Written by guest writer, friend of the site and Bald Gun Guy Podcast cohost Matthew.
Hello there! My name is Matthew and being asked to write about my year is a daunting experience. I’ve started and restarted this piece with varying levels of scope and inclusion only to realize that my writing went so rogue I got lost in my own shadow. Hopefully this attempt is the one I can keep the reins and not get out of hand. Saying 2022 was a bit of a mare isn’t unique or unfounded, but at least we’ve made it far enough to talk about it. For me, there were indeed highs and lows, laughter and tears, plenty of fun and plenty of work.
I’ll be quick with the personal events. The hardships of 2022 began for me at the tail end of 2021 with the death of my father. While the unacknowledged problems between us will now be luggage I’ll carry with me, I am now way less angry about the entire scenario than I used to be. That coupled with much of the beginning of the year being some of the most arduous months in my still short career as a radiologic technologist, my mettle was tested and pushed harder than I could remember. I was very lucky in these times to not only have my partner, Reba, but my co-hosts on my podcasts (Trivial Merit, Free Reeling It, and the now defunct Story Route Zero) provided incalculable support in ways I’m not even sure they know.
Reba and I co-built our first Gunpla together (HGUC RX-78-2 for the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai – honestly, we just think the red and white color scheme is cool as hell) and loved doing it together so much that we want to make it a regular-ish occurrence. We also went back to The Binding of Isaac card game and it actually sang for both of us so much that we basically have a game set up on our dining room table all the time. That game is very good. My really happy news came for me when I was given a chair on The Bald Gun Guy Podcast with Six and Tai. Hitman is one of my favorite series and it brings me so much joy to talk with them about it when we do. However, the highest high for me personally came in 2022 with Reba saying 2 words she never thought she’d say, “I’m pregnant.” As of this writing, our first child is due in 2 weeks and we hope we’re ready. Now, let’s move to why we’re here, LISTS!
I love video games a whole bunch. 2022 provided so much in terms of games that were riveting experiences for me. Some on my list came out this year, some did not. Dear reader, you’re just going to have to put up with it. Time waits for no one and the games we miss in a given year don’t get scrapped for the newest and latest. Often in my time, when I experience something is more important than when it was released. So here goes nothing.
10. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Ratchet and Clank have spent 2 decades filling in a void for me that was left when Calvin and Hobbes ended. Every time I play a new game in this series, I almost know I’m going to love it to a degree, even Full Frontal Assault spoke to me in so many positive ways despite its…well itself. Rift Apart is among the series’ best entries whatever you may consider them to be. It’s fun to play, the story is absolutely delightful and I really hope Rivet and Kit become new mainstays of the series and are even given their own adventures in the future. This game made me laugh and cry in ways I needed in 2022 all while being full of whimsy and wonder.
9. DNF Duel / Guilty Gear Strive
Fighting games have come back into my life in a way that just feels right. My partner is not a capital G gamer and doesn’t plan on ever trying to be, but when she saw me playing Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 over a year ago and said “I want to play,” a match made in heaven was born. Her with Baiken and me with May, we button-mashed to our hearts’ content. No, we’re never going to be ‘good’ at these games. I have jumped in to play with folks in the community when able and had absolutely the best times both scraping a win or 2 together and getting every last one of my teeth kicked in.
What made times with these so special was watching Reba laugh as she stumbled into one of DNF Duel’s several absolutely broken infinite combos to victory or her thought experiments as she tested out new characters in Guilty Gear Strive. It’s become a relatively regular occurrence in our house to just say “wanna fight?’ and next thing you know, we’ve prepared a little cheese board, I’ve made her a mocktail and we’ll sit down, fire up one of these and absolutely bash the hell out of our sticks or controls till sick anime shit happens. One day, we may even learn the controls, but what would even be the fun in that?
8. Vampire Survivors
For more than one third of 2022, I would end my nights with at least 4 runs of Vampire Survivors. It provided the type of relaxation that I’ve only seen in those videos on Tiktok where one watches cans get crushed by a machine 1 at a time over and over and over. A run in this game starts off with a Castlevania sprite ripoff that can only move slowly around the screen. The weapons – oddly seeming like sprite and functionality lifts as well – fire off themselves and new ones are acquired as enemies are dispatched and the player levels up.
