End of Year 2022: Great Moments/Highlights

General Discussion Events
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We laughed. We cried. We fought through adversity. We accomplished something. This thread is the place to share your most memorable stories and impactful moments from games we played in 2022.

Maybe it was something you pulled off that made you feel great about yourself. Maybe the game’s clockwork systems interacted just so, and something incredible happened. Maybe it was a completely scripted moment that was deeply thought-provoking, side-splittingly hilarious, or just hit you right in the feels. Maybe it was a small moment that just stuck with you. Or maybe it just had you saying “Wow!”

We want to hear about those moments that stick out in your mind, whether it be a major plot point or a personal story only you experienced.

Given the spoiler-heavy nature of this topic, we’d like to remind everyone to please be courteous and blur your spoilers, annotating what game (and roughly what part of the game, if applicable) the spoiler is from. That way other folks reading through the thread have the opportunity to experience that moment just like you did.

To blur spoilers, add and around the spoiler text, or select the text and click on “Blur Spoiler” in the gear menu of the post editor.

[Hub Thread]

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The Case of the Golden Idol is a very clever detective game. The best part of it is how you will often find something that makes you go back to earlier cases and realize that there was more going on than you thought. Me in the early chapters: literally everyone has a knife on them in this game, that’s goofy but concerning. Also noticing a lot of ruby rings, what’s up with that.
Me hitting the Strange Practices chapter: OH WAIT

Hedon Bloodrite constantly surprised me by introducing little tricks in the level design, special mechanics, even interesting lore where I was expecting a simple shooter. One of the last levels, Paradise Lost, opens with you waking up on a beach… and then you get the Hell reveal. And THEN you look at the map and you’re like, how big is this level?? I have to find the five primarchs? There are sidequests and entire dungeons to explore? Who put a whole-ass RPG in my Doom level??

And there’s of course Signalis, where things keep getting more intense and poignant as you progress deeper and deeper. The brief title drop sequence that occurs in the first 20 minutes has been imprinted on my brain, it’s the perfect way to set up the forlorn mood that permeates the rest of the game. Oh, and the first time you meet a Kolibri unit!

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This is from **Chained Echoes, a game I’m playing right now and it’s something that needs to be highlighted. It’s incredible:

Edit: just remembered, the ending of Live a Live. You save the final boss’s soul, and if you select Pogo, the darling cave boy, as your party leader, he’ll give the bad guy a great big hug. It’s a perfect moment.

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For me the moments I can remember most vividly from this year are the gut wrenching decisions from Citizen Sleeper. It is rare a game even tries to tackle social nuance let alone succeed. Eagerly awaiting the forthcoming dlcs.

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There were two moments this year that blew me away, so I’m gonna do the cowardly thing and nominate them both.

The first is the ending of Tunic, or rather, the true ending. The basic ending has you getting to a final showdown with the end boss, a former hero like you who long ago took a devil’s bargain to keep the world in a status quo. Swords clash, you triumph, and take the boss’s place at the heart of the world. Pretty standard gaming stuff. But after the credits roll the game lets you know there are secrets left uncovered, and you can go back to just before the boss to find them. Among these secrets are the remaining pages of the instruction manual you are collecting on your journey, of which several are cleverly hidden behind some neat side quests (and one tedious one; just go to a guide to complete that one). Anyway, you collect the entire manual, learning more secrets and lore along the way. And then you face the final boss once again. As they raise their sword to strike you, your character gets down on one knee and presents this weathered booklet. As a whole, it is a memento of a life once lived, of what possibilities remain. The former hero is moved by this, laying their sword down in understanding that they can end this bitter cycle. No battle is waged, and credits roll. We see the two heroes merrily explore the game world, not as a hostile territory, but rather a place of wonder. It’s honestly one of most moving endings to a video game I have ever experienced.

The second is from Immortality. What’s brilliant about this moment is that it occurs differently for each person who plays the game. The game’s central premise is finding out what happened to Marissa Marcel, an actress who starred in three unreleased films and disappeared. You watch and scrub through clips of these films and can click on objects to access new clips. That alone is pretty fun, and the movies themselves are interesting genre flicks. But eventually the player will notice odd occurrences, like a person who is not supposed to be there appearing in an errant frame. But eventually, the player will rewind an otherwise nondescript clip to find these aren’t just errant frames, but are entire alternate scenes and performances that play out in reverse of the regular clips. From there the rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper, until the question of Marissa’s fate is a distant concern, and the player begins to worry about their own sense of safety. After enough peering into the screen, the screen peers back.

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End credits spoilers for Pentiment: I have no idea if this is consistent across all playthroughs of the game, but playing as a heathen/encouraging hereticism while speaking to other characters, seeing that Ursula - the adorable little girl who first wakes you up at the start of the game - was fated to be burned at the stake was shockingly devastating. Made me feel very bad for encouraging her to keep the old traditions alive, which is probably one of the only times a video game has made me feel honestly bad for making a decision I consider morally correct.

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Citizen Sleeper : many, many moments,
but

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is the moment of quiet repose in the game that sticks with me.

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It might sound incredibly simple in the grand scheme of game moments, but in Elden Ring when you get transported to a new location and the game map zooms out… and then it happens another two or three times. I kept thinking, “What is this world?!!”

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Basically every aha moment of Tunic. I inhaled that game and its puzzles.

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It’s kind of unfair how Elden Ring is just filled with great moments both big and small.

Here are some of my favorites that range from fun little surprises to whole-ass sequences that leave me stunned or laughing with glee.

Finally meeting the Two Fingers and realizing that, no, that’s not just a fancy title for a pair of wise old folks that will impart wisdom to help you on your journey to become Elden Lord. It’s literally two fingers!

