Top Games of 2022 - Honorable Mentions and Extras

And now... everything else:

Honorable Mentions: 

Triangle Strategy, dev. Square Enix & Artdink

Triangle Strategy was already barely clinging onto the Top 10 list and then Tactics Ogre: Reborn came out later in the year, and threw it off the list with more brutality than Scar regiciding his brother. Tactics Ogre is simply a better game than Triangle Strategy. One is the nostalgic retread, the other is the real deal, one of the best games ever made, there is no discussion. Still, I do feel bad because I had a great time with Triangle Strategy. This game's reputation seems to have sunk poorly as the year went on due to several issues: too many cutscenes, an awful English dub, and a frustrating morality system screwing you out of plot decisions. But I got a solid strategy RPG campaign out of it. I have favorite units (Anna), favorite battles (Chapter 7 Morality), and favorite moments. Triangle Strategy gave plenty of options to build an army that kicked ass. One late game boss thought charging alone up to a plateau to kill my squishy mages was the right play. He soon learned my units were not stuck up there with him, he was stuck up there with them. He died badly, in great pain, on fire. Glorious.

Bayonetta 3, dev. PlatinumGames

There's many things wrong with this game and this experience - and I'll get to the ending later. Bayonetta 3 is unfortunately a classic case of "Just Another One of Those" Syndrome. It is clearly inferior to the first two. Worse, it looks like shit, it was one of the ugliest games I played last year. Platinum really thought the monster summoning mechanic was what the series needed, and so every environment is enormous and barren. The increasingly ancient Switch hardware does this game no favors. 

However, Bayonetta 3 is an enormously ambitious game with huge scale, the kind of blockbuster that makes the average MCU movie seem restrained and low-key. There's Godzilla, there's a Metal Gear Solid pastiche, and there's a giant lady taking a bubble bath in the clouds. There's the most awesome moment of all, when your giant frog summon Yassifies into a parasol lady and sings the techno opera song from The Fifth Element in a rhythm minigame. I really hope that Bayonetta 3 gets a remake on a stronger system so the environments are not so terribly gray and flat. But no hardware will fix this game's real problems - I'll get to that later.

Sable, dev. Shedworks

Yes, this was a 2021 game. However, Sable did get ported to the PS5 in November, so it just barely makes my ridiculously vague definition of what a year is! Sure, I didn't play Sable on the PS5, I played it on SteamDeck, and sure, it still ran as poorly as it did on release, but I like this game. It's Breath of the Wild with no combat and no stress. You're a young adult released onto a vast alien desert world with no real goal other than self-discovery. The whole planet is a big friendly zone to climb and see. Yeah, I could have used more in the way of friction and story. Worse, the more extreme platforming challenges are certainly possible, but Sable does not really have rewards for the trouble. I spent hours climbing up this vast sea of giant dinosaur bones and huge skyscraper-sized mesas to only find another empty settlement. The view was great, though. Sable is a gorgeous game, even if the splendor will run at remarkably low framerates.

Heaven Will Be Mine, dev. Pillow Fight Games & Worst Girls Games

Okay, this is a not 2022 game. Heaven Will Be Mine was the best old game I played last year. When else am I gonna find time to talk about this? It didn't the 2018 list and that's on me.

Heaven Will Be Mine is every joke that Mobile Suit Gundam has gay subtext made text. It's every queer reading of Shinji Ikari made flesh. It's a mecha visual novel about three ladies, Luna-Terra, Saturn, and Pluto, all representing different factions in solar system-wide war. They all jump into their ridiculously over-powered machines and do battle. Or maybe the dogfights are just them flirting with each other, the metaphor barely remains a metaphor after awhile, these mobile suits might be fucking. Heaven Will Be Mine is not long, each of the three campaigns only takes about an hour, depending on how fast you can read. There's dense lore, Heaven Will Be Mine actually does a very poor job explaining the backstory. Mankind went to space to fight aliens and discovered instead that we were all lesbians, is basically the metaphysics. There are some truly terrifying powers, such as Pluto's robot, the Krun Macula, which is a collapsed star in humanoid form. If this were not a very low-budget visual novel, Heaven Would Be Mine would need a billion dollars to actually animate all of its ideas.

Dishonorable Mentions:

I don't really touch truly bad games so this is all graded on a curve. Please do not murder me for not loving these games:

Stray, dev. BlueTwelve Studio

Okay, the cat is cute. It's really cute. I get it. Even the wacky French animation robots are cute. Cool. Stray is unfortunately limited otherwise. Once you get over the instinctual need to yell "kitty!", you'll realize this is a not great game. Most of Stray involves a terrible stealth system avoiding annoying head crabs that will wipe out your little kitty in one mistake. The rest of the game is fetch quests, Stray feels ancient, despite how good it looks. There's even worse stealth segments later, reaching Hyrule Castle in Ocarina of Time-levels of rote hide-and-seek gameplay. I'm embarrassed for this game that it brought back an idea that stale.

Cyberpunk 2022, dev. CD Projekt Red

I've already written tons about this game and its myriad disappointments. Yeah, I know the Studio Trigger anime on Netflix has people excited about Cyberpunk again. If anything that series made me dislike the game more. Because Edgerunners was the story of a game I wanted to play. You know, with an actual party of memorable characters and real body customization and a sick yellow jacket. There's even cooler powers! Why do I gotta play this awful FPS built around a broken unbalanced RPG when these anime kids get to have fun?

"I Really Want to Stay at Your House" was my favorite last year, on the other hand. I've listened to it 1000 times.

Overwatch 1, dev. Blizzard Entertainment

RIP my GOTY 2016. Blizzard shut it down, and that's it. It's over for me and Overwatch. Everything about the second game looks terrible. F in the chat, bros.

Bayonetta 3's Ending (Spoilers)

The Bayonetta series lead, Hideki Kamiya, went out and said basically "don't touch the series in the future" if you didn't like the ending to the third game. And well, if that's how you feel about it, dude, I won't play Bayonetta 4. Makes it easier for me. This game was getting heat before hand due to labor issues, than Bayonetta's old actress decided to go TERF on us. So the temperature was pretty high in the room before the game decided to kill off everybody's favorite characters, including the title character,  then pair her in her dying moments with the useless chucklefuck dude from the first game, and promise in the sequel a Raiden-like character switch. I actually like Viola, I dig her goth-y vibe, the only problem is her sections of Bayonetta 3 are bad. Her parry is frustrating, I hate her combos, and all the fun of just flipping around and crunching enemies as her mom is gone. I do not want to play a whole game as her. Who would??

Also Bayonetta is not a character that should lose. She basically isn't a character. She's Superman but fetish camp. She's met God before and laughed at him and then basically shoved a stiletto heel up his ass. She is all sexuality but cannot actually have sex, because no living person could ever possibly be her equal. No franchise needed to go turn towards tragic melodrama less than Bayonetta. Who asked for this?

Best Boss Fights of 2023 (More Spoilers!)

5. Mummy from Bayonetta 3 - There were remarkably few encounters in Bayonetta 3's core game that I felt were exceptional. Rosa, your Mummy and Viola's Grandmummy, stands out because in a game full of Bayonettas, she was the only one you actually get to fight. The best fights in any action RPG are against enemies as quick as you and with similar skillsets. The Rose boss fight turns into a awesome rail-shooter segment, because Mummy can also deploy giant kaiju-sized monsters against you. Finally an enemy my equal, versus the villain who is as gray and meaningless as the environments.

4. Siege Engine from Tunic - Usually the bigger the boss, the less interesting it is. They're slow, they're dumb, their patterns are predictable. Not Siege Engine. They are surprisingly nimble for a spider of their size. It can really scurry. It's got about a dozen different attack patterns and many different moves. Maybe this time it wants to summon a lot of drones to pester you, maybe this time it wants to lay mines, maybe they're just going to keeping spinning out of the way. The whole fight is a positioning battle to get behind them and smash their one weakness. Also, the Engine's roar synchs up great with the music and I love that.

3. Purity of Odio from Live a Live - The original final boss on the SNES, now just phase one of three. (Which by the way, really messed me up because I had to take on the true final boss with badly underleveled characters and very nearly softlocked my game when I saved between phases. Getting out of that pickle was my second greatest achievement of 2022.) Purity of Odio is a very impure-looking pile of nasty body horror. This is a really tough fight, because you're fighting four bosses at once: two eyes, a mouth, and a winged bastard in the back who you do not want to wake up early, let me tell you. Your party is split across the field, so the whole thing becomes this epic slug match to keep control of the situation and not get overwhelmed by the many status effects.

