It’s that time of year again when we tell you about our favorite games that came out in the past 12 months. It’s my turn, and I hope you’re not expecting some left-field picks; an artistic indie game you’ve never heard of, and I’ll do my best to convince you it’s 2022’s Game of the Year.
Unfortunately, that’s not me. More cultured people may have more interesting options, but I’m a simple happy person. So without further ado, here are all my picks for 2022’s Game of the Year — starting with the game that’s consistently topping the charts in February.
Ring of Elden – PC
There’s little chance that Elden Ring will be one of my favorite games in any year it’s released. I love FromSoftware’s creations so much they pretty much ruin most of my other games.
The idea of ”Dark Souls with Horses” is appealing, but it worries me that my favorite studio is going down the dark path that has ruined so many others. I’m afraid we’re going to get a massive game that offers multiples of the first ten hours with more maps to explore than you can imagine and icon barf to make sure you’re never done without anything engaging matter.
Elden Ring didn’t end up with any of these problems, and that’s all because of two guiding principles. Elden Ring is an open world game that justifies openness. You’re free to go anywhere, and the game will even play with you, sending you to places you wouldn’t organically go after a dozen hours–teasing you about what’s to come.
This freedom will always be rewarded, even if only by increasing your strength. Elden Ring does this by constantly showing you things on the horizon that are sure to grab your attention and entice you to pursue them. Even if you ignore this temptation, you’ll quickly discover that there are other distinct benefits to going off the beaten path.
Another thing that makes Elden Ring’s open world so appealing is that, for all it does to make you want to explore it, there’s a lot you can miss out on. You are allowed to fail and get stuck. Elden Ring can totally let you get lost, because it believes that you will eventually find your way.
Most open world games are so afraid of players missing out on content that they completely exhaust all discoveries in their huge playgrounds. For that, Elden Ring deserves my admiration.
Master – PC
I talk a lot about the need to feel cool in video games. For me, this is almost always achieved through mechanics. I’d be content if a game made me do one cool thing and gave me as much agency as possible within its framework to do more cool things.
So it’s no surprise that Master is one of my favorite games of 2022. The Master is a romanticization — almost obsession — of a real practice action game that you and I would never be good at in the real world. In this case, it’s kung fu.
There’s nothing like mastering a game mechanic, but it’s especially satisfying when your moves are rooted in tangible martial arts. You feel like you’ve transcended the medium enough to keep you in a trance until you close the game.
Marvel Stories – iOS
ok, look. I am not a poker player. In fact, I’d say adding cards to anything would definitely reduce my interest in it considerably. But as I discovered this year, the rule isn’t as strict or as fast as I once thought.
I started playing Marvel Snap on a whim, because when you make a living covering video games, you’re more inclined to check out popular titles, even if you’re not interested in them yourself.
I thought once I got the hang of the Snap, I’d be done with it in a day or two. But here I am a few weeks later, still playing every day. Snap is the perfect mobile game. It doesn’t try to recreate the visuals or gameplay of the big console games. It succeeds in part because of the excellent utilization of the devices it’s designed for, but also in how it plays to the extent that players expect games can and should run on those devices.
Games have a time and place to push those boundaries, but I’m rarely interested in playing them on my phone. What makes Snap so easy to come back to is the trust that it won’t waste your time or suddenly become so complicated that you’ll have to pay more attention to it than to play a mobile game.
