Marvel Snap, Elden Ring, and Neon White

Nuverse/Second Dinner; Bandai Namco Entertainment; Angel Matrix/Annapurna Interactive

2022 was supposed to be different. A shiny Zelda installment and the release of the long-awaited Starfield—a new series by storied Skyrim developers Bethesda—would’ve seismically changed the gaming landscape this year. But both were delayed into 2023, where they’ll square up against a new Diablo, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and more, in what’s looking like an unusually stacked year for games. 

So where does that leave 2022? Sony hit its marks, delivering graphically impressive but otherwise unadventurous installments in their major series, and Nintendo shipped a suite of characteristically springy platformers and sports games. Still, it would be tempting to call it an interstitial year in games, as the availability of new consoles increased but the release calendar contracted due to pandemic-related delays, ever-increasing production costs, and an industry-wide willingness to delay rather than crunch.

Tempting, that is, until one attempts to assemble a list of 10 games to sum up said year, and finds oneself excluding a new Bayonetta and Cuphead, trimming sidelong experiments like Rollerdrome and Last Call BBS and Sifu, disqualifying robust new campaigns in Destiny 2 and Final Fantasy 14. Perhaps no game (save our #1 pick) punctured the discourse this year quite like Wordle, an elegant hybrid of Sudoku and Spelling Bee that seems sturdy enough to withstand a nuclear bomb. A couple of the entries below will bend the rules to encapsulate several titles, either a reflection of critical spinelessness or a refutation of the idea that this year was anything but another flagship one for gaming. 

Elden Ring—featured below, of course—dominated the year, swallowing the lives of everyone it touched. But what flourished in its shadow showed a medium staking out strange new forms, factors, and distribution methods, gathering its narrative footing in enthralling new ways, and, at its best, demanding from players one more game, one more run, one more peek beyond the mountain. 2023 may have a lot of big titles, in other words, but it’ll be hard-pressed to match the slate of surprises below.

1. Elden Ring


 

Elden Ring

Bandai Namco Entertainment

What you hear about is the difficulty, and it’s there: You’ll die. What you hear about is the art, and it’s there: gothic and sprawling, fog gloaming over the midnight-blue lake, seas of subterranean stars. That something this difficult was also so popular, though, clarifies at last the FromSoftware difference. If the past decade has seen the “map game” become the dominant form of the medium, infiltrating every genre with endless icons and checklists, Elden Ring is its absolution. Hidetaka Miyazaki transplanted his famously level-based game design into an open world and in so doing rendered that open world irrelevant—a setting, a fog we wander through on our …….

Source: https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiQmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNocm9uLmNvbS9jdWx0dXJlL2FydGljbGUvYmVzdC1nYW1lcy0yMDIyLTE3NjM4Mjg1LnBocNIBAA?oc=5

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