IT IS TIME FOR THE GAMES OF THE YEAR 2022! I’m actually surprised at how good 2022 ended up being as far as games. There were a lot of good ones, so much so that I couldn’t play all the interesting ones. There was just no time. Not that all games were good, Sonic Frontiers and Return to Monkey Island exist, after all. But overall, there was plenty of good stuff.

So it is this time of the year where I can talk about all the great games I loved that came out that year. I usually do 6-7 GotY winners, one of which would be my grand TOP GotY choice, but I don’t know if I can do that this year.

I will also rant about the year as a whole, as usual, with a focus on the big 3.

There’s some games I was interested in during 2022 that I have yet to play, in case you’re wondering. Who knows if I’ll get to them, but if you think they’re really good and are sad they’re not named here, know that I probably hold no ill will against them, I probably just didn’t play it.

Amongst big games I haven’t played that could’ve had a chance: Digimon Survive (actually bought it but haven’t played it yet), A Plague Tale: Requiem, God of War Ragnarök, Horizon 2, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, Choo Choo Charles, Signalis, Soulstice, Sports Story… and many others. A lot of interesting games came out this year, was a bit hard to get to all of them.

So let’s go!

Click here to skip to the winners if you’re not interested in my inane rantings.

This was shown at a Nintendo Direct and it instantly got my attention. A fast FPS with an interesting card system for weaponry. It wasn’t entirely clear to me if it was some kind of roguelite or if it was a level-based game, but I knew I’d be getting it on release.

It got a release date during not-E3 2022, and I bought it the moment it released. Let’s see if it was worth me getting excited for it!

I’m super happy E3 was not a thing this year. The ESA sucks and E3 has been very pointless for a while, providing nothing good for the consumer. With the internet being a thing for a long time now, we should have evolved beyond E3 LOOOOOOOOOOONG ago. Nintendo, with their Directs, set the stage to how game announcements should happen. Sony badly copied Nintendo with their State of Play presentations (there’s been only ONE of them that has been any good so far (the March 2022 one)), but went a step further by dissociating from E3 pre-pandemic. That’s good. All companies need to dissociate from E3.

With E3 gone in 2022, people thought there’d be nothing, because people are idiots who thing the gaming industry revolves around E3 for some reason. But the presentations came just the same. Of course they would, game companies don’t just… stop announcing games because there isn’t an expo for journalists.

So let’s talk about this year’s not-E3 and see if any of the presentations were any good! Hint: no.