It’s no exaggeration to say that, in terms of video games, 2022 is off to a banner start. The first three months of the year have been flush with the sort of marquee releases that tend to clog the holiday season, when year-end shopping sprees and awards shows are on everyone’s minds. It’s not even April and we already have close to a dozen games that easily qualify as some of the best of 2022.
This post originally appeared on March 16, 2022. We’ve updated it to reflect some of the best games that have come out in the meantime.
What follows is a comprehensive list of those games, blockbusters and indie standouts alike, that have already left a meteoric impact on Kotaku’s collective tastes. But also, we get it: Your time is precious, and even if you spend every second of your free time playing, you’ll never be able to knock these all out before the next wave of must-play games comes out. To that end, we’ve included rough estimates of how long it would take you to complete each game, citing figures from the eternally helpful HowLongToBeat.
All right, that’s enough ado. Here, in no particular order, are the best games of 2022.
