The State of the Art: Games 2022

I mentioned in my movie post that while films would usually be the finale of the favorites lists, it wouldn't be this year, because overall, the films I watched in 2022 were not very memorable (aside from a couple of fun exceptions at both the top and bottom of the list). Usually, that would mean books or television would have been the medium to capture my heart. Nope. For the first time ever, we're closing out with games. Video games have had an absolutely phenomenal year, and they've earned their place at the top of the cultural mountain. 

Normally, I'd say I play about three good games per year, with hopefully one standing out as excellent, and then a handful of pretty-good ones filling out the list. This year, there were nine outstanding games (!), and those are just the ones released in 2022 (!!). That is unprecedented. So while I did have a favorite, I want to be sure and call out those other eight as well, because they are all over the tonal map, and yet each struck a chord. However, there can only be one at the #1 spot, and this year, that spot goes to Immortality.

I knew Sam Barlow was special when I played Her Story, but I never expected he'd top it. This game made my jaw drop. Immortality is about an actress named Marissa Marcel, who worked on three unreleased movies in three different decades. She disappeared after her work on the third movie, and the purpose of the game is ostensibly to figure out what happened to her. I say "ostensibly", because while I was, of course, very curious to solve that mystery, it's really not the most interesting aspect of what's going on. The game works by watching behind-the-scenes clips of the movies being made, from chemistry tests to location scouting to table-reads to scenes being filmed. If you click on something within a clip, it will go find a match in another clip. So you might, for example, click on an apple in a scene shot in the 1960s, and be taken to a bowl of apples in a scene in the 1990s. As you click around, you begin to piece together the three stories of the movies, as well as the overall story of Marissa Marcel. And that's just the surface. I won't even get into the mysteries within the mysteries. It was absolutely brilliant, and not only from a gaming perspective. Once I was done with the gameplay, I actually just sat down and watched all of the clips again, beginning to end. Though it can be tough to recommend a game to others in which you just click around watching fake movies, for me, this game was, in a word, enthralling.

Now, let's get to those other eight, because they certainly deserve their time in the spotlight as well:

2) The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story: If Immortality was the best right-brained mystery game of the year, this one was far and away the best one for left-brained mystery solving. It also happens to contain multiple stories spanning decades, but instead of soaking in a game of pure atmosphere and story like Immortality, this game is about sifting through clues and using your reasoning, both deductive and inductive, to solve each case and then how they weave together into one overarching puzzle. It's beautifully-shot, well-written, impeccably-performed, and was an absolute joy to play.

3) Marvel: Midnight Suns: I'm told this is very similar to the XCOM series of games, but I never played those, so this style is new to me. At its core, it's a comic book story just like any other. You're a person trying to fight a demonic presence that's attempting to take over the world, and you have a bunch of famous Marvel characters on your team to help out. Sounds pretty standard, right? It probably would be if the gameplay weren't so frigging engaging. Each character has a customizable deck of cards that improves over time, and those cards (along with some environmental attacks) are used to battle enemies. But aside from that, you're also crafting cards and items, cultivating friendships with your teammates, solving the little mysteries of the creepy Abbey you inhabit, and of course, snuggling with your hellhound. Thankfully, the battles are turn-based, so it's not about hysterical button-mashing chaos. It rewards strategic thinking, while still lighting up the primal part of your brain that loves it when Spider-Man fwips into a Hydra minion.

4) Pentiment: It's nervy of me to even include this game, let alone put it so high on the list, because really, I just started playing it. And it's completely hooked me. Once again, it's a mystery game of sorts (sense a theme?), only this time, you're an artist in 16th century Bavaria who's trying to get your mentor off the hook for a murder, using the tried and true investigative technique of: Gossiping with your neighbors. You might talk to them about God or taxes or how so-and-so isn't a valuable member of the community. Maybe you'll question them over a simple meal on the farm, or join the ladies' wool-spinning bee, but whatever you do, do it fast, because time is against you. The art style is a big part of why this game works. For instance, the written dialogue shines with wet ink before drying into the parchment. But also, it does a terrific job of challenging the player of learning all they can, while in an oppressive religious environment, always knowing that people are hiding secrets that have nothing to do with murder. 

