Browse by year
303 games released in 2022 and reviewed here, best first.
303 reviews
A 1994 Japan-only SNES anthology RPG gets a gorgeous HD-2D remake and its first-ever release outside Japan -- eight short, wildly different stories in one box, held together by writing critics and players agree is stronger than the archaic combat carried over from the original.
8 / 10
A near-universally beloved web-swinging superhero game whose PC port has carried an unresolved, save-corrupting crash bug since the day it launched — persisting across three years of patches and still blocking full completion for some players.
8 / 10
An exceptionally well-supported, expert-verified milling and lathe simulator that real machinists and trade students praise for its accuracy, backed by one of the most sustained update records this lane has found, let down only by a steep learning curve that leaves true beginners with too little guidance.
8 / 10
A Pomodoro focus timer fused with a tiny idle farm, overwhelmingly loved by a review corpus full of people describing real help with procrastination, ADHD and depression — held back from a perfect score by a specific season-transition bug that can quietly lock progress, and a content ceiling dedicated users eventually hit.
8 / 10
A beautifully designed train-track puzzle game with one of the strongest, most sustained support records this lane has covered, let down only by marketing that undersells how genuinely demanding its back half becomes.
8 / 10
The sequel that fixed nearly everything wrong with the original — and got criticised for it. Its sharpest reviewers say the classes are now too balanced and every run plays the same. Both things are true, and that's the interesting part.
8 / 10
A rollerskating bullet-time shooter that fuses Tony Hawk-style trick scoring with Max Payne-esque gunplay into something genuinely unlike anything else on the market, whose Steam reception has, since 2025, split into two separate questions — is the game good, and should you actually pay for it after the publisher shut down the studio that made it.
8 / 10
Asymmetric's prohibition-era, Lovecraft-flavoured follow-up to the award-winning West of Loathing -- Overwhelmingly Positive on its own considerable merits, with a review sample so consistently framed against its beloved predecessor that "not quite West of Loathing" is practically this game's second title.
8 / 10
A stylish, cinematic kung fu brawler whose biggest obstacle is entirely by design — a parry-and-dodge combat system reviewers repeatedly call harder than Dark Souls, Elden Ring or even Sekiro, backed up by a Platinum achievement completion rate of just 1.5%.
8 / 10
A beloved, deceptively accessible 2D rocket-building and orbital-mechanics sandbox that grew from a mobile hobby project into one of Steam's most consistently praised simulators, held back only by a real multi-year content drought its developer has only recently broken.
8 / 10
A classic-styled turn-based RPG about anxiety, found family and a healer joining her girlfriend's adventuring party, whose deliberately blunt title undersells writing reviewers describe as some of the most emotionally honest in the genre — held back only by real RPG Maker engine limitations around fullscreen and key rebinding.
8 / 10
A VR automation puzzle game built around a genuinely novel idea — recording your own physical actions to spawn clones that repeat them forever — wrapped in a warmly written, well-voiced story, held back only by a short runtime and clone-reliability quirks reviewers describe in specific detail.
8 / 10
A tense, tightly-balanced roguelite about a lone parent scavenging to keep a baby alive through a zombie-infested winter, earning near-unanimous acclaim for its short, replayable core loop, with a real minority pushing back on RNG-driven difficulty and a developer who went quiet after a brief, focused post-launch support window.
8 / 10
A tactics RPG built on genuine terrain manipulation and a persuasion-driven branching story, from the producer behind Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler — and a game whose own Steam reviews argue at length about just how much dialogue sits between its battles.
8 / 10
A viral internet joke that turned out to hide a genuinely inventive rhythm game underneath — you slide a mouse to actually play the melody rather than just hitting notes on a track — backed by more than three years of sustained free updates that answered its players' biggest requests one at a time.
8 / 10
The deckbuilder that removed the luck. You see every reward in advance and rebuild your deck between every fight — which makes it the most controllable game in its genre, and is exactly why some players bounce off it. Six dollars, 251 achievements, and criminally under-noticed.
8 / 10
A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.
8 / 10
A genuinely substantial side-scrolling shoot-em-up built on Andy Balaam's Smolpxl engine - real enemy variety, projectiles, and a scrolling city backdrop, confirmed working via a real scored kill on desktop and a real fired bullet on phone.
7.7 / 10
A deceptively deep survival sim that runs entirely on cards instead of free movement — brutal, granular and beloved by its fans, but gated behind an interface several reviewers call the real enemy.
7.6 / 10
A clever black-world/white-world twin-platformer, now confirmed genuinely playable with real keyboard controls under the desktop tier - move, jump, and an invert mechanic that swaps which of the two characters is highlighted, all verified with real dispatched input.
7.6 / 10
A NZ$7.39 visual novel dressed up as a clicker game from npckc, in which a hero who fails to rescue the princess spends two-odd hours making amends by growing magic berries — Very Positive at 95% of 79 reviews for its storybook art, warm cast and unusually deep accessibility options, with the one consistent complaint being that the "clicker" half thins out into repetitive quota-grinding by the later routes.
7.5 / 10
A charming, ASMR-quality tidying puzzle game whose satisfying sorting mechanics draw near-universal praise, tempered by a persistent gap between its cozy, freeform marketing and puzzles that often demand one specific solution, plus a real, unaddressed colour-blind accessibility gap.
7.5 / 10
A visually extraordinary sequel that nearly every reviewer, on both sides of the score, agrees looks and sounds better than its beloved predecessor -- while a wide majority of its critics argue the writing that made that predecessor special didn't come along for the ride.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeously illustrated storybook mystery whose "charm" branching mechanic promises narrative agency that a large, detailed share of its own reviewers say never really arrives, funnelling every path toward one true ending while the story runs noticeably long after its central mystery resolves.
7.5 / 10
