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303 games released in 2022 and reviewed here, best first.
303 reviews
A cheap, addictive day/night survival-crafting village-builder that's received genuinely substantial content updates for years longer than its early, frustrated reviewers expected, though its 2022 launch was marred by an incomplete translation, an always-online requirement for a single-player game, and a specific bug that left some players permanently stuck.
6 / 10
A NZ$10.49 cosy pixel-art crafting sim from solo Turkish developer Musa Gungor, Mostly Positive across 56 reviews on the strength of genuinely attractive art and atmosphere, but with a real gap between the two audiences reading it — Turkish reviewers who already follow the developer's other games score it far higher than English-language newcomers, several of whom call it an overpriced, oversold idle clicker that most buyers, per Steam's own achievement data, never actually finish.
6 / 10
An autobattler roguelike whose central hook — your character becomes the boss the next contender must defeat — is, by near-unanimous reviewer agreement, both the most interesting idea in the genre in years and the exact mechanic actively punishing players for playing well.
6 / 10
A charming, Zelda-inspired tower-defense dungeon crawler whose limited number of active turrets and shallow upgrade tree left the Kickstarter backers who waited years for it recommending it only reluctantly, if at all.
6 / 10
A tiny, cheap Game Boy-styled fishing trip that turns unsettling partway through, charming reviewers with its retro presentation and multiple endings while a consistent minority say the horror never really lands and the fishing minigame itself gets old fast.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn, Dark Souls-inflected Metroidvania nine years in the making, whose gorgeous atmosphere and the sympathetic story of its solo developer's journey carry a review score that a large, detailed share of players say the underlying combat and pacing don't quite earn on their own.
6 / 10
A cozy, nostalgic Kairosoft management sim about running a Japanese hot-spring resort, undermined by the same minimal-effort PC port pattern found across the studio's Steam catalogue and a specific design flaw that actively works against its own "play in the background" appeal.
6 / 10
A free chemistry-themed incremental from a solo mobile developer, with real scale on Android and iOS and a stalled, near-invisible Steam release that has sat in Early Access for four years while its developer's attention has moved to an unannounced sequel.
6 / 10
A beautiful, genuinely original tile-placement puzzle crossed with tower defense, whose card-draw randomness splits its own fanbase between players who find it a fair, tense balancing act and players who call the same system simply unfair.
6 / 10
A stylish, short cyberpunk JRPG with genuinely excellent pixel art and music -- its own review corpus consistently argues the cyberpunk hacking theme is a coat of paint over conventional turn-based combat, and that eight hours isn't nearly enough time to find out otherwise.
6 / 10
A short, inexpensive Castlevania-homage metroidvania whose "meat and potatoes" simplicity reviewers find genuinely charming, undercut by a punishing no-healing-outside-save-points loop and control remapping options reviewers say are missing entirely.
6 / 10
A remake collection bundling two beloved late-90s and early-2000s PlayStation platformers, whose Very Positive score is driven less by the quality of the remake work itself and more by devoted fans recommending it anyway, out of gratitude that the series was resurrected at all after two decades of silence.
6 / 10
A fantasy necromancer-builder where you assemble undead minions from mismatched body parts and send them to defend your tower -- a genuinely inventive Very Positive hit at NZ$4.49, undercut by minion AI reviewers call frustratingly dumb and a publisher that moved on to a sequel while this one's bugs stayed open.
6 / 10
A crossover that put two very different action-anime franchises on the same box art and then, by its own review corpus's overwhelming consensus, built the combat, tone and mechanics around only one of them -- leaving fans of the other feeling like they bought the wrong game.
6 / 10
A melancholic, deeply atmospheric handyman sim set in a fictional frozen Siberian panel-house city that lands with real specificity for post-Soviet players and leaves others cold, backed by years of genuine solo-developer support but held back by honestly-acknowledged repetition and achievements locked behind separate paid DLC.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, cosy alchemist life-sim whose own review base repeats the same verdict with striking consistency — beautiful and charming on the surface, thinner than its genre neighbours underneath, and sold alongside more than thirty individually priced decoration DLC packs that together cost nearly as much as the base game.
6 / 10
The most-improved entry in years for a long-running cycling management series, adding a genuinely credited scouting system and reworked rider development, while a substantial share of its own longtime fanbase say it's still fundamentally the same game they've been buying since the 2010s.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn, isometric SRPG set in the Arton fantasy universe whose beautiful art and genuine tactical depth are matched almost evenly, review for review, by a resource-attrition system and a fixed four-character roster that a comparably sized share of players find punishing rather than rewarding.
6 / 10
A tower-defense roguelite whose constantly-expanding, self-branching map is a genuinely fresh idea, undercut for years by the one quality-of-life feature — a speed-up button — its developer never added before moving on to build a full, multiplayer-enabled sequel instead.
6 / 10
An H.R. Giger-inspired biomechanical nightmare eight years in the making, whose extraordinary art direction is praised almost unanimously by the same review base that overwhelmingly describes the actual game underneath it as short, clunky and built on a store description its own most-upvoted review calls factually false.
6 / 10
A dollar-priced homage to the Flash-era shoot-'em-up Heli Attack, where picking wands and hats to "break the game" is genuinely fun for a few hours before the reviews agree, in striking numbers and across four years, that the meta-progression grinding it down into.
6 / 10
An ambitious, Banished-inspired survival city-builder with genuinely deep production chains, weighed down by persistent balance problems, a currently game-breaking macOS bug, and rumours of developer abandonment the studio has publicly and directly denied.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn, dark-fantasy turn-based tactics RPG with genuinely different mission variety and a fast-responding launch team, currently held back by a thin progression system and a clunky interface that a confirmed, dated free remaster is set to overhaul within days of this review.
6 / 10
A Team17-published fantasy alchemy-adventure about a masked Warden brewing potions and taming creatures to stop a spreading corruption -- genuinely atmospheric and well-loved by a devoted minority, but let down by threadbare tutorials, a locked camera and a developer who shipped two patches in its first two weeks and then largely went quiet.
6 / 10
