My Top 10 Video Games of 2022
17 December 2024 ☼ video games
Our jaunt through recent history continues with my personal list of the best games of 2022. Will I remember how I felt about most of them? Will I even recall playing through all of them? Join me as I figure that out on the fly.
Doing a quick count, I played 46 2022 releases in 2022, up 15 from the previous year. Clearly this was the year I started taking this particular side activity Seriously, as I know for a fact that number continued to trend upward into 2023.
10) Strange Horticulture
A neat little game that I described to folks as “Papers Please in an occult plant store”. The narrative is fairly soft, but the light puzzle elements and general vibes are delightful. It took me just shy of 5 hours to plumb the depths of this one, which is a perfect little chunk of time: I think I completed it in two sittings.
The developers are working on a sequel called Strange Antiquities that is set in a curio shop, a fact I only uncovered after popping open the Steam page to do research for this write-up. My procrastination is vindicated!
9) Hardspace: Shipbreaker
A first-person spaceship salvaging simulator that’s perhaps more fun than it sounds (or exactly as fun as it sounds if you’re my kind of sicko). The game spent a while in early access and really benefited from the time to bake. The campaign has a decent little pro-union storyline that is nudged along ever so elegantly by the introduction of new tools and a few additional ship types to break apart. Overall a great “podcast game” if that’s the direction your tastes bend.
Sadly, while I thought the game had a lot of room for expansion and some kind of post-game endless mode, sales and money and all that terrible stuff meant the game shut down post-release development rather quickly. A shame, but what’s there is still great.
8) Pentiment
Pentiment was a lovely surprise at the end of the year, a brief adventure game set in a meticulously detailed and illustrated 16th century abbey and its surroundings. A really great example of the best art being produced by people with unique passions making things for themselves and sickos just like them. Would it have been particularly clear what sort of audience Pentiment was for in the pitching stage? Absolutely not. Am I happy the game got made and I was able to play it? Definitely.
My only real complaint is that the game’s narrative is a little too adaptive to your choices, taking some of the real emotional thrust out of solving the game’s mysteries. Hopefully folks who’ve played this know what I mean and the folks who haven’t aren’t too spoiled by that. What are you latter folks doing, by the way? Stop reading this and go try Pentiment. It’s even available as part of Xbox Game Pass!
7) Tunic
Tunic was a long time coming, being in varying stages of development for 7(!) years. A little reductive, but calling this “Fez meets Legend of Zelda with a fox protagonist” would be an entirely fair summation. The mystery/puzzle elements are really the thing that are worth the price of admission here: a good chunk of my playtime was spent unraveling the game’s constructed language, a task that was both satisfying and completely unnecessary to beating the game. The game also uses the clever Outer Wilds-esque conceit in which most of your “upgrades” are simply knowledge about how the game’s world works, which leads to some fun moments later on (and for future playthroughs, I’m sure).
I actually ended up doing the equivalent of 100%ing this one, which I wouldn’t recommend. Doing whatever you need to get the “good ending” is really more than enough. There is also a particularly difficult stretch in the last third of the game that felt somewhat frustrating and unnecessary, which is one of the reasons that this is further down my list than you might otherwise expect.
6) Stacklands
Another surprise, Stacklands took the somewhat opaque and unforgiving “manipulate cards that represent various people and objects on a tableau to produce effects” mechanics of Cultist Simulator and gave them a little revamp and wrapped them in a big village building bow. The result was an incredibly addictive game that is tough to fully describe. In the days since this list was originally made, the game’s had a couple sizable free patches and two sets of DLC released, so now is probably the best time to grab this if you haven’t already.
Note that Stacklands, among other games, was made by one of the folks at the Sokpop Collective, which is a group of Dutch developers working together/in parallel to make games. They used to release a new game every month(!) on their Patreon, but have since slowed down and are focusing on making a few larger games every year.
5) Potionomics
God, I got pulled right in to Potionomics: 45 hours worth, according to Steam. Despite my politics, I’m still a sucker for a cozy shopkeeping game, having cut my teeth years ago on the Harvest Moon series and Recettear, among other titles. Potionomics is a blend of three small game modes: a deckbuilder in which you haggle with customers, a somewhat detailed potion brewing system, and a fun system for collecting ingredients in which you give your previously-brewed potions to adventurers in order to help them advance past obstacles on a little area map.
When it originally shipped, it was maybe too much of a brain-burner for folks, which led me to building out a spreadsheet with ingredients and recipes and whatnot. Only a few weeks ago, however, the developers shipped a huge “Masterwork Edition” update with some new (easier) difficulty modes, some finer-grained options for the campaign, voice acting, and even a little piece of paid DLC. It’s kind of wild that I’ve had the opportunity to say it so much in this write-up, but: now is probably the best time to give Potionomics a try!
4) I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
Made by a friend of mine here in Vancouver, Exocolonist is a really sharp and fun adventure game sort of in the style of the old “Princess Maker” games. You have a young protagonist with a bunch of attributes, and you take them through their ten teenage years living on an alien planet, raising stats, making friends, and learning about the world and its characters. The game also has a light deckbuilding element in which “memories” you make from certain stories are deployed in a small card game to determine if you succeed at various challenges.
My girlfriend at the time really loved this one and 100%ed it, a feat that still seems mind-blowing to me since it required you to collect all the game’s cards (and hence, see pretty much every scene in the game) and get all of its 29 endings. Geez.
3) Citizen Sleeper
A game that could not be more of a 100 mile fastball thrown directly at my head, Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi visual novel very heavily inspired by tabletop roleplaying games, and specifically the game Blades in the Dark. You’re a decaying robot/cyborg called a “sleeper” trying to survive after unceremoniously arriving on a space station called the Eye. The game alternates between snippets of story and a metagame featuring skill checks using dice and some light resource management. It’s received a free set of DLC with some extra storylines since I first played this at release, so I definitely recommend going back and taking a look if you haven’t yet, especially with the sequel coming out very early in 2025.
(As an aside, in case you’re not an ardent follower of my work, I actually made a cyberpunk-themed Blades in the Dark-inspired title called Exacorps. It’s neat!)
2) Roadwarden
There have been years in professional hockey where a bunch of great new players end up having no chance at winning the award for best rookie because one particular player is simply an outrageous talent. This is what ended up happening to Roadwarden, perhaps the Actual Best Game of 2022.
A simple narrative adventure/RPG much in the same vein of Citizen Sleeper, except set in a fascinating original low fantasy world where there are few animals and the titular Roadwardens are some of the only people to travel between settlements, delivering messages and keeping the peace. You only get to make a few choices about the sort of character you end up playing, but they have very far-reaching consequences: only one of the character classes, for example, can read. Amazing game for a guy like me that loves a good visual novel with meaty mechanics.
2022 was the year my friends and I started our Game of the Month “book club” in which we all attempt to play a particular game over the course of each month, and this was the first game from one of those meetings that ended up making one of my GOTY lists. The club is still going today, in fact, and has proven to be a very useful exercise.
1) Elden Ring
You already know this one. A 3-player co-op “sequel” is coming out in 2025.