2. AI Sada from Pokémon Scarlet - The Champion in this game is an immense disappointment, but do not fret, AI Sada is easily the best final boss fight in Pokémon history. A lot of the encounters in Pokémon Scarlet are surprisingly decent, because even if the game does not give the gym leaders full teams, they do give them good movesets and competitive strategies. Sada comes with a team full of ancient Pokémon, who you're probably unfamiliar with, and also are Pseudo-Legendary levels of strong. It gets even more awesome considering the whole presentation. You're in a freaky diamond disco ball nightmare zone, the opposing trainer is this machine woman glitching uncontrollably on a plateau above you, and the music, as always in Scarlet, slaps hard.

1. The Heir from Tunic - I did not intend this but I realize that three out of these five bosses are evil moms. Because the plot is so vague in Tunic, I'm not sure if The Heir really is your little fox's mom. They have an hourglass figure and they seemed nice when you were praying to them, I just kinda assumed. However, when you reach the end of the game, Mommy has a huge sword and will spank your ass hard. A lot of this battle is about staying in "the spice range". You gotta keep within access of punishing her mistakes. If you run away, she will dominate the field with huge AEO attacks and ranged moves. Her main attack is pretty easy to dodge, until it becomes a three hit combo, and until the second form when it starts hacking away at your max HP bar. This is a really tough fight, I ended up having to spam fire balls to get through the second phase. Fox Mommy is a masterpiece of a great boss fight, the best way to end GOTY 2022.

My Best Party Members of 2023:

5. Tinkaton from Pokémon Scarlet - Fairy/Steel is great typing. Her unique move, Gigaton Hammer has 160 base power, plus STAB. I loved to bring in Tinkaton to finish off battles, since my Clodsire would have already poisoned everybody with Toxic Spikes. Tinkaton's Fake Out is basically a free turn to sap the enemy's energy. Then I'd hit them with the big hammer.

4. Pogo from Live a Live - Pogo is a darling little caveman boy, easily my favorite character from Live a Live. He gets the best moment of the whole game when he gives the final boss a big hug. Also, since he was born before language, Odio's big villain speech meant nothing to Pogo, he did not catch a word of it. As a unit, Pogo is a great tank and hits like a truck. His move Whee Jump throws him right onto of enemies and slams hard, it is great all game long.

3. Skeledirge from Pokémon Scarlet - The final form of my beloved Fuecoco! Playing Skeledirge is real simple: use Torch Song. It's a solid fire attack and boosts your Special Attack one stage, it's ridiculously broken, and only gets more so if you Terastallize to pure Fire. Within a few uses, you'll probably sweep any boss's team... until you reach AI Sada, who actually can overcome this guy. But until then, Skeledirge is an unstoppable avalanche of fire.

2. Sienna from Chained Echoes - Being lesbian Balthier makes Sienna already the best character in the game, but she's also a great fighhter. She's really fast, she can Poison enemies, and she's got the best DPS of any party member in that game. Sienna has very hit Crit rates and many moves that hit multiple times, or the entire enemy party. Her Limit Break is also the most reliable way to hit for four digits of damage, which is a lot in Chained Echoes.

1. Anna from Triangle Strategy - Turns out I like fast ninja girls. Anna has a broken invisibility that the enemy AI cannot break, so she can wall off routes all on her own. She also is fantastic for hitting enemies from behind to set up brutal follow-up attacks. On top of that, se can Poison bosses for you in complete safety, or just assassinate annoying squishy mages. She can do it all, and usually retreat right back into the shadows to hit them again.

Wildly Inaccurate Predictions for 10 Top Games of 2023:

10. Hi-Fi Rush, dev. Tango Gameworks -  Yeah, I know it's out, maybe I can finally play it now that this list is done. I do not foresee a world where this game does not make the 2023 Top 10.

9. Season: A Love Letter to the Future, dev. Scavengers Studio - See above.

8. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, dev. Rocksteady Studios

7. Street Fighter 6, dev. Capcom - I don't even like Street Fighter but this looks amazing.

6. Sea of Stars, dev. Sabotage Studio

5. She Dreams Elsewhere, dev. Studio Zevere

4. Mina the Hollower, dev. Yacht Club Games

3. Hollow Knight: Silksong, dev. Team Cherry - It makes the list every damn year and will continue to do so until it comes out.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dev. Nintendo - Same!

1. Final Fantasy XVI, dev. Square Enix - Honestly if these top 3 games all release this year, I might become depressed because I'll have nothing left to look forward to.

And... that's it. 2022 is done, and it's almost March. I hope to finish up next year's lists in January.

Top Game of 2022: No. 1 - Tunic

1. Tunic, dev. Andrew Shouldice

I got my wish. That doesn't always happen in this life, so we should cherish these moments. 

Tunic was the game I most anticipated back in the beginning of 2022, and now it is my Game of the Year. However, in fairness, my called shot did not come out of nowhere. I did play the Tunic demo back in 2021 and put it down after only a short period. There's two reasons why that happens. Most of the time, the demo has already dissuaded you from continuing with the game. But sometimes you realize this game is going to be so good, so special, that you want to save all your passion and energy for the full experience. That was Tunic. The final complete Tunic was everything I wanted and more.

We basically do not get classic Zelda games anymore. Besides a remake of Link's Awakening, the last fully new one of those was A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS. (Itself largely a remake of A Link to the Past.) The Crypt of the Necrodancer people have more original top-down Zeldas for the Switch than Nintendo has! So I was more than starving for some games of that style. Importantly, Tunic offers a particularly adorable spin on things by transforming Link into the most precious little tiny fox guy.

Aww, look at him yawning on the beach! You can barely hear it in the sound mix, but he makes little cooing sounds! He's the best!

Tunic has the costume, it has a starting weapon in the first cave to your left, and it has a difficult non-linear overworld. You can see a deep reverence for The Legend of Zelda, the O.G. from 1985, even down to recreating the instruction manual. The manual ends up being a very important element to this experience. It is where Tunic becomes more than imitation, into something more meta. I would already love Tunic if it were just a really fun isometric copy-cat with a delightful plastic toy box aesthetic. But this game has much more on its mind.

I still buy physical media. Honestly, I do not why because jewel cases these days are empty, and even the discs/cartridges themselves are basically just download codes. Maybe I just want to keep GameStop in business, I dunno. I already sound old when I talk about "back in my day", but we used to build shit in this country and we used to get things in our games. You had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to go to school, and your games came with beautifully-illustrated companion pieces. This was especially important back in the 8-bit days (pre-Eric, I'm not that old). The first Zelda could only fit 128kbs into its cartridge, so there was not much room for story, and nobody built tutorials into games yet. The only help you got came with the companion booklet, that was essential to the game. Without the pages, you had to reply on magazines, schoolyard rumor, or random chance to play it.

With perfect knowledge, Tunic is a trivial experience, which speedrunners can complete in mere minutes. However, Tunic is all about tricks, all about a puzzle whose pieces you cannot see. So we start with no knowledge, no pages of the instructions. All you have is instinct from Zelda experience, blind luck, and a wooden stick you found in a cave.

Tunic, very cleverly makes the manual part of the game. These pages are items scattered all across the world, all clearly drawn in the style of the Zelda NES instruction booklet. (They went so far as to even imitate the small errors a physically-printed booklet would have in its color illustrations.) This allows for Tunic to control the player's knowledge. Some pages are the map, some tell you important gameplay mechanics such as the exhaustion system, some give you hints as to what the blueberry item might do. Another layer of the puzzle is the script is the manual is written in, which is these complex geometric runes. But like much of this game, it's only a sight-line trick. The script is English but written with a phonetic alphabet. Redditors solved the whole language injust a few weeks (Big Spoilers).

Like the language and the manual pages, Tunic's overworld map is full of things hidden in plain sight. The isometric perspective is not just retro, it's key to the illusion. The camera angle is hiding all kinds of secret passages and short cuts. Some of these are painful to discover, you will have spent an hour fighting through a horde of tough enemies, until you realize that hugging the corner takes you to a passage right to the area with the Shield.

This all opens up another question. What is the game we're playing? Yeah, there is the game of the little furry Link fighting through monsters. But also, Tunic has a metagame occurring with the manual and the very structure of the world. You find a foreboding library tower, now abandoned like most things in this world. Inside, somebody has been fiddling with and experimenting with the core gameplay objects, such as the Save Points and teleportation squares. In most games these would be merely abstract concepts, in the game but not "real" to the characters. Cloud Strife has no knowledge of saving the game when he's in Midgar. But in Tunic these objects have a physical reality now. Somebody is aware of them and their functions and is trying to unlock a deeper truth. During the course of the adventure, Fox-Link goes from a very Hyrulian overworld down into deep horrifying depths. You're literally exploring the mechanical depths of Tunic's interface. This whole world is a construction for a mysterious, nefarious purpose. 

