My Favorite Game From Every Year I've Been Alive Part 7: 2017 to 2022

Videogames should get better at some point

More years, more games, less enthusiasm.

2017

What was happening in the world? Despacito?

Who cares? The Nintendo Switch is here! Nintendo’s new console was a massive hit, and it brought with it some incredible new games like ARMS, which no one remembers and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I haven’t played. We’re starting early with those. I haven’t played Breath of the Wild, but I have played versions of it, since this is one of the most influential and copied games in recent memory. It made a Ubisoft style open world with some stuff do do and explore, and it introduced the climbing stamina system every other game would go on to adopt.

For the other Switch games we got Mario Kart 8… again! That’s right, that Mario Kart game you were already sick of on the WiiU is now on the Switch. Who am I kidding, no one played it on the WiiU. No one bought a WiiU. I didn’t, but I did play Mario Kart 8. It was alright.

I didn’t play Lawbreakers. I wasn’t the only one to not play it. In fact, not playing Lawbreakers was the style at the time. You might be asking yourself “what the hell is Lawbreakers?”, and you wouldn’t be the first or the last to ask. It was Cliff Bleszinski’s answer to Overwatch. A hero shooter where you could go into zero gravity areas. The art style was boring, the characters were unappealing, the gameplay looked slow and heavy, and it flopped in a few weeks. No one remembers it. I’m sure nothing like that happened again. I never played it for the aforementioned reasons.

Every time I post this picture, an angel gets his wings.

In the same realm of high-profile flops I didn’t play, we got Mass Effect: Andromeda. A terrible follow up to the besmirched Mass Effect franchise. We all thought Mass Effect 3’s ending was the worst thing to happen to the franchise, but along came Andromeda to show us true horror. Poorly made, riddled with bugs, and with a script that redefines millennial writing. Constant, unfunny quips, baffling turns of phrases like “My face is tired from all of this”, and awkward cutscenes. All from a franchise known for its writing and cinematic presentation. The gameplay was hot garbage, too, apparently. Allegedly. I didn’t play it. You couldn’t get me to touch anything Mass Effect related after 3. That wound runs too deep.

I still check under my bed for this thing

We also got a new Bubsy game for some reason. I don’t know who asked for it, but we need to find them and put them in jail. Same for whomever came up with the game. Matter of fact, find anyone who bought the game and put them away, too. The only good thing we got from this game was an episode of Oney Plays. That’s it. I didn’t play it, either. What? You think I’d play the new Bubsy game of all things? I have questionable tastes, but I still have some discernment.

I did play Nioh, which also released this year. It was Dark Souls in ancient Japan, before Sekiro. Then Sekiro did Dark Souls Japan, but at that point it was Nioh without stamina. The web of comparisons is weird, but the game was fine. It had a dumb loot system that had you collecting hundreds of junk with slightly different numbers, which was infuriating. The overall gameplay, combat and mechanics were good, at least. Tough as hell, too.

Tekken 7 came to consoles after being out in the arcade for years. It was fun. The rage system was a bit annoying, but it was still a good time. Then the game kept getting updates and DLC characters, and it stopped being such a good time. Then Tekken 8 came out and 7 started to look a lot better again, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Capcom didn’t want to be left behind in the fighting game arena, so they released Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. We wish they hadn’t. It was the long-awaited follow up to Marvel vs Capcom 3. When the game was announced, the hype was immense. We couldn’t believe we were getting a new entry in such a legendary franchise. Then the trailers dropped and opinion quickly turned sour. It looked like a mobile game. It didn’t have one third of the love and care the previous games had, it had a much smaller roster and it was missing fan favorites like the X-men. The overall negative attitude towards the game and lack of support in the esports scene led the game to flop like a fish out of water. The game itself was fine. It was a degenerate tag fighter, and the infinity stone system just led to longer combos and more oppressive offense. Not much different from the previous games.

What’s wrong with your face?

