2022 in Review: More From Less, More-or-Less
Steam launched a year-in-review feature called Replay -- it's pretty cool! And its gray "other games" bars highlight a certain pattern in my 2022 gaming:
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As does comparing Steam's counters with Glog statistics:
Where did all those Steam games and demos go? Well, nowhere.
Building on my "less writing, more playing" agenda from 2021, I culled a considerable amount of my backlog last year, focusing my playtime and my Glog posts on fewer and more-remarkable games (as the Steam timeline's colored-in segments show).
As for those replays: I dug up Assassin's Creed IV after watching Our Flag Means Death, and The Witcher's TV series has had me jonesing to revisit Wild Hunt (plus Hearts of Stone) since my 2019 recap. Media consumption! Am I right?
... anyway. My DLC and expansion activity in 2022 tells a similar story:
While it'd be hard to beat the quantity of DLCs (especially Mass Effect's) I played in 2021, last year's quality of add-ons was surprisingly solid.
- South Park: The Fractured But Whole's extra chapters From Dusk Till Casa Bonita and Bring the Crunch both did great at channeling that classic South Park sense of humor, while experimenting with some passably-fun gameplay twists.
- Control's comprehensive, unsettling yet entertaining tone (and its tense shooting-supernatural-monsters action) carried through into very substantial side-stories in The Foundation and AWE.
- And of course, it cannot be overstated how essential Hearts of Stone is to the whole Geralt experience.
These add-ons were good, just like the main games I played last year. I mean, check out these rating values:
Here, summarily, is the glorious result of my ruthless backlog management. A majority - more than half! - of my post ratings were positive, for the first time since 2015 (which was itself a statistical aberration).
I played a satisfying amount of Awesome games, with the expectedly-impressive Horizon Forbidden West, the unexpectedly endearing Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, the shockingly compelling Control + The Foundation + AWE, and a comfortably enthralling return to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt + Hearts of Stone.
And I got a healthy serving of Good, highlights including the fun and funny South Park games, the action-packed time-hopping Deathloop, the science-fantasy time-bopping Outer Wilds, and the ... Shakespearean time-skipping Elsinore.
(Plus Omensight and The Forgotten City; I hadn't planned on getting stuck in so many time loops! Call that another of my niches, I guess, along with nonograms and programming puzzles.)
2022 only held a few, mild disappointments, like the over-extended Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (Meh), the genre-confused Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials (Meh), and the terminally dull Evoland 2 (Bad).
So what's next?
Some pretty exciting franchise entries and sequels are targeting 2023, like Hollow Knight: Silksong, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. But all of these games have histories with release dates that ... well, I'm not holding my breath.
God of War Ragnarök will almost certainly be the swan song of my PS4, since the upcoming Horizon Forbidden West DLC is apparently skipping it.
Although my backlog has thinned out, I've got positive expectations for its remainders, especially Cyberpunk 2077, Disco Elysium, and The Outer Worlds.
But for now, I'm already in the thick of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine. And I still need to finish investigating Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye -- more on that, uh, eventually.