Editor’s Picks: Flora’s Favorite Games of 2022
Last year, I decided to write up a personal list of my favorite releases in 2021, and I wanted to replicate that effort again. While 2022 has been a mixed bag of massive new releases all dropping at once, followed by a dearth of major releases for months on end, there have nonetheless been some incredible games that have captured my imagination and attention, reminding me of why I love this interactive medium in the first place.
2022 has also been one of the busiest years in my professional life, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I’ve spent playing contemporary releases. And, looking back, 2022 has been the year of the replay. From Paradise Killer to NieR: Automata to Life is Strange and Celeste, my decision to join the Left Behind Game Club podcast has also eaten into my usual time exploring unplayed games. The collaborative creative project has brought fulfillment and has given me a platform to opine verbally about some of my favorite games of all time, but the result is that I’m rounding out the year feeling less informed than I’d prefer.
Unless a game has hooked me like a bad habit, I have found myself drifting away from gaming as a pastime in the latter half of this year. I’ve written about that fraught relationship, and the result is that I’m arriving at this list having overlooked a dozen or so indies that normally I would have piled onto my plate. I’m hoping that my personal life calms down next year, but as I addressed in my previous piece for Epilogue, I must take a few steps back in 2023. Thus, while time permits, let’s celebrate some of those games that surmounted my threshold of inertia in 2022.
Honorable Mentions
Readers of Epilogue will remember that 2022 has yielded some games that are undoubtedly enjoyable but that didn’t click with me in the manner that I expected them to. These are games that I had been looking forward to for a long while. Metal: Hellsinger, for instance, presented a compelling concept but never evolved in a way that was impressive enough to recommend. The Quarry was a goofy spiritual successor to Until Dawn, a horror game that I, uncharacteristically, loved greatly. Cuphead finally released its “Delicious Last Course” DLC this summer, and it was a treat to revisit this brutally unforgiving indie classic. Kaichu – A Kaiju Dating Sim was a quick and silly spin on the visual novel and dating simulator genres. And, if it counts, Life is Strange: Remastered was worth revisiting, though riddled with bugs right at release.
Then, there are some teeming indies that excited me for superficial reasons, and delivered satisfying experiences through and through. One of these impactful indies is Rollerdrome, a slick skating and shooting game whose visual identity strongly reminded me of Sable, which became one of my greatest challenges of the year. A Memoir Blue was gifted to me on Christmas Eve, and I was swallowed by its watery depths, its masterful use of music and atmosphere – an unexpected hit about a neglected relationship between a mother and daughter that made me tear up towards the end. Signalis is an eerie but beautiful pixel art game that puts you through the hell of older series like the Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises, focusing on limited inventory slots, tense combat encounters, interminable environmental puzzling, and so forth; while I came for the sapphic overtones, I was deeply gripped by the cosmic horror elements binding me to this claustrophobic world. And, on a completely different note, I finally gave Trombone Champ a whirl while weathering my family over the holidays, in which I satisfyingly ruined the songs “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” for everyone. The indie list goes on, though less notable with each successive entry.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, there are the more prominent games that, despite their visual grandeur and emotional fortitude, didn’t make the cut. A Plague Tale: Requiem, for instance, is a massive upgrade to 2019’s Innocence, featuring stronger acting, refined visuals, and more rats than ever; despite struggling with the game’s protracted pacing, I wept during the final few chapters. God of War Ragnarök is an undoubtedly better version of 2018’s reboot, and it made me emotional within the first half hour, which is a testament to its veteran command of storytelling; I still haven’t found the drive to finish it, however, as a number of recent Sony first-party releases have started to to feel formulaic. Stray captured endearing elements of catlike activities and behaviors while presenting a compelling cyberpunk post-humanist reality, leading me to speedrun the game down to about one and a half hours. These three games are probably the strongest contenders that might have entered my top games of 2022, but ultimately didn’t because they don’t feel like genuine favorites in the way that I anticipated them to be.
That being said, here are my five personal favorites:
5. Neon White
Though Neon White hit me at a strange part of my 2022 when I was struggling to play games at all, the worst thing I could say about Neon White is that there’s a little too much of it. Part first-person shooter, part parkour simulator, part relationship simulator, Neon White succeeds in mixing up its formula all the way through. Everything in this game evolves: the level design, the weapon effects, White’s relationship with other characters like Red, Yellow, and Violet. The game gives you precisely what you need and little more, which is a successful sort of “design by subtraction” ethos made indie and modern. Furiously paced, Neon White is the perfect game to play in little bursts, where there’s never the looming prospect of getting stuck in a lengthy cutscene or stage. Whether it’s replaying a level to perfection, competing with your friends’ times on the leaderboards, or collecting gifts for the other characters, I didn’t feel any pressure to make progress, and Neon White can be played at any rate – design traits that kept me hooked even when I was feeling burned out on gaming.
