Best Games I Played in 2022

Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 (Rollback Edition)

Xrd got rollback which means it is now playable online in a form that reflects offline play. I still love this game, it is the fighting game that I keep returning to. When a game eclipses my desire for novelty I know I am stuck for life. I usually like playing random fighting games and when I feel like my time is better spent practicing one instead of something new it means I’ve really fallen in love. I will be stuck playing Xrd forever and I love it. 300-400 hours in I still feel like I don’t understand 95% of my character. I don’t think there is anyone in the world who is actually good at the game and that is a fun feeling.

Norco

Games are rarely all that personal. It is really hard to fit an evocative narrative into an interactive space. Norco feels like it could only have been made by someone who literally lived in the shadow of the Oil Industry. The writing is clever, the gameplay is unique and fun. The characters are compelling. Norco is just an intensely solid experience

Solar Ash

Solar Ash is a perfect video game. It made me imagine a world where instead of hundreds of millions of dollars spent trying to make me cry to earn Art Clout, you could instead fund like 50 games about moving around. Wouldn’t that be a better world to live in? Regardless, it took literally 10 seconds of touching the game to understand that I loved it. Heart Machine really really gives a shit about movement in a way that makes me feel seen. It lets me know that other people out there give as much of a shit about how characters move as I do.

Neo The World Ends With You

I haven’t finished this game so I can’t speak to the full experience but I absolutely can speak to the starting experience. The original The World Ends With You is the game on the Nintendo DS that justifies the console existing. It is impossible to separate that game from that hardware and I highly recommend playing it on a DS if you have the ability. Neo:TWEWY has translated that strange specific gameplay feeling perfectly onto a console. It is a testament to how Art Direction is far far more important than budget. It is one of the best looking games of the past few years by far.

Elden Ring

Dark Souls filtered through Breath of the Wild seemed like it would dilute the strength of both of those experiences, but it turns out that if you put in an absurdly large amount of time, effort, and accumulated craft you can get 75-90% of both. The sheer scale of Elden Ring is disgusting, no game should be this large and this dense. I mean this as both a compliment and as an insult.

Maiden and Spell

This is a video game that legitimately only needs more people to play it. The only thing holding this game back is that it hasn’t hit critical mass where you can get games without asking people on discord. Simple controls, simple concepts, wickedly difficult competitive bullet hell game. I love it, I wish I didn’t have to hope and pray that people are online or awake so I can play it.

Inscryption

I think over time the formal choices and shock of playing Inscryption wore off, but it ultimately is a pretty fun ride. I think the ultimate ending soured my extreme fondness for the Penultimate ending.

Outer Wilds Echoes of the Eye

I didn’t complete this because it got a bit too spooky for me to want to continue. Which is a real shame because it just is more Outer Wilds in a way which I didn’t think was possible. It isn’t as good as the main game in the amount that I played, maybe the ending also rules.

Slay The Spire: Downfall

This just is more Slay the Spire. I really wish I could choose to just skip playing the basic difficulty levels to get to the meat of the game. The card pool is much stronger than the base game which makes it hard to judge how well balanced the whole thing is. I still put in more hours with it than most games I’ve played in my lifetime. Slay the Spire is good, this is an expansion for it that is slightly worse but still great.

Metal Gear Solid Revengeance

Rules of Nature baby. Is it a good video game? It’s ok. Is it a good experience? Hell yeah.

Dragon’s Dogma

What a strange piece of work. I’ve tried starting this game so many times and it just sets off so many mental alarm bells that made me not want to keep going. An Elder Scrolls game made by the monster hunter team making a game that has too many systems and no direction is exactly what you’d expect from those words. When I actually broke through though, the game is a bizzare accomplishment of combat design and progression. There definitely isn’t any other game like it, and I enjoyed my time overall.

Last Call BBS

I only caught the tail end of old computers but this game makes me feel like I was there the whole time. A love letter to an age of computing when everything was possible and making things was a hobby. It has just enough of the friction of the time to feel correct.

