Best Storytelling: God of War Ragnarok

God of War: Ragnarok finished the gaming year strong and provided Sony’s large audience with a fantastic and immersive experience that continued the quality of the 2018 reboot of the franchise. The game’s focus is certainly on its narrative and storytelling, and it accomplishes delivery of a successful movie-like experience in videogame form.

While the story itself may have lacked some more runtime, Ragnarok’s overall production values elevated its core message to deliver a very well-constructed piece, and for this, it takes this 2022 award. Read our God of War Ragnarok Review for more details.

Best Gameplay: Elden Ring

Elden Ring takes our Best Gameplay Award because it is truly the king of gameplay. With significant additions to traditional souls gameplay such as the ashes of war and spirit summons, FromSoftware continues to drive forward the Action-RPG genre and prove that small but nuanced spicing up can truly revamp gameplay without departing from its original roots.

Featuring the expected multiplayer options plus a newly added arena, gameplay is further enhanced by cooperative and competitive elements, allowing players to live the world not just through their own lens. Exploration seems limitless with intricate lore and narratives hidden deep within the many secrets of the game, giving a true sense of wonder and discovery to the most menial of tasks.

Even after thousands of hours of playtime, the game’s mechanics remain as exciting and satisfying as ever, proving that gameplay-first approaches are really the core of gaming! Read our Elden Ring Review for more details.

Best Visual & Audio: God of War Ragnarok

Choosing the game with the best visual and audio design is no easy feat since there are other worthy titles like Horizon Forbidden West and The Callisto Protocol. That said, the superior acting quality and score of God of War edged out other contenders to take this award home this year. Sony has managed to maintain its stellar streak of impeccable visuals coupled with excellent music and sound effects.

The Nine Realms are richly depicted in Ragnarok, and incredibly brought to life by a truly talented cast that make the whole experience feel like a playabable movie, making the game truly deserving of our Best Audiovisual award. You can watch our God of War Ragnarok Review for more details.

Best Multiplayer: Overwatch

While not an RPG and slightly removed from our usual repertoire, our team and community has become obsessed with spending long hours jumping around rooftops and ambushing others while yelling “Genshi ult watch out!”.

If you join our streams or our after-hours chats, you’ll find most of the community is still having a blast with the game, and playing together. With over 25 million registered accounts and servers supporting the 800,000 concurrent players this very second, Overwatch 2 succeeds in creating a fantastic free-to-play experience. Excellent QOL improvements over its predecessor further its case making it take our best MP for this year. Catch our Overwatch Streams for more details.

Best Value: Elden Ring

2022 has been a good year for gamers on a budget. There are many free hours to be enjoyed out of Overwatch, Fall Guys and Lost Ark. However, we feel the most “bang for your buck” this year was actually out of Elden Ring, in which Cas has clocked an absurd 3000 hours on steam alone without counting his Playstation playthroughs or account switches for other characters etc.

With Elden Ring, you’ll experience rich and intriguing storylines, multiplayer, bosses and arenas, deep combat mechanics, and the thrill of discovery of hundreds upon hundreds of unique and fun Builds. These elements combine into a fantastic experience that keeps you going and doesn’t get old.  It is for these reasons that Elden Ring easily wins our Best Value Award!

Best Soulslike: Steelrising

Steelrising is a well-thought-out action RPG, which will be recognized because of its fresh gameplay features. Not only do you get to experience challenging and exhilarating encounters against raging automatons, but you are also able to appreciate exploring the beautiful horrors caused by these abominations. If you have been looking for a fun and more forgiving Soulslike title worth trying, then Steelrising might be just what you are looking for.

Read our Steelrising Review for more details and also Best Tips and Tricks.

Best DLC: MHRise Sunbreak

Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is a fantastic expansion to our 2021 GOTY, Monster Hunter Rise. Adding new locales, monsters, hundreds of weapons and items, and new interesting and fun mechanics, the content and quality of the expansion easily rivalled the original release and for even less money.

If you loved the original title, or if you’re looking to buy a bundled sale, this should be on your must-buy list for its 2023 PS5 & Xbox release. There’s no better DLC than MHRise Sunbreak, easily taking our Best DLC Award!

