The Best of 2023 post was fun and kind of interesting, and I never did one for 2022, the first year that I started making an effort to play new games to completion rather than gravitating back towards old favorites and replaying them into the dirt. So what were the games I recommend from 2022?
The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy are getting grouped together because they are both PS1 mascot platformer classics getting a rerelease. These two have always been loosely associated with one another, so I’m associating them here, too. These games have updated graphics and a couple of bonus features tossed in, like playable Coco in Crash 3 and the hidden level in Crash 1 being accessible as an optional level rather than requiring Game Genie codes to drop yourself into, but for the most part they are as they were in the 90s. They’re some of the best video games of the 90s and I recommend them to anyone who wishes Sonic had more than like three good video games, because they have a lot of that 90s cartoon energy while being actually fun to play.
Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of several indie games that I really liked but never finished and had lying around in my backlog when the project began. The unique rhythm-based dungeon crawling combined with a killer soundtrack makes this game a delight to play.
Going Under is a game about working for a tech start-up in Silicon Valley during the early-to-mid decline era, back when everyone was still living off of venture capital but there hadn’t been a new invention on the scale of the smart phone in a decade. You work at a startup that’s gone corporate, nobody here really believes in the idea except the founder-CEO, and that guy’s completely out of touch with reality. Everyone else is just hoping for a paycheck and an impressive looking resume credit. You’ve gotta hold things together long enough to pick up venture capital or else you’re going under – which is also a literal thing that you do by going into a dungeon to beat up the monster-themed employees of previous startups who occupied the same building, failed, and went under. It’s funny, it’s a fun dungeon crawler, and the game’s art style is hideous Corporate Memphis but that’s the joke and it works.
I wasn’t actually doing the new plan when I finished Graveyard Keeper, I just loved its goth Stardew Valley vibe and played through it and all its DLCs. In Graveyard Keeper, you have been teleported to a fantasy world where you have inherited a graveyard. People pay you to dispose of corpses properly, which you do by embalming the corpse, digging a hole, burying the coffin, and sticking a grave marker on it. Fancier grave markers and better embalming gives you various resources, and you can also do some farming on the side to take the heat off of food costs, maintain a church and write sermons to get people to give you more tithing, and go dungeoncrawling to help a cultist with a dark ritual. Ultimately there are six different people with six different projects in need of completion, from the cultist’s dungeoncrawling to the bishop’s church restoration/sermonizing to the merchant who wants a big pile of money, and when you finish them all, you open a portal back home.
The isekai elements are basically just an excuse for why you need to advance these six plotlines to completion and why you have no idea how anything works when you arrive, as nobody ever comments or cares about your mysterious origins. It’s Stardew Valley in a demon-haunted world, full of mysterious occult forces that you don’t really understand and can’t combat, just have to work around, and the gothic vibe means that what would otherwise be transparent “because gameplay, fuck you” systems instead come across as the acts of an unconscious, inchoate divinity that is neither just nor at all within your capability to challenge, so you’ll just have to deal.
Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 2 fought over the direction of the series. Far Cry 3 is a murder vacation focused on how much fun all the carnage is. It takes that seriously, drawing attention to how twisted by the violent delights the protagonist becomes, but its emphasis is still on the fact that, as fucked up as it is, the protagonist is having fun. Far Cry 2, on the other hand, emphasizes that you have come to a terrible place and can only make things worse by remaining here. Future Far Cry games want to have Far Cry 2’s plot, but they deliver it with Far Cry 3’s gameplay focus on open world fun. Far Cry 2’s open world isn’t set up to help you. Fast travel points are widely spaced and inconvenient to use. Outposts respawn rapidly, and are never under the control of a friendly faction. Nobody here likes you, and the only one who survives longer than half a dozen missions is the guy you were sent here to kill. And your mercenary buddies from the first act, who turn out to be not dead in the second act – but they want revenge on you for reasons that may or may not make any sense, depending on whether you chose to abandon them.
Far Cry 2 shows the scars of a branching narrative that got pruned down to one linear path, which means choices you make to leave that path don’t actually get you off of it, just make the game’s one path make less sense. It’s also kind of absurd with how densely packed it is with people trying to kill you – there’s not really any civilians and it’s impossible to make even temporary alliances with anyone except a small handful of fellow mercenaries, who turn on you in the end. Sure, the climax hinges on everyone in the country trying to kill you, but 99% of the country is trying to kill you so early on that it barely feels like anything has changed. Even so, Far Cry 2 tries and mostly succeeds at delivering an experience of coming to a terrible situation where you can’t help. Future Far Cry games, especially 4 and 5, wrote their plots as though they had made games like this, but then they let you liberate the outposts, so really what’s happening is not that you can’t help, rather, you totally can help and even single-handedly turn the tide of a war, but the hand of the author will reach down to erase all your accomplishments in the ending cut scene.
2022 is the year I finally finished Hollow Knight 112% including all DLC. I did cheat the last couple of Godhome bosses because I wasn’t having fun with it anymore. I love Hollow Knight for its exploration of a ruined world and its combat that makes me feel like a tiny, nimble warrior using skill and precision to keep up with enemies in a much heavier weight class than me, and the Godhome boss rushes have the latter but not the former. It’s still my favorite video game of all time, and I am still excited for Silksong, even if it is nervous-making that it’s six years and counting in development.
