Game Developer’s best of 2022: Danielle Riendeau’s top six games of the year
It’s become a common refrain in my life, when writing these year end posts, that I simply didn’t play enough games in a given year. It happened again, and this time around it feels especially egregious because there was so much work that speaks to my particular dorky sensibilities. Do you even know how many cool adventure games came out in 2022 (I even made a tiny one myself!)?
But the exasperation is partly exaggerated. I’ll get to most of them in the new year, and after all, this is a wonderful problem to have: it means there’s tons of interesting, inspiring, special work out there that I’ll be able to enjoy some time.
So, while this is a short list, and many of the 2022 games I know I’ll love won’t get their shout out here, it’s ok. We’ve got plenty to be happy about right here.
The Advanced Edition is a massive (I would call it feast-like) content update to one of my favorite games of all time, 2018’s brilliant tactics puzzler Into the Breach. I’ve written a great deal about this game, and played even more (I have several thousand hours of commanding tiny mechs under my belt). While it was hard to argue for this as a “2022 game,” for the purposes of our staffwide list, it’s such a brilliant update to an existing game and such a genuinely dizzying design feat that I can’t help but be impressed just thinking about it.
Subset managed to cram in so many more mission types, pilots, mechs, entire teams, enemies and more that I understand why the team needed years to design, balance and probably playtest the living daylights out of it. The real feat is in that balance: the reason I play so much of the game (and continue to) is that I still haven't seen every possible scenario play out on those 64-grid maps, between
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