January 2023

Katharine asked me to do a quick little round-up of my favourite features that we've run over the past year (to go with the other section round-ups, which you can read here) so I said "No problemo, Katharino!". Off I went to make a list, running down the published pieces and clicking whichever ones I thought were good. Then I looked at my list and said "Oh, no!", because it was extremely long. I cut it down by about half to get what we have here, a collection of interviews and thinky pieces and silly pieces and wonderful pieces from 2022.

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It's a well-documented fact here at RPS that I love a good spreadsheet. Specifically, my spreadsheet that lists all the lovely games I manage to play each year. I've been looking at that spreadsheet a lot in recent weeks, and I'm pleased to report that most of my top game picks from this year have successfully made their way into the RPS Advent Calendar. There were plenty that didn't, of course (pouring one out for you, Dorfromantik, Flat Eye, Dome Keeper and Lost In Play), but such is the way of things when your current list of completed games for the year is teetering on the verge of 50.

No word of a lie, I would probably be here all day if I laid out my entire long list of honourable mentions for 2022 (additional shoutouts to Railbound, Cursed To Golf, God Of War, Weird West, Jack Move, Hard West 2 and The Kids We Were), but for the sake of all involved (and poor Alice Bee's editing pencil), I've narrowed it down to a shortlist of three. (Do still go and check out those other games, though. They're all absolutely rad).

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Sequels are often contentious, but I feel like video games can get away with being a part of a long-running series – and, crucially, still be good while they’re at it, well past the point where a book or movie franchise would have outstayed its welcome.

The thing is, though, when it comes to GOTY lists like our Advent Calendar, it’s a much bigger task to convince your fellow voters of the merits of your new favourite game when it’s the third, fourth, or maybe even sixteenth in its series. I’m adamant that those games deserve their share of recognition at the end of the year, which is why my honourable mentions celebrate 2022’s new entries into some of my favourite ongoing series.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What's Gabe Newell's favourite carol?

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SanDisk's capacious 512GB Ultra drive is down to £36.99 at their UK web store, offering nearly a 50% savings off its RRP. This is a great pickup for Steam Deck or Switch owners, but of course this memory card would also work in phones, tablets, action cams and so on too - there's even a full-size SD card adapter included.

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Duronic do a good range of electricals, and today the only one I've actually bought is reduced on Amazon: a 12-gang power tower, basically a power extension lead with a supportive base that points the unit towards the sky. This particular model normally costs £18, but today has been reduced to £14.99.

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I've been looking back over an entire year of RPS reviews and, well, we've written a lot. Over the past twelve months, the RPS treehouse and our merry band of freelancers have reviewed 168 games in total - and that includes early access reviews, PC-port reviews, group reviews, reviews-in-progresses, and your common or garden fully-fledged reviews. 168! Damn. Even though game releases are still suffering from pandemic pushbacks, 2022 has been a busy year for games. There wasn't a huge number of big name releases - although the ones that did come out were plenty big enough - but, as always, we've had a wealth of wonderful indies releasing all year round, and we scooped up as many of them as we could.

Out of all the games we’ve given any kind of review treatment throughout the year, only a handful of them recieved RPS’s coveted Bestest Best badge; just 23, to be exact. I've gathered them all in one big round-up bundle below (there are round-ups of our favourite bits from other sections of the site, too), and they make a great collection of games. Have a scroll and click on any that take your fancy for the full review. Enjoy!

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It’s my first RPS Christmas Advent Calendar, whoooo! I feel so honored - and I’m pretty happy with how the GOTY 2022 Calendar turned out, as most of my top choices made it into the roster. However, great games are sure to fall by the wayside in any year - which is why we have our Selection Boxes of honorable mentions this year, right? For my picks I've swept up three quite different games, but I think they come together to give a very Rachel vibe.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: Why does Santa keep falling asleep while playing games?

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Back in 2017, Rakuen was a pixel art, combat-free RPG which mixed serious themes with cute, fantasy characters and songs. We adored it. Now its developer Laura Shigihara has announced a new game, Mr. Saitou, which she describes as "the next installment in the Rakuen universe." You can find the announcement trailer below.

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Trombone Champ is a good joke. I played it once, chuckled along with its simulated tooting, and haven't felt any compulsion to return.

