If we sought escape from reality
from a world that was once again turned upside down, it was instead in the small that something really happened.
It is of course not the whole truth, but after a spring that for many of us was swallowed up by the role-playing epic "Ring of Fire" - to say the least, a big game in the true sense of the word - predictability followed.
What have really got players' hearts racing are the small games that house the big adventures, or that stretch the image of what a video game can be.
In the future vision "Stray"
from French Blue Twelve Studios, we became a cat.
Soft and purring, but also flexible in our exploration of what happened in a long-forgotten neon city, where robots imitate human life.
While balancing on narrow window frames or knocking things off the table in a sure-footed cat manner, the game posed the big question of what life really is.
The avant-garde "Immortality"
instead explores the game medium itself.
With the simple question "What happened to the actor Marissa Marcel?"
huge amounts of recorded film are rolled up, "real" films in which you as a player have to rewind back and forth to find the answer.
"Immortality" challenges the image of what it means to play and how a game should be.
With an incredibly strong performance by the Swedish actress Charlotta Mohlin, it is both one of the more strange and thought-provoking gaming experiences in a long time.
Another experience
worth writing home about is the medieval adventure "Pentiment".
At first a text-heavy story about evil sudden death, which soon unfolds to tell the story of the little man's life in the shadow of peasant revolt, reformation and development.
It is an incomparably fact-packed game that makes full use of the medium's narrative technical greatness, and clearly shows how the winners write the story.
Yes, the game year 2022
has not been the year of the big games.
But the little stars that have sparkled will give shine to next year's games, both big and small.