Cohost repost: 2022 GotY

[Originally posted on Cohost December 28, 2022. Bringing these up now because it's award/wrapup season. I probably don't have a ton to say about these games after the fact, but I will be retroactively awarding Puzzle Game of the Year (For Sickos) and Puzzle Game of the Year (For Non-Sickos), because I jokingly picked games for them in 2023 and I think it's an interesting category to make recurring.]

Not sure what I want to use cohost for, but let's try this. In no particular order, these are ten games I played in 2022 that I'd call... the top? It's hard to compare games that do such different things, so I'm not going to try to rank these in any more detail.

This is only games that had a commercial release in 2022. Played a ton of random web stuff and the like, but it's hard to track all of them.

Citizen Sleeper's a text-based cyberpunk game where you're a decaying robot who's escaped from your corporate masters and has to figure out how to survive and live on an aging space station. Mechanics were neat, story was interesting.

Strange Horticulture is a game where you own a magical botany shop with a collection of weird plants and a book of weird plants, and the primary gameplay loop is matching the entries in the book to the plants you have. But there are some neat twists on it, and a story that ties it all together.

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative is more of Uchikoshi's weird bullshit, and I love that. Don't know how much more space is left in the space of dream-logic leading to adventure game segments in a bunch of different genres, but this does some cool things with it.

Marvel Snap is the current mobile hotness. I'm at the point where new cards have slowed to a trickle, but I have enough cards to build a variety of okay decks, and sometimes grab a card that can turn an okay deck to a decent one.

14 Minesweeper Variants is a new take on the Minesweeper but you never need to guess subgenre. The variants all add some interesting logic to the looking for mines, and once you get into bigger puzzles and more complex variants they get tough. [Puzzle Game of the Year (For Sickos)]

Taiji is a solid Witness-inspired game. Some mechanics made me go "Oh, this works just like X in The Witness," and some mechanics were new and interesting. But the puzzles and overall flow were solid throughout.

The Looker is a solid Witness-inspired shitpost. There's one bad puzzle in it, but it's funny whether you played the Witness or just know it's about drawing lines and pretentious audio logs.

Tunic is a weird mix. It has Zelda-style exploration which is cool, a puzzle layer which I enjoyed a lot, and then it's stuck to combat with Dark Souls-esque stamina and death penalty mechanics. I got through it and had a blast, but I've seen people who would've loved the puzzles bounce off the combat and people who enjoyed the combat bounce off the puzzles.

The Case of the Golden Idol is obviously inspired by Obra Dinn with trying to catalog a series of deaths based on snapshots of the time around them, but it's distinct enough to stand on its own.

Patrick's Parabox is a puzzle game that seems to be getting a little of the broad appeal that Baba Is You got, and deservedly so. The hook is harder to explain than Baba's in words, but it does a good job of walking you through its mechanics, even the weirder ones. There's some good tiering between "required main path puzzles" "optional challenge puzzles" "weird bonus puzzles" and "extra-hard postgame puzzles," too. [Puzzle Game of the Year (For Non-Sickos)]

And some honorable mentions for games I first played in 2022 or were a big part of my gaming year, but didn't come out then:

• Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
• Hypnospace Outlaw
• La-Mulana 2
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
• Vision Soft Reset

Weird how this list is 3/5 Metroidvanias and none of them made the other one, unless Tunic counts. (The Plumber Thing was also on the shortlist) Did I miss any big new ones this year?