I will click on any Trombone Champ video I come across online, however. Armed with some community-made modding tools, creative players have added custom songs to the game, with custom models and backgrounds. At their best, these videos turn a good joke into a complete comedy sketch. And the person making them at their best is Gloomhonk.

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In late November we saw incredible prices on the Ryzen 7000 series, and now we're getting even better deals on many of these processors. The one I'm highlighting today is the Ryzen 5 7600X, which is down to £249 at Amazon - significantly below its £350 RRP and £21 cheaper than it was for Black Friday.

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Portable SSDs are a brilliant way to ferry files around, but often they're a bit overkill if you're just copying a game directory to another PC, bringing a video file to watch on TV or backing up your schoolwork.

In this case, a fast USB-C flash drive can be just the thing, with the newfangled connection allowing use on a wide range of devices like phones, tablets and games consoles too. Case in point is Samsung's 128GB model, which is reduced to £12 today from its usual price of £20.

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Archer Maclean, the developer of several classic games for early home computers, has passed away. Maclean was 60 years old.

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Valve have launched Steam Replay, their own equivalent to Spotify Wrapped. It offers you a single page covered in graphs and diagrams which illustrate how you spent your time on Steam in 2022. Me? 30% of my total playtime was spent in Spelunky 2, and I played 41 different games over the course of the year. How about you?

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Hello! VidBud Liam here. You may recognise me from those videos that autoplay on every page. Or not. It depends on how quickly you scroll past, I suppose.

I joined team Arpus all the way back in February, and to say the last 11 months have been a whirlwind is a bit of an understatement. In less than a year I’ve made just under 90 videos covering a wide range of topics from major releases to international gaming events and brand-new hardware. My first year at RPS has been busy, basically. So when Katharine asked me to pull together a few of my personal highlights, I was kind of stumped. It's hard to pick favourites! It's even harder to celebrate my own achievements, but that's beside the point.

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Don’t look at me, I’m just the hardware guy. But I do recommend looking at these, my favourite also-ran games that weren’t quite team-impressing enough to win a spot on the RPS Advent Calendar 2022. Out of everything I played this year, these are the avatars of adequacy, the sultans of satisfactory. The prime ministers of pretty good.

I’d probably also tip a hat to Warhammer 40K: Darktide, but Alice0 already nabbed it for her honourable mentions, and frankly there’s enough shootybang stuff here as it is. But, also: toilet build quality testing, pushing Nazis into cement pits, and more than a hint of 70s funk. Check ‘em out.

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Listen, I don't have much time. I enjoyed a lot of games this year, but Alice just told me that if I spend more than 1,500 words on this list then she's going to murder my whole family*. And that includes some people I like.

So without ado: here's a handful of the games I enjoyed the most this year which (crushingly) didn't quite make their way into our soft 'n' snuggly RPS Advent Calendar 2022.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What is Batman's favourite Christmas poem?

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With all the doors on our RPS Advent Calendar well and truly busted open for 2022 now, we thought it was high time to gather all of our favourite games of the year together in one handy location. If you've been diligently scoffing our Advent treats throughout December, then you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2022, but just in case you missed them or want to go through them one final time, we've got 'em all right here for you in our definitive Games Of The Year list. Enjoy!

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Guides work is a very strange beast, and one that we don't talk about as often as we maybe should. By its nature, we here in guidestown can feel a bit isolated from the rest of RPS. Our guides aren't very visible to our regular readers. No one hops onto a website like this and says to themselves, "Well now! I wonder what guides have been written today that I can spend my time reading through!". The vast majority of people who read our guides come straight from a Google search into something specific like "Can I romance Yennefer and Triss at the same time?" (spoiler alert: you can, but it may not end well for you).

Because we operate so much behind the scenes, it's easy to miss some of the amazing stuff that the team did in guidestown this year. It ain't easy, writing a walkthrough or how-to that's useful for the reader while simultaneously appeasing those nebulous and mercurial SEO gods. But 2022 has been a stonkingly good year for guides, and I'd love to take a little bit of time to shine a light on some of the things we're most proud of having achieved this year - and to toast what will hopefully be another smashing year for guides in 2023!

