The 37 best games of 2022
2022’s had plenty of flak for its lack of major, triple-A tentpoles – and there really has been a lack of them, thanks surely to the (hopefully) final wave of covid-induced delays. But in the void left by the blockbusters, some truly sensational alternatives have appeared. For all the talk of a fallow year or a struggling industry, to our minds in 2022 games have never felt more diverse, more strange, more and challenging and accomplished. 2022 was, against the odds, a banger of a year for video games.
This time, we decided our best games through a mix of voting – across our full-time staff and our regular contributors to Eurogamer’s news, guides, features and reviews – and some, ahem, lively debate as we sorted through the results. There will inevitably be a game you loved that’s missing or featured far too low, and a game you loathed sitting far too high. In those cases we can only apologise for our terrible taste. But still: these are the 37 best games of 2022. Why 37? Good question! We don’t really know – it’s just how many we loved.
Excuse the ludicrous name (a mash-up of Darius and Gradius that went a bit too far and ends up sounding like a form of colonic irrigation), because Team Ladybug’s STG is one of 2022’s stars, and a standout in what’s been a stunning year for the genre. Evoking the genre in its late 90s/early 00s pomp, Drainus evokes the likes of Gradius 5 in its detail and design, matching it with exquisite artwork and feel for a game that stands proudly alongside the genre’s very best. It’s hitting Switch in 2023, but don’t let that stop you from picking it up on PC (or playing it on Steamdeck where it performs admirably). Read our Drainus review
Sam Barlow turns his usual tools inwards in this game of introspection, reflecting on auteurs, muses, and exploitation in art. There’s a frightfully clever – and frightful – twist to be found here, but while much of the focus has been placed on that, the real magic is all in the craft. This game must have been extraordinarily difficult to put together, a process of weaving multiple, layered live action films across one another and hyperlinking between them at specific moments. Production design, reaching across at least three eras, is a treat, and there are filmmaking references aplenty. All together it’s overwhelming, even if it’s a familiar format now for this team. Read our Immortality review
PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Android, iOS, Mac
A good game or a very potent one? It’s a testament to the joy that Vampire Survivors creates that this question doesn’t really matter. This one’s all about the Katamari power curve as you go from a lone hero with a feeble whip attack to becoming a wandering stack of fireworks, sparks flying in all directions. Don’t stop to think, just chug through the popcorn crush of enemies. So what if there’s little to aim for except for the next unlock? Some games are like this: ingeniously mindless. And very hard to put down. Read our Vampire Survivors review
What a gloriously horrid place Hyper Demon takes you to – a Rodeo Drive boutique decked out in crystal, hot pink, and those strobing waves that tell you a migraine is brewing. Stay alive, take out enemies, don’t fall off the map: you know the drill. Except you don’t, because this isn’t about simply shooting so much as it’s about air dashes, dodges, rebounding shots off the floor in order to lock on. The whole thing is brisk and lingering, like a summer nightmare. And as with Devil Daggers, the game that provided the template for this fresh horror, it feels like something deeply primal is being mined. Read our Hyper Demon review
This was always going to work – Space Marines from the Warhammer universe tricked out with the weighty turn-based battles of XCOM. It didn’t have to work this well, though. What an awful treat it is to take your stompy Grey Knights across the galaxy, stomping on everything that displeases them. Read our Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Demonhunters review
Victoria 3 is grand strategy of the very grandest kind. An overwhelmingly rich nation-building game, Paradox’s latest gives players control of the politics and economics of granularly modelled states battling to maintain stability through a time of great change. Like a lot of Paradox stuff, it can be a little rough in places, but its sheer ambition is a thing of wonder. Read our Victoria 3 review
You’ll struggle to find a game with more authenticity than Metal: Hellsinger. Things get called “love letters” rather often in video games, but there really is no better way to describe this game, an ode and homage to a misunderstood genre that seems to be channelled out of pure, direct experience. You have to be a little bit of a nerd to like metal, really – a little overenthusiastic and over sincere, ready to don a pair of impossibly loose (or tight) jeans and bang your head in public, without shame. It’s Metal: Hellsinger’s ability to understand this so well – with its Skeletor album cover artwork and cheesy voiceovers and relentlessly committed soundtrack of real artists – that makes it feel so true, and so personal a thing to play. Read our Metal: Hellsinger review
