2022 was a year that started and ended strong, with a slew of massive triple-A titles and darling indies that kept gamers busy for hundreds of hours across dozens of genres, making deciding my games of the year a particularly tough task. The only thing I am truly sure of, though, was that it was an unforgettable year as I rode the waves of adventure, hashed out my best strategies, and saved the world a few dozen times over before finally whittling down the list of contenders into this top five.
| 05 | Sonic Frontiers |
I’ll admit, I had low expectations for Sonic Frontiers, and maybe that’s why I was blown away by the experience it was able to deliver in the end. A couple of issues with the camera couldn’t take away from the fact that Sonic in an open-world setting just plain works here. Every island he explored to save his friends from a digital purgatory was a fresh new adventure that also found various ways to call back to Sonic’s past. Both the islands themselves (pinball anyone?!) and a half-dozen “levels” contained within that you could teleport to paid homage to Sonic games of the past. By the end, the Blue Blur had never looked better, and I had a hankering for some chili dogs.
| 04 | Marvel’s Midnight Suns |
Developer Firaxis is likely best known for XCOM, an intense, punishing, turn-based strategy series, so them taking a crack at the practitioners of the dark arts in the Marvel Universe seemed like an interesting idea. The studio was able to deliver both a memorable strategy experience and a game far more accessible than its usual fare. Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ card-based system, the removal of XCOM staples like fog of war and permadeath, and an explorable hub world outside of battles that holds its own secrets come together to provide a special strategy experience that is enjoyable for newcomers and veterans alike. Even the grind outside of story missions in order to enhance the Abbey, your fully upgradable base, never got old. When you take all this and throw in the settings of the larger Marvel universe, it made it difficult for me to put this game down.
| 03 | Nobody Saves the World |
It was late January and I had nothing on my docket to play, so I went scrolling through Xbox Game Pass and noticed Nobody Saves the World. It had a catchy title and a cute art style, and I saw it was made by DrinkBox Studios, the folks behind the Guacamelee! games and Severed, some of my favorite handheld releases from recent years. So, I took a chance and was not disappointed. Imagine an overhead adventure game, but filtered through the lens of DrinkBox’s humor and art style. It was both something familiar and new at the same time as you play the titular Nobody who has the power to become anybody: Mermaids, warriors, ghosts, dragons, and more as every new persona opens more to explore and offers you greater power as you try to save the world. It was so brilliantly done that it stayed in my top five the entire year.
| 02 | Pokémon Legends: Arceus |
The formula for Pokémon has worked so well for 25 years that while the mainline games have tried adding some bells and whistles, the series has stayed relatively close to its roots. What makes Pokémon Legends: Arceus so special, then, is that it’s probably the biggest deviation from what makes a great mainline Pokémon game, but still has those tenets of exploration, capturing, and battling. Journeying through the ancient Hisui region, finding variations or new evolutions for classic fan favorite Pokémon, and having to strategize more about each catch with the player character doing much of the workwas such a breath of fresh air that it made my return to the mainline series later in the year with Scarlet and Violet almost disappointing. The only hope now is that we’ll get another legend sometime in the future.
| 01 | Horizon Forbidden West |
This was my only easy choice on my list this year. There was no other world I spent as much time in as I explored every nook and cranny, completed every quest, and got to know every character on the way to my lone PlayStation Platinum trophy. Aloy and her allies took part in the most captivating story I experienced this year, and when combined with an unbelievably gorgeous world to explore and gameplay that never got old, it was the singular, most complete package I experienced in 2022. Every main and side quest felt organic to the world, whether it was helping out all the strangers Aloy met, laying waste to every robot animal in her path, or clearing the land so that it might heal. It did all this while setting up the next heart-pounding adventure that I cannot wait for.
| SP | The “Best Reason to Dust Off Your PS VR Headset” Award Moss Book II |
With Sony focusing on the future with its next VR headset, it should come as no surprise that support has somewhat dried up for the headset that’s still currently on the market. But one of my most anticipated sequels did finally drop on the PS VR (and later PC) this year, and it was absolutely worth digging out my PS4 controllers for. Moss: Book II continues the tale of Quill, a field mouse turned unlikely hero. With a larger world to explore and more powers to wield, Moss: Book II brilliantly builds on the first game in every way imaginable, and provides a premiere experience as VR continues to slowly grow in the gaming market.
| SP | The “Unsuspecting Addiction” Award Vampire Survivors |
Sometimes there’s a game that’s so simple on its surface but has so much depth to it that it takes the gaming world by storm. This year, that game was Vampire Survivors. All you have to do is move around and try to avoid the ever-encroaching horde of undead enemies. But as you find items, meet new bosses, unlock new arenas, and continue to try to stay alive for longer and longer periods of time, a quick pick-up and play experience soon becomes one of the biggest time sinks, and most pleasant surprises, of the year.
| SP | The “Don’t Forget About Me Because I Released So Late” Award High on Life |
It’s easy for a game released in mid-late December to get lost in the awards shuffle and then slip from people’s minds the following year. So, I wanted to highlight a solid shooter that is one of the funniest games you’re likely to ever play. If you’re a fan of Rick and Morty, then High on Life will be right up your alley. It feels like you’re injecting a full season of the show directly into your eyeballs as you’re guided through alien worlds by a set of talking weapons whose lack of filter is only matched by their bloodlust.