Prey came out this year, too. Not that Prey. That was a sci-fi first person shooter with horror elements where you go around a space station full of aliens. This one was a sci-fi first person shooter with horror elements where you go around a space station full of aliens. Wait a minute. This version of Prey is an interesting game. An immersive sim with a good amount of freedom, creative problem solving, spooky moments and some neat ideas. This game is what Bioshock should have been.

There was Cuphead, the indie darling that introduced millions to the concept of “difficulty not in a Dark Souls game”. It had gorgeous hand-drawn graphics and a great soundtrack, but it wasn’t all style and no substance. It was a genuinely fun run and gun shooter with some good challenge.

Speaking of highly-regarded indie darlings, we got Hollow Knight. A metroidvania with heavy dark souls influence. You can’t discuss games after 2014 without mentioning dark souls. Dark souls this, dark souls that. I didn’t like Hollow Knight. It’s incredibly slow in its progression, and it’s a lot of walking and basic platforming. Oh, but it gets really hard later. Yeah it gets hard eventually, just give it a moment. This doesn’t usually happen, I usually get my double jump upgrade sooner.

While I’m tanking my credibility by admitting I dislike beloved games: Nier Automata. I know everyone loves this game, and they think the story is so deep and they jork themselves raw over 2B, and yeah, 2B is cute, but damn is that game boring. My God. The combat is shallow and repetitive, I didn’t like the empty world and the “exploration” and backtracking. The presentation is great, but I couldn’t bear the gameplay enough to get through it and enjoy the story. Even on that front, I think The Talos Principle did a better job of questioning the nature of existence and consciousness, all while having fun gameplay.

Your reaction to that information

Indie game speed-round: Fight n Rage. It’s a beat-em-up where you pound furries into submission. With your fists… not- not like that. Nex Machina: arcade style shooter with seizure-inducing graphics. It’s a lot of fun when you can actually see what’s happening. Overcooked is a multiplayer cooking game that has the uncanny ability to start arguments. Slime Rancher was a cozy game where you catch slimes and profit off them. Very relaxing.

With all this heresy out of the way, let’s get to my favorite game of 2017

My pick for 2017: Battlerite

If I could take Hollow Knight’s popularity and give it to another game, it’d be Battlerite. Battlerite was a 3v3 moba battle arena. It took the fun aspect of mobas- the part where both teams are trying to kill each other- and made an entire game around that. No towers, no farming, no items, no objectives, just pure chaos, and it was wonderful. The characters were well designed, with interesting kits and abilities, the flow of each match was fast and satisfying and it was all around a blast. Too bad no one played it and it died a few years after release. It had so much potential. To this day, I consider it the greatest moba ever, even if it wasn’t really a moba.

2018

Did 2018 happen? I don’t think so. Filler year.

Starting off with a quick foreshadowing, we got Among Us. A little indie deduction game that went under the radar on its release. I’m sure nothing will come of it in a few years.

If you wanted less fun and more stress in your game, Darkest Dungeon had you covered. A brutal dungeon crawler where one wrong move could send your entire party into a schizophrenic meltdown. You didn’t even have to be the one to make the mistake. Sometimes they’d just start killing each other because they got spooked by a roach. It crossed the line from “challenging difficulty” all the way into “oh my God why would I even bother with this shit?”.

Assault Spy was a game where you played as Dante from Devil May Cry if he were a salary man. I did a quick write up recommending this one for Christmas, and it’s probably getting a full review at some point.

This year was huge for the kind of multi million dollar triple-A game I don’t play, but everyone else seems to love.

