The Best Game of 2022

Considering 2022 was a 'quiet' year for new games, the quality on show was unquestionable. From blockbuster releases to smaller yet equally as impressive Indies, the last 12 months has been a stellar year whether you play on console or PC.

Two long-awaited giants lead the pack, with Santa Monica Studios' God of War Ragnarok closing off the latest chapter in Kratos' epic journey in style, while Elden Ring once again proves that FromSoftware and Hidetaka Miyazaki raise the bar with everything they make. Immortality boasted powerful performances and a gripping story, Tunic's unapologetically challenging gameplay was charming and rewarding in equal measure, and Marvel Snap upended the collectible card game genre with truly fresh ideas. Mario makes it into our best game list once again, but this time alongside the Rabbits in a game that's a major leap forward over its predecessor, and Vampire Survivors is an outwardly simple roguelike that digs its teeth in deep.

Without further ado, IGN's Best Game of 2022 is...

Elden Ring

After 13 years of iterating on the “Souls” series and decades more in the wider gamut of game development, renowned Japanese studio FromSoftware did something that seemed tougher than even the most brutal Dark Souls boss fight: it created a global smash hit, all while continuing to cater to hardcore fans and expertly evolve the often imitated, never replicated formula it’s best known for. Elden Ring is a monumental achievement in video games, a sprawling, endlessly rewarding masterclass in open-world game design where grand vistas and towering cities feel as paramount to the experience as the intimate conflicts that happen within them.

At the heart of it all is you, the player, exploring a gorgeous and intriguing but also arduous, punishing world that pushes back hard. You’ll die a lot – in brutal and seemingly unconquerable ways – to brutes and beasts and environmental perils, but you’ll never feel alone. You’ve got a near endless combination of weapons, spells, armor sets, and even human players to summon by your side. Roleplay as a hulking knight swinging a truck-sized battle axe at the head of a fire breathing dragon, or a withered mage hailing cosmic horrors down on enemies from afar. Elden Ring is your story to create and your Tarnished hero yours to shape.

While Elden Ring may be light on narrative in the more overt, traditional video game way, it more than makes up for it with its lore and world building, rewarding players with intricately crafted characters in sidequests tucked in corners all over the world. Like most things here, the more effort the player puts in to discover, the more rewards they’ll reap. It’s a core tenet of the philosophy behind what makes Elden Ring so special and it’s something that no studio can pull off quite like FromSoftware can.

Ironically, for a game about a lonely journey through a hellish world, one of the most lasting gifts of Elden Ring is that it became a global cultural phenomenon, inspiring millions of players everywhere to share secrets and incredible moments. We all cheered each other on, spent countless hours discussing our strategies against the toughest bosses, and proudly posed our characters in their greatest (and strangest) costumes and builds.

We’ll likely spend the rest of our lives thinking about, talking about, and playing Elden Ring, but until then and for now, Elden Ring is IGN’s Game of the Year for 2022.

These are our nominees for the Best Game of 2022.

The Best Game of 2022

Elden Ring

At a glance, Elden Ring could be mistaken for Dark Souls 4, something that admittedly would likely still be enough to put it in the running for Game of the Year. But developer FromSoftware has masterfully applied its honed, unforgiving formula to a vast open world, and it's that combination that really makes Elden Ring such a new and unforgettable experience. Not since Zelda: Breath of the Wild have we had a game that provides a sprawling world so densely filled with liberating opportunities and astonishing discoveries. FromSoftware’s switch from linear to open-world design moves its medieval fantasy closer to the realm of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. This is your story, your adventure, and you’re free to chase your destiny in almost any fashion you choose. Such an open-ended structure also means that, should you hit one of FromSoft’s infamously difficult challenges, there’s always something else to do in The Lands Between; something that will help build your strength and overcome that sticking point. That’s the key to Elden Ring being FromSoftware’s most approachable game, and something that enabled it to become not just a mainstream hit, but a genuine cultural phenomenon.

God of War Ragnarok

God of War Ragnarok achieved everything it set out to. A stunning blend of bone-breaking action and delicate drama, it’s a nuanced story packed full of memorable characters and moments that keep you guessing at every turn. Its mix of rhythmic combat, smart puzzles, and nourishing side stories combine to create an unforgettable journey through stunning Norse realms, where you’ll meet the uniquely realized gods that call them home. Ragnarok further pushes God of War into the emotionally complex spaces it once never dared step foot into, while never forgetting to give a knowing nod to the series' storied history. God of War Ragnarok is not only one of the very best games of 2022, but the culmination of nearly two decades of reinvention and refinement. In being so, it brings another of Kratos’ mythical sagas to an end and cements his place in the pantheon of the greatest video game characters.

