Browse by year
191 games released in 2022 and reviewed here, best first.
191 reviews
Asymmetric's prohibition-era, Lovecraft-flavoured follow-up to the award-winning West of Loathing -- Overwhelmingly Positive on its own considerable merits, with a review sample so consistently framed against its beloved predecessor that "not quite West of Loathing" is practically this game's second title.
8 / 10
A stylish, cinematic kung fu brawler whose biggest obstacle is entirely by design — a parry-and-dodge combat system reviewers repeatedly call harder than Dark Souls, Elden Ring or even Sekiro, backed up by a Platinum achievement completion rate of just 1.5%.
8 / 10
A tactics RPG built on genuine terrain manipulation and a persuasion-driven branching story, from the producer behind Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler — and a game whose own Steam reviews argue at length about just how much dialogue sits between its battles.
8 / 10
A viral internet joke that turned out to hide a genuinely inventive rhythm game underneath — you slide a mouse to actually play the melody rather than just hitting notes on a track — backed by more than three years of sustained free updates that answered its players' biggest requests one at a time.
8 / 10
The deckbuilder that removed the luck. You see every reward in advance and rebuild your deck between every fight — which makes it the most controllable game in its genre, and is exactly why some players bounce off it. Six dollars, 251 achievements, and criminally under-noticed.
8 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
A deceptively deep survival sim that runs entirely on cards instead of free movement — brutal, granular and beloved by its fans, but gated behind an interface several reviewers call the real enemy.
7.6 / 10
A NZ$7.39 visual novel dressed up as a clicker game from npckc, in which a hero who fails to rescue the princess spends two-odd hours making amends by growing magic berries — Very Positive at 95% of 79 reviews for its storybook art, warm cast and unusually deep accessibility options, with the one consistent complaint being that the "clicker" half thins out into repetitive quota-grinding by the later routes.
7.5 / 10
A charming, ASMR-quality tidying puzzle game whose satisfying sorting mechanics draw near-universal praise, tempered by a persistent gap between its cozy, freeform marketing and puzzles that often demand one specific solution, plus a real, unaddressed colour-blind accessibility gap.
7.5 / 10
A visually extraordinary sequel that nearly every reviewer, on both sides of the score, agrees looks and sounds better than its beloved predecessor -- while a wide majority of its critics argue the writing that made that predecessor special didn't come along for the ride.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeously illustrated storybook mystery whose "charm" branching mechanic promises narrative agency that a large, detailed share of its own reviewers say never really arrives, funnelling every path toward one true ending while the story runs noticeably long after its central mystery resolves.
7.5 / 10
A factory-automation colony sim where the terrain itself is a resource — you mine the ground you build on, dump waste that physically piles up, and the island's shape becomes a side effect of every production decision. Four years into Early Access, with two to four more to go by the developer's own estimate.
7.5 / 10
A solo-developer job-system JRPG built for players who want Final Fantasy V's class depth without any hand-holding -- widely loved for exactly that reason, and just as widely criticised for making platforming mandatory and its endgame punishingly unbalanced.
7.5 / 10
A Motherload-inspired mining roguelite whose tense dig-and-defend loop earns some of the most specific sound-design praise in this library, held back at launch by a "too little content" complaint that dominated its negative reviews for years before free multiplayer and a first paid expansion finally answered it.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous hexagonal tile-placement puzzle that its own devoted players can't agree is actually relaxing — some call it genuine anxiety relief, others a hardcore puzzle in a cozy disguise — with a lack of tools to recover from bad luck as the most consistent complaint, and a smaller but genuine controversy over the developer promoting their next game inside it.
7.5 / 10
A short, devastating survival game about a mother fox protecting her cubs in a world humanity has ruined -- overwhelmingly praised for its art and emotional weight, with a real, specific complaint about a rushed ending that even many of its most moved fans share.
7.5 / 10
A co-op liminal-space horror game that rode the Backrooms internet craze into Early Access in 2022, spent three years earning a huge audience on atmosphere and jump-scares with friends, and is still being actively patched onto new consoles four years later.
7.5 / 10
A David Lynch-inflected FMV mystery from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, built around piecing together three unreleased films through a "match cut" navigation system that a large and detailed share of its own audience says lacks the deductive satisfaction of his earlier work.
7.5 / 10
An excellent, warm, considerably shorter Spider-Man game — and 42 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews reach for the same word to explain why they're annoyed: DLC.
7.5 / 10
A rhythm-FPS built on an extraordinary heavy metal soundtrack, near-unanimously loved for exactly that -- and now carrying a real, documented postscript after publisher Funcom shut down developer The Outsiders in October 2025, leaving the game's future uncertain.
7.5 / 10
The finest medieval battle simulator ever built, wrapped in a sandbox its own fans say is thinner than the 2010 game it replaced. Its most-upvoted negative review is a list of features Warband had and this doesn't.
7.5 / 10
A densely written, richly atmospheric Southern Gothic point-and-click set in a surreal, sinking Louisiana refinery town, whose passionate fanbase and its critics converge on the same specific complaint — a narrative that loses its footing in the final act after an extraordinary opening.
7.5 / 10
Obsidian's hand-illustrated murder-mystery RPG set in 1500s Bavaria earns comparisons to Disco Elysium and praise from actual medievalists -- and a genuinely substantial minority of its own fans arguing the choices that define it matter far less than the game pretends.
7.5 / 10
A one-person-built, Overcooked-inspired restaurant roguelite that sold over 1.5 million copies on the strength of its co-op chaos and permanent between-run progression -- Very Positive at Steam scale, with a consistent, well-documented complaint that its randomised upgrade rolls and multiplayer netcode haven't kept pace with everything else it does well.
7.5 / 10