We got God of War again, but this time, Kratos is a dad! This is a more serious, mature take on those immature God of War games you liked as a kid. Those were videogames (derogatory), this one is closer to a movie, therefore it’s art. It’s still about clobbering fantasy creatures, but you’re not supposed to enjoy the violence. It’s just the focus of 99% of the game because- uh- well- uh- we’re making a statement about how violence is childish and you should be a dad… with axes. It’s high art, dammit! The fact that you’re questioning it means you’re not ready for it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 took this concept and ran with it to the point of parody. A giant, massive, bloated game that puts everything over the gameplay. It plays like a regular cover shooter from the 360 era, with no real changes or improvements, but hey whenever you’re looting something you have to take every item out individually! Isn’t that neat? In terms of gameplay it’s Red Dead Redemption one, but with a lot more talking, but you don’t care, do you? The graphics are incredible and the horse’s testicles shrink when they’re in the cold! Gaming isn’t about the gameplay, it’s about horse balls. We need to make our employees work 70 hour weeks to get those horse balls juuuuuust right.

Monster Hunter World also attended the same school of design as the others. You won’t see any of those details on the monsters, there are other games for that, but it did introduce a lot more story elements into a franchise previously known for its gameplay. It also drained it of all its color. It’s Monster Hunter, but with less of what made the previous games fun, but it was still a worthwhile experience. Even if some of the monsters were a complete pain in the ass, especially in its Iceborne expansion. Looking at you, Blackveil Vaal Hazak. It would take another entry for the franchise to go fully triple-A, but I’m getting ahead of my self.

This guy can go fly a kite.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance came along to show you could make a high-end story-driven game, while still being fun. You just have to trust that your player is capable of figuring out what to do, and how to do it. Judging from a lot of the reviews complaining about the combat, it sounds like the developers had a little too much faith in the average consumer. This game’s great. Its systems work well together, there’s a good sense of freedom to what you can do, the quests are interesting and the combat is weird at first, but satisfying once you get the hang of it. I especially liked the archery mechanics. The section in the monastery could have been removed, in my honest opinion.

2018 was also a good year for Mega Man, and re-releases of Mega Man. We got Mega Man 11, a great new entry in the franchise after over a decade of inaction.

We also got four other Mega Man games. Wow! Four new games? Yeah, four new re-releases. We got the original franchise with the Legacy collection and X in the X Legacy collection. Wait, that’s two games. Where are the other two? They’re right there. We split both collections in two games for some unknown reason. This is even worse if you remember the Anniversary collections that released back in 2005. They had every game in their respective franchise in one disc, for $30. I still bought the legacy collections because I’m a good little consumerist piggie.

We also got a re-release of Burnout Paradise. Wait, why? That game isn’t old enough to warrant a remake, it came out… a decade ago? Oh no. I remember buying the original at Gamestop like it was yesterday, and now it’s getting a re-release? Damn. Time really do be progressing in a linear fashion.

Me the moment I realized 2008 and 2018 are 10 year apart (I suck at math)

There was also a re-release of Ressonance of Fate. Sorry, let me use its proper title: Resonance of Fate^TM/END OF ETERNITY^TM 4K/HD EDITION. That’s its actual name. That’s how it shows up on Steam. This is an HD remaster of a relatively unknown JRPG where you shoot trolls with guns. It has an interesting combat system with a steep learning curve, but once you figure out how it works, the game doesn’t ever really evolve past it. The combat is one puzzle, and when you solve it, the same solution applies to every other fight. It’s fine, but since it’s a JRPG, it means it keeps going for around 50 hours, which leaves the gameplay feeling a bit thin.

I got my eye on you, re-zone-ance of fat-ee TEE EM.

There was also a re-release of Dark Souls (there it is again), but now it’s in High Definition. Wait, why would you re-release Dark Souls? It’s only seven years old at this point.

We also got Super Smash Brother Ultimate. It was not as good as Melee.

On the subject of fighting games that aren’t very good: BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. Like Smash Bros, it was also a crossover fighter. This time, it combined all of Arc System Work’s most famous fighting game franchises, like BlazBlue, Under Night In Birth, Persona- wait, Persona?- and RWBY. What? RWBY? That isn’t even a fighting game! Did I forget to mention Guilty Gear? No, because this Arc System Works fighter doesn’t have a single Guilty Gear character in it. It does have Yumi from Senran Kagura. Not a fighting game, either. The game was an unbalanced mess of degenerate strategies, unblockables, touch-of-death combos and unreactable crossups. If you managed to find someone to play with, you could suffer through this game’s vomit-inducing netcode. A waste of time and money for everyone involved.

