2022's Games of the Year, Part 2

What’s eligible as a Game of the Year for me was already explained in the first part, so check that out if you haven’t done so yet. I’ve got another five to get to this time around, and then the last five on Friday. This time around, I’ll also do brief write-ups for some honorable mentions — it wouldn’t be a list of mine if I didn’t include more games than I said I would.

Remember, these aren’t in any order, so today’s games aren’t necessarily better than Monday’s batch, except for the ones that are.

Citizen Sleeper

Developer: Jump Over The AgePublisher: Fellow TravelerWindows, macOS, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|XMay 5

What a beautiful game. Given my own political leanings and ravenous appetite for the kind of sci-fi that’s used as a way to discuss the inequalities and issues of the era it’s written in, something like Citizen Sleeper was basically designed to speak to me. And it does! Did. Whichever.

Citizen Sleeper doesn’t have action, and it isn’t full of expensive explosions, but it is instead a wonderfully and thoughtfully written game about a space-based civilization that isn’t as idyllic as the posters promised. You play as a robot who has had the consciousness of a human programmed into it, which of course brings up questions about who the real you is, and not just because your memories on that front are intentionally fuzzy. Offscreen, you’ve escaped from the corporation that owns your robot body and paid for the privilege, and are slowly dying because of engineering decisions made to ensure compliance. So, you’re trying to make your way on a vessel that’s coming apart at the seams at about the same rate as you, avoiding bounty hunters, finding work, looking for your next meal, and simply trying to stay alive in a world that does not want that for you.

Gameplay is pretty simple once you get the hang of it, but very satisfying in a “what’s gonna happen this time?” Dragon Quest-y way. (I don’t mean that there’s turn-based combat, so much as the little delay between an action and its result gets the right chemicals going in your brain as you wait.) Everything is achieved through dice rolls, and the number of dice you have per turn (cycle, in the game’s parlance) is determined by your condition. If you didn’t wake up hungry and your body isn’t on the verge of breakdown, you’ll have more dice than if that’s the case. There are opportunities to level up so you can better see your odds and both the positive and negative results of playing the particular odds, and ways to improve the value of your dice so you can stretch the ones you have out even further, but you have to live long enough to get to that point. It’s all resource scarcity on the verge of death from the start, but once you find some work, find a place to sit down and have an inexpensive meal, and figure out how to keep your body going beyond its manufactured limits, you can relax a bit on that front and focus more on paying back the station that welcomed you than on ensuring you wake up tomorrow.

One thing that drew me in to Citizen Sleeper is the sheer quantity of endings possible. It’s not like you get to the “end” and have your pick of a bunch of different routes: it’s that the end, after a certain point, could come at any time. You’ll meet others who need help or want to help you or both, and when you get to the end of their narrative, you might get a chance to leave this station behind and head off to an unknown future. Maybe you’ll be satisfied with that; maybe you’ve grown attached to the station and the life you’ve built there, or maybe there could be something better for you in the future in another possible ending. Want the questions you have about your past answered? Don’t be in a rush to get off of the station.

You can also see every ending as they come up, and then reload your last autosave, which will let you go back to the moment before you chose to leave. This time, you don’t have to sneak on that ship, or become part of this crew, or decide to place your consciousness in yet another form. You can keep seeing what there is to see on the station, and now that we’re this far past the initial release, also participate in the additional stories that are still being added to the game: the first batch is already out, the second coming in early 2023.

I can’t recommend this game enough: if you’re into more visual novel-y adventure games, then this is top tier for the genre, and if you’re not into that style of game yet but want to give it a shot, this will deliver for you.

Pentiment

Developer: Obsidian EntertainmentPublisher: Xbox Game StudiosWindows, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|XNov. 15

What a great year for adventure-style games. Pentiment is a medieval murder mystery made by Obsidian, directed and written by Josh Sawyer, who also served as the director and designer for Fallout: New Vegas, aka the best Fallout. And it’s not that making games is a one-person deal or anything unless literally one person makes the thing, but my feeling after playing both is that Pentiment benefited from Sawyer’s direction in a way that 2019’s The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian joint, suffered in its delivery of what it had promised due to some reticence to go all the way with what it set out to do. There’s a coherence here, and a thoughtfulness, that make Pentiment far more than just a game with a unique and notable art style, and instead turned it into a title I’ll be thinking about for a long time — and absolutely returning to in the future, as well.