Soon enough, the player is a walking buzz saw as enemy hordes just walk forever towards them and to their doom. The feedback of seeing the numbers pop off, go up and rewards consistently fly towards the player is so satisfying. One eventually becomes the embodiment of the Brick Top quote from Snatch as they “go through bone like butter” as runs go on. It was cool to just end my night with a beer and build my own little buzz saw.
7. Cult of the Lamb
I love a roguelike/roguelite. I think about them all the time. Some friends get easily annoyed by this or simply scoff at it as a waste of time. Massive Monster’s prior game, Adventure Pals, was an unlikely hit in our house providing a delightful co-op experience that we still smile about today. When their follow-up was announced and it was confirmed to be a roguelite, my heart was set aflutter. There is only one real flaw with this game and it’s not even really that it’s a flaw. We just wanted to play co-op, which the game sadly does not have.
That said, Cult of the Lamb is a wonderfully bonkers experience. The dungeon crawling is a relatively loose combat experience, the bosses all provide their individual challenges that make sense and can be a white-knuckle tense experience with being at the cost of an impenetrable difficulty spike. The real gold here is managing the cult. It has that XCOM factor of naming the cultists after friends and caring for and about them as times move up and down day by day. It also provided a forever smile for me when the cultist named after my partner decided it would be funny to make the cultist named after one of my closest friends, Moose, eat poop for a laugh. It’s juvenile and gross, but somehow just adorable because it’s being asked by cute farm animal avatars.
6. Tunic
Sometimes, not often, a game is announced that is a slam dunk for me, but also completely different from whatever it was I originally expected. Tunic presented as another Legend of Zelda-as-its-main-inspiration action/adventure game. I don’t remember when the ideas of filling in its game manual and the puzzles related to that came about for the wider audience of games, but that idea was a wonderful carrot dangling from a stick to chase for me because of sincere curiosity hard coded into my brain. Things like that get my brain buzzing and keep my attention for a long time.
Ultimately, I did not get all of that solved in my playthrough. While external forces muscled me away before I could get all of that taken care of, I can say that it’s a beautiful looking game, with a cuteness not-so-carefully concealing a combat loop of difficulty, nuance and wonderful feedback. I do like that there seems to be a new one of ‘these’ that raises the bar every year (at least it’s felt like that for me since Hollow Knight). Tunic is wonderful.
5. Salt and Sacrifice
FromSoftware’s output since Demon’s Souls has had a hold on me for damn near a decade and a half. It has gone a long way to change my thinking about the games I want to play and how long I give the games I play before I make a choice to move on, the criteria for which will always be a game by game basis. Games are all different, you know. While I’ve gone a distance to try and be the change in the community around those games that I’d want to see in it, those games are 100% one of those stars in the sky that I’ll always look for.
Salt and Sanctuary from 2016 was arguably the first of the 2D side-scrolling Metroidvanias to really get the formula right from its constant dread-drenched-in-muted-colors, and clues of danger hidden within the environments to a wonderful battle between the light and the dark, an admittedly overwhelming skill tree, and a translation of the From combat system to the 2D space. For me, it was the gold standard of the 2D Soulslike that would also be achieved by Hollow Knight and Blasphemous. Then Ska Studios announced its follow-up. Sure, it was a no-brainer for yours truly. However, I wasn’t sure where they could really go without just doing another one.
What arrived was on its face a worthy follow-up with a wider color palette with the same translation of combat and same overwhelming skill tree (I do say this with absolute love and respect) with a wonderful new addition of online multiplayer. What took some figuring out is where I’d seen the overall loop before. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks, “IT’S A MONSTER HUNTER GAME!” While the endlessness and need for preparation of the Capcom franchise is not the goal here, the idea of being given targets, confronting them and chasing them all over a series of maps for materials for armor, weapon and spell upgrades. It translates aspects of the series in a very similar way to 2014’s Mercenary Kings from Tribute Games did and I didn’t know I wanted it till now.
4. Yakuza 0
I’ve been on the outside looking in on this series forever always wanting to play, but never doing it. Then came Yakuza: Like A Dragon with the new protagonist and gameplay style. That was my chance, my entry and I absolutely fell in love.
