Top 5 Games I played in 2022

Gather round and get cozy, friends, for the time has come for me to talk about the five videogames I most enjoyed playing this year. It’s been a wild one for me personally - I finished a Master’s degree, went to some premieres on the East Coast, then quickly realized that my degree in composition was not, in fact, going to help me find a professional career, and have been in a quarter-life crisis ever since. I have spent a lot of time playing games as I sit here and try to figure out what I want to spend time doing for the rest of my life, so these five works are very close to my heart.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a list of my top five favourite games released in 2022. As a rule, I don’t play games until at least six months after release; in today’s gaming industry, it seems prudent for me to wait for a game to actually be finished before I buy it. Besides that, I live in Vancouver have two music degrees and thus don’t often have eighty dollars to spend on every new game that comes out. Four and a half out of these five games were released a few years ago, and thus already have had ink spilled on their behalf, so I’m going to keep it brief and focus on the reasons why I, specifically, enjoyed playing them.

I also spent a lot of time this year investing in non- or partly-digital hobbies, AKA Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Because of this, I actually didn’t spend as much time videogaming as I usually do. I’m a creature of habit, though, so when I did sit down to play a game, I was most likely playing a game on this list.

5: Elden Ring

I kind of fell off Elden Ring this year - and when I say that, I mean I played sixty hours and never finished it. This game is absolutely ginormous. It’s on such a massive scale that it’s hard for me to believe that it’s only one video game and not an entire cycle or trilogy. This is a true open-world game on par with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is so large that I ended up getting washed away in the scope of the thing and lost interest before I could finish my first playthrough. Elden Ring is perhaps better designed than its Dark Souls predecessors, but it didn’t scratch the hit-things-with-swords itch in quite the same way as the latter series usually does. Maybe it’s the mass appeal and (well-deserved) popularity among a more general audience, or the more-gruelling-than-usual boss fights, or the fact that my preferred Soulsborne strategy - hitting things with a giant sword until they die - is just that much less effective in this game due to different priorities in weapon balance, but I don’t see myself returning to Elden Ring any time soon. Still, the fact that it’s an impressive achievement in game design and that I enjoyed my sixty hours (which felt like twenty) mean that it deserves a slot on my Top 5.

4: Divinity: Original Sin II

I played about a hundred hours of Divinity II this year, and I loved every minute. This game is about as close to D&D as you can get in a video game. The character creation screen hits you with a spreadsheet when you click on it, which generally bodes well in a roleplaying game, and the rest of the experience does not disappoint. The story is intricate and enthralling, the environments and soundtrack immersive, and the combat, while challenging, scratches a very particular part of my brain that usually can only be sated by D&D’s combat encounters - it’s turn-based, attacks and damage are mediated by luck, and there are even finite resources called “Sourcery Points” that you need to keep track of while traversing a dungeon. There’s no hour-long tutorial like in many modern RPGs - this game is, first and foremost, about you and your party going on an adventure. And what an adventure it is! Demonic doctors, a saint faking his own death, a paladin in service to an evil God-King, and an army of monsters breaching the veil between our world and the Void - this game truly has it all. Each of Divinity II’s five pre-generated NPCs has their own storyline to follow - you can play as them or create your own character. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different party builds, and the game does a good job of making each new playthrough feel like the first one. Quests are open-ended, with multiple ways to complete nearly any single objective, up to and including literally murdering every single person in the game world! I have never done this because I don’t like to hurt my digital friends, but it is something Divinty II allows and that, in itself, is pretty impressive. This game is a true descendant of the tabletop RPG, and it remixes the dangerous adventures of ye olde Fallout-style isometric roleplayer with a sleek interface and more, well, scrutable gameplay systems for an experience that I think many gamers would enjoy.

