LIST: The Best Video Games You Can Play Right Now

New video games are rarely released during the first few months of a new year. Developers that fall short of the holiday deadline frequently cut their losses and postpone the results of their labor until January or February in order to purchase essential time for additional polish. Nevertheless, the beginning of 2022 is unlike anything I can recall. The COVID bottleneck is starting to ease, studios are working at maximum efficiency, and all of a sudden Namco and Sony are managing to release two of the most anticipated titles on their respective slates in the same week, far ahead of the autumnal peak. Following the gaming industry means you’ll always have a backlog of unfinished games in your Steam library, but it’s rarely been this bad so rapidly. Of course, having that issue is a positive thing. I considerably prefer our current situation to the difficulties of 2021, when the release schedule completely stopped up. Here are some of our favorites for what is already looking to be a banner year in gaming, sorted in date order.

10 Best Video Games You Can Play Right Now

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Playable on: Nintendo Switch

It wasn’t necessary for Pokémon to alter. In the past three years, two DS classics—Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl—as well as new editions of the main series have all been released. All of those games had incredibly strong sales, demonstrating that the Pokémon formula is still successful 30 years after Red and Blue. However, Pokémon Legends: Arceus offers a different future in which Nintendo decided to forgo the too-basic RPG trappings in favor of something a little more profound. Here you are, a Pokémon trainer living alone in the wild, getting a clearer, spookier idea of what it might be like to live among the wild Pikachus. Poké Balls can be used to sneak up on Pokémon and surprise them, fight your target without being forced into a turn-based grind, and flee for your life after upsetting a massive Electrode. I’ve had dreams about playing this video game since I was approximately eleven years old because it’s Pokémon meets Bear Grylls.

Strange Horticulture

Playable on: Windows PC

Strange Horticulture is a game about observing plants, as its name suggests. As distressed clients flood your door and demand particular herbal cures, you peruse a dusty tome packed with botanical theory before giving the requested specimen. Even though it sounds dull now, you’ll start to enjoy Strange Horticulture’s sophisticated deduction method as it finds its rhythm. With only a few hints, you are expected to go over an extensive list of phytologic disclaimers, gradually eliminating the exceptions and edge instances until you are positive that the man in your business requires the plant with blue blooms and triangle-shaped leaves. Finally, a computer game that makes us simultaneously feel educated and bucolic.

Rainbow 6 Extraction

Playable on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X

It has the feel of a big expansion pack, Rainbow 6: Extraction. The game shares the same characters and weapons as Rainbow 6 Siege from Ubisoft, but forgoes squad-based multiplayer in favor of a horror-movie-style journey through an outrageous, viscerally terrifying alien apocalypse. Think John Carpenter’s The Thing with SWAT squads as you and two pals struggle to accomplish a trio of challenges before falling victim to the horde in the franchise’s sterile corridors and corporate antechambers, which have been overrun by oozing pustules, curdled zombies, and infectious muck. Extraction exceeded my incredibly low expectations; it reminded me of the best high-stakes XCOM missions with their grim, white-knuckle thrills. Have you left any of your pals behind in the churn? The parasite has them trapped, and your next goal is to release them, or they’ll pay a harsh progression penalty. You recall what it was like to actually fear death in Extraction after so many co-op games that treat us with kid hands.

Elden Ring

Playable on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X

The past 10 years have seen FromSoftware produce some of the best single-player action games ever. With games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, developers let us loose in intriguing universes filled with brutally challenging boss fights and a teeming underbelly of hidden information, Easter eggs, and branching pathways that will keep you guessing long after the credits have rolled. The company’s most daring evolution to date is Elden Ring. FromSoftware tosses its conservative linearity out the window and masterfully stretches its epic, Souls-ian grandeur in every direction with a world map that rivals the size of Grand Theft Auto’s Los Santos. Every square inch of the atlas glows with custom-written adventures, excluding the repeated simulacra that clog up the typical Assassin’s Creed voyage. This open-world game was constructed to the highest standards. It’s a remarkable game that marks a turning point for the field of environment design.

Read: Everything We Learned About Splatoon 3 From The Nintendo Direct

Horizon Forbidden West

Playable on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

The Horizon series’ setting is challenging to comprehend. You are a Neolithic cavewoman living in an ancient America where enormous cybernetic dinosaurs are common. You’ll repel them with a spear made of silicon chip blades. Oh, and you also peruse what look to be the abandoned laboratories of a much more advanced human race in underground ruins. The 2017 release of the first game did a terrific job of weaving all of these erratic plot lines together, and Forbidden West maintains that effort. You’ll stick around for the plot, which deftly reveals more of the secrets surviving in this post-post-postapocalyptic world, even though the gameplay is still a fine open-world adventure that shines when you’re up against one of those aluminum-plated T. Rexes. Is mankind truly deserving of a second chance? is always the central query.

