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Well done everyone, we made it through to 2022. Has anyone else’s brain lost the ability to distinguish between “holiday at home with the kids” and “lockdown at home with the kids”? After 14 days ‘off’ I am very ready to be somewhere completely silent, and perhaps be able to play a video game for longer than 20 minutes without either being asked for a snack, or falling asleep.
There’s a lot to look forward to this year, not least all the big games that we were supposed to be playing in 2021. There are so many open-world timesinks, especially, that I don’t know how anyone is supposed to fit all of them in. If you want to know what I will be doing in late February and the entirety of March, the answer is Elden Ring. Dark Souls meets Breath of the Wild! Get it in my veins!
Speaking of Breath of the Wild, the sequel to the most expansive (and, in my opinion, the greatest) Zelda game will be out sometime this year as well. Then there’s Horizon: Forbidden West, a game about a flame-haired female warrior fighting robot dinosaurs, a game that I’m pretty sure I made up in my dreams at the age of 11. Somehow I almost forgot about Starfield, the first big Bethesda game since Fallout 4, an explorable sci-fi universe that I still know tantalisingly little about. Will Mass Effect finally have some competition?
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Traditionally it takes a few years for new games consoles to bed in, and for developers to really explore what they can achieve with the technology. Though the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 had a few standouts last year, by the end of 2022 there’s going to be a proper catalogue of new blockbusters. Of course, actually buying a new console to play them on is still, more than a year after launch, a total scramble. Supply-chain issues and huge demand as a result of ongoing global lockdowns have contributed to a scarcity that has had people frantically hitting refresh on Amazon and Game restocks, mindful that they’ll all be sold out again in minutes (or snapped up by bots, to be resold on eBay at an infuriating mark-up). This problem is likely to persist through 2022, Sony’s CFO Hiroki Totoki has admitted. It’s never been so difficult to buy into the next generation of video games.
But then: do you really need to? I have always felt that buying a games console in the first year or two of its life is only necessary if you get a real kick out of technological novelty. For most people, there is no rush. We are long past the time when games became unplayably aged after a few years on the shelves. Though only a few games from my 90s childhood could be unreservedly recommended today – pity anybody coming fresh to GoldenEye on the N64, with its bizarre single-stick controls and muddy graphics – pretty much all of the best games of, say, 2010 are a) still just as good and b) still available to buy. Sometimes I rather miss the thrill I used to get from tracking down a coveted retro game on eBay, or from digging through baskets of cartridges in Japanese game stories in the late 00s and coming across a copy of some obscure sumo-wrestling game I once saw in a copy of Super Play. But it’s also undeniably a good thing that you can instantly download or even stream the vast majority of games released in the last decade, when we used to have to go to such lengths.
The video games industry is obsessed with the new. As a technology-driven art form, new tech has always been part of the deal. But now more than ever, it’s not what defines games. If you’ve not got a next-gen console yet, you’re not missing out on much. 95% of the joy of this medium is available to you regardless.
What to play
Over the Christmas break I dipped into a few games that I hadn’t found time for over the course of the year, and one that stood out was Unpacking, the story of a life told through the act of moving house. Each chapter presents you with a diorama of a home (a childhood bedroom, a college dorm, a cosy one-bed), into which you must somehow fit all of the stuff jumbled into your cardboard boxes. I found this game soothing – it has an implied narrative that is quite sweet, if also very predictable – until I started playing with my partner, who methodically Tetrised everything on to shelves and surfaces however they would fit, like a psychopath. Given that one of this game’s themes is how to fit your possessions (and therefore your life) in around someone else’s, it felt appropriate that we were low-level arguing about how to arrange a virtual kitchen.
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One/Series X/S, PC
Approximate playtime: 3.5 hours
What to read
The games industry is busy in-fighting over NFTs, the latest solution-to-a-problem-that-doesn’t-exist from the techbro universe, and also one of the most depressing trends I have encountered in all my years covering this business. Ubisoft has introduced them to its games, but nobody wants to buy them. Square-Enix’s CEO has declared his hopes that they become a major trend, which seems rather ambitious as they have yet to be proven useful for anything except Internet flexing. Having spent several months gaining a better understanding of NFTs and cryptocurrency this year, and listened to a few developers evangelise them (and more developers spit fury over them), I have found no better summary than this Gawker piece about the total soul-deadening dumbness of the entire scene as it stands: “world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.”
You’ve read the Guardian’s 10 games to look forward to in 2022, right? It is becoming a running joke that every year, about half of the games on it fail to actually come out in the year they’re supposed to. A full 6 of the 10 games I picked for the 2021 list are still unreleased, and one of the 2020 games to watch still isn’t finished. Anyway, if you are looking for more games to look forward to and then be disappointed by when they entirely fail to materialise, Polygon has put out a list of 50.
What to click
Riot Games to pay $100m to settle gender discrimination lawsuit
As a parent obsessed with my kids’ safety, I have discovered the video game from hell
How playing the video games of your youth reconnects you to yourself
Question Block
Because everyone is still recovering from their New Year’s hangover, I’m in the hot seat for Question Block. This week, reader Lawal Muhammad asks: Which recent games made you feel happiest/most content while playing them?
For me there are three kinds of game that give me happy brain chemicals: anything involving playing to music (Guitar Hero, Tetris Effect, Rez), which induce a kind of flow-state euphoria; games with predictable, repetitive, gentle rhythms that you can sink right into (Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, old-school Harvest Moon), which create a sense of safety; and absolutely mad nonsense that makes me laugh and gives me something unexpected, feeding my insatiable need for novelty.
So the games that made me happiest recently were Psychonauts 2, a game about delving into people’s brains that brought a delightfully weird buffet of different game concepts, visual gags and in-jokes to the table, and It Takes Two, a genre mashup about a divorcing couple that completely changes itself around every hour or so.
If you’ve got a question for the next Question Block, hit reply on this newsletter and I’ll find someone interesting to answer them!