2022: Video Games, Ranked
29. Bugsnax
Bugsnax as a concept is cute enough, but I found the myself turned off by the characters. I found most of the villagers to be more annoying than charming. The gameplay was just okay, and I felt catching some fo the titular bugsnax was more trouble than it was worth and in service of characters I didn't want to talk to. Bugsnax seems to coast mostly on being cute and wacky, and it just wasn't enogh to get me through it.
28. Dogworld
Dogworld is something of a metroidvania, but you have a fun dog companion. I had a hard time making it too far through the game; I don't think the controls are precise enough to support the difficulty spike. It starts off okay, but it doesn't get better.
27. Escape Academy
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a good escape the room game. In fact, I'm a big fan of the Zero Escape series of games. It's just that Escape Academy doesn't have too much going for it outside of the actual puzzles. I wasn't expecting a deep meta-narrative, but I wanted something. The escape puzzles themselves aren't too bad, but they aren't terribly interesting either and when it asked me start busting out a pen and paper, I stopped playing.
26. Trackmania Turbo
I wouldn't say Trackmania Turbo is a bad arcade driving game by any means, but it just doesn't scratch the Trackmania itch that I need to be scratched. As far as I know, there are no custom multiplayer servers, and the campaign modes maps aren't nearly as insane as they need to be.
25. Crusader of Centy
Yes, I picked up one of those Sega Genesis Mini 2s, but most of the games didn't grab me. I might hook it up again one day, but the only game I got any progress in was in Crusader of Centy. This is one of those Genesis games that made to compete with The Legend of Zelda and of those games this one is… not great. There are some ideas at work, like the animal companions and sword throwing, but it all feels so imprecise and often frustrating, that I didn't bother finishing it.
24. Aperture Desk Job
It says something that the game made to show off the features of the Steam Deck doesn't really function the way it's supposed to. It took a couple of times before I could actually get the controls the way they were supposed to, but when I did it was… fine. I don't know, it's not much of anything if I'm being honest, but it was nice to hear Nate Bargatze's voice. That guy deserves more work.
23. Sonic Frontiers
Sonic Frontiers is a bad game. Well, it's more complicated than that. It is a compellingly bad game.
I'm in the unfortunate position of sharing a birth year with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and I still have fond memories of the genesis games, TV series, and Archie comics from when I was kid. In practical terms that means I occasionally punish myself by purchasing and playing whatever the newest Sonic game is. It's not exactly a secret that Sonic the Hedgehog games haven't been good for a while now, so it's not surprising that Sonic Frontiers isn't good either.
And yet, I wouldn't say that this is the worst Sonic the Hedgehog video game. No, what really sets it apart is that there are the seeds of a good game in Sonic Frontiers, but it just keeps falling short in a way that lacks cohesion. At some points, I found myself wondering if any of the development team had ever bothered speaking to each other.
The game that I would compare Sonic Frontiers most to is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It becomes obvious that some of the development team has heard of BotW. It doesn't copy enough of the good ideas in that game to feel like a complete rip-off. It's a weird criticism to say that a game doesn't rip-off another game enough, but that's where I'm at. The fast-travel system isn't nearly as robust as it needs to be and you usually only unlock it close to the end of all the goals you have to complete on a given island, and it never feels like anything you do actually changes the landscape around you. There aren't enough landmarks to navigate the island easily, and instead you get a huge amount of grind rails that are difficult to keep track of. At least they stand out from the rest of the grind rails, springs, and boost pads that do not fit in naturally to the landscape in any way, whatsoever.