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Maybe I hadn't looked hard enough, but I played a lot of games this year which ended up being a bit naff or totally fine. All of my top picks made it into the Advent Calendar, so that's good! But otherwise, I didn't have to think too hard as to what I'd shout out here. Hope you're having the merriest of Christmases and catch you for - hopefully - a big 2023 filled with big games.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What happens when you rest your kneel down in the snow?

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The Radeon RX 6700 XT is an excellent 1440p graphics card, offering strong rasterised performance, a good image upscaler in FSR 2 and relatively cool and quiet operation. The card is much stronger pound for pound than its closest Nvidia competition, the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, with the latter remaining at surprisingly high prices due to the ultrapremium RTX 4080 and 4090 Team Green has launched so far.

Today, the best price we've spotted for the RX 6700 XT is for a Gigabyte Eagle model, selling on Amazon UK for £389.99. That's nearly 40% below its RRP and an overall great value for this level of performance.

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The SteelSeries Arctis 7P+ is a top wireless headset for PC, PS5, PS4 and Switch, and today it's down to £79 at Ebay with a discount code - the lowest price we've ever recorded for this model. To get this price, use the code BOXING-20 at the checkout.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What did Adam Jensen say when he unwrapped a giant knife sharpener from Father Christmas?

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We've reached the very last day of our RPS Advent Calendar for this year! That means that behind this door is our actual Game Of The Year. The GOTYest goat for 2022. Unfortunately, behind the door are also a lot of bats, ghosts, zombies, oh man that looks like a giant praying mantis I think? How on earth are we going to get through all this?

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: Which RPG character do you always want on your quiz team?

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It's almost time. In a few short hours, we will open the final door of the RPS advent calendar and reveal our favourite game of 2022. Oh, and we're all off work until the new year, bye. RPS won't be barren, mind. We have quite a few bonus festive treats lined up between now and our official return on Tuesday the 3rd of January, 2023, so enjoy those (or enjoy the ones you can; the cracker jokes are... painful). Thanks for reading RPS for another year. Before we go, please do tell us what you're playing this holiday. Here's what we're clicking on!

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Hear that? Christmas bells are ringing, carolers are caroling, and GTA Online players are being pounced on by an atrociously-named Grinch parody. He's one of several Christmas treats now stocked on the streets of Los Santos, which also pack snowmen to destroy, rooftop shootouts and, for some reason, superpowered beasts getting chased by serial killers.

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Merrrrry holidays, folks! The RPS Treehouse is now officially shutting up shop for the year as the team enters its annual hiberation phase. While we settle down into our mountain of games, sweet wrappers and warm blankets for a couple of weeks, we wish you a merry Christmas, a happy holiday and a general Festivus to all who celebrate. The site won't be completely silent during the break - we've got a couple of fun things planned for you over the next week and a bit - but we'll be back in full bright and early on Tuesday, January 3rd 2023.

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Death Stranding director Hideo Kojima has claimed his upcoming Death Stranding movie is "taking a direction that nobody has tried before with a movie adaptation of a game", arguing that other attempts to wring movies out of game-ies have failed because they "cater to gamers". His will be different, he says, because he's "taking the approach of changing and evolving the world of Death Stranding in a way that suits film well".

He also says there's "no real need" to turn games into films, which is a true and enjoyable acknowledgement from someone who is doing that.

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The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a playable teaser released to promote Life Is Strange 2, the first episode of which followed on three months after this surprise p.t. dropped during E3 2018. Not to be confused with Silent Hills P.T. (it's like… the exact opposite of that), Captain Spirit is free to play, takes two to three hours to complete, and manages to perfectly encapsulate the Life Is Strange experience without giving anything away about the main (read: paid-for) games in the series. It also features possibly my favourite LIS protagonist in adorable wannabe superhero Chris, which is quite a high bar to clear, considering how much time I spend banging on about what great characters Chloe and Sean are.

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It's a well known fact that there are "Too Many Games"(TM) these days. I have not done the maths, but I've seen enough graphs, tweets and analysis from people who have crunched the numbers to know there are more games coming out on Steam every day than a site like RPS could ever possibly hope to cover a single month, let alone every week. But gosh darn it if we don't try our hardest all the same.

