The 25 Best Video Games of 2022

If we’d cut this list off only at March, you’d be left with one that still included Elden Ring, a Horizon sequel, Norco, and maybe four or five other candidates for some of the best pop-cultural experiences of the year, to say nothing of major overhauls for Destiny 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. Something about the beginning of this year felt urgent in the arts, but especially in gaming, which makes total sense given that many of us were finally leaving our home for more than just essentials for the first time in two years.

Much of the year’s works of art were the product of a world that was once in isolation, which is to say that it’s no accident that so many video games from 2022 feel introspective and self-examining in ways that we haven’t seen from the industry on such a scale before. By contrast, so many of the titles released in the latter half of the year suggested a pressure valve being released, namely for the way they reveled in possibility, the limitations of technology be damned.

Wild ideas seemed to come from every area of the gaming spectrum. And that urgency felt less like a wild flail toward any kind of finish line than a result of the pressing need for a radical reimagining—to say something worthwhile above the often cacophonous din that is the gaming industry. If there’s anything these titles we’ve chosen have in common, it’s that none of them have settled for doing things the way they’ve been done before. Collectively, they make a loud statement: that it’s too late in the day to let gaming stay stagnant. Justin Clark

25. Live A Live (Square)

For most gamers outside Japan, Live A Live came out of nowhere this year, but there’s an argument to be made that it came to Western shores at the perfect time. While not as legendarily coveted as Mother 3—a game that, embarrassingly, Nintendo hasn’t been localized or released outside Japan—Live A Live in 2022 feels like a rosy reminder of why JRPGs have endured all this time. It’s an ode to and refinement of old-school RPG storytelling that would have been drowned out at the time of release, but with over 25 years of distance, it stands as a lovely re-establishment of the gold standard. Here are eight perfect little slices of storytelling, ranging from hours-long adventures to 30-minute-long sci-fi horror stories, rendered even more beautiful and nostalgic courtesy of the same 2D-HD engine that powers Square’s much more meandering Octopath Traveler. None of them outstay their welcome, and all of them leave the player absolutely buzzing with new emotions at their end. As RPGs have gotten bigger, it’s never been more important to remember what can be done with less. Clark

24. Escape Academy (Coin Crew Games)

The smart, satisfying Escape Academy starts out in a run-down escape room business that’s revealed to be a front—a recruitment tool for a secret school that educates escape artists through a gauntlet of increasingly elaborate puzzles and challenges. Admittedly, the notion of a virtual escape room sounds a little redundant, given that the point of a real-life escape room is to transplant puzzles seen in games and movies into a physical space. But the differences between a virtual escape room and the real deal, or just about any run-of-the-mill video game level, are immediately, thrillingly clear here. For one, Escape Academy relies far less on carefully walking you through mechanics and signposting where to go. So much of this game is about exploring a space and observing under time pressure, discovering information hidden in the scenery and learning on the fly. And the freedom that the game hands you is such that every single victory leaves you with a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. Steven Scaife

23. Metal: Hellsinger (Funcom)

There are no misunderstandings when it comes to Metal: Hellsinger. It’s exactly what it portends itself to be: a straightforward, no-nonsense FPS set in Hell—literally seven hells, in fact. But there’s a twist. Sharp aiming, dodging skills, and smart use of powerups won’t save you. The only thing that leads to victory in this game is to speak the language of metal. It’s easy to imagine the elevator pitch: “Doom Eternal: The Musical.” There’s not really a way to grace this up: Metal: Hellsinger fucking rules, and it knows it. It’s one thing to have Mick Gordon’s guitars underscore your curbstomping of demons. It’s another entirely to find yourself in the middle of this sneering, blood-drenched interpretive dance of guns, razors, and knives, constantly reorienting, recalculating the right tool for the job, dodging bullet-hell lightshows of fire from Hell’s worst and weirdest, while Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy or Randy Blythe from Lamb of God tells you the grim legacy of the very land you stain. Clark

