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.

This university management sim is far more entertaining than its genre might make you think, tasking you with keeping your students happy and your school profitable. It is colourful, quirky and packed with personality. You may well have pondered the fate of the humble rollerskate at the height of the Tony Hawk-era skateboarding craze. Ponder no longer: Rollerdrome proves it was simply biding its time, only to return more radical than you could have imagined. Pro Skater meets The Club in this score-based, dystopian deathsport.

There was a time when it was possible to play pretty much every interesting video game released in a given year, from nailed-down 9/10 blockbusters to that divisive horror curio. That's not the case now – not only because games have gotten longer and more involving, as I wrote about last week, but also because so many of them are released. The publisher model, where a few big companies controlled the release calendar, has given way to a mix of legacy megaliths (Sony, EA, Nintendo, Microsoft), indie publishers (Devolver, Annapurna, Team17), self-releasing developers and everything in between. How is a player supposed to keep up? Good curation is one of the most useful things a games critic can offer in 2022.

What saved the project was competition. Esposito dropped the randomized deck approach in favor of looting enemies for cards, which opened up new possibilities for level design. In "Neon White," each card represents a weapon that, when discarded, activates a movement ability: double jump, dash, grapple and so on. Stringing these together in succession while picking up new cards from fallen foes is the second-to-second objective of any given level. Building levels around specific cards and combos allowed for more interesting challenges for both developer and player, but what really kept Esposito engaged was a message from a friend who demoed the project: "Here's how long it took me to beat this level."

Welcome back to Pushing Buttons, folks. In case you're wondering where I've been, I was on secondment from video games for a week covering Glastonbury. Thankfully, a decade-plus of E3 coverage prepared me well for the fragrant crowds and inevitable liveblogging tech issues. Thank you to our ever-brilliant games correspondent Keith Stuart for covering for me while I screwed my head back on after the festival. Pride events took place in London last weekend, and among the million people lining the streets for the event's 50th-anniversary were parade contingents from PlayStation, Microsoft and Square Enix, among other game publishers and developers.

On its face, "Neon White" is about a deceased assassin with amnesia, White, competing against other assassins to kill demons and get out of hell. But the real relationship at the heart of the game is that between the player and the individual levels. At the outset of each blistering obstacle course -- many of which can last fewer than 30 seconds -- the goal is simply to kill every demon and reach the finish line. You can use various items, which take the form of cards that act as either demon-slaying guns or single-use abilities depending on how you deploy them, in service of this. One allows you to double jump, another lets you slam down with craterous impact and so on. Playing the specific hand you're dealt in each level -- and realizing how to creatively exploit it -- is key in optimizing your run times.