DIRECTOR'S CUT - 5 More 2022 Games You Should Have Played (Patreon)

Hey hey hey, it’s me, here with a very special end-of-year replacement for the Director’s cut. Normally this is a segment that goes out to $3 people and above but I thought seeing as it’s just game recommendations I could be charitable and let you all see five bonus games that I really wanted to put on the Games You Should Have Played list but wasn’t able to for a variety of reasons. What are they? Well, I’m glad you asked, let’s start things off with…

You Suck at Parking, a manically paced precision third person driving game in which you’ve got to park your little car in increasingly fiddlier and more insane spots, all with limited fuel and without ever stopping. You Suck At Parking easily could’ve been one of many janky rage-bait games but thanks to its smooth controls and very creative level design that sees you flinging your little toy car into the air and gliding it around minefields with ease, it actually transforms a comparatively simple concept into something with a very high skill ceiling and a whole host of fun optimizations as you try to hit each spot in a level with one car each, and carefully setting up subsequent attempts with your first drive through a level. This game is the best kind of whiteknuckle stress inducing and that’s even more true in the multiplayer which is one step short of absolute chaos, and thus is even better than the singleplayer. (Greenmangaming £11.89)

Speaking of vehicular games, next up is Iron Lung, a game that - in the manner of these things - takes place in a submarine sinking into an ocean of blood on a strange alien planet. Oh yeah, the door has also been welded shut behind you. Iron lung is weird, because the entire experience is presented from the inside of your sealed cockpit, you never actually see the outside world except via the medium of your craft’s camera, which can only capture grainy black and white photos, leaving you to speculate about what those noises coming from outside are, and who’s been leaving all those skeletons around. I won’t spoil how Iron Lung’s ninety minute playtime ends but rest assured it’s one of the best bitesize horror experiences around, with some very creative and, err, realistically fiddly movement mechanics. (Steam: £4.31)

Stray is another game with really interesting traversal systems, taking all your assumptions about what typically humanoid movement and navigation should feel like and upending them by making you play as, well, a cat. Stray is, predictably, adorable, but what struck me about it is just how fun getting around is - the game expertly leverages the natural agility of a cat to have you bounding between rooftops and shimmying into little crevices and shelves so that you can knock things over arbitrarily like all good cats are dutybound to do. Stray’s not the most complex game on the list and the story’s not too much to write home about either - but in terms of gorgeous cinematic action games that are chill enough to be played with a stomach full of party food then Stray is a top-tier pick. (Steam: £19.19)

Next up, we’ve got Sifu which is about as heavily inspired by visceral Hong Kong kung fu action movies as you can get without just being one. The game is an absolutely brutally difficult brawler that has you cinematically beating up armies of thugs using improvised weapons and an awesome rough and tumble combat style that flows together beautifully even when you’re bad at the game like I am. On that note, death in Sifu is encouraged and expected, and when you do, you don’t get a game over, you instead come back to life a few years older, ready to try again, introducing an interesting failure spectrum where the older you become, the more damage you do, but the frailer you are. Getting to the end of sifu will take some real skills, so it’s a good thing every inch of the game feels absolutely perfect to play because you’re going to be seeing the outside of the bar level a LOT. (Fanatical: £18.55)

And after that there’s Across The Obelisk, which is what you get if you take your average deck building roguelike and multiply everything by four. See, rather than just managing a mere one character with a measly single deck, in across the obelisk you have to contend with four characters, each with their own decks and entirely separate cardpools. This introduces a whole new layer to deckbuilding as in order to win you have to construct synergies across your whole party, setting up enemies for a smackdown with your healer and tank before dealing the killing blow with your damage dealers. Across the Obelisk is the next logical step from a genre that’s become a little oversaturated and I really appreciated its increased complexity and variety relative to everything else on the market. If you consider yourself a deckbuilding expert then be sure to give it a look. (Steam: £12.74)

And there we have it, there’s five more games for you to take a look at! Ultimately, there were unique reasons for each game that lead to me deciding to include or not include them, from being too popular to just not looking very good as footage. However, it mostly just came down to which ones I thought were the most unique and interesting rather than necessarily good - there’s one game on the list this year I genuinely didn’t like but I thought was too special to exclude, see if you can figure out which one it is!

Anyway, I’ll be putting up an end-of-year retrospective Architect Address in about a week after I’ve had a well-earned break. I hope you all have a good new year and I’ll see you in 2023!

… time to get to work on next year’s list…