I'm far from the first person to make the observation that while the past year has been great for the people playing games, it's been a terrible one for many of the people making them; for every incredible labor of love, there's been countless instances of the games industry exploiting that love and devaluing that labor, most prominently the staggering number of layoffs that rocked the industry in wave after wave, month after month. This is all to say that while I'm writing this list to celebrate the passion, creativity, and hard work that went into the many, many games I played last year, I don't want to leave it acknowledged that all of the fun, excitement, and wonder I experienced came at a very real human cost that is not just unfortunate but unacceptable.
Ok, enough about the failings of the industry, let’s talk about some good video games! I played somewhere around 50-60 different games over the past year, and while I was initially planning to write up separate top 10 lists for 2023 releases and for older games like I’ve done in the past, I found that I didn’t really have the time nor the energy to write 20 full entries, so I’ve scaled it back to an overall top 10 of games from any year, with the games I had to drop joining the honorable mentions. Now, without further ado, let’s see those GOTYs!
1. Void Stranger [System Erasure, 2023]
Void Stranger is a tricky beast to recommend; its secret-heavy nature and seemingly endless series of surprises is a big part of what I love about the game, but at the same time, I don't want to say "you just gotta play it, trust me" and leave it at that. So here are some things I can tell you: Void Stranger is a game built around block-pushing and tile-moving puzzles, but it’s also a game that requires keen observation, lateral thinking, and either a great memory or an obsessive amount of screenshotting and note-taking. It’s a game whose scope seemingly keeps expanding right before your eyes, revealing further layers each time you think you’ve finally bested it; even now there are multiple major things in the game that I know about but will likely never see for myself outside of a YouTube video. It’s a game that eschews conventional wisdom about “good game design” in pursuit of its own vision; it will not “respect your time”, it will offer you choices while obfuscating the consequences, it will gleefully scatter rakes along the ground and have a good laugh at your expense when you inevitably step on one—though ideally you’ll find it in yourself to laugh along at your own folly. It’s a game with a killer soundtrack, a story whose characters I got incredibly invested in, and a surprising amount of lore that I honestly only like 80% understand. It’s my favorite game of 2023, and while it’s one that plenty of people are liable to bounce off of, it’s an incredible experience if you can get on its wavelength.
2. Alan Wake II [Remedy Entertainment, 2023]
Ah yes, my second favorite wildly inventive Finnish game released last year with a looping (or would that be spiraling?) structure, unexpected connections to the developer’s previous work, and an unforgettable sequence set to a lyrical song written for the game. Ok, but seriously, I have been waiting for Alan Wake II for around a decade and I’m still gobsmacked by how good it is. The opening sequence alone sets an incredibly high bar (if that title card played in a movie theater I guarantee you there’d be cheers and applause), and rest of the game more than lives up to it. The writing is fun and goofy and meta, but also manages to be genuinely chilling when it needs to, the game is gorgeous to look at (I’m not sure what I enjoyed more: watching reality double up on itself in the Overlaps or seeing how wet Alan looked in all of his scenes), and we’ve been graced with not just one but three new Old Gods of Asgard songs, one of which accompanies what is easily one of my favorite sequences from any game I’ve ever played, and certainly my favorite of the year. I’m admittedly not as much of a fan when it comes to much of the actual gameplay—the shooting is an improvement over the first game but still isn’t terribly satisfying, and filling out the Case Board is pretty paint-by-numbers—but it has its moments; the way Dark Place enemies mingle with identical but harmless shadows makes for an unnerving experience, and there’s a scene late in the game that subverted the Case Board so effectively that it single-handedly justified its inclusion for me. On the other hand, I was over the moon about the use of live-action / FMV, which has gone from a fun curiosity in the margins of Remedy’s previous titles to an integral part of their storytelling, with Alan in particular regularly shifting between mediums at key moments, not to mention some other fun uses ranging from pitch-perfect hilariously terrible local commercials to an entire optional 20-minute surreal Finnish horror film. (Make sure to enable subtitles!) It’s the kind of idiosyncratic choice that’s emblematic of the wonderfully unique sensibilities of Sam Lake and the other creative and talented folks at Remedy, and I am beyond excited to see whatever big and weird swings they make next.