Journey is an absolutely delightful two-hour playable animated movie. I don’t mean that it’s an animated movie with some vestigial gameplay bolted on because nobody Kickstarts animations. I mean that it feels like an animated movie but it has actual, legit gameplay that is foundational to achieving that feeling. My experience with it was pretty singular and probably not repeatable – I played through the early single-player portions picking through the ruins of a civilization that my character had some ancestral connection to, and that felt very appropriate. I had heard about Journey when it came out, but my computer was such a cheap wreck held together with duct tape and chickenwire that I never even tried to run Journey on it, because even an indie game might’ve been too much. Then I lost track of it for a decade and came back to it while assembling my backlog on How Long To Beat, and here was a very short game that I liked the idea of but didn’t get to experience because I’d been forced out of it by near-poverty. So here I was, arriving at the ruins of a culture I was technically a part of long after everyone had left and the pillars had crumbled.
I was so surprised to see another player that for the first few seconds I thought it was some recording. I was so sure I was the last one. But people still play Journey. One of them took the journey with me.
Knights of the Old Republic has a better legacy than the game itself, but that’s praising with faint damnation. While it’s kind of annoying that you can’t actually pursue the Grey Jedi path of Darth Revan that KotOR II and TOR canonized, the game is full of genuine roleplaying choices, it captures the Star Wars vibe very well, and its gameplay mechanics are sufficient to get out of the way and let the game be fun. The graphics have aged miserably, it’s on the wrong side of the Half-Life gap despite being a contemporary of Half-Life 2, but that’s a minor drawback on what’s otherwise still a very good game even today.
Lego Star Wars: The Complete* Saga is where I first stumbled upon the completionist backlog idea. While playing out a May the Fourth Star Wars sale haul, I decided I’d get 100% on Lego Star Wars, since I’d never done that before. It was a lot of fun and very satisfying, but I found that doing that to all of the Star Wars games I’d picked up didn’t seem nearly as appealing, and decided that I should probably assemble a list of games I wanted to finish, rather than trying to find some specific genre, setting, or other theme that would tend to put a lot of garbage in my path. Lego Star Wars is a game of pretty much pure exploration, it’s full of charming and funny secrets to discover across well-crafted levels. Well-crafted should not be taken to mean “challenging,” though. You’d have to be 8 years old to find this game difficult (and even then, it’s perfectly manageable), which I imagine was the point. The pacing of the levels is solid and they’re full of things that are fun to find, though, so I didn’t mind crawling over every inch of it. Honestly, while I haven’t given the Lego series a full examination, my biggest concern for it is that it’s become too focused on being actual Star Wars/super hero/whatever games. If I want a real Star Wars game played straight, I’ll play Knights of the Old Republic. Stick to being a delight to explore! You’re better at that than anyone else!
Necromunda: Hired Gun puts the jank in Eurojank for sure, but it’s such a good representation of a Warhammer 40k hive city that I don’t care. Everywhere you go everything is impractically massive and hive gangs fight for dominance with grimdark zealotry in the enormous gaps left behind by the enormous machinations of the Imperium of Man. The Imperium is not a flag you rally around, it’s so much bigger than you that the grinding gears of its war machine don’t even notice you as you fight your local wars in its underbelly.
I’m coming to Okami so late that I don’t know what else to add to it, but it’s an amazing game that I finally played to completion in 2022, and it’s one of the early triumphs of my new backlog-focused system drawing my attention to finishing games instead of picking at them and then losing interest when something new and shiny comes along.
Ori and the Blind Forest was the vanguard of the indie Metroidvania revival. Hollow Knight stomped all over it a few years later with a much more open world design, but although Ori’s main path is quite linear, it does a good job of rewarding you for revisiting locations to discover new secrets with new powers. Its cutesy design does seem a little stock-indie, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is Ori copying others versus others copying Ori.
Project Wingman is the best Ace Combat game, in the same way that Stardew Valley is the best Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game. A fan loved the series so much that when they made their own, it exceeded the source material. Story, gameplay, and soundtrack are all basically flawless. I love this game.
Transistor is a marvelously creative cyber-art deco action RPG game by Supergiant, the guys who made Bastion and Hades. Transistor is the middle child (along with their one basketball thing I never played), between their breakout Bastion and their masterpiece Hades, and while it definitely compares unfavorably to those two, it’s still a marvelous game. The narration is different from but just as good as Bastion’s, the smooth noir voice of your giant cyber-sword commenting on unfolding events rather than the deep Bastion narrator recollecting them. A beautiful civilization is torn apart around you as you struggle, at first, to escape the assassination attempt of a sinister conspiracy, and then to prevent the apocalypse they unleashed and then lost control of. It’s bittersweet and beautiful.
Yoku’s Island Express is a Metroidvania pinball game about a beetle tied to a pinball who navigates around a tropical island by getting the pinball smacked so hard it flies three miles above the canopy, and uses this method of transport to deliver the mail. This game is the foundation of my theory that all video games would be better if they were Metroidvanias in addition to being whatever genre they already are.
There were more games in my Best of 2022* list than Best of 2023*, and while this isn’t as straightforwardly measured, I feel like there was a lot more unreserved gushing in this one. I think this was in large part because I was picking up lots of games I’d been meaning to finish for years but hadn’t gotten around to, a supply that was largely exhausted going into 2023. 2023’s games weren’t in the first wave for some reason or another, and that reason was usually either that I wasn’t as confident I would enjoy them and was sometimes correct or else that they were longer, which means I couldn’t fit as many of them into a single year.
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