The Best Games I Played in 2022

Are ya winning, son?                                                                                                                                                    I don't know.

Considering that I spent most of last year playing through some extremely long games, it's perhaps not a surprise that this year I gravitated towards games that offered a more condensed experience. Not necessarily games that could only be completed in a couple of hours (though there are a few that fit that description), but ones that you can pick up for 20-30 minutes, and then walk away feeling like you got something out of the experience.

That preference for shorter experiences explains some of the major absences on this list, so let's get them out of the way: I did not play Elden Ring, God of War: Ragnarok or Horizon Forbidden West. In part that's because they're all very long games and I was not in the mood for that this year, and partly because I have either a lack of experience with the previous games in those series/genres (I keep meaning to play the Soulsbourne games, and maybe this will be the year) or a lack of interest (I found the 2018 God of War pretty boring and not fun to play so didn't feel the need to run out and play the sequel). As such, those three behemoths of the year in gaming will not be on this list.

Before we get to the top ten, I have a few honourable mentions, which this year are a mix of older games that I played for the first time, games from this year that I really liked but just missed the cut, and ones that I didn't spend enough time with, but was impressed by what I saw. 

Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PlayStation, Xbox, PC) 

Grizzled Yakuza is about to have an extremely bad time

I picked away at this spinoff from the main Yakuza/Like a Dragon series over the course of the year and finally finished it just days before the new year started. While it didn't quite hit the same highs as Yakuza 0 did for me, it's easily one of the best games in the series and the shift from the beat-em-up combat of the earlier games to turn-based RPG mechanics worked fantastically well, adding an extra layer of over-the-top ridiculousness to a series that has always gone big and delivered. I'm glad that I'm all caught up on the mainline series in time for the next installment, the remake of Like a Dragon: Ishin! that comes out in February.

Pentiment (Xbox, PC) 

If you ever wished the Bayeux Tapestry was a game, that's pretty weird, but also Pentiment will suffice

I played some of Pentiment when it came out in November, but didn't really get into it enough to include it in the top ten, but it's a beautifully-realized and engrossing game about history, not just as a setting but as a theme to be explored through point-and-click adventure mechanics. One of the most distinctive games of the year and I'm looking forward to playing it more in 2023.

Super Kiwi 64 (Switch, PC) 

This looks so bad and so good at the same time

A delightful hit of nostalgia that mimics the style and feel of N64-era collectathons like Banjo-Kazooie, which does not overstay its welcome since it takes literally an hour and a half to finish. Not a deep experience by any means, but a really excellent recreation of a specific style and vibe. 

So now, here are the ten best games that I played in 2022. 

The Best Games I Played in 2021: Non-Yakuza Edition

Inscryption

 

Whereas last year I spent most of my time playing older games that I kept meaning to play but never got around to until the pandemic gave me plenty of time to play through an extremely long game like Persona 5, this year I split my time between playing through the Yakuza series and trying to keep up with some of the more notable titles of the year. As such my list for 2021 consists mainly of games that actually came out this year with a few older titles sprinkled in, and I've split them into two lists rather than the undifferentiated list of all games that I used last year since I feel like I can actually field a decent best of the year list. And I also put all the Yakuza games I played in their own list so that they don't swamp this one.

Probably the biggest absence worth mentioning before getting into it is Metroid Dread, which I haven't had time to play yet but which would almost certainly be on there given how much I love Metroidvanias, and by all account it seems like a great one. Feel free to mentally slot it anywhere in the top five, which I'm pretty sure is where it will end up when I actually get around to it.

The Best Games I Played in 2021: Yakuza Edition

What can I say, this game speaks to me

 

Every year, I like to set myself little cultural projects. Things I can whittle away at over the course of 12 months like watching 52 films directed by women, or watching more films from India, so that I can force myself to experience new things and step outside of my comfort zone.

This year, I decided that my project would be to play through all of the main games in the Yakuza series. Produced by Sega, the sprawling and long-running series of action-adventure/RPG games encompasses over a dozen titles at this point if you include spin-offs, some of which can only be played (legally) on consoles that are no longer available. So for this, I played through the seven games focused on the story of Kazuma Kiryu, a sentient slab of muscles with an extremely well-developed sense of morality who starts out as a mid-level Yakuza enforcer in the first game, rises to become head of the powerful Tojo Clan, then walks away from it and spends the rest of the series trying to escape from his criminal past with extremely limited success. It's an epic saga that covers 30 years of Kiryu's life, and features some of the best long-form storytelling the medium of video games has ever attempted.

