 So, as I was going back over the games I played this year, I was surprised at how many I found that I liked enough to put on this list. For the past few months, I've had the feeling that this was a pretty bad year for games, and I still kind of feel that way, but I've had to figure out why I feel that way. Because a ton of huge budget games released and most of them were well-reviewed or even called all-time classics. And while I liked almost every one of those games, not you, Batgirl, writing this made me realize that my issue with 2022 wasn't that there weren't enough good games, but rather that there were almost no nearly perfect games. This year ended up being a year with a bunch of very good stuff that fell just short for me. There was no Spider-Man or Ratchet & Clank. There was no Sekiro. Instead, there were a bunch of really good games and then a few near classics that ultimately won't be games I come back to for years and years. There was no game released this year that I'll go to NG Plus 10 in, like I have with Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne. And there's no game that I'll replay every six months for the rest of my life like I do with Sekiro and Doom Eternal. Instead, there were a ton of games that were very good, but that I'll likely never play again. With that out of the way, let's get to a list of the best games of the year that still somehow fell a little bit short for me, after the logo. Number 10, Metal Hellsinger. Metal Hellsinger released on Game Pass at a time when there was absolutely nothing going on in games. I downloaded it and then promptly forgot about it for like two months before noticing the thumbnail on my desktop and thinking, eh, what the hell, I may as well give it a go. And boy am I glad I did. Metal Hellsinger is so easy to recommend because it's best described as, what if Doom Eternal but Rhythm Game? And the answer to that question is, it is awesome. The only thing holding this back from being much higher, aside from the terrible name, is that the game is clearly a small studio on a tiny budget. There are very few songs through the game and levels are kind of samey, but it has an excellent roster of enemies, fantastic weapons and progression systems, several very good bosses and rock solid mechanics. And like all the best games, it's easy to pick up but extremely tricky to master. It's probably four or five hours long, but there's added value in getting higher and higher scores and climbing the leaderboard. It's unlikely that this game ever gets a properly expanded sequel, but Metal Hellsinger was an absolute gem of a game and I will be looking forward to whatever else this team makes. Number 9, Dying Light 2 Is Dying Light 2 better than the first game? Eh, maybe, but maybe not. It's basically Dying Light, but 2. The game wants with some serious performance issues and it probably drags on a bit too long near the end and while the early marketing made a big deal about the serious consequences of your choices like flooding the city, none of that stuff is actually in the game. Still, it had a reasonably decent story and the combat probably was better than the first game. My main complaint that kept it being even higher on the list is that progression was far too slow. It takes like 10 hours to have the parkour feel as good as it does in the first game and the game starts with you feeling like you run significantly slower. Dude, you have to unlock the ability to sprint in Dying Light 2. Still, if you stick with it and slog through a very boring early game until you eventually unlock a bunch of stuff, Dying Light 2 has the very best first person platforming you'll ever play. It's no classic and it isn't all that much better than Dying Light 1, but it's still a very solid game, well worth your time and money. I still think there is a better Dying Light waiting to be made, but this was easily one of the best games of the year. Number 8. A Plague Tale Requiem A Plague Tale Requiem often pissed me off, a lot. The game was full of weirdly annoying difficulty spikes which as I say over and over really don't belong in a heavy narrative focused game. Imagine if you're at a movie and to see like the conclusion of the film you had to finish a Rubik's Cube and then like do a hand-eye coordination test. It just doesn't work. And the puzzles are often barely puzzles at all and more like time-wasting busy work. But once the game opens up a bit and gives you all the tools, Plague Tale starts to shine. Like other games this year, Plague Tale could have been an all time classic, but it stumbles in several important places. The game is probably too long by like a third. Or at least it takes way, way, way too long to actually get going. The story is kind of badly paced although it is very good. Arnaud is probably the most interesting character in the game and he's barely in it for some reason which is weird. Still, the game is gorgeous. The story is really great. The ending is pretty spectacular and the game just has a certain charm. Plague Tale Requiem had me constantly angry that it wasn't better than it is and has a bunch of odd design choices and bad combat encounters but there's enough great about it to balance all that out in the end and make it one of the best games of the year. 7. Evil West This might be a little controversial to most of you but I gotta say there were very few games I enjoyed more than Evil West this year. Flying Wild Hog is responsible for one of the year's biggest disappointments and we'll talk about Shadow Warrior 3 soon enough. But Evil West is the perfect double A game. It feels almost exactly like an Xbox 360 game. From its 7th gen level design to its bullet storm-esque story, Evil West is a game straight out of 2007. But it's got all the good shit from 2007 too. Very little care went into designing the actual levels although there are a couple of good ones. But that's because a shitload of care went into designing the combat and progression. Evil West is surprisingly hard. It's the almost perfect mix of button mashing and precise. These are all so unique that different combinations of them produce wildly different encounters. And the progression is massive and impressive. Almost every level produces an agonizing choice as almost every node in the skill tree is a totally new gameplay altering skill. What starts as a hard but simple brawler eventually morphs into something