Pentiment’s art direction is truly wonderful: it’s based on the kinds of art monks would insert into books in the days before the printing press wrested control of book production from the church, and it animates splendidly while bursting with character. It also, in its quest to emulate this particular moment in time, did not forget about accessibility: while the default is for the various characters to have medieval- and Renaissance-era fonts for their text based on their station in life as well as whether or not they can read — one character, in particular, sees their font switch from the typical peasant’s scratching to a more refined, learned text mid-conversation when you discover they’re literate — you can set it so that all of the fonts are of a more standard and familiar legibility. As I’m able to see what’s going on with my television wearing (very strong) glasses or contacts, I kept the changing fonts on, and was rewarded with things like the village’s printing press operator having his font look like it came from one of his books rather than being a written script. If all of this proves difficult to read, however, it’s wonderful that the option to just use standard font is available.

This is loaded with spoilers so you probably want to skip it until you’ve played, but Elijah Gonzalez’s feature on how Pentiment successfully contends with and preserves history explains a whole lot about what I love about the game:

The world, and its inhabitants, are fully realized, non-cliches — they all feel like real people, and they react in ways that real people would. You’re tasked with solving various murders throughout the game, and whether there are right or wrong answers is kind of beside the point: regardless of whether you pointed the finger where it belonged or not, the village of Tassing is irrevocably changed, its people impacted by the horrors of seeing the problem of a death “solved” with more death. And you’re going to want to watch what you say, and to whom, maybe more than I’ve ever had to in a game with dialogue trees. It feels good for these things to truly matter in a game centered around them.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Developer: Monolith SoftPublisher: NintendoSwitchJuly 29

What can you even say about Xenoblade Chronicles 3? Oh, right. I already said it:

Between having two kids and writing about older games multiple times per week, I have to be real sure these days that I’m not going to regret going 100 hours in on a video game — I ended up over 120 hours for Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and I do not regret any of them. Monolith created a world I became fully invested in, with characters whose plights and growth and feelings kept me going even as the hours piled up.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is excellently written, focused on rebellion, on child soldiers, and a society that’s never been about anything but trying to envision a new life without war, but it’s also a game about learning how to live, in general: how to build friendships and relationships that aren’t centered around military needs, how to survive in a world you can be more in touch with, and how to love, both romantically and otherwise. It’s about how to live for more than just yourself or a dangerous sense of nationalism that too easily takes hold and refuses to let go. Just excellent, excellent stuff.

And the battle system is really something, too, even by Monolith’s standards. I’d say more here, but seriously, I wrote a lot about the game and the series as a whole already for Paste, so, please, read that.

Gunvein

Developer: NGDEVPublisher: NGDEVWindowsOct. 7

That’s right, not one but two shoot-em-ups made it into my Games of the Year, which is partially a testament to my own interests, but also because these were two damn great shmups. (If you are also a shoot-em-up nerd like me who needs more than just the two recs per year, well, I have you covered, too.) Gunvein was made by NGDEV, a studio whose name maybe doesn’t ring a bell for everyone, but to the kinds of people who are into the scene of modern-day games developed for defunct consoles like the Dreamcast and Neo Geo, well, NGDEV isn’t new.

Gunvein is a modern game made for modern platforms, however, released on Windows in 2022 and scheduled to come out everywhere else in 2023. And it rocks. It’s a very Cave-style STG, a real bullet hell adventure that will test your abilities, especially if you aren’t used to this sort of game. NGDEV decided to be more welcoming and inviting than that particular sub-genre usually is, at least, by introducing a tutorial that explains not just how to play the game, but the concepts behind bullet hell shooters: how to essentially control the flow of enemy bullets with your movements, how your hit box works and what you can do to exploit its minuscule size for your benefit, and how best to go about pulling in high scores, which also happens to be the best way to survive in the long-term. It’s a wonderful addition you don’t usually see in this kind of game, likely in part because they have historically came from the arcade scene and simply getting them ported at all is sometimes a chore. This was made for at-home play from the start, though, and extra care was put into not just adding in challenge modes, but making sure people understood what it was they were playing, and how to play it.

Which does not mean Gunvein is easy — far from it! The lowest difficulty setting won’t make things easy on you unless you’re a veteran of many bullet hells, and the game’s “Normal” setting is titled “Intense” with good reason. Because of the way the game is designed, you’ll be putting yourself in harm’s way often: in Gunvein, using bombs is how you score the most points, and to earn the bomb fragments that become bombs, you must defeat enemies quickly. To defeat them quickly, you’re going to want to bring your guns closer to them, which means opening yourself up to explosive surprises at the top of the screen as it scrolls. This not only makes the game a bit nerve-wracking even if you’re playing well, but it also makes Gunvein play differently than so many other shooters: using bombs is meant to be a last resort, the kind of thing you’re rewarded for not doing in end-of-level scoring tallies. Here, though, the bomb economy is the whole point, and utilizing them your greatest ally for both survival and scoring.

