Graham’s Top 5 PS5, PS4 Games of 2022
Our individual Game of the Year articles allow our lovely team of writers to share their own personal PS5 and PS4 picks for 2022. Today it’s reviewer Graham Bana’s turn.
I’ve always loved the look and feel of the Outrun games, but they’ve been out of the public eye for so long that it’s sometimes easy to forget how much fun they were. Enter Slipstream, a game that unashamedly wears the Outrun influence on its sleeve. While it didn’t hold my attention for long like some of the other games on this list, it stayed with me long after I’d stopped playing, and I’ll definitely dive back into that delicious racing well again at some point. Also, it made me wish there were new Outrun games on the horizon.
What on earth is this doing here?! Call of Duty is a series that has been around for as long as I’ve been playing games, and I’ve played most, if not all, of them. And among this deluge of titles, I can count on one hand how many entries I loved. Black Ops 4 was particularly good, and my personal highlight of the series, but this latest Modern Warfare? It’s surprisingly great. The gunplay feels amazing, the sound design is genuinely solid for the first time maybe ever, and the amount of content on offer is impressive. With the exception of the half-baked co-op mode, pretty much everything has something great to offer. The campaign is interesting, DMZ is a nice idea if a little undercooked, Warzone 2 is solid, and the regular multiplayer is my favorite for a long time. Call of Duty offered quite the package this year.
The first Moss is by far one of my favorite PSVR titles. So I was extremely excited to rejoin Quill and venture back into Polyarc’s charming fantasy world. And boy did it not disappoint. Beautiful art direction, an amazing soundtrack, really fun hack-and-slash gameplay and a VR-essential diorama-style level design; Moss: Book II is incredible and even better than its predecessor. When both of these titles drop on PSVR 2, you better believe I’ll be playing through them both again. And I can’t wait!
What. A game. Norco is very much the kind of experience I can look at and feel like it was tailor-made for me. A dystopian, exciting point-and-click puzzle game, Norco knocked it out of the park. A bleak yet colorful mining town, Norco, Louisiana ended up being a brilliant backdrop for a bizarre cyberpunk experience, with great music and even better writing. Seriously, the prose in Norco is some of that absolutely best i’ve ever seen in a video game. Each passage was overflowing with floral, poetic language that I fell in love with almost immediately. This is one I will be thinking about for years to come.
While it may be a strange game to have as the number one pick of the year, I have adore Unpacking. A surprisingly relaxing title, Unpacking transformed a chore as normal as emptying boxes into a delightful distraction from the ordinary world. With some genuinely excellent contextual storytelling, the act of placing a variety of items exactly where I wanted them in my home became the highlight of the year. The music is great, the colorful pixelated graphics are vibrant and cheerful, and the gameplay is incredibly satisfying. While it might not be an experience for everyone, it was definitely one for me.
What do you think of Graham’s personal Game of the Year picks? Feel free to agree wholeheartedly, or complain relentlessly in the comments section below.
