Game of the year
Marvel Snaps
Yup, a mobile game takes it for me. As a free to play game it's pretty fair. Being on mobile makes it super convenient to play for someone like me with kids. It's a pretty simple strategy card game but still has more than enough depth. Personally, it fixes a lot of issues I have with these types of games with how the locations work. It not just about playing your deck or against your opponent deck. You have to try and take advantage of the many locations for better or worse. It makes it so two players could play against each other and have completely different match's. As a fan of Marvel the art style is so well done. It kinda makes me want some of the cards in real life. I'm still playing it now and have already put lots of hours into it. It's GOTY for me easily.
Most disappointing GOTY
Sonic Frontiers
Waited 5 years for a new mainline Sonic game and this did not deliver. When I think of modern Sonic games I think fast paste fun, multiple paths and epic moments. This game has no stages to me. It's just 30 seconds long stages that leave no room for level design. It doesn't help that you have no control of Sonic for a good part with him doing loop the loops and stuff. What Sonic Frontiers is, is a lifeless open world hub game when you'll have to collect loot to unlock more hubs to collect more loot. I really don't understand game and how we got here.
GOTY that wasn't released this year
Sunset Overdrive
What a game. I can't believed I missed out on this. This might be my favorite Insomniac IP. If you take all the crazy guns from Ratchet and Clank. The traversal and movement of Spiderman and you get Sunset Overdrive. It also helps that the game has a punk rock theme throughout. Definitely my jam.
Marvel Snap has occupied my waking thoughts to a possibly-unhealthy degree.
There are a bunch of buttons it pushes in my lizard brain - the bright colours of the card art, the satisfying animations as they flip over and activate their abilities, the delightful use of haptic rumble, the nostalgia kick of recognising a lower-tier character from some comic storyline I read twenty years ago, or the link between characters and card abilities that makes each one memorable for that feeling of dread as the full scope of an opponent's scheme unfolds.
But the kicker, the thing that takes my phone battery down from fully-charged overnight to 12% by lunchtime, is the snappy (no pun intended), three-minute game length. Just long enough to feel like you can be tactical in your deckbuilding and placement strategy, but quick enough that both victory and defeat trigger that "ooh, one more can't hurt" impulse.
That it's light on the monetization and generous with its currency handouts helps massively, to the point that splurging on the season pass bundles feels like a pat-on-the-head reward I'm handing to the developers rather than a cheeky treat for my own "numbers go up" endorphin receptors.
I'm curious to see how it grows from here, though - they're already drafting some pretty obscure characters into the card pool, and I worry it can only ride this popularity wave for so long before it's deposed or a design blunder upsets the community.
Then again, people are still playing (and paying for) Hearthstone after more than eight years, so maybe the core is solid enough for long-term success.
Is Marvel Snap better than Chained Echoes???
I'll do my GOTY properly when I get home but it's maybe Xenoblade 3?
I knew it was aniki writing about Marvel Snap in this week’s Hit Points (and getting told off for being a bit too verbose). Nice job.
It’s Immortality for me. Something I’ve genuinely never seen before, carried off with absolute style and confidence, and one of the greatest reveals in the whole of gaming.
Runner up is Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, for entirely different reasons, and I’m not sure if it even counts as it was technically an expansion (even if in scale and scope it dwarfs many full games). But I love it, it’s the best the series has ever been, and I’m still coming back to it regularly.
I did my usual card game thing with Marvel Snap, which is to say I was enjoying it until I had to start engaging with The Meta. I just don't have the attention span to keep building and refining decks to incorporate the newer cards, so… baleeted.
Honestly, I can't remember what I've played that even came out this year, other than Pentiment, and though it's extremely My Shit, I haven't had the time with it to say its GOTY.
Most of that I've played is in the GOTY that wasn't released this year category, which is to say a lot of Sea of Thieves. We play regularly with Sarah's sister in New Zealand, mainly either bimbling about on Merchant Company missions or working through the Tall Tales. It's a nice place to just chill and hang out, even if I often end up sailing the brig solo, as Sarah and her sister play shanties and fish off the bowsprit…
Is Marvel Snap better than Chained Echoes???
That's like asking if a perfectly cooked filet mignon is better than a speedboat. Not sure it's even possible to compare.
I knew it was aniki writing about Marvel Snap in this week’s Hit Points (and getting told off for being a bit too verbose). Nice job.
Yeah, that was a bittersweet moment for me…
What is Hit Points? It's proving hard to Google.
It’s really good - and you get a lot of newsletters even as a free subscriber. I signed up for the paid tier last week as much as a mark of appreciation as anything.
Marvel Snap doesn't make my top ten games of the year, personally. I think it's a bit too geared around pushing you into getting the monthly pass, which is pretty steep for a mobile game. It seems to fence off a bit more than you think without the pass. You think it's going to be just one of the many forms of xp, but from reading people recommending things to do that didn't even appear in my ghetto form of the game I realised that it was gateing off stuff from the free players. I get why, they're allowed to make money off their product, and the base game is a good card battler, but I still found that a bit disappointing.
My personal top five of the year are Elden Ring (which is an all-time great); Trombone Champ (which made me laugh even when life was extremely bleak this year); Vampire Survivers (which I was sure I wouldn't like then couldn't stop playing); Splatoon 3 (a refinement of an already near-perfect formula); and Warhammer 40K Dark Tide (Vermintide in 40K, providing all the Grimdark thrills you could want, amazingly satisfying gameplay, which is almost ruined by it's technical problems - crashes, difficulty joining matches, etc.)
