Best of 2022 is ComingSoon’s weeklong celebration of the entertainment that made this past year so memorable.
My eyes glaze over in record time when looking at games like Total War. A zoomed-out view of a field of dudes tossing spears at each other puts me in a comatose state like no other genre. I had more or less written off strategy games because they almost always based in worlds or time periods that don’t interest me. But while I don’t care about faceless soldiers, I do care about Spider-Man and Rabbid Mario and that wrapping was important enough to get me to finally try — and enjoy — tactical games in 2022.
Patterns are hard to break and I had decided somewhere in my history playing games that I just wasn’t into the strategy genre. My disdain for their self-serious tones and ancient settings was enough to dispel me whether or not those generalizations were true.
But I’ve begun attempting to tackle my biases as of late and have tried to go after games I had previously written off. I’ve been diving into more and more soulslike games after falling in love with Bloodborne in 2019. I didn’t think Fallout-style RPGs were for me until I had a grand time with The Outer Worlds. The Lovecraftian style of Bloodborne and The Outer Worlds’ goofy sci-fi angle were appealing enough from the outside to draw me into the beauty both genres have to offer.
I was enthralled from beginning to end, and while many games have hooked me until the credits, doing so in a different genre just hits, well, differently. Outthinking an opponent through turn-based strategy is as rewarding as pulling off a no-hit run through a level in Sifu, but they differ ever so slightly. And that slight disparity with the right context is what keeps the hobby fresh, especially when certain genres can blend together if there’s not much to break them up.
Before that point, I had only played the first mission before bouncing off, but was able to stick around with it for a few hours before hitting some insurmountable mission that, as much as I don’t want to admit it, prematurely ended my run. It’s significantly more hardcore and absolutely does not fuck around, but it did grab me, something I likely wouldn’t have had the curiosity to find out a decade ago.