The sports are great, aren’t they? Nintendo knows tennis and Badminton, and the addition of Golf was a lovely autumn treat. Meanwhile sword fighting and volleyball are there to bring a bit of bloody-mindedness to proceedings. But where Nintendo Switch Sports really works is the unexpected touch of worldbuilding that knits everything together. Play Badminton surrounded by shipping crate cafes. Play tennis – or is it volleyball? – under the looming glass of a bookstore/coffee shop. Nobody but Nintendo would think to add this stuff. What a treat. Read our Nintendo Switch Sports review
Unquestionably the biggest Total War game ever, Warhammer 3 is a raucous crescendo for the fantasy trilogy. The standard campaign alone is vast and chaotic, with squawking, brightly-coloured agents of capital-C Chaos flying at you from every angle and relentless spectacle and scale to its battles. Beyond that, though, the arrival of the long-awaited Immortal Empires mode, which mashes together all three maps of the series into one gigantic map, is the type of big “what if?” mega mode that young strategy nerds dream of. It’s a proper technical achievement and a genuinely spectacular sendoff for the Total Warhammer series – one that was already blessed with strategic depth. For the Dark Gods! Read our Total War: Warhammer 3 review
From Edward’s review: “If you’re in the mood for an imaginative little puzzler, this is the one. It’s the best I’ve played in ages. It has all the inventive spark I’d expect of Nintendo EAD. Tripley impressive from a young, independent, two-person development collaboration. Stick to the main path and it’s a playful, accessible palette-cleanser; a toybox of delightful ideas that never outstay their welcome. Head off the beaten track, though, and it has boxes within boxes within boxes and depths within depths within depths.” Read our Patrick’s Parabox review
I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed – and I’m not even sure they’re aware themselves, given how muted the rollouts of some of its titles – but Square Enix is going through something of a purple patch. Last year gave us the understated yet electrifying return of Hiroyuki Ito in Dungeon Encounters, next year promises the best Final Fantasy in a generation and in-between there are so many gems. Like Live A Live, an unlikely but welcome revival of a cult favourite that never saw a western release. It’s a JRPG unlike any other, an anthology that mashes together different eras and styles with ideas way ahead of their time. Now, how about a Racing Lagoon revival next pretty please? Read our Live A Live review
Pelted with budget, pitched at the end-of-world climax, and packed with an exponentially growning cast of superheroes (or slightly petulant Norse Gods), Ragnarök is surely The Avengers: Endgame of video games. A series with this silly a history and this tight a focus on broad-appeal fun might always fall short of profundity, but it’s still pure box office. Ragnarök is a galaxy scale, ensemble cast epic, built on the simple pleasures of whacking stuff in a bellowing, but tightly choreographed kind of combat and smashing about some simple brain-teasers in a big, beautiful world. A few quibbles with over-chatty hint-givers and a soggy middle are overcome by all the sheer grandeur and spectacle – and more than that, a poetic end to a story about learning self-love. Like its characters, Ragnarök’s at its best when it gets over the naval-gazing of the last entry and learns to make peace with its true nature: namely, its tendency to be so gloriously over-the-top. Read our God of War Ragnarök review
I love how unashamed and proud Neon White is about being a speedrunning game. It’s the primary thing the game is about, not an accidental thing caused by the way a mechanic works in the game – like Quake’s jump, for instance. There’s no pretence at being a shooter, really. From the moment you begin, you know exactly what the game is about: speed and routes and acrobatics, and repetition. And I love that. But it’s not only that. The confidence I talked about: it extends to the game’s personality. There’s nothing apologetic or timid about Neon White; it’s every bit as dizzying and energetic as the way it plays. It’s a bombastic package. Read our Neon White review
Tight tactics with possibly the most beautiful art style (or at least the most delightfully garish) of 2022, Kaiju Wars is a wonderful surprise of a game, merging a comedic flair with a rare understanding of monster movie tempo. As Edwin put it in our review: “Toss Into The Breach and Advance Wars into a nuclear reactor with the contents of an abandoned VHS store and you’ll get Kaiju Wars – a brilliant turn-based strategy game about putting off the inevitable or preferably, taking it on an extended tour of the unpopulated warehouse district, well away from your town centre.” Read our Kaiju Wars review
