Best Video Games I Played in 2022
- Aragami (2016)
Synopsis: You are a spirit of vengeance summoned to free an imprisoned queen. But is everything as it seems? No, it’s clearly not, like it’s super obviously not.
A fun stealth game with a well-paced difficulty curve that really pushes you to try out different skills and strategies. Feels similar to Dishonored, though it’s a little less built up in terms of the level design and skill tree. That being said Aragami brings some novel skills to the table, so it certainly doesn’t feel like just a simplified Dishonored clone. It’s also pretty much a pure stealth game–if you get discovered, running is basically your only option, as your offensive skills are limited and enemies kill you in one hit.
While it plays well for the most part and allows for some experimentation and cheese, the mechanics can be a little wonky. Aiming your Shadow Leap and trying to get the camera where you want it in particular can occasionally be tricky, but these tend to be minor frustrations at most.
Storywise you can see the “twist” coming a mile away which completely destroys the narrative tension they’re trying to build, but it has a relatively satisfying conclusion. Mainly you’re going to pick this up for gameplay though.
Also, fair warning, you’re definitely going to want to pick up those scrolls even if you think the Kage / Shadow Kill combo is all you’ll ever need. It’s not, believe me. - Deathloop (2021)
Synopsis: You wake up after a bender, not able to remember anything, but you eventually figure out you’re in a time loop, which apparently you just forget sometimes. Oh, and to break the loop you need to assassinate like 9 different people in one day.
When I started Deathloop I was at first overwhelmed by how much information it seemed like I’d have to keep track of. By the end I was kind of wishing the game wouldn’t hold my hand quite so much.
As with the Dishonored games (also by Arkane, so the comparison is apt), your journey through an individual level is pretty much up to you—you choose which goals to focus on in any given iteration, and how to achieve those goals…up to a point. The main storyline is pretty well locked in though, and while there’s some variation in how you go about finding the pieces (I never once had to visit Frank’s place, for example), there’s only one way to put them together, and you don’t even get to figure it out yourself. It just felt a little unsatisfying.
Mechanically, the discovery of new slabs, weapons, trinkets, and upgrades is pretty compelling during the middle section of the game, but if you unlock infusion early on (which, why wouldn’t you) and focus on gathering residuum for a few loops, you very quickly build up a top-tier arsenal with room for only marginal improvements, particularly if you play how I do. While the game clearly wants you to be thinking about your loadout each time you go out, I just equipped my favorite weapon for each ammo type with generic trinkets that play to their strengths, equipped character trinkets that boost health, power, and hacking, and maybe occasionally switched out a slab here and there if I knew Shift or Aether would be particularly helpful (at the end I was just using Nexus and Fugue and barely had to do anything at all, though admittedly neither of those are particularly useful against Julianna, which I found out when I almost got looped on the night phase of my end-run before I even got to the party). All of which is to say you can definitely have a lot more fun messing around with loadouts than I did, which will probably also end up encouraging you to do more side-quests than I did.
Speaking of which, while I did enjoy the way you kind of stumble onto side-quests with very little nudging from the game (other than environmental clues, and let me just say here that the level design is, unsurprisingly, really good), I often just didn’t feel like it was worth the hassle to pursue them, especially after a few less-than-stellar rewards for going out of my way (the plane in Karl’s Bay was particularly disappointing, since I figured out how to get there on my own without even reading the note). In the end it just didn’t feel like a good use of my time unless it happened to synchronize with a main story lead.
Which brings us to the end of the game. I liked it. It was fine. I’m glad I finished the game 2 days after the “Goldenloop” update which apparently added the extended ending. But I never really felt invested in the world enough to care all that much, which is ultimately, I think, what made it a good game but not a great game.
Still, it’s the kind of game where you get out what you put in to some extent, so I could see people with a little more patience or more interest in messing with the loadout having a much better time with it.
p.s. Shift didn’t feel like it worked as well as the similar powers in Dishonored, which was weird.
p.p.s. Getting the wolf mask just seems like such a hassle, why would anyone ever do that? I guess if you can infuse it then maybe.
p.p.p.s. Same with the residuum experiment in The Complex. Why would you go through all that trouble to get one trinket when by the end of the game you’re drowning in trinkets? If it were a unique trinket, sure, but I don’t know if there even are any unique trinkets. I was getting duplicates of gold trinkets by the end, and not even from Visionaries.
p.p.p.p.s. I’ve been watching The Prisoner (1967) and it’s given me a new appreciation for Deathloop, which I feel like took a lot of inspiration from the show, in a good way. - Disco Elysium (2019)
Synopsis: You wake up after a bender, not able to remember anything, and then you kind of just have to take it from there.