3. Pentiment [Obsidian Entertainment, 2022]
Confession time: I know this is kind of absurd for a game from the developer of Fallout: New Vegas and published by Microsoft, but I keep forgetting that Pentiment is not by any stretch of the imagination an indie game. It’s got budget and polish, sure, but its eschewal of both photorealism and combat makes it basically a total anomaly in the modern AAA landscape. Rather than action, Pentiment’s sole focus is narrative—specifically, a murder mystery set in a 16th century abbey. Playing it, I was struck by the game’s phenomenal lettering work, which feels like a strange thing to fixate on in a video game, but the way different characters' dialogue is presented in different scripts or print based on their occupation or background (or more accurately, your character's perception of them—there's at least one instance where the font changes when you learn that a character is more educated than previously thought) is some fantastic attention to detail, as are the occasional appearance of misspellings that are then crossed out and corrected, and the references to Jesus/God that are filled in after the rest of the sentence as the writer switches to red ink. That attention to detail extends to the narrative as well, which does a great job laying out the rich social fabric of the abbey, from the monks to the peasants, and the slowly brewing class tensions between the different factions, and the story goes to some surprising and genuinely heartbreaking places.
Also, slight spoilers here, but I loved how the game refuses to let you off easy when it comes to solving the murders and accusing a suspect. This ain't Ace Attorney; the evidence is never decisive and the suspects don't break down and confess when confronted, so there's this awful lingering feeling of "what if I got it wrong?" that you just have to sit with and live with as your meddling costs people their lives, and I think that rules.
4. Rhythm Doctor [7th Beat Games, 2021-present]
I’ve already put Rhythm Doctor on a GOTY list before, back in 2021 when the medical-themed one-button rhythm game first launched in Early Access, but the brand-new Act 5 is so good that it single-handedly earned itself a spot on this list. It’s Rhythm Doctor’s baseball arc (proving once and for all that RD truly is anime), a self-contained narrative about an injured star athlete trying to rush his recovery so he can get back to playing. The new freeze-shot mechanic (delayed one-shot beats with timing indicated by an audio cue) is a ton of fun even if it tripped me up so many times when I was learning the new songs, and speaking of new songs, let’s just give a full rundown of my favorites of the new levels:
- 5-1 Lucky Break: A chill time slugging baseballs with the multi-hit mechanic from the Muse Dash crossover levels and some smooth sax gives way to an incredible glitchy nightmare-scape with some musical drops I felt in my bones and a surprise cue that was definitely not in the tutorial and felt so satisfying to nail on my first attempt. A fantastic high note to start the act on.
- 5-1N One Slip Too Late: The first of two lyrical tracks in the new act, this one was an emotionally charged banger about Lucky fearing the death of his career (“Now when they call my name, all my pride has turned to shame”) that also managed to cleverly line up some of the lyrics with the rhythms (“One slip, too late, three strikes, for me” as you’re fed cues for 1, 2, 3, and 4 beats). I also have to shoutout the visuals: the dot matrix display effects, the lyrics on the scoreboard, and especially the visual transitions, which are slick throughout but get especially wild and fun in the final chorus (they even went to the trouble of drawing a cute photo of Nicole that’s onscreen so briefly I had no idea it was there until rewatching the level while writing this).
- 5-2N Unsustainable Inconsolable: My personal nemesis, the one level I’ve yet to achieve a perfect S+ (or even an A!) in. 5-2 introduces the freeze-shots, but 5-2N gives you them at a much higher tempo, varies their timing all over the place, and adds the extra wrinkle of their sped-up counterpart: burn beats. Every time I tried playing this one, I could feel my brain short-circuiting trying to keep up with the different cues. Between the high stress and general vibes, this one reminded me of Thumper more than anything.
