RPS apparently never met a detective game it didn't like. There are six on our list of the best games of 2022, for example. If the glowing praise of the team here convinced you to try Chinatown Detective Agency or The Case Of The Golden Idol, then you might want to wait a little while longer before buying them. One of next year's genre-specific Steam sales will be the Steam Mystery Fest, running from February 20th-27th.
2022 is ready to drop from the calendar, revealing the unblemished pages of 2023 beneath. There's a small chance you're spending the next several hours at a bacchanalian rager, but I'd bet that you're not. You're more likely enjoying a few hours of peace and quiet after a week with family and wishing Jools would hurry the whole thing along.
That sounds like a perfect time to peruse your gaming library and wonder what you could play. Look at all those games you haven't got round to yet! Maybe 2023 should be the year you really commit to learning Dwarf Fortress, now the Steam version is out. Maybe this is the year you finally give an MMO a try or see your first JRPG to completion. Or maybe this year you're going to uninstall your backlog in its entirety and just accept you're only ever going to play Spelunky from now on.
What are your gaming ambitions for 2023? Tell us in the comments below.
I didn't play as many games as I wanted to this year - but then I say that every single year and will probably continue to do so until the end of time (I assume at some point my consciousness will be uploaded into an immortal robot that will exist until the heat death of the universe, and that robot will still be doing previews). Like everyone else who has written their selection box, my top picks made it onto the Advent Calendar this year. But some didn't! Here are but a three of them.
A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q. What goes great with Cult Of The Lamb?
The Samsung 980 Pro, a 'PCIe 4.0 SSD speed demon' with 'absolutely barnstorming... read and write performance' and a former 'fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD' pick has been reduced over at Amazon UK. There, you can pick up the 1TB model for £98, and it's even the premium version that includes a high-grade heatsink preinstalled.
It's been a weird year at RPS for me. After eight years as news editor, I started the nebulous new role of associate editor. This brought a broad mandate to cover indie games and PC Game Pass and to do, like, whatever else I think might be fun or good. It has been weird to not clock in and just Do News, and to have responsibility only over myself. This freedom has felt great when I've had ideas, and terrible when I've not. I'm still feeling it out, settling in, and making mistakes, but I'm quite enjoying myself. Hopefully you have enjoyed some of it too. Here are a few of my favourite things I've written this year!
I confess: I usually did my damndest to rig the RPS Advent Calendar vote. When every year has so many more than 24 good games, I always tried to tactically vote and reshuffle points to wedge in a few wee great games I knew not many people had played. But with a change to voting procedure this year, I simply couldn't get some games on our list. So, here are the games I would've slammed into our advent calendar if I were still allowed to cheat, along with some that simply didn't quite make the cut.
A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Someone stole all the PSU cables out of my PC
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 development has continued even during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where developers GSC Game World are based. Now there's a new trailer which shows combat against humans and mutants, scavenging in the Zone, comforting inventory management, and dialogue from several high-strung NPCs.
The Epic Games Store's festive season of freebies has drawn to a close. The Epic Games Store's weekly freebies have therefore resumed. Right now and until January 5th you can grab Dishonored: Definitive Edition for free, which includes Arkane's first-person stealth playground and all its expansions.
Katharine asked me to do a quick little round-up of my favourite features that we've run over the past year (to go with the other section round-ups, which you can read here) so I said "No problemo, Katharino!". Off I went to make a list, running down the published pieces and clicking whichever ones I thought were good. Then I looked at my list and said "Oh, no!", because it was extremely long. I cut it down by about half to get what we have here, a collection of interviews and thinky pieces and silly pieces and wonderful pieces from 2022.
It's a well-documented fact here at RPS that I love a good spreadsheet. Specifically, my spreadsheet that lists all the lovely games I manage to play each year. I've been looking at that spreadsheet a lot in recent weeks, and I'm pleased to report that most of my top game picks from this year have successfully made their way into the RPS Advent Calendar. There were plenty that didn't, of course (pouring one out for you, Dorfromantik, Flat Eye, Dome Keeper and Lost In Play), but such is the way of things when your current list of completed games for the year is teetering on the verge of 50.