At its heart, Sonic Frontiers is a collect-a-thon style game. And of course, you're collecting the seven chaos emeralds. This is accomplished by playing through the Cyberspace levels which are all just typical 3D Sonic levels. And you know what? They aren't bad. They aren't incredible, but they work just fine and are fairly inoffensive. The only problem is that they're a little too easy, and you'll be able to easily earn enough keys for the Chaos emeralds without them. On top of that, you also have to collect "memory tokens" for whatever given character is stuck in cyberspace on that particular island. They're scattered everywhere and can usually only be collected through completing platform challenges that are set up all over the map. In fact, there's way too many of them. I kept stumbling into them by mistake when trying to get somewhere else and Sonic Frontiers has a nasty habit of locking you into a 2D plane until you complete each challenge. It is clunky and frustrating and that's not even taking in the pop-in that makes it difficult to know where the starting point to any challenge might be.
When you get enough memory tokens you occasionally also have to complete a minigame that doesn't share any gameplay similarities to any part of the rest of the game and feels forced an unnatural. These rank from mildly poorly thought-out to actively infuriating and bafflingly difficult. It's a problem.
The thing is though, all these important and plot-relevant items can be picked up casually in treasure chests spread along the ground or even purchased as part of a fishing minigame from Big the Cat. In practical terms it means that there are systems in place to give you relief from actually playing the game. I truly don't know how to feel about that, but if you're game has huge swaths that you never have to interact with, that's a problem. By the time I got to the last island in the game, I had bypassed almost all of the cyberspace levels entirely.
22. Chicory: A Colorful Tale
I don't like coloring. Even as a kid I didn't like coloring. No wonder I'm such a shitty artist! Chicory is a game all about coloring. You may be able to see where I'm going with this. To its credit, there is an equivalent of a fill function and that will let you get past most challenges in the game.
I'm always keptical of any narrative that champions the act of creating art an universally positive thing in the world, but besides that, whenever any thing goes all in on mental health and self-care, the cynical parts of my brain light up and lead me to think that something h as been created just to get the attention of weird inherent "media critics" who are prone to crying a lot. I think the developers are sincere in the message they're trying to convey, but this stuff just naturally rubs me the wrong way.
It's not a bad game by any means, but I also didn't find it super interesting and the day after I completed it, I was extremely depressed for a reason I still can't pin down. Also, the boss fights stick out like a sore thumb, and nothing in the rest of the game prepared me for the combat. It's a real weird choice to include them at all.
21. Nobody Saves the World
The thing I hate most about this game is that I couldn't stop playing it. This is not a compliment. Nobody Save the World showers you with sidequests that help unlock new classes and… more sidequests. I got so bogged down by sidequests that I completely neglected the main quest in the story. If the gameplay was all that different between different forms that your character takes on, it would be more compelling.
It's completely inoffensive, and as far as Drinkbox studio games go, the humor is the most tolerable of any of their games. There are no memes to speak of, thank Christ.
20. Scanner Sombre
This is a game about navigating an underground cave system with entirely invisible geography, only aided by the a little device that coats the entire world in a multi-color dots that reveal the topography around you.
It's definitely a one-note game, but it's a very good note, and it hits it well. It's frightening when you find your first anomaly, as despite illuminating and outlining everything around you, you can't actually see anything and kept help but think you're still just stumbling around in the dark. It hits just the right combination of horror and intrigue that kept me going. Unfortunately, I couldn't work out what to do at a large lake section of the game, and stopped partway through. It's definitely worth a look at the very least.
19. The Looker
The Looker is a free-to-play parody of The Witness. It is short, funny, and Jonathan Blow deserves as much grief as possible. Go play it!
18. Kirby and the Forgotten Land
We love the pink orb. This is a pretty good 3D Kirby game, but it feels repetitive after a while. There's only so much that you can do with Kirby, and they hit up against the limits of that here. Still, it isn't terrible.
17. Lost Your Marbles
This is an entry that is more or less just an excuse to talk about the Panic Playdate.
The Panic Playdate is a small, yellow, gameboy-like device released by video game company Panic and designed by Teenage Engineering. It has two buttons, a d-pad, and an analogue crank (specifically, it is not meant to power the device, but another way of controlling the device).
