What games are you desperate to get to before 2022 dies?
Norco, Signalis, and other games we're hoping to fit in before the year wraps up
Games Features Songs
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Now that The A.V. Club’s list of The Best Games Of 2022 has been put to bed for the year—thus fulfilling our contract with the Pop Culture Ranking gods and slaking their numerical bloodlust for yet another spin around the sun—I can happily get down to my favorite year-end tradition as the head of the site’s gaming coverage: Trawling through the comments on our list (as well as the lower reaches of our various contributors’ ballots, i.e., the bits that didn’t make it into the Top 15), looking for obvious gaps in the stuff I played in 2022 that I can fill back in over the holiday season.
After all, nobody can play everything; I stand by our ranking, great games all, but it’d be absurd to suggest that it’s a complete picture. Whither, for instance, Norco? Geography Of Robots’ text-heavy exploration of an alternate-universe New Orleans is obviously something right up my alley, full of strangeness and beauty and lovely, lovely words. But it simply missed me this year. (See also the more medieval Roadwarden, which our regular freelancer Alexander Chatziioannou has been singing the praises of since its release a few weeks back, but which I’ve yet to carve out the time to properly appreciate.)
That’s one of the pleasures of lists like ours, after all: By sketching out an image of the year in gaming, they also leave all sorts of negative spaces where exploration can continue to happen. There’s no feeling better than knowing that there’s a great game out there that I haven’t tried yet. I’ve been eyeing Square and Artdink’s Triangle Strategy for months now, for instance, enticed by its blend of tactical combat and consequence-heavy decision-making. And now, at least for a week or two, there’s a chance to dip back, and get my head and heart truly stuck in to that kind of tactical JRPG goodness that I’m always craving.
Signalis! How can I possibly get out of 2022 without at least trying rose-engine’s throwback to traditional survival horror gaming? (Especially after The Callisto Protocol left such a sour taste in my mouth; I need something space-y and terrifying to cleanse the palate.) (Got my eye on you, too, Scorn.) That’s to say nothing of those games I enjoyed this year but never quite completed: I really enjoyed Tunic, for instance, spending multiple hours deciphering its puzzles and its complex-but-fair fictitious language. But I never brought it all together for a final push to an ending. Like an insufficiently cautious Burgess Meredith in a video game-y version of the Twilight Zone, I’m convinced now that there’s time enough at last. (The irony/hubris of typing these words out while a winter storm with a pretty decent chance of knocking my power out completely bears down on Portland is not lost on me.)
It’s natural to bemoan a backlog of games. No other pop culture-y hobby demands as much investment in terms of time or focus as this one does. (A lackluster movie wastes at most three hours of a viewers’ life; a bad TV show 10 or 12; god knows how many hours of my life I’ve poured down the drain of a B- game.) But that’s also the joy of being invested in an art form that evolves every single time you turn around. It’s why I’m sincerely grateful for every single “How the hell did you forget XXXX?” comment that greeted our list: If someone’s passionate about a game, I want to know about it so I can get a taste of that passion myself. Hell, something amazing that didn’t even make the comments of our best-of list probably just came out while I was writing this; I can’t wait to try to hunt it down. (Feel free to point me in the right direction down in the comments of this piece.)
24 Comments
I think I heard about Roadwarden at some point, but forget to add it to my list of games I want to try, so thanks for putting it back on my radar. Signalis is probably worth checking out at some point, too.I’m mostly done with a playthrough of Stories Untold, but I became so annoyed with it in Chapter 3 that I just kind of took a break from it. That chapter’s puzzles relied on consulting an in-game microfiche, which you had to focus in and rotate to see clearly. I get that it is trying to lend a tactile feeling to the game, but it was never not frustrating when I had to consult that microfiche. At some point, I just gave up and looked up the puzzle solutions online. It is possible this problem is inherent to the PS4 port and it plays a lot smoother on other platforms.
Thankfully, I’m not a games writer so I don’t need to keep up with the zeitgeist. Whatever I haven’t finished this month will still be there in January, just like it was a year or a decade ago…So instead I’ll just remind everyone that PowerSlave: Exhumed exists, and I guess remind myself that 10 months on I should probably finish it :PI missed the Best Of article, so consider this my “how did you forget about XXX” comment 🙂
Is that Kirby in the background?
I don’t know what you’re talking about
Lil Gator Game is what I was looking forward to and I pre-ordered it on sale and beat it in a day and had a great time.
Midnight Suns has taken over my life. You can join a book club with Captain America. You can go fishing with Spider-Man. Also, the combat’s cool. But you can pretty much go on dates with Wolverine, even if he’ll never *really* love you.
