The Best, Worst, and Blandest of 2022 – Zero Punctuation

5th best: Not for Broadcast

I’m sorry, Sam Barlow, I’m all about new approaches to interactive storytelling, but I just can’t get on with this Her Story Immortality “watch all the videos and draw your own conclusions” format. I need knobs to twiddle and a voice telling me how well I’m twiddling them. That’s why Not For Broadcast is my FMV game of choice. A bit hit and miss, but god bless it it tries so hard it won me over in the end, and you won’t find a more authentic knob twiddling experience.

5th blandest: Stray

As always, the Game Awards showers its indie prizes on whatever passing trend gains sufficient buzz to be deemed worthy of hanging with the cool kids even if its just a linear hike whose core gameplay lacks any noteworthy feature besides a butthole concealing algorithm. It’s Stray, a game that you can recreate at home if you happen to own a cat and a laser pointer shaped like a contextual button prompt.

5th worst: Hell Pie

Hell Pie is a game that actually plays pretty well. With nuanced platforming mechanics and interesting, varied environments. Unfortunately it’s also, in a very literal sense, gross as shit. And thus all that effort was tragically wasted. I mean, 2001 A Space Odyssey is considered one of history’s greatest films but that would not be the case if every time you turned it on Stanley Kubrick ran out and jizzed in your eye.

4th best: Hardspace: Shipbreaker

There’s a game coming out next year inspired by Jet Set Radio called Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and I’ve already declared that to be the most abuseable name of any video game in history. My mind reels at the possibilities. I can get three swears in there easy. But until it comes out, Fartface Shitcaker will retain the title. You remember, that meditative game about spaceship dismantling. I liked it. Fuck you.

4th blandest: Dying Light 2

Being one of the first big triple-A releases of the year, Dying Light 2 had some shoes to fill. And proceeded to fill them with porridge and watery custard. It’s such a bland, obvious open world with such a bland, obvious setting, and its zombies probably get bullied by the zombies from Left 4 Dead. Even parkour and a hang glider couldn’t help it much. Felt like trying to liven up a dull work presentation by flicking the lights on and off.

4th worst: Stranger of Paradise: FFO

I feel iffy about condemning things I don’t understand. Maybe there are other people with different cultural backgrounds for whom this game’s story is a searing emotional roller coaster rather than a roomful of deranged circus seals banging kitchenware together. But I guess I can only ever speak for my own experience, which reliably informs me that Stranger of Paradise: Anal Man-tasy Squidgybums is a load of old piss on a freshly laundered pillow.

3rd best: Tunic

It’s a little bit Zelda, it’s a little bit Soulsy, it’s a little bit country, it’s a little bit rock n’ roll. Rock and dodge roll, that is, arf arf. Tunic is wonderfully deliberate in its nostalgic theming and solid core gameplay integrated with a sense of unfolding mystery, and as well as 3rd best it’s also the new holder of the Best Game Set Entirely In A Soft Play Area award. Get over it, Fall Guys.

3rd blandest: Trek to Yomi

You know, I’m starting to relish Third Blandest as the sort of One True Blandest award, a game so bland it couldn’t even stand out in the field of blandness. And this year it’s Trek to Yomi, a game about waving a sword and moving right that limps its way through a stop-and-start plot before meandering to a close and disappearing from my memory until this very instant.

3rd worst: Callisto Protocol

It’s happened more than once that the very last game from the year ends up in my worst list. Maybe since it’s after The Game Awards mid to late December has become “Well, we’ve officially given up on THIS winning any prizes,” season. So yeah, the Callisto Protocol’s bad. Maybe I’d have gone easier on it if it weren’t so fresh in my memory, but much like ripping off the top of a dude’s head so you can see his tongue wiggling about in the stump like a curious worm in a strawberry trifle, some wounds don’t heal with time.

2nd best: Elden Ring

(sigh) Okay. Hear me out. Elden Ring is a fantastically realised world and a great natural progression of the Dark Souls legacy that, rarity of rarities, I kept playing in my spare time, all seven weekly minutes of it, but I can’t in good conscience call it my game of the year because I stopped about three or four bosses before the end and never felt the desire to go back. Like many men my age, I struggle with soulslike fatigue. But if you give generously perhaps hope can be found for those who suffer from this debilitating social illness. I *hope* the next From Software game has a decent fucking ending for once.

2nd blandest: Gotham Knights

The stock expectation of the superhero game is that it should make you feel like the superhero in question. But after riding a slightly underpowered motorbike through mostly empty streets for ten minutes before chipping away at several overly spongey health bars in yet another samey punch-up, I don’t feel much like the superheroes depicted in Gotham Knights. I feel like an overworked pork butcher with an unusually long commute.

2nd worst: Babylon’s Fall

Nothing like a turd so sphincter-stretchingly big its own publisher shuts it down after six months. Babylon’s Fall is an ugly, boring, confusing tripe lollipop that already failed so hard there’s little point in berating it further. It’s so bad it made me retroactively hate Babylon Five just by association. It’s just fuckin’ Deep Space Nine but set on a giant bicycle pump.

Best game: Neon White

In the end there was only one game that always came to mind first when I thought of my favourites of the year. Yes, I was a little down on the whole wannime beach episode accidental panty shot ooh notice me senpai no not like that you perv vibe of the plot but Neon White’s core gameplay loop is very strong and has a wonderfully breezy innovative spirit that you just don’t get from games that have to drag their oversized development budgets around with them like two fat horse carcasses. In a bag.

Blandest game: Saints Row

Blandness is relative, really. If you took Saints Row open brackets 2022 by itself it’d probably seem far from bland compared to most of its peers, but unfortunately it has to be weighed against the previous Saints Row games and the moment they get dropped on the scale Saints Row open brackets 2022 gets catapulted into a ditch. And then its dreary attempt to get back into its decades-old bed with only the tokenest attempt to refresh the linen is what pushes the dirt over it to finally bring an end to this severely mixed metaphor.

Worst game: FNaF: Security Breach

Considering I gave Carkplace Titshaker a prize, it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that I feel a bit out of touch with the kids. I cannot comprehend how anyone can look at Security Breach and see anything but a horrendously badly thought out six-lane pile-up of a game, riddled with terrible design decisions and misplaced effort, held together about as efficiently as a swarm of angry wasps in a fishing net. But the popularity of Five Nights at Freddy’s mystifies me generally, so maybe I’m the wrong demographic. Maybe this is like complaining that there’s no driving philosophical theme at the heart of Peppa Pig’s Pumpkin Party.