While the universal truth remains intact that video games are in fact good, 2022 was such a good year that it made our jobs a little bit difficult.
With games that told relatable familial stories wrapped up in grandiose adventures, games that felt like they pushed us to our absolute physical limits, and games that transcended the artform to deliver an experience unlike any other traditional narrative it was near impossible to pick a single game to rise above the rest.
2022 was also a difficult year because of the content. 2021’s Game of the Year nominees were full of a lot of warm and fuzzy. 2022 was a bit more pain and tears. The best art reflects the world and what people are going through, and these past few years have been so difficult for all of us. These games, our nine Game of the Year nominees, dig deep into your soul and embed themselves within you. And in the end, our Game of the Year was the one that dug deepest. One that grabbed on and refused to let go.
With that… let’s roll film and introduce VGG’s 2022 Game of the Year.
Immortality. Developed by Half Mermaid.
From the first moment one of Immortality’s actors stared down the barrel of the camera lens and directly into our souls, we knew the team at Half Mermaid were doing something special with this game. That something special just happened to be a team establishing itself as one of the best storytellers of the artform.
Within this one FMV game lies three fully-fleshed out movies, each with their own things to say about creatives and auteurs, the prevalence of misogyny in creative fields, and broadly, the human condition. The pure creativity and artistry in establishing three distinct films in three different genres, each with their own film-making techniques and dense production design… on top of building a satisfying mystery game that perfectly ties all those movies together? It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. You enter this game expecting to swim through the familiar territory of Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid's usual narrative-driven mystery games, like Telling Lies and Her Story. But as you comb through video clips, analyze moments in time, follow the trails of people and mundane objects, and ultimately piece together the story of the disappeared actress, Marissa Marcel, you'll pull at threads that eventually reveal a whole other tapestry of story beneath the surface.
Immortality was a game that ran the gamut of emotion.
We were at times confused, shocked, fascinated, desperate for answers, and more connected than ever to the human experience and the drive for creativity.
But what else is there to say about this game that we didn’t already cover in our 10 out of 10 review and the subsequent gush fest we at VGG have been participating in since launch?
Well how about the performances of its actors. We’ll close out by singing the praises of a cast that brought together this incredibly dense and layered batch of characters. Each performer gave us chills at some point in the journey and each managed it for wildly different reasons. So here are your roses.
Manon Gage, Charlotta Mohlin, Timothy Lee DePriest, Ty Molbak, Hans Christopher, Jocelin Donahue, and everyone else who brought these characters to life. Your performances gave the game its soul and created a storytelling experience that left us captivated, no matter when or where we ran into you.
Thank you for making this game pretty damn good.
All art stays with you in some way, but Immortality may live within us for the rest of our lives. And that more than earns it our top marks for 2022.
Thank you for reading! If 2022 was any sign, 2023 will continue the upward trend both for the quality of games and the industry and for Video Games are Good. This past year was full of ups and downs but felt even more fulfilling than ever. We hope you continue with us on our journey of celebrating the industry and its incredible artists, because the future is stunningly bright.
Comments