It’s a new year, which means that the Best of 2022 lists are all officially here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best albums, songs, books, video games, TV shows and movies. You're welcome.
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The Best Games Of 2022
10. 'Pentiment' from Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios
Layered atop these people is a conversation of faith I’ve never seen in a game, and very rarely in any popular art. Religion is beautiful and prone to corruption, a service of the state and its most powerful cudgel. Or to put it simply: Faith is what we make of it. Fittingly, so is Pentiment.
[Polygon]
9. 'Neon White' from Angel Matrix and Annapurna Interactive
Above all else, Neon White wants you to feel cool. Everything – from the art, the music, and of course, the gameplay – is all in service to that one simple rule. While there is a learning curve for true mastery, Neon White is designed to make you feel like a pro from the jump, immediately flying through its more than 100 brief levels like you're a speedrunner that has practiced for years. It's easily one of the best-playing games of the year, and perhaps any other year before it, and for that reason alone, it's claimed a spot high atop our best-of 2022 list.
8. 'Tunic' from Finji
Like Fez, Tunic is a work of nostalgia that's never happy to settle for nostalgia alone. A spin on the classic top-down Zeldas, the game's fox cub hero sets off on a dangerous quest through a world that is actually one gigantic puzzle. The best thing about Tunic should not be spoiled - if you've got to December without hearing about it, good on you - but even without it, this is a game to be savoured. Strange, familiar, intricate and built with love.
7. 'Norco' from Geography of Robots and Raw Fury
This game vibrates on my frequency in the way that only "Disco Elysium" and "Kentucky Route Zero" have in recent years. It's about melancholy and the world collapsing around you, sure, but it's also sincerely interested in the people left behind during the collapse. "Norco" is a rebuke of oil and megacorps ruining communities and the environment, but it's also a love letter to the places and people being ruined. I've never lived in Louisiana, but I feel the same way about Delaware that these folks feel about their home state. Very sad, scared, but madly in love.
[Digg]
6. 'Horizon: Forbidden West' from Guerrilla Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment
With smooth, intuitive combat and traversal, and graphics that showcase the power of the PS5, Forbidden West is a joy to play. But what makes it linger is its emotional heft, memorable characterization, and strong allegory about what happens when humans put their faith in greedy billionaires whose egos outweigh their technological knowhow.
[Time]
5. 'Stray' from BlueTwelve Studio and Annapurna Interactive
Stray took the gaming world by storm. After all, how many games let you play as an adorable ginger tabby cat? Thankfully though, developer BlueTwelve Studio backed up the hype with a fantastic game, where a city abandoned by humans and now inhabited by robots – and a whole lot of trash – accidentally becomes your playground. The way Stray captures the movements and behaviors of your average house cat is a genuine joy, with elements like scratching on rugs and knocking things off tables seamlessly entwined with Stray's lovely narrative. Every moment you spend with the feline hero makes you appreciate the meticulous detail that has been poured into the experience, helping to bring the entire thing to life. And with a little drone as your navigator and translator, there's far more here than a cute platformer with excellent cat physics.
4. 'Vampire Survivors' from Luca Galante
The fast-paced unlocking of its dozens of auto-firing weapons and passive upgrades make each roguelite survival run more interesting than the last: you find new combinations of upgrades and evolve them into more powerful forms until, before you know it, you’ve tumbled down its innumerable rabbit holes of weird secrets and your screen fills with psychedelic destruction as swarms of thousands of enemies part before you as the Red Sea before Moses.
[IGN]
3. 'Immortality' from Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid Productions
A spellbinding game that is also three entire movies, Immortality is something that has never been even conceived of before either in games or film. Unravelling the mystery of a vanished Hollywood starlet by examining footage from her works, we become absorbed into this fastidiously recreated cinematic universe – and become part of the story ourselves.
2. 'God of War Ragnarok' from Sony Santa Monica and SIE
God of War Ragnarok is the culmination of a character arc that, just a few years ago, sounded like a ludicrous proposition. And yet, developer Sony Santa Monica managed to pull off what felt like an impossible feat by depicting a journey that shows Kratos, the one-time Greek god of war known for brutality and absolute dedication to death and destruction, find balance as a father, a friend, and a champion for the future of the oppressed in the nine Norse realms.
[GameSpot]
1. 'Elden Ring' from From Software and Bandai Namco Entertainment
Elden Ring is technically impressive, visually stunning, and satisfyingly challenging. It has humor, it has sadness, it has turtle popes. It dashes your hopes up against a jagged rock only to hand you hope back bit-by-bit as you strengthen your character and your resolve. It is everything that we hope for in a video game, and then some.
[Kotaku]
Honorable Mentions
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"Marvel Snap" from Second Dinner
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"Citizen Sleeper" from Jump Over the Age and Fellow Traveller
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"Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope" from Ubisoft
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"Xenoblade Chronicles 3" from Monolith Soft and Nintendo
A Note On Methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).
The outlets we got these rankings were: IGN, Polygon, Kotaku, Digg, Golden Joysticks, GameSpot, The Game Awards, Giant Bomb, Kotaku, Game Informer, The Guardian, Time, Games Radar, Eurogamer, Empire, Edge, EGM, Destructoid, VG247, Shacknews and Ars Technica.