- 5-X Dreams Don’t Stop: Forget those other levels; even if this had been the only addition in Act 5, it still would’ve made this GOTY list. 5-X is a big rock opera finale that simultaneously gives a satisfying payoff to Act 5’s story through an absolute banger of a song while also bringing back and combining my favorite elements from previous bosses (1-X’s glitch effects and 2-X's window movement) and introducing a new trick of its own.
I genuinely don't know how 7th Beat are going to top Act 5, but I look forward to seeing them try.
5. corru.observer [corru, 2022–present]
The video game known only by its URL corru.observer is a strange beast: a browser-based, episodically released mystery about jacking into an alien computer filled with both the fragmented memories of its absent owner and a menagerie of digital beings with varying degrees of sentience and sanity. At first, you’ll settle into a comfortable rhythm of clicking and scrolling around through different web pages of strange text and glitchy CMYK imagery, but keep exploring, and you’ll find places where the gameplay shifts into entirely different genres. I don't want to spoil the specifics myself (although if you're curious, the video here shows some brief glimpses of what I'm talking about), but it makes playing corru.observer an exhilarating experience; after a couple of those switch-ups you get the feeling that the game could do basically anything, that any new update could completely change what "playing corru.observer" even looks like, and it has me so, so excited to see those limitless possibilities explored in 2024.
6. Signalis [rose-engine, 2022]
Ah yes, my second favorite European indie game I played last year that opens with a gay lady entering a perfectly geometric hole in the ground. Wait, did I use that joke already? Anyways, as a certified horror-game wuss and total survival-horror neophyte, I'm admittedly not terribly familiar with the games that Signalis draws inspiration from (I've never played a Resident Evil or a Silent Hill, the closest I've ever gotten would probably be Alan Wake II), so I'll leave it to others to decide how derivative it is and how well it fares when compared against its influences. All I can say is that from my narrow perspective, Signalis is cool as hell. Its bold aesthetic and cryptic presentation had me hooked from minute one (if not for Alan Wake II it would have been my favorite title drop of the year), and I remained totally enthralled as things only got weirder and more disconcerting from there. The strict 6-item inventory limit was occasionally aggravating, but mostly I appreciated how mindful it forced me to be about balancing weaponry, healing, and key items, as well as giving me a compelling reason to use stealth whenever possible in order to conserve the precious few resources I was carrying. Also, I don't want to spoil anything, but there are some things that happen towards the end that really threw me for a loop (complimentary).
7. Bee [Emily Short, 2012 (rereleased in 2022)]
I'm a huge fan of the couple of Emily Short games I've played (Counterfeit Monkey and Galatea), but there's so much of her work I still haven't checked out, so last year I looked up her itch.io page and came across Bee, an absolutely stellar work of interactive fiction about a home-schooled girl in a conservative Christian community who's devoted herself to competing in the national spelling bee. The game operates on a storylet structure where, each in-game month, you choose one of three available vignettes, ranging from holing up by yourself to drill flashcards or doing chores to spending time with your sister and parents or getting to know other families in the home-schooling co-op, and then you usually make a couple choices about what you say or do or sometimes even just how you feel about what's happened. There's an element of strategy to your choices if you're aiming to win—spending time studying obviously helps your chances at the bee, but drilling rapidly loses its effectiveness if you don't balance it with other activities to restore your motivation—but mostly I found myself preoccupied with the narrative of this young, sheltered girl trying to do her parents and community proud even as she feels stifled and isolated by them. There are moments of real compassion and warmth, but it's also a story that's quietly devastating in places (there's one scene in particular that absolutely destroyed me), and I repeatedly found myself struck by how empathetic the writing was towards characters that in lesser hands could have come across as mere caricatures.
