just realized that in the chaos of the end of the year and all the other end-of-year-wrap-up things I did, i forgot to talk about video games. And I love doing that. So, uh
My favorite games of 2023:
If I had to pick just one "Game of the Year", it'd probably be Hi-Fi Rush. I really enjoyed it all the way through, it felt fresh, it was a great execution of a concept I've always wanted to see someone do well (certainly not the first game to ever do the 'attack on the beat' thing, but it's the best execution of it I've personally ever seen), and I finished the game having pretty much no complaints about it. It rules.
I really, really enjoyed my time with Super Mario Bros. Wonder. It is, in my opinion, the single best 2D Mario game that has ever been made, by a pretty wide margin. Almost every single level has you doing something new and fresh and it's all very thoughtfully designed. It's really well-made, and it's a lot of fun!
Remnant II is another game released in 2023 that I had a lot of fun with. I loved Remnant: From the Ashes, and I'm stoked that they got to make a sequel. It's quite good, and it does a lot of things better than the first game, but I found myself feeling a little disappointed with the level variety compared to the first game, and I was annoyed by a few minor design choices (Your character pretty much stops improving after a single playthrough, unlike the first game which felt like it gave you much more to work towards across subsequent playthroughs). I still need to do a few more playthroughs to see all the bosses and encounters I missed on my first run, and I'm especially looking forward to the DLC, though! Some of my favorite stuff in the first game was DLC, so I'm sure whatever they cook up this time will be good too.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a good-ass video game that might have been my game of the year had I not started it like a week before 2023 ended. I'm still not even that far in. I only finished act 1 like yesterday. It's really well-made, and it's really cool to see what Larian can accomplish with a stupid-insane-big-budget. Many of the sidequests so far feel more interesting and memorable than those of Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2, and I can say the same about each of the companion characters. I feel like it suffers a little from having to be a D&D Video Game, though. By being a video game it improves upon and eases the burden of many of the things D&D sucks at (math, leveling, remembering all of the things you can do) while unfortunately also being very bad at many of the things D&D is good at (facilitating roleplay, collaborative and adaptive storytelling, etc. -- things which are, in fairness, basically impossible to do in a video game as well as you can do them in a TTRPG)
Tears of the Kingdom is the only other new release I actually played last year that comes to mind. It's Breath of the Wild again! And it does almost everything better than Breath of the Wild did! The world feels less empty, the dungeons feel more memorable, there's more enemy varieties, and a bunch of other new stuff I'm not remembering. It's good! But I haven't finished it yet, and I'll admit I'm not having as much fun with it as I wish I was. I felt sort of the same about breath of the wild. They once again put too much focus on quantity over quality IMO. I also think I might just not like open world games that much anymore. Elden Ring poisoned me by being too good, like food from the fairy realm, and now all the other open world games I eat taste like dirt
My favorite games I played for the first time in 2023 that did not actually come out in 2023:
Okay, so I'll admit I actually don't even PLAY that many new releases. I usually end up getting around to games a year or two (or twenty) after they come out. So here are some of my favorite games I finally got around to playing in 2023.
If I had to pick a favorite from this group, it would be Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, no question. I'm a big fan of Chulip, another weird RPG made by many of the same core people as Moon, so when I learned that another earlier, similar game of theirs had finally been translated into English after twenty-something years, I knew I had to play it. I wasn't disappointed. There's just something special about these games. Like Chulip, Moon is a game where you go around solving people's problems and doing little puzzles in order to collect 'Love'. It also has one of the most interesting framing devices I've seen in a video game in a long time, but I feel like I can't really talk about that without spoiling some of the game's most powerful and memorable moments. I'm going to be thinking about this game for a long time, and I recommend it highly. It also has a really cool approach to its soundtrack -- almost all the music in the game is diegetic, collected via in-game music disc items which you can play at any time and even arrange into a playlist from your music player in the pause menu. Almost every single one of these thirty-something discs is a song by a different japanese indie musician, across a BROAD selection of genres. And they did that shit in 1997 on the PS1.