5) Strange Horticulture: Oh, hey! Another mystery game! I played this one before any of the others on this list, and was convinced at the time that it was going to be #1, so it coming in fifth place shows just how terrific games were this year. This one is also drenched in atmosphere, even as you barely ever leave the single room of the plant shop you run. People show up with all sorts of requests. They want to sleep better. They want to attract the attention of someone they like. They want to...curse their enemies. They want to............face an ancient evil that lives in the forest? Your plants can help with all of these requests, but which plant will fit the bill? And should you help your customers, or are there ones you'd rather circumvent? Who keeps sending mysterious notes for you to seek out new plants in the wild? Is the local witch a friend or foe? This game may test your logical deduction skills, but it also asks you to go with your gut. It's up to you not only to find the right plant, but to decide what is actually right. 

6) NORCO: For all the games above, honing in on solutions to the puzzles presented brings a burst of accomplishment. Even if the premise is murder, you're left with a sense of things moving in a positive direction. But not all terrific games are feel-good. Hell, my favorite game of 2020 was all about embracing sadness. And this one, in which you play a woman who has returned to a fictionalized, futuristic version of the real town of Norco, Louisiana after her mother's death to settle affairs, is definitely not feel-good. The town is dominated by refineries, and the entire community is afflicted by urban decay. Everyone you meet, even if they're relatively well-off, is mired in depression and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Finding out what happened with your mother and where your shiftless brother has wound up is no easy feat, as everyone is too wrapped up in their own problems to lend you a hand. It's a fascinating narrative, and the retro art style really sells its setting.

7) Disney: Dreamlight Valley: OK, this is a silly pick, but I can't deny that many, many hours of 2022 were spent in Dreamlight Valley. This game is basically what would happen if you smashed Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and The Sims into one game, populated by Disney characters. It's extremely chill. You walk around, talking to folks like Ariel and Remy. You farm. You cook. You give out presents. You go on quests for your friends. You decorate your home. Is it a ground-breaking achievement in the craft of video games? No. But if you need to de-stress after a long day of work, hopping into this game and spending some time collecting blueberries so you can bake Elsa a pie certainly does the trick.

8) Stray: I'll admit up front; I'm a dog person. But even I was not immune to the charms of this game, in which you play as a curious cat in a post-human world, attempting to find their way back home with the help of some polite robots. As you navigate the detritus left behind after the apocalypse, and do your best to avoid the critters that brought about this extinction, there's a sense of nostalgia about humans, and the decent run that they had. Plus, with the touch of a button, you can purr and make your controller rumble pleasantly. 

9) Elden Ring: This style of game is generally not my speed. I had no interest in playing other popular games that FromSoftware produced (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, etc.), mostly due to their inherent difficulty. There was some terrific animation, but I watched others play, getting one-shot by a wandering monster or falling off a hidden ledge and losing all their progress. Thanks, I hate it. So while I didn't come close to even getting to the halfway point of this game before I abandoned it, the fact that I put any time into it at all speaks volumes about how well-made it is. It's that fascinating. The story is incredibly sparse, and the dangers that await you in every part of the map are no less frustrating than they appeared in those earlier games. However, the art is gorgeous, and I have to grudgingly admit that trying to get past a valley of giants with a combination of spellcasting, guzzling healing potions, and running my ass off was a lot of fun.

Those are just the standouts from 2022! There were a ton of other video games that were solid, or that were excellent, but that were released in previous years. Here's a quick list of other games that are worth your time:

Overboard!
Lucifer Within Us
Cyberpunk 2077
Life is Strange: True Colors: Wavelengths
Solasta: The Lost Valley
Alt-Frequencies
Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
Tick Tock: A Tale for Two
Potion Craft
Unpacking

And a couple of others, which I won't say much about, because I'm either just getting started (A Little to the Left), or that, um...weren't good (Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?). There was also a ton of fun had with tabletop games this year. Mostly it was the reliable standards (D&D, Arkham Horror LCG), but thanks to the holidays, I'm starting to delve into some intriguing new ones as well (The King's Dilemma, Cthulhu: Death May Die).

All in all, I couldn't have asked for a better year, and I can only hope that the trend continues. Happy gaming! Well, unless you're playing NORCO.

The State of the Art: Movies 2022

Usually, the post about movies is the last list of the year. If culture still has hierarchies, The Art of Cinema is generally considered to be at the top (though I'd argue that in recent years, television has taken that mantle). All this to say that movies will not be the grand finale post this year, because frankly, I saw precisely one terrific movie this year, and the rest were fine to mediocre. So what was that terrific movie? Longtime readers will know that I'm very stingy with the A+ grades. I only give them out if I can't think of a single thing I'd change. Well, welcome to that exclusive club, Everything Everywhere All at Once!

