Trent’s top 10 games of 2022
It feels unreal to be looking back at a nearly completed 2022, but here we are. Fans of video games have had plenty to enjoy this year, with great titles in the visual novel and JRPG sectors that we all know and love. Just like at the end of 2021, our kind and benevolent editor here at Rice Digital sat us all down and asked us to come up with the nearly impossible task of choosing our top ten video games from 2022.
So, in no particular order because I’m not picking an absolute favourite from this list, here are the games that I’m still thinking about long after I put them down this year.
Trent’s top 10 games of 2022
When your job entails sitting down and playing a lot of different video games, it is tough to decide on your favourites. I had to go back into our archives and my gaming library just to remind myself what came out this year. These are the games that stood out and reminded me of just how special video games can be.
Unpacking
When you first load up Unpacking, it seems like a straightforward puzzle game. For the most part, it is, but there is such wonderful storytelling being done just with the simple act of unpacking your things after a move. There is a whole narrative unfolding before you if you look for it, like the relationship that is doomed because you can’t move your partner’s things when you move into his flat or the sensation of failure as you move back into your parents’ house. The game is short, able to be completed in a single evening, but it is remarkable how much story they pack into a game without a single visible character in it.
Wife Quest
Deep down, what we all want is someone willing to charge into a dungeon and fight a host of busty monster girls to rescue us, which is why Wife Quest is so much fun. Mia’s husband, Fernando, has been kidnapped by the resident monster girls that surround their farmland, so Mia is forced to go out with her giant sword and beat them all to death. There is a lot of humour here and some genuinely fun and challenging gameplay mechanics to master in one of the best action platformer titles I’ve played in a while. It is short but well-paced, and perfect for my top 10 games of 2022.
AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative
Both of the AI: The Somnium Files games are weird, but this one takes things further than the original. The characters are big and dramatic, the fourth wall gets knocked down repeatedly, and time is just one more mechanic to play with. It is difficult to explain the best bits of this game without potentially spoiling the experience, but just the random dance number with top himbo Lien is enough to justify the price tag.
Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 2
Nippon Ichi Software has an amazing catalogue of games that play on all the usual JRPG tropes that we love, but with a decidedly silly tone. Getting to play through these titles with the NIS Classics collections that have come out has been a treat, but the pair here is my favourite so far. Both Makai Kingdom and Unlosing Ranger have genuine laugh-out-loud moments that caught me by surprise. These are the perfect light-hearted games to bring in the new year with. Even though both these games came out multiple console generations ago, I played them for the first time as part of this collection so they’re going on my top 10 games of 2022 list.
Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child
I am grouping these two together for obvious reasons, but as someone who never got to experience these visual novels before it was great to finally see what all the fuss was about. Especially after the incredibly strange issues it came across with its Steam release. What I found earned both a spot on my top 10 games of 2022 list. While there were certainly some moments where you could feel the years catching up on them, both titles still had a lot to offer modern gamers. These plots are dark and twisted and charming in all the best possible ways. These are the games that laid the foundation for the Science Adventure series of visual novels.
Signalis
Signalis is an old-school Resident Evil game set in space with a touch of Twin Peaks’ surreal storytelling mixed in. There are puzzles to solve and limited supplies to collect as you make your way through the remains of a deep-space mining facility that delved too deep and unlocked something horrible. If survival horror is your thing, this was one of the best games in the genre released this year.
Digimon Survive
I didn’t have much experience with the Digimon series when this game popped up on my radar, but it almost immediately proved to be one of the best visual novels of the year for me, so it was an obvious one to include on my top 10 games of 2022 list. A deep story with great characters and a slowly unravelling mystery, Digimon Survive delivered a more grown-up experience than I thought possible from the series.
Rune Factory 5
Farming simulators, dungeon crawling, and bountiful waifu and husbando options – these are a few of my favourite things and Rune Factory 5 delivers all of them beautifully. Do you want a submissive succubus that feeds on people’s dreams? Elf tsundere? Wolf-man himbo running a bathhouse? All these options and more are yours in a game where you’re trying to save the world by beating up monsters and doing a touch of farming.
Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition
No one is going to say that Chrono Cross is their favourite JRPG, but I was excited to dip back into this classic title when it got released on the Switch. There are some good quality-of-life improvements on show, though they don’t fix some of the biggest issues with the original game. If you’ve got the time to sink into a long, classic JRPG, there are worse ways to spend 60 or so hours of your life. While it isn’t the best JRPG released this year, pure nostalgia earns it a place on my top 10 games of 2022 list. It just made me want a Chrono Trigger remake that much worse, unfortunately.
Lost Ruins
Another exploration platformer that caught my eye earlier this year, Lost Ruins is all about a young woman stuck in an endless dungeon with no memories of how she got there. The game plays with tropes and has a few twists in the plot, but the mixture of dungeon-crawling and storytelling was well-balanced. The character designs are one of the best parts of the game, with some boss fights taking up the whole screen in this 2D adventure.
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