Our 2022 Game of the Year: will Elden Ring be the last of its kind?

Blood on moss, tattered horrors taking to the sky: Elden Ring is Eurogamer’s Game of 2022. And it feels odd to say that, even if it was never really in doubt. Perhaps it feels odd to say that because it was never really in doubt. Elden Ring got roughly double the votes of the closest runner-up when we polled staff and freelancers. Over the last few weeks, games site after games site has announced that Elden Ring is the game they loved most this year. In 2022 Elden Ring is inevitable.

Real talk: at first, we were a little underwhelmed by our own choice. Not by the game, which is a grim marvel. But by that feeling of giving way to the inevitable. A game of the year pick should hit with a sense of surprise before it settles in and feels like the only choice we could ever have made. Elden Ring has a lot of the second part of that, but the first part? It was never going to feel like a surprise.

And yet. And yet, isn’t that the surprise? And isn’t that the thing worth celebrating? Let’s step back so we don’t accidentally frame Elden Ring’s success through the lens of editorial decisions. Right. Isn’t it kind of incredible that a game as wilful, as strange, as distinctive as Elden Ring is not just our pick but also so many people’s game of the year in 2022? And isn’t that brilliant?

It’s a reminder of the course that From Software’s games have taken over the last decade or so. Almost everyone who loved the early games in the modern From era – Demon’s Souls, even the first Dark Souls – has a story about discovering this brilliant, odd, maddening thing that felt like it was a huge secret. Everyone has a story about working out – often painfully – how these games worked. And how these games thought: the choices they made and the choices they wanted their players to make. Everyone has a story about trying to win someone else over too: I’m playing this game at the moment, and there’s just nothing else like it. It doesn’t explain anything. Multiplayer is terrifying. I literally don’t know what’s coming next.