In 2021, I’d made a resolution to play all the series in 2022, but life would put some serious brakes on that journey for now. But Yakuza 0, man… I think this game is flawed perfection, cynically earnest and imbued with the sort of realistic whimsy usually reserved for other media than video games. It’s one of those games where I would gleefully recount an occurrence for my partner over dinner or in the car towards any of the normal adult tasks we have to do and she’d say, “what’s actually happening in this game?” My response would usually be one of those, “well, if I just stuck to that, I’m not sure how interested you’d be.” Saying it like that would usually indicate that it’s not worth the time. While that’s 100% not the case with Yakuza 0, me getting into the beats with my partner would probably garner the “Ah, a gang story. Got it.” While I love that this game is almost a complete blend of various Nikkatsu films from Seijun Suzuki and others, but somehow elevated to the level of melodrama exhibited by Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pedro Almodovar. Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima contain multitudes within them both caring for their position and their path as much as doing the right thing.
They might revere the wrong people just a bit much and be a bit too out of touch with the world outside of Kamurocho and Sotenbori, but they make these places shine. In fact, for an open world game, I cannot think of a setting quite as dense with purpose and packed with life. At the beginning of my time with Yakuza 0, I hated the lack of fast travel. At the end, I’d just take little detours on the way to my objectives whenever possible.
It felt like when I first moved to Philadelphia and started venturing out on my own. Sure, I’d get lost from time to time, but I’d also find some of my favorite spots that way too. In no game have I had near as much fun doing the silly side stuff as I did going to the arcade, batting cages, doing dance battles, singing karaoke and bowling, among others in this game. Even the real estate stuff is just such a wild time. Ryu Ga Gatoku Studio threw several balls of wax into this world and it’s like nothing else I can remember.
3. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak
Monster Hunter World brought me to the fold with this series. Monster Hunter Rise is the one that sang to me. While I’ll not likely become the expert that others are, I will likely play these games for the foreseeable future and I cannot wait to see what comes with new updates. Sunbreak for me elaborated and illuminated things I’d heard about this series from people in my social media circles and taught me a wonderful lesson; Monster Hunter is at its absolute peak when you’ve not had someone tell you how to play.
As a new player, I 100% looked up weapon tutorials and looked for ideas on how to build around my weapon of choice. That was invaluable for me even getting my feet wet. However, with Sunbreak, I changed my weapon and devoted my time to its study in a way that I’d not previously. With World, I tried weapons in short bursts getting real time with only the hammer, hunting horn and insect glaive – all 3 being absolutely fun in their own way. The horn and the glaive are probably the first 2 weapons I fell in love with. Rise came along and I picked up my horn and blasted through it busting both beats and skulls along the way. When the expansion came, and I thought to myself, “there are a lot of weapons in this game that I’ve not used and I should try them. So I went to the training dummy and started messing around.
On PC, I picked up the gunlance while playing bow on switch. I was completely drowning in learning these that it felt like I was in school again and I couldn’t have been happier as I slowly began to cook with them. The big realization for me is that with each new weapon I tried, the game became different. Sure, the end result of a captured or carved monster was the same, the journey there was vastly different. Tackling monsters with the bow that posed no challenge with the horn or gunlance saw the tables turned and presented the challenge of learning new methods. All of a sudden, I was invigorated, ecstatic and enthusiastic to do it all over again. Now, I’m slowly working on learning the lance on base Rise since the game has come to PlayStation.
Sunbreak is where I thought I’d get with Iceborne, but I never really got far due to external circumstances. This is where I found what several of the folks in my social media circles would tell me. They’d say “since you like the souls games, you’ll love Monster Hunter.” I wasn’t sure what that meant till now. With the endless loop of afflicted monsters which drop materials for augmenting weapons and armor (which is its own dragon to chase, to be fair), I find myself receiving what I always wanted out of souls games, repeating the boss fights without necessarily having to go through some of the areas in which they reside just to do it. It’s a blissful loop to me. And while I feel proficient with the bow, insect glaive, and hunting horn, I can’t wait to try a new weapon and thus be presented with a new game all over again.
2. Elden Ring
Reading how much FromSoftware’s output the last 14 years has been important to me in this piece already probably telegraphed this game being high on my list. I may be a creature of habit when it comes to most things, but few of those ‘most things’ have come close to being as interesting as Elden Ring is to me. Sure, I did chuckle at several of the tweets and videos that went viral around the time of its release. Yes, it was probably a tad wrong to do so because I’d be lying if I said that none of these games ever felt like they put me in similar positions. And of course, I’d be lying if I said these games didn’t have their problems.
