Librarianon

It's very hard not to look at this as "the year Bungie laid me off into the most inhospitable labor climate the industry has seen in a very long time". But if I dwell on that too much right now I may sink into a pit too dark to return from. I am entirely too angry and hopeless to confront any of those feelings with words right now but I wanted to frontload it because it colors everything.

With that in mind, hey, it's another new year which means another exercise of looking back at what I played over the last 12 months. I kept a loose list of anything that I completed or at least played most of over on Backloggd, you can read it here

For the sake of everyone's sanity, I will only be listing games I played in 2023 that also released (or came out of early access) in 2023. Also, I'll be trying to minimize how much I write, so we're not here all day. Obviously there's TONS of stuff that came out this year that I didn't get to play yet, and most of what I did play this year was from my backlog of older titles, but here's an almost arbitrarily ordered list of games released in 2023 that I played, arranged according to personal preference.

1. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (PS5)

A functionally perfect monument to player expression, an idealized revival of a dormant series and genre that retained everything that made it weird and unique, it got a lot of new people into Armored Core, and it got me pretty deep In My Feelings towards the end.

2. Baldur's Gate 3 (PC)

Absolutely stunned by this game. What else can even be said at this point? Even when I was working in marketing support for Beamdog's first two BG re-releases, I never thought a game like this would ever even be possible. And it only was, because of highly specific circumstances that allowed it to be! Unfortunately, an update broke my mod compatibility and now I have to redo at least 20 hours of progress if I want to beat it lol.

3. Lunacid (Steam Deck)

I've seen a few "King's Field-likes" come and go, but this is the first one I've seen that absolutely Gets It, and even has a bunch of built in considerations for people who are simply not powerful enough to deal with what made those old games so frictional lol. Anyway, Lunacid perfectly understands that friction, and the importance of exploring and inhabiting an extremely sick place. One of the best dungeon crawlers ever made, and the third best game I played in 2023 that was released in the same year.

4. Alan Wake II (Xbox Series X)

I am on record as having absolutely hated Alan Wake in 2010. It was extremely repetitive, and not nearly weird enough. I have a weird relationship with Remedy in general. I love them, I love their spirit, and I'm rooting for them, but generally speaking I don't usually like the part where you play the video game. I'm the weirdo that thought the Ashtray Maze in Control was super embarrassing! But Alan Wake II feels like this ultimate culmination of everything Remedy has been working for all along, and it's hard not to fall prey to its charm. I like that the game is more than willing to just let me be lost for a while. I like that the game is doing super weird stuff with new hardware. I love the art direction and tone. I love that it somehow feels incredibly handmade despite being extremely polished and expensive looking. Most of all, I just can't quite figure out how any studio could possibly be so well organized as to create and release something so precise and oddly specific.

5. Wanted: Dead (PS5)

A ridiculous mess that shouldn't exist. Funded, written, and directed by the son of a Russian oil baron, Soleil can't seem to catch a break. Incredible gameplay, exceptionally satisfying action game kinesthetics that all make perfect sense given the pedigree. Forgettable nonsense story and characters, ridiculous difficulty spikes in a few spots, just slam it down to easy ("neko" mode) and have yourself an incredible time. Just thinking about it makes me want to play it again.

6. System Shock (PC)

The first, but not the last time that Nightdive will show up on here. Their long-awaited remake of System Shock landed like a grenade in my skull. I couldn't stop thinking about it whenever I wasn't playing it for a while there.

7. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (PC)

The original Jet Set Radio is a very Cool video game that isn't especially great. The 2002 Xbox sequel Jet Set Radio Future, however, is one of my all time favorites. BRCF is essentially that game again with some tweaks? I'm still trying to put together my feelings about it!

8. Vengeful Guardian Moonrider (Switch)

I'm a massive fan of Danilo's work. He understands what makes 16-bit Mega Drive action games tick better than damn near anybody. Oniken, Odallus, and Blazing Chrome all showed expert level design principles, but VGMR is a straight up virtuosic take on the Super Shinobi formula. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

9. Humanity (PS5)

Enhance's goal of putting out a modern day PS1 game in the style of Intelligent Qube etc. was met and exceeded by an excellent puzzle game with an excellent (and laser focused) sense of personality.