Out of all these, which game gets the dubious honor of being my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2018: Celeste

A neat platformer with a great soundtrack. It’s one of those save-state games where you can retry the same jump 300 times in the span of one minute. It’s still a good time.

I even got the achievement. None of my friends were impressed.

Runner up: Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I’m serious about that monastery section.

2019

Let’s start off by addressing the indie elephant in the room: I haven’t played The Outer Wilds. I know I should. I’ll get to it at some point.

What I did play was its similarly named compatriot, The Outer Worlds, and I sure wish I hadn’t. I only played a couple of hours of this, but by golly gee willickers, this has to be the most boring thing I’ve ever played in my entire life. I got so bored at one point that I had a near-death experience. My body detected a lack of brain activity and said “well, I guess my time’s up”. If you measured my brain waves while playing it, it’d be a flat line. The gunplay was terrible, the guns felt like garbage to shoot, enemies were spongy and dumb, the dialogue was horrendous, the characters gave me kidney stones, the moral choices were so asinine they made me curl up into a ball and weep. I can safely say that I hate this game. It’s a void of boredom that destroys joy and personality. It’s the videogame equivalent of getting stuck in an elevator with a redditor. I truly understand the Angry Video Game Nerd now, on a spiritual level. Having a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in my ear really is more appealing than playing this terrible game.

I think the same would happen if I had played Kingdom Hearts 3. The long-awaited third installment in this mess of a series. It came out, and I don’t know if anyone cares anymore. I sure didn’t.

I didn’t care about Jump Force, either. It took all your favorite Shonen Jump characters like Naruto, Luffy and Goku, and had them fight in typical 3D arena fighter fashion. It was a terrible cash-grab game that ran like garbage. It made every character look like a cheap, plastic knockoff of themselves. It was like mashing two TEMU action figures together under a strobe light.

Since I’m ripping on games, let’s transition into Metal Wolf Chaos XD. Metal Wolf was first released in 2004 by Fromsoft, the makers of Dark Souls (see what I mean? You can’t talk about games without bringing that up). It’s a game where you play as the President of the United States and you use your presidential mech to bring justice! It sounds like fun on paper, but in practice you end up shooting stationary targets that take 40 seconds to destroy. Not fun. Boring, in fact. My fellow Americans, it is with great displeasure that I announce that Metal Wolf Chaos XD is a stinky game. I did not have fun relations with that game.

I’ll be talking about Disco Elysium now. The fact that it’s here and not at the end with the runner ups and the favorite should tell you something. This is foreshadowing. It’s a literary technique. Disco Elysium uses a lot of literary techniques. It has amazing writing. Shame about the gameplay. It’s like a visual novel, with filler. I wish this game were a real novel. A book. I’d read the hell out of it. Not too enthused about playing it, though. I found it to be kind of intolerable. Inland Empire: Now you’ve done it. You went and tipped the Disco Elysium fans’ bookshelves. You practically pissed all over their library with your… “hot takes”. You’d best say something nice about another popular game, or your four subscribers will see through your cheap charade and go read something better.

You have quite the talent for saying the worst things.

I didn’t like Katana Zero. It was Hotline Miami, but side-view and a lot less free-form. Very restrictive save-state gameplay. Not fun.

I think I’m done speaking ill of videogames for 2019. The only other game I’d poke fun at is Death Stranding, the first strand-type game, but I didn’t play it.

Indie game lighting round: Baba is You is a creative puzzle game where you switch out attributes to make new situations. It’s hard to explain in one little blurb, but it’s a lot of fun.

My Friend Pedro is a side-scrolling shooter where you dual wield guns. Good stuff, even if some of the later levels do away with the dual wielding gimmick.

Ion Fury is a first person shooter made in the Build Engine. It’s good, has some really chunky sound effects, and I recommend playing it, even if they overuse the tiny skull enemies. Seriously, you can’t go more than 20 seconds in that game without seeing at least one of those.