There have been retro FPS shooters before – Ion Fury, Dusk and hell I’d even argue that the Doom reboot and its sequel are revivals of a very 90s brand of action – but Prodeus still stands out. It’s a full-blooded shooter with a healthy appetite for the red stuff, with gibbage delivered in gargantuan amounts and with guns that are just as over-the-top (the mini-gun is a masterpiece in overstated feedback, and getting your hands on it for the first time likely ranks as one of 2022’s most satisfying moments). Read our Prodeus review
Gran Turismo 7’s been on quite the journey in 2022. On launch it felt like a return to fulsome form of the series in its pomp before the stripped back – and entirely necessary – reboot of Gran Turismo Sport, with a full campaign and a bulging garage of exquisitely rendered cars. Soon after, though, it was dogged by understandable disappointment at its ruthless economy that had no place in a full-priced game and that’s been a blot on what should have been a banner year for the series. Still, small steps have been made and a triumphant showing at the World Series 2022 finals, which delivered some of the finest racing of the year virtual or otherwise, showed that Gran Turismo 7 looks to be back on-track. With the potential of PSVR2 support and cutting edge AI via the Sophy project on the horizon, Gran Turismo 7’s best years could well be ahead of it. Read our Gran Turismo 7 review
There’s always been something of the doll’s house to XCOM’s base-building, and this new tactical game from Firaxis leans right in, to the point where it’s almost a Marvel and Fire Emblem crossover. Take your famous superheroes out for intricate, thoughtful turn-based battling, but then lead them back to the abbey they all share together to join book clubs, forage for mushrooms, and watch terrible movies on the sofa. Bonds make the team more powerful, but there’s also something hilarious about taking Iron Man fishing. Read our Marvel’s Midnight Suns review
This one crept up on us. Does anyone really need a new collectible card game in 2022? When it’s this clever and compulsive, yes. Rather than damaging an enemy hero, you use cards to battle for ownership of three locations on the board, each of which have their own devious quirks and modifiers. The Marvel stuff is lovely, but what’s really striking about this game is the freshness – a new card will change the game in implausible ways, and when matches last three minutes tops there’s lots of room to experiment. Read our Marvel Snap discussion
Swordship’s an explosive action game in which you can’t directly damage your enemies. Instead you have to indirectly damage them, by luring them into shooting each other, or blowing each other up. All of this against the backdrop of modern day piracy. Is there a single better feeling this year than perfectly grabbing a shipping container from the briney blue in Swordship? Probably not. Best fonts, too – and that’s including Pentiment. Read our Swordship review
Can we leave it there? The Sniper Elite games have an enjoyably low-brow reputation – something along the lines of slow-mo Nazi nut-popping simulators with maybe a dash of casual stealth – but this fifth entry blasts up to higher ground thanks to some sumptuously open, inventive level design. Then there’s the added spin of invasions – think Dark Souls or Deathloop – where other players pop up in your mission and turn you from stalking predator to scarpering prey, and a bursting toybox of new gear. As Rick Lane put it in our review: “Sniper Elite has been dependably entertaining for a while. It just needed a spark of inspiration to make it excellent.” Consider it sparked. Read our Sniper Elite 5 review
This is that rare game that can put arcade games in their proper context – in terms of space and the back room of a dirty laundrette, sure, but also in terms of time, as things you steal moments for, rushing through work and ignoring friends in order to have a few more minutes with the game you love. The idea is simple: you run a laundrette and slowly pump the earnings into buying more arcade games, until you’re essentially running an arcade. Within that idea though are a hundred little pieces of playfulness, and a thousand prompts that ask: what do you really value? Read our Arcade Paradise review
After years of silence and an April Fools Day tease that turned out to be true, 2022 saw the return of Monkey Island with the aptly named Return to Monkey Island. Series veterans Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman, along with Guybrush Threepwood voice actor Dominic Armato, proved they hadn’t all shivered their last timber and jumped back on board the pirate ship for this release, providing us with a colourful and playful adventure across the high seas. Why are pirates called pirates? Because they Aaaar. And Guybrush just so happens to be a mighty one, don’t you know. Read our Return to Monkey Island review