RPGs often give you a sense of ownership over your character. You’ve made them into who they are, you’ve written their story to be what you want it to be. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to the end of an RPG and felt like I had to let go of that ownership, that the character was now taking back control of their own story. But that’s what happened with Disco Elysium. It was a surprisingly moving and personal experience, and I don’t feel like I can write a thesis-based, detailed review. So instead, here are just three moments that made me glad this game exists.
All of these are from late in the game, so spoiler warning for everything.
I. The Founding of Disco Elysium
The church was where everything turned.
Sure, having your entire psyche split up into discrete entities with whom you regularly converse (these conversations making up at least half the dialogue in the game) is a little odd. And there are obviously some differences—different names and geographies, different cultures, different history—that set this world apart. But it’s not that crazy, right?
But the church that eats sound…is a little spooky. And then you learn about Dolores Dei, and it sure seems like she was not, in fact, human, and you don’t know what to do with that.
This world is starting to feel a little darker, a little heavier than you initially thought. This is not just just a fun, weird little game is it?
Yeah, no, it turns out the world (which may or may not be a planet) is composed of islands of matter surrounded by vast swaths of what could best be described as entropic fog called the Pale. The Pale is difficult to navigate, and impossible to pass through unscathed.
The church that eats sound? It’s got a tiny hole in it, a tiny gap in reality, which it seems is essentially a seed of Pale. And the effects of this seed are likely more wide-ranging than a spooky anti-auditory phenomenon. The district of Martinaise is steeped in a sort of malaise of failure: failed relationships, failed businesses, failed revolutions, failed recoveries. This failure, it is posited, might actually stem from the Pale, its entropic effects tilting the scales ever so slightly toward ruin.
So what do you do with a hole in reality that’s slowly destroying everything in the vicinity?
You build a goddamn dance club around it. A dance club called Disco Elysium.
II. Discovering What Was Always Here
What’s the harm in indulging a nice old woman? Sure, phasmids, so good at hiding hardly anyone’s ever seen one but they definitely exist. Why not?
Your partner might be a little annoyed that you’re running around checking traps for a cryptid, but hey, you need the exercise.
And when all that turns up nothing, as you knew it would—even if a little part of you was starting to hope it wouldn’t—and it seems this friendly old woman is about to have her heart broken, why not give her some encouragement? Why not believe in the extraordinary, the intangible, that which can never be found but can never be disproven? Why not, if it keeps you going?
And then, at the end, you see it. You speak to it. In that moment the little part of you that hoped is now the whole of you, and anything is possible.
III. Letting Go
So this is where your journey ends, even as he continues on. His old friends might forgive him, or maybe not. His new friend might be a light in the dark, or maybe not. He might, truly, change, or maybe not.
You hope you’ve done enough. You hope you’ve molded him into someone that won’t just survive the world but fight for it. You hope, as you watch him drive away towards whatever destiny awaits, that something beautiful is going to happen.
You know, also, that it already has. - Going Under (2020)
Synopsis: You just got an unpaid internship at a startup that makes flavored energy drinks. Then it becomes a very different game than what that sounds like.
Going Under is a sharply-written satire of Silicon Valley startups, leviathan mega-corporations, and the terrible things they do. What makes it more than that, though, is the cast of characters, all of whom are delightfully quirky. Oh, and the whole beating-up-goblins-with-office-supplies thing. For all its charm, it is a difficult game, and while I found the challenge satisfying for most of my playthrough I admit I got a little too frustrated toward the end and turned on Assist Mode; real gamers will probably be fine with it though.
My main complaint aside from the frustration (although this definitely contributed to the frustration) is that when your weapon breaks you don’t automatically switch to the next weapon; this combined with automatically picking weapons up when rolling over them while not holding anything meant I often found myself fighting for my life with a stapler when I had a perfectly good sword in my inventory. It would be nice if you could automatically switch, or if you could at least have a button that always switches to a slot with a weapon in it (if possible) rather than just switching to the next slot which may or may not have a weapon in it.