8. Stephen’s Sausage Roll [increpare games, 2016]
For years, Stephen's Sausage Roll has been a fixture on my Steam wishlist, an apparently brilliant puzzle game that I desperately wanted to try but always felt too intimidated by to actually take the plunge on. In the end, what got me to actually give it a go was my twin brother suggesting as a game for us to tackle together, and I am so glad he did, because SSR is every bit as brilliant as I had heard. Much like Void Stranger, part of the challenge of many puzzles is figuring out not only how to get yourself where you need to be, but how to do it while also facing in the correct direction, although SSR's tank controls and the way your character's fork and whatever might be speared on it get in your way mean that a very different kind of dance is required to orient yourself correctly (prepare to spend a lot of time walking backwards). In most other respects, it's a very different sort of Sokoban game, one much closer to A Monster's Expedition in its elegance and minimalism; rather than offering a drip feed of new puzzle elements (in Void Stranger's case, new monsters, statues, and tiles), SSR keeps things fresh by having each set of levels tease out some latent property of the existing elements, a logical consequence of the previously established mechanics that only reveals itself when those elements are arranged just so. I'm being deliberately vague, but that's because those moments of discovery (whether they occur when you reach the point where they're required, or if you stumble into them slightly earlier as I did a couple times) make for some very cool reveals that are absolutely worth experiencing for yourself; accidentally [REDACTED] my [REDACTED] for the first time and realizing the implications for future puzzles was incredible. Also, I highly recommend reading all of the signs in the overworld; they're totally optional and initially seemed like a pointless distraction, but the eventual payoff was so much darker and wilder than I could have anticipated.
9. Psycholonials [Andrew Hussie, 2021]
At once a fiery power fantasy about bringing America to its knees and a cautionary tale about internet fame swallowing its subject whole, Psychocolonials is a fascinating visual novel. It’s kind of impossible to talk about it without talking about its creator Andrew Hussie’s most well-known work, Homestuck, so let’s get into that first. There’s obviously plenty of overlap in narrative voice and art style (and music, courtesy of Homestuck music team member Clark Powell), but even when it comes to its format, Psychocolonials feels more like Homestuck than it does like other VNs (even including the Homestuck spin-off ones!); rather than reused sprites and backgrounds punctuated by bespoke CGs, Psychocolonials is entirely composed of unique if rough illustrations (tellingly, they’re even referred to as “panels” at one point) and the occasional animated cutscene (I kept getting thrown off by the lack of a “[S]” preceding each one). And of course, it’s hard not to read parts of the story as allegorical for Hussie’s own experiences as the figure at the center of Homestuck’s passionate fandom—the mental-health-destroying weight of all that attention, the inability to control your following even as you bear responsibility for your influence over it.
Even if you don’t know a thing about Homestuck though, Psychocolonials is a great time. It’s fun watching events rapidly escalate from social media rebrand to geopolitical chaos, the character writing is really sharp, and as fucked up and bleak as it gets at times, it’s also incredibly funny when it wants to be; there’s one gag in particular involving spinning guns that absolutely killed me. I think it missteps a little during the ending, which goes on longer than it needed to and features some armchair political theorizing that I didn't find terribly persuasive, but I did enjoy getting called out for trying to save-scum the final choices.
10. Photopia [Adam Cadre, 1998]
*Much thanks to Aaron A. Reed and his fantastic book/blog 50 Years of Text Games for introducing me to Photopia, a short and excellent work of parser-based interactive fiction that doesn't really have any puzzles but nevertheless uses its medium to great effect. Really glad I took Aaron's spoiler warning to heart and went in blind, because there are moments of comprehension and epiphany that were alternately thrilling and devastating, where a single seemingly innocuous line of narration was able to instill a sense of curious wonder or mounting dread (and in the latter case, trying to act on my sudden sense of urgency only let the game twist the knife that much deeper). As John Walker wrote, "to describe [Photopia] is to destroy it", so go play it for yourself to discover what it's about.
Honorable Mentions
As always, the list proper is far too small to encompass all of the games I fell in love with over the past year, but I’d burn myself out trying to write a full-size entry for every last one of them. So instead, we have the honorable menchies, where I can just fire off a whole bunch of fun-sized recommendations covering everything I couldn’t fit in the main list, listed here in alphabetical order:
- Baldur’s Gate 3 [Larian Studios, 2023]: I actually haven’t even finished this yet, but as someone who plays a lot of 5e, I’ve been having a blast with this video game adaptation, especially when I’m curb-stomping bosses using ridiculously broken builds no DM would ever let me get away with.