The eventual goal of basically any shmup is to eventually get to the point where you can clear it in one credit — a 1CC. This is why you typically can only upload the score from a single credit’s play to an online leaderboard, and Gunvein is no different. What it does do differently, however, is allow you to convert your points into in-game currency after a game over, which you can then use to increase your chances of surviving longer with your next credit. A temporary shield, an extra bomb, and extra life, another continue — these are the kinds of things you can purchase with your converted points, but this market isn’t an endless resource, either. You’ll have to score enough points in life to be able to cash in at death, and since continues are fairly limitd until you’ve completed a number of challenges to boost that number, you’ll need all the market assistance you can get to make it through, if your goal isn’t a high score so much as just completing the title.

It’s a good system, the kind not every shmup nails — Cotton Fantasy, for instance, also released in 2022, is an excellent game when it comes to trying for a high rank on the leaderboards, but is pretty forgettable if the goal is merely to complete it by using continues until you outlast the game. Gunvein works in either way, for either mindset, and is easily the best brand new STG of 2022 because of it.

Norco

Developer: Geography of RobotsPublisher: Raw FuryWindows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|SMar. 24

Seriously: a great year for visual novel-y adventure titles. Norco is a point-and-click near-future mystery title, where you have returned home to the small Louisiana town you left behind: you came back because your mother had died, only to find that your brother was now missing, too. The writing here is as good as anything else you’d find in 2022, delving into how a town dies, and what happens to its people in the aftermath of that. Questions of corporate greed and the crimes committed in its name are asked, as are far more personal questions of identity, purpose, and family, and no one is going to like the answers to any of them.

Like Citizen Sleeper, Norco does an excellent job of reflecting the problems of the present in a sci-fi setting, but as it’s near-future set on an Earth that is starting to wonder if all of the planet’s problems can be solved in space — problems like “we’ve run out of places to exploit for all they’re worth as much as we used to be able to here on Earth” — it all feels even closer to home. I’m not from the south, so the specifics of Norco are not the specifics I know, but I grew up in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts, flanked by former mill towns, one of which started to pull itself away from that century-long shadow while I was still around, and the other of which has not, and might never do so. And now I live in Maine, a state that used to be powered in large part by its paper mills. You notice as much paper being used today as there used to be, he asks as you read this on your phone, tablet, computer, whatever. Point is, I might not know these people, but I know these problems enough to say that Norco really gets at the heart of a something disastrous that is both local to its fake-ish setting and much broader than that at the same time.

It’s also a game with a good sense of humor, too, that knows when to be out there and when to focus before throwing the emotional punches it has to land to work as well as it does. You can’t live in the world of Norco without knowing when to laugh, even if it’s a laugh coming from somewhere dark — how would you get by, otherwise? I actually think I preferred both Citizen Sleeper and Pentiment to this, but there are no losers in this trio of games about the way incomprehensibly huge institutions control and destroy the lives of regular people. Play and love them all: I certainly did.

Honorable Mentions

Triangle Strategy: High-quality tactical RPG here, with a fascinating world and player choice that actually matters. Not just in terms of how the story will unfold, but how the characters within it treat you. There’s a way to get a run where basically everyone is happy and none of your close associates leave you either due to believing you have moral failings or have created a space where there’s no room for them, but it takes a ton of work and prior knowledge to pull off. Just enjoy the ride.

The story/choice mechanics in Triangle Strategy really work! It's not Good vs. Evil morality stuff, and even the seemingly cut-and-dry options have their monkey paws. Instead, the system is “here are three unsatisfying options, each with pitfalls, and even the morally good path will cause unexpected harm.” And you can't just choose what you want to do, either: you need to find compelling evidence during the exploratory portions of the game for why the path You, The Player want is the one for your party to take, and you might not convince your party members in conversation.

Throw in that the actual tactical portions of the game really sing, with some real challenge thrown in pretty early to let you know the game expects you to take these bits seriously, and that it has replay value due to the various paths that can be taken… maybe it’s not the Final Fantasy Tactics sequel people were hoping it was going to be, but it’s a great effort in the genre all the same. So long as you turn off the voice acting, anyway, which not only allows you to not have to hear it, but also converts all the spoken dialogue into text, which you can move through faster. In a game with as much exposition as Triangle Strategy, you’ll find this to be the right call.

