But still: I’m amazed at how many other games have equally strong arguments for that top slot. Sure, a clear winner emerged as Polygon staffers’ votes began to trickle in - a surefire indication of the one game we collectively predict will, looking back from some point in the future, be the video game of 2022. Some of the best games of the last 12 months: a two-button roguelite about the meta strategy of character progression a dungeon-crawler-meets-management-sim about organized religion and echo chambers a dice-based paean to the power of community that’s also a visual-novel lament to the things we lose in pursuit of wealth.įor me, it’s this erasure, reinterpretation, and reinforcement of genres that defines the list below. And in 2022, more so than any other year, I threw up my hands and allowed myself to revel in the chaos. Like any worthy art form, they require constant categorization, re-categorization, and re-re-categorization, just to keep track of every twist and turn in their labyrinthine evolution.

Even “Metroidvania,” a portmanteau created specifically to denote a certain set of design tenets, often comes with a cascade of asterisks, caveats, and parentheticals.īut of course, video games’ stubborn refusal to be pinned down is part of what makes them so damn fun. “Turn-based strategy” isn’t doing all that much work anymore. Simple terms like “open world” and “first-person shooter” have lost much of their original meaning. These findings suggest that CTC clusters may contribute a greater role to tumor dissemination than previously believed and may point to strategies for combating CTC cluster-initiated metastasis.It’s becoming increasingly difficult, as the years go by, to describe my favorite video games. Preliminary experiments demonstrated that clusters could be disrupted during transit using drugs that affected cellular interaction energies. Xenotransplantation of human CTC clusters into zebrafish showed similar reorganization and transit through capillary-sized vessels in vivo. Clusters rapidly and reversibly reorganized into single-file chain-like geometries that substantially reduced their hydrodynamic resistances. Over 90% of clusters containing up to 20 cells successfully traversed 5- to 10-μm constrictions even in whole blood. Here, we present evidence that challenges this assumption through the use of microfluidic devices designed to mimic human capillary constrictions and CTC clusters obtained from patient and cancer cell origins. However, it is currently assumed that CTC clusters are too large to pass through narrow vessels to reach these organs. Multicellular aggregates of circulating tumor cells (CTC clusters) are potent initiators of distant organ metastasis.

Let There Be Blood by Tina Traverse