It is also an extremely ridiculous, melodramatic run of games that features over the top characters, wild action, more shirtless rooftops fights than you could possibly imagine, and a dizzying array of side-quests and minigames that add up to a frankly exhausting amount of videogame. The balance the series strikes between how silly its story is and how deeply it cares for its characters makes for an intoxicating mix, and while I started playing them because I'd heard they were unbelievably fun and engrossing, I very quickly found myself being invested in the story and character of Kiryu, and the series' prolonged interest in exploring the inner life (and outer violence) of a man approaching middle-age, reckoning with all the pain he has caused and trying to build something better for the next generation.

I also fell in love with Kamurocho, a fictional entertainment district in Tokyo which provides the main setting for much of the series. Not only is it a very fun place to run around, get into fights, and sample minigames that range from simple (darts and pool) to intricate (slot car racing and running a cabaret club) to extremely seedy ("massages" and softcore video booths), but it feels like a living, breathing city where things change every time you start a new game. Some of this reflects technological advances over the course of the series, but it also underpins one of the recurring themes of the series; the battle between an older way of doing things rooted in loyalty and the messiness of humanity, and a newer, heartless and more corporate way of living. 

It's such a central idea to the games that there is a series-long subplot about how Kamurocho's one big public park, which serves as a home for the city's unhoused population, gets turned into a mall, forcing the people who previously lived there to eke out an even more meagre existence in the sewers. Not to throw all video games under the bus, since there are plenty of games out there that tackle big and complicated issues in innovative ways, but it is rare to see a series of this scale and prominence so interested in fundamental issues that shape modern life.

All that being said, the series is not without its flaws. Probably the biggest mark against it is the strain of transphobia which runs throughout, and while the games get better at handling their trans characters as they go along (to the extent that one of the most egregious substories from the third game was removed entirely when it was re-released as part of the remastered collection of 3, 4 and 5) at best it manages to be awkward at including them. This is not to say that all the violent crooks in this series of crime games should have good politics, far from it; many of the characters in the games are racist against Koreans and the Chinese, in fact their racism is central to the plots of at least two of the games, but there is always a sense that the Korean and Chinese characters in the game are people, whereas the trans characters in the game are, with very few exceptions, depicted as little more than jokes, and that runs counter to the warmth that can be found throughout the rest of the series.

Since these games are all pretty long and involved, and it took me pretty much the whole year to work through them, I thought I would do a whole list ranking them separate from my best games list, rather than have that list consist of seven Yakuza games and Inscryption. So with all that out of the way, here is my ranking of the mainline Yakuza games.

The Best Games I Played in 2020

Hades

Like many people, I found myself spending a lot more time at home this year. As the Coronavirus pandemic gathered steam in the spring, I started working from home, limiting travel, and looking for ways to occupy the many anxiety-riddled hours each day. Between reading Agatha Christie novels at an alarming rate and making a dent in the ever-growing list of films I've been meaning to watch (which I'll do another post on), I leaned on video games for comfort and escape, broadening my horizons a little by trying genres that I've previously been skeptical of, and ever so slightly reducing the backlog of games I've bought in sales over the years but never had the time to actually play (then buying more games in subsequent sales, thereby perpetuating the cycle). The games listed below (and ranked in no order other than chronological) were the ones that proved especially meaningful, and made the long stretches of worry and isolation a little more bearable. 

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 70 - 2014 Halloween Special

For the first time since starting the show in 2011, we have successfully managed to record and release a Halloween special. In keeping with the season, Joe and I talk about the things that scared us when we were young, the things that scare us now, and somehow manage to get distracted talking about Michael Parkinson.

Film Review: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Videogames are built upon repetition. Collect the rings, drop the blocks, perform a Fatality, these are the foundation upon which an entire medium and accompanying culture have grown. Each time through, the players might get a little bit better, they might keep failing at the same point, but the mechanics of the game remain essentially the same. But what if the characters carrying out that repetition had lives of their own? What must it be like to have to go through the same limited selection of motions and actions every day? And what of the bad guys, the ones who throw the punches and the barrels, who spend their days being the focal point of constant anger and frustration? To paraphrase Camus, should we imagine Donkey Kong happy?