By Nelson Schneider - 03/06/22 at 02:41 PM CT

Wow, is it March already? I guess we’d better take a look at the games coming in 2022 that are worth getting hyped about before any more of 2022 is in the rear-view mirror! Unlike previous years, there are a LOT of titles coming up in the near future to get excited about: 14 of them, to be precise. Let’s get to it.

14. Steel Rising
This upcoming release from Euro-Jank developer, Spiders, and trash-tier publisher, Focus (formerly Focus Home), is filled with mystery. While the visible surface looks like a mix of Dark Fantasy Revolutionary War… with Mechs, combined with open-world game design, we won’t actually know what we’ve got on our hands until we get to play it. Will this be an amazing Action/Adventure to follow on the heels of Spiders’ last release, “Greedfall,” or will it be another unplayable wreck like… nearly all of Spiders’ other games?

13. Sonic Frontiers
Who gets excited about new ‘Sonic’ games anymore? It seems to be mostly Furries and delusional Sega fanboys, the latter being an increasingly rare breed as the years wear on. There really hasn’t been a good ‘Sonic’ game outside of “Sonic Colors” in a VERY long time, and when Sega ported “Sonic Colors” to modern platforms to refresh our collective memory of what a good ‘Sonic’ game looks like, they managed to cock it up with performance issues and gobs of glitches. Regardless, Sonic Team looks to be cribbing ideas from Nintendo – specifically the free-form, open-world exploration of “Super Mario Odyssey,” which means that we might finally get a second good ‘Sonic’ game.

12. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
Disgruntled ex-Konami employees got together to crowdsource a spiritual successor to one of the best RPG series of all time, ‘Suikoden.’ Unfortunately, that game – “Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes” – isn’t supposed to release until 2023. To build hype, however, the dev team, lead by Yoshitaka Murayama, is releasing a sort of a prologue to their new game. “Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising” would be higher on this list, were it not for the stated fact that it’s going to be an “Action/RPG,” which is very difficult to pull off, and rarely turns out well.

11. Sacrifire
Another Inde Action/RPG, this time ripping-off the art style Square-Enix introduced in “Octopath Traveler.” It’s also a project involving a wide swath of Square-Enix veterans who worked on games during the RPG Golden Age of the 4th and 5th Generations. You had me at “Square-Enix veterans,” but lost me at “Action/RPG.” We’ll see how it turns out.

10. Shadow Warrior 3
This follow-up to one of the best FPSes and Looter Shooters ever made just released last week… to mediocre reviews, largely revolving around the fact that the game is only 5 hours long and removed all of the Looter Shooter elements in favor of adopting Flavor-of-the-Day mechanics, and ripping off “DOOM Eternal.” I Am Disappoint.

9. Zoria: Age of Shattering
Now that we KNOW Owlcat Games is incapable of doing anything right, it’s time to pin all of our hopes for solid tabletop-to-cRPG conversions on… someone else. Tiny Trinket Games used to have some copy on their game’s product page stating that it was based on the D&D 5th Edition System Resource Document (SRD)… buuuut, I can’t seem to find that note anywhere anymore.

8. Gestalt: Steam and Cinder
People just can’t seem to get enough of the Metroidvania subgenre of Action/Adventure. Unfortunately, ‘people’ tend to latch onto really terrible examples of the subgenre and flog them in the public square as though they were the second coming of Christ, Buddha, and Krishna all at once (fuck you, “Hollow Knight” and “Dead Cells”). “Gestalt” could be the next big thing in the subgenre, but, as with most things, we’ll have to wait and see.

7. Inkulinati
Some games hang their entire existence and identity upon their visuals. Games like “Cuphead” wouldn’t have gotten a second look if not for the striking visuals. “Inkulinati” is a Strategy game that seems to be doing the same thing, employing visuals inspired by the margin illustrations of medieval religious manuscripts. As a Classicist and half-assed Medievalist, the game’s themes speak to me. Unfortunately, the word “Roguelite” somehow crept into the game’s Steam tags, in spite of the words “permadeath” and “procedural generation” appearing nowhere in the game’s official copy. We’ll have to see how it pans out, because I really wouldn’t mind an Indie Strategy game that both looks and plays differently from most.

6. TinyKin
An Indie ‘Pikmin’ knock-off by Splashteam and tinyBuild, “TinyKin” might scratch the itch that “Pikmin 3” failed to satisfy when I played it on the WiiU… back in 2015 (SEVEN years ago!).

5. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
With all the awfulness happening in Russia and Ukraine at the moment, it feels kind of tactless to be excited about a post-apocalyptic FPS that takes place in that part of the world… but it looks like a good game! Maybe I’ll get around to de-backlogging the original “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” and its expansions before the new one drops.

4. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
Tabletop RPGs meet ‘Borderlands,’ only this time as a full stand-alone game instead of a DLC. The Crew is really looking forward to cooping through this one, though whether we buy it sooner rather than later all depends on how much DLC there’s going to be. I also gave Chris a copy of the Bunkers & Badasses tabletop game for Yuletide this past year, so he should be chomping at the bit to play this game and get some inspiration for how to be a completely insane Bunker Master (as if he needs it).

3. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2
The Switch has been getting tons of games every month, but not much of anything new or must-play. I mean, in 2021, “Metroid Dread” was, like, IT. This year, there’s rampant speculation that Nintendo will indeed release the sequel to “Break of the Weapons” that they have shown-off at E3, with its theme of a lost civilization in the sky. With that theme, it seems like it’s intended to be a sequel to BOTH “Break of the Weapons” and “Skyward Sword,” the latter of which did get a recent Switch port with adjusted controls, perhaps in an attempt by Nintendo to make people forget about the crappy WiiU version while also reminding them that the game exists at all. We don’t even know that “Breath of the Wild 2” is the official subtitle (hopefully not, as it sounds super-lazy and has nothing to do with sky-ruins).

2. Starfield
“Skyrim” in space? Yep, “Skyrim” in space. As much as Bethesda Softworks is revered for their open-world Sandbox games, they’ve been equally reviled for destroying the ‘Fallout’ IP (a.k.a., “Skyrim” with guns) lately, with the dismal “Fallout 4” and the cynical cash-grab that is “Fallout 76.” It got so bad that the original ‘Fallout’ team had to go and make “The Outer Worlds” to show Bethesda how it’s done! Anyway, “Starfield” is a new IP out of Bethesda, and really the developer’s first big release after being gobbled-up by Microsoft’s Xbox Division. Will it be a finished product at launch? Will it have fewer game-breaking bugs and glitches than pre-Microsoft Bethesda games? Will it be well-written, interesting, and fun? Who knows!? The old, Zenimax-owned Bethesda was seeing increasing quality slips, while Microsoft hasn’t exactly impressed with its first-party titles (*looks at “ReCore” and “Sunset Overdrive”*). I’m almost more excited about basic things like QA, monetization, and DRM than the actual content of the game!

1. Baldur’s Gate 3
It’s been in Steam Early Access for a couple years now, yet manages to maintain “Very Positive” feedback from early adopters. Will 2022 be the year that RPG fans finally get the next big thing we’ve been salivating over? Perhaps! Larian has absolutely impressed with its recent efforts, and I will be shocked, appalled, and personally betrayed if “Baldur’s Gate 3” is anything less than perfect. If it’s perfect in 2022, great. If it takes more time, fine. I’ll be patient.