that feels like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta 2 and Dark Souls 2 had a baby and a test tube. And the story is more than fun enough to not annoy the shit out of you. I was actually shocked by how much effort went into the narrative and cutscenes. They aren't great, but they're pretty good. And when you add the exceptional combat, you get one of the best games of the year and maybe the best double A game since Remnant from the Ashes. Number 6 Horizon Forbidden West I was pretty torn on this game. I didn't make a video because it came out at a time when I was kind of cutting it back on YouTube, but Horizon Forbidden West is an interesting game. Almost nothing about it is better than the first. The story is much worse than the first game. The combat is a bit more complicated, but not in a good way. The weapon system is more obtuse, meaning it's harder to find the arrow you need. And enemies seem far more likely to knock Aloy down and stun her, which always annoys the shit out of me. And of course, the game is massive, meaning you spend an awful lot of time just riding around. But still, Horizon Forbidden West is a good game. It's one of the best looking games ever, and a ton of effort went into designing a huge world that feels fresh all the way through. There are a bunch of interesting characters, and the combat is good, if not quite as good as the first game. If Guerrilla's going to make another one of these, they need desperately to make the game have a better progression system. And they need to simplify the weapon system back to how it was in the first game. I didn't love this game, but I liked it well enough, and the further I got away from having played it, the more I think I maybe wasn't totally fair to it. I was judging it against the first game, instead of on its own merits. Either way, one of the best games of the year, even if it's not the best game in the series. Number 5. Ghost Wire Tokyo. Okay, okay. Hear me out. So, how many times have I said that if you're going to make a big ass open world collect-a-thon, then you either need excellent combat or an excellent story? I've said that over and over that if you make a big open world game with only average combat and story, then you've made a shitty boring game. Well, Ghost Wire Tokyo is a big ass open world collect-a-thon with a below average story and middling combat. It got pretty bad reviews because of that, and I totally loved it. And I'm not even really sure why. If there's one thing Ghost Wire was praised for, it's the stunning realization of downtown Tokyo, and that is a big part of what made me love it. But it's so much more than that. Ghost Wire Tokyo is, by most measures, a pretty standard open world game. There's a bunch of map icons and repeating activities. There are open world combat encounters. You clear neighborhoods by clearing outposts, and then you expose the map by finding a shrine. And yet, beyond that very basic structure, something about Ghost Wire just worked for me. The game felt consistently odd. It managed to keep me in a weird state of relaxation and curiosity. The combat was strangely compelling even though it was kind of simple, and the progression was straightforward and easy to deal with. Moving around the map by flying and gliding is entertaining the whole way through. But beyond even all of that, what makes Ghost Wire worth playing is that it's just a weird game, a weird story, a weird combat system, a weird map, weird enemies. It's a bog standard open world game design, but just slightly twisted so that it all feels kind of unique, even though you're just clearing another outpost. I'm sure this will be a controversial choice, and I actually find it hard to even justify why I love this game so much, but I don't know man, I just did. Sometimes style and tone is as important as anything else, and when it comes to style, Ghost Wire gets just about everything right. A strong recommend. Number 4. Gloomwood. This really isn't fair because Gloomwood didn't even really release this year. It's in quote unquote early access, but what that really means is the first three levels of the game released and then abruptly ends as the dev spends another two years finishing it. Normally I don't even like playing games in this state. I'm kind of annoyed that I played Ultra Kill when I did, I wish I'd waited until that game fully released. But like Ultra Kill, Gloomwood is a revelation of a game. It's basically an indie thief reboot, but with a bit of a horror vibe. Each of the three levels on offer feels like a mix of old resident evil and dark souls. Winding levels with multiple routes and shortcuts that loop back to the save point. The game has a variety of interesting tools and weapons, and like all of the great immersive sims, it gives you all sorts of ways to move through the game. Half the joy is slowly exploring the map and eventually figuring out how it all fits together. That doesn't seem to be much of a story yet, but Gloomwood is looking to be an all time classic of an immersive sim. If you love Thief, you will love this. If you love Dishonored or Prey, Gloomwood is the game for you. If you don't like playing one third of a game and waiting a year and a half for the rest, then put this on your wish list. But if you're cool with supporting the devs with money and just checking out one of the very best games of the year, the first third of Gloomwood is as good as it gets. Number 3, Cult of the Lamb. I do not like management games, they stress me out and annoy me. And I don't really like building games either because I find them kind of boring. I do like roguelike games, but I'm pretty picky there as I think we might have passed peak roguelike sometime in 2019. And now we're just getting flooded with low effort garbage in games that are only roguelikes because the studio didn't feel like designing actual levels. I'm at a point where if a roguelike doesn't have spectacular combat like Dead Cells or amazing synergies like Binding of Isaac, I'm just not really interested anymore. So when you take a roguelike with decent but fairly mediocre combat and regression and mix it with a sim management game, that sounds like something I am going to hate. A lot. But instead, Cult of the Lamb is one of my very favorite games of the year. Neither half of Cult of the Lamb is good enough to have stood on its own. Just the city building and management