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ducktastic · 1 year

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Derrick's 2022 Gameological Awards

Every year on the Gameological Discord, rather than a simple top ten list, we ask what games did what things especially well. Here are my picks in this year's pool...

Game of the Year

Game of the Year means different things to different people. Simply being “the best” is subjective. For me, it’s a matter of which game stuck with me the longest, a game that I couldn’t stop thinking about, a game that captured my imagination and would not let go until I was through. In 2022, no game did that quite like Tunic. A gorgeous isometric action-rpg heavily inspired by classic The Legend of Zelda games, Tunic fashions itself as a long-lost retro game. One where the instruction manual has had its pages separated and lost within the world itself, leading players to explore the world with little guidance and literally piece things together as they go. Mysteries on top of mysteries, stretching through the corners of my mind, obsessing for days on end. Tunic is a whole damn journey and no game in 2022 swept me away into its mythology, world-building, and sheer scope quite the way Tunic did.

Single-player GOTY

As we continue to blur the lines between the various forms of media, the main detail that separates games from comparable experiences in film and books is that games are about the agency of the player, that the person consuming the media is actively a part of it. It’s easy to escape into lives unlike your own by watching them on the silver screen or reading about them on the page, but games make you FEEL the way a different person might feel. Put aside the dreamy aesthetic, raunchy dialogue, and supernatural conspiracy story… the real star of Neon White was that it made the player feel like a goddamn golden God, launching themselves into the heavens and crashing down on the heads of their foes with righteous justice and unwavering focus. The absolute speed and force of Neon White’s gameplay made every player experience the rush of being a pro gamer, squeezing every last drop of blood out of a game’s throat as you dominated it. Yes, it’s gorgeous and sounds great and all that good stuff, but the adrenaline provided by Neon White was unlike anything else this year.

Multiplayer GOTY

The Splatoon games have lovely and imaginative single-player campaigns, but let’s be real, the franchise is all about frantic multiplayer paint action. Splatoon 3 is the least innovative game in the series so far, but that doesn’t make it any less joyous an experience to hop online with some friends or make some new ones while painting the town [insert your randomly assigned team color here]. New personalization features like SplatTags and lockers, along with games-as-service inspired seasonal catalogs and an always-on upgrade to Splatoon 2’s Salmon Run, Splatoon 3 is constantly hitting players with reasons to keep coming back for more.

Favorite Replay

The Stanley Parable remains an iconic experience from the previous decade’s golden era of indie games. It introduced countless impressionable gamers worldwide to the concept of metatextual narratives within gameplay and the relationship between the player’s choice and the creator’s voice. It was all set to remain a once-in-a-lifetime exploration of interactive media, right up until this year’s release of The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, a game that was, on the surface, a modern remaster of a decade-old PC game for modern hardware and consoles, but was secretly a stealth sequel with even more to say about the current gaming landscape. While the original Stanley Parable was happy to direct a mirror at gamers to make them question the choices they make when they consume media of any kind, the additional new areas of Ultra Deluxe raise new questions and concerns about the game industry and the ways that video games are designed, consumed, critiqued, discussed, and ultimately tossed aside. The revelatory experience revealed more than ever before, and remained effortlessly hilarious all along the way.

Didn't Click Award

Going into 2022, there was no game I was more hyped for than OlliOlli World. The first two entries into the side-scrolling skateboard trick-em-up were damn near perfect. Perfectly at home on the Playstation Vita, they were tight, thrilling, and oh-so-stylish. A long-awaited sequel was just so exciting, and the new Adventure Time-inspired aesthetic had a ton of potential, along with the ability to finally design your own skater and express yourself through fashion and gear. The only problem was… the gameplay never quite CLICKED. What was so magical about the previous games was how responsive the controls were. Just like Super Meat Boy assured people that, if they died, it was their own mistake and not the game’s controls, OlliOlli 1 and 2 both had immaculate precision with the skateboard controls. OlliOlli World did not. Controls are floaty and imprecise, sometimes it felt like the game just decided you didn’t jump in time or didn’t grab correctly. Without that precision, OlliOlli World just never felt right, and no matter how many times I tried, I just never connected with it the way I had with its predecessors.

Most Forgettable Award

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Netflix made its first proper foray into game publishing this year, along with its first showing at the not-E3 “Summer Games Fest,” where they announced plenty of successful licensed games coming to mobile devices via Netflix, several Netflix streaming projects based on popular video games, and most notably surprise-dropped a new Netflix-exclusive game from the creator of Downwell. “Poinpy” instantly trended on social media as gamers laughed about the humorously named vertical platformer, and as one would expect from the creator of Downwell, the game showed a surprising amount of depth and strategy. That said, I only played the game maybe three or four times that first week and then it lay idle on my home screen for months before I finally just deleted it. Poinpy was certainly a thing… but only for a hot minute.