Inevitably, though, time does get the better of us sometimes (or, in my case at least, maybe my eyes are just too big for my gaming stomach), and certain games end up slipping further and further down our to-do lists until they eventually fall away entirely. Not through any fault of their own, mind. Just... time. But as a final parting shoutout for 2022, I wanted to memorialise all the games that fell of my personal to-do list this year and say, "I'M SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN IT, I PROMISE!" (For real, though, I still want to talk about all of these at some point. Maybe January...? Please don't hate me)

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What’s up my gamers? This year I invited my son to participate in the GOTY fun because there’s no one to tell me I can’t. That’s right folks! Nepotism, babyeeeeee!

In reality, his opinion is of increasing relevance, where mine is just… also here.

So let me get my list out of the way so that we can take a look at his, which was hand-written and scanned for your viewing pleasure.

10. NORCO

Wow, a point-and-click game that had me engaged in the year 2022. What kind of ass-backwards bizarro world are we living in? NORCO had its hooks in me out of the gate, because that game gets down to business immediately and drops interesting exposition from the second you hit start.

Plus, I’m a sucker for retrofuturism and robots– mostly because I’m a shallow one-dimensional idiot and only one flavor of cyberpunk dystopia speaks to me anymore.

10. Evil West

So you hit the punch button and hold it down to launch the enemy, then you jump up and Superman-punch them into an environmental hazard–killing them. Then, you’ll lasso the tick in front of you, drag them in, punch, Superman, repeat… this all feels pretty good.

Baby’s second GOTY at Giant Bomb! Wow! It’s happening!

Honorable Mention: Save Room

Hey man, this is cute. It’s a bunch of puzzles based on the Resident Evil 4 briefcase inventory system. It’s a bunch of em, it’s cheap, it’s something I didn’t know I wanted so bad, but I did.

Honorable Mention: Tinykin

If you take Pikmin and Chibi Robo and subtract the time limits and stress, you get Tinykin. It's a really lovely game with tight controls and satisfying collectibles. It also manages to have rather sprawling levels that don’t feel overwhelming, due to its usage of speedy and logical traversal via silkworm rail grinds. Each level has a great sense of momentum and a flow that just feels good. It’s a bit shorter than I was hoping – about 6 hours – but it was a very pleasant time overall!

I’ve never written a Giant Bomb top 10, but I’ve definitely always taken inspiration from the many lists I’ve read on the site over the years. It’s always a strong reminder that game tastes are varied and also that more stuff comes out than any one person could ever play. With that in mind, I’d like to give you a snapshot of my year with 10 or so games that were great for me.

10. Mario Strikers: Battle League

I know a lot of people weren’t happy with Mario Strikers, but the game had almost everything I needed from it. Very few people complain about the mechanics of recent Mario sports games because, on that front, they are almost always solid. And in the case of Mario Strikers, the core soccer (or strikers, as it’s called) action is nonstop fun with space for strategy and mayhem. I wish it had better online support, but it’s still one of the best sports games of the year.

It's the time of the year when everyone reveals the games they love the most from the past 12 months. Naturally, this comes in the form of articles where they eloquently write about what each game stirred in them and why they believe it will be remembered for years to come.

I will not be doing that.

I have written extensively about each of the games in my list on the internet, so if you want to read what I have to say about them, you're just a Google search away. This is Giant Bomb and, somehow, I’m now a member of the team. Before we carry on I just want to highlight how unbelievable that statement is—it would give young me an actual breakdown. I always dreamed of working at GameSpot, but Giant Bomb felt so out of reach that I didn’t even let myself fantasize about it. I can’t express how wild it is that I’m now here, doing a list as a member of the Giant Bomb team. And that means I can express how I feel about the games on this list how I want, because this is Giant Bomb, baby! AND I AM ON THE TEAM.

Anyways, I have chosen to do my list through the beloved medium of gifs (not pronounced jiff, eat my ass gif maker person that keeps saying otherwise, you’ll never convince us). Not just any gifs, though: anime GIFs.

Anime is a wonderful medium that has made me feel all kinds of things. For every game, there is an emotion; for every emotion, there is an anime; and for every anime, there is a gif. Enjoy.

Online social deduction game Goose Goose Duck, has surpassed Steam's concurrent player record for Among Us, the game it has taken heavy inspiration from.

Based on the latest figures, the free-to-play game garnered a peak of 563,677 players today, making it the third most popular game on the platform.

How does a brand-new indie game burst into the scene out of nowhere? Well in this case, we can attribute its success to the power of K-pop.

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