22. Bayonetta 3 (PlatinumGames)

Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with the first two games can jump right into Bayonetta 3 with only the tiniest bit of fuss finding out that certain combos end differently. Newbies, though, can also jump in without fear, as the game is every bit as welcoming to button-mashers as it is to meticulous combat experts. The big looming threat of the game is more nebulous, but the ways in which Bayonetta and her friends deal with that threat have never been weirder or wilder. Why take out baddies with stodgy old swords, spears, and claws when you can knock them around with chainsaws, or a demon diva’s mic stand? One weapon in the game is literally just the two sharpest chunks of a gothic cathedral. In case it isn’t obvious, Bayonetta hasn’t lost a step in terms of pure unfettered chaos. You may not get to punch anything more grandiose than the unfathomable, ancient face of God, but you still get to have kaiju fights in a ruined New York, fire gatling guns off the back of a demonic train that’s being chased by a monster across the Great Wall of China, and watch a mega-sized demon witch flick enemies away like flies while taking a sexy bubble bath in the upper stratosphere of the Earth. Clark

21. Marvel Snap (Second Dinner)

Though Second Dinner’s Marvel Snap grows increasingly complex as you earn and encounter new cards in your and your opponent’s 12-card deck, it’s always a, well, snap to pick up and play, with matches taking fewer than three minutes to complete. Then there’s the game’s Backgammon-inspired “snap” mechanic, where a player can effectively double the number of cosmic cube points on which the players are wagering. Character and location cards have entertaining (and sometimes random) abilities, which results in each game feeling unique and surprising to the point where even a loss can be fun, and sometimes funny, due to the springing of bizarrely synergistic card combos. A game like this doesn’t need dialogue, as the cards leap off the pages of the comics they’re based on and speak for themselves. Marvel Snap is a chaotically well-designed game that merges the best parts of chess and poker, leaving it up to you to predict, outmaneuver, and yes, sometimes bluff, your enemies. Aaron Riccio

20. The Entropy Centre (Stubby Games)

There’s never been a more convincing narrative given to the first-person puzzler than in The Entropy Centre. Aria is a junior puzzle operative, and each puzzle that she solves by rewinding objects through time generates the entropic power that the moonbase requires to rewind Earth itself, thereby giving the planet ample time to avert cataclysms—like the one currently engulfing the planet. The more unique the puzzle, the more energy it produces, which is a fun narrative constraint that forces the developers to keep adding new elements and twists into the game’s mix, with each of the 15 chapters introducing objects that let you manipulate time and space. It’s normally unflattering to force a comparison to Portal, but The Entropy Centre’s assured, comic tone and precise testing chambers allow it to feel like a worthy successor to that classic. Time may occasionally run in reverse here, but the developers at Stubby Games ensure that their wholly original, engrossingly detailed creation never feels stuck in the past. Riccio

19. We Are OFK (Team OFK)

Gaming, in general, still has a chip on its shoulder about its legitimacy as a dramatic art. It’s just that we’ve transitioned from morose Gears of War trailers set to Gary Jules’s “Mad World” to interactive dramas about Things Our Parents Did To Us. We Are OFK is shot through with the need to address generational trauma, but it’s also a game about how to procrastinate at work, the choice to respond to being fired over email, and which deep-cut movie quote to drop on your friends via text. There are plenty of games aspiring to be interactive TV shows, even interactive albums, though We Are OFK is spectacular as both a visual and aural showcase. But unlike many games of its ilk, We Are OFK is joyous, a mad search for some sort of equilibrium and community and creativity when everything else in the world feels impermanent, and finding it in four of the most relatable, wonderful weirdos ever crafted for a game. Clark

18. Dying Light 2 (Techland)

Dying Light 2 is a rare example of ludonarrative harmony, as every element in the game, from its setting to its gameplay mechanics to its story beats, moves together in unison to expound on its themes. Here, conflict isn’t always the solution, but some individuals—especially those in power—cannot be left to freely carry out their actions unchecked. Early in the campaign, Aiden Caldwell’s guide tells him that he’s free to abandon his quest and just explore the City as a playground, which, yes, is an option that’s available to players. But doing so is irresponsible, as it would leave many to suffer as a result of his lack of intervention, while limiting the gameplay variety that the player can experience. This is game about choice and consequences, and it rewards the player for exploring and engaging with the City’s environments. Unlike the derivative setting of last year’s Far Cry 6, the City is a character of its own, alive with lived-in detail and a refinement of the use of environmental storytelling. And it’s all the more incredible for making us feel as if we can change it for the better. Ryan Aston