Pocky & Rocky Reshrined: Hey, I wrote about this already.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes: It took intense willpower for me to not put this in my actual Games of the Year list. Laugh or roll your eyes all you want, but Three Hopes combined the social aspects of Fire Emblem we all know and obsess over with the unrelenting action and speed of Koei Tecmo’s Warriors franchise, which means it’s two different kinds of catnip for me in one package. I don’t even care if the endings are a little flat — this game is all journey over destination, except for the times where it’s you realizing that the mission is asking you to kill 100 enemies per minute for 7-15 minutes in order to score an S-rank while avoiding taking much damage in the process. Which you will want to achieve, because when you’re cutting through enemy forces at that rate while riding atop a pegasus, wielding a lance that also causes mini tornadoes… that’s video games, baby.

It’s the best of all of these Warriors spin-offs, if you ask me, and I say this as someone who was pretty pleased with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Zelda is a real good fit for Warriors. Fire Emblem, with the social stuff and character writing at the level it’s at in Three Hopes, is significantly better for this. Hey, only one game in 2022 dared to produce an interaction where you were given the chance to convince a comrade to talk to another character whose parents were dead thanks to their own father, or, alternatively, to respond at this critical juncture with “Meat party! Meat party! Meat party!” to resolve the issue through a feast and avoid exhuming painful, buried memories. And you know what? The meat party was the right answer in context, not just the funny one.

Signalis: This isn’t here because I enjoyed Signalis less than some of the games that got more than just the honor of a mention. No, the issue here is that I got a few hours into Signalis and thought it was great, but not so far into it that I got to all the parts that made people go from “oh yeah this is a nifty sci-fi Playstation-era Resident Evil-style horror game” to the ones that had it making top 10 and top 5 Game of the Year lists. I’m very excited to return to Signalis due to how much I’m into it even before reaching the real separator portions of the game, but so it goes with the late-year juggling act where I try to wrap on things I haven’t wrapped on.

I couldn’t stop playing Three Hopes, alright? Did I mention the tornado lance whilst riding a pegasus? Because you can do that.

Chained Echoes: If not for its absurdly late release date — December 8, are you kidding me? — this would possibly make it into the full list, as well. Sometimes I get annoyed by modern JRPGs (or Japanese-style RPGs, depending) that are throwbacks to the golden age of 90s JRPGs, because too often the aesthetics are nailed but an understanding of what made those games work is not. Sometimes the systems end up too complicated for their own good, to try to show the genre has evolved beyond its roots, but what you need is a story I feel is worth getting invested in with a battle system with a wrinkle or two beyond standard turn-based action. Manage that, and I’m intrigued. Final Fantasy IV pulled this off by introducing the Active Time Battle system at the same time it helped put characters first. Phantasy Star IV has its macros and combo attacks and a battle speed that should have been the envy of everyone else around, and all tied up in an engrossing story that, if you wanted to, you could plow through in a day and still be able to go out that night. That some newer games that try to be like these can’t thread these needles themselves is both confusing and aggravating.

Chained Echoes, however, certainly nails all that: there’s a clear understanding of the source material here, between its opening that reminds you of… well, a whole bunch of classic JRPGs, as it segued from one opening trope to another, and how it’s structured. The battle system is turn-based, but with some modern touches that help to elevate it, and nothing is as complicated or chore-like as some of what Square Enix was doing in their Remember When phase of 5-6 years ago when it first got going with a series of middling and forgettable JRPGs. The pacing in Chained Echoes is also excellent: I’m maybe five hours in, and I feel like I have an understanding of the people and this world, but one that will continue to grow as I play. Great stuff: release something like this in January next time, though, so I can talk about more than a fraction of what’s here.

Tunic: This is like, an honorable mention for honorable mentions. I messed around with Tunic a bit when it released and had a good enough time, but lost interest after a few hours despite its fascinating, dialogue- and English-instruction-less explorable world and emphasis on unlocking secrets, in large part due to combat that didn’t feel very enjoyable. Aidan Moher, though, had a great write-up on the game and its eventual inclusion of lowered combat difficulties and a “No Fail” mode that helped bridge the weird gap between its exploration aspects and its combat. And that has me considering going back so I can just casually mess around with Tunic’s world and figure out its puzzles without having to focus on fighting even a little bit. Just let me explore! Let me learn your mysterious secrets without having to worry about all of these gatekeeping little creeps you’ve got all over the place, blocking my exploratory nature. Which, again, the No Fail mode allows you to do. So, now instead of just letting it go into the bin of unfinished titles, I’ll probably return to Tunic in 2023, No Fail mode at the ready for when I get annoyed.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.