The Best PC Games of 2022

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – January 1, 2023

Which PC games impressed professional reviewers the most during the past year? We rank the best-reviewed titles released between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 by Metascore. Games must have at least 7 reviews from professional critics to be eligible for inclusion. (All scores listed here are from December 31, 2022.)

12 of 14 photo by Bandai Namco

94 Elden Ring

(#2) Was the best new game of the year released all the way back in February? Certainly, few titles released in the months since have garnered the same level of acclaim as Elden Ring, a brand new IP and the result of a collaboration between Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and game designer Hidetaka Miyazaki (of the famed Souls series). Their action/RPG is set in a vast and richly detailed open world and features a fantasy storyline revolving around an all-powerful ring, which, in the game's present, has long been shattered into shards—though the shards are still powerful enough to corrupt anyone who possesses one. You play as an exile (one of the "Tarnished") who seeks to return to the Lands Between to track down the shards and restore the ring to become the Elden Lord. If that sounds easy, you haven't played a From Software game before. If that sounds like one of the best videogames of the past decade, well, it just might be.

“FromSoftware’s most ambitious title yet, Elden Ring is a glowing spectacle of achievement. A refined open-world format adds unimagined wonder to the game, whilst legacy dungeons will likely go down as some of FromSoftware’s best level design. Beyond that, there are so many improvements to the Souls formula that make this an essential play for fans – this is a game that brings so much to the table, yet somehow leaves nothing out.” —NME

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