Brad's Top 10 Games of 2022

The conventional wisdom about 2022 is that there were no games, but when I started to rough out a prospective personal list this year, I immediately ended up with way more than 10 games, and had to start making some tough cuts right off the bat. Perhaps sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong!

Before we get into the main event, there are plenty of other games that didn't or couldn't make my proper list but that still deserve honorable mention:

• Trombone Champ, for being the most gleefully batshit ridiculous thing I've seen in years
• Sonic Frontiers, for being almost as weird as Trombone Champ
• Devastator, for being a damn Geometry Wars in two thousand and twenty-two
• The Looker, for being a parody game that’s actually really clever and funny
• The Case of the Golden Idol, which might be in my top 10 if I had finished it last year
• Kao the Kangaroo, for being just the right kind of friendly character platformer that I could delight my nephews with
• Dwarf Fortress, for… being Dwarf Fortress

OK, on with the list. Hope you enjoy my prattle, and thank you so much for keeping us going for another year!

11. Teardown

Fine, whatever, it’s a top 11. Deal with it! I had already written up 10 other games, and then realized I was bummed that Teardown wasn’t in the mix, so here it is. I started following this game when it wasn’t even a game, just some animated gifs the developer was posting on Twitter, when it had the look of a tech demo. So I was pleased to see an actual structured video game with real objectives layered on the impressive destruction tech here, which encourages you to use that destruction creatively to speedrun its levels. It’s not quite like any game I’ve seen before, and its visual style is just cool as hell. Also, just… go on the Steam Workshop and get some user-made levels. Please. This is a platform for some of the silliest and best user-made content I’ve ever seen.

10. Horizon Forbidden West

It took me like a year to get through the first Horizon, and it’s looking like the second one will be the same deal. This is a lot of game, and it would’ve been quite a bit higher on this list if Guerilla had made more of the improvements I’d hoped for, to things like climbing and combat. But it feels like they simply layered more of everything onto the formula they already had, resulting in a game that feels a little unwieldy in a number of ways. Anyway, I still like exploring this unusual world (and boy is it gorgeous this time around), and the story is both gripping, with the present-day inter-tribal conflicts, and excitingly ridiculous with its sci-fi elements, such that I’ll still see this through… eventually.

9. Tunic

On a presentation level, this is such a charming love letter to… A Link to the Past, right? That’s the reference point that most comes to mind for me when I play Tunic, although really it’s all the Zeldas, and all NES games, and all Dark Souls games, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of inspirations at work here, that all work together to create the unique mix of exploration and mystery and nostalgia that make up Tunic. If the combat had been just a little snappier I think the whole package would have clicked a little better for me (and been higher on the list), but there’s something about being in this world that’s just so enchanting and dreamlike. And those manual pages. Those manual pages!

8. Neon White

I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like Neon White, best described as, uh, “a first-person parkour time-trial obstacle course but a card game except the cards are actually guns.” I can take or leave a lot of the writing and VO and other anime-ish trappings here, but the action is so tight and smooth and fast, and the visuals are so perfectly streamlined to enable that action (both in terms of frame rate and your ability to read the terrain), that it feels almost like a game design masterclass. It’s been a long while since this many people I know got sucked into this kind of heated leaderboard competition. I also can’t get over the fact that the developer’s last game was… Donut County, which could not be more different than Neon White. What in the world will they make next? I’m excited to find out.

7. The Callisto Protocol

I guess I’ve always known in the back of my mind that I love survival horror, and extra love space survival horror, despite never thinking of myself as a big fan of the genre. My burning need to play the Callisto Protocol is what finally drove it home for me that I’ve badly missed games in the vein of Dead Space and will play just about any kind of big budget third-person horror game. The unusual melee combat and ominous atmosphere aren’t quite enough to make up for some repetitive environment design and a story that doesn’t entirely land, but I still quite enjoyed my time with this. Shout out to Josh Duhamel for doing a lot with a little here, and to this game for making me excited about the potential for graphical advancements over the course of these new-ish consoles.

