Back in the first weeks of 2022, I wrote about how that year was shaping up to be a great one for gaming after 2021's relative disappointment. Some of you joked that I must have been hungover and skipped your daily sweep of TheGamer for my musings. I get it. But I meant every word. I even slapped together a huge list of upcoming games to prove the point. Still, not one of them felt like my Game of the Year. I called myself a regular Nostradamus, but deep down I knew the real winner would probably walk in through a side door.
2022 was absolutely stacked. Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, and Starfield were all flexing for the crowd. Halo Infinite, which technically launched at the tail end of 2021, was also circling The Game Awards. Then came the wildcards with no set date or lower expectations: Breath of the Wild 2, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Saints Row, and Gotham Knights. Big names, huge budgets, plenty of noise. But my favourite game of 2022? I still hadn't met her yet.
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The Unpredictable Truth About Game of the Year
I promised I'd circle back to our GOTY list, and I'm a woman of my word. Our overall winner that year was The Forgotten City. Even without a series of delays thinning the herd, nobody could have predicted that. Chicory, The Artful Escape, and Boyfriend Dungeon also made my personal list, and if you'd asked me a year earlier to name 30 games I was excited about, I wouldn't have even thought to mention them. It Takes Two? It came out of nowhere and became our Podcaster's Choice. Guardians of the Galaxy, a game I eyed like a suspicious sandwich because I was worried it would be a bit shit, ended up in my top ten too. It even deservedly won Best Narrative at The Game Awards, though the writing was probably what we were all most nervous about.
Severed Steel got an honourable mention in my top ten, and I hadn't even heard of it until the review code landed in my inbox. Seems like almost nobody else played it, so I'll say it again: go play Severed Steel. I'm not joking. Go play it. In 2020, Coffee Talk, Call of the Sea, and Umurangi Generation made my list, as did Yakuza: Like a Dragon, my first dip into the Yakuza series.
The Smaller Games That Actually Called My Name
Since I can't list games I've never heard of before—that's the whole point—I can only offer a small list of things that felt extremely my vibe but weren't typical Game of the Year candidates. Goodbye Volcano High, Oxenfree 2, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Stray, and She Dreams Elsewhere were all contenders to crack my 2022 list. There were also dozens like them, tailor made for me but either not yet revealed or swallowed up by bigger marketing cycles.
Here's a little table of what I was tracking:
| Category | Game | Why It Got Me |
|---|---|---|
| Big budget spectacle | God of War Ragnarok | technically excellent, probably not personal |
| Narrative gem | Goodbye Volcano High | a non-binary dinosaur in a rock band—a non-binosaur |
| Cozy comfort | Coffee Talk | warm drinks, low stakes, late-night feelings |
| Underrated action | Severed Steel | slipped under everyone's radar |
God of War Ragnarok was surely going to be technically excellent, but it would have surprised me to see it in my personal top ten. Goodbye Volcano High, on the other hand—a Life is Strange-style narrative adventure about a non-binary dinosaur in a rock band—might not win any "Best Game Ever To Make This Bald Dad In A Plaid Shirt Cry" awards, but I was fairly confident I'd enjoy it a lot more.
As I sit here in 2026, the lesson from 2022 is even louder. The huge games are fun to watch from a distance, but the smaller ones are the ones that sneak up and rearrange your whole year. You might just find a new game that you get to tell everyone else to play for months on end. Speaking of, go play Severed Steel. Some things never change.