(In)famous Award

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Social media could not get enough videos of the viral sensation Trombone Champ, a rhythm game played by sliding up and down the screen like pushing and pulling the slide of a trombone. People loved adding silly songs or viral audio clips and making Trombone Champ levels out of them. I have no idea if the game is fun because frankly I have no interest in playing it. The videos were funny for a while, but really, they just felt like yet another meme, just one that happened to be centered around this silly game.

Unexpected Joy

With an uninspired name like Vampire Survivors, a nondescript retro pixel art style, and the increasingly tired “rogue-like” label, I had absolutely no interest in what seemed like yet another flash-in-the-pan indie sensation. And then they went and dropped a free mobile port during The Game Awards and I was like “eh, what harm could it do?” And then I drained my phone’s battery twice a day for a week, completely addicted to its game loop. As much as the game lazily lifts from rogue-likes and bullet-hell shmups, it brilliantly and expertly lifts from idle games and clickers. The end result is a remarkably passive game that steadily makes you feel more and more like an unstoppable machine of divine power. It’s incredible and has no right being this good.

Best Music

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Melatonin only just came out a few days ago, so I haven’t had enough time with it to really consider it for titles like GOTY, but I can already say that this Rhythm Heaven-inspired minigame collection absolutely nails its inspiration when it comes to hooky melodies with toe-tapping beats. More than anything else, a rhythm game has got to have compelling music to keep you playing, and there is no doubt that Melatonin has that in spades.

Favorite Game Encounter

There were several fascinating encounters in my GOTY pick, Tunic, from enormous mechanized sentinels to flittering joyous fairies, but nothing this year came close to The Mountain Door. If you’ve played Tunic, you know. Opening The Mountain Door is a puzzle that literally spans the entire breadth of the gaming experience in ways that I still get excited about just remembering months after the fact. It requires using all of the knowledge you’ve collected along the way to explore, examine, and rethink dozens of smaller puzzles that culminate in one euphoric victory. And it’s still not even the end of the game!

Best DLC of the Year

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Little Inferno was the unlikeliest smash hit of the Wii U launch library, and proved to be an absolute delight when it came to PC and mobile devices. Equal parts idle game, passive toy, and black comedy narrative adventure, the game remains a truly special oddball indie romp. Ten years after its initial release, in Fall 2022, players were surprised with its first DLC—Little Inferno Ho Ho Holiday—taking the game’s already explicit anti-consumerism bent and applying it specifically to that most commercial time of the year: festive winter holidays. What an unexpected joy!

"Waiting for Game-dot"

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Disco Elysium. I know. I KNOW. It’s been sitting in my library for years now. I’ll get there someday.

Game that Made Me Think

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I continue to find Sam Barlow fascinating as a game creator. He and David Cage are the two directors most experimenting with the rapidly blurring line between cinema and game, and his latest title, Immortality, blurs that line even further by actually just being about movies. The game is, essentially, three feature-length films, broken up into reels and rehearsals and behind the scenes footage for players to scrub through and explore, and even more than his previous efforts Her Story and Telling Lies, Immortality really bonks players over the head with "THAT WAS IMPORTANT" by disrupting the footage in jarring ways that I don’t want to discuss in case people want to enjoy the game unspoiled. It’s not my favorite of his titles, and I had a harder time investing in the characters than his other works, but from an interactive standpoint, Immortality pushes boundaries in fascinating ways that I couldn’t stop thinking about, even when I no longer really cared about the game’s mysteries.

Girlfriend Reviews Award

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The last major feature update Harmonix’s Fuser got in 2021 added a “Diamond Stage” where users could buy spots on the bill and mix tracks live to a global streaming audience. As the game steadily died through 2022—first with an end to new DLC tracks, then the decline of weekly challenges, and finally online services being shuttered just this week—but even when the game didn’t compel me to come back and play more, the Diamond Stage kept me hooked on the official Fuser Twitch stream, enjoying endless mixes by players spinning live at all times. The stage is finally closed now, leaving legacy players to their own devices to play locally and share mixes as one-offs rather than real-time collaborations, but for half of the game’s short life-span, we had a lovely dance party available to us 24/7 we could all share together.

WILDCARD

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is just too good a game to not mention at all. It’s the best Kirby game since Super Star, which is very possibly one of the greatest video games of all time. It’s also, somehow, the first mainline Kirby platform adventure on a three-dimensional axis, something that other Nintendo icons Mario and Zelda did back on the N64 and Metroid did on the GameCube, all while Kirby kept happily within the confines of flat two-dimensional platforming (aside from some spin-offs like Air Ride, Blowout Blast, and Dream Course). Not content to simply mimic foes by stealing their powers, this time Kirby would take on the characteristics of inanimate objects in the world, becoming a car, a vending machine, a staircase, and more. The game ends with a spectacular over-the-top battle that feels like it belongs in Bayonetta, not the unassuming pink puffball that is Kirby, but it all works! Hell, this game gives Kirby a gun, AND IT WORKS!!! On paper, nothing about this game makes sense, but in practice, it freakin’ rules. If this is what 3D Kirby games are going to be like, I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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