Malindy’s GOTY List 2022
Let’s be honest, 2022 hasn’t been a great year for me. It also hasn’t been a bad year, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve done financially well, and I have people who support me, people who wish me the best without asking for anything in return. I still don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that, but people saying nice things about me and looking forward to Mythwrecked even at times when I’m not have definitely kept me going. Thank you for that!
But there’s always the duality in everything — just like how I’m sitting here with my first case of strep throat in five years, but at least I caught it hugging a family member. People enjoy a lot of the things I do, but they are work, and that work has gotten harder to do. Video games, too, are work, and the fact that this list is shorter than usual and missing some of this year’s big games is due to me standing in front of the rubble of one career and facing the mountain of another. So I’m sorry to Citizen Sleeper, Norco and Pentiment. I can’t pretend to make time for you before the year is out, not when my GOTY has me in its claws still. Let their developers know I own these games, I will always support narrative games with my money, it’s only the actual playing that has to wait. But now, feast your eyes on my fairly rote (for me!) GOTY list for 2022.
5. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes
Despite Oscar’s best attempts, I’ve never played a Warriors game before, but you knew I had to play this. Turns out that smashing down hordes of enemies with over the top anime effects is really just as satisfying as people say, in an absolutely braindead way.
The second I got into Fire Emblem for the first time with Three Houses, I was doomed. I love everything about Three Houses. I genuinely think it’s a fantastic example of character design, both visually and narratively, and how you design not just for a game, but a fandom. I really wished more Western games would learn from this, then again a lot of Western creators are so odd about fandom still, after all these years.
You MAY also know that I’m just a massive fan of certain voice actors, and if you want to hear good voice acting, this is the game for you. This game was bittersweet to play, seeing as Ferdinand’s voice actor Billy Kametz unfortunately died before release — he’s done such a great job and I’m still sad people couldn’t celebrate him for it to his face.
But yes, this is basically the game for a depressed person struggling with her flow state who also just loves acting and anime characters. I never said I was sophisticated, and I’m having a great time down here in the pit.
4. Roadwarden
Look, if there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that I love writing. It’s what I’m here for. It’s my daily bread. And my jam. And really, when it comes down to it, my GOTY lists are traditionally filled with games that fill me with goopy green jealousy.
Boy, can Aureus write. His personal GOTY is Pentiment, btw, so that shows me. He seems like a chill dude, 10/10, would love to be socially awkward around! (edit: he tweeted at me shortly after I tweeted about roadwarden, 10/10 chill soul) People love to say 2022 has been the year of the narrative game, and I want to subtly disagree — 2022 has been the year where people who normally don’t have the time to go to make space for narrative games in their calendars as they were waiting for the next AAA game to hit, which really elevated games like Roadwarden to a level of visibility they normally just don’t get. Lucky us! Something similar made games like Domekeeper and Vampire Survivors huge this year. It’s truly a case of shorter games with worse graphics, huh. Personally, I didn’t discover Roadwarden until Edwin’s brilliant review, which I also warmly recommend.
People like to invoke tabletop roleplaying when they talk about narrative games, but it’s nice to see a game go back this closely to the source and show us that all you need is great storytelling to really feel that — here comes the dreaded word — immersion.
3. Signalis
Anime art? Check. Tech that reminds me of tech in 80’s Bubblegum Crisis and other anime? Check. Immaculate vibes? Check.
Look, I’m a huge wuss. I don’t play horror games. I had a stint playing Silent Hill games, and I love Silent Hill 2, but it also nearly broke me. I don’t play horror games and I don’t watch people playing horror games. But then there’s Signalis. Signalis isn’t a straightforward horror game, in that I think not a lot of games get the psychological aspect of horror down right, because it’s not the aspect they care about most.
That, weirdly enough, is the stuff I like, the stuff that Signalis uses as inspiration — I’m a lifelong Neon Genesis Evangelion fan and I couldn’t tell you why, I like the parts of Akira and Ghost in the Shell that don’t make sense to me. The desperate parts. The uncomfortable ones.
Signalis is confusing and uncomfortable and beautiful, and I got obsessed with trying to figure out its world to the point I dreamed about it. It’s the worldbuilding for me with this one, honestly. Roadwarden is a game that made me go “I wish I could write like that” and Signalis is my “I wish I wrote this” game of 2022.
2. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
This one goes to Oscar, he kept talking about it, I bought it. Everyone kept talking about this game, but in very unspecific ways that made it difficult for me to determine what was so good about it. I’m still not sure I can put into words why I played the entire game like a mad person within 2 days and then took another 2 days for a second go round. I’ve said this before, my favourite games this year gave me back a strong feeling of flow that I miss dearly in other activities. Games that have a day structure just seem to do it for me — what do you want to do today? In real life I can’t answer that question, but in games, just the prospect of making friends with someone or discovering something new is usually enough to keep me going.
Honestly, I don’t know what it was about this one. Maybe it was just the effort put into a sci-fi story that’s not hopepunk, but also not dystopian, a game that came out with impeccable timing for someone who’s as tired of the world as I am. Exocolonist’s world and its’s characters were all a bit too simple, narratively, but I love a game that can circumvent my critical brain somehow just by being that YA book in game form.