GOTY for me is Celeste. Perfectly put together, very challenging but never impossible. Best of all it does that thing where the story and the gameplay feed into each other making each stronger.
Others I have enjoyed this year:
Jedi Outcast, Archvale, Vampire Survivors
It's scandalous the PC gamepass version of Dark Tide can't play with the Steam version.
Beyond games as services that I play (I would probably say Valorant is my GOTY, followed by Apex) it's actually a hard thing to pin down. I played Monster Train the most, but that wasn't released this year (2020 I think). I've enjoyed a few PS5 games, but I'd say I admire Deathloop, Ratchet and Horizon 2 more than actively think they're GOTY material. I didn't play Ragnarok. I do think, ultimately, there can be few arguments that Elden Ring is something special and while I've not got long enough in it to say conclusively whether it would ever be my GOTY I'd respect anyone who did.
Hardware wise my HOTY is either the PS5 or the Steam Deck. Platform-wise the Steam Deck is a flawed, but impressive bit of cheap technology. It's a hobbyist's device: updates to games frequently break them on SteamOS, you need to tinker occasionally to get it to do stuff and general issues with a small screen and controls on a platform designed to work with a keyboard and mouse mean annoyances are frequent. But it's also amazing when it all comes together and you're playing something graphically astonishing, at 60fps, from your existing huge library of games without having to pay a kidney to Nintendo.
The PS5 has come on leaps and bounds this year. Gamepass/Series X is still probably just about a better option (and I still pay for Gamepass on PC), but the PS+ equivalent library is now really decent and there are a smattering of interesting exclusives that make the PS5 still worthwhile. The haptic stuff the pad does is overblown, but still fairly cool and what I like mainly about it is that it does still feel more console-like to switch on and play than an Xbox (giving you something distinct from the PC) - both from the UI quirks to the look of the thing.
I suppose though the real GOTY are services like Gamepass and PS+. They allow "free" access to such huge and varied game libraries now, that paired with any iterating multiplayer free to play title you might want to augment it with there really is no real reason to pay 70 bucks for anything, any more. That is both awesome and a bit sad, as the gaming landscape is so hugely fractured right now with a billion distractions that shared experiences are sort of fading away to a different era. Which I guess does also speak to the strength of Elden Ring as it appears to be one of a handful of titles that cut through the noise.
Marvel Snap [is] a bit too geared around pushing you into getting the monthly pass, which is pretty steep for a mobile game. … from reading people recommending things to do that didn't even appear in my ghetto form of the game I realised that it was gateing off stuff from the free players.
I'm pretty certain it's just the one card that's "gated off", with everything else being purely cosmetic (or currencies used for cosmetics). Looking back through this season's rewards at least, the only mechanical thing you can't get without the Pass (yet, it'll enter the rotation eventually) is Silver Surfer.
That, of course, only adds weight to the "pretty steep" pricing criticism…
My top 4, because I've not played enough of enough worthy 2022 games to make a 5.
Immortality - which is up there with the all-timers for me. It affected my dreams.
Elden Ring - which makes me wish I was better at games. I know there will always be so much of this frankly amazing world that I won't see, and that's both frustrating to know and exactly as it should be.
Xenoblade 3 - which makes me wish I had more time, because unlike Elden Ring, I should be able to see this whole, frankly amazing world, and would, except for life getting in the way… I'll be in and out of this until it's done though, whenever that might be…
Escape Academy - which reminded me that couch co-op is a thing, and a good thing too. We played the whole thing together over a week, and we both loved it. That has only happened about 3 times in the last 10 years.
GOTY for me is Celeste. Perfectly put together, very challenging but never impossible. Best of all it does that thing where the story and the gameplay feed into each other making each stronger.
Others I have enjoyed this year:
Jedi Outcast, Archvale, Vampire Survivors
I like your extremely loose definition of the word "year." 😁
I suppose though the real GOTY are services like Gamepass and PS+. They allow "free" access to such huge and varied game libraries now, that paired with any iterating multiplayer free to play title you might want to augment it with there really is no real reason to pay 70 bucks for anything, any more. That is both awesome and a bit sad, as the gaming landscape is so hugely fractured right now with a billion distractions that shared experiences are sort of fading away to a different era. Which I guess does also speak to the strength of Elden Ring as it appears to be one of a handful of titles that cut through the noise.
Yes, Gamepass has changed the gaming landscape completely. For me personally, it hasn't destroyed that "shared experience" thing though - quite the opposite, it's brought it back. Over the last few years, I haven't been able to afford to pay full price for any game, so I always missed the shared experience around any big release, only playing them months or years later when the price dropped enough. Gamepass has allowed me to dip into whatever game people are talking about as long as it is on Gamepass, and it usually is.
It's quite unusual for me to actually have a top five of the year as more often than not I won't have played five games released that year. There have been years when I've realised at GOTY time that I haven't played a single game released that year. This year I left quite a few really good games off the list. Total War Warhammer 3, Immortality, Tinykin, TNMT, and Prodeus could all have featured. I've got Norco and Pentiment installed but haven't got round to playing them yet.
What version of Dark Tide do you have? I'm playing on Gamepass. We could arrange to play a couple of games and never actually get round to it if you like.
What version of Dark Tide do you have? I'm playing on Gamepass. We could arrange to play a couple of games and never actually get round to it if you like.
I bought it for my eldest on Steam, and was looking forward to playing with him on Gamepass. Oooh no. It is allegedly slated to be in a future patch.
I like your extremely loose definition of the word "year." 😁
That’s what I played.
I know, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you didn't know what a year was.
All good. It was said with a shrug not annoyance.