SplitGate was a fun first person shooter with portals. Cool maps, satisfying guns and some neat game modes made for a great party game. I sure hope this game lasts for years and never does anything stupid. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

We also had Dead or Alive 6. It was fine, I liked it. No one played it. It tried to do away with its sexy image and it made an effort to present a more serious tone. You can’t try to be serious and also charge hundreds of dollars for swimsuits at the same time. One or the other, Tecmo. Preferably the former. If people didn’t like the sexy girls, this franchise wouldn’t have six installments. Now is not the time to change course like that. I have very little hope for DoA 7.

The entire franchise goes against our Core Values

Another long-running fighting game got an installment that no one played: Samurai Shodown. The game itself was good, offering that classic Samurai Shodown experience you know and love. Well, a small number of you know it. The problem is that its launch was a mess, and it was on the Stadia. Remember the Stadia? Google’s streaming-only game console? That was a fiasco. The terrible launch soured any chances this game had at an audience. This is Samurai Shodown we’re talking about, so its chances of having an audience were near zero anyways.

Sad?

Devil May Cry 5 also came out this year. Pretty good. Haven’t really played enough of it to give a definitive answer. From my first playthrough, I found that the combat encounters were pretty sparse, and the environments felt very samey. You spend too much time wandering around the sinewy tree thing. Maybe it gets more enjoyable on higher difficulties? I don’t know. I’ll find out when I get to them.

There was also Code Vein, which was Dark Souls again, but this time it’s anime. I have this game sitting in my library, but I’ve never played it.

Hey I haven’t mentioned Dark Souls enough so let’s talk about The Surge 2. It’s a souls-like, but technological. You dress up like an accident at an appliance store and go cut people’s limbs off. It’s an enjoyable game, even if the difficulty spikes its way into complete bullshit every now and then.

There’s a game called Zanki Zero that released this year. It’s a dungeon crawler with survival elements. It’s fun, but it outstays its welcome and falls apart near the end. I’ve been chipping away at it with intentions to review it, but that last segment is a bit of a slog. A long dungeon full of tough, annoying enemies and tons of environmental hazards. Not to mention that the story devolves into nonsense and goes out the window. That’s what I get for following a game’s story.

Me whenever I boot up Zanki Zero

With so many games mentioned, what was my favorite for this filler year?

My pick for 2019: Slay the Spire

I wrote a weird review/extended skit thing about the game, which you can read here. It’s a great game, go play it.

Runners up: Yeah, this year had multiple games competing for the top spot. Imagine that.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It’s the game that started the parryslop movement, and arguably the only one that did it well. It’s a great, well-crafted game with a lot of cool ideas. Its gameplay is single-minded and sharpened to a fine edge. It does one thing, and it does it well.

Oxygen Not Included. A base management sim where you have a bunch of little guys and you give them orders, which they complete at their own leisure. You also have to keep them fed, happy and comfortable, or else they’ll refuse to work or just outright die. It has a ton of complicated mechanics, and you have to familiarize yourself with thermodynamics to keep your base cool.

The game is on the same level as Civilization or Factorio for me. A game so addictive and complicated, that I banned myself from playing them. I can’t trust myself to play them for a healthy amount of time, so I just got rid of them. That’s a glowing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.

Mordhau. A first-person medieval melee game, like Chivalry. Great, satisfying combat and simple mechanics with deep uses.

That was a fine year. Hopefully nothing happens to ruin it.

2020

The pandemic hit.

At least we had games to keep us busy. We got the release of the hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. It was a disaster. A complete, unmitigated mess, full of bugs, crashes and unfulfilled promises. Then the game was supposedly fixed, and everyone says it’s good now, but I don’t believe them. That game’s problems can’t be fixed with a few patches. They’re buried deep in the core mechanics.

