It’s time to give the most prestigious award of the year, that’s right it’s the Rathole Game of the Year. This is an award where we take time to reflect and try and remember all the games we played over the last 12 months, and hopefully recall one we enjoyed that was actually released in 2022.

This is the text/transcript version of a video I posted on my new channel BigRathole. Watch the video right here or just keep on reading if you can’t stand hearing me use an announcer voice for an entire video.

We pride ourselves here at the Rathole Game of the Year Awards show for knowing that more than just Elden Ring and God of War exist, and we promise not to arbitrarily give them both awards. We will in fact, only give one of them an award.

We went through a rigorous process of deciding who is most deserving of an accolade this evening. It’s the new scientific method known as just my fucken opinion bro. Essentially I canvassed the denizens of the Rathole and they gave me their individual choices. I made no attempt to order them because my friends tastes are all equally shit.

Without further ado our first GOTY goes to 

Triangle Strategy

It’s got an inscruitably terrible name but don’t let that put you off. Initially released on the Switch with a PC release dropping later in the year Triangle Strategy showed us how good Tactical RPG’s can be just in time for a half baked remaster of tactics ogre. Every single fight feels like it’s on the edge of failure, till it’s suddenly a cake walk. The 2.5D visuals are a treat that we can expect Square Enix to thrash mercilessly for years to come. Great Story, great gameplay, great branching choices. 

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

Odyssey dropped in 2021 but live service games get a pass around here so Elite makes the cut. While finally getting the long awaited space legs proved to be underwhelming for practically everybody, and fire causes even the best computers in the world to chug Odyssey still provides the classic Elite experience, now with added thargoids! Didn’t like the size of human occupied space? No problem it’s all getting fucked up now and it’s time for you to stop trading slaves and finally shoot some bugs. Perhaps the most exciting emergent real time storyline ever delivered by a videogame. Playing it feels like you’re making your small mark on a real but fictional history.

Overwatch 2 

Who needs a new game when you can have the same game again with a year of patches applied all at once. OW1 was game of the year in 2016 so I see no reason why it can’t be GOTY again in 2022. Exciting changes happen every day like the sudden removal of heroes for the rotation but not the cash shop. This keeps players on their toes never knowing who will be unplayable next. Overwatch 2 delivers the promise of taking Overwatch  to the very next level with single player campaign material. And one day it might deliver us more than just a promise.

Grounded 

Finally a game where you can be the physical size of your self confidence. Fight ants, drink water droplets off leaves, be terrified of birds, and rediscover what you already knew as a child, the backyard on a microscopic level is the most exciting place to explore in the world. 

It’s honey I shrunk the kids the video game. We’re the first to make that connection, and we’re extremely proud of our powers of deduction. It’s been rocking around for a while but this year saw the version 1.0 release of the game, with new patches being added all the time. Probs be fun with friends if you had any!

Last but not… Last, It’s

Elden Ring

Elden Ring is the Genshin Impact of Dark Souls games. But instead of having hundreds of dollars extracted from you for a copy pasted character model with slightly different clothes on you spend dozens of hours earning the right to wear cooking utensils. Spend glorious hours as some sort of maidenless undead hobo getting killed by even bigger hobos. Explore a world in a non ubisoft way. Discover secrets! discover that yeah it’s the greatest thing you’ve played all year but you’re still gonna get distracted by something else before you get anywhere near completing it.