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191 games released in 2022 and reviewed here, best first.
191 reviews
The trilogy-capping mega-campaign Total War fans waited years for finally arrived and is genuinely excellent — after a rough launch, an expensive DLC structure, and a 2023 forum moderation policy that told players criticism was "a privilege" rather than a right.
6.5 / 10
A small, charming Kairosoft pixel-art town-management sim with a devoted but tiny Steam following -- reviewed here from a genuinely small sample, honestly disclosed, rather than padded out to look more authoritative than the evidence allows.
6.5 / 10
A grand-strategy game brave enough to be about economics instead of conquest, four years and seventeen DLC later still arguing with its own players about warfare — and its newest expansion needed nine hotfixes in two months.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely addictive choose-your-own-adventure-style permadeath RPG ported from mobile, let down by a corroborated late-game softlock bug, rough mobile-port controls, and a store-page "constant updates" claim this review's own check found doesn't hold up.
6.2 / 10
A well-crafted reverse-escape-room puzzler from an actively supported studio, undercut for a large share of reviewers by puzzles that lean on unclear logic leaps rather than fair deduction, and a co-op structure that leaves one partner idle for long stretches.
6.1 / 10
An award-nominated interactive drama whose rotoscope-style presentation and first-half storytelling drew real critical acclaim, undercut by a store description promising a thirty-year saga that ends on an unresolved cliffhanger its developer has said nothing publicly about continuing in more than three years.
6 / 10
The Dota 2 mod that invented the auto battler genre now stands alone on Steam as a free mobile port — genuinely deep team-building strategy buried under a cluttered UI, a chest-and-key economy, and a shrinking player base.
6 / 10
A free revenge-fantasy clicker that is refreshingly honest about what it is — an 83-achievement afternoon, not the idle game its own tags claim it to be.
6 / 10
A NZ$3.69 "meditative" crypto-trading toy with no fail state, no complex interface and pleasant background music, whose tiny nine-review corpus is entirely positive but includes at least one review that openly admits to being posted to support the developer's family.
6 / 10
A charming, cheap cat-run boba tea shop sim that earned a loyal following in its first five months of Early Access, then went quiet — no update since April 2023, no save mid-shift, and a growing pile of reviews from players who love what's there and are giving up waiting for the rest.
6 / 10
A viral solo-developer horror hit about upgrading a train to fight a monstrous spider train -- genuinely well-liked, and just as consistently criticised, on both sides of its score, for being over in about the time it takes to watch a movie.
6 / 10
A steampunk Darkest Dungeon-inspired tactical RPG whose gorgeous presentation and combat earn real praise, undercut by an irreversible, one-way progression path that repeatedly softlocks under-levelled players — a severe, specifically documented design flaw the developer never appears to have patched.
6 / 10
A NZ$10.49 cosy pixel-art crafting sim from solo Turkish developer Musa Gungor, Mostly Positive across 56 reviews on the strength of genuinely attractive art and atmosphere, but with a real gap between the two audiences reading it — Turkish reviewers who already follow the developer's other games score it far higher than English-language newcomers, several of whom call it an overpriced, oversold idle clicker that most buyers, per Steam's own achievement data, never actually finish.
6 / 10
A charming, Zelda-inspired tower-defense dungeon crawler whose limited number of active turrets and shallow upgrade tree left the Kickstarter backers who waited years for it recommending it only reluctantly, if at all.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn, Dark Souls-inflected Metroidvania nine years in the making, whose gorgeous atmosphere and the sympathetic story of its solo developer's journey carry a review score that a large, detailed share of players say the underlying combat and pacing don't quite earn on their own.
6 / 10
A free chemistry-themed incremental from a solo mobile developer, with real scale on Android and iOS and a stalled, near-invisible Steam release that has sat in Early Access for four years while its developer's attention has moved to an unannounced sequel.
6 / 10
A stylish, short cyberpunk JRPG with genuinely excellent pixel art and music -- its own review corpus consistently argues the cyberpunk hacking theme is a coat of paint over conventional turn-based combat, and that eight hours isn't nearly enough time to find out otherwise.
6 / 10
A remake collection bundling two beloved late-90s and early-2000s PlayStation platformers, whose Very Positive score is driven less by the quality of the remake work itself and more by devoted fans recommending it anyway, out of gratitude that the series was resurrected at all after two decades of silence.
6 / 10
A fantasy necromancer-builder where you assemble undead minions from mismatched body parts and send them to defend your tower -- a genuinely inventive Very Positive hit at NZ$4.49, undercut by minion AI reviewers call frustratingly dumb and a publisher that moved on to a sequel while this one's bugs stayed open.
6 / 10
A crossover that put two very different action-anime franchises on the same box art and then, by its own review corpus's overwhelming consensus, built the combat, tone and mechanics around only one of them -- leaving fans of the other feeling like they bought the wrong game.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, cosy alchemist life-sim whose own review base repeats the same verdict with striking consistency — beautiful and charming on the surface, thinner than its genre neighbours underneath, and sold alongside more than thirty individually priced decoration DLC packs that together cost nearly as much as the base game.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn, isometric SRPG set in the Arton fantasy universe whose beautiful art and genuine tactical depth are matched almost evenly, review for review, by a resource-attrition system and a fixed four-character roster that a comparably sized share of players find punishing rather than rewarding.
6 / 10
An H.R. Giger-inspired biomechanical nightmare eight years in the making, whose extraordinary art direction is praised almost unanimously by the same review base that overwhelmingly describes the actual game underneath it as short, clunky and built on a store description its own most-upvoted review calls factually false.
6 / 10
A dollar-priced homage to the Flash-era shoot-'em-up Heli Attack, where picking wands and hats to "break the game" is genuinely fun for a few hours before the reviews agree, in striking numbers and across four years, that the meta-progression grinding it down into.
6 / 10