17. Nobody Saves the World (Drinkbox Studios)

Freedom in its purest sense—and most exhilarating self—is at the heart of Drinkbox Studios’s Nobody Saves the World. As a so-called nobody, players spend the game discovering who they are, in the process magically shapeshifting into 18 different forms. This gimmick is what gives the game—otherwise a classic top-down Zelda adventure filled with overworld exploration and foe-filled dungeons—a compelling sense of identity. You don’t have to stick to any form for too long, such as the familiar sword-wielding hero, and you probably won’t given the idiosyncratic draw of the other forms, from a horse that attacks by kicking its hind legs to a mermaid with a tail-swipe that’s powerful both in and out of water. “Why not?” is the modus operandi here for both the comic action-adventure gameplay and the outrageously punny plot, and it’s the most entertainingly weird game you’ll play this year. The only problem is that fighting’s so much fun that you might forget to get around to saving the world. Riccio

16. Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (Ubisoft Milan and Ubisoft Paris)

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is more colorful, more fluid, and just all-around more fun than Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, giddily taking cues from Super Mario Galaxy to blast off into new territory. The game wastes no time demonstrating its newfound freedom from the grid-based “realism” of its predecessor—the very first battle is fought atop a giant ravaging space manta ray—and in doing so draws focus to unique challenges, as well as novel maps that aren’t restrained by needing to double as the game’s overworld. Each region in Sparks of Hope is bursting with quirky things to stumble upon, though the tactical combat is rich enough to be rewarding enough on its own. The secret weapon of these fights is the way in which the developers have centered them around unique objectives, such that they serve as extensions of the environmental puzzles found on each island. Missions are rarely as straightforward as simply killing enemies, which keeps you on your toes as you try to come up with new strategies to best synergize your squad (of two to four heroes), your Sparks, and the environment. Riccio

15. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (Tribute Games)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a shot in the arm for the beat ‘em up. A sequel to two of the classics that defined the 1990s arcade and NES era, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Turtles in Time, the game is both a nostalgia-driven throwback and an evolution of a genre. Right out of the gate, it’s clear that the developers were aware that simply duplicating the 16-bit graphics and sound effects of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Turtles in Time, as well as channeling their core gameplay and old-school difficulty, wouldn’t be enough to sustain a contemporary video game across a lengthy campaign. Shredder’s Revenge goes the extra mile by bolstering its gameplay with modernized mechanics that will allow the most skillful of players to avoid taking damage entirely. And though it’s a love letter to the franchise, the game isn’t above making fun of its innate silliness. In that sense, it follows the lead of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original comic book, especially in the way that it mocks the criminal—and ineffective—ninja gang known as the Foot. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is about oversized, crime-fighting mutant reptiles, and Shredder’s Revenge is alive to the ridiculousness of that premise. Aston

14. Pentiment (Obsidian Entertainment)

Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment is a reminder of how you can see the brushstrokes above all else when you stare at a painting long enough. The game’s aesthetic suggests nothing short of a playable illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages, which is impressive enough. The dialogue is razor-sharp, augmented by a rather inspired implementation of old English text, and what feels like an exhaustive amount of research into the Bible and the political landscape and history of 16th-century Bavaria. But the attitude of the thing is very 2022, turning what could’ve been just a wry murder mystery in a small Catholic village into a smirking, incisive, and surprisingly adult teardown of organized religion and how institutional power infects the hearts of men, especially men of the cloth. It’s a game that recognizes the comforts and perils of piety and refuses to flinch in the face of blasphemy. Clark