2022’s most transporting game takes players to a small, dark plant shop – definitely not a florist! – where an endless line of sinister strangers need various herbs and fungi for various mysterious reasons. A puzzle game and an evocative exploration of our interactions with the living world, Strange Horticulture is best enjoyed on a grim winter evening when the wind is blowing hard through the night. There’s some absolutely dazzling stuff here, and the map screen alone is a proper classic. Please play this – it’s brilliant. Read our Strange Horticulture impressions
The Return to Monkey Island might have been the most high profile adventure game of the year – it depends how you define something like Pentiment – but Hobb’s Barrow is arguably the richer experience. This game of archaeology and horror, of the scientific method pitted against folklore, has a gloriously nasty sting in the tale. To tell you about its true theme would be to spoil one of the most intricately constructed traps in all of games. Read our The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow review
Perhaps the star attraction of Nintendo’s quietly stellar year, and a fine example of the low-key brilliance that’s defined a lot of the Switch’s catalogue in 2022. The third instalment in a series that’s always been destined for cult status, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 doesn’t have the star pulling power of a Horizon: Forbidden West or Starfield, but it does have hundreds of hours of high concept adventuring and a JRPG that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the greats. An understated masterpiece. Read our Xenoblade Chronicles 3 review
Based in a Sardinian town at the end of the 1980s, Saturnalia is a memorably independently minded horror and a reminder that Santa Ragione is one of the best design teams working at the moment. Head out into the night to find your friends. Light bonfires, hoard matches, and keep track of the plot’s many threads. Make too many mistakes and the town reassembles itself around you. This is magic. Albeit a very dark kind of magic. Read our Saturnalia review
Roll7’s charismatic racing series embraces a new art style – they’ve all had a different art style – and a fascinating approach to three dimensions in this gloriously sporty platformer. Multiple paths, a delightful overworld map and lovely customisation options make this one of the most satisfying and expressive games of the year. Read our OlliOlli World review
At first glance a well-polished isometric indie tribute to survival horror of the PS1 era, Signalis ends up being so much more. It adds fun puzzle mechanics and tightens-up the familiar Resident Evil formula of inventory management and exploration, then pulls the bloody rug from under you just when you’re getting comfortable. Well, as comfortable as you can get going through its David Lynchian story of a Germanic-tinted spacefaring future – which looks gorgeous to boot. Signalis is everything good about survival horror, and then some. Read our Signalis review
What starts out as a simple riff on The Name of the Rose becomes a wonderfully human exploration of guilt, complicity and regret. That probably doesn’t make it sound like much fun, but what’s surprising about Pentiment – much like Eco’s novel – is how light and enjoyable it is from one moment to the next. A game trapped inside a medieval manuscript, Pentiment is genuinely illuminating – and illuminated. Read our Pentiment review
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell called this “one of the finest historical fantasies you’ll play.” Here’s an extract from Edwin’s review: “The intricacy and imagination of the writing is reflected in the diversity of choices you can make in any given scenario, which, again, typically rely on your local knowledge. Here’s a highly non-exhaustive list of questions I’ve wrestled with: what colour should I choose when using magic to illuminate a cave? Is it worth buying a shield I don’t really know how to wield? When gambling with the village youth, do I flirt or focus on the dice? Should I sit next to or across from somebody I’ve just met? Who do I trust to faithfully translate a wax tablet? Can I work out where a fellow traveller calls home from their accent? A few puzzles see you typing in words yourself – deciding what to focus on when confronted by a giant spider, or who to ask for in a village where nobody volunteers any information upfront. Elsewhere, you’ll peel back perilous locations section by section, braving the shadows of a mine shaft or fending off inexplicable nausea as you circle a ruined hamlet.” Read our Roadwarden review
