GregHowley.com

While I didn't play a ton of video games over 2022, I did play more than in some other years. My free time in 2022 was largely occupied with a local resurgence of Warmachine, starting up a 5e campaign with my first time as a DM in close to a decade, and of course, the never-ending task of driving children hither and yon to their various activities, birthday parties, sports, lessons, and practices.

I did, however, play a handful of PC games worthy of mention. Five this year, in fact. So here are the video games I was in on during 2022.

Horizon: Zero Dawn - Throughout most of January 2022, I played the hell out of Horizon: Zero Dawn. It's fantastic running through the wilderness, exploring, shooting robotic dinosaurs with a bow, and learning about how the military-industrial complex of the late 21st century created AI which led to the downfall of humanity. I'm very much looking forward to playing the sequel.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - A computer role-playing game based on Pathfinder, the D&D 3rd edition spinoff game? Excellent. I'm in. It's a great game in the spirit of many of the older infinity engine D&D games, although doing 70 points of damage with an attack isn't out of the ordinary, which feels odd.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has you fighting a demonic invasion, which is exactly the kind of plot I enjoy. Unfortunately, the demons in the game have resistance to pretty much every type of attack you've got, which can be seriously irritating.

I took months-long breaks when playing, and came back to the game later in the year to hit a game-breaking bug in chapter 4 out of the game's 6 chapters. A small but mandatory location in an extraplanar town ended up being unreachable, and I couldn't progress the plot. So I had to stop playing. Without that, it would have been a contender for my favorite game of 2022.

Ni No Kuni 2 - I was a huge fan of the original Ni No Kuni, and I was surprised as I played this game that it didn't include any of the original's Pokemon-like mechanics. As the play continued to expand, introducing significantly different gameplay, I decided that the game wasn't for me.

Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara - I bought this game on Steam years ago. Back in the mid-90s, I played Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom in an arcade I'd worked at, and I loved the game. Over Thanksgiving weekend this year, I fired up Shadow Over Mystara, the sequel, and got into it. When you're using your Street Fighter 2 skills in a beat-em-up like this, it gets seriously fun. I found that I didn't love manipulating the game menu's interface, and so the spellcasting characters were less fun for me. Oddly, my favorite two characters to play ended up being the dwarf and the elf.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown - It was a podcast I listen to in which they played their first episode from 10 years ago that turned me on to XCOM: Enemy Unknown. In 2012, they were talking about this great new game, and I decided to give it a try.

It reminds me quite a bit of Fallout: Tactics, which I loved. You control a squad of 4 to 6 soldiers, running missions to stop an alien invasion. You defend cities, assault crashed UFOs, and build a tech tree to better equip Earth's forces. Great game, despite being ten years old. As soon as I finished, I immediately started up a second run-through.

When my second playthrough of the game was interrupted by save file corruption, I looked and found a sequel to the game, X-Com 2, which I'm playing now. It has a great Half-Life 2 vibe, in which the alien invaders are an occupying force on Earth. But if the first game was hard, this one is a whole new level of difficult. I'd done some save scumming in the first game, but in this one it's mandatory. I'm sure I'll have more to report when I cover this game next year.