13. Faith: The Unholy Trinity (Airdorf Games)

To our eyes, the image of Father John Ward is functionally a silhouette, a human-shaped splotch of blue broken up only by the white pixel of his priest’s collar. Faith: The Unholy Trinity’s environments are presented on a black background, and most objects are represented as single-color sprites. You can make out small details well enough, but they demand an additional degree of focus and scrutiny that suggests any object might have a specific purpose. One might figure into a puzzle solution, hide an explanatory note that fleshes out the story, or be purely decorative. Where another game might have simply colored in all the interactive objects, Faith leaves us to find out their purpose for ourselves, thus priming us for a sparing and effective series of jump scares. The game’s masterful sense of timing and mood create a truly rare feeling of persistent uncertainty where anything can happen. In short, it manages to be frightening because of its technical constraints rather than in spite of them. Scaife

12. Signalis (rose-engine)

The sci-fi survival horror game Signalis isn’t shy about what inspired it, from the Nier video games to the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime, even Robert W. Chambers’s seminal horror novel The King in Yellow. But rather than seeming like a patchwork of borrowed ideas, Signalis weaves all of its influences into something marvelously assured and distinct as it follows the search of combat android Elster of a doomed mining facility for her lost love. The setting is vividly realized, in no small part due to the seamless switches from the polygonal overhead perspective (shades of the original Metal Gear Solid) to a first-person view and visions of cramped rooms littered with East German-inspired propaganda. Throughout, you’ll constantly find yourself fiddling with old technology to a jagged, clattering soundscape, scrounging for medical supplies and bullets because you’re hardly alone: The facility’s mangled survivors patrol hallways and pop out from under tiles, driven violently mad to a degree that casts a particularly hopeless pall over Elster’s mission. Bursting with a loving attention to detail, Signalis is one of the year’s most impressive achievements in atmosphere and storytelling. Scaife

11. Wayward Strand (ghost pattern)

So many games are eager to show that you, the player, matter above all else. Everyone asks for your permission before they do anything, and the impact of your decisions is always loudly declared. Sometimes it feels great, but it more often feels childish and limited, like getting a nice pat on the head for keeping all the sand in the sandbox. How appropriate, then, that Wayward Strand uses its 14-year-old child protagonist, Casey, for some of the most believable and mature storytelling of the medium. It doesn’t constantly highlight the effects of your choices and your intervention, even though it demands constant player choice as you decide what to pay attention to. The elderly ward that Casey visits operates on its own schedule, with events and stories that play out regardless of whether she’s around to see them or not. And it gives the game a staggering level of depth and authenticity, its small environment full of details just beneath the surface that you dig up just by talking and observing. In doing so, Wayward Strand offers a profound argument that contradicts so much common wisdom of game design: We don’t need to be in control to feel, and we don’t need to be the center of the universe to care. Scaife

10. Betrayal at Club Low (Cosmo D)

Cosmo D makes “walking simulators” of the most eccentric kind—first-person explorations of music-centered, pizza-obsessed pockets of the universe that suggest art installations. Until now, that is, because Betrayal at Club Low is fully and unambiguously a role-playing game, complete with dice rolls to determine how your skillset fares when you try to perform an action. Of course, the Cosmo D signature remains. Not only does Betrayal at Club Low present a familiar-seeming world of chilled-out workers who are slaves to a daily grind, it imports a few recognizable assets and characters from Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1. It would not be terribly surprising to find this RPG retroactively labeled Vol. 2, though the wacky story and the mechanics that accompany it are meant to stand alone. Rather than providing distinct experiences for different skillsets, the game is more about tweaking the details on a linear route to victory. And yet, even then, going through the same motions hardly dulls the sheen of Cosmo D’s latest clever and wholly invigorating gaming experiment. Indeed, it’s hard not to leave the game buzzing with excitement about all the new and surreal directions that its developer might take from here. Scaife

