As I write this in the dog days of 2022, my thoughts naturally turn to my personal highlights of the year in games. If you’d asked me a year ago I would have confidently predicted that my top game of 2022 would be the rerelease of Advance Wars 1 & 2, but Nintendo – in a display of geopolitical sensitivity that one might consider excessive but the likes of which are at least literally unheard of among giant videogame corporations – delayed their release because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Savvily, Ukraine’s own official communications channels went on to exploit the power of videogame-style imagery by tweeting COD-style top-down monochrome footage of gunships destroying Russian tanks, to rousing soundtracks of rock and hip-hop.