kill satellite in space. And for some reason, this kid and his two goober friends are tough enough to storm the corporate HQ in order to rescue the girl and save the day.

I don’t pretend to know what’s going on in The Bouncer. Acharky and I are just letting it wash over us.

Okay, I won’t lie. I still think the word Robotomy is hilarious. Beyond that, there’s a lot of detail in the plot that feels like it was either left on the cutting room floor or just never fully fleshed out in the first place. Events just seem to “happen” and honestly, I’m more than fine with that. As we saw with The Quiet Man, sometimes learning the context just makes everything worse.

Eventually, I will have to do something other than sweep kick, but that time isn’t now.

We got another cool deck to show off in Marvel Snap. This time, we’re playing with a unique card that can’t be adequately replaced: Cerebro.

Let’s get as much mileage out of this bad boy as we can.

Cerebro itself is an interesting card. With 3-cost and 0 power, its entire strength is tied up with its Ongoing effect to give +2 power to every card we control with the highest power. The easiest way to leverage this effect is to ensure that most of our cards are tied for the highest power, so they collectively get the boost. For that reason, decks that leverage Cerebro are often called “Cerebro X” decks, where X is the power that you’re aiming all of the cards to be. In this case, we’re aiming for 2 power cards primarily, with a few exceptions that don’t break the synergy.

Our other potential payoff for a flood of bodies is Blue Marvel, which gives a flat +1 power to every other card on our board. Despite being a 3-power card, this actually doesn’t break our synergy with Cerebro. What will happen is that all of our 2-powered bodies will grow by 1 to 3-power bodies, which will tie with Blue Marvel and force every card to share the same power again. In the case we draw them both, we’re actually extremely happy with that outcome.

And of course, both of these cards benefit from Mystique. If either Blue Marvel or Cerebro was the last card played prior to her, then she will copy their Ongoing effect and provide additional boosts to our team. Ideally, our Turn 5 Blue Marvel will be followed up a Cerebro and Mystique on Turn 6, sequencing depending on the board state, to gain a massive power swing in the final two turns to tip the game in our favor. No matter which flavor of Cerebro deck you’re playing, you will want to include Mystique as a way to double up on its Ongoing ability.

There are other benefits aside from Blue Marvel for running Cerebro 2 as opposed to Cerebro 3, but we can talk about that next time.

Now that the Murder Castle is soundly behind us, it is time for Acharky and I to indulge in our… baser instincts. I have heard people talk about The Bouncer, mostly as a basis of comparison to our favorite stream game: THE QUIET MAN!

Lucky for me, Acharky is as morbidly curious about this game as an artifact of old Square Enix, which allowed me to sucker him into joining me for the experience.

As a spoiler for the rest of this series, the strategy I settle on in the fight at the very start of the game ends up lasting me for the entire rest of the game. There’s almost nothing to talk about with regard to the combat because it is surface deep.

Chris noted this already, but part of that is just that this game is a between-generations game. It came out the same year that the PS2 did, which means it was in development prior to its launch. Neither one of us can prove that this game was the game that Square used to cut its teeth on the new hardware, but I can’t think of any other explanation for how stiff and PS1-era this game feels.

And while it’s not good, I can accept this game being really rough and janky if it means that Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts would go on to be as polished as they were.

PS: Happy birthday to The Bouncer, which just recently turned 22!

We’re on a roll, and Death becomes us. Let’s keep the streak going!

As a Destroy deck, we’re equipped with a healthy package of cards aside from Deadpool that benefit from being destroyed. Cards like The Hood, Nova, and Bucky Barns all do wonders for us when they bite the dust. Nova and Bucky in particular leave behind a power boost for the board and the Winter Soldier respectively. And after The Hood is played, and we get our Demon out of him, he’s nothing more than a hindrance.

This is where our cards that destroy other cards, like Carnage, Killmonger, and Deathlok come in. While Deathlok just comes with a pile of stats, Carnage grows stronger for each body he consumes and Killmonger kills every one-drop, even the ones on our opponent’s board.

Special mention goes to Venom, who gains the combined power of every card he chomped, unlike Carnage’s flat +2 per kill. Normally, this isn’t a big deal. However, as we saw in the match where Nidavellir was one of the lands in play, it has applications on certain boards. All of those +5 boosts on the units we had there were transferred over to Venom when he consumed them. And on the Cloning Vats or other copy effects, the copy of Venom will also have the power of the consumed units before it eats anything else and absorbs their power in addition.

But more vital to our game plan in a vacuum, if we play Taskmaster immediately after playing Venom on the following turn, he will copy the final total of Venom’s power, after all bonuses have been applied. This gives us a third potential outlet to create a big swing with Taskmaster.

I don’t know if it’s the best deck around. In fact, I’m fairly certain it’s not. However, it is both extremely fun and powerful. Additionally, it lets me play some of my favorite Marvel characters together in a synergistic package.

There’s not much more I could ask for.