Equal parts funny, heartbreaking, exciting, thoughtful, and hopeful, this movie has absolutely no competition for best of the year. The story of Evelyn Wang and her family traversing a countless number of parallel universes in order to confront a threat that is pure nihilism sounds completely bonkers. And it is! But it's never confusing or disorienting, and journeying alongside Evelyn as she learns that love and understanding are often the best ways to break down seemingly insurmountable barriers brought tears to my eyes even on second viewing. Plus, the movie just looks cool as hell, and is impeccably acted by every single person in it.

Let's get to the rest of the list! A couple of caveats: I didn't see a huge amount of movies in 2022, so it's likely there are some out there I haven't gotten to yet that would rank highly on the list, though I don't see how anything could come remotely close to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Also, the grades below reflect my opinion of the movie's quality - not how much fun it was to watch them. If I ranked on the fun scale, getting together with friends to watch incomprehensible fever dreams like Moonfall and House would be much higher. So, for 2022 movies:

Everything Everywhere All at Once (A+)
Glass Onion (A-)

Enola Holmes 2 (B+)

The Bob's Burgers Movie (B+)

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (B+)

Werewolf by Night (B+)

See How They Run (B)

Fire Island (B)

The Adam Project (B)

Catherine Called Birdy (B)

Hocus Pocus 2 (B-)

Seeing Red (B-)

A Christmas Story Christmas (C)

Kimi (C)

Falling For Christmas (C)

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (C)

Moonfall (D+)

And for the pre-2022 movies:

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021) (B+)
Kajillionaire (2020) (B+)
Free Guy (2021) (B+)

Spider Man: No Way Home (2021) (B)

The French Dispatch (2021) (B)

The Power of the Dog (2021) (B)

Luca (2021) (B-)

Dear Evan Hansen (2021) (B-)

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) (C+)

The Shadow on the Window (1957) (C+)

Don't Look Up (2021) (C+)

The Eternals (2021) (C+)

Ruthless People (1986) (C)

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) (C-)

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) (D+)

House (1977) (D+)

Christmas in New York (2005) (F)

The State of the Art: Books 2022

The two things I generally start with when assessing my year of reading is 1) Did I read enough books to avoid embarrassing myself, and 2) What's the "theme" of the year, if any? As to the first question, I'm in the clear; 28 books isn't bad. I mean, it would be if you were my sister, but she doesn't play video games, so it's not hard to see where all that extra reading time vanished to. As to the second question, as a recap, themes in previous years were:

2019: "Anywhere But Here"
2020: "Dealing with Loss"
2021: "What We Owe to Each Other"

In looking at the reading list for 2022, I'd have to say that an overarching theme is "Look Behind the Curtain". In many areas of life, from love to sex to sickness to crime to grief to death, how we respond to society's expectations of what our reactions should be aren't always so cut and dried. If there's one thing a lot of these books have in common, it's a re-examination of how we internally process the challenges life throws at us, and how we package our reactions into acceptable stories to tell others. Of course, there's also a handful of books that were just for giggles, so let's get to the list!

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) (Stuart Turton) (A-)
Anxious People (2019) (Fredrik Backman) (A-)
A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth) (1993) (A-)
The Glass Hotel (2020) (Emily St. John Mandel) (A-)

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Hallie Rubenhold) (2019) (B+)
Poison for Breakfast (2021) (Lemony Snicket) (B+)
Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) (2020) (B+)
Three Left Turns to Nowhere (Jeffrey Ricker, J. Marshall Freeman, 'Nathan Burgoine) (2022) (B+)
Providence (2020) (Max Barry) (B+)
Hits & Misses (2018) (Simon Rich) (B+)

American Fire (2017) (Monica Hesse) (B)
Red, White & Royal Blue (Casey McQuiston) (2019) (B)
The Midnight Library (Matt Haig) (2020) (B)
The Final Girl Support Group (Grady Hendrix) (2021) (B)
Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (2012) (Gustavo Arellano) (B)
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (Bryan Caplan, Zach Weinersmith) (2019) (B)
Moonflower Murders (Anthony Horowitz) (2020) (B)
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (2020) (Laura van den Berg) (B)

The Windfall (2017) (Diksha Basu) (B-)
Manhattan Beach (2017) (Jennifer Egan) (B-)
Snobs (Julian Fellowes) (2004) (B-)
It Wasn't Me (2018) (Dana Alison Levy) (B-)
The Elephant Vanishes (1993) (Haruki Murakami) (B-)
No One is Talking About This (2021) (Patricia Lockwood) (B-)