I’m not so much obsessed with pulling games off my backlog before 2023 as I am trying to bring my raw number of unfinished games down before I shovel on a few more during the Steam Summer Sale. Trying to get a new low score, if you will. I’m at 15 now, which was the mark I wanted to make it down to, but can I make it down to 14?I’m getting the feeling that, no, I probably won’t. We had a 6.4 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday, followed by 18 hours without power, so while prioritizing perishable food and waiting for power and Internet and my office to all get back up and running, I turned on my fully charged Switch and finally got a few hours into Paper Mario: The Origami King. What started out as a project to rush through quickly got foiled by “Oh shit, finding Toads is actually really fun.”So now this is a completionist playthrough, just like all my playthroughs, and a particularly well hidden Toad’s even thanked me for that. I just finished the red streamer area and made it inside the Water Vellumental’s temple before quitting for the night last night, and given that there are five main areas and a final dungeon… this doesn’t feel like one I’m gonna just cram into the last week of the year, extra days off for the holidays or not. But it’s a game I’m gonna enjoy quite a bit – something I knew the moment I saw that fights were based around simple puzzles. This is exactly what I enjoy. I’m a puzzler. I puzzle. You want to replace just about any gameplay feature in just about any game with a puzzle? I’m in.
I bought Paper Mario: The Origami King a few months ago and got a couple hours deep. I’ve bought maybe 6 or 7 games since then and I haven’t touched it since. I was supremely disappointed with how watered-down it seems in comparison to earlier games in the series. Your post has inspired me to give it another shot but honestly wishing Origami King was more to my liking is my biggest gripe of the fall.
It’s a pretty hard sell for people who are looking for something that feels like Paper Mario, but I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzle combat mechanics, and especially, especially the boss fights. The boss fights all have cool spins on the basic combat mechanics, and the motion controls, though not that important to the gameplay, actually deserve major style points. If you are going to give the game another shot, I recommend you at least push through the end of the first chapter so you can see what the chapter bosses feel like.I appreciate that there weren’t fetch quests that sent you back to several earlier chapters’ areas to trade key items until you could make progress, and I love that there are multiple modes of fast travel. And I never felt like there was a segment that was telling me, “Yes, this section is tedious. That’s the joke.” Even disregarding the very, very me decision to make combat puzzly, they did a good job improving on several things I found annoying in Paper Mario and TTYD.
I’ve been consumed by Backpack Hero ever since they released a web-playable demo on itch.io. It’s a roguelike that’s all about backpack tetris, and is surprisingly deep for a small little game.
Downloaded The Case of the Golden Idol after seeing the comparisons to Obra Dinn on this site. Sadly have had a few work emergencies pop up in the last two weeks and have been so tired / stressed from that, have delayed starting the game up. Have next week off and hoping to wake up one day with the right mindset to get into the game.
I think I’ll get myself Peglin, which blends RPG and roguelike mechanics with Peggle play and lets you do some very wild things. Beyond that I’ll work on older stuff. Christmas with the fam means I’m away from the consoles for a bit but I look forward to cracking into them in the new year.
Why is there a game named after my favourite brand of milk?
I finished the Midnight Suns story last night. I found the game very enjoyable. I know some people state that the relationship building parts didn’t live up to what they wanted, but I found them fun and sweet, and if someone wants lore, this game drops a ton of lore on you. I feel like I could recommend the game to a lot of people.
Plus, it feels great throwing Hydra agents into an explosive fissure of demonic energy. It never gets old.
The rest of the holiday break is gonna be New World for the winter event and finally finishing up the NG+ Ultra Hard run of Horizon: Forbidden West, the game that somehow looks better every time I load it up.
As a non related note, came home for christmas and had to follow the ultimatum of “get rid of all the gaming stuff you have in here”. I am throwing away around 300 old games, some in cardboard boxes, some even NES originals, because after 10 years I cannot bring them to London (really, I can only afford houses with limited storage space, and I want to invest that in music) and everyone that told me “what! how are you going to throw away those treasures!” never commited to actually take them. So this lemmings box, this eternam one, all these treasures are going to be gone. I feel frustrated, sad, but also very much relieved.Aaand cannot help thinking how storage space is something only some privileged people do have. Still remember that house I was living in with two friends where there the only storage was taken by a huge boiler and not even the vacuum cleaner could be fitted in there. Maybe it is a London thing, I don’t know anymore. Anyway, bye games, by nes console, bye dreamcast, bye super mario 3, bye megaman 2, I really cannot take care of you anymore and no one can.
Yo go to a retro game shop omg what are doing some of those definitely have increased in value. I got a Nintendo Switch basically for free this year by bringing my dusty N64 and a couple old cartridges in. Dude there are stores for this you threw away a chunk of money there…
Yoooooooooo who advised you to do this?!?! There are stores that will buy them omg you should have looked into this first.
It doesn’t matter if your friends wont shit or get off the pot cuz there are literal stores that will buy it from you..
Dude, seriously – I can think of several places off the top of my head that would have had you send the whole lot in one go. Hell, someone on AtariAge.com would have taken it off your hands for sure.
Ever hear of this thing called eBay ?
Mrs. F. didn’t know it but now she’s looking to finish “Ghostwire Tokyo” by year’s end. She just got it for Christmas and dove right in.
I’m going to start and complete Persona 5: Royal before the end of the year. After that I will have mastered all of time and space, so maybe I’ll become a God. Or maybe I’ll get lucky and I can get maybe ten hours in
Trying to get as many people to play FAITH: The Unholy Trinity as humanly possible. It does so much with so little, and I love how the game discusses mental illness and manipulation.
123