Best Indie: King Arthur Knight’s Tale

Neocore’s rendition of the Arthurian tale is dark and gritty, and isn’t for the feint of heart. It’s tough, it’s challenging, it doesn’t hold your hand, but damn it if victory doesn’t feel oh so sweet! Without a doubt, King Arthur: Knight’s Tale is a day-one buy for anyone who enjoys strategic, tactical combat that goes far beyond the decisions you make on the battlefield.

In addition to the excellent combat, the game also has compelling and interesting characters, some of whom you won’t be able to recruit due to differences in beliefs, a lot of build options, and a base to manage and customize as you see fit. It really does combine some of my favorite elements from other RPGs into one fantastic Arthurian tale. Read our King Arthur Knight’s Tale Review for more details and our builds if you’re diving in.

Best Surprise: Marvel’s Midnight Suns

This year’s surprise for us came in the form of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, simply because we could not have expected the combat to be as good as it actually is. Marvel’s Midnight Suns has some of the best turn-based combat we’ve played in modern gaming, in spite of a subpar story and dialogue really make the game drag in places that it shouldn’t.

This game’s combat fun makes it a day 1 buy for hardcore turn-based combat lovers, a genre we love, so this is our surprise of the year! Read our Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review for more details.

Game of the Year: Elden Ring

Fextralife’s Game of the Year in 2022 is Elden Ring! We understand this is a HUGE surprise to anyone that frequents our content, so let us explain in detail.

We have frequently noted that FromSoftware has been creating variations of their ideal game with each installment of their souls genre. Each game added features, tweaked mechanics, and increased polish. Each game is the manifestation of the artistic vision of its creator, who is always struggling to achieve that perfect mix of spices for its perfect delivery.

Elden Ring is FromSoftware’s Magnum Opus, and it’s hard to imagine them making a better game. Elden Ring delivers on a scale that few games ever have, and likely ever will again. The sheer expansiveness of the Elden Ring Map, the amount of unique and interesting sidequests, the excellent gameplay combat mechanics and infinity of builds thanks to Weapons, Armor, Spirit Ashes and infusions. Everything comes together to create the great crescendo of Souls, and it is absolutely glorious.

We can’t wait to see if more DLC is coming and hopefully a fully-fledged expansion, but even without it we know we will be playing Elden Ring for years still.

Community Member: Rustybeardo

Our Forums and Discord continue to grow with almost 70,000 Discord users, 1.4 million Twitch Followers and over 630,000 Youtube Subscribers, making the choice of best community member more difficult with each passing year. In 2022, we’re going to put the spotlight on Rustybeardo, not only for the countless subs he has gifted to our twitch community, but also for his engagement and cheerful participation in nearly every activity we put on. Quick to laugh and join any game, Rustybeardo vibes with Fextralife to make our community fun and accessible. Thank you Rusty for your always keeping things fun!

Wiki Contributor: Nex3

As it is every year, this was a VERY difficult choice! We now have over 200 wikis with dedicated community editors who go the extra mile to help out those who need guides. Nex3 stands out this year for her ongoing contributions to the Elden Ring Wiki, where she not only helped people with useful content and information, but also made thousands of fixes to critical pages, expanded the formatting and css of unique pages, and coordinated with dozens of other contributors to keep things in order throughout the whole year.

Special mentions to the outstanding contributions to the Elden Ring wiki from Varinese, CommonCents and datamine excel master Hylian_Pi! We must also highlight Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous contributor Ardrel who has continuously helped to improve the quality of the wiki, and T-Furan for many useful updates to the Dark Souls wiki. As with the past few years, thank you to Lewisriver for an incredible amount of contributions to Monster Hunter Rise!

That’s it for our Fexy Awards 2022, congratulations to all the winners! We look forward to some great games coming in 2023, and we’ll have our list of what the best ones are, so keep an eye out for that video. What were some of your favorite games this year? How did we do? Let us know in the comments below!

You can check this list of 2021 games that we are excited about! You might also want to check out our 2021 winners, 2020 winners, 2019 winners, 2018 winners and 2017 winners.

To keep up with all upcoming releases, visit the Fextralife Wikis Hub