1. Marvel’s Midnight Suns
Listen. Listen. When this was announced, I sat up and texted Oscar “is Firaxis making a game where I can almost, maybe, date Tony Stark?” Because you see, at Gamescom 2021 I accidentally gave away my biggest secret, my love for the hamburger of cinematic entertainment, the MCU. I’ve calmed down about the MCU since Endgame, to be honest, because it was always Tony Stark for me. Always. I love Tony. Love him. Laid eyes on Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in 2008, the greatest casting choice on earth bar none, and it was game over from there on out. I watched the first Iron Man six times at the cinema. I had an Iron Man Funko Pop, okay.
I was as much a fan of a thing as a young woman without money could be. Also, my XCOM playtime will go to the grave with me. So there was Firaxis, just casually throwing out all the Malindy dog whistles. Tony Stark. Fire Emblem structure. Cards. Turn-based. It was like a video game fever dream. But it also, let’s be real, looked like a Firaxis game, because you can pay animators to take their time on facial animations, or you can say hey, we want 65k voiced lines and a Spider-Man who moves like Spiderman.
To everyone who *jokingly* rags on of Midnight Sun’s graphical quality — some of you at least are supposed to know better by now. Whether it’s a time thing or a budget thing or even an engine adoption thing, there’s nothing I hate more than people who pretend to be anti-crunch but still jammer on about how a game looks. They know. You know how much they moved the game, shut the fuck up.
Anyway, where was I. Ah yes. Tony Stark. You see, in the end Oscar broke me. I told him I couldn’t afford another full-price game so shortly after the last one, and I had Fire Emblem to buy “Reckon this is the best Fire Emblem in years,” he said, and oh. OH. Mate was right.
It’s the writing for me. I don’t know anything about the comics’ timelines first hand, but with even the stuff I don’t get, it’s clear that this group of writers at Firaxis do. This is a terribly good game to study character speech patterns and conversational writing, which made me very excited, and the love for Marvel is there, and it’s deep. It’s also just the sheer fannish-ness of it, having Blade and captain America discuss the Art of War, in depth, in their book club or listening to Doctor Strange and Iron Man bicker.
As a fan, this is really a game that has me clutching my breast, filled to the brim with love, at regular intervals. “Acting!” I say as I smush your face between both of my hands, listening to Yuri Lowenthal be my favourite Spider-Man.
And the main story is actually good, too. You see, this may be one of the few chosen one stories I’ll allow, because Midnight Suns has a Chosen One that just fucks up a lot, an unreliable narrator that’s clearly powerful but for all their power is just as confused as everyone else. I think that’s something very Marvel-y, and something games definitely needed.
In the end, I think it all comes down to Midnight Suns being the kind of game I want to work on. So much. I want to work on a game with that many voice lines. I want to work on a team that pays my industry favourites union rates to voice them. I don’t know how to get there, or if I can. But this game really reinforced that dream, so how could it not be my GOTY?
Honourable mentions
(Because I couldn’t fill a list up to ten games)
God of War Ragnarök
So this one is slightly out of character for me. I surprised myself, to be honest, but you can like things without thinking they’re the best thing in the world. Ragnarök came at a time when I had no game to play for work, so I could really just enjoy a game for the sake of it. From a narrative design perspective, this game has issues I’m going to dedicate an entire separate blog post to, but at the time I played it, this was another game for my exhausted brain — press R1 to forcefully smash into monsters and watch them fly.
God of War isn’t a deep game, it’s just terribly good at pretending it is, in part because Christopher Judge is terribly good at his job to the point he has convinced himself this is some high art.
God of War Ragnarök is “just” more God of War — something that was a point of criticism for many and seems to go against a lot of the game industry mentality. After all Horizon Forbidden West, a game that also releases this year, couldn’t sit similarly still. It needed to go bigger, even if bigger meant space aliens and some fucking prehistoric spec ops, keeping people away from their families for one more version of an incredibly large mech crocodile.
The Quarry
The Quarry at the Game Awards is like a comedy at the Oscars. We all saw it, we all enjoyed it, but because it didn’t immediately try to sell itself to our subculture by sheer virtue of superlatives, we chose to…ignore it?
The Quarry isn’t a game for gamers. It doesn’t claim to reinvent the wheel. Both cardinal sins as far as gaming is concerned. But it’s also just a good time, albeit a little slow. A genuinely funny game written by people who know how to write teenagers and enjoy horror tropes. No more than that, but also no less — games like to skip the fundamentals like this and go straight to something you’ve never seen, because the games industry is full of people with ADHD on a sugar rush. But just having things like this finally work in a game is the more satisfying version of a game adaptation that doesn’t make your brain bleed. I think I’d enjoy working at Supermassive, but the fact that I’m not a horror gay has always kept me from trying so far.
Chained Echoes
Late 2022 GOTY alert on this one. My extreme honest reverse hot take on this one is that I severely underestimated this game when I first came across it. I was a jury member for the Indie Arena Booth at Gamescom this year, and when I saw this game in the selection, I thought ok, it’s an old-school RPG homage, neat. Some games aren’t made to be played on a show floor with noise levels of a pachinko parlour blasting at you, however, and Chained Echoes definitely is one of those games.
Instead, Chained Echoes is this — when I started in games, people told me the JRPG was dead. It wasn’t, I just had to learn that a lor of Western critics didn’t know what to do with it, especially since a lot of these RPGS aren’t interested in the Western holy grail idea of innovation. However, playing a JRPG in your thirties is different from playing it in your tens, and Chained Echoes knows this. It knows what to subtly tweak and what to leave alone, it knows how to tell a story, it looks incredibly good, and, not unlike Midnight Suns, just has this overflowing love for what it is and what came before it that I find irresistible. All that from a single dev. Makes you wanna go back to bed, doesn’t it!