3: HITMAN: World of Assassination Trilogy

I don’t think I could ever get tired of playing the new HITMAN trilogy. For my tiny brain, HITMAN’s sealed yet complex and open-ended level design is like a balm to soothe away the aches and pains of living in an illogical and scary universe (Is it weird that I get super relaxed playing this game about killing people? Let me know in the comments). Everything is logical in the world of HITMAN - each level is a puzzle box that operates the exact same every time, and it feels wonderful to key into those patterns once you’ve played them through a few times. I really feel like an assassin casing the locale and studying my targets’ movement and habits, waiting for the perfect time to strike unseen. The story begins with you killing evil rich people and ends with you killing rich people who personally hurt Agent 47 and his friends for their own world-controlling reasons - the fact that you assassinate members of the global elite while impersonating their servants is very morally satisfying to me. While it’s hackneyed and cliche’d, I still found its convoluted spy-thriller mannerisms endearing. In my roleplay as Agent 47, the reason why I am in a particular locale doesn’t matter all that much: I’ve got people to murder, and I want to make it look like an accident. For what it’s worth, I also love HITMAN’s soundtrack: while it’s simpler than others on this list, I love how it draws on music from Mission Impossible and other spy thrillers, off of which these games’ story and characters are clearly based. It’s got a neat two-note hook that plays once you’ve completed all the objectives in a level and are trying to escape, and this hook gets transformed in some cool ways throughout the series. If IOI’s recent newsletters are to be believed, they are soon going to release a roguelike mode that remixes HITMAN’s levels into a procedurally-generated experience for which I am very excited. Between Elusive Targets, Escalation Contracts, player-made contracts, and this upcoming new mode, the HITMAN player enjoys a myriad of ways to re-experience old ground in entirely new ways. It may not be perfect, but I plan to keep HITMAN in my back pocket for a very, very long time.

2: Insert team-based multiplayer shooter here

I play a lot of shooty games with my friends - in fact, I almost exclusively play shooty games with my friends. As much as I love unravelling a complex puzzle or working through a compelling story, sometimes I just want to turn my brain off and click on people for a few hours. Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends were the shooters of choice for this year, and for all their obvious flaws, I spent a lot of time playing them and had a lot of fun doing it. I am very wary of the proliferation of the games-as-live-service model for political reasons - as seen in the Overwatch 2 launch, it allows executives of game studios a plethora of new ways to shove out and monetize an unfinished game, and the current ubiquity of loot boxes and other gambling tools in a medium enjoyed by millions of children is deeply concerning to me. Unfortunately, there aren’t many mainstream shooters out there that don’t subscribe to this incredibly lucrative model, and while I would love to boycott any game that engages in this behaviour, I really like playing games with my friends and these games feel good. Overwatch has had balance issues since day one of the first game, but Apex Legends’ balance woes are far less egregious and nearly all weapons and characters feel somewhat viable, at least at my low level of play. Both games enjoy smooth and consistent game feel and are based around movement and knowing one’s surroundings, which I quite enjoy in my shooty games. They might be made by awful companies that embrace business practices of dubious legality (and even more dubious morality) and treat their employees like shit, but, for better or worse, I played these games quite a lot this year.

1: Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight is fucking bae. I’m late to the party on this, but I could honestly gush about it for thousands of words, and I may do that eventually on this blog. This game was made by, like, eight people on a shoestring budget and is still one of the best video games ever created. I only invested sixteen hours into Hollow Knight, but it made more of an impression on me in that time than most games do in eighty hours or more. The environments, enemy and level design, platforming, combat, and storytelling are executed with immense artistry and flair, yet it always remains inextricably tied to its roots in the metroidvania genre. It’s neither pretentious nor overstated, but quietly and humbly excellent in every aspect. I loved exploring the world of Hollow Knight in the same way I love reading a good fantasy novel - the creators’ voices are ubiquitous yet veiled, making the locale of Hallownest feel realized in a way that feels parallelled only by my own imagination. Special mention goes to Christopher Larkin’s score, which is absolute genius: like the rest of the game, it doesn’t aggrandize itself but still stands out as one of the best in the genre. A simple five-note melodic motif ties together the music of each area and some major bosses - it gets in your head and pushes you forward, urging you on your journey and accompanying you through every triumph and challenge the game has to offer. You can get emotional listening to the City of Tears music and be inspired by the Dung Defender boss theme. This is a video game to end all video games - at least until Silksong comes out - and it’s the one that, despite having the least playtime on this list, I enjoyed the most.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed me infodumping about the five games that came to my head first and that I also played this year. Video games have been a very important hobby to me as I figure out my life, and the capacity of the best ones to encourage player creativity has given me an outlet of which I have made frequent use as I recover from composition burnout. There are a lot of worrying trends in the business of games, as always, but there are also beacons of hope amid the darkness of our dystopic capitalist hellscape. Indie creators and crowdfunded projects like Divinity and Hollow Knight continue to excel against all odds, and that is proof to me that good games (at least for now) don’t need to be published by major studios. I try to make it a policy to mostly play well-crafted video games made by studios that care about releasing a polished product, and I think I achieved that this year. I even resisted the urge to buy Skyrim on sale for a fourth time! I suppose if there’s a point I’m trying to make in this hastily-written conclusion to a list I wrote on my phone, it’s that we as consumers still have a modicum of power with regards to what games get released - for now. I urge my fellow gamers to give attention to all the less-played but excellent indie titles out there, and please don’t ever buy Fallout: 76. Thanks!