6. Stray

There’s not really a lot of game here–I enjoyed the more adventure-game-ish interludes where you’re casually exploring a city area, meeting robot-people and solving light environmental puzzles, but the sections where you’re out by yourself running obstacle courses or doing stealth sequences are fine but unremarkable. What really made Stray memorable for me were the (dare I say it) vibes, the atmosphere and music and absolutely delicious lighting and environment design, the clever computerized dialogue and expressive screen-faces of the characters you meet. Stray is just bursting with personality, and melancholy charm. The prerelease reputation as “the game where you play as a cat” sort of overshadowed what a lovely and haunting world this turned out to offer.

5. Vampire Survivors

It’s hilarious to me that one of the best and most talked-about games of the year is written in Javascript and looks like a browser game from 2004. Vampire Survivors has got it where it counts, though, and where it counts turns out to be slowly leveling yourself into an absurd dervish of death and mowing down countless thousands (probably millions, let’s be real) of enemies merely by… walking at them. I know this game didn’t invent the idea of reverse bullet hell, or whatever we’re calling it, but it’s one thing to have an idea, and quite another to execute on the idea in such a precise way that it hooks this many people this goddamn hard and becomes a straight up phenomenon. Addicting barely describes it.

4. Elden Ring

I went through a weird arc with this game, first not really getting how it was different from a Souls game when I was playing it like a Souls game (i.e. banging my head against that starting area and that asshole Margit for way too long). Once I realized the game wanted me to just roam around and discover things–and then realized how many and wildly unique things there are to discover in this world–the brilliance of this game kind of blew my mind. I then went on to be away from my PS5 for a couple of extended stretches right after it launched, and it’s a bit impenetrable to come back to after several months away, but this game feels almost timeless, like you could play it five years from now and still be just as impressed by it. I put Elden Ring up there with Breath of the Wild and Red Dead Redemption 2 as games that advanced the state of the art in open-world game design, and its influence is going to be felt for a very long time.

3. Grounded

I thought this was a perfectly fine “one of those” when it launched into early access in 2020, but I was downright gobsmacked to see how well it came together into a full game this year, which feels more like a structured adventure than your average survival game. It’s got an amazing and whimsical sense of scale that recalls some great kids’ adventure movies (you know the ones), but it feels like Obsidian’s RPG chops are what really bring it together, layering some good loot lust and character progression on top of the hunger/thirst mechanics and base-building. I guess I’m just a sucker for hunting giant monsters and turning their husks into armor. This is one of the best co-op experiences out there right now, and between this and Pentiment, Obsidian really had a heck of a year.

3a. Resident Evil Village

This came out in 2021 but I played through it in 2022, and if I had played it in its year of release, this feels like probably around where it would have ended up on that year’s list. Resident Evil Village rules.

2. The Quarry

Despite dabbling with Until Dawn just a bit when it was new, I’m really late to the party on the whole Supermassive thing, but The Quarry is the one where I finally Got It. There’s a lot you could say about the impressive facial tech that captures the likenesses of all the recognizable actors here, or the branching narrative structure that leads to a ton of fun who’s-gonna-be-a-werewolf-next guesswork as you go through it. But it’s the pitch-perfect “teen camp counselors in a schlocky horror movie” writing that makes this work, which is goofy and dumb and fun as hell, but also makes you care about everyone eventually, even the characters who are (likely intentionally) not so likable up front. Also, I’m sure this is no great revelation, but: best enjoyed in a group!

1. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration

It’s already been said: Atari 50 is as much an interactive documentary as it is a game (or more specifically a collection of old games). But it’s also something else: important, pressing work. The folks who created some of the first video games aren’t getting any younger, the capacitors in those old arcade machines will wear out some day, the old design docs and marketing material and business cards won’t avoid the recycle bin or shredder forever. Assembling all this material and getting these stories from the people who were there isn’t just a fun nostalgia trip, it’s a service to history and culture (even the Jaguar emulation!).

Digital Eclipse has been doing great archival work in their retro collections for years now with the Disney Classic Games Collection, Blizzard Arcade Collection, and this year’s TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection, but Atari 50 is the first time they’ve made the historical material the focal point of the whole product, arranging it all into a slick narrative package that walks you through the story of this seminal company and tugs at the heartstrings along the way.

It feels fitting that Digital Eclipse only perfected their documentary format once they were creating a package for what is effectively the original video game developer at a national scale across home and arcade, the first game company to become a cultural phenomenon and household name. I sincerely hope they have more work than they can handle after this, making the same documentary efforts for other classic developers large and small. What better way to document the history of the medium than from within the medium itself?