Unfortunately, you never do get the confront the sinister architects of Tunic's universe. What you get instead is several difficult bosses, including a very challenging final boss that pushes your skills to the limit. I've talked a lot about Tunic in the last year, and a lot of people I know had difficulty with the combat. Somebody might say it's "Soulsy", but everything has some Souls DNA now. Tunic punishes your mistakes without much forgiveness. Also, the whole flow is tuned a bit strangely. The rhythms of your actions do not seem connect unless you lock onto enemies, which somehow makes the dodging and countering all connect much better. I love the boss fights, even the final boss, which took me days to beat. That victory was the most satisfying gaming accomplishment of the year for me. But winning is not the whole story. 

As I asked before, what game is Tunic? If you beat the boss, all you've done is complete a sequence of events pre-planned by whatever force has created this world. You can actually go further, you can find another depth to the mystery. I wish I could say I loved that element of Tunic as much as anything else. I greatly cherish the art style, the chill low-fi beats soundtrack, the cycle of exploration, and even growing my skills with the combat. However, once Tunic started moving into Fez or The Witness territory, it lost me. Those puzzles are too abstract for my brain. I would have needed to look online to complete all that.

I also feel like that's defeating the purpose. Tunic gives you all the resources you need to beat it and beat its meta-game. To just run your question by a search engine is destroying the mystery. The game is not merely the buttons you press to complete the mechanical challenge, Tunic is the knowledge you have and the knowledge do not have. I'm usually not a guy who cares at all about spoilers, however, once you're checking Youtube for hints, you're not really playing Tunic anymore. You're only playing half the game now.

(That said, if you need help, go get it. Fuck those "you cheated yourself" people. Tunic includes various accessibility options, including a No Fail mode. If you just want to enjoy the puzzles, you can make your fox invincible and have fun. Nobody is kink-shaming here, there's a reason I played Tunic and not Elden Ring.)

Tunic is the kind of experience that reminds us that games are objects with mass, constructed out of parts, not actually worlds. The magic is all only skin-deep. The illusion of a video game is that you press a button and the little guy in the game moves. You are led to believe the inputs come from you into the game, and you become the master making the decisions. However, what we see on the surface is just a single slice of a vast mechanical apparatus with all sorts of hidden functions and systems. There were decisions made about what you have access to and how you get them. The author's will is always here in the puzzle box they designed. The game was built for a purpose, and you're being guided towards it. Maybe those purposes are high-minded, maybe they're just innocently trying to entertain you, maybe their goals are unspeakable. However, somebody built this thing to do something to you. The final output is never the little guy winning their story. There is no little guy, they do not exist. The only true output is you, changed by the gaming experience.

Keep that in mind when you're playing in 2023. It's embarrassingly late to be saying this, but Happy New Year.

Top Games of 2022: No. 2 - Pokémon Scarlet

2. Pokémon Scarlet, dev. Game Freak

Wait, am I sure about this?

I was not originally to play this game. My feeling about Pokémon has been ambivalence at best for a long time now. I thought Pokémon Sword was extremely boring, and honestly was more more thrilled by Pokémon Moon. Let's Go Eevee was fantastic four years ago, but that almost does not count because it was a remake of Red and Blue. The reviews for the new games, Scarlet and Violet, were also quite poor. On Twitter, these games were receiving Cyberpunk 2077-levels of mockery. You do not need to look hard to find compilation videos of the most hilarious glitches. Really, Pokémon has not felt 100% healthy to me since X and Y on the 3DS almost a decade ago. I skipped the Gen 4 remakes, I skipped the Legends: Arceus game, and was probably going to skip Pokémon Scarlet too until... something happened...

And that something was Fuecoco. Who can say "no" to Fuecoco? It's a little baby gator with a big dumb mouth and a gormless expression indicating no intelligence of any kind. Fuecocos have never had a thought in their lives other than "I will bite you" or "I will give hugs before I bite you". They are wonderful. So Santa Claus brought me Pokémon Scarlet this Christmas because I was a good boy in 2022. Naturally Fuecoco had to be my starter. He is now my perfect first-born. I love my hopeless idiot son.

Fuecoco got me through the door, but if having a cute starter is all a Pokémon game needed, every one of these would be stone-cold classics. Gen 9 has a solid collection of great Pokémon like my chubby whale Clodsire and my hammer death girl Tinkaton. However, so did Gen 8 (I love you, Morepeko). No, something else was working here for me.

It was not even the open world focus this time. Or at least not entirely. Despite the game's reputation, I found that Pokémon Scarlet ran very well. I am not terribly picky about slow-down, and the only glitch I encountered was a single crash. My Switch is never docked anymore, so the handheld experience was more acceptable. Why would I need a turn-based game to run at 60 FPS? Frankly, I'm a bit disappointed, I could have used a laugh.

Still, if the general performance was fine, there were still issues. Scarlet's region, Paldea, is not exactly overflowing with beauty. This game was clearly compromised to fit on the Switch and only a handful of locations actually stand out to me. In addition, the structure is less free than promised. Yeah, you can go anywhere and do anything,, but you're not going to. This is still a stat-heavy RPG, so you're just going to complete the eighteen boss fights (eight gyms, five giant monsters, five Team Star leaders) in the order of their level. No point in skipping straight to the Ice Gym early when Grusha has an unbeatable statistical advantage over your level 6 Fuecoco. It also makes the towns less interesting when they're in no way major landmarks anymore, they lack special events or story moments. The real issue is that Pokémon's battle system feels slow and ancient compared to the attempts at modernity everywhere else. All the vast open adventuring is undercut when every battle has to be this slog of repeated text boxes and frustrating luck-based effects.

What the heck is Pokémon Scarlet doing so high on my list anyway? I had a lot of trouble figuring it out while playing. My argument so far shows why Scarlet should an Honorable Mention and nothing more. Am I sure that this is better than Pentiment?

Well, here's the thing: I beat Pokémon Scarlet and did not want to put it down. I went through all the post-game content I could find: re-beat all the gym leaders, and played two rounds of the bonus tournament arc. I wish they had announced DLC at the Nintendo Direct this past Wednesday so I could be playing more right now. Give me more Paldea!

Pokémon Scarlet feels like a proper adventure in a way the previous games just have not. Even if the open world concepts are undercooked, there is still a grandeur to being here in Paldea. Sword's open world sections were gray foggy emptiness, depressing, almost Stalker-like environment. In Paldea there's a dazzling wonder of just being out in the fields which are teaming with many forms of adorable life. You can march along, riding your living motorcycle, and pass by whole families of Psyducks in the river. Sure, the ecosystems are shallow, the wild Pokémon do not interact with each other, and it's really annoying to be riding along and accidentally touch a tiny nigh-invisible Nymble on the ground and suddenly have to fight an encounter. But... it's Pokémon all around! A splendor of cute little guys in all directions.

What helps too is that I actually came to really like the characters. Many of the side characters and rivals in the past decade have been these awful little brown-nosers who fuse themselves to your hip whether you want them there or not. Hop, leave me the heck alone, you creep me out. Whereas the rivals in Scarlet, other than Nemona, only warm up to you in time as you complete their quests. You're not just handed guys and told they're your best friends, you develop relationships with the rivals over the course of the campaign. You help Arven's dog, you fix Penny's issues with Team Star, and they both prove to be remarkably competent trainers too. The last act of this game sees you and your friends explore this exceptionally creepy deep crater called Area Zero, straight out of the anime Made in Abyss. This time it feels like The Zone intentionally. I was stunned to find I cared about this party of humans around me as much as I cared about the party of monsters. Even Nemona, who is love at first sight with you, has more to her than being too cheery and too supportive. She says she loves battling, she's Pokémon Goku, and she can back up that claim with a solid team. It also helps the story ends on a dramatic and intense final boss. The presentation in that last hour is top-notch.

Finally, Pokémon Scarlet has a ridiculously good soundtrack. Toby Fox helped work on it with GameFreak and the results are jaw-dropping. This is the best soundtrack of the year, maybe the best Pokémon has ever sounded. There are a dozen truly great songs in this score. Area Zero, the gym leader fights, the post-game tournament fights, Cascarrafa Town, Nemona's battle theme, PENNY'S BATTLE THEME, it goes on. It sounds like the Final Fantasy IV battle theme is sampled in the Elite Four music. I'm nerding out so hard about that!

