Every now and again, you get a year of games that feels a little in limbo. Sometimes it’s a generational shift as developers focus on newer hardware. Sometimes it’s the culmination of lots of small things, regular delays as studios struggle to find the secret sauce.
It’s probably notable that spending on video games declined every single quarter in 2022, with the proviso that the fourth quarter figures aren’t in yet. The industry as a whole still earned literal squillions, but it’s nice to have a hard data point to back up the nagging lack of fulfilment that’s hovered over the last twelve months.
There, of course, have been some outstanding highlights. I feel like most people forgot the year started with a breath of fresh air for Pokemon in Pokemon: Legends Arceus, a much-needed re-envisioning of the franchise. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel was a cracking card game, one whose media spotlight has been overshadowed by the excellent Marvel Snap of late. And then there’s the hyper success of titles like Raft – which has sold more than many AAA games, by the way – Elden Ring, Stray, Ready or Not, Total Warhammer 3, Lost Ark, V Rising, Cult of the Lamb, and lots more.
But most of the year has been marked more by what’s missing. No Starfield. No Hogwarts Legacy. No Dead Island 2. The Avatar game got postponed. That awesome Replaced sci-fi platformer got bumped due to the Ukraine invasion. Everything that happened with the Stalker sequel. Redfall was pushed back. Forspoken slipped into 2023. And we’ll probably get Windows 12 before Star Citizen’s story campaign, Squadron 42, is done. Or bootable, depending on what fork of the English language has been deployed to explain the situation there.
So it hasn’t been a splashy year – particularly for Microsoft, which didn’t add an Xbox exclusive to Game Pass until July, although the service as a whole has been excellent. But there’s still been plenty to enjoy. Here’s what’s kept me busy or stuck with me the most, in no particular order, with the exception of my top game, which I’ve listed last.
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen (Bungie)
Destiny 2 is one of those games that I always keep installed on my hard drive. And while I haven’t gone back to The Witch Queen at all in the second half of the year, the 80-ish hours I spent with it earlier in the year were an absolute blast.
I’d probably rate The Witch Queen alongside Forsaken and Rise of Iron as some of Bungie’s best work, although I know folks have a lot of love for The Taken King. Playing the campaign, in co-op with my partner, doing PvPvE runs in Gambit, the odd bit of Crucible and the occasional raid – it was a total blast.
Other things always keep getting in the way, so I probably won’t end up checking back in with Destiny 2 until Lightfall drops. That’s a shame in the sense that I know there’s more content there that I’d really enjoy. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you should enjoy what you get out of the time you spend, not lamenting what could have been.
Yum Cha (Quokka Games)
I’m always a sucker for good, accessible games you can share with a crowd. The Aussie-developed Yum Cha, which I got to play at PAX this year, immediately went into my board game rotation.
Fundamentally, it’s a simplified version of Mahjong without any of the complex hand requirements. There’s a neat little requirement where you can pick up takeout cards to bank points, and the cards have superb designs with phonetics for each of the items.
It’s pleasant as hell and a cheap gift to boot, provided you don’t immediately end up forking out over a hundred for the actual yum cha you’ll want to have afterwards.
The Quarry (Supermassive Games)
A lot of folks would have popped Immortality in their list, but I found Immortality runs into the same problem that every other Sam Barlow game has: the ending. If you haven’t had it spoiled for you or revealed wildly out of order, Sam Barlow’s FMV-driven games tend to run into a wall where you end up having to spam keywords or clicks just to find the last few videos.
Immortality, in particular, has a bit of a quirk with its rewind mechanic, too, which stopped some videos from triggering. My partner and I would hear the ominous sound, know a clip was there, but it’d take two or three minutes finding the right point and proper rewind speed before we’d be able to watch the rewards.
