The first few months of a new year are always lousy with new video games. Developers who can’t meet the deadline for the holiday season often cut bait and shunt the fruits of their labor into January or February to buy crucial time for some extra polish. Still, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like the winter of 2022. The COVID bottleneck is loosening up, studios are operating at full capacity, and suddenly Namco and Sony are somehow releasing two of the biggest games on their respective dockets in the same week, long before the prime real estate of autumn. To follow the gaming industry is to constantly contend with an overflowing backlog lingering in your Steam library, but rarely has it gotten this dire this quickly. That’s a good problem to have, obviously. I much prefer our current predicament to the challenges of 2021, when the release schedule dried up entirely. Here are some early favorites for what’s already shaping up to be a marquee year in gaming.
Weird West comes from WolfEye Studio, a development team staffed with Arkane ( Dishonored , Deathloop ) veterans, and to nobody’s surprise, it has brought one of its trademark, eternally cursed realms to the American frontier. Bounty hunters, cultists, and the chittering undead are afoot as you wrest control of several misbegotten characters out for revenge. This is a top-down, tactical shoot-out in which the playing field is wide open. Nothing is taken for granted. See that chimney on the roof of the bank you’re trying to rob? Find a way up there, and you might discover you can shinny down the hatch to avoid a deadly firefight. WolfEye believes that gamers should be allowed to touch the worlds they explore, and Weird West is he ideal proof-of-concept for that philosophy.
Ghostwire: Tokyo (PlayStation 5, Windows PC)
Tango Gameworks first made its name with the pulpy, janky Evil Within series, but Ghostwire: Tokyo is the first time the developer has actually orbited greatness. It has left American suburbia behind in favor of an eldritch, rain-slicked Tokyo, haunted by every vengeful spirit in the Japanese legendarium. Ghostwire can be dragged down by its grind at times, but I’ve remained captivated by its silky first-person animation and vivid enemy design as well as the resonant hometown pride Tango takes in its capital city. This is a game in which you will banish demons before stopping into an ersatz 7-Eleven for some health-restoring mochi. It’s Japan in the midst of an apocalypse, presented as honestly as possible. Tunic (MacOS, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X)
We are living in a golden age of abstruse, elliptical video games when Elden Ring has sold 12 million copies, but FromSoftware’s indomitable opacity has nothing on Tunic — a top-down Zelda- ish adventure that provides the player with no helpful exposition whatsoever. Dialogue is encoded in strange hieroglyphics, objective markers are missing, and the puzzles are almost impossible to parse. Your only salvation? A tattered in-game instruction manual, akin to the paperback guidance you’d find in cardboard Mega Man boxes in the late ’80s, scattered about the world. Tunic wants to invoke the wondrous confusion of the gaming of yore, when we slapped an anonymous cartridge into a Super Nintendo before we even knew how to read, relying on our intuition to get by. Designer Andrew Shouldice trusts us to take the plunge. Once you’re in, you’ll realize that the water isn’t so cold after all.
Core Keeper takes the bucolic charm of Stardew Valley and moves it deep underground. This year’s foremost Steam breakout hit is a satisfying meld of all sorts of other fantasy homesteading simulators (think Minecraft, Valheim, and Terraria ) except, this time, your sprightly survivalist is lost in an expansive, procedurally generated network of caverns. Core Keeper strikes a sublime balance between precarious dungeoneering and the cozy chores back home. Yes, sometimes I would like to face off against the monstrosities waiting for me at the abyssal depths as long as I get to tend the garden by torchlight afterward.
Nobody Saves the World (Windows PC, Xbox One)
In most RPGs, your character’s destiny is set in stone by the second or third time you’ve leveled up. We allocate some talent points into strength and dexterity and become resigned to the fact that if we ever want to roll a mage, we’ll have to start the game over someday. But Nobody Saves the World is specifically designed to solve that problem. The protagonist, named Nobody, can morph into 15 different forms running the gamut of every blasé fantasy cliché (a dragon, a warrior, a ranger). Each form has its own set of abilities to unlock, and forms can be swapped in and out of different move sets across the board. The results are sacrilegious in the best way possible; suddenly, your puny spell caster is wielding some of the tankiest cooldowns in the game. Nobody Saves the World shows you everything it has to offer by the time you’re done with it. Because, honestly, is there anything worse than realizing you chose the wrong character at the 20-hour mark? Rainbow 6 Extraction (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X)
Rainbow 6: Extraction feels like a generous expansion pack. The game includes the same arsenal and characters as Ubisoft’s venerated first-person shooter Rainbow 6 Siege , but it trades the squad-based multiplayer for a horror-flick romp through an obscene, viscerally unsettling alien apocalypse. The antiseptic halls and corporate antechambers crucial to the franchise’s muted aesthetic have been overrun by oozing pustules, curdled zombies, and infectious muck — think John Carpenter’s The Thing with SWAT teams — as you and two friends attempt to complete a trio of challenges before succumbing to the horde. I went into Extraction with exceedingly low expectations, and I found a game that evoked the morbid, white-knuckle thrills of the best high-stakes XCOM missions. Did you leave behind one of your friends in the churn? Next mission you gear up to free them from the clutches of the parasite, or else they’ll suffer a punitive progression tax. After so many co-op experiences that treat us with kid gloves, you remember what it’s like to truly fear death in Extraction. Strange Horticulture
As the name implies, Strange Horticulture is a game about looking at plants. Beleaguered customers pour through your door and request specific herbal remedies, and you consult a dusty tome full of botanical theory before delivering the specimen of choice. This may sound boring, but by the time Strange Horticulture hits its groove, you’ll begin to appreciate the deep deduction system animating the design. You’re asked to pore over an encyclopedia of phytologic caveats with just a few clues, slowly narrowing down the exceptions and edge cases until you are sure, without a doubt, that the man in your shop needs the plant with blue flowers and triangle-shaped leaves. At last, a video game that allows us to feel intelligent and bucolic at the same time.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves (PlayStation 5)
Naughty Dog frequently rereleases its back catalogue, so it was no surprise that the great PlayStation developer bundled its PS4 Uncharted games in a package that coincides with the mediocre film adaptation . But if you missed Uncharted 4 or The Lost Legacy when they first arrived in 2016 and 2017, The Legacy of Thieves is absolutely worth a look on the spiffy PlayStation 5. The Uncharted series typically presents Nathan Drake as an unruly man-child who grows weirdly petulant whenever he doesn’t get his way, but the fourth and final game in the narrative was the first to actually scrutinize his selfishness. (It’s also one of the best action games of the past ten years.) And The Lost Legacy, the mini-chapter that focuses on two of the franchise’s most beloved characters, found Naughty Dog experimenting with an open-world gestalt that still has me excited for whatever the company is cooking up next. It will likely be a long time before we get another Uncharted game, and that’s probably for the best. After all, the series went out on top.
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