Anyway, all in all Going Under is a fun game with good values, and Aggro Crab came out against NFTs so that’s cool. - Hyper Light Drifter (2016)
Synopsis: Honestly your guess is as good as mine.
This game has the most beautiful opening cinematic ever and that is the extent of my review. - Immortals: Fenyx Rising (2020)
Synopsis: You wake up after a shipwreck to discover that everyone’s been turned to stone. Your quest to turn them back will lead you to what feels like a slightly arbitrary selection of the Olympian gods, who are all trapped in ironic forms.
God it hurts me to include an Ubisoft game on here, but I give credit where it’s due, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising is…inoffensive; even…fun. It’s good, alright? It’s not groundbreaking, it’s not going to join the pantheon of great games, it’s not going to haunt my dreams, but it’s fine. It’s charming, there’s no gratuitous child murder, no dead family members, some of the puzzles were actually interesting, cheesing the puzzles was sometimes more fun than the puzzles themselves, and I was only ridiculously overpowered for like a third of the game.
Does it have Ubisoft towers? Of course it has Ubisoft towers, but there’s only 5, and being able to climb up any part of them makes it a relatively quick and easy chore, and gliding off in any direction definitely beats taking a zip line or jumping into a pile of hay. And the world is pretty; it’s not breathtaking or particularly interesting, but it’s pretty, and diverse enough to not get too boring.
The gods were entertaining (favorite: Athena (obviously), surprise runner-up: Ares, most disappointing: Hephaestus [oh cool, we’re doing the “true art comes from pain” thing]), the story was decent—though, as with AC: Valhalla the game potentially suffers from allowing players to do things in any order: because I did Ares’s quests last Fenyx’s brother showed up after she’d already proven herself, so that dynamic felt well-earned and like a satisfying conflict, which I don’t think it would have if I were just starting out. Also, meeting him right before tackling Mount Olympus just felt right, pacing-wise. Like, it would’ve felt weird if I met him and then travelled around the whole island without running into him, and then he just showed up again at the end. I just feel weird when a game lets me make its story worse, and while all open-world games run into this problem to some extent, Ubisoft has a way of making it a feature instead of a bug (but like, not in a good way).
Still, though, I had fun, didn’t yell at it more than any other game with mediocre platforming, and I don’t regret playing it.
Also, love a customizable HUD.
p.s. I haven’t played Breath of the Wild but based on what I’ve seen I think this is both more and less than a BotW rip-off, for whatever that’s worth. And narratively it is both more and less than a Hades rip-off, for that matter.
p.p.s. As with all Ubisoft games, if I’d played it longer I’d probably have liked it less, so I quit while it was ahead and didn’t get to all of the side quests, including the Hephaestus heist quest that I’m not convinced was actually going to be a heist quest.
p.p.p.s. I found out you can just guess the lyre melodies, which is cool.
p.p.p.p.s. It would’ve been nice if the wings had perks and weren’t just skins. Maybe even make them special, like have 1-3 wings that are just standard and then the rest have like an upside/downside thing, maybe trading off navigation boosts for combat boosts or vice versa. Just feels like a missed opportunity. - Machinarium (2009)
Synopsis: You’re a little robot dude who’s trying to stop the evil robots from doing evil robot stuff.
The hand-drawn art and animations, the wonderful soundtrack (which I’ve actually owned for years after getting into Tomáš Dvořák through the Samorost soundtrack)—it’s just a good time.
Some of the puzzles are a little unintuitive, but I didn’t mind looking up the occasional walkthrough because the puzzles didn’t really feel like the point, and none are particularly long or tedious so you can pretty quickly move on to the next one.
Short too, which is a nice change of pace. - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021)
Synopsis: Dr. Nefarious is ripping apart the multiverse, and it’s up to Ratchet & Clank to stop him! But also there are girl versions! (Ok, that’s not entirely fair, they’re better characters than that, but it does sometimes come across that way.)
Definitely did not have the same frustrating experience I had with the 2016 game, partly because all the weapons are at least sort of viable against bosses, partly because ammo drops in boss fights seem a little more generous, and partly because with the Arena fights I could just grind all the weapons up to level 5 while also getting all the raritanium I needed (don’t fall for the lure of the Arena battles that specifically give raritanium as a reward—Francois will give you 3 or 4 raritanium and he’s way faster to beat than even the undead grunthor (you can beat Francois in the time it takes Sue to enter the arena)). That being said, I don’t know that any of the boss fights really stick out to me as being particularly memorable.