Tunic is another game that I finally got around to last year that I am going to be thinking about for a long time, and another game I feel like I can't say that much about without spoiling it. You know when there's a revelation in a game or a movie or something that's, like, earth-shattering, changes everything moving forward, re-contextualizes everything that happened up to that point, and opens your mind to a thousand new possibilities? Tunic is a game that somehow manages to do this to you fifty times, without these moments ever losing their impact, and without those feelings of excitement and discovery ever diminishing. Even just saying that much feels like I'm potentially spoiling it, but I'm really not. The things this game will do to you -- you will not see them coming. It's awesome.
Psychonauts 1 & 2 are games I had always heard about, but never played, or even seen other people play. After playing both of them for the first time this year, I understand why they're so beloved. They're really, really well-made 3D platformers with fantastic art direction, great writing, and fun mechanics. Playing them back-to-back, the jump in quality between the first game and the second was really, really funny (the second game was released like 16 years after the first). If I'd played Psychonauts 2 when it came out in 2021, it might easily have been my game of the year. It was actually nominated for game of the year in 2021, and lost to It Takes Two, and now I'm retroactively mad about it. And I'm saying that as someone who loved It Takes Two. It Takes Two is basically Psychonauts but with Co-op Multiplayer and Worse Writing (and again, I like It Takes Two! It's good!). I have no idea how it won over such a similar game with better execution
Slay the Spire ruined my life (positive). According to steam's spotify-wrapped-style year-in-review thing that they apparently do, 40% of my time playing steam games in 2023 was spent playing Slay the Spire, and my number of play sessions of Slay the Spire was almost double the number of days I had owned the game. It was frankly embarrassing. Anyway it's good. One of the best roguelike deck builders out there. I kinda wish it had more stuff in it, though. It feels a little light in content compared to a lot of other similar games I've played. What's there is all really good though. Perfect brain-off-play-while-watching-youtube-or-listening-to-podcast type of game.
Lunistice is a really fun indie 3D platformer with excellent movement, a great soundtrack, and colorful visuals inspired by the ps1 era. It's one of those games that just feels really good to play, and just looking at footage of it doesn't really do it justice. I had so much fun playing it that I even attempted to speedrun it (which was really fun, but I gave up on that endeavor when I realized I would need to learn multiple extremely-precise skips in order to even remotely compete). It's a load of fun, it's like 5 dollars, and you can beat it in a day. If it sounds like it's up your alley, give it a try!
Neon White is another game that just feels really, really good to play. It's extremely satisfying and rewarding to replay levels to whittle down your best time, and the game encourages you to do so. There's a lot of really cool artwork and visuals in this game too, it's oozing with style. I saw a lot of people complaining about the writing and voice acting around the time it came out, and while I kinda get it, I also sort of think that those people are cowards. But the gameplay is the real main attraction regardless. I'd say it's worth playing even if you're allergic to 90's-anime-ass-nonsense.
Oh shit I was gonna make that the end of the list but I forgot I also played Deathloop in 2023. What a great game. Some of the most fun I've had with a shooter in a while, and as a Majora's Mask Enjoyer, it really scratches that same itch of iteration, gaining knowledge, figuring out everyone's routines, and executing a perfect plan. Actually, this might be the best execution of a timeloop game I've seen since Majora's Mask. It also does something I really wasn't expecting any game to be able to pull off: stealing Fromsoftware's Single Worst Mechanic (Invasions) and making them actually extremely fun. Throughout the course of the game, if you've opted in, you can be invaded by other players playing as alternate-timeline versions of the game's antagonist. Those players try to kill you for big rewards, and you try to kill them from big rewards. The maps are so small and dense and intricate, and the gameplay is so focused on using stealth and your environment to your advantage, I had so much fun sneaking around and outwitting invading players. It ruled. And, unlike in every Dark Souls game, these encounters never felt imbalanced, and I never felt like in order to not get my ass handed to me by every single invader I would need to optimize for a stupid-specific meta-build that would make me worse at playing the ACTUAL game. It's actually balanced really well. Unfortunately, when I completed my campaign and tried invading other player's campaigns myself, I could almost never find anyone to invade. By the time I'd gotten around to playing the game, everyone else had already finished the campaign, so there was an abundance of invaders, but no one to invade. Which was a real shame, because that part of the game was so much fun.
Uhhhh anyway I think that's it. And I don't really have a good way to wrap this post up. Video games good.
