You think I'm joking? I'm not. Okay, okay. It's not a game but I'll get to that in a moment. The Steam Deck has transformed everything about gaming for me.
At the risk of people pointing out how I'm repeating myself, and how I've likely said all this before in various places: yes I probably have but I'm going to bore you with it again because I can.
The freedom the Steam Deck affords is just a constant reminder of how I hate being sat at my desk for most of the day, the feeling of being shackled to it sets in quite quickly if I start up a game on my actual desktop PC now. I would much rather unhook my Steam Deck from the charger, and go be a potato on the sofa with it. There's just something about the feeling of being that much more connected to the gaming experience too when you have it all there in your hands. I'm certain I'm not alone in that feeling either.
Valve had a great year with it too and I'm ridiculously excited for what 2023 brings.
What's my actual game of the year for 2022 though? Well, this might surprise and even shock you but it's Vampire Su…just kidding. It's actually not the very good Vampire Survivors. While it has sucked away many hours from me, and again it is very good, it's not my game of the year.
Despite many good games released across this year, and a lot of high profile releases too, I ended up being sucked in by something small. The majority of my time actually gaming now being on a Steam Deck either handheld or docked in various rooms, can easily be part of the why on this too.
My GOTY for 2022 is: Brotato.
Similar in many ways to Vampire Survivors, but I honestly like Brotato so much more. Brotato is a frantic top-down arena shooter roguelite set in a small arena (although certain characters can change the arena size). You pick a character from a growing list, each with their own pros and cons, and run around as a potato shooting at everything else that moves.
When you level up you choose from various power-ups and pick from multiple weapon types that you also get to upgrade. It becomes absolute madness once you get a good few waves into it and that's also what I love about it, the timed waves let you know clearly how long you've got left until you get a breather again. Your characters changing visually based on your weapons is a thoroughly nice touch too, some of them really make me laugh.
Here's a previous video I did on it:
Direct Link
Love it. Madness.
Over to you: what's your GOTY 2022?
It saved me a lot of boring hours.
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