I always get a little tripped up over choosing my Game of the Year. Should it be my favorite game of the year, or the best game I played? A lot of times those are one and the same but not always. Sometimes I focus on the “of the Year” part more than the “Game,” part; I don’t know if Wolfenstein: The New Colossus was the best game I played or my favorite game of 2017, but I know for damn sure that a game that unapologetically said “Hey, the fascists suck and you should kill them without a lot of handwringing” was the game that I thought most captured what we needed in 2017.
This all brings us to 2022’s choice: Marvel’s Midnight Suns. The black-and-white description of this game is where we need to start, so I’m going to rip this off directly from the game’s Steam Store page as a basic intro for those who have not heard of it.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is the ultimate crossover event combining the rich story, character relationships, customization and progression of an RPG with the tactical strategy and combat mechanics of a revolutionary new card-based tactics game.
And that’s fully accurate: you play as a customizable character named The Hunter, resurrected for the purpose of once again ending the reign of terror of your mother, a demon named Lillith. You enlist the help of some Avengers, some of the Midnight Suns team from the eponymous comic run, and one Marvel mainstay who’s been a part of both teams plus the X-Men plus every team they’ve needed to give a little boost since the ‘90s (it’s Wolverine.)
The game’s loop is incredibly satisfying: there’s a day period and a night period. Spend the day scrounging for resources you’ll use to upgrade or craft cards/abilities and consumables, talk to your teammates, train with one for a bonus, and maybe send someone out on their own mission to earn some resources or bonuses. Then, select a mission from your futuristic war table and select your three-man squad to accomplish it.
The missions are satisfying combat puzzles: each member of your team has a set of abilities represented by cards you draw and then choose to play. As a basic rule, you have three “card plays” per turn and two “redraws,” where you can chuck something from your hand to get a different card that may be more useful. Attack and Skill cards do damage or enable your heroes in some way while generating a resource called Heroism. This is then spent to play Hero cards with bigger effects and more damage, or to trigger environmental effects that can damage or hinder your enemies. You can upgrade and augment character’s abilities and customize their playstyles a bit based on which cards/abilities you put in their deck for any encounter. While the announcement of “a Marvel game from the people who made X-Com” had me excited for “Marvel X-Com,” this is a very different approach to tactical combat and one I’ve enjoyed thoroughly
Completing your mission puts you and the rest of your team back in the game’s hub world, the Abbey, for the night portion of the game’s cycle. Now, you can still explore the grounds for resources and secrets using a light Metroidvania-style set-up or you can bond with your team in one of a few ways. You’re invited to join clubs: Shop club with the tinkerers like Peter Parker and Robbie Reyes, a book club that’s just a thin cover for one of the Midnight Suns to spend time with an Avenger he has a crush on (I’m not kidding, it’s an unlikely pairing and some of the most entertaining writing in the game), or the Emo Kids club which is really what it sounds like - the spookier members of the group hanging out and being goth superheroes. On nights without club meetings, you may be able to pick one member of your team to join a “hangout,” a chance for the two of you to spend some quality time reading, having a drink, pool lounging, mushroom foraging, or a number of different activities around The Abbey. Match the right person with the right activity, maybe give them an appropriate gift you’ve picked up at the Abbey’s gift shop, and your Friendship with that character will increase, making you both more effective in combat on your own and when fighting together. Send The Hunter to bed after being sure to pet your demon-dog companion Charlie, and the cycle starts all over again.
Those three dense paragraphs pretty dryly lay out Midnight Sun’s core loop and it’s a cycle that’s kept me amazingly entertained with both the “down time” at The Abbey and with the combat challenges s I try to figure out how to best use each hero and build complimentary teams. But there’s an additional reason this was my game of the year and it all comes down to timing.
Midnight Suns released on December 1, 2022. On the morning of Monday, November 28th, I got a phone call that my best friend of nearly 30 years, Kyle, had passed away suddenly the night before. Kyle was a huge fan of Marvel and video games and Marvel video games and X-com, so I had been eager to dive into Midnight Suns to start sharing my impressions. He’d just gotten a PS5, so I was trying to figure out if I could gift him an electronic copy of the game if it was any good or order a physical version for him for Christmas.
I spent that week not really knowing what to do. I still spend a good chunk of time not knowing what to do. I don’t think I ate a meal until Wednesday, maybe Thursday?I couldn’t watch an MCU movie or show, or any of his favorite things that we’d talked about ad nauseam. I was numb. But to keep my mind and hands occupied, I did start Midnight Suns on December 2nd. And over the past 3-4 weeks I’ve kept playing, some as a distraction and some out of, finally, actual enjoyment. The first hours were rife with minefields - every little joke about a character’s backstory or a nod to the MCU properties this game can’t explicitly be a part of elicited a chuckle and then a stabbing pain in my chest. I couldn’t share them with Kyle or give a vague hint about a joke from Spider-Man or Doctor Strange that would have him groaning. I’m pissed we won’t be able to talk about this game’s take on Agatha Harkness compared to what we saw in WandaVision and is still to come in Coven of Chaos.
I’m still playing Midnight Suns and expect I will be for quite some time. There seem to be endless side missions for me to play around with team compositions, there’s a New Game Plus mode so you can keep using your optimized heroes, and new characters are coming via DLC in 2023. A joke or aside from a character still gets me from time to time; I finished a major story mission last night and wanted to reach out to talk about what I think is strange character behavior by one person and…can’t. And won’t be able to. And that’s also not going to go away completely anytime soon, if ever.
On its own merits, Marvel's Midnight Suns is my game of the year. Due to circumstances no one could have foreseen or wanted, and by being an anchor for me when I needed one, it was my game of 2022.