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.

Tunic

I liked  because it captured the allure of the original Legend Of Zelda. Andrew Shouldice’s tribute to the original king of adventure games stars an adorable fox in a lushly animated world. But it doesn’t simply mimic the style of early Zelda games—it fully recreates the experience of being dropped into a game world full of secrets and esoteric mechanics, drip-feeding you the knowledge you need by way of a lovingly crafted in-game instruction manual that, in a stroke of sheer brilliance, is written mainly in a made-up language. Just like the days of your youth, when your grasp on the syntax of video games was less than fully formed, each simple act in Tunic, from reaching the next dungeon to simply leveling up, is a puzzle in and of itself. [Mike Rougeau]