Lost Your Marbles is one of the first season of games that are included with the playdate, that were distributed out of the course of six weeks. Honestly, it's sort of a neat distribution model, but if you get your playdate later than everyone else it would be nice to just download everything in bulk. Honestly, the novelty wears off after a week or two.
Anyway, the game itself is charming enough, and makes great use of the analogue crank. There just isn't much too it.
16. Immortality
I have heard that Mannon Gage's performance in this game is great. I wouldn't know myself, as if I was playing the game in the most efficient narrative to unlock the secret narrative. I spent somewhere in the ballpark of 3 minutes actually watching her performance.
Immortality is all about scrubbing through footage to find weird alternate scenes that explain what happened to a mysterious French actress who's disappeared. You're presented with plenty of raw, unedited footage from three different movies (none of which seem all that good) to scrub through and find clues. The big gimmick is that you can pause the scene at any time and highlight an object or person, and then unlock a scene featuring the same (or at least a similar) object. In theory this should be interesting, but in practice it can lead to revisiting scenes a dozen times over, hunting to try and find any interesting object that may unlock a new scene. At some point it's just too much.
The other big mechanic is scrubbing through footage with the sticks and finding secret scenes. This, again, doesn't seem like the worst idea, but whenever you're nearing a secret, hidden scene, your controller will vibrate. If you're playing as practically as possible, you skip to the end of each scene and rewind as fast as you can until you feel a vibration. Then you have to rewind at just the right speed (which can be a real pain in the ass, as the sticks are not the best vehicle for this sort of thing), until you get the alternate take to play out. I played this way until I got the last scene in the timeline which was supposed to unlock the real ending. But since I was so used to scrubbing through stuff as fast as possible, I ended up jumping to a different scene and had to actually read on Wikipedia how to make the game end. I barely saw any of the performances of the actors aside form the secret protagonist and antagonist deuteragonist agonist.
But hey, those secret scenes are pretty great! They tell a compelling story and Charlotta Mohlin give such a captivating performance that I still found the motivation to keep going despite these problems. It is, to put it lightly, a mixed bag, but if you have Game Pass or Netflix on your phone (they couldn't figure out how to make it work on TV?) it's worth a playthrough.
15. Return of the Obra Dinn
The meat of this game is really solid. The design, the one-bit color palette, and the mystery of it all is pretty great. The only big knock on the game is that it requires a little too much esoteric knowledge to complete it accurately. How am I supposed to know how a French sailor's outfit is different from a Dutchman's? It's kind of weird, and I couldn't get to the end without a walkthrough.
14. Spark the Electric Jester 2
The original Spark the Electric Jester game was a game made by one man the style of 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games, with a touch of Kirby and Megaman thrown in for good measure. Spark 2 doesn't actually feature the titular character, instead you play as his Metal Sonic counterpart Fark (not named after the old website , and instead a portmanteau of "Fake Spark") and just like the Sonic franchise, the developer decided to go 3D.
The game that I would compare this most to would be Sonic Adventure. That isn't necessarily a bad thing as I think that's the one they experimented the most with and gave the player a good amount of freedom that feels ironically absent in the latest Sonic game. However, just like those games it runs into similar problems. The geography of the world can often lead Fark to fly off the edge with little input from the player. Happily, it doesn't happen nearly as often as it does in Sonic Frontiers. I also found a few moments where Fark will just lose momentum, even after hitting a boost pad and falling off the side of a runway. In particular, this was a problem in the Tower Climb level, and is where I ended my time withe the game. Honestly though, SF makes me look back much kinder on this game, as it was only one guy versus a Triple-A publisher who should have the resources to prevent this sort of thing.
But, unlike the last few sonic games, including the cyberspace levels of SF, you get more control of Fark, and rarely feel funneled into one path. The levels in Spark 2 are also incredibly expansive. you can go places you never would be able to go in a normal Sonic game. It is a decent attempt at 3D sonic-style platformer, but falls just short of being great. Maybe if there was a third game, LakeFeperd could really make something special (spoiler: he did).