No word of a lie, I would probably be here all day if I laid out my entire long list of honourable mentions for 2022 (additional shoutouts to Railbound, Cursed To Golf, God Of War, Weird West, Jack Move, Hard West 2 and The Kids We Were), but for the sake of all involved (and poor Alice Bee's editing pencil), I've narrowed it down to a shortlist of three. (Do still go and check out those other games, though. They're all absolutely rad).
Sequels are often contentious, but I feel like video games can get away with being a part of a long-running series – and, crucially, still be good while they’re at it, well past the point where a book or movie franchise would have outstayed its welcome.
The thing is, though, when it comes to GOTY lists like our Advent Calendar, it’s a much bigger task to convince your fellow voters of the merits of your new favourite game when it’s the third, fourth, or maybe even sixteenth in its series. I’m adamant that those games deserve their share of recognition at the end of the year, which is why my honourable mentions celebrate 2022’s new entries into some of my favourite ongoing series.
A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q: What's Gabe Newell's favourite carol?
Duronic do a good range of electricals, and today the only one I've actually bought is reduced on Amazon: a 12-gang power tower, basically a power extension lead with a supportive base that points the unit towards the sky. This particular model normally costs £18, but today has been reduced to £14.99.
I've been looking back over an entire year of RPS reviews and, well, we've written a lot. Over the past twelve months, the RPS treehouse and our merry band of freelancers have reviewed 168 games in total - and that includes early access reviews, PC-port reviews, group reviews, reviews-in-progresses, and your common or garden fully-fledged reviews. 168! Damn. Even though game releases are still suffering from pandemic pushbacks, 2022 has been a busy year for games. There wasn't a huge number of big name releases - although the ones that did come out were plenty big enough - but, as always, we've had a wealth of wonderful indies releasing all year round, and we scooped up as many of them as we could.
Out of all the games we’ve given any kind of review treatment throughout the year, only a handful of them recieved RPS’s coveted Bestest Best badge; just 22, to be exact. I've gathered them all in one big round-up bundle below (there are round-ups of our favourite bits from other sections of the site, too), and they make a great collection of games. Have a scroll and click on any that take your fancy for the full review. Enjoy!
Archer Maclean, the developer of several classic games for early home computers, has passed away. Maclean was 60 years old.
Valve have launched Steam Replay, their own equivalent to Spotify Wrapped. It offers you a single page covered in graphs and diagrams which illustrate how you spent your time on Steam in 2022. Me? 30% of my total playtime was spent in Spelunky 2, and I played 41 different games over the course of the year. How about you?
Hello! VidBud Liam here. You may recognise me from those videos that autoplay on every page. Or not. It depends on how quickly you scroll past, I suppose.
I joined team Arpus all the way back in February, and to say the last 11 months have been a whirlwind is a bit of an understatement. In less than a year I’ve made just under 90 videos covering a wide range of topics from major releases to international gaming events and brand-new hardware. My first year at RPS has been busy, basically. So when Katharine asked me to pull together a few of my personal highlights, I was kind of stumped. It's hard to pick favourites! It's even harder to celebrate my own achievements, but that's beside the point.
Don’t look at me, I’m just the hardware guy. But I do recommend looking at these, my favourite also-ran games that weren’t quite team-impressing enough to win a spot on the RPS Advent Calendar 2022. Out of everything I played this year, these are the avatars of adequacy, the sultans of satisfactory. The prime ministers of pretty good.
I’d probably also tip a hat to Warhammer 40K: Darktide, but Alice0 already nabbed it for her honourable mentions, and frankly there’s enough shootybang stuff here as it is. But, also: toilet build quality testing, pushing Nazis into cement pits, and more than a hint of 70s funk. Check ‘em out.