4. Vampire Survivors
It seems from afar like the hype around Vampire Survivors is a bit of a meme. Everyone raves about it, people describe Vampire Survivors as the best Steam Deck game, but when you watch a trailer, it’s hard to understand that enthusiasm and appeal. My skepticism was reinforced when I learned that the singular point of control you have is over your character’s movement. But somehow, when I first installed Vampire Survivors on my Deck, I instinctively understood how this simple concept could hook someone for dozens of hours. Apart from Elden Ring, Vampire Survivors is my most played 2022 game, and despite nearly completing the game’s many achievements, new additions like the “Legacy of the Moonspell” DLC have kept the game feeling bottomless. Not to mention, I was delighted that Vampire Survivors received a free mobile port shadowdropped during the Game Awards, leading me to dabble all over again when I’m stuck in line at the store. As Vampire Survivors is a perfect game to fill half an hour – or, more honestly, half a day – I’ll be playing it for months to come.
3. We Are OFK
We Are OFK is probably the game on this list that sits the most fondly in my heart, though I expect it will not appear nearly as often in other game of the year lists. It’s a tough game to recommend to others due to the passive nature of much of OFK’s storytelling, but I think the developers’ insistence on referring to this game as an interactive narrative series – something akin to a lightly playable season of television – is a wise way to frame OFK. Filled with endearing queer characters, groovy music that loops in your head for days at a time, and an episodic story structure that benefits the pacing and character development, We Are OFK fits a niche that I didn’t know I needed from a video game. I am so glad that I played this game right at release, because it was exciting to have new episodes to look forward to each week. OFK has also found a place in my life even when away from gaming; the “We Are OFK” EP they released alongside the game clocks in as one of my most listened to albums this fall, containing go-to jams when I need something fun to sing along with after work. With five episodes complete, it feels like there’s a future here for OFK. Especially since OFK recently released a Christmas cover in their style, I’m holding onto hopes of a sequel with this quasi-virtual band.
2. Elden Ring
It’s practically obvious why Elden Ring made it on this list, which makes its appearance at number two feel somewhat inexplicable. For having cleared all the bosses, scoured the regions of the Lands Between, and cheated my way to a nearly level 300 build, Elden Ring left a void in my life that could only be filled with more games like it. Elden Ring took over a full month of my free time, overwhelmed my online spaces with content, and even caused me to dream about my ongoing adventures through the Lands Between. I was able to share my Elden Ring adventures with friends in a way that felt fundamentally unique in my gaming life, and became one of my favorite things about FromSoftware games as I later played Dark Souls and Bloodborne. My only potential caveat when praising Elden Ring is that I felt (and still feel) no desire to replay it in the foreseeable future; whereas almost everyone I know who finished Elden Ring did another playthrough or two for the platinum trophy; for whatever reason, I feel like my journey is complete. Nevertheless, Elden Ring is an unforgettable experience that will no doubt be spoken about as the single most defining game from 2022 for years to come.
For most of 2022, like so many other people, Elden Ring was my game of the year – by a mile – but then, my socks were rocked off by a game that I had no idea would top this FromSoftware masterpiece.
1. Immortality
Though I enjoyed Sam Barlow’s previous work on Her Story and Telling Lies, I had no idea that Immortality would blow Elden Ring away as my game of the year. I’m just the rare person who loves FMV games, who thinks they can be just as engaging as rendered graphics. Immortality is a disturbing game, to say the least, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I finished it. The puzzling mystery of Marissa Marcel, the out-of-order narrative, the obscure hidden paths and counterintuitive scrubbable objects – it all swirls together in my brain, like William S. Burroughs’ idea of the “virus from outer space” infecting one’s ability to think through mediated language. Immortality requires its own kind of visual and interactive grammar that feels alien at first, but ensnared me as I drank deeper into the goblet of what this game proffered.
Each fragment of the story you grasp onto in Immortality feels like capturing a balloon, securing its string under a rock, and hoping that the other balloons don’t fly away each time you lift the rock to add another. By virtue of how this game is structured, you may end up bored, mystified, enthralled, frustrated, and so on; in my experience, I was able to buy into Immortality‘s necessary uncertainty and corresponding weirdness immediately, and my suspended bewilderment kept me addicted to each new pathway I organically wove through the game’s many (and meta) narratives. Immortality is my game of the year because of how its narrative resists prediction, demands patience, invigorates curiosity, and psychologically slow burns until the smoldering fire becomes so hot it melts through your screen. No matter how deeply I dig into the game, there’s somehow always more to find.
You might notice that I’m intentionally avoiding a direct description of Immortality’s narrative and why it was so impactful for me; that’s because, unlike any other game on this list, Immortality is the rare game where prior knowledge undermines the experience. If you know what you are getting into, it might not hit as hard. If you need convincing, I wrote about my disturbing experience with Immortality earlier this year. But considering it’s my favorite game of 2022, I recommend saving my article for later, as I want as many people as possible to dive into the ice bath as possible. Immortality is the greatest game that 2022 had to offer, despite the unquestionable juggernaut of Elden Ring.
Final Thoughts
Unlike 2021, I am not ending the year with a pile of shame – or, at least, not one nearly as daunting as last year’s. Ironically, the three games at the top of my 2021 pile of shame – Inscryption, NEO: The World Ends with You, and Scarlet Nexus – remain unplayed one year later. If I had to identify a few games I’d like to play from this year but haven’t, Citizen Sleeper tops my list, followed by a vague interest in Horizon Forbidden West and Pentiment. But especially after realizing that the three games I predicted last year remain unplayed, I feel less guilt and urgency about following through on this interest. As I’ve written about extensively this year, feeling obligated to play games sucks the fun out of them, so hopefully I can learn from this advice in the stacked year of 2023.
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