13. TOEM
This is a fine, short photography game. It's cute, it's got a unique black-and-white look, and I didn't find it as grating as Chicory's didacticism. There isn't really all that much to it, but it's completely solid and I have no complaints.
12. Trombone Champ
I'm just happy that the developers of cult classic Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing finally have a smash hit on their hands. The Trombone mapping works, and the humor ranges from bizarre and funny to tolerable. I was happy to be part of the playtest and I hope there's another typing game in the works. I don't find the act of playing trombone poorly as funny as everyone else seems to, but it's completely solid.
11. Peglin
This is an extremely evil idea; what if you combined Peggle and Slay the Spire. I played this thing for hours, and I eventually got past the final boss (of the early access build, I should say). It's solid, but I feel like it needs more variety. Luckily, it's still in Early Access, so there might be some nice stuff down the line. But again, it is inherently evil.
10. Amid Evil
Definitely one of the best retro-styled shooters out there. I'm shit at shooters, but I still had a good time. Until I had to quit because I'm too terrible at it. Look, what do you want from me?
9. Lumines Remastered
Still the best vibes-based video game. While this could end up being a stressful puzzle game never feels that way with the help of the chill electronic music and lovely visuals. If you haven't played any of the Lumines games, I would start here.
8. Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle
Yeah, pretty good! Warriors of Fate is my personal favorite.
7. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
I played this game for probably eight hours and never got past the ogre. It's difficult, but probably still the only FromSoft souls-type game I like. I think it has to do with the removal of the stamina bar.
6. OlliOlli World
Hey, you remember those OlliOlli games? They're really good! This one is the latest and best of the series. It has a new cel-shading style, and an added charm to the gameplay that isn't present in the previous games in the series. It still got to a point where the where I found it was a little too complicated to continue, but I got a good length of the way into the it before giving up. I came away with the sense that if I had wanted to, I could spend time getting better at the game and 100% it, but I don't have the patience for it.
5. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron HD Remaster
I originally played this game on PS3 and was more than happy to see it get a re-release on Steam (also it's on Amazon Luna? Who the hell is playing this on Luna? Who is playing anything on Luna?). There's really nothing like El Shaddai.
There has been so much craft and care put into just the visual aesthetics with each level having a distinct art style ranging from ultra-modernist cityscapes to painterly, expressionist abstract platforming spaces. There's so much dedication to these environments, you don't even have a HUD unless you play New Game Plus. They put the work in and as a result, this game is fantastic to look at.
The gameplay consists 3D platforming and some Devil May Cry-style fighting (and also a motorcycle racing section, it's complicated). If you're familiar with DMC or Bayonetta or countless other games of this ilk, it is easy to get a hang of. It's still easy enough to pick up even if this is your first character action game of this ilk.
But what about the story? It's weird. If you're Jewish (or upsettingly Christian), you might know that "El Shaddai" is one of the names of God as it appears in the Torah/Old Testament. And if you've seen the film Dogma, you might know that "The Metatron" is an angel that serves as the voice of God (which is not correct, Kevin Smith). Yes, strangely enough, this is a Japanese game based on the Book of Enoch, an ancient religious text that is often ignored by most denominations of Christianity and Judaism, with the notable exception of the Ethiopian Betta Israelites.
It's an incredibly ambitious game, but it's smaller budget can bleed through the screen in (possibly?) unintentional ways. The voice acting is… strange. It's not particularly bad, but there's a weird, somewhat muffled quality to the English voices, and they don't always line up with the characters' mouth movements; it sticks out like a sore thumb. On top of that, there's a big, long introductory montage spanning over 500 years, which tells a lot about Enoch's journey to the Tower (of babel? I don't think so, that's just the only one I know of). If you're playing for the first time, you might think this is a montage of moments from later in the game, with characters you'll meet along the way. But, it isn't. I honestly don't know if this is actually glossing over a huge chunk of what was supposed to be playable content, but it stands out as a very off-putting introduction to the game with characters and events that you will never encounter nor witness. The ending also suffers a bit, and the director has gone out of his way to clarify that there was supposed to be a more bombastic and climactic battle, but they had to scrap it at the last minute.