If you still want to scratch your cyberpunk itch, you could check out Ghostrunner. It’s a first person game where you speed through levels killing dudes. Everything dies in one shot (usually) and you combine parkour and ninja skills to complete your objectives. I had fun with it, even if I died to the tower boss over 5,737 times.

This was also the year of Genshin Impact, the game that spawned a million gachas. I don’t like it, and I don’t like its derivatives, either.

Not all live service games released this year were as long-lasting as Genshin. We got Dota Underlords, a game that tried to capitalize on the auto-chess fad that was growing at the time. It existed for under a year, then it was unceremoniously abandoned by Valve.

There was also Bleeding Edge, a kind of moba brawler hero shooter thing. No one played it and it died. A lot of that had to do with the fact that the game looked horrible. Maybe it’s a matter of personal opinion, but I hated how the characters looked. They were ugly, terribly designed, with weird silhouettes, disparate and busy designs with no real rhyme or reason. I played it for a bit on Gamepass just to see what it was, and I still don’t know what it was supposed to be.

At least there was Deeprock, which was also a live service multiplayer game. This one lasted longer. I don’t like Deeprock. It’s a chore simulator, and the chores aren’t particularly fun to do. If only there were another multiplayer shooter where you complete tasks while getting attacked by aliens. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

Hades dropped. I haven’t played it. I’m sure it’s fine. Same with Ghosts of Tsushima. Apparently it’s good. I wouldn’t know.

Wow there weren’t any games. What did I pick, then?

My pick for 2020: Streets of Rage 4

A fantastic game and a worthy installment in the legendary Streets of Rage series. It has a ton of playable characters, an interesting chaining mechanic that encourages you to keep a full combo going without distracting too much from the core gameplay. It has modern additions like combos, while keeping everything else extremely old-school. You don’t have a dodge, for example. If you want to avoid damage, you have to walk out of your enemies’ range. Actual spacing in a modern game. Wow. Imagine that.

Even in a scarce, starved year such as this, there were runner ups.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The Yakuza series was always a kind of JRPG, but now it fully embraces that with turn-based combat. Great characters, interesting battle mechanics, an neat job system that lets you build powerful characters, and a ton of stuff to do. The financial minigame was my favorite.

One Step From Eden. I wrote about it for my 12 days of Christmas series, which you can find here. It’s a fast-paced take on the Mega Man Battle Network formula, which turns it into a roguelike. Highly recommended.

2021

Nothing was happening still, but we got more games.

What could be worse than Cyberpunk at launch? Balan Wonderworld. A game by the legendary minds behind Sonic 2006, this revolutionary game managed to piss everyone off with its terrible gameplay and laughably awful presentation. At least you could get some entertainment by laughing at it. Yuji Naka, who created Sonic and Balan, was arrested shortly after the game’s release. It was for insider trading, but I like to think it was because of Balan Wonderworld.

Monster Hunter came back and gave us Rise. It was a lot closer to the old Monster Hunter games, with more color and monster variety. It was much better than World, in my opinion. I hope they keep going down this evolutionary path, and make the games less like World. Foreshadowing. You know the drill.

Ninja Gaiden got a re-release with the Master Collection. It gave us Ninja Gaiden 1, 2 and 3. One and two were the Sigma versions. Again. Three was the improved Razor’s Edge edition, at least. It’s good to see these games again, but stop with the Sigma. Please.

We got Guilty Gear Strive. It’s Guilty Gear, but geared towards beginners. Simplified characters, less Roman Cancel options, and more of a focus on neutral. Then the DLC came along and threw this base premise out the window. Now it’s another convoluted mess of anime nonsense and characters that can kill you in two combos from across the screen. Not to mention Happy Chaos. Fun.

Halo Infinite came out this year. It was promptly forgotten.

My pick for 2021: None.

I’m serious. I like Monster Hunter Rise, but I wouldn’t call it a favorite. I used to enjoy Strive, but then Happy Chaos happened, and now I actively hate the game. I like Ninja Gaiden, but the Master Collection is just a re-release of the inferior Sigma versions.

What a year. Hopefully 2022 is better.