Slow Horses (Mick Herron) (2010) (C+)
Full Service (Scotty Bowers) (2001) (C+)
The Grammarians (2019) (Cathleen Schine) (C+)
Alive (Scott Stigler) (2015) (C-)
Ghouls of the Miskatonic (Graham McNeill) (2011) (Abandoned)

The State of the Art: Television 2022

What a strange year this has been. Normally, the post about television would be one of the last ones posted, either because it's battling it out with the movies post as the Grand Finale, because there are additional shows I'm desperate to wrap up before the list gets finalized, or both. But in looking at the list of shows I watched in 2022, not many of them, even among the ones that have higher grades, elicited much of a reaction. There are standouts, of course, but in general, my opinion about most television this year could be summed up as "Yeah, that was fairly good."

Whatever the reason is, even if I'm not doing cartwheels over the majority of television I watched in 2022, it was a good, solid year, with more to like than dislike. And for those shows that did distinguish themselves as outstanding, one stands above the rest.

Sadly, even as I went about putting together my list for the year, the news of HBO Max's continued implosion spelled (hopefully temporary) doom for Minx, which had an absolutely incredible first season. Minx is about Joyce Prigger, a journalist in 1970s Los Angeles, who cannot get any traction with her strident articles about women's liberation, but finds a way to get her message out by teaming up with an open-minded smut peddler, and inserting her pieces into the first magazine with naked men.

Some of the other shows at the top of my list highlighted a singular point of view consistently well. Minx, however, somehow found a way to strike a balance in exploring the depths of feminism, race, sexual orientation, censorship, misogyny, capitalism, and other Big Topics while still being charming and hilarious. Plus, naked dudes. What's not to like?

There were other excellent shows this year as well. Tuca & Bertie went from absurd and breezy to absurd and deeply emotional. The razor-sharp dialogue in Harley Quinn made it the biggest surprise of the year; I never expected an ultra-violent cartoon to become my favorite entry into the lackluster DC universe, but it's amazing. And of course, watching Quinta Brunson's rise from mild internet fame, up through a terrific stint in A Black Lady Sketch Show, and into the limelight with Abbott Elementary has done my heart a world of good.

Let's get to the full list! Unlike in years past, I'll just put everything into one list instead of separating out the 2022 shows. That way, we can see what truly rises to the top.

Minx (Season 1) (2022) (A)
Tuca & Bertie (Season 2) (2021) (A)
Harley Quinn (Season 1-3) (2020, 2022) (A)
Abbott Elementary (Season 1) (2022) (A)
Love Life (Season 2) (2021) (A-)
Derry Girls (Season 3) (2022) (A-)
Bridgerton (Season 2) (2022) (A-)

Only Murders in the Building (Season 2) (2022) (B+)

Bob's Burgers (Season 13) (2022) (B+) [still airing]

Tuca & Bertie (Season 3) (2022) (B+)

The Bear (Season 1) (2022) (B+)

Love Life (Season 1) (2020) (B+)

Our Flag Means Death (Season 1) (2022) (B+)
Over the Garden Wall (Season 1) (2014) (B+)

Reboot (Season 1) (2022) (B+)

The Kids in the Hall (2022) (B+)

Ms. Marvel (Season 1) (2022) (B+)

Steven Universe: Future (2019) (B+)

Murderville (Season 1) (2022) (B+)

What We Do in the Shadows (Season 4) (2022) (B)

Seinfeld (Season 6-9) (1994-1997) (B)

DuckTales (Season 3) (2020) (B)

Archive 81 (Season 1) (2022) (B)

A Black Lady Sketch Show (Season 3) (2022) (B)

Q-Force (Season 1) (2021) (B)
Russian Doll (Season 2) (2022) (B)

The Midnight Club (Season 1) (2022) (B)

Dollface (Season 2) (2022) (B)

The Great British Baking Show (Season 13) (2022) (B)

Three Busy Debras (Season 1-2) (2020, 2022) (B)

Indian Matchmaking (Season 2) (2022) (B)
Wedding Season (Season 1) (2022) (B-)

The Movies that Made Us (Season 1) (2019) (B-)

She-Hulk (Season 1) (2022) (C+)

The Golden Palace (Season 1) (1992) (C)

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (Season 1) (2022) (C-)

Moon Knight (Season 1) (2022) (C-)