Immortality

Immortality seems like a bizarre concept on paper: you’re tasked with determining what mysterious fate befell fledgling actress Marissa Marcel, but to do so you must analyze a box set of three unreleased feature films whose story chapters and special features can only be experienced entirely out of sequence as though the scene selection is stuck on shuffle mode. It could have been an incoherent mess, were it not for the authenticity of its production values and powerful performances from its cast. It pulls you in and convinces you that you’re poring over footage fragments from genuine movies lost to time, along with an ingenious image-matching interface that demands you scour each and every frame for clues. Manon Gage remains consistently engaging in the lead role no matter how many times you watch and re-watch each scene, but it’s Charlotta Mohlin’s turn as enigmatic presence ‘The One’ that provides Immortality with its most intimate and intimidating moments, not to mention its most chilling surprises. A messy, maze-like and utterly mesmerizing mystery to solve, Immortality presents a spellbinding narrative unlike any other we experienced in 2022, or indeed in any other year.

Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

There are two kinds of great sequels: those that play it safe and stick close to what worked, and those that take risks, swing for the fences, and pull out a second big win. Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is the latter, following up Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle’s unexpectedly strong game that handed Nintendo’s mascot dual pistols, mashed him up with Ubisoft’s weird nonverbal rabbit characters, and threw them into XCOM-style turn-based battles. Sparks of Hope is still all of those things but much larger and more open in more ways than one, with a superb customization system that lets you attach a pair of cute floating star fellas on your characters to give them your own customized elemental bonuses and special attacks. At the same time it pulls the grid out from under the tactical board, letting Mario and friends move as freely as we’re accustomed to, and blows out the overworld map into five distinct open-world planets to explore and solve puzzles in. It’s a fantastic example of how game developers can reinvent and expand on a wonderful idea rather than just iterate on it, all without keeping the bizarre personality that helped make it special.

Marvel Snap

Not only does Marvel Snap take great advantage of the Marvel license — utilizing a huge cast of characters and locations from the iconic comic property, and celebrating some absolutely incredible art — it also upends many of the conventions of the collectible card game (CCG) genre. Designed first and foremost for mobile, decks are small, games are short and both sides play their cards simultaneously, making the gameplay all about anticipating what your opponent will do and adapting your game plan accordingly. The three locations where you play your characters to each match are also randomized, adding another significant wildcard element. Marvel Snap even eschews the traditional booster packs used by basically every CCG since Magic: The Gathering and instead ties card acquisition to a progression track that players work their way down over the long haul. While some of these design elements have serious drawbacks, Marvel Snap is still a breath of fresh air and packed with personality.

Tunic

That Tunic is largely the work of one person (Andrew Shouldice) who spent seven years working on the project only makes its brilliance all the more impressive. Tunic looks like a beautiful homage to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – right down to the green, well...tunic its anthropomorphic fox hero wears – but it plays more like an isometric-view Dark Souls, complete with a rogue's gallery of ultra-challenging bosses. But its fusion of old-school charm and new-school challenge is exceeded by its impressive world-building: there is no dialogue in Tunic, and instead its gameplay instructions are conveyed via the hidden in-game pages of a pictorial instruction manual that looks like it was ripped straight out of the early '90s. It is a riveting action-adventure that stands tall despite its fox's short stature.

Vampire Survivors

One of these nominees is not like the others. Seeing a game with sprite graphics that appear to have been ripped from a long-forgotten fantasy arcade cabinet from the late ‘80s and controls that amount to a single joystick and a button to say “ok” when picking your new weapons up here next to nominees like Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok surprised us too… but it didn’t take long after we started playing Vampire Survivors that we were awestruck by how much it’s able to do with seemingly so little. The fast-paced unlocking of its dozens of auto-firing weapons and passive upgrades make each roguelite survival run more interesting than the last: you find new combinations of upgrades and evolve them into more powerful forms until, before you know it, you’ve tumbled down its innumerable rabbit holes of weird secrets and your screen fills with psychedelic destruction as swarms of thousands of enemies part before you as the Red Sea before Moses.

All IGN Best of Games 2022 Categories

IGN's Best Games of 2022 - Ranked

Here are all the games nominated for Game of the Year in 2022, ranked by the number of votes they got by the IGN editorial staff. Elden Ring won GOTY.

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