I also don’t know that all the haptics really added anything to the experience for me, and honestly I kinda didn’t like them. I like a good rumble as much as the next guy, but I’ve never seen the appeal of trying to make a controller feel less like a controller. Having to press harder to use one weapon than another doesn’t really immerse me in the game or make me relate to the character, it just makes me not want to use that weapon.
My final nitpick is that, while I generally enjoyed the platforming, I occasionally got screwed over by camera positioning, particularly when trying to land a big jump on a small platform, as the camera would often angle itself in such a way that it was really difficult to tell where I was actually going to land.
Other than that the game was pretty much an improvement on the 2016 release. Good story, great graphics, beautiful animation, and the pocket dimensions and Blizon crystal shifting really take advantage of the PS5’s hardware.
p.s. Someone clearly watched “The Beast Below” and “Time-Heist” episodes of Doctor Who. Not that I’m complaining. - Star Wars: Episode I – Racer (1999)
Synopsis: Now this is, in fact, podracing.
A fun racer with a steep (if not necessarily high) learning curve that rewards mastery. I obviously can’t separate my experience playing the game now from my nostalgia for playing the game as a kid (technically, it took me 20 years to beat this game), but I think it’s legitimately a good racer, with a wide array of vehicles and maps—the maps are especially diverse, not just aesthetically but mechanically, with a number of different obstacles, terrains, and shortcuts to master.
Also a surprisingly complex market system that the game does not explain to you at all and that if you aren’t interacting with from the beginning you won’t be able to get the most out of (which the game also does not tell you).
Also I got my first (and probably only) ever Platinum trophy for this game, which is cool. - Valley (2016)
Synopsis: You’re exploring a valley. Look at all the trees and such. Isn’t it pretty. Definitely nothing weird happening here.
I went into this thinking it was going to be a largely chill platformer about, I don’t know, becoming one with nature or something.
And it is. For a bit. Until it isn’t. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say if you’ve passed on this because you also thought it was just a chill platformer about nature, consider giving it a look. Also, running really fast and then jumping really far is very fun.
I also didn’t think I was going to care about the story, that it was largely there just to provide some kind of progression for the game, but by the end I was fully invested. And for a story delivered entirely though audio logs and notes it’s pretty good, both in terms of the writing (which while relatively broad is still engaging), and in terms of the pacing; the audio logs are cued automatically at various points in the game and don’t interrupt the action, while the notes that you find scattered about are usually relatively short, so you don’t feel bogged down by lore dumps.
My complaints about the game are largely minor level design quibbles that aren’t worth going into. There’s also the fact that the game has you choose your character’s gender but then you never actually see your character or hear them outside of the two times in the entire game where they make like a gasping/grunting noise. It’s just kind of a weird choice, you know? Oh and also it feels like your character is crouching the whole time when it should feel like they’re 8 feet tall given that they’re in this giant exoskeleton. I don’t know if this is a camera thing or the environment wasn’t scaled properly or what, but it really bugged me, especially when I was walking upright through seemingly normal-sized air vents (i.e. the kind you would normally be crawling through).
Anyway, overall this was a surprisingly good game and I don’t why I’d never heard of it until I happened to see it in a PS Store sale. Seems like a game people should know about.
p.s. There’s a bit where the game refers to quantum immortality in a way that is just not at all what quantum immortality is, which was annoying, but then later there’s another reference to quantum immortality that actually describes it correctly (which reference then gets restated as the incorrect version again, but whatever) so, in case that bugs you too, I just want to make it clear that they do actually know what quantum immortality is, they just explain it badly at first..and then also at third.
p.p.s. It’s weird that I said the level design issues weren’t worth going into and then listed a bunch of stuff that bothered me much less than one of the main level design issues.
SO, for the record, the main one that bugged me was the on-rails section where everything about the game is telling you to just keep going and enjoy the ride, but then they keep placing chests and stuff along the side that you have to stop to go get, completely destroying the momentum they’re trying to build up. And it was incredibly silly hopping around a platform to get to a chest while the music was still acting as if something super cool was happening.
It’s a self-sabotaging design decision that compromises the integrity of the game for the sake of trophy hunting and collectibles, and apparently I’m still kind of annoyed about it.
Honorable Mentions
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020)
- Need for Speed Heat (2019)
- Strider (2014)
- The Swapper (2013)
Certain of Eventual Failure 