RayCarsilloWrites.com 
EGM Commentary: Putting Away My Geeky Things
Spector speaks, but who should listen?
I’ve wanted to write an article like this for some time now. I knew I wanted to vent my frustrations with the comics industry, but I didn’t know how to jump into the subject without coming across like a raving lunatic—which I admit to sometimes being the case.
As my comic qualms simmered in the back of my mind for weeks on end and I pondered how to kick off this editorial, DICE 2013 rolled around. I’d planned on burying my anger even further in the recesses of my mind in order to focus on the conference, but I found some inspiration in an unlikely spot.
Celebrated game designer Warren Spector was scheduled to speak at the conference; he didn’t cancel his appearance even after the disheartening news that his studio, Junction Point, closed just a week prior to DICE. I’m sure this experience inspired Spector’s talk about spending almost four decades in the game industry—and what he saw now that he had the chance to take a step back.
Anyone who’s had the pleasure to speak candidly with Spector knows that he’s quick with a joke no matter the subject. Because of this, his presentation was one of the more enjoyable ones at the conference, even if it lacked the structure of other talks. But shooting from the hip—as Warren is wont to do—certainly ruffled a few feathers. Spector condemned the tongue-in-cheek zombie-ripping romp that was Lollipop Chainsaw and gushed over Heavy Raincreator David Cage’s work (maybe Warren’s trying to line himself up for an interview?), but what made my blood boil was his encouragement that we all “put away our geeky things.”
This irked me on several levels. Not only does what we do as game journalists drip with geekiness, but my beloved hobby of comic books is another cornerstone in the foundation of any solid nerd cred. My rage was palpable, to say the least—to begin with, anyway.
Like many other geeks, my first instinct had driven me to anger, before rationale (and, later whiskey) settled in to calm me down. After all, the same old song and dance from our favorite games, movies, and comics are like geek comfort food, and we don’t take too kindly to folks messing with tried-and-true recipes. But the more I thought about Spector’s words, the more I realized that he didn’t mean for us to drop the hobbies near and dear to our hearts or to stop being inspired by them. He didn’t literally want us to stop being who we are.
Warren Spector wants us to get away from the same tired formulas we’ve been using in games since he got into the industry. He wants developers to stop being so geeky and to grow up in a figurative sense so that we can break boundaries as a medium. The same can be said for what’s going on in the comics industry.
And this leads me into the point of this article (yeah, I like the sound of my own voice—I know, I know!). For the most part, the comic industry, much more so than the gaming industry, has become tired and stale, at least when speaking of the Big Two, DC and Marvel. “Transmedia” was a buzzword thrown around liberally at DICE, and it seems that with the comics industry being so focused on crossing over into games and movies, Marvel and DC have completely forgotten what it means to tell meaningful, entertaining stories through the traditional pages of a comic book.
In fact, Marvel and DC have gotten so far away from what they once were that they’ve transformed into an Ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail. I’ll let you decide which one of the Big Two is the head and which is the tail, but it doesn’t really matter. At this point, we can’t tell which came first, the chicken or the egg—because both are scrambled. Every time there’s a major story in one universe, the other has to go for a copycat narrative. When one relaunches, so must the other.
And heaven forbid that an original idea actually explains the drastic story switches this constant cycle signifies. If a writer uses time travel one more time to launch a series, I’m going to break the fingers of whoever wrote it. I’ll still never forgive DC and Geoff Johns for how they brought Swamp Thing back. And I’ll never forget what Marvel and J. Michael Straczynski did to Spider-Man back in 2007; they felt the best way to relaunch the character was for him to sell his marriage to Mephisto. I want you folks to look back over that last sentence and contemplate that for a little while if you’re not familiar with a horrendous little story arc called One More Day. Spidey sold his marriage to the damn Devil! It’s too much for even a comic-book fan like me to swallow.
The worst of it—at least in regards to the Big Two—is that it doesn’t look like things are going to change anytime soon. In fact, if this weren’t my job, I might be tempted to take Warren Spector literally and stop buying comics altogether, because the stuff being printed nowadays on a regular basis is slop.
I do see some potential for hope, though. While the Big Two continue to bite off each other to the point that, soon, there’ll be nothing worthwhile left to read, the indie scene is resurgent. The return of classic Valiant Comics likeArcher & Armstrong and Shadowman, new Star Wars books from Dark Horse, IDW’s takes on Ghostbusters andTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Archie’s continued success with other videogame properties like Mega Man andSonic the Hedgehog keep comics viable, much like how gaming’s own indie scene continues to breath fresh concepts into the industry year after year.
In the end, Warren Spector was right. It’s time for the comic-book industry, just like the game industry, to put a lot of their geeky, tired, uninspired ideas of what constitutes content away and to grow up. We can keep the capes, though!