Sure, there's a million more things you could want with Pokémon Scarlet: more interactions with the world, a battle system that does not need to remind you every motherfucking turn that its still raining, better frame rates, whatever. It's always nice to ask for more. But, ultimately, Pokémon Scarlet is the first time since maybe back on the Game Boy that Pokémon has felt like this vast world full of possibility for me. It feels alive again, free from the rigid patterns of structure that had grown stale in the Obama Administration. For the first time in forever, I'm exciting about where this series can go, versus dreading its next release.

Also, you can little picnics with your Pokémon anywhere and that's the best thing ever.

Top Games of 2022: No. 3 - Pentiment

3. Pentiment, dev. Obsidian Entertainment

Turns out Microsoft and their recently-purchased studios can still make games. Halo is a disaster, I don't know if we'll ever see Everwild again, and the jury is out - literally - on whether they'll ever own Call of Duty, but they made this! I'm not even being facetious, Pentiment is a game a giant trillion-dollar conglomerate can be proud of. Between Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush (which I hope to play soon), Microsoft is actually achieving the promises of Xbox Game Pass. It is creating a stable financial foundation in which smaller, more interesting, more artistically daring games can be made. Obsidian's developers confirmed that there was no world Pentiment exists in without Game Pass.

Personally I'm suspicious of Game Pass. A "Netflix for games" sounds great until your remember how the "Netflix for movies" is doing right now. Also, I like to own my games, even if "own" is an increasingly abstract claim since ownership is just a few values in the Steam Cloud code. If you want to not pay for games, visit your local library, you may be surprised how good the selection can be. I honestly am concerned about how long Xbox can continue on this path considering the gruesome, pointlessly self-destructive layoffs we saw just a couple weeks ago. But hey, even if that new Fable game is doomed, people will get their Starfield, and I'll get my Pentiment.

If you have read my GOTY lists in the past, you'll know I'm pretty horny for games like Pentiment. This is typically the kind of thing that wins that much-coveted No. 1 slot. Let us remember such past winners such as Night in the Woods, Disco Elysium, and Kentucky Route Zero. I love a narrative adventure game, especially ones with Big Thoughts that resonate with how I'm feeling at that particular time. However, I can't be boring and predicable, even to myself, and after much painful discussion, I decided there two games I loved more in 2022. Pentiment is an incredible game, exhaustively researched, full of hundreds of unique characters across multiple moments in their lives. It has interesting ideas and questions about the act of deciding one's history. Simply put, it rules hard. Do not think the number in my post title means anything at all.

I'm gonna shift into middle school five paragraph essay mode for a moment here. Merriam-Webster defines "Pentiment" or "Pentimento" as meaning "a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist". This is useful to me because I had no idea what the title of this game meant. Its title is never used in Pentiment's script, which is pretty hard to do since this game has ten of thousands of lines of dialog and has things to say about a thousand topics.  If you want to get into an argument about the continued relevance of ancient Greco-Roman medical texts, this is your scene. However, the "pentiment" is still a very useful idea to keep in mind when you consider the themes of this project.

Our protagonist is Andreas Maler, an apprentice in 1500s Bavaria, working on his "masterpiece", literally the work that will allow him to enter the guilds as a Master Artist. He is an outsider in this fictional town of Tassing, which is ruled by a grand medieval double monastery, Keirsau Abbey. By 1518, where Pentiment starts, this monastery is already a relic in its time, and your work of illuminated manuscripts is approaching obsolescence thanks to the adoption of the printing press. The game itself takes on that antiquated style, as every character is drawn like the 2D figures of medieval Bibles. However, this is not a game about medieval times, it's about the end of that period. Tassing is a bubble of the past even now, since the Early Modern Era is creeping in on all sides. Martin Luthor is causing a ruckus, proto-scientific ideas are developing, and the old power of the Church over society is breaking down. During the course of the game, set across several decades, you see how the worldview shifts.

This is represented in a million little details, but most prominent is the sense of time. In the early chapters, the parts of the day are measured by the movement of the Sun, and by the traditions of the Abbey, such as midday services. You need to consider such a thing as "Vespers". In the last chapter, Tessing has built itself a large public clock, so characters now imagine their day as we do, in twenty-four uniform divisions of time, "hours".

Andreas is the character we control and the viewpoint through which we discover Tassing. We make our mark on this place and its many petty rural politics and the Europe-wide grievances about religion, governance, and peasant freedom. He's our amateur detective, a learned figure with unique access to the nobles, the monastery, and the villagers. This is a murder-mystery game and through Andreas you must solve multiple cases, trying your best to help as many people as possible. However, Andreas is not really the star of Pentiment. That top billing should really go to Tassing itself.

Many might be disappointed learn that ultimately what you do does not really "matter". As in what you do will not cause the story to move in vastly different ways. A lot of games like this, especially the old Telltale model, really wanted to push the whole fantasy of choose-your-own adventure freedom. (And notably it was all fluff, Telltale never actually achieved that.) Andreas is not going to stop the flow of time to bring illuminations back into popularity, nor will he suddenly turn Tassing into a modern democracy or socialist utopia. He's not Geralt deciding the fate of everybody in The Witcher 3. You're just one guy. I failed practically every dice roll to get people to give up information to me, my Andreas was a dick, yet the story moved on basically the same as if I had charmed them all over. 

For the most part, the cases are unsolvable, any of the suspects could have done the crime, you never find 100% perfect evidence for any murder. I ended up just fingering the biggest asshole in the line-up. If all you want is a puzzle, you will be disappointed. The cases are just methods by which you explore, learn, and develop a relationship with the real star of Pentiment, Tassing itself. By the of the game, in the final "case", you're making a much more profound and meaningful impact on the future than a simple decision of "did the widow, the thief, or the monk do it?"

Tassing is the pentimento of Pentiment. This is a place whose history goes back thousands of years. This is a town whose foundations go back to Antiquity, they're actually building structures on top of Roman stone. You can see the ancient aqueducts in the background. The old men of the village pass down folktales of a pre-Roman era and spit on their memory as violent conquerors. The saints of the local monastery have a mythology suspiciously similar to that of the pagan legends whispered in the woods. This is a place that has been re-imagined a dozen times, and the past has never disappeared. It's always hiding, still visible under the attempts to paint over it. So what really matters? The Germanic story, the Roman story, the Catholic story, whatever is coming next that we call "modern"? We see yet another revolution during the course of Pentiment, and it is a very difficult question who won and who lost. Life is rarely that black and white.

Pentiment ends up not being merely a historical game, it is a game that asks you to do the work of the historian. Historians do not just tell you what happened, they take evidence and sources and build a narrative around it. It is an act of interpretation, argumentation, it is finding values and meaning between what we know or what we think we know. Our knowledge is always going to be insufficient. You'll never know every little detail of what happened in Tassing. But you can decide what it means to you and what is most worthy of celebration.

Top Games of 2022: No. 4 - Live a Live

4. Live a Live, dev. Square Enix & Historia

I've played a JRPG or two in my day. You may have heard this about me. For years now I've heard talk of a legend of a game, Live a Live. This game comes from one of Square's most fruitful moments of creative output, the late-SNES/Super Famicom era. It was one of the unfortunate titles sandwiched between the legendary Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, thus just missed the boat to be released outside of Japan. That made it join other niche titles like Bahamut's Lagoon or Terrangima or for a long time, even Final Fantasy V, as this obscure marvel that only gamers with emulators or working knowledge of Japanese could have access to. Live a Live was compared a lot to Chrono Trigger specifically, since they were both games set across a variety of different eras and different tones. There were not a lot of RPGs in that era to send its players back to Flinstonian Dinosaur Times.

I foolishly never go around to Live a Live until now. I had always assumed that Live a Live was just a curiosity. A truly great game, would have gotten an export. How good could some silly game be with cowboys and whatever? I was wrong. Live a Live is great game, a mini-masterpiece. 1994 lives again on our Nintendo Switch. We're bringing back "Cotton Eye Joe", The Magic School Bus, and Planet Hollywood restaurants. Turns out the Nineties ruled. All we need to relive the Nine Inch Nails era is a new coat of HD-2D paint. Live a Live might now look a lot like Octopath Traveler, but this game is vastly superior.

What I love about the SNES-era in JRPGs is that you can already feel the rumbles of a revolution to come. Square starts out with Final Fantasy I in 1987 as this nearly plotless Dungeons & Dragons campaign on your TV screen. It's a simple crunchy game of simulated fantasy adventuring. The player fills in the story as much the game. There aren't even characters, you just have four blank slates you get to name. But as technology advanced, you can see them growing less and less interested in tabletop modules and more interested in what this system can be as a storytelling engine. Final Fantasy VI was setting the stage for the PS1-era of cinematic adventures. It pushed the SNES to its very technical limits to tell a grand epic. Live a Live feels like another test of what RPGs can be.

