Game of the Year 2022

Standards have slipped and I haven’t finished writing my list until February, but will late be better than never? Only you can decide!

#10 – The Case of the Golden Idol

Available on PC and MacOS

Case of the Golden Idol hit a very specific nostalgia point in my brain that I would say usually doesn’t get much attention – the Apple II generation of puzzle adventure games. It’s a game that tasks you with solving a series of murders that follow the eponymous Golden Idol and the people who it comes into contact with. Each chapter is presented as a digitally hand-drawn scene (the kind that’s sort of weird in the way art in old PC games was), usually with multiple areas that can be switched between, where you as the player must click around on people and objects to uncover clues and information that will allow you to ultimately piece together an explanation of how the depicted murder has occurred. The subtle details in each scene pave the way for plenty of “ohhh, now I get it” moments as you go back and revisit previous scenes after new information is uncovered in future chapters, and ends up making Case of the Golden Idol one of the most interestingly told stories I’ve seen for a while in a game.

#9 – Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Available on PC, Xbox and PlayStation

25 years ago an episode of The Simpsons featured a gag where a bunch of kids were playing a virtual reality game called Yard Work Simulator. The year is now 2023, and video games that let you do mundane chores is such a well established genre that we’re now at a point where we’re getting games that let us speculate on potential mundane manual labour in the future. Hardspace: Shipbreaker puts you in the space shoes of the newest recruit for a soulless future megacorp whose day-to-day existence consists of systematically deconstructing a variety of increasingly complex space vessels, trying to recover as many valuable resources as possible. It’s dangerous work, and you may die doing it, but luckily your employer now has ownership of your genetic sequence, allowing them to create a new copy of you if a previous version was careless enough to get themselves killed on the job. There is a semi-interesting story that gets presented mostly in the form of radio conversations with other members of your team, but to be honest, I just mostly got a kick out of slowly laser-cutting my way through enormous spaceships. Putting aside the likelihood that the world is heading towards exactly the dystopian corporate future presented here, I had few more zen experiences this year than when I was throwing on a podcast and playing a couple of hours of Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

#8 – Cult of the Lamb

Available on PC, MacOS, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch

I think we need to come up with a new genre classification for roguelite dungeon crawlers that have interstitial management sim moments in between dungeon runs, because we’re starting to get a few of them now. Cult of the Lamb is the latest one of… those, giving you control of said lamb as you endeavour to build up a following of other cutesy forest animals to pledge body and soul to Narinder, AKA The One Who Waits. The dungeon crawling is pretty solid hack-and-slash action, if not very original, but the real game comes in around managing your cult between dungeon visits, by making sure your followers have food and shelter, putting them to work on gathering resources, cleaning up (and sometimes making them eat) their shit, and of course giving them places to worship their new god. Both modes of the game are fairly simplistic compared to other dungeon crawlers or other base management sims, but this ends up being a good thing because it means you don’t get too bogged down focusing on one element of the game. It’s also worth pointing out that they are still updating and adding new content to this game several months after its initial release, and have a pretty lengthy roadmap of content still to come. If you haven’t tried Cult of the Lamb yet, do your bit to support Australian game developers and give this one a go.

#7 – Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

Available on PC, Xbox and PlayStation

I’ve always liked playing Borderlands games. What I’ve increasingly disliked from the introduction of Handsome Jack onwards is listening to people talk in Borderlands games. While Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands doesn’t completely change my feelings there, I certainly think the setting of a fantasy roleplaying game world being DMed by Tina is just enough of a change of pace that I was willing to get deep into this one. Having Will Arnett play the main antagonist also turned out to be an inspired choice, and his performance goes a long way towards making up for most of the other characters in the game that were often tempting me to mute the TV. That’s not to say he’s the only good character, and there’s certainly at least one quest-line that is very heavily referential of the Monkey Island games that really stood out as one I enjoyed. If you never really liked Borderlands to begin with, this isn’t going to change your mind, but as someone who didn’t enjoy Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was enough of a change-up in setting and mechanics to draw me back in and thoroughly enjoy my time playing it.

#6 – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II

Available on PC, Xbox and PlayStation

I think we’re in a fairly well-established pattern now that going forward I can ignore all Call of Duty games that aren’t made by Infinity Ward. I don’t even really have anything new or interesting to say about this one. The single-player story is an enjoyable globetrotting action movie romp, minus one section of the campaign which I will happily never play again, and the multiplayer is still the same snappy, fast-paced FPS action that it has been for 15+ years now. Probably the most impressive thing they’ve gone and added for this iteration is the DMZ mode in Warzone. The more astute observers amongst you will be quick (and correct) to point out that DMZ is really just Escape From Tarkov for babies, but I will happily include myself amongst those babies. I’ve tried Escape From Tarkov, and while I appreciate that game for what it is and what it sets out to do, quite frankly that game is for psychopaths. DMZ feels like the mainstream version of that same concept, and given how popular its been so far, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more Tarkov/DMZ clones appearing in the next 18-24 months.