side is far too simple to be a compelling management sim. And the roguelike is far too basic and barebones to be a good roguelike game. But combined, they are magical. The game is amazingly well paced in that each part of the game is played in very short bursts. A run through the dungeons takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes, which is about as long as the game can stay interesting. And each round of management takes 15 or 20 minutes, which is also as long as it can stay interesting. But the cult management is so clever and unique that it just rops you in. Deciding whether to marry a cult member or maybe torture them to prove your power. Or maybe one of them is spreading heresy and lies, so you imprison them. Cult of the Lamb has all the basics of too, like farming and resource gathering and so on. And all of that is fine. But it also revolves heavily around sermons, ritual sacrifice, and disturbing moral decisions. I had a bunch of followers who lived for like decades and I felt terrible when they died. I had others who were little turds and I murdered them when everyone was sleeping, or fed them to a demon in the church. It's just brilliant. And right when that's getting old, there's the perfectly serviceable roguelike action game. There aren't a ton of weapons or powerful upgrades and there's really no synergies. But the minute to minute gameplay is smooth and fun. Cult of the Lamb is like peanut butter and chocolate. It's such an amazing game that it feels totally obvious and hindsight. Of course a management salmon roguelike would work well together. Number two, God of War Ragnarok. God of War Ragnarok is an excellent game. It also kind of disappointed me in many ways. I think it's very clearly better than the first game, but it's also consistently more frustrating than the first game. I'm finishing up a second playthrough now so I can make a video about it, so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here, but I will say this. Ragnarok's combat is great, except when it is terrible. Its enemy design is really quite excellent, except when it is occasionally terrible. Its puzzles are pretty good, except when they are the worst, most infuriatingly broken shit ever. Its story is wonderful, except when it falls a bit flat or weirdly contradicts its own themes. And its world and level design is almost perfect, except when it's making you backtrack through level six times with a compass that doesn't fucking work. God of War Ragnarok is a fantastic game, but just like the last one, there are an awful lot of little annoyances that add up to keep it from being one of the best games ever. I loved it, but I also have a long list of things to criticize. Tune in to my 35 minutes of bitching about it when I get that video done and then call me an idiot or tell me I'm wrong and actually the problem is that I'm terrible at video games, that's always fun. Ragnarok is the second best game of the year and a triumph of the game and it's also a little bit disappointing. I'm often much more frustrated by games that are near masterpieces that fumble at the goal line than am of games that are just good and nothing more. Ah, speaking of which, number one, Elden Ring. Elden Ring is the perfect game to be the number one game of the year. It is, at times, very clearly the best thing from is ever made. And it is, at other times, very clearly the most annoying shit that from is ever made. Levels like Storm Bill Castle, Landel City, Volcano Manor, Seafro River, and others are easily the very best souls levels ever. Then you've got places like Castle Soul or Lake of Rot or any one of the tombs of the giants that are so titanically annoying it retroactively erases all the joy I had felt for the previous hour and ten minutes. It looks better and feels smoother than anything else from has made but its boss design consistently feels like it demands you use magic or ashes of war or spirit summons. Listen, I dislike spirit summons, period, I don't like it and I hope nothing like them ever appears in a from game again. I will go to my grave saying that Malania is a dreadfully designed boss. I beat her three times and I consider her proof that one move can literally ruin a boss fight. That's how delicate a game's balance is. Malania without Waterfowl is up there with Lady Maria or Owl Father or Gale. Malania with Waterfowl Dance is a terribly designed boss. Elden Ring is very possibly the best open world game ever made which is amazing. But I like linear games more than I like open world games. Elden Ring is the best game of the year but it's like the fourth or fifth best from soft game. It's better than almost every other game of the last three years but it's not better than Sekiro. It's not even close to Sekiro as far as I'm concerned. Elden Ring is both the best game of the year and the game that annoys me more than any other game this year. If Elden Ring bosses had their recovery times increased by a few frames across the board it might be one of my favorite games ever. If you could use Torrents against Elden Beast, if they'd maybe not given every single boss after the mid game 40 AoE stomps it might be better than Sekiro. If every single boss didn't have ridiculous attack delays that look completely unnatural and force the player to count off in their head before dodging, I might think Elden Ring is the best game ever. If the fire giant was in a miserable slog to fight without spirit summons I might play Elden Ring again next month instead of playing Sekiro again next month. But none of that is true. Elden Ring has all those problems and it also has Lamed El and that open world and Storm Bell Castle. It has the offer river but it also has Elden Beast. It's very easily the best game I played this year by a good amount and also very easily not nearly as good as the last three FromSoft games and no amount of perfect 10 reviews or people telling me I don't know how to play Souls games aside my thousands of hours playing Souls games will convince me otherwise. Elden Ring is the best game of the year by a good margin. It frustrates me to no end that it wasn't even better. Alright, thanks for coming. A super short video about the most disappointing games of the year will be up next. And by disappointing I mean truly disappointing. Not Elden Ring is great but not great enough disappointing. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.