Crashing these worshippers doing some kind of ritual fire sacrifice in Agheel Lake in the middle of the night and then actual Agheel crashing the party by swooping in and killing everybody as he lands, transitioning smoothly into a dragon boss fight in the open world.

Stumbling into this unassuming building in Mistwood that only has an elevator that goes down, and then taking that enclosed elevator that just keeps. going. down… until the walls give way to an underground sky that somehow impossibly is full of stars. Also, it’s a whole new area that’s home to ancient civilizations and dark secrets!

The entire Radahn boss fight, from the lead-up of entering Redmane Castle to the post-fight cutscene. Special shout-outs to Radahn leaping into space halfway through his health bar with the music cutting out and then after a couple of seconds comes crash landing back down like a meteorite trailblazing through the night sky to instantly kill anyone that’s in the impact zone and trigger the second phase music, and to Patches getting summoned only to peace out one comedy beat later after seeing Radahn lay waste to your NPC squad.

Finding the Beast Clergyman, this mysterious hulking, robed figure that you’ve been feeding Deathroot to for the entire game, as the boss fight of Crumbling Farum Azula. And then you get his health down to half where he reveals himself to be Maliketh, the Black Blade, Marika’s shadow-bound beast, Bearer of the Rune of Death, feared by all demigods, whose power was stolen and used to kill Godwyn the Golden, setting off the chain of events that led to the game. Also, his flowing white mane, black gold-trimmed berserker armor, and crimson flame-wrapped black stone greatsword make for such a sick fucking character design.

The entire final boss fight. The twist is you think you’re going to fight Marika the Eternal, the one responsible for shattering the Elden Ring, when she breaks out of her rune arc crucifixion and picks up her hammer. But then you see her golden locks turn fiery red, the mark of a demigod born from Marika’s union with her other half as seen with Radahn, Malenia, and Ranni’s old body, and it turns out you’re actually going to be fighting Radagon, leal hound of the Golden Order. It was such a great moment for me, especially because I had done Goldmask’s quest all on my own and called it before Radagon’s name appeared with his health bar. And to top it all off, From Software pulls out the trope of playing a grand reprise of the opening theme for the final battle, as the camera slowly zooms out of the shot showing Radagon with his back to the player, one arm raising Marika’s hammer and the Elden Ring suddenly lighting up from inside his hollowed body.

Here’s a time-stamped video of me reacting to it the first time just to remind folks! I would have put literally any other no-commentary video on here, but all of them frustratingly have a hard cut in the music when it shifts from the cutscene to the battle instead of the music smoothly transitioning from cutscene to gameplay as stylistically intended.
Elden Ring Playthrough Part 34 - YouTube

Also, I really enjoyed the aesthetic spectacle of the Elden Beast fight!

I could seriously rattle off way more unforgettable moments, but I think this is enough to make the case for Elden Ring.

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What @amlabella mentions about Elden Ring is probably my pick too. It never got old how many times I thought the map had reached its maximum size only for something to happen, sometimes sudden or sometimes expected, and it got a whole lot bigger. Both in terms of expanding in size and in scope, with the two underground rivers being revealed, and then eventually Deeproot Depths. It’s worth mentioning along with that the sheer guts it takes to put a big chunk of the map and one of the game’s most intricate areas behind extremely, easily missable side encounters and quests.

ER really is just a massive collection of moments. Just mammoth swings with everything they could muster. It feels pointless to list them all because, it’s just what the game is. It’s like they took the Anor Londo reveal from Dark Souls — something they’ve been trying to recreate in every game since, it feels like — and decided that each region reveal should feel like that. Coming out of the Fringefolk Hero’s Grave and seeing Limgrave laid out. Coming out of Stormveil to see Liurnia laid out beneath you with all the fog lifted. Getting trapped in that chest and finally making it out of Sellia Tunnel to see a Mars-like wasteland. The Siofra River Well.

I think my personal favorite is still the gate at the Four Belfries that leads to that chunk of Crumbling Farum Azula. Something I found within my first… 30 hours? And a place that I wouldn’t get back to for probably 80 more. Just incredible how successful it all was.

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That moment in Vampire Survivors when you realize you can cheat the system and get more then 6 passives. Also the first time you make it 20 minutes and death flies onto the screen.

Lot of really fun ah ha moments in the game if you can resist the allure of looking up a guide!

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I really enjoyed sending off the dead in Xenoblade Chronicles 3. It was cool when Yuna did it in FInal Fantasy X and it’s cool in this game too.

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Similar to @amlabella and @diglett my pick is the expansive map of Elden Ring. But honestly, I think my favorite moment was when you first step out into Limgrave after leaving the tutorial cave area. Like yes, everyone knew from the marketing that a big feature of this game was the fact that it was going to be set in an open world, but the gravity of what that meant did not hit me until I was finally playing it and reached the aforementioned point. Like I remember stopping in my tracks, slowly panning the camera around thinking “oh yeah, this is an open world Souls game”.

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My favorite gaming moment was that viral campaign some modders did for Nier Automata. Reminded me of pre-internet schoolyard video game rumors.

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That is super interesting, because my mural showed Vasclav burning at the stake. Perhaps it’s from how much you indulge a character’s blasphemous thoughts?

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Having looked into this myself, it’s exactly what you guessed. (If you shut Vaclav down as both Andreas and Magdalena - or at least emphasise that he shouldn’t go talking to just anyone about this and should keep his head down both times, then he doesn’t burn. If you don’t convince Ursula to keep interested in the old ways, then she doesn’t burn.)

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