Venineth

When I think of making games, all I really think about is moving abstract objects in abstract spaces. I really only care about mechanics and movement systems in particular. Venineth is a game I feel like I saw in my dreams. Move a sphere around spaces that look like early-2000s Graphic Card Box Art in the best way. It feels a bit too much like a puzzle platformer at times but when it cuts loose it really shines.

Deathloop

A cute conceit that is executed well. The writing is good, the voice acting of the two main characters is great. If you have liked Arcane games in the past, you will like this one. I didn’t beat it but I will continuously intend to get around to it for the next 5 to 6 years.

Vampire Survivors

I saw Vampire Saviors graphics when I closed my eyes for a couple weeks. This is not being metaphorical, I literally saw the gems from Vampire Survivors floating in the void when my eyelids went down. A great video game.

Splatoon 3

A surprisingly gorgeous game with a still novel concept done really well. It made me want to go thrifting cause having cool clothes is fun.

Citizen Sleeper

You play as an emulated consciousness inside of a robot body owned by a corporation, the original version of you sold a brain scan for money. You escaped to The Eye, a derelict space station, but you still need proprietary Corpo Drugs to live. Work in the gig economy to avoid breaking down. This shit rules, if this doesn’t sound cool idk what to tell you cause that is everything I want out of an aesthetic.

I’ve never played a game that resonated on a personal level as much as this one. Being offered essentially everything I’ve wanted on a real physical level and learning that it wasn’t as easy a decision as I thought it would be was a profoundly strong moment for me.

I started this game and beat it in one very long sitting, which isn’t something I really ever do. It has a real magic that captures the best parts of narrative games and board games. Putting dice into slots to get resources just felt good. I love this game a lot, I really want to go back to play the new content, but I also made a really difficult decision to leave the space station behind at the end of my playthrough. It was so difficult to do that. I don’t want to cheapen that decision by just waltzing back in to a new playthrough. There will be a time in the future where I do go back.

Music

Glass Beach

Glass Beach is a new Genre, they have inspired a new genre. I hope to live in the Glass Beach decade they have created.

Vince Staples

Vince just keeps being more and more essential listening. He isn’t trying to make music for me but he knows who is listening in.

Origami Angel

Lets all just be glad there are still good emo/pop-punk/mathy albums coming out all the time. There was no guarantee of this a decade ago so lets all appreciate it. This is a fun album with a couple of real slappers on there.

Prince Daddy and the Hyena

The last Prince Daddy album is one of my favorites of the past few years. This does not reach those heights. That means it is merely a pretty good record.

Bladee

Ascend into pure feeling, Bladee was on a heater this year with Spider and Crest. Once you remove your need to have him be a perfect lyricist in his second language you enter into the space where you feel everything in a better way.

454

During 2020 I spent a lot of time messing around on DJ software with my friends, just broadcasting and listening to stuff together. Before going live I would usually turn all the knobs and see if I could find something interesting. I liked speeding things songs up and deforming them a lot but would never usually put that out on the air. 454 has proven that I am a coward, and that shit rules. This music is honest to the feeling of listening and enjoying the sensation of sounds. Rapid fire weirdness that is inviting the listener to live in the same space as 454.

Anime

Arcane

I’m glad I heard enough buzz about this show that I actually tried it. It didn’t seem like something that would be for me but ultimately it was a really compelling show. They used the ten episode run time to very economically develop a good set of characters without ever overplaying their hand.

Mobile Suit Gundam Zeta

The original Tomino Gundams are not actually all that much fun to watch episode to episode. You really gotta enjoy the concept of Giant Robots to find the individual parts compelling. The majority of the shows are about sending out the protagonists in Large Machines built for war to deal with an immediate conflict. Around the edges of that though is a fascinating set of politics around the issues of war and machines written 35 years after WWII. Gundam is endlessly more fun to think about and talk about than actually watch. Zeta Gundam is by far the best of the 3 shows cause it is more willing to engage with the strange politics than the other two shows. When the episodes are good they are great and when they are average they’re really bad. I really like having watched the Tomino Gundams.

Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ

A strange tone shift from the bleak cynical ending of Zeta, ZZ Gundam starts off the first quarter of its runtime as a kids show targeted at literal children as opposed to teens. It slowly creeps back into the weird tones of the first two series and ends up being about on par with the other two. It is a good resolution to the trilogy of Tomino Gundams. The show made me happy but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone not really invested.