Can RPGs be westerns? Can they be Ridley Scott's Alien? Can they be Street Fighter II? Live a Live answers "yes" to all these questions. Therefore, it is not really one game as much as eight or nine short games all with their own unique style and tone, all of which you can finish in a few hours. It does not return to the classic sword and sorcery origins of RPGs until the very final level. And when we finally get there, Live a Live pulls a cruel deconstruction of all the tropes of the genre. It is almost like the game is outright rejecting its roots: "RPGs can be anything now, and we don't need to be that".

The variety is one of the best elements of this experience. Live a Live is eight stories all with different methods of gameplay and focus. Pogo, our darling little caveman boy, has an adventure through an overworld and random encounters. Meanwhile, Cube, a spherical robot in the far future, goes through a horror game, so it is mostly all cutscenes, with only one true RPG encounter at the end. Masaru's chapter is a Fighting Game, so it's just a boss rush. Along the way you'll encounter all sorts of different events. The Wild West level is about preparing ambushes for outlaws. There's a level with psychics in the near-future where you get a giant robot and a fittingly glorious tokusatsu theme song. (Sung by anime opening legend, Hironobu Kageyama, no less!) Then in the final level where all your character team up, there's dungeons and a non-linear world to explore in any order.

Another really awesome thing about Live a Live is the combat. This is not your traditional row of four heroes on the left and monsters on the right. Instead this game uses a psuedo-tactical system, on a 7x7 grid. It is remarkably varied too, with positioning being very important. The martial arts stages are all about swiping at enemies, then moving just out of range. It feels much more like an actual tug-of-war hit-and-run battle than you'd think turn-based tactics can achieve. The big high noon showdown is all about keeping the boss bottled up in the top left corner, knocking him back into place, so he cannot get into position to use his insta-kill Gatling Gun. The Prehistory levels are about controlling the field by dropping poison all over your enemy's feet. Then when we're back in medieval high fantasy, it just feels like a regular RPG battle but on a grid, as the entire level is a return to classic form.

Also, every one of these chapters ends with a huge boss fight with incredible music. "Megalomania" is the track, and I'd share a link to it if Square Enix were not downright fascist when it comes to keeping their music off Youtube lately. You gotta sell Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line copies somehow, I suppose. (I actually might buy that whole game and the DLC just to have "Megalomania" in my house.)

To me, Live a Live just feels like a game that had to be fun to make. It has infinite possibilities to be anything. If you were there in Square Enix offices in the mid-90s, you could pitch anything, any crazy idea at all, they could put it in this game. That's a level of creative freedom I cannot imagine exists anymore when modern games take five years and tens of millions of dollars to produce. We will not get get tokusatsu romps and cowboys in Final Fantasy XVI. Finally, after all these years, Live a Live has regained its place in the great history of RPGs.

Top Games of 2022: No. 5 - Neon White

5. Neon White, dev. Angel Matrix

We're halfway through this list and we're missing something. Where are the video game-ass video games?? I love narratives, I love interactive media, I love role-playing, sure. But at some point, I just want to hit the buttons and have some action. Preferably straightforward action without a lot of bullshit getting in the way. I look at the menus for things like Forspoken and get exhausted and depressed. There's all these systems and numbers and percentages and loot and maps full of dots for endless activities to grind out more things to make all the numbers go up. I just have enough at some point! Can I just play the damn game?? Does it all have to be such a damn project, a second job, a friggin' lifestyle?? No, I just want to have levels and things to shoot! That's it!

(Deep breath)

Neon White is an FPS platformer designed to give you the most basic arcade-y thrills of gaming. The game is over a hundred levels of high-flying action. And that's it. Just a tiny story around it, some speed-running options, and bonus levels, and nothing else. It is tiny morsels of good food prepared well; Neon White is filling but not gluttonous. It does one thing really well and pushes that idea as far as it can take it.

The experience starts fairly simple with some lush white towns over reflective seas, then Neon White slowly evolves into increasingly absurd cityscapes over bottomless pits. In the late-game, it becomes this wonderful aerial ballet like many of the best moments in Celeste. You achieve this glorious feeling of pulling off trick after trick in rapid succession, almost never seeing the ground, or even needing the ground. The enemies are stationary, mostly serving as tiny hurdles to make you look cooler. The whole game is about speed and flow, and a steady progression of mastery.

Neon White's brilliant idea is to mix up guns with various forms of jumping and movement. High-speed FPS platforming goes back decades, all the way to the classic rocket jumps of Quake, when you could fire explosions into your feet. With Looney Tunes physics, that would launch your dumb ass across the map. There are rockets in Neon White, and that trick does work. But every gun in the game also has an alternate use a movement mechanic. So your starting pistol can be discarded for a double jump. The rifle is a forward dash. The rocket launcher is a grappling hook. Neon White has a card mechanic, but this is not a deck-builder. The cards are just a way of stacking jumps until you need them. You might want to save a few bullets in your Uzis because they're also a shockwave ground pound, great for clearing thick bunches of monsters, or diving downward onto stacked TNT for an upward boost.

The story of Neon White is the weaker element. On the surface, it does have interesting ideas. Your character, of course named Neon White, has died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately heaven is a crappy resort. You and the other sinners are forced by the corrupt angels in charge to constantly slaughter demons in the various levels. Your reward is minor inane gifts like watching The Matrix at the cinema or just an ice cream cone. There's a lot of intrigue and secrets, which reminds me of Paradise Killer, a first-person mystery game I enjoyed a lot from 2020. However, the developers are obsessed with anime, as evidenced by hiring English VA legend, Steve Blum, to play the lead. This a blessing and a curse, as this game is riddled with typical anime cliches and horniness. There's beach levels, a very fetishized character who might be underage, and talking cats with New York accents.

Let's be clear, I am not anti-horny. Immortality is a much hornier game than Neon White. The problem is that Neon White's cutscenes all feel like the comedy cutscenes in a Persona game. Your mileage will vary here, but is just not funny enough, not particularly sexy, and often undercuts the actually interesting ideas the narrative has.

Eventually Neon White reveals that this afterlife is a conflict between modern Christian assumptions of divine rewards versus more ancient Biblical understandings. The old heaven has been destroyed and torn down to build a mediocre land of menial pleasures. It works as a symbol of true faith and desires for connections with God, being demolished by our world's puritan grifters. The game wants to be critical of people who have no interest in religion besides constructing systems of rewards and punishments for petty temporal grievances. That should be fascinating, but Neon White spends too much time posing the girl with big boobs in a swimsuit, or dealing with the quest for revenge against Neon Green (Ben Lepley), a one-note flat villain who steals the plot.

The various characters and their personalities actually come together better in their special bonus levels. Neon Violet (Courtney Lin) is this "cute psycho" girl obsessed with explosions and violence. So all her levels are trollish nightmares with spikes and explosions. In one scene she makes you ground pound through forty levels with the Uzi, but if you ground pound too much and lose count, you get stuck on "Idiot Island" with no escape and no way out except to reset or kill yourself. Neon Yellow (Ian Jones-Quartley) is a dumb bro guy, so his levels are built around just shooting things for the most part. Neon Red (Alicyn Packard) is elegant and precise, so her levels are advanced platforming challenges all about the movement abilities. These are great challenges, and I simply had to do all of them.

Notably, no other game in 2022 led me to get as close to hitting 100% as Neon White. I had to get a high score in every level, I had to find all the secret treasures, I had to beat every side level, and I had to get the secret ending only reachable if you complete a secret ten-minute long marathon in a level fittingly called Marathon. I'm really impressed how well Neon White works, even on Switch, where it ran flawlessly. Another first-person platformer, Ghostrunner, was just impossible on consoles, a downright cruel experience if you're playing without mouse and keyboard. Neon White is perfectly tuned for any method of play. I've been dreaming of a truly great fast-running FPS platformer since Mirror's Edge on the PS3 almost achieved it - but got tragically short of the mark. Here we are, over a decade later, we're finally here, with Neon White, the dream is finally achieved.

Top Games of 2022: No. 6 - Immortality

6. Immortality, dev. Sam Barlow & Half Mermaid

Immortality is a live-action video game about the failed ambitions of a young actress to create art on camera. And that story works rather well a metaphor for all frustrated ambitions of this unique medium. The golden age of live-action video games is now decades old, and it came and went without leaving much of a legacy.