9. Norco (Geography of Robots)

You can feel the end coming in Geography of Robots’s NORCO, not through some dramatic flame-out but as a slow and undignified crawl. Partially set in the real-life Louisiana oil town that serves as its namesake, this sci-fi adventure takes place in some indeterminate future where advanced AI coexists with chunky, outdated technology like landline phones and rickety old pickup trucks. Playing mainly as Kay, you return home more out of duty than anything else, needing to settle affairs following her mother’s death. It was a slow, cancerous death that doesn’t suggest a larger mystery, but Kay finds one anyway that includes ecoterrorism, space-bound incels, and a duck-based neural network. NORCO functions mainly as a point-and-click adventure across pixelated screens that are strikingly detailed, emblematic of the game’s desolate, poignant, and often hilarious specificity. With modest tools and a rotation of weirdo companions, Kay’s investigation goes to the poisoned heart of humanity’s need for belief and how undiscerning we can be. Splashing every line of text and every image with local color, Geography of Robots has crafted nothing less than a new classic for the medium. Scaife

8. Vampire Survivors (Poncle)

Vampire Survivors is one of the year’s most addictive games. A unique rogue-lite whose 16-bit graphics harken back to the earliest Castlevania, its gameplay loop is best described as a bullet hell in reverse. Throughout, the player’s vampire hunter character fires off projectiles and short-range melee attacks in multiple directions, battling swarms of fantasy monsters rushing at you from all sides. This minimalist gameplay, where the player controls only the movement of the vampire hunter, conceals surprising depth, namely in the experimentation of the arenas that encourages exploration and quick-thinking when it comes to withstanding increasingly vicious enemies. And each run offers new characters, power-ups, and challenges, complete with bosses and special events—assuming the player can survive long enough. That each round lasts about half an hour, and with a quick start option to begin anew, Vampire Survivors is eminently playable for both casual gamers and hardcore slayers of the undead. Aston

7. Horizon Forbidden West (Guerrilla Games)

If there are moments throughout Horizon Forbidden West where you feel the linearity of the adventure a little too much, it makes up for that by endearing us to its characters, to the bite-sized episodic stories that fill its vast, startlingly detailed open world, and by making every activity have meaning to someone within it. Even the Tallneck tasks—this series’s version of the typical open-world “climb a tower, reveal the map” trope—have been crafted not just as self-contained action set pieces that are more thrilling and adrenaline-pumping than most full games, but as one more occasion to tell us stories of the world that was and how it collapsed. That connection to the past is also this game’s ace in the hole, giving us a parallel story to Aloy figuring out how to save her world, filling in the blanks left unanswered by Horizon Zero Dawn. As in that game, these stories are captivating, sad, and, at times, terrifying. Clark

6. Patrick’s Parabox (Patrick Traynor)

An old riddle asks, “When is a door not a door?” The playful answer: “When it’s a jar.” Patrick Traynor has taken a similarly mischievously punny approach to an analogous question. Within the classic block-pushing sokoban puzzle genre, the indie game developer dares to ask, “When is a box not a box?” And the answer is right there in the title of the delightfully inventive Patrick’s Parabox. In this bursting-at-the-seams collection of over 350 handcrafted puzzles, you’ll need to think both inside and outside the box to not only solve each conundrum but, in some cases, solve seemingly impossible recursive paradoxes in order to proceed. The idea of a Sokoban in which players push boxes into and out of other boxes isn’t new; Traynor credits that concept at least as far back as the 2018 puzzler Sokosoko by Juner. But Traynor’s taken the idea far beyond that game, and not just because he comes up with more than a dozen different types of boxes that can be entered and exited. By combining the various principles of his puzzle boxes, he’s turned them not just into optical illusions but into a work of art. Riccio

5. Tunic (Andrew Shouldice)

Tunic is more than an imitation of The Legend of Zelda, as it focuses on the most unexpected elements of its forerunners in order to reward players with a rapturous sense of discovery. Though Andrew Shouldice’s game is designed to lead you along an obvious path, it’s possible to stumble upon various secrets by accident throughout the campaign. Starting Tunic over will allow you to use your accumulated knowledge to complete tasks more quickly and out of order, if not bypass certain parts altogether, though you may not want to given how charmingly rendered the world is here. This sense of discovery follows through to the game’s surprisingly systemic nature, of realizing that certain interactions exist once you watch them happen. Where other isometric games of this sort heavily telegraph areas and objects that you should return to later, the levels here subtly fold in on themselves in ways that are both slyly hidden and obvious in hindsight. Tunic appears unassuming and even a little routine on the surface, but it constantly reveals how clever it is every time it encourages us to take a closer look. Scaife

