While 2022 may not have enjoyed as many AAA releases as in past years, the ones that weren't delayed into 2023 were stellar and the indie development scene more than made up for the lack of big-budget titles. Some of our favorite releases this year came from small, ambitious teams that delivered fresh ideas. As is tradition, the Engadget team came together to extol the virtues of our favorite releases from the past 12 months. Bayonetta 3 is a delicious amplification of the series' most ridiculous themes. It indulges in absurdity without disrupting the rapid-fire combat or Bayonetta's unrivaled sense of fashion and wit. Bayonetta 3 is joyful, mechanically rich and full of action, plus it allows players to transform into a literal hell train in order to take down massive beasts bent on destroying the multiverse. The Bayonetta series just keeps getting weirder, but that doesn't mean it's losing its sense of satisfying gameplay along the way. In the franchise's third installment, Bayonetta is powerful, confident and funny; she's a drag queen in a universe loosely held together by witchcraft, and the chaos of this combination is truly magical. Sure, you've played Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Hades and The Binding of Isaac – but what if you could play all of them at once, in a single adorable demonic package? Cult of the Lamb is part social and farming simulator, part dungeon-crawling roguelike and all-around fantastic. After being sacrificed and resurrected, you're instructed by a grand, dark deity to start your own cult, managing worship services, agriculture, cooking, marriages, deaths and much more.

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. The U.N.'s COP27 climate summit kicks off on Nov. 6 in Egypt, inviting us, once again, to consider whether we're doing enough, fast enough, to stave off climate chaos and the suffering that will come with it. The scale of change required is head-spinningly drastic, so even unexpectedly rapid expansions in clean energy won't do much to curb malaise and doomsaying. Here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate investment in the nation's history, has been met, largely, with collective indifference, despite positive buzz about its potential effectiveness. The bill was, predictably, passed without any Republican votes, a grim reminder of the scale of climate denialism.

All of these tabletop games provide players an opportunity for turn-based strategy, which is naturally a slower, more methodical style of gameplay than open-world combat. In "Horizon Forbidden West," each totem for Machine Strike is modeled off the robotic animals you fight against in the wilds of Horizon's world. To defeat a glinthawk in "Forbidden West," you need to aim and strike the sack of chillwater in its breastbone, all while dodging to avoid the creature's incoming attacks. To win against a glinthawk totem in Machine Strike, you need to methodically outmanuever your opponent in a step-by-step process across tiles on the game board. You're allowed the time to step back and think.

Because the burden of saving humanity's chance for a future lies on Aloy, it was important to the team that she and the characters around her seemed believable and relatable, reacting how actual people might when they discover San Francisco as ancient ruins of their ancestors, whom players can imagine as our near future selves, destroyed by their own technology. Aloy and humanity's relationship with their past and present is further elevated in "Forbidden West." It's a result of the studio doubling down on what made the first game's story so memorable to its fans: the idea of "futurist archaeology." In "Forbidden West," for example, the recipe and cooking method for pizza is a new and intensely intriguing concept for humans a thousand years in the future who have lost touch with their history.

When Guerrilla Games revealed that Horizon Forbidden West would have underwater gameplay, I was not excited. I was in the minority with this feeling, but I have a ridiculous, lifelong fear of large things in deep bodies of water, and games in these settings genuinely freak me out. However, Forbidden West has won me over, thalassophobia and all. The underwater environments are terrifying and filled with gigantic robot monsters, but they're also beautiful and rich, inviting Aloy to explore new layers of her world. From the submerged ruins of Las Vegas to a volcanic hot spring buried under a mountain, swimming is shockingly one of my favorite activities in Forbidden West.

For a big-budget blockbuster game, Horizon Forbidden West is extremely weird. It is a detailed science-fiction story about a red-haired outcast warrior, the tribes that inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years in the future, and a bunch of robot dinosaurs. It's a tangle of different ideas and complicated systems that only reluctantly interact with each other. It's also a damn good time, and especially on PlayStation 5, a stunning example of just how good video games can look in 2022. You kind of get used to its beauty while you're playing, but I found that whenever I returned to the game after making a cup of tea I was newly struck by whatever awesome scene was frozen on the pause screen: Aloy mid-roll away from a murderous mechanical hippo, or standing in the foreground in her war paint with an extraordinary view of mountains and snow behind.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. The premise of the 2017 video game Horizon: Zero Dawn might sound a little silly to the uninitiated: It's the story of a teenage girl Aloy, an outcast with no parents in a post-apocalyptic world filled with giant robotic dinosaurs known as "machines," which are terrorizing the tribal populace.

Sony and Guerrilla Games tentatively plan to release Horizon Forbidden West sometime next year. In a new video detailing the upcoming open-world title, game director Mathijs de Jonge, said the studio "aims" to release the game in 2021. That means Forbidden West won't make the PlayStation 5's 2020 holiday launch. Outside of a release date, the three-minute video is full of tantalizing details. According to de Jonge, the game's title refers to a "mysterious new frontier" extending from Utah to the Pacific Ocean.