Despite its shortcomings, I can't help but recommend it. It's unlike anything else you could play and I can't help but root for something that is clearly a passion project for the director of the series. Sawaki Takeyasu went out of his way to found the publisher Crim, buying back the rights to his IP from the former UTV Ignition (which according to Wikipedia is now owned by Walt Disney India? That doesn't seem correct), and released it ten years after the initial release (and as far as I know are trying to publish it on the Nintendo Switch). There's even a sequel novella included with the steam version detailing the fall of Lucifel.
I absolutely love this game and want it to be as successful as possible, so I would recommend you go out and buy a copy for yourself (and more for all of your friends and family).
4. ULTRAKILL
The only so-called "boomer shooter" with official buttplug support (as far as I know). How can you possibly resist a game that combines the fast-paced FPS movement of quake with the stylish tricks and combos of Devil May Cry? You can't.
This game does a whole lo with low-poly aesthetics: it's stylish and at parts genuinely creepy. Admittedly, I'm not great at first-person shooters, but I couldn't stop playing. Granted, I played on the easiest difficulty, but I still had a good time. After getting through it, I felt like I was ready to take on the next highest difficulty with little to no problem.
It's still in early access and only has two episodes, but those two episodes go hard as hell. I'm excited to see where it goes next.
3. Spark the Electric Jester 3
Spark 3, much like Spark 2, is a 3D Sonic-style platformer, and I honestly didn't expect too much from it. Spark 2 was okay, but fell into the same traps that the previous 3D sonic games. I was happy to be proven wrong, seeing that it not only improved upon Spark 2, but made a new standard for any game emulating this style, Sonic the Hedgehog games included.
Every level gives the player a decent sense of speed, but it's more than that. There is a sense of nearly unrestricted movement combined with a moveset that's fun to pull off and intuitive to use. In 3D sonic games in recent memory, there's feeling of being locked into and funneled into invisible lanes, but that's far from the case here. The sense of control that you have over the character Spark is such that even when you find yourself in an unfortunate or awkward position, you always feel like you have to tools to work your way out of it. Unlike Sonic Frontiers, when I fell off of the edge of the level in Spark 3, it felt like my fault and not the game screwing up.
Each level is also gigantic; if you can see a piece of geography in the background, you can probably get to it and be rewarded for it. Each level is also distinct and different, with a fun handful of different gimmicks for each level, none of which overstay their welcome. You 'll find yourself at various points driving drift car, piloting a helicopter, and piloting a giant mech. It's fun, creative, and bold in a way that I feel its spiritual predecessors rarely were.
That all being said, it's not entirely perfect. While most levels are about getting to the finish line (with or without a time limit), the game promises more levels with different mechanics and ways to complete that there simply aren't enough. In fact, there's only one high-score challenge level in the whole game! There's a possibility that there were more to unlock somehow, but I couldn't find any in my two different playthroughs. I get the feeling that Lake Feperd wanted to include more in the game but at some point hit up against the limitations budget or release date. I don't know, I didn't subscribe to the patreon.
And while I think the movement controls are, for the most part, wonderful, there are some mechanics that can get annoying. I was never a fan of getting funneled into combat: it's not terrible, but it isn't super fun either. I also think the fall damage mechanics are a little annoyingly implemented.