10. The Making of Karateka (PS5)

Holy smokes, what a thing. The entire concept of Atari 50's structure, applied to a single game with ample historic material and an unbelievable amount of documentation and access. I cannot wait to see what else Digital Eclipse does with their Gold Master Series.

11. Quake II (PC)

Nightdive did it again, babyyyyyyy. They gave Quake II the same treatment they gave Quake I, including a ridiculously impressive new campaign from Machine Games that has me desperately wishing they get the go-ahead to make a Quake 5 at some point.

12. Separate Ways (PS5)

This year I finally went back and played the original Separate Ways, before this expansion came out. I didn't really love the RE4 remake overall, but the new version of Separate Ways felt like an even better paced version of that game, that also managed to hit a lot of the big set piece moments that the remake missed.

13. Like A Dragon: Ishin (PS5)

I'd been hoping for localized releases of Ryu Ga Gotoku Isshin and Kenzan for soooo long. The fact that we actually got one of them, in the form of a whole-ass remake using the new engine, is far beyond my expectations. And it's great!!

14. Dead Space (Xbox Series X)

An even better remake of a pretty good game! Was it necessary? Probably not! But it's an improvement with 15 years of hindsight and design growth. Had a lot more fun with it.

15. Shadows of Doubt (PC)

The closest I've seen to Warren Spectre's idea of a one-block simulation game. Shadows of Doubt is possibly the most impressive immersive sim I've ever played, though the voxel-y nature of it is aesthetically off-putting to me. What an engrossing game, though.

16. Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion Remastered (PC)

The only Turok game I really care about, cause it's The Weird One--it's hilariously influenced by Half-Life, and reaching wayyyyy too far for the hardware it was designed for. Once again, it's impossible to overstate Nightdive's deft touch here, countless small decisions made in the remaster process that amount to a transformative experience I can highly recommend.

17. DoDonPachi DaiOuJou Re:Incarnation - M2 ShotTrigGers (Switch)

One of Cave's all time masterpieces, given the ShotTrigGers treatment by M2, the ultimate honor for any old STG. I've dumped countless hours into this on an OLED Switch with a FlipGrip and I will continue to do so, happily.

18. Demon Lord Reincarnation (PC)

My friend Romanus Surt released one of the best Wizardry-likes I've ever seen this year with DLRI. He has a history of great DRPGs, but this might be his best yet??

19. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC)

And right behind that is Digital Eclipse's ground-up remake of the original Wizardry, reframed in a way to show newcomers what was so compelling about these games to begin with. On the other hand, though, every Wizardry-like since time immemorial has been "Wizardry, but with some new art and some light quality of life tweaks to the systems and difficulty", and that's kind of a large part of what this remake is, so it almost feels weird to frame it as such, but that's a longer conversation for a different day.

20. Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action (PC)

The sequel to Demon's Tilt, and the accompanying spiritual successor to Alien Crush, I mean . . . If you have any love for "pinball as only a video game can do it" which is the only form of pinball I'm personally invested in, I highly recommend Xenotilt.

21. MyHouse.wad (PC)

I know it quickly became a meme, and I hate that it's full of memes like shrek and the backrooms or whatever, but holy heck man, this is still ridiculously impressive for something that can run in GZDOOM.

22. HROT (PC)

Hey, HROT finally came out of early access! It's a good-ass Dusk-ass Soviet-ass Quake-like.

23. F-Zero 99 (Switch)

It's F-Zero! But a lot more chaotic!

24. Vividlope (PC)

An excellent little puzzle game with extreme PS1/Saturn energy. Not quite this year's CROSSNIQ+ maybe, but a real cool game all the same.

25. Forza Polpo (PC)

Also out of early access this year, the secret new best Jumping Flash game!