A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q: What is Batman's favourite Christmas poem?
With all the doors on our RPS Advent Calendar well and truly busted open for 2022 now, we thought it was high time to gather all of our favourite games of the year together in one handy location. If you've been diligently scoffing our Advent treats throughout December, then you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2022, but just in case you missed them or want to go through them one final time, we've got 'em all right here for you in our definitive Games Of The Year list. Enjoy!
Guides work is a very strange beast, and one that we don't talk about as often as we maybe should. By its nature, we here in guidestown can feel a bit isolated from the rest of RPS. Our guides aren't very visible to our regular readers. No one hops onto a website like this and says to themselves, "Well now! I wonder what guides have been written today that I can spend my time reading through!". The vast majority of people who read our guides come straight from a Google search into something specific like "Can I romance Yennefer and Triss at the same time?" (spoiler alert: you can, but it may not end well for you).
Because we operate so much behind the scenes, it's easy to miss some of the amazing stuff that the team did in guidestown this year. It ain't easy, writing a walkthrough or how-to that's useful for the reader while simultaneously appeasing those nebulous and mercurial SEO gods. But 2022 has been a stonkingly good year for guides, and I'd love to take a little bit of time to shine a light on some of the things we're most proud of having achieved this year - and to toast what will hopefully be another smashing year for guides in 2023!
A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q: What happens when you rest your kneel down in the snow?
The SteelSeries Arctis 7P+ is a top wireless headset for PC, PS5, PS4 and Switch, and today it's down to £79 at Ebay with a discount code - the lowest price we've ever recorded for this model. To get this price, use the code BOXING-20 at the checkout.
A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q: What did Adam Jensen say when he unwrapped a giant knife sharpener from Father Christmas?
We've reached the very last day of our RPS Advent Calendar for this year! That means that behind this door is our actual Game Of The Year. The GOTYest goat for 2022. Unfortunately, behind the door are also a lot of bats, ghosts, zombies, oh man that looks like a giant praying mantis I think? How on earth are we going to get through all this?
It's almost time. In a few short hours, we will open the final door of the RPS advent calendar and reveal our favourite game of 2022. Oh, and we're all off work until the new year, bye. RPS won't be barren, mind. We have quite a few bonus festive treats lined up between now and our official return on Tuesday the 3rd of January, 2023, so enjoy those (or enjoy the ones you can; the cracker jokes are... painful). Thanks for reading RPS for another year. Before we go, please do tell us what you're playing this holiday. Here's what we're clicking on!
Hear that? Christmas bells are ringing, carolers are caroling, and GTA Online players are being pounced on by an atrociously-named Grinch parody. He's one of several Christmas treats now stocked on the streets of Los Santos, which also pack snowmen to destroy, rooftop shootouts and, for some reason, superpowered beasts getting chased by serial killers.
Death Stranding director Hideo Kojima has claimed his upcoming Death Stranding movie is "taking a direction that nobody has tried before with a movie adaptation of a game", arguing that other attempts to wring movies out of game-ies have failed because they "cater to gamers". His will be different, he says, because he's "taking the approach of changing and evolving the world of Death Stranding in a way that suits film well".
He also says there's "no real need" to turn games into films, which is a true and enjoyable acknowledgement from someone who is doing that.
It's a well known fact that there are "Too Many Games"(TM) these days. I have not done the maths, but I've seen enough graphs, tweets and analysis from people who have crunched the numbers to know there are more games coming out on Steam every day than a site like RPS could ever possibly hope to cover a single month, let alone every week. But gosh darn it if we don't try our hardest all the same.