In the Nineties, a revolution in more powerful computers and disc-based media led many game companies to imagine a bright future for interactive movies. FMVs were sure to be the future for more sophisticated and cinematic narratives. In some cases, they took the idea of "interactive movies" very literally, such as the CD-ROM adaptations of movies like Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic, the latter of which was basically a cheaper remake of the Keanu Reeves cult classic. Other studios were bringing in Hollywood talent to their shoots, such as 1996's Ripper starring a host of stars, most prominently Christopher Walken.

However, nobody remembers Ripper. Nobody remembers the Johnny Mnemonic game. That Blade Runner game has a bit of a cult around it, but only a tiny one. Unfortunately, even the good FMV games get lumped in with the bad. Most of the productions were amateur, looking ridiculous at the time, and coming off as impossibly cheesy within just a few years. What were industry stand-outs like Phantasmagoria rapidly aged, so by the new millennium they were already hilarious embarrassing relics. Even Vanilla Ice did become this un-cool this fast. By the 2000s, pretty much only Command & Conquer could still get away with live-action cutscenes and not get laughed out of the room.

Certainly the dream of making cinema with video games never went anywhere. Developers decided to just make the movies entirely in CG. As that digital animation advanced, tastes moved in that direction. Games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII were incredibly ambitious, and their CG rendered FMV cutscenes stood the test of time, unlike poor forgotten Ripper. Within decades game designers learned to depict all kinds of cinema in cutscenes. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us so successfully copied the beats and moods of prestige TV that there's a faithful HBO remake airing right now.

But the dream of live-action gaming is not dead completely, we do still have Sam Barlow, the maker of acclaimed live-action games like Her Story and Telling Lies. Immortality is his latest game, and the game most interested with the act of making films: the stress, the labor, the physical texture of film rolls, and the pain of failure.

One of the problems with live-action footage is that it is very awkward to mix together with gameplay. Christopher Walken can act his head off, but he cannot just transform into a little guy on screen made of pixels without it feeling unnatural. Immortality solves this problem neatly by making the only interactive element the act of watching and editing video. You are given a series of clips about this actress Marissa Marcel (Manon Gage) all on an editing bay for physical rolls of film. Your actions are to push the rolls forward, backwards, or to click on objects in the frames. Basically every item on screen links to some other moment in some other clip, meaning there's an infinitely vast maze of connections you can find to collect every clip in the story. The movement of the film is very tactile, so you can fast-forward or rewind at almost any speed, there's a great "feel" to what would otherwise be just the basic controls on a DVD player.

The mystery you're solving can be summed up simply: what happened to Marissa Marcel? Why did all three of her movies fail? Her career was only three projects: Ambrosio, a dirty nun movie shot in 1968 Italy, Minsky, a sexy crime thriller shot in NYC in 1970, and finally, Two of Everything, a 1999 indie drama, none of which were ever released to the public. The resources you're given included fully-completed scenes of the movies, raw rehearsal footage, some out-takes, behind the scenes clips, and TV interviews. Along the way you will learn direct reasons why these films were never finished - accidents on set, jealous directors, mysterious illnesses. But you'll also discover there's something much more sinister going on. Why are so many of these clips seemingly haunted by a vampire woman (Charlotta Mohlin)? Also, why hasn't Marissa aged over these thirty years?

I do like the little side-game that occurs with the "haunted" clips. Depending on how you replay the footage, you may discover secret layers and alternate events. It is a fun diversion that complicated the experience beyond just watching all the content. However, I will also confess that none of the meta-plot in Immortality did anything for me. None of it made sense until I read some explainers online, and frankly, those revelations are less interesting than the main narrative. The pain of frustrated artistic expression is just more compelling to me than the immortal part of Immortality. Worse, it is very easy to miss one essential clip you need in order to get the ending. I spent hours unable to unlock the one scene that show what happens after Two of Everything wrapped, a key story-essential moment, until I just lucked out and clicked on Marissa in a random moment.

Even without vampires or nonsense, I think Immortality is showing very cool stuff. I actually want to see Ambrosio, that seems like a great bit of erotic sacrilege, like The Devils meets Black Narcissus. Manon Gage is great as Marissa in all her many forms and guises, from virginal newbie to seductress manipulator. Even without a supernatural twist, all three of the movies have thematic resonances with their backstories, explaining their failure. Plus, the developers did a great job recreating the feel of late-Sixties movies. Most of the clips are believable as movies that could have been. They seem like they could have been great movies - well, except, Two of Everything that has the production values of an early-2000s Cinemax porn.

Ultimately, Manon Gage as Marissa Marcel as this wicked being destroying the men in her life? That's great in any aspect ratio. We finally did get real, respectable movies in our games.

Top Games of 2022: No. 7 - Chained Echoes

7. Chained Echoes, dev. Matthias Linda

I've played a JRPG or two in my day. You may have heard this about me.

I'm pretty sure Matthias Linda has played a few as well. In his game, Chained Echoes, he has assembled a Greatest Hits collection of JRPG ideas. There's the Conditional Turn-Based battle system from Final Fantasy X. The enemy encounters play like Chrono Trigger. The mechs are out of Xenogears. The plot feels like a remake of Final Fantasy XII, with character portraits imitating Final Fantasy Tactics, and the final boss sends-up Final Fantasy VI. You get a cool airship in the second half of the game and an island you can populate with NPCs, which is right out of Skies of Arcadia. There's a License Board. There's Limit Breaks. Sure, not all of Chained Echoes works (the Materia-ish Crystal system is frustrating and the Job Classes feel unfinished) but that's a lot of classic JRPG grandeur to fit in one package.

On the most recent episode of the Final Fantasy Wiki Podcast, I made the argument that Chained Echoes was the best Final Fantasy game of 2022. Now Final Fantasy is a huge and varied franchise, so what "a Final Fantasy should be" is a very difficult question. This franchise has sired multiple generations of fans all with very different ideas, often contradictory ones. I've lived this life, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII fans do not get along very easily. We have withered ancient Boomers who still call the SNES games Final Fantasy II and III, and we have tiny adorable babies who joined the story with Noctis. So there's more politics at play here than most Yasumi Matsuno games.

Personally, my gold-standard of Final Fantasy (and therefore, the entire JRPGs genre) is that PS1-PS2 era, where the games were long, the adventures were wild and varied, and there were never too many ideas. Square never said no to anything, and that's how you end up with confusing messes of games like Final Fantasy VIII or Chrono Cross. Just wonderful, wonderful messes, truly glorious piles of self-defeating bullshit. Love them. Chained Echoes by emulating so many other great games feels like it has that same ambition.

There have been a lot of games aiming for the nostalgia of the SNES (Bravely Default, for example), but until Chained Echoes, I have not found many that have aimed for the PS1 era. Mostly because trying to make your own Final Fantasy VII-IX demands a a level of production just beyond an indie team. Chained Echoes was not even made by a team, it was largely made by just one person, only needing a bit of additional help making music and art assets. So you will not get the polygons or FMVs of the late-Nineties. But Chained Echoes, even if made out of pixel art, still looks great. And at thirty hours this is the full experience of being one of these old blockbusters. There's big twists, there's intense act break moments that feel like the dramatic reveals at the end of a PS1 disc, and the major boss encounters are awesome. And I will never not love a pixel art top-down game, especially one that looks this good.

There is an issue where that Chained Echoes is too reliant on being a Greatest Hits collection for its own good. I would prefer that the characters were more original, so that I could not immediately name their inspirations. Glenn is Cloud mixed with Fei Wong, Sienna is a lesbian Balthier, Victor is Citan with a beard, Lenne is Garnet with a spear, Amalia is Eiko with a pet dog, Kylian is Delita but the subtext is text, Robb is a redeemed take on Argath, Ba'Thraz is Kimahri with a Fullmetal Alchemist curse, the cast of evil flunky generals are straight out of the Valuan Empire, and the evil gods are the Occuria. There's even a friggin' Quina, and always hated Quina. Why can't we have a Beatrix or Setzer instead? I love that we jump inside a character's mind to help them through their period of darkness, but we did do that already in Final Fantasy VII. I love that we get a Millennium Parade pastiche, but it is still a pastiche.

If you're wondering what Chained Echoes brings to the table on its own, it isn't a lot. I am happy that this game is very open with explicit LGBT themes where Final Fantasy somehow still isn't. (Vanille and Fang in Final Fantasy XIII were still only "really good friends", wink wink.) There is a late-act twist revealing our hero's identity and has a beautiful montage of his long backstory that I think is unique and special. But moment like that are the exception, not the rule.