Total War: Warhammer III 

Playable on: MacOS, Windows PC

A franchise called Total War was once totally engulfed in historical doctrine. From Napoleon’s front lines to the feudal Japanese Oda clan, we wreaked devastation while being permanently constrained by the boundaries of the planet Earth. But with 2016’s Total War: Warhammer, the game’s creator, Creative Assembly, switched to orcs, elves, and demons, and now, six years later, we have the trilogy’s climax. Like the earlier games, Warhammer puts you in command of a roving army that is eager to engage its adversary force on the open battlefield. Total War is more about watching from a distance and savoring the magnificent viscera when your cavalry executes a perfectly timed flank, while there is plenty of strategic strategy to analyze. With a stronger focus on narrative than its predecessors, Warhammer stands out. Here, Creative Assembly is unrestricted by analects and is free to conjure up gruesome situations involving the numerous revolting creatures that make up the Warhammer universe. Total War is a great place to start if you’ve always been interested in this grimdark world but haven’t had the need to paint those pricey pewter statues.

Tunic

Playable on: MacOS, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X

Elden Ring has sold 12 million copies, proving that we are in the golden age of enigmatic, elliptical video games. However, FromSoftware’s unbreakable opacity is nothing compared to Tunic, a top-down Zelda-like adventure that offers absolutely no helpful exposition to the player. Objective marks are absent, the dialogue is encoded in odd hieroglyphics, and the riddles are incredibly challenging to understand. Is that your only hope? The world is littered with a ragged in-game instruction booklet, similar to the paperback guidebook that came with cardboard Mega Man boxes in the late 1980s. Tunic aims to bring back the wonderful bewilderment of earlier video games, when we inserted an unidentified cartridge into a Super Nintendo before we could read and relied on instinct to get through. Designer Andrew Shouldice has faith in us to go for it. You’ll discover that the water isn’t as chilly as you first thought once you’re in.

Norco

Playable on: MacOS, Windows PC

Norco is a true location. With a population of just under 3,000 people, it is situated just outside of New Orleans and is dominated by a massive Shell oil refinery that both supplies and represses the community. Although the depiction in Norco isn’t entirely accurate—Louisiana isn’t dotted with elegiac androids and swampy, revanchist death-cults—for all of its sensationalism, Norco feels surprisingly grounded in the numerous tragedies of 2022. This point-and-click adventure wants you to immerse yourself in an especially American dystopia while you try to uncover an alluring mystery. With each breath of that moist, sulfur-flecked air, you’ll sense the pain.

The Quarry

Playable on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X

With 2015’s Until Dawn, a gruesome slasher-flick parody in which you accompany a group of clueless twentysomethings to their unfortunate demise, Supermassive Games established themselves. In a sense, The Quarry is the game’s spiritual heir. This time, we’re in charge of a group of teens trying to make it through the night at a camp in the moonlight, and to no one’s surprise, things immediately spiral out of control. The plot of The Quarry develops like an interactive drama; you control the protagonists’ decisions during a series of daisy-chained cutscenes and watch as they inevitably meet a horrific, midnight movie ending. It’s corny, hematic, and humbly unassuming. Some horror games seek to throw your body on a meathook, while others want to reveal their great thoughts about the cosmic flaws of morality. Both are essential in their own right, but The Quarry strikes the ideal note amid the beautiful early summer.

As Dusk Falls

Playable on: Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PC

Since Dusk Falls was created specifically for those who don’t play many video games. It resembles a very interactive comic book instead. You can interrupt at specific flex points in the story, much like in a choose-your-own-adventure book, as the tragedy in Two Rock, Arizona, plays out and the errant souls of this world fall toward their doom. Although Dusk Falls obviously aims for the western-themed family drama of Breaking Bad or Yellowstone, its cooperative mode has garnered the greatest praise. You and seven other friends can watch the narrative and weigh in on the moral judgments that are made, revealing who the true Machiavelli in the group is. Do you really think mum supported shooting the robbery victim at the convenience store? To everyone’s astonishment, As Dusk Falls is the summer’s most popular party game.

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