Char’s Counterattack

Boy talk about missing the point of Gundam. I can’t believe this is the actual ending to the first Tomino Gundam run compared to ZZ Gundam’s ending. Profoundly disappointing to see the capstone film just ignore that the second and third series happened. I wouldn’t put it on this list for quality but I might as well complete my thoughts about the series up to this point.

“Wow Cool Robot” as a meme has done a large amount of PR work for Gundam. The shows really are 90% about Big Cool Robots, everything else that people talk about is far less of the shows than they want it to be. I truly understand wanting to only focus on the cool parts of a thing and not thinking about the vast majority of it, that’s what being a Kindom Hearts Fan is like.

I want to be clear that I like Gundam, but also I think the appeal of Giant Robots is that they are scary, inhuman machines that are ominously made to look like people. Each series resolves every problem by sending the robot out to kick ass and even though the protagonists are harmed, the shows do ultimately seem to think that it is necessary to solve these problems with the big cool robots they lovingly animate and use to sell toys.

Gundam Wing

Forget everything else I said about Gundam shows, Gundam Wing fucking rules. What if we trade in the broad fascinating themes for actually good character interactions and plots? What if we trade in deeply unlikable romance subplots with ugly people and instead have a group of characters that want things for ideological reasons and have to reckon with the consequences of that? Far far less time is spent on the cool robots than any other Gundam but the trade is that I actually really cared about what happened to everyone. I gave a shit about the fights because I wanted to see what the main characters did. The final third falls pretty flat but so be it.

Gundam Wing Endless Waltz

An OVA that decided to shore up the weak ending of the show. It isn’t a bad goal but it turns out there were a lot of things that didn’t need explanations. Some of the explanations added make me feel like the creators didn’t get the same joy out of the show that I did. I think it ultimately is worth watching but it isn’t necessary. If you craved large machines doing combat, they added it back in just for you. I like the new Mech designs generally less than the old ones but they are more detailed cause they had more money which is cool.

Kyousougiga

Every time I rewatch Kyousougiga it continues to absolutely rule. There is a real love to the characters and the setting. The show really understands what it is like to have relationships with other people. The characters get mad at one another and reconcile in ways that feel earned and authentic. The setting is a unique weird drawn city that nobody can leave, with a love of color that feels unique a decade later. I want shows to look like this, the character, setting, and art design are things that should be copied.

Hit me up if it looks interesting at all because the official translation is actively detrimental to the show compared to the fan one I use.

Aria the Animation

When Aria is good, it is a supremely calm gorgeous early-2000s slice of life anime. I love the digipaint style. When it is bad it is a really really mediocre early 2000s slice of life anime with budget issues.

Yurei Deco

I watched this for two reasons, 1. It was made by Science Saru, Masaaki Yuasa’s studio which means it is definitely made by animation nerds, and 2. The color scheme is really similar to Kyousougiga and I feel I should make the effort to watch things that have elements of things I love. This show is surprisingly weightless given both of those factors. It doesn’t do a ton with its themes or payoff any character arcs all that much. It is pleasant to look at and I’m happy I watched it. If you look at it and it seems interesting, it is an ok time. It feels reductive to talk about art with numbers but the phrase that comes up when I think of this is 6/10, a fine show that is slightly better than average.

Last Exile

The definition of a pretty good early-2000s show. A perfectly mid show with some high points and no real down points. I love the early care put into the problem of how to integrate chunky 3d models with 2d artwork. Where a lot of later shows would steal off this one, they don’t have as much care because they know it can be done well. A pleasant watch that I really liked.

Books

Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin

Holy shit this book was written in 1969 and it rules.

The City and The City - China Miéville

Disco Elysium both stole so much from this book but also did it better. There’s no shame in being worse than Disco Elysium though, most things are. This is a really good detective novel in a fascinating setting which is interacted with quite skillfully.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

It is always a treat when you feel like a piece of media is made for weirdos like yourself. This 1970s italian man wrote weird little prose poems about strange cities, the people that live there, and the people that discover them just for me.