#5 – We Were Here Forever

Available on PC, Xbox and PlayStation

So apparently there’s been a whole bunch of these “We Were Here” games already, but I am incredibly late to the party and so my entry point is the fourth game in the series. Not that it caused any problems, because We Were Here Forever exists completely independently of the rest of the series. Much like Operation: Tango which made my top ten last year, We Were Here Forever is an asymmetrical co-op puzzler, which will frequently separate you and your partner into different areas, forcing you to communicate with each other in order to solve puzzles based on the different objects or information you have access to that your partner doesn’t and vice-versa. The fantastical setting leads to an amazing variety of environments and puzzle types that always felt unique and satisfying to solve over the very generous 10-12 hours it took us to finish. Much like Operation: Tango, the replayability of We Were Here Forever might be a sticking point for some, as other than re-playing the game from the “Player 2” perspective, there’s not really anything else to get out of multiple play-throughs. But, as a one-and-done experience, We Were Here Forever was one of my favourite games in 2022, and I think I can probably say is the best co-op puzzle game I’ve ever played.

#4 – Vampire Survivors

Available on PC, MacOS, Xbox, Android and iOS

This game is just pure dopamine. It came as no surprise to me to learn that the guy who developed Vampire Survivors used to work in designing slot machines, because basically everything that goes on here is the same sort of sensory overloading that I imagine is very effective at getting people to keep feeding money into those things. I have to admit, it took me a long time to give this game a try, because frankly it presents extremely poorly when you watch someone else playing it. Especially if you jump in to watch someone playing it at a high level, where I think the most accurate way to describe what’s happening to someone who has no context for what they’re looking at is “absolute bullshit”. But give it a go and start off from the beginning for yourself (it only costs like $8, or it’s on Game Pass if even that’s too rich for your blood), and like me you’ll probably slowly start to get sucked in. At first you’ll be trying to work out what weapons and items you like, then how to upgrade your weapons, then trying to stay alive for 30 minutes until Death comes for you. Before you know it, you’re consistently filling up the screen with absolute nonsense that shreds every enemy before they can even get close to you, and you’ve become the next unwitting victim of Vampire Survivors.

#3 – God of War: Ragnarok

Available on PlayStation

Can I just say right off the bat that I find it so refreshing that they didn’t feel the need to force the God of War reboot series into a trilogy, and that they’ve managed to fit an incredible story arc into two amazing games. The writing consistently delivers throughout the 25-30 hours of the main story, brought to life by several powerful performances, perhaps highlighted by Richard Schiff’s portrayal of Odin as essentially Asgard’s version of a mafia crime family boss. The music and direction are once again incredible. The gameplay is mostly unchanged from the last game, but four years later its still incredibly satisfying to swing Kratos’ Leviathan Axe around, seamlessly flowing into combos with the Blades of Chaos. I feel like between the last God of War, The Last of Us: Part II and now God of War: Ragnarok, I’m saying the same things about how good Sony’s cinematic single-player releases are. They have proven to be completely untouchable in this category, and long may that continue.

 #2 – Pentiment

Available on PC and Xbox

I love a good murder mystery. But will I love a murder mystery set in a small 16th-century European village where for some reason the person doing most of the investigating is an artist? Spoilers, the answer is yes. Pentiment was far-and-away my favourite story to play through in the last year. For a game with such a simplistic presentation, there is an incredible amount of narrative depth here. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise though, as this is coming from Obsidian, the same developers behind other well-regarded video game stories, Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. In Pentiment, the characters you meet in the town of Tassing are all so memorable and well-written that I often found myself almost forgetting that I was supposed to be investigating multiple murders, because I just wanted to know more about the drama and tribulations they were all going through. Over the course of the several years that the story covers, you feel like you’ve seen so much of their lives that it gives you a real sense of connection to the townspeople. The culmination of the story is incredibly satisfying and thought-provoking, and I don’t think I could really ask for much more from a narrative adventure game. Best of all, its included as part of Game Pass, so if you’re subscribed to that and you’re looking for a great story game, I cannot recommend Pentiment highly enough.

Game of the Year 2022
Grounded

Available on PC and Xbox

I know what you’re probably thinking. You’re thinking “well this is embarrassing, I’ve read all the way down to the game of the year and he still hasn’t mentioned Elden Ring.” Well, gentle reader, I appreciate your concern, but I have in fact not forgotten Elden Ring, and while I am very happy for everyone who enjoyed that game (and there were a lot of you), you can not count me as one of them. Now, with that done with – how good is Grounded?

As someone who watched Honey I Shrunk The Kids as a child and then grew up through the 90s, Grounded feels like it was made to be laser-targeted at my generation. And good on them, because in this specific case, it has completely taken me in hook, line and sinker. Putting you in the shoes of a miniaturised teenager in an overgrown backyard, the setting for Grounded really goes a long way for me here. It is a constant joy to explore and see the creative ways they’ve taken the usual open world biomes and applied them to things you’d expect to find in a suburban backyard – there’s a hedge that serves as a dark jungle, a koi pond for the obligatory underwater section, the sandpit gives us a desert area, and an overturned barbecue with hot coals spilling out creates a fiery hellscape, just to name a few. The creativity in the world design seamlessly flows into the base building, from using blades of grass and weeds to create floors and walls for your base, to crafting armour out of ant parts, to building an expansive network of ziplines to all corners of the yard using spider’s silk, and so much more.

It might be an unconventional choice, but no other game that came out in 2022 really captured my imagination the way that Grounded did, so on that basis its an obvious choice for me. On top of that, and in addition to Pentiment, Vampire Survivors and Hardspace: Shipbreaker that also made my top ten this year, it rounds off what has really been by far the best single year for Game Pass yet. So if you want to take one thing away from my list this year, it’s that if you still haven’t got on to Game Pass, you really should start to reconsider that.