Some games show their true qualities over time. This is the case with Mothmen 1966, which we played in July and have been thinking about ever since. With visuals that take players back to the very early 1990s and the birth of PC gaming, and a narrative that explores spooky happenings on a dark night in the middle of nowhere, this is an absolute masterpiece when it comes to creating an atmosphere. It contains a really good Solitaire variant too. Former Eurogamer EIC Oli Welsh would be proud. Read our Mothmen 1966 review
Tony Hawk with Tomb Raider pistols was always going to be a winner but Rollerdrome, Roll7’s jagged, edgy side project, has something else – this game is cool. Cool fonts (hello again, Pentiment and Swordship), cool music, cool sound, cool action, which has you flipping and twirling in slow-mo, flowing from half-pipe to rail, dodge to kill. It’s a game that seems to have been 3D printed out of a Hoxton creative agency, decked out in exposed wood and the crimsons and mustards of mid-century modern. There’s a bit of fun, retro-future autocracy going on, with a story that seems to drape itself over the game as casually as your racing suit flung over a dressing room chair – but really the magic is in how little this game offers, rather than how much. A handful of levels and that one magical mechanic: do tricks to get ammo; shoot the bad guys; repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat. Read our Rollerdrome review
Has a place that is ostensibly out to kill you ever felt more like home? Citizen Sleeper’s hubworld space station, a drifting mechanical carcass known as the Eye, is billed as hostile and dangerous – and for much of your time there it is, filled with mercenaries and assassins, underground gangs and ghostly AIs, all hoping to hunt you down. But over time the Eye becomes home, and Citizen Sleeper shifts from a game of scrambling for survival to one of community and belonging, and then one of purpose and, eventually, hope. It’s a wondrous, kind-hearted RPG, with a keen political edge, thematic depth to plunge, and a thick cyberpunk-and-sci-fi atmosphere to wade through. And all of it built from a dice roll – and a creator, in Gareth Damien Martin, who’s now surely one of the most exciting indie talents around. This one’s a real gem. Read our Citizen Sleeper review
In a first for Kirby, the Forgotten Land takes our beloved spherical hero to the realms of 3D platforming. This charming adventure sees Kirby embrace a new ability known as ‘Mouthful Mode’, which allows Nintendo’s pink ball to swallow and embody an array of items from vending machines to cars. In turn, this lets Kirby traverse the game’s worlds in a myriad of really rather unusual ways. To borrow from Martin (because, if you are going to borrow from anyone, why not make it your EIC), Kirby and The Forgotten Land is an absolute hug of a game, and one that the whole family can, and I thoroughly recommend should, enjoy together. Read our Kirby and the Forgotten Land review
Arguably the greatest sense of place created this year, Norco, an adventure game set in a sci-fi future version of a real Louisiana town of the same name, is a work of sumptuous atmosphere. The writing can push the limits at times, occasionally getting a little purple, but that works as much in Norco’s favour as it does against it, stirring a bleak, muddy streak into the haze of its murky pixel art and audio fuzz. There are a handful of micro-games within Norco – including rhythm-memory games for its brief and often comical combat, and a kind of ASCII-art boat mission – but it’s the human mystery at the heart of Norco that sucks you in, a story of personal and collective pain in the shadow of a local chemical plant. In an all-timer of a year for beautiful narrative adventures, from The Case of the Golden Idol, to Mothmen 1966, to The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, to Pentiment, Citizen Sleeper and Monkey Island, Norco’s captivating, grimly poetic take on a region’s future still manages to stand out. Read our Norco review
Like Fez, Tunic is a work of nostalgia that’s never happy to settle for nostalgia alone. A spin on the classic top-down Zeldas, the game’s fox cub hero sets off on a dangerous quest through a world that is actually one gigantic puzzle. The best thing about Tunic should not be spoiled – if you’ve got to December without hearing about it, good on you – but even without it, this is a game to be savoured. Strange, familiar, intricate and built with love. Read our Tunic review
FromSoftware’s open world epic has dominated the conversation this year. The Elden Ring hype had begun long before 2022, but once released it became the game everyone was playing and talking about. Have you defeated Malenia yet? Which of the Ashes of War is most overpowered? Have you seen the underground yet? And just how many times do you need to hit that illusory wall in Volcano Manor?
