The Ten Best Things I've Touched
In 2022

Ladies and Gentlemen, it has occurred to me that we're more than halfway through 2022 already. Shocking! I know. So I've taken a minute to compile a list of my favorite things (books, video games, and comics) I've interacted with throughout the year, though not necessarily things from this year. Please feel free to drop your ten favorite things below, too, and lemme know if you've been into any of these. I'd love to get your opinions.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is my first proper Castlevania that I've beat front to back. It's a bit lackluster in the intro but the real fun comes from stealing superpowers from the souls of your slain foes and toying with the weapons and armor bits you find around the castle. Unfortunately, the clothes you equip don't change the appearance of your avatar (Soma) but the weapons fortunately do have different sprites and animations.

Crash Bandicoot 4 is the first Crash game I've played in over five years but after ten minutes I was hopelessly addicted to smashing all the boxes and getting gold stars. The way they challenge you with the old school difficulty and reward you with a new costume every time you complete a level really spoke to me to the point that I couldn't really tear myself away from it for a week.

Death or Glory (Rick Remender) is a crime story about a gal whose automotive hijacking exploits bring her in conflict with human traffickers. It's violent and suspenseful, creative and just as much fun as anything else Rick Remender ever put out but it's short page time makes it extraordinarily easy to recommend. Really, I adore Remender's style and the way he depicts his protagonists as ultra slick street rats reminds me of the way I thought of myself when I was a teenager.

God of War is a simple story with immaculate production and crunchy action and great drama. While I didn't really enjoy grinding experience to get through the skill tree, I did adore the parts of the endgame where I'd bounce off of a challenge and experiment with my armor, gems, and moves. Really, it's the first time I've ever appreciated developers dropping RPG elements in my action game.

The Hunter (Richard Stark) is sparse, terse and does things in its own time. That said, things do have a way of happening in an instant and with little ceremony about them. While I don't necessarily like the present day actual plot too terribly much but the way it kept the IV trickle of exposition going really made it a lot more entertaining than it otherwise would've been. I'm aware that Stark wrote a million other books but I'm having a lot of trouble imagining how bad the protagonist Parker's life can get fucked up on a regular basis to keep a steady trickle of books sharing a formula coming out. But that's kind of the cool thing about them being written. I don't have to imagine how it would happen. I just gotta read them.

I Am Not A Serial Killer (Dan Wells) is the bittersweet coming of age tale of John Cleaver, a teenaged sociopath, as he stalks his town's local murderer and comes to appreciate what it means for a man to put other people's concerns ahead of their own in the most surprisingly heartwarming story I've read in years.

The Quarry is both one of the messiest, most spasmodic things I've ever beheld, and one of the most immaculately beautiful games I've ever seen thanks to its stylistic choices that result in a surprising amount of gore. I've played all the Supermassive games and this one is my favorite, even though I played it on launch with all the bugs their games usually have. Its easily worth the sixty dollars for a day with friends and family, by my estimation.

Prince of Thorns (Mark Lawrence) has the distinction of probably being the darkest fantasy book I've ever read. If you're triggered easily by sensitive subject matter, this book isn't for you. But if you want extreme suspense, overwhelming odds, my favorite worldbuilding conceit, and fancy a rat bastard hero whose improvisation is impressive but still basically believable, then the trilogy will serve you well. It's endlessly clever without being pretentious and epic without having a very large scale at all.

Revival (Stephen King) was the first time I read a Stephen King book and thought "I get why this guy is where he is". It's a book about faith, farce, nihilism, and rock n' roll. Having gone through The Shining and Salem's Lot before it, I finally found that I have enough life experience to appreciate the older protagonists of King's classics but this one just felt a lot sharper to me than anything else of his I'd ever touched. I think of it as his version of Frankenstein except there's no animated corpse chimera anywhere in sight, just the tropes of a mad scientist grubbing for a fistful of heaven and finding himself insufficient for his own divinity. After this got done, I immediately scrambled over to The Dead Zone and The Outsider and found two more books that could just as easily take this slot.

The Road (Cormac McCarthy) is basically The Last of Us without zombies. It's just the story of a father, son, and the road they travel down. In spite of basically being a series of unfortunate events, it really makes you appreciate the simple beauty of being able to take a warm bath and having someone to share a can of beans with. I'm really stoked to read Suttree and his other works one of these days.