So I’ve popped for The Quarry here instead. I won’t say its highs hit as much as Immortality. It’s certainly not perfect either – Until Dawn’s characters at least talked about what transpired, whereas The Quarry just ends out of nowhere. But the prologue is excellent, the characters are fun, the overall game is a step up from their previous work, and The Quarry nails the theme. It’s not for everyone, but if you love that schlocky teen horror vibe, The Quarry is a blast.
Betrayal at Club Low (Cosmo D Studios)
Here’s the pitch that sold me on Betrayal at Club Low. Imagine you’re playing a tabletop game where you’re trying to infiltrate a night club to rescue someone, and you’re doing so by delivering pizza. All of your skill checks are resolved using pizza dice, which can be customised by applying different toppings – toppings which can regenerate your health, generate more money, or other things.
If it sounds completely bizarre, that’s because it is. It reminds me a lot of Jazzpunk’s zaniness, which is par for the course for Cosmo D games, although Betrayal at Club Low is more of a mechanically-driven game than their past works.
Either way, if you like funny writing and tabletop vibes, Betrayal at Club Low is a great way to spend $10. There’s a free demo on Steam too.
Katana Zero (Askiisoft)
I remember reporting on Katana Zero when it was temporarily banned in Australia, but I never got around to playing the game until about mid-2022. I’d realised I had a lapsed subscription to the old Humble Bundle service, and after digging through my unused Steam keys, I figured it was worth giving the platformer a go.
What an absolute blast of an experience. There are very few games that I play where I binge and binge until I’m completely done, but Katana Zero was one of them. Excellent design, superb music, and a great balance between the challenge and checkpoints. It’s also going for about $12 right now, which is bonkers for how good a game it is.
Dawncaster (Wanderlost Interactive)
This basically became my new Slay the Spire on mobiles. Dawncaster follows the classic deckbuilding vibes, although rather than having the FTL-style pathway, your interactions are drawn from a separate deck (a bit like the Pathfinder game, if you remember that).
Structurally, though, Dawncaster plays out exactly as you’d want. You get six playable classes from the off, all of which use blue, green, red or yellow mana to cast certain spells. There are boons you can unlock that give you access to new abilities, much like Slay’s relics. Future playthroughs give you extra XP for each character, unlocking new starting abilities and affinities to enable even more broken builds.
For a deckbuilder that plays out on phones, and for $6.49/$8 (Android/iOS), it’s well worth it. It doesn’t have the same complexity as Slay, but it makes up for that with a deeper story, bigger mix of characters, vastly better performance, and some excellent art.
Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over The Age)
Citizen Sleeper’s soundtrack has been on my playlist all year, so it’s worth shouting out for that element alone. But Citizen Sleeper’s also a really cleverly written tabletop RPG, starring you as an android doomed to planned obsolescence.
Fighting that reality, you come across a string of characters on the Eye who help or hinder your survival. You roll a number of dice every day to try and get by in a lovely sci-fi parallel for the gig economy that powers so much of our own lives. It’s on Game Pass as well, but it’d play just as nicely on the Switch, the Steam Deck, or even streamed through a TV.
Elden Ring (FromSoftware)
I’m definitely not a Soulsborne-fan. I had the benefit of working under someone who absolutely adored the entire series, so there was never any pressure on me to absorb that franchise.
Mind you, I did give it a red hot go. I spent about 25 hours in Bloodborne before eventually tapping out – the loading times on the original PS4 eventually got too much. I tried to get to grips with the parrying in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but after the Lady Butterfly fight, I was genuinely exhausted and haven’t made a serious effort with the game since then. Demon’s Souls is an incredible game – I remember going to its original preview event in Australia, and I played the title at launch on PS5 – but again, I ran into the same walls.
Elden Ring’s accessibility didn’t make those barriers melt away. But having that freedom to tackle events at my own pace has opened the Soulsborne-world more to me.