Inevitably, though, time does get the better of us sometimes (or, in my case at least, maybe my eyes are just too big for my gaming stomach), and certain games end up slipping further and further down our to-do lists until they eventually fall away entirely. Not through any fault of their own, mind. Just... time. But as a final parting shoutout for 2022, I wanted to memorialise all the games that fell of my personal to-do list this year and say, "I'M SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN IT, I PROMISE!" (For real, though, I still want to talk about all of these at some point. Maybe January...? Please don't hate me)
Serious racing games are not, as a rule, my thing. If the goal is to repeat a course 20 times to trim 0.2 seconds off a number, and not to cackle like a petty chaos gremlin as you slam someone off the track at a tight corner, I am probably not going to enjoy myself much.
Rush Rally 3 isn't all that serious, but it's still on the wrong side of the tracks for me, I thought, before accidentally playing it for 3 hours. This is an excellent bundle of rally trials, challenges, and simple circuit racing with a cheerfully mid-2000s feel. I might prefer the messy nonsense of Trail Out, but if you value actual driving skill more highly, this is well worth your time.
Last week I spoke to Larian's founder and director Swen Vincke about the latest big update to Baldur's Gate 3, and the road to 1.0 release. But also it was December the 16th, so I saw fit to waste his time asking a bunch of fun seasonal questions that blended the love and goodwill of Baldur's Gate 3, with the companion-wrangling and clutch strategy of Christmas. D'you see what I did there?
My questions are in bold, and Vincke's answers are undeneath - and they are both amusing and instructive. I for one hope that Wyll's romcom visit home becomes a future winter DLC.
Behind today's RPS Advent Calendar door is a game that was only just beaten into second place. Luckily, after said beating it can just pop back to life at the last Site Of Grace it visited and then dive back into the fray again.
Can you hear that gentle rapping, tapping at your chamber door? 'Tis some visitor tapping at your chamber door - only this, and nothing more!
No it isn't. It's the Nate Files bonus podcast, funded by our supporters supporters, and we have an egg for you. Quoth the egg "Yolk!"
December always feels like a good month for VR gaming. Perhaps it's because Christmas and VR headsets go together like mangers and Messiahs, or perhaps its because virtual reality is the only place I'm likely to see sunlight before March. In any case, if you're giving or receiving a pair of magic goggles this festive season, I'll be recommending a couple of stocking fillers to go with it at the end of this article.
First though, it's time for a more general bit of stocktaking. 2022 was a big ol' shrug of a year for VR gaming. Which is not to say it was bad, plenty of fun and interesting games launched in the last twelve months, one of which I'd probably put in my personal top ten. But from both a hardware and software perspective, nothing released this year is likely to shift the needle.
CD Projekt RED have pushed out another hotfix for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s ever-so-slightly borked next-gen update that was released last week. You can expect some extra stability compared to the previous version of the update, something that’ll always be welcome on my PC. Along with Roach’s early Christmas present of some stabilisers, the hotfix also tackles the annoying bug that caused toxicity to be stuck at max level, along with some minor tweaks to photo mode, and unexplained improvements for The Witcher 3’s performance on Steam Deck.
Not content with chucking a whole bunch of dragons and dragon-adjacent stuff at players, World Of Warcraft: Dragonflight is planning six more updates in 2023. Blizzard have released a roadmap for the next year’s worth of shenanigans for the expansion, with new zones, raids, a megadungeon, and profession changes planned. Two major updates, one each scheduled for the first and second halves of the year, will kick off new seasons for Dragonflight.
As we enter the end of year and awards season, it would be remiss not to revisit FMV match-cutting three-movies-in-one detective game Immortality, one of the most innovative and thought-provoking games I played this year. But given the game's subject centres on the depiction of women on film, and their exploitation in the film industry by male creators, it felt appropriate to examine it from the extremely talented femme members of the team. That means not just the star Marissa Marcel herself, played by the award-winning Manon Gage, but other women and non-binary creatives who played different roles in bringing this game to life.
For day 22 of our RPS Advent Calendar, we're going to make a break for it. Let's escape our enforced drudgery and make a new life for ourselves, out on the outer reaches of space in a lawless space station where we can be anything we want!