I suppose if Chained Echoes does anything it's just reusing all these ideas in a solid package. There are issues: the script could use another pass, the music is below average for this genre, and the Crystal is an awful slog of menus. But I think the general flow of the combat is great. The game uses a system called "Overdrive" where you need to balance your abilities to not overheat your units. There's solid decisions like making every boss vulnerable to most status effects, even the three types of Poison damage. You can stack all sorts of buffs and vulnerabilities for enormous damage. The combat is quite punishing, regular encounters can wipe your team out if you get sloppy. Chained Echoes is a really well-made game that's much better balanced than the Nineties Square games it was inspired by.

Anyway, that's enough nostalgia. The next game in the Top 10 is nothing like anything else I have ever played.

Top Games of 2022: No. 8 - OMORI

8. OMORI, dev. OMOcat LLC

OMORI originally released in late 2020, but only for PC, the one place I could not get to back then. Luckily, I have a rule for just these occasions. If you release on consoles in 'Current Year' then you are a 'Current Year Game'. OMORI absolutely would have made the Top Games of 2020 List so this is just delayed justice. I have been anticipating this game since back in 2014, when I first saw the original trailer. That was promising an extremely cute pixel-art RPG with horror overtones representing themes of loneliness and depression? There is not a single part of that sentence I don't like! So only eight years of patience later, the final OMORI delivered.

Of course, there is an elephant in this room. And while I do love elephants, they're great people, they are big problems if they are in a room. The elephant is: Why do we need OMORI when we have Undertale and Deltarune? I do try hard to never add a game to these lists if all I can say positively about them is "Game is like Other Game that I already like'. (Spoilers: Bayonetta 3 is not making this list, for example.) The room elephant is creeping ever closer as I tell you that OMORI's plot is extremely similar to Deltarune, actually. They're both stories about isolated kids escaping an Earthbound-style suburban childhood into silly fantasy realms, while simultaneously escaping from a deep darkness within their psyche. Since Deltarune is unfinished, it is impossible to know where that game is going. But I do think I can satiate the scary elephant by saying that OMORI plays nothing like Toby Fox's franchise. It also has its own original emotional affect in mind, separate from any of its influences.

OMORI is a struggle about with nostalgia and facing reality. Our character first is entirely lost in a white empty universe, before they awaken inside a magical forest full of adorable little guys. Some of these cartoon figures are NPCs, some are monsters to fight. Most importantly, we have our friend group who are utterly supportive of us without question, and the world is vast and colorful. We then discover all this is pure fantasy, we're actually a teenager who has hidden inside his room for years. (The game uses the term 'hikikomori', which I am hesitant to use, personally.) Most of the cute little guys turn out to be the toys in our room from when we were little. And in the real world, our friend group has all but disappeared. One of the kids in core RPG party, Kel, has lived next door to us, but we have not spoken in years.

The juxtaposition between the 'Headspace' and the real world is one of OMORI's best tricks. Even while aware of the in-game unreality of this place, the Headspace draws you in. It is where you fight planets come to life or deal with the relationship troubles of anime boys. That world is all silliness, all comedy. Then in the real world, everybody has come to hate each other. Everything is more difficult, even the RPG combat options, which are extremely limited. The party has all grown distant thanks to a terrible event that has torn them apart. You get the sense they all wish to speak but have somehow forgotten the language they once shared. You just can't rewind back to being the people you once were.

Personally, I think OMORI makes a massive mistake in its storyline. There is moment in this game that should have been the natural conclusion yet is not. It is one of the most touching and beautiful moments of 2022 in gaming for me. You and your friends in the real world gather together and look through a photo book that you have not seen in years. You are reminded of all these memories from when you were younger and the group was complete. The associated minigame is just a simple task of arranging the pictures in the right order. But just working that out feels like processing these memories in a healthy way for once. You're not escaping to magical lands with actually pretty well-made RPG battles. Nor are you escaping away by growing distant in the real world and pretending none of this ever happened. You're finally dealing with these emotions, mourning what was, and appreciating that you had these times together. OMORI should have ended right there. This scene is one of the few moments in video games to actually bring me to tears.

Instead we get an unnecessarily dark twist and a frankly horrible final boss. (I get what you're going for here, OMORI, but it's really annoying to have to fight a difficult enemy without any access to my skills or customization.) If OMORI was an hour shorter, it would be in my Top 5. It also sucks that half the content in this game is inaccessible unless you replay and pick the Bad Routes where your characters loses themselves in fantasy forever. I am just not going to do that.

But back to positives, OMORI is a unique and interesting take on RPGs. I love the Omocat style to the faces. There's a sketchy texture to all the drawings, like it was made with pen on paper, so a lot of the coloring has gaps between the pen strokes. The music is great - Toby Fox contributed a song, speaking of Undertale. A lot of OMORI is legitimately delightful, including the battle system with a rock-paper-scissors system based on emotions. There are also horror moments are legitimately terrifying, there's a 10/10 jump scare. 

Most importantly, I liked the people in this game and liked being around them. Aubrey, Kel, and Hero were good friends to have while happily ignoring my own real world.

Top Games of 2022: No. 9 - Norco & Citizen Sleeper

9. Norco, dev. Geography of Robots

9. Citizen Sleeper, dev. Jump Over the Age

Our first ever tie in any End of the Year list!

In Spring 2022 we received two text-based adventure cyberpunk games set on the dirty frontier just outside Capitalism. Norco came out in March, Citizen Sleeper arrived May. Together they feel lot like somebody took my GOTY 2021, Disco Elysium and chopped that bad boy right in half. You have the surreal sense of a dying world gone mad in Norco, and in Citizen Sleeper you have a table-top dice mechanic representing the a daily struggle for resources and a place to sleep. Both games also are about minds themselves being copied to be monetized by Capitalism. However, in both cases, the soul is one product too powerful to be controlled.

Norco is set in the actual Louisiana town of Norco, a few miles upriver from New Orleans. The place today exists mostly as a refinery for Shell Oil, with a name maning "New Orleans Refinery COmpany". The semi-fictional setting of Norco is either in a miserable near-future or a twisted alternate reality. There's robots, there's eldritch AIs that have taken over most of the bayou's ecosystem, and there's gangs of pathetic fascist gamer boys roaming around. There is no government, even the evil cyberpunk corporation is barely interested in ruling its domain, and to nobody's shock, the new cryptocurrency is worthless. This is a game whose narration briefly separates from the main story to fast-forward us further along in the timeline, when the Mississippi Delta will finally erode completely and all that is not washed away into the Gulf of Mexico will be small pirate islands. Norco is often depressing, often ridiculous, and those things need not be separate tones.

Meanwhile, Citizen Sleeper is set deep in the Space Age. Your character is what is called a "Sleeper", a copy of a debtor's mind implanted into a synthetic body by an evil galactic Corporation. You have somehow escaped your future life of slavery and find yourself on Erlin's Eye, a circular space station just outside the reach of your owners. The point of the game is to meet the various people around, find work, find stable lodgings, and escape the long-arm of the Corpos. That arm may come as shitty mercenaries who extort you for your continued freedom, or it may come as various killer viruses hiding in the space station system. There's multiple endings, multiple ways to solve problems, but mostly you're making the good numbers go up and the bad numbers go down. Which is itself, deeply addicting. Citizen Sleeper almost does not the good writing and interesting characters. I could just do runs of this dice survival game over and over.

Norco is a point-and-click adventure with linear chapters and one ending. Citizen Sleeper is more open-ended. I actually rejected every ending available and my Sleeper is still on Erlin's Eye, happily living in a hard-won apartment with their cat. In Norco, it's a long mystical track towards one conclusion and one major mystery to solve. You're playing as Kay, a vagrant who has only come home after her mother, Catherine has passed away from cancer. However, in the game you also go back in time a few weeks to play as Catherine in her final days in her futile attempts to leave something behind for her children. Your brother/son is missing and the goal is to find him, wherever he is, whatever trouble he's found himself in. Citizen Sleeper meanwhile is all about unlocking as much of the space station as you can, completing the various tasks that you can each day, and letting the cycle repeat.

But either way, the point of each narrative is a question of finding a home, finding a place, maybe even losing that place. The eponymous Sleeper citizen is most likely going to be victorious. Catherine's journey in Norco is doomed from the start.

There's a beautiful poetry to Norco, which I can only compare its moves to being like Kentucky Route Zero. At one point you're playing along and you're magically transported into a story you're being told, now playing a minigame as a boat on the bayou. There's a strange magic to this world, a logic that feels random or supernatural. Kay's freaky-looking teddy bear becomes a recurring figure, maybe even central to the closest thing you'll find to salvation. It's full of horrifying tragedies, like a man Duck who is also near-death, probably because of the environment poisoning him. He sold a copy of his mind that has now evolved into a god-like entity called Superduck, a physical virus outside of anybody's control. There's great imagery like the faceless Virgin Mary I posted above or a flowing stage curtain decorated with eyes.