4. Neon White (Angel Matrix)

Neon White’s setting thrillingly liberates it from the pesky rules of gravity, leaving the developers free to embrace momentum and level design above realism. Every enemy placement, every land mass, serves to help a savvy player move more fluidly from start to finish, and it’s not unusual to find levels that eschew solid ground entirely, mapping out a route through demon corpses as players dynamically grapple from foe to foe above a sea of clouds. In the context of all this exhilarating gameplay, Neon White’s amnesia conceit comes to feel vital, especially as you enter each new stage for the first time, building memory (muscle and otherwise) along the way. Even the way in which White learns about his teammates is tethered to good mission design, as each course houses a well-hidden gift that can only be reached with some creative and acrobatic maneuvering. It takes a bit of time to get used to playing at the game’s frenetic pace, but once you understand that each enemy and obstacle has been deliberately placed, it gets easier to read how the game wants you to move between them, and that’s a blissful experience. Riccio

3. God of War: Ragnarok (Santa Monica Studio)

There isn’t a single quest in God of War: Ragnarok, not a single action, that isn’t without purpose—a story to tell, wrongs to address, a sight to see, or a direct emotional through line to follow for at least one of our menagerie of travelers. Every new quest in the game enriches these characters or the world they inhabit, sometimes both. Every step of the way, you feel the pull of that world, and the tangible, plentiful rewards pale in comparison to the company we keep and fight for. Ragnarok has such a way about making the player care about the smallest characters, the most thoughtless aspects of the larger quest, where even our loyal dwarf shopkeeps, Brok and Sindri, become some of the most fascinating, layered, and tragic figures in the entire game at points. But, of course, it all comes back to Kratos and Atreus, both of them trying to figure out how to be decent men, or if that’s even a possibility in chaotic times. Theirs is a story of constant loss, and regret, and oppressive stress under circumstances familiar and wildly supernatural. But ultimately, it’s a story of power and dictionary-definition maturity, questioning the nature and responsibility of the power that lies within everyone who has people to care for. Clark

2. Elden Ring (FromSoftware)

In Elden Ring, failure teaches you one thing: that there is a main path, and getting there will never be a straight one. There’s adventure, there’s advancement, there’s aid, and there’s power waiting for you in every direction leading away from Margit the Fell Omen. Where you get the power to slay him and what form it takes doesn’t matter, but you’re meant to go find it elsewhere. “Getting gud” is such a tiny sliver of what progress in Elden Ring looks like, and it’s less about the developers at FromSoftware placing bosses and obstacles in front of the player as it is about rewarding our willingness to be intrepid, creative, and truly courageous. The game represents the studio taming the monster they created, not by filing down its teeth and claws, but by giving players the weapons and armor to endure it. It’s the first of their games to not feel like a brick wall but a doorway, with allies in every direction all reaching out to help you tread carefully to the other side. The result is a paradigm shift, a seemingly once-in-a-generation recalibration of old ideas and taking them to the next level. Clark

1. Immortality (Sam Barlow)

Most games are made to be solved. Whatever mystery shrouds them at the outset fades as they teach us their systems and their limitations in service of the player’s eventual conquest. Sam Barlow’s Immortality, though, isn’t so easy on players, asking us to trust a mechanic that we never fully grasp in order to parse video clips. A narrative emerges over time, though we never choose how it plays out. We can only piece together what’s already happened to an obscure 20th-century film actress, Marissa Marcel (Manon Gage), and the people in her orbit. Here, the granular understanding of game systems comes a distant second to the overall experience, where we watch these characters’ lives and the things they made in order to reflect them. That lack of understanding, in turn, mirrors the supernatural elements of the story: Whatever we may gain by imposing our will on the universe, we can be sure that it won’t be any greater comfort or certainty about our place in it. Immortality is an impressively layered work, filled with conflicted thoughts on the concept of the auteur, the collaborative process of art, and the prospect of going too deep in the service of expression. Scaife