Hey all, 2022, huh? I cannot lie: this one was a rough one! We said goodbye to Jeff Gerstmann, we got sold to the fourth company that has owned Giant Bomb while we were still trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves technologically from the second company that has owned us, and Jesus Christ those fucking shirts. Editorially things are going well, but from a behind the scenes point of view, it’s definitely been a lot of lurching from emergency to emergency. Combine that with taking maybe 3 days off all year long, and you have a recipe for limping across the finish line of 2022! And as soon as 2023 starts, we get to do it all over with Fandom! So far they have been a very fun company to work for, but I can't stress enough that switching to whole new HR/benefits/expense reporting/contractor systems has been A LOT to deal with lately. Working on it! Gonna get that store back up as soon as I can in 2023!
2022 was a bit of an off year for games, in my opinion; my preference at this point is for the big, grand, flashy AAA games over the indie darlings, and this was certainly a year when the impact of quarantine seemed to hit the industry in myriad ways: games were delayed, games came out with substantial bugs, and overall it just felt like there were fewer huge games for me to sink my time into. The games I did play were more likely to be huge 50 or 80-hour adventures, so at least the stuff I actually got around to had some meat on their bones, but there were notably fewer of those this year than in years past.
There were a lot of games that I played that I don’t quite feel like throwing on this list, at least partially because sometimes I just want to talk about a game without people seeing it in here and thinking that it is a Game Of The Year for me. Like, Dying Light 2 was really fun but obviously felt half-baked in terms of the writing! I still really liked it but probably not enough to write much about it. V Rising! Peglin! Tunic! The Master of Magic remake! I bounced off of Dragonflight real quick! All of them and more are interesting but I’m probably not going to go out of my way to say much about them! There’s also just a ton of stuff I didn’t get around to trying at all, like Midnight Suns or Tinykin or Neon White. I’m busy!
As always, the game I spent the most time on this year was definitely Magic Arena on my desktop. I somehow clocked in over 2,000 games this year, over five a day, and that was during some bad times in the meta! It’s a constant companion on my desktop and I love being able to play Magic all day long for what might as well be the cost of “free” compared to the amount of playtime I get out of it. I won a whole 873 of those games, so I’m not the best Magic person around, but I have fun with it and that’s what counts.
And as always I’m going to intersperse this list with some of the other media that I’ve enjoyed this year. Not everything, mind you (do you really need another person to tell you to go watch Better Call Saul or Everything Everywhere All At Once?), but the stuff that stuck out at me. It was a good year for readin’ as I think I clocked in 40 or 50 books, but not many of them were brand new and I won’t go back and list them all. But I’ll point out some that I liked! By and large my media choices were basic bitch/comfort food territory this year; I didn’t get super experimental, so be forewarned. Also I guarantee that I left a couple of sentences unfinished here; let me know in the comments and I'll adjust.
I loved it! This game is more or less fantastic from beginning to end, especially in terms of dialogue. In most games I read the lines in the subtitles and skip through conversations as quick as I can just to get back to the gameplay, but for HFW I picked every conversation option and sat back and watched: Guerilla is insanely good at cutscene animation and while I have some issues with some of their choices here (the skill tree is probably too broad and there’s still no reason to really focus on melee combat), the good far outweighs the bad and it’s easily way up there on my GOTY list. You can read my full review here!
I have no idea how they're going to resolve that last-minute twist for the third game's villain; it almost seemed like someone just wanted to write this game and leave a huge problem for whoever writes the third! We'll see!
Confess Fletch
I didn’t go into this expecting much, having heard some bad word of mouth, but wound up thinking that it was maybe the funniest movie I’d seen all year, mostly thanks to the just ridiculous amount of mugging that Jon Hamm gets to pull off. No one needs to be told that Hamm is a very good actor, or that he’s very attractive, but for him to be this funny with little more than his expressions is a rare gift. Joss Whedon once said that he wrote a scene in every episode of Angel where David Boreanaz could just be petulant because that was what he was best at, and the director of this movie definitely leaned into the idea that Jon Hamm is at his funniest when he's just reacting to a bizarre situation with a funny face. It works!
It’s not a movie that holds up well if you think about the details, but it’s a fun screwball comedy and what more do you need? I honestly liked this more than Glass Onion!