2022

This year starts off strong with High on Life. Oh God… the Rick and Morty shooter?

Maybe there’s something better. Here we have Babylon’s Fall. A game made by Platinum Studios, so you know it’s good. They made Nier: Automata. Wait, I didn’t like Nier. This game was a live service MMO slop thing that only lasted a few months before getting nuked. I don’t know what it was about.

Surely it has to get better at some point. Here we have Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. That’s good, right? Phantasy Star Online is a great game. This new update completely overhauls the game, getting rid of everything that made it good and replacing it with nothing.

That can’t be right. No way they took Phantasy Star Online 2 and turned it into a dull, content-less void with nothing to do other than grind numbers. They- they did? Oh my God. This is worse than I thought.

What’s next? A free-to-play mobile game version of Diablo? Foreshadowing is-

We got Diablo Immortal. A free-to-play mobile game version of Diablo. Full of micro-transactions and other garbage.

Quake Champions got its official release this year. I played it in Early Access years before, and it was already losing players. It came out to zero hype and completely fizzled out. No one noticed. It was Quake, but with hero shooter elements. Not a great combination.

Enough about live-service games, let’s talk about actual videogames. Starting off with Gungrave G.O.R.E.- son of a...- Can’t we get anything good?

Gungrave G.O.R.E. sucks. It sucks so much that I wrote an entire review on it. Read it here.

There’s also God of War: Ragnarok. More man and his boy.

Surprisingly, that wasn’t the biggest game of the year. That honor goes to Vampire Survivors. A five dollar indie game where you walk around a stage auto-shooting things. It’s incredibly simple to the point of boredom, with a bunch of skinner box mechanics to keep you engaged. Not my cup of tea. It forever changed the gaming landscape and ruined the Bullet Hell tag.

We also got Need for Speed Unbound. I played it, thought it was fun. Didn’t review the game, but I reviewed every song on its soundtrack for some reason. You can read that here.

There was also Stranger of Paradise. A Final Fantasy game that gained notoriety for its absurd cutscenes about killing Chaos. The funny, corny parts are few and far between.

Out of all this, what did I pick as my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2022: Sifu

Become a Kung-fu master and avenge your father’s death by beating the tar out of everyone in the neighborhood. It’s a great 3D brawler with big fights that really capture that kung-fu movie feel. It strikes a good balance between modern parry games, including a stance bar like Sekiro, combined with more traditional options like dodging. It’s short and it has a lives system, so it’s the closest a modern game is willing to get to an arcade experience. Decently challenging, too.

Runners up: There were runners up, it’s just that they were the only games from this year that I had anything positive to say about.

Postal: Brain Damaged. A first person shooter loosely based off the Postal franchise. Use a grappling hook shotgun to fly around levels at high speeds, shooting hallucinations and other monstrosities that lurk in The Dude’s mind. It has an incredibly juvenile sense of humor like the mainline games.

Prodeus. It’s DOOM, again. There’s a base being overrun by demons- I mean- creatures from another plane, and you have to rip and tear until they’re all dead. Or until you find the blue key card to open the blue door. It’s a bit on the easy side, but the well-crafted levels and excellent sound design keep it interesting.

Madcap Mosaic. A weird little deckbuilder where your cards are tiles. Walk around the board to activate them and win fights against monsters. It’s an interesting concept, and it provides a fresh twist on the card game formula. I expect this to be copied by every other deckbuilder in around four years.

Thanks to Jim Mander over at “I Play Games So You Don’t Have To” for recommending it. Go read his article on obscure games. There’s sure to be another hidden gem there for you to discover.

Conclusion

That was 2017 to 2022. An overall poor stretch. There are definitely a lot of indie games I didn’t cover, but I did my best to mention any that I’ve played. Had to do some digging and check my Steam Library. If there’s one you think I missed, comment it down below and I’ll give you my uninformed opinion on it.

Next time, it’s the final stretch; 2023 to 2025. There’s a lot to cover at the end. Tune in next time!