Citizen Sleeper lacks that poetry because its systems rely so much on clear mathematical logic. It's about the tough choices you make or do not make. You can lead an assassin to her target, another Sleeper. Your reward to watching this murder is some badly-needed currency. Every action does move the needle further for your own survival, and there is something deeply satisfying about destroying the systems that have kept you under control. For example, you need an injection of expensive medicine every few days - another method of the company of keeping your body in bondage. But as the economy progresses, that restriction becomes less and less of a problem. You prosper in Erlin's Eye, and that is a victory.

I wish there could be a game that could combine the surreal magic of Norco and the steady progress of small victories in Citizen Sleeper. But then again, that game exists, it's Disco Elysium. And I worry I'm being a bit reductive when I compare both these games to that one. They are their own pieces of art that accomplish very different tasks. They do not need the deflationary irony that Disco Elysium traffics in. They actually cannot be that ironic. In these worlds, you cannot be a fascist or a racist or a dirty cop, all those kinds of people exist in the system. In Norco and Citizen Sleeper, you can never be part of the system, either physically or ideologically. 

The only place for the heroes of Norco and Citizen Sleeper is outside systems, in worlds full of danger, magic, and freedom. The must dare to believe that such a thing is even possible, because there is no alternative.

Top Games of 2022: No. 10 - Wordle

10. Wordle, dev. Josh Wardle

Turns out I'm not completely immune to massive popularity. I am much anti-fad just by instinct. If I see a lot of people tweeting colored squares, I'm probably going to stay away. I tried as hard as I could to not even learn what Wordle was. Wordle finally beat me back in February and I'm still here.

Wordle is the single game I played the most in 2022. At the time of writing, my stats say I played it 352 times with a winning percentage of 96%, my current streak is 34, and best streak was 75. I'm actually better at a six-letter variation called WordHurdle, with a 97% winning rate, and 106 win streak. I also routinely play Quordle and Octordle and sometimes Sedecordle if I want to go full freak. And let us not forget that I have to play Framed, the movie screenshot version. I was into Heardle for a bit but I fell off that because I wasn't very good at it. Sorry, I cannot recognize "Zombie" by the Cranberries in five seconds, the opening bars to every song from the Nineties sounds like "Wonderwall" to me. Finally Worldle, the geography version, was way too easy. Oh and there's Linkr, the daily linking game, that one rules.

Maybe we have gone too far. My morning routine now is waking up and playing like four games on my phone before I even get out of bed. Is that healthy? Is that unhealthy? I dunno. It has developed in me a deep hatred for the letter 'J', one of the least-used letters in English, so uncommon that I used every letter in the alphabet in that last paragraph except one: 'J'. All my homies hate 'J'. The word 'NINJA' can lick my ass.

Of course, Wordle started it all. It was a big fad in early 2022. Technically Wordle launched in October 2021, but I do not remember seeing anything about it until Christmas and by last January, it was the most talked-about game in the world. Until a circle of advanced age came along and conquered the world. January was the same month that Josh Wardle wisely sold out just as the fad peaked and got himself a tidy undisclosed seven-figure sum from the New York Times. I have heard endless complaints that the NYT ruined the game, usually all shallow ones. Lizzie O'Leary from Slate was upset that the NYT would dare have some whimsy and pick 'FEAST' for the solution on Thanksgiving. I think she was tongue in cheek, but still, come on !

The only issue I've ever had with the Times owning Wordle is that they treat their workers like shit. I had to break my Wordle streak on December 8th because of a one-day walkout by their Union. And also, my opening word is always 'RATIO' and I notice that has never been the solution. Is the NYT tacitly admitting to some kind of deep fear here? Maybe stop carrying water for horrible anti-trans movements and you do not need to fear a Twitter reaction, Gray Lady. And you'll out-live Twitter anyway, so do not worry.

Anyway, as a game, Wordle is just a clever little construction. It's a deviation on hangman that with seemingly easy options, but thousands of possibilities. As you run out of guesses, the stakes get real. You never would believe how much drama can occur when you have the last four letters of '-IGHT' and the first letter could be twelve different things: 'S', 'B', 'L', 'N', 'E', 'F', 'M', 'R', 'W', or the dreaded duplicate, 'T'. Or very rare words 'DIGHT' or 'HIGHT'. I only got three guesses left, you're killing me, Wordle! Or you have a jumble of yellows, one guess, that somehow add up to being 'ABODE', but you spend ten minutes trying to work out something ending with 'O'. "'BEADO'? Is it 'BEADO'?" There is something magical when your brain snaps out of its blockage and solves it. And there is something terribly painful when you realize you'd have never solved it, like when the word is 'NINJA'. Fuck 'NINJA'. Duplicate 'N' and a 'J', what a miserable, horrible word.

Video games do not need to be all that sophisticated, or even have much "video" to them. I love really basic puzzles to kill time with Solitaire and Minesweeper, so hey, welcome to club, Wordle. I can never finish the Times crossword, but I can beat you.

Top 10 Games of 2022 - Masterpost

Preamble:

If this were a list that were attempting to be anywhere near the word "objective", the winner would be obvious. In fact, last year Game of the Year has never been easier to pick. This is one of those opinions so universal they can be confused for facts. 

It's Elden Ring - obviously and near indisputably. The most important, most anticipated, most discussed, most acclaimed, and most successful game of 2022 was Elden Ring. It practically had half the year all to itself. It squashed Sony's big AAA production, Horizon: Forbidden West more easily than Horizon: Zero Dawn had been squashed by Zelda: Breath of the Wild five years earlier. Elden Ring was the culmination of a twelve year story telling From Software's rise from strange niche developer from Japan, a then-laughable backwards country in gaming, to the single most beloved force in the industry. We have seen a revolution occur in our lifetimes and Elden Ring is the moment the old monarch was decapitated in the street, death to the ancien régime. Animal from The Muppets simped for Melania at The Game Awards. If that is not the definition of mainstream success, I do not know what is.

Anyway, I did not play Elden Ring. Not an hour, not a minute, not a single button pressed. I do not like Souls games. I find them deeply unpleasant and they make me upset. I do not have fun. The best Souls game of all time is as much fun to me as the best termite. It might as well be the most delicious meal in the world made with vinegar. I don't like vinegar, no matter how you use it. It's gross. Please leave my salad without dressing.

I notice I have a pattern of being dismissive of the most popular thing in the world when I'm writing these lists. Hmm. Anyway, here's a bunch of other games I want to talk about that are not Elden Ring.

As always, these Preambles are mostly apologies for how few games I actually managed to play in 20XX. 2022 was a year full of massive gaps between major releases. It was hopefully the final awkward stumble of the Covid-era mixed with the stress of a new console generation before we get back to regular production. However, 2023 looks weirder and more fucked already but in different ways. (Sure are a lot of layoffs in gaming and games media even with the economy doing better otherwise.) The thing is that like the rest of the world, I played a lot fewer games in 2022 than I did in 2021. All my Yearly Recaps for Switch and PlayStation and Steam show me spending months without touching any of my consoles. A lot of the games on this list are pretty short, usually under ten hours. To which I say: hell yeah.

So I do not know what that means for me as a gamer and a critic. Am I just old and boring? Is my day job so exhausting that I get home and only have the energy to watch TV? Did I go outside too much? Am I such an Old Head that I only want to play three or four kinds of games? Or maybe this is just right. I played exactly as much as I needed to in 2022.

In another reality where time is infinite I do wish I had gotten around to more games. Games like Vampire Survivors, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, AI: The Somnium Files 2: Nirvana Initiative, The Quarry, SIGNALIS, Splatoon 3, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, Tinykin, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, God of War: Ragnarok, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and most painfully, Marvel's Midnight Suns. (I hope to fix a couple of those one day, but there are too many fucking games, what is one to ever do?)

Still do not regret not playing Elden Ring though. I do not think I would have gotten anything out of that experience that you would want to hear about.

But here are some experiences you might want to hear me talk about, we'll be publishing one review daily just like Movie of the Year. So enjoy the next ten days:

10. Wordle, dev. Josh Wardle

9. Norco, dev. Geography of Robots & Citizen Sleeper, dev. Jump Over the Age

8. OMORI, dev. OMOcat LLC

7. Chained Echoes, dev. Matthias Linda

6. Immortality, dev. Half Mermaid

5. Neon White, dev. Angel Matrix

4. Live a Live, dev. Square Enix & Historia

3. Pentiment, dev. Obsidian Entertainment 

2. Pokémon Scarlet, dev. Game Freak

1. Tunic, dev. Andrew Shouldice

Honorable Mentions and Extras