goty's of the year 2022

again not all games from this year - maybe at best ones i played this year but some of these are games i played as like a little tiny child.

these are games in no particular order

lifesaver's branded mini golf (from candystand dot com): must be played with older sibling or friend with older sibling energy in front of the same chunky old computer or else it is off the list
discord mini golf: well, at least up until they made it so you have to have nitro to play it and then i was sort of like a dog on the other side of a sliding glass door from a beloved toy or favorite treat, staring with big wet eyes and pawing mournfully at the barrier keeping me from what i so desperately want
this one little old old encyclopedia game that i keep having to spend hours searching for and then promptly forget the name of again. it's not the main one that always comes up whenever i search for this and i am not going to spend hours searching for it again as i write this list.
stardew valley again but this time i mostly want to specifically give a special shout-out to my in-game queer platonic partner krobus.
fancy pants adventure: i played this for a million million hours in middle school i think but i can't find a version of it to play now that doesn't look sooooo virus-infested :(
bleebo's big move: BLEEBO ALERT BLEEBO ALERT!!!!!!!
trying to figure out if the cashier at the grocery store i always go to is flirting with me or not? i don't intend to like. do anything about it either way. but everybody i know has insisted that yes, they obviously are, but i still think maybe they're just one of those people who calls everybody things like "cutie," you know? some people do that.
ok well there was one time where they seemed really excited to tell me about their day, definitely said some flirty lines that i assumed were jokey, and then after that they sort of stood beside me for a second at self checkout and then leaned into my line of sight to stare at me for a minute and then they really intensely said "i hope you have a really great night." that time might have been flirting.
hades: i'm going to make a self-insert oc who is in some sort of loving partnership with dusa and that's final. she can decide what that partnership looks like. my self-insert oc will be flexible and just happy to be there. i love her.
wysardwıch: my friend's first bitsy!!! it's really good, and ESPECIALLY good when you know it's his first ever bitsy
man or muppet: a really remarkable game with many parts that stick with me.
acnh: i think i did this one last year as well but i specifically want to talk about the fact that i made a nookazon account after seeing some video about how people will request to have others come to their islands and draw pictures on their bulletin boards and i thought that the idea of that was very sweet. i've drawn things for a lot of really nice people, especially during a period of a week or two where i was sort of dissociated, and it felt like a nice way to feel connected to people.
corpse meditation for the rat under my bed and also the universe: a really beautiful game! there are several parts of it that i've thought about a lot since first playing it.
chibi robo: i'm sure i haven't played it since like 2008 or something but i've just been thinking about it a lot this year. what a game. there's a song just for scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush like it's a little mop. oh! oh, i cry!
the evil era: really nice manifesto from manifesto jam 2022!
pikmin bloom: it occasionally sends me little fitness culture-y notifications and i don't enjoy that but i loved the first two pikmin games and i got a few of my friends to play this with me and for a while i was playing it all the time and having fun showing my friends all my freakiest little guys
journey: i know i said journey last year but i had a bit of a resurgence of playing it a lot near the end of 2022 and i had a nice time where i would hide and sit near the end of the second to last level, at a point where players often get separated from their companions. going through the final level alone can feel sad, so i'd wait until i saw a player pass by who'd clearly gotten separated from a previous companion, and then i'd go join them so they'd have company for the end of the game.
i read a post online about monarch butterflies: i really loved the moment in the game where you open another tab!
he fucked the girl out of me: incredibly striking game.
tinder date in the belly of a long dead god: really sweet story set in a world that pulled me in immediately! really nice dialogue between characters that were compelling and interesting to hear from with a lot of really nice moments and a couple of jokes that made me laugh out loud.
wait i just remembered another fortnite one: i started another co-op game with two more friends this year and our farm is called Tasty Milk! Farm, named after one of the friends' pc's from a ttrpg we played, Milk Tasty.
i meant stardew
not fortnite
please i meant to say stardew valley
i meant to write stardew valley but i'd just been talking to those same two friends about fortnite sasuke while writing this and in asking them if i could include our farm in my goty list i accidentally said fortnite and they said i was only allowed to talk about milk tasty if i wrote fortnite by mistake
garfield's lasagna party. i have not played it yet but two completely unrelated friends gave it to me as a gift within a week of each other.
botw: i know i'm very late to playing it. i think it's fucked up you can't have more horses. i love that link hums when he cooks. this is the first legend of zelda game i've ever played and i partially wanted to play it in the first place because of a handful of posts i saw where people were talking about why they love to headcanon link as various flavors of trans and i found those posts so sweet. i also wanted to play it because of gabby caldera's breaking bad x breath of the wild link/jesse comics. my friend named one of his horses after me, with my childhood nickname.
applying to jobs: *clutching the edges of my monitor with such force that the screen is beginning to splinter, smiling but my teeth are gritted and my jaw is obviously being clenched so so so hard* this is a game to me! it's fun and it passes the time and i get a lot of interviews! yippie!!!!
[ABSOLUTE TOP GOTY ALERT!!!!!]
going back through every message i had ever sent to two of my friends (and every message i had ever sent in one entire discord server) where i said "speak" or "speaking" or "speaks" and editing them to say "squeak" or "squeaking" or "squeaks" and then responding to each message i edited to alert them to the change: they hated it, i responded to so many messages so fast that discord stopped displaying them, and i ended up editing a few from genuinely sort of serious or heartfelt conversations, including SEVERAL about what was at the time a fairly recent breakup

these aren't all games that came out in 2022. also, i linked to all the smaller games but i don't think anybody needs me to link to like. breath of the wild. also i am looking at this in early january of 2023 and realizing that wow... i really didn't play many games after i got laid off in june... huh... oopsies!!!

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