The 10 best games of 2022 (so far)

2022 has been a quieter year for gaming than most; outside a few high-profile releases—and one massive, medium-sweeping bulldozer courtesy of FromSoftware—major releases (at least, from the big-budget studios) have been few and far between.

But that, of course, only calls for deeper curation, and so The A.V. Club is here with a look at the best games published in the first half of 2022, whether smaller indie titles, Elden Ring, or big-budget games forced to exist in the unfortunate shadow of Elden Ring. Our list runs the gamut from open world epics to small-scale emotional adventures, and from obscurity-soaked love letters to the latest adventures of everyone’s favorite pink vore monster. But all our picks are united by one thing: These were the games we liked—and why—in the first half of 2022.

Horizon: Forbidden West

I liked because it made hunting giant robot dinosaurs as thrilling as it should be. Whatever curse keeps forcing Guerilla Games to release its Horizon games directly in the path of titles (Zelda: Breath Of The Wild in 2017, Elden Ring this year) that radically reconfigure the open-world genre it trucks in can’t obscure that these games have some of the most thoughtful combat out there. Forbidden West has other assets to its credit—an interesting sci-fi story, and a continually winning performance by star Ashly Burch as heroic hunter Aloy—but it’s the feeling of tracking down, disassembling, and harvesting a massive array of brutally powerful, wily machines that keeps it lingering in the memory. [William Hughes]