I started with the most un-Souls like of approaches: Glintstone Pebble and, if available, a horse. I exclusively did that for the first 25 hours of the game, functioning as the most mana-efficient glass cannon in the land. My idea was that I never needed more than 20 vigour if I had enough intelligence to plough through enemies quickly enough.
What actually enabled the whole approach, though, was the fact that Elden Ring didn’t care that I never encountered a real boss (Margit) until the 20-hour mark. I simply picked a direction and wandered, exploring like a tourist might. The fact that I enjoyed doing that for almost as much as the time I spent in Bloodborne is a testament to its world design, too. But that intro helped get me through the rest of my 130-hour playthrough. I needed that space and familiarity to enjoy reading the game, instead of simply grinding against it out of obligation.
Would I go back and give Sekiro, Dark Souls or Bloodborne another go after the Elden Ring experience? I’m not sure. Maybe Bloodborne, if ported to PC. I enjoyed its world and setting the most. Maybe even a simple PS5 remaster that cuts the 40-second-long loading screens would do the trick.
But I could also just go back and play Elden Ring some more. There’s so much variety and depth to the world. Why not just try a colossal weapon build? Or something that uses all of those spears and swords that I’ve typically ignored.
What an absolute triumph.
Dune: CHOAM & Richese / Dune: Ixians & Tleilaxu (Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, Peter Olotka, Ilya Baranovsky)
Despite everything I said above about Elden Ring, it’s still one of those games that I couldn’t exclusively recommend to everybody because of its mechanical difficulty. That’s not a knock against it – hell, I’m someone who put in the effort to get two Grandmaster accounts in StarCraft, so I clearly love bashing my head against a wall.
But not everyone is like that. The Dune board game, on the other hand, is really something else, no matter who plays it or how much experience they’ve had coming in.
This year was my first experience with the new Dune expansions, Ixians & Tleilaxu and CHOAM & Richese. They basically add four extra factions to the game, as well as a host of advanced tidbits and leader skills for those who want to play with them.
CHOAM and the Tleilaxu, as far as I’m concerned, are completely game-changing. If you’ve never played, Dune runs on a series of phases as players fight for control of Arrakis. One of those phases is the charity phase, where players can receive a couple of spice if they don’t have enough (or any) money left in their reserve.
With the CHOAM, that changes. The CHOAM receives all of the charity money – and then redistributes to players if necessary.
The Tleilaxu have a similarly absurd level of power creep, although theirs kicks in a little later in gameplay. As you lose troops in battle throughout the course of a game, Dune entitles players to a certain amount of “free” revivals. Since the Tleilaxu thematically control the Axlotl Tanks technology (which has its own sickening backstory), it makes sense that the Tleilaxu gain spice for every revival that takes place. So while you might not start with the money to make plays immediately, after a couple of turns the Tleilaxu get super rich, super fast, making for some incredible shifts in power.
It all adds up to a Dune experience that’s more volatile, and also more conducive for newer players as well. It’s also relatively easy to introduce new folks into Dune’s madness. Sure, the game might literally end on the first turn. Yes, you might have just lost half your army because a sandstorm shredded your troops. You might lose a battle before it even begins, and that’s before any of the constant bidding, and bribery kicks in.
But it’s also pure magic. The chaos at the heart of that unfairness, randomness and potential for abuse doesn’t just thematically fit the world of Dune. Even if you get completely shafted one round, the joy of absolutely obliterating the rest of the table when the phase that comes along to trigger your hilariously overpowered ability never gets old. It also means you always have the chance of influencing the game’s outcome somehow, whether it’s through your power, traitor cards, alliances, or just flatout paying to shift the odds of somebody else’s battle. (Need to earn a quick buck? Offer another player information on the traitors you’re holding of their leaders!)
Also, any game where a laser gun and a shield generates a nuclear explosion is always worth a laugh. Especially if you’re triggering the nuke and the other player loses a lot of units as a result of your sci-fi shitposting.
Alex Walker is a freelance writer, media advisor and former editor of Kotaku Australia.
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