And then comes the story that I have mixed feelings about. Besides the fact that on Steam Deck the cutscenes stopped playing after the Police helicopter boss fight, it depends a little too much on the plot points of previous Spark games and goes places. I give it points for taking a hugely ambitious swing which is comparable more to NieR Automata and The End of Evangelion, but I'm not sure it sticks the landing. It's strange, I didn't see it coming, and was a welcome surprise, but if you're looking for something to replace sonic, you might find it somewhat repellent. If you wanted to play it with kids, it might get a little difficult to explain the existential dread. I didn't think I would say that about a game that I would comparable to Sonic Adventure.
2. Tinykin
Hey, do you like Pikmin? I've been told that this game is somewhat like that! I haven't played a Pikmin game, but that's what I heard.
This game is a great 3D collectathon platformer that involves a tiny little man going around different rooms of a house, collecting tiny little guys that help you out with tasks you're trying to accomplish. It is beyond charming, with great 2D hand-drawn characters traversing well-crafted 3D environments. Why don't more games do this, it looks great!
It's so much fun to wander around every nook and cranny of a given level; I can't remember a single time where I couldn't figure out what to do next and I never felt stuck. All the characters are well-designed, cute, charming, and occasionally funny (shoutouts to my boy Ghasper). It doesn't make me laugh out loud or anything, but there's some fun stuff without ever seeming like it's too clever for its own good or veering into "internet humor."
Last I checked it was still on Game Pass and it's a great game for the Steam deck.
1. Tunic
There were some really good games this game, but Tunic was the only one that completely blew me away.
I understand if you are skeptical about it. If you look at the page on any digital marketplace, it looks like an isometric Zelda-style game starring a cute fox (as if that wasn't enough!), but I promise you there's so much more to it. The world of the game is deceptively simple. You'll come across sign posts in a made up language, and strange structures everywhere but, if you're like me, you might dismiss all that stuff at first. I just took it for granted that at some point I would be given an item to help me use these strange structures and understand the strange language on every sign I came across.
Then I got the first page of the manual. More than anything else, the central mechanic in the game is finding pages of a digital manual that looks like it would've come with a game boy game (I'm sure there are other manuals this aspect ratio, but that's the one that came to me first). But it's also in the language that the developer had made up for the game, with only some English spread about it. It gives the feeling of important a Japanese game and trying to understand everything about it by going through the manual. And that's all you get. The more pages you find, the more you can figure out, but the game isn't going to spell it all out for you. In fact, there were some things I figured out based on unrelated mechanics presented in the manual.
It's like a magic trick; I found myself actively rethinking how to play the game and altering my play style to find secret passages, new items, and doorways that, as it turns out, were all available to me from the very beginning. you can even go through the entire game without ever picking up the sword and other items that other games would treat as plot critical. It's so much more open than it presents itself as, but it directs the player to find that out for themselves. At no point did the game point me directly where I needed to go; there were always some indicators, but I always felt like I was finding all this stuff on my own.
Then comes the halfway-point of the game. It's constructed in such a way to make you think that you are close to the end when something happens that changes everything. I'm sorry for being so vague, but I really want you to play this game. This moment, and the manual page you find afterward reveals such a huge aspect of the environmental design that I never thought about beforehand and made me realize there were a whole lot huge stretches of the game that I had access to the entire time, but never knew about. There are so many bits and pieces of the environment scattered around that just seem like generic ruins, but they all mean something. Everything means something.
Despite all this, I do have some light reservations about the game. As much is it's about discovering secrets, I couldn't find everything on my own and by the end had to turn to the internet in order to get the Golden Ending. On top of that, the combat can get very difficult, especially towards the end. I would encourage going into the accessibility settings in the game and turn off damage or stamina if you need to. There's no penalty for doing this, and I did it myself during the final boss fight of the game.
That aside, there's so much to love about this game, and so much to discover. I can only ask that you go play it as I believe it's one of the greatest video games ever made. I've never had this feeling of discovery and independence from any other game, aside from maybe something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's wonderful. But don't look up anything about it before you play it. I'm serious, you'll ruin the whole thing for yourself.