Super quick, very good card battler Marvel Snap rolls out a new location every week, then boosts it with a 40% likelihood to appear for 48 hours. New, temporarily common locations are a clever way of mixing things up, imposing restraints or possibilities depending on how much you tinker with your decks.
The latest location, Vormir, is a bit borked. I just spent a minute or so swapping emotes with someone while the game tried to load our (unrelated) animations, which might not sound like much but constitutes a good third of a match's normal running time.
If you're tempted to hop on a dragon in World Of Warcraft's latest expansion but don't want to pay £40/$50 for it, you can currently try out Dragonflight with a regular WoW subscription. That means the skies can be yours for just £10/$15, if you pay for a month. The trial's only available until Jan 2nd, though, so best hop on it quick.
Bricky puzzle game Lego Builder’s Journey is the latest freebie being given away on the Epic Games Store as part of their Christmas sale. Honestly, I did not immediately mistake this for Lego Bricktales, which I’m sure you didn’t either. Builder’s Journey tasks you with solving puzzles by, well, building with Lego. It’s also a bit of a looker, with some snazzy visual accoutrements such as ray tracing and global illumination. You can have a watch of the very pretty Builder’s Journey trailer below.
Two weeks ago, after much hoo hah, the Federal Trade Commision launched a lawsuit with the aim of blocking Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Yesterday, a bunch of CoD players did the same.
The private consumer complaint from the 10 #gamers claims the deal would give Microsoft "far-outsized market power in the video game industry". Power to 'em. Power to the gamers.
As you might have noticed, there’s just a few days until Christmas lands on us all like an overladen sleigh pulled by some very exhausted and confused reindeers. Overwatch 2’s marking the occasion by turning robotic damage hero Bastion into a gingerbread automaton with a new legendary skin. Seeing as it’s the holidays, Blizzard are charging just a single Overwatch Coin for the skin, which is way, way less than the thousands that legendaries usually cost. Bastion’s fresh look is also quite a bit more involved than some of the other legendary efforts Blizzard’s dreamt up for Overwatch 2 so far.
If you want to open today's door on the RPS Advent Calendar you're going to have to jump and pull on the handle, or scratch on the door until someone comes to open it for me. Unfortunately, today you don't have opposable thumbs - but you're way better at climbing, which is going to come in useful.
Underwater citybuilder Aquatico will submerge players on January 12th, 2023. This new release date comes a little more than a month after its release was set for January 19th, but I won't look a gift seahorse in the mouth. There's also a new trailer below which breaks down how you'll build your very own Rapture equivalent.
Martial art fest Sifu will make its way to Steam in March 2023 together with a new free update, devs Sloclap have revealed. From the snippets Sloclap have shown, the update will have a new arenas mode that seems to be similar to combat challenge maps from the Arkham series. A new patch, 1.16, has also gone live for Sifu today to duff up some pesky crashes and bugs, although patch notes haven’t been released yet. You can watch the teaser for the arenas mode update below.
The Winter Sale continues over on GOG, and they’re giving away Revolution Software’s classic point-and-click Broken Sword for free until Thursday. It’s the Director’s Cut too, which adds some more stuff for nosey American tourist George ‘Goat-wrangler’ Stobbart and French journalist Nico ‘Curtains’ Collard to investigate. Good grief, I can’t even remember the last time I played a Broken Sword. The first one is a classic adventure game from a time when they were beginning to fade from PC, goat puzzle notwithstanding.
Shipmas arrives in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 tomorrow, with the game’s Christmas update for multiplayer. The reimagined version of the classic Shipment map - introduced with last week’s Season 01 Reloaded midseason update - will be festooned with decorations, along with the bodies of your enemies. COD now has its own Santa, too, and I wouldn’t want to tangle with him. You can see what I mean, and catch a glimpse of the holiday version of Shipment, by watching the trailer below.
