The Best Video Games of 2022 (So Far)

 The first few months of a new year are always lousy with new video games. Developers who can’t meet the deadline for the holiday season often cut bait and shunt the fruits of their labor into January or February to buy crucial time for some extra polish. Still, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like the winter of 2022. The COVID bottleneck is loosening up, studios are operating at full capacity, and suddenly Namco and Sony are somehow releasing two of the biggest games on their respective dockets in the same week, long before the prime real estate of autumn. To follow the gaming industry is to constantly contend with an overflowing backlog lingering in your Steam library, but rarely has it gotten this dire this quickly. That’s a good problem to have, obviously. I much prefer our current predicament to the challenges of 2021, when the release schedule dried up entirely. Here are some early favorites for what’s already shaping up to be a marquee year in gaming.

Weird West (PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One)

Weird West comes from WolfEye Studio, a development team staffed with Arkane (Dishonored, Deathloop) veterans, and to nobody’s surprise, it has brought one of its trademark, eternally cursed realms to the American frontier. Bounty hunters, cultists, and the chittering undead are afoot as you wrest control of several misbegotten characters out for revenge. This is a top-down, tactical shoot-out in which the playing field is wide open. Nothing is taken for granted. See that chimney on the roof of the bank you’re trying to rob? Find a way up there, and you might discover you can shinny down the hatch to avoid a deadly firefight. Wolfe believes that gamers should be allowed to touch the worlds they explore, and Weird West is the ideal proof of concept for that philosophy.

Ghostwriter: Tokyo (PlayStation 5, Windows PC)

Evil Within series, but Ghostwire: Tokyo is the first time the developer has actually orbited greatness. It has left American suburbia behind in favor of an eldritch, rain-slicked Tokyo, haunted by every vengeful spirit in the Japanese legendarium. A ghostwriter can be dragged down by its grind at times, but I’ve remained captivated by its silky first-person animation and vivid enemy design as well as the resonant hometown pride Tango takes in its capital city. This is a game in which you will banish demons before stopping into an ersatz 7-Eleven for some health-restoring mochi. It’s Japan in the midst of an apocalypse, presented as honestly as possible.

We are living in a golden age of abstruse, elliptical video games when Elden Ring has sold 12 million copies, but FromSoftware’s indomitable opacity has nothing on Tunic — a top-down Zelda-ish adventure that provides the player with no helpful exposition whatsoever. Dialogue is encoded in strange hieroglyphics, objective markers are missing, and the puzzles are almost impossible to parse. Your only salvation? A tattered in-game instruction manual, akin to the paperback guidance you’d find in cardboard Mega Man boxes in the late ’80s, scattered about the world. Tunic wants to invoke the wondrous confusion of the gaming of yore, when we slapped an anonymous cartridge into a Super Nintendo before we even knew how to read, relying on our intuition to get by. Designer Andrew Shouldice trusts us to take the plunge. Once you’re in, you’ll realize that the water isn’t so cold after all.