2022 is drawing to a close, and that means it's time for one of gamers' oldest and most sacred traditions: the debate over the Game of the Year. Was it Elden Ring, with its dramatic open-world overhaul of the well-worn Dark Souls formula? Could it be God of War: Ragnarök, with its acclaimed narrative work and weighty axe swinging? While both are great games deserving of attention, what's lost in the debate are the incredible indie games that released this year.
In recent years, the "Game of the Year" discussion has been largely facilitated by The Game Awards, the Geoff Keighley-backed award show that's often been called the "Oscars of gaming." The Game Awards began in 2014, although the show had a nearly identical predecessor in the form of the Spike Video Game Awards that began all the way back in 2003. It's been nearly 20 years since the Spike Video Game Awards began, and in that time, exactly one indie game has taken home the top prize: last year's It Takes Two.
It seems absurd that only one indie game has ever won Game of the Year in the combined 19-year history of the Spike VGAs and the Game Awards. Obviously, AAA titles can afford to spend more on marketing campaigns, and voters are more likely to have played the biggest games of a given year, but discounting indies on the basis of size is clearly unfair. Sure, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild might have been the best game of 2017, but surely the competition wasn't fierce enough to entirely exclude games like Cuphead, Night in the Woods, Hollow Knight, and Dead Cells from the conversation -- and yet, none of those titles even landed a nomination.
The Game Awards has something that almost looks like a solution for this issue. In addition to Game of the Year, it hands out an award for "Best Independent Game." This is nice in principle -- if the show must be dominated by massive blockbusters, then it's at least considerate to spotlight a handful of excellent games that couldn't make it to the main event. Still, it almost feels insulting, as though a line has been drawn between "real games" and "indie games." That delineation is unfair, and despite seeming like a good way to account for indies, it only ends up isolating them further from their more expensive and flashy counterparts.
The Game Awards 2022 nominations won't be announced until Nov. 14, but many gamers speak as though the lineup has already been decided. The debate is between Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok. On occasion, someone might bring up Xenoblade Chronicles 3 or Horizon Forbidden West. As usual, it's an argument about which massive tentpole titles from AAA developers deserve the most praise. This has always been a troublesome way to frame the discussion, but in a year like 2022 that has been stuffed so full of phenomenal indie games, it's particularly insulting.
2022 has seen some of the most truly fascinating indie games in years. Angel Matrix's Neon White revived the bizarre and uneven dialogue of early dubbed anime and implanted it squarely in a fast-paced first-person parkour game, combining two concepts that AAA developers would rarely dare to touch, and managed to create a critically acclaimed and deliriously fun experience. Half Mermaid Productions put together a multi-tiered ghost story in Immortality, utilizing the language of both games and films to create something truly original and compelling. Nerial made Card Shark, a visually breathtaking microgame-infused visual novel about cheating at cards before the French Revolution.
There's also Geography of Robots' melancholy pixelated fever dream Norco, poncle's genre-defining survival bullet hell roguelite Vampire Survivors, Holy Wow's deliriously funny rhythm game Trombone Champ, rose-engine's brilliant survival horror throwback Signalis -- the list goes on and on. 2022 has seen an enormous wave of truly brilliant indie games that attempt (and accomplish) things AAA developers would hesitate to even consider. Each of these games deserves to be part of the Game of the Year conversation.
When the Game Awards nominations finally arrive, it's safe to assume that they'll look like those of years' past. Games like God of War: Ragnarök and Elden Ring will be there, with one or two indie games possibly squeezing their way onto the list with little to no chance of winning. It's time for that to change. It's time to reconsider which games truly deserve to be talked about as the "Game of the Year" and which games are simply well-marketed, massively expensive, conventionally successful products.