All that said, Elden Ring is, in my mind, a game that FromSoftware needed to make. For all the praise that’s been heaped on the souls series over the years, Dark Souls 3 showed clear signs of wear despite elevating aspects of the series to wonderful new heights in ways that were indeed special to it, but nothing hit like the first 2 or Demon’s Souls. Elden Ring is both innovation through iteration on everything they’ve done and everywhere they’ve been with these games as well as cinemascope level expansion to brave new places. The open world of The Lands Between provided a staggering sense of wonder while traversing it. Each new area hustles and bustles with its own brand of death delivery to the player while looking absolutely beautiful doing it. The day/night cycle and story progress brought changes to it in interesting ways and in a clear nod to Breath of the Wild, there are things to do everywhere.
There are also nooks and crannies that almost always lead to finding something. The multiplayer aspect is the best it’s been in terms of playing with friends. Sure, there are invaders and yes, many of them are just in it to ruin days, but there are plenty of ways to mitigate the invasion problem that actually work now rather than just running off a cliff to avoid giving the invader “the satisfaction” as it were.
Much has also been made of the story collaboration with George R.R. Martin. I’ll say this, I think the backstories of characters, bosses and even places played more of a role this time out. I don’t remember where they said it, but Jackson from Abnormal Mapping wonderfully articulated “Elden Ring’s opening is just Miyazaki mad with power and he’s staring directly at lore divers like Vaati Vidya with the reveal of ‘The Poo Man’ knowing full well they’re going to dig right in” or something close to that (I couldn’t find the exact wording, but I did try). All kidding aside, the ideas put into every area of this world make it feel alive unlike any before not only in its lineage, but games as a whole (well, most of the current crop for sure).
As much as I want to say about this game, I feel the need to mention the wonderful story of Let Me Solo Her, a naked, katana-wielding hero with a pot on their head that would hang out outside 1 boss gate. I absolutely love the story of this player that said, “if you want help, I’m here” with the stipulation that the host couldn’t get involved. There are videos of Let Me Solo Her backing out because the host intervened. Sure, I disagree with that part, but I think there are plenty of folks who just want to get through and help others along the way. I count myself among them. I’ll never be what Let Me Solo Her became, but players who are struggling are more thankful for just that brief draw of agro so they can heal. I can’t wait to see where FromSoftware goes in both The Lands Between and the future.
1. Immortality
I had not played a Sam Barlow game since Her Story when Caroline, my co-host on Trivial Merit, suggested to Jesse, my co-host on Free Reeling It, that we tackle Immortality. While I had a few ideas on what we were getting into, I cannot say I was ready for what this game had to tell me. Hell, I’m still not certain I’ve gotten all of it sorted. Immortality speaks to the way I have enjoyed and explored different media basically since I learned I could.
Endlessly scrolling through the mountain of clips, putting the events together and attempting to make real sense of what these films had to say about the players involved in them was almost a pleasurable looping delirium of speculation, projection and conjecture. The forging of these pathways was reminiscent of being a kid and learning the idea of sampling in hip-hop and the joy that brought. Then, I accidentally found the layer behind the clips which led me back through the experience again realizing there was twice as much meat on the bone. It’s one of the better moments where I’ve realized I was playing checkers just in time to notice that bishops have laid siege to my rooks and the knights had my queen trapped.
Immortality’s story succeeds for me not because it’s a straightforward narrative wrapped up nicely with a beautiful statement for the player to just take on board. It’s a story that is so tied to its central mechanic of watching and scrubbing through clips, picking items in frame that will lead you to another clip with a similar object in a frame.
While there’s a finite number of clips for sure, the order in which the player receives each one, whether they happen to find the ‘inner layer of the onion’ as it were, where they find it and how they react will contribute to vastly different experiences and likely lead to varying interpretations of the material presented. Sure, that variance will ultimately be curtailed and corralled for players that experience 100% of clips and their background layers, of course. But the lack of distance between story and mechanics, for me, is what makes a game experience memorable, valuable and ultimately something incredibly special.
You can find Matthew on Twitter at @Infinite_Rewind, and in addition to cohosting the Bald Gun Guy Podcast, you can find them on music podcast Trivial Merit, film podcast Free Reeling It!!, and Story Route Zero, a podcast for telling stories about playing games.
