Top Picks 2022 – 10 Favourite Indie Games from this Year

“We don’t need to have just one favourite. We keep adding favourites. Our favourite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change.” – Lloyd Alexander

Top Picks from 2022

The whole writing team, Rachael, David and Tamaster, choose their 10 top picks from the 2022 indie releases they have reviewed this year!

Rachael’s Top Picks

Lost in Play

Lost in Play is a delightful point-and-click puzzle game about a brother and sister who are playing make-believe and travel too far. Lost, they must embark on an adventurous journey back home, encountering many perils along the way.

Click here for the full review!

Ghost on the Shore

Ghost on the Shore is an emotional new exploration game in which players take on the role of Riley. Accompanied by a mysterious and headstrong ghost she must venture across the abandoned Rogue Islands to uncover their troubled past.

Click here for the full review!

Beacon Pines

Beacon Pines is a cute and creepy adventure game with a twist. Players can sneak out, make new friends, organise heists and collect words that can be used to alter the course of fate!

Click here for the full review!

Karisvale

Karisvale is a narrative-focused, top-down detective game by solo developer Brendan Tighe. Players must explore the titular town as they take on the role of Shaymus O’Malley, an experienced private investigator who has been hired by Karisvale’s mayor to find a missing person.

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Arise

Arise: A Simple Story is an emotional puzzle-platformer in which players traverse past memories, solve puzzles and manipulate time in order to change their surroundings. It is a story of happiness and hardship and is sure to pull on the heartstrings!

Click here for the full review!

Tamaster’s Top Picks

Sunday Gold

Sunday Gold deserves a place among this year’s picks thanks to its hard-boiled characters, dystopian setting and crude humor that pulls no punches. Not only that, but it also manages to innovate in gameplay, by seamlessly blending together RPG, point-n-click and puzzle games. Definitely a title to try out if you want something different – originality is a scarce commodity in this day and age, after all.

Click here for the full review!

Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Don’t let the cutesy aesthetics and colorful palettes fool you: this second yearly pick conceals a fierce sleeping beast underneath its surface (on higher difficulties, at least). A mix of traditional platforming, metroidvania-style open-world and unforgiving souls-like combat, Kena caters to both casual and hardcore players with its scalable difficulty – also excels in narration, visual design, music and voice acting on top of that.

Click here for the full review!

Citizen Sleeper

No matter how far mankind evolves, greed and selfishness follow us as a shadow, always. This sci-fi narrative adventure puts player choice at the center, and keeps tension up with a good dose of resource management and hard decisions that influence its diverse, relatable, empathetic character roster. With deep themes such as the nature of life, transhumanism and the consequences of corporatocracy, this is a game that not only entertains but elicits more than a few moments of introspection.

Click here for the full review!

David’s Top Picks

Last in Space

Last in Space is a minimalist strategy shooter game taking place in the final frontier, developed and coded for the TIC-80 fantasy computer. As the last survivor of the human species, you must travel across several dimensions to eradicate the hive (not us, we’re innocent) and prevent the hostile zorg from infesting too many planets! However, the hive is too strong and the zorg will quickly rush you, so you need to hop from planet to planet and build facilities to aid with your survival!

Click here for the full review!

Belle Boomerang

Belle Boomerang is a 2D platformer featuring a young lady with her ever-trusty boomerang. With the King and Queen suffering from a horrible curse, she sets out on an adventure to remove the curse and bring back prosperity to her land!

Click here for the full review!

Summary

There were so many great games released during 2022 that picking just ten was a tough challenge. Our honourable mentions include Lucy Dreaming, a pet shop after dark and Martha is Dead. We can’t wait to see what all these indie developers have in store for us next and we’re excited about all the games 2023 promises to bring – in particular, we’re very excited about Dead Pets Unleashed by Triple Topping!

We’d also like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our readers and wish you all a happy and healthy new year!

If you enjoyed this article you might also like to see our top picks from previous years:
2021 – 2020 – 2019