- Betrayal at Club Low [Cosmo D, 2022]: A brilliant dice-rolling RPG infused with Cosmo D's trademark off-kilter style and sensibilities. I’m so glad that this won the grand prize at the IGFs, 100% deserved.
- Cocoon [Geometric Interactive, 2023]: Come for the slick world-nesting orb puzzles, stay for the fantastically alien visual design. Never have I been so enthralled watching doors open.
- Dominion [Temple Gates Games, 2021]: After discovering the joys of the deckbuilder through video games like Inscryption and Slay the Spire, I got way too into the original deckbuilder, the physical card game Dominion (as I write this, my table is still completely overrun with expansion boxes), and now I’ve come full circle with Dominion’s digital adaptation, which has been a great way to continue enjoying the game with my siblings when we’re not all in the same place.
- Don’t Take It Personally, I Just Don’t Like You [Christian DeCoster, 2023]: A lo-fi dating sim with routes ranging from really sweet to textbook emotional abuse, and which plays with its presentation and interface in interesting ways.
- Exapunks [Zachtronics, 2018]: Another excellent programming puzzle game from Zachtronics. I'm a sucker for touches like tucking away the documentation inside printable zines with extra worldbuilding, and I really enjoyed trying to work around the kinds of very limited constraints that Exapunks revels in. (My kingdom for just one more register!)
- Fallen London [Failbetter Games, 2009-present]: A strange and wonderful browser RPG / text game about a version of late 19th-century London that sank into supernatural subterranean realm of The Neath. FL has been a daily fixture of my life for just over a year now and I look forward to seeing what the next year brings for the game.
- Guess The Game [Guess The Game, 2022-present]: Exactly what it says on the tin: a daily guessing game where you identify a video game based on cropped, contextless screenshots. Every time I correctly identify a game I’ve never so much as watched a Let's Play of based on nothing more than some virtual grass and trees, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. (Seriously though, why the hell do I know what the foliage from Advance Wars looks like?)
- Horse Master [Tom McHenry, 2013]: A fantastically disturbing Twine game about raising a horse in a world where "horses" are actually some kind of utterly alien nightmare creature.
- Kid A Mnesia Exhibition [[namethemachine] and Arbitrarily Good Productions, 2021]: Thank you to Jacob Geller for introducing me to this virtual Radiohead museum; I had zero prior relationship with their music, and it still isn’t really my thing, but even then this was an absolutely stunning audiovisual experience.
- Mice Tea [Cinnamon Switch, 2023]: Not gonna lie, I feel real awkward recommending or even admitting to having played a kinky 18+ VN (at least with Ladykiller in a Bind I can affect some distance and be like “this dialogue system is brilliant”), but the thing is that this game is just really charming and also yes, I am very into the magic TF tea shenanigans.
- Monuments to Guilt [louis, 2023]: Another virtual museum I discovered through the same Jacob Geller video as Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, albeit a far more mundane one: the Museum of Exclusionary Design, a short little 3D walkaround showcasing real-world examples of hostile architecture benches designed to prevent people (particularly homeless people) from drawing too much comfort from them. It’s very matter-of-fact in its presentation, but the facts themselves are so damning that playing this made me genuinely angry.
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder [Nintendo, 2023]: After four consecutive New Super Mario Bros. games, it’s such a relief to finally have a fresh new take on 2D Mario, one that both gives the series a new look and spices things up with the anything-goes chaos of the Wonder Flowers. Now I just want to see them play around with Mario’s moveset in a more permanent fashion so the level design can actually capitalize on it, like with the cap throw in Odyssey.
- Sylvie Lime [love ♥ game, 2022]: A playfully antagonistic exploration-platformer with unusual movement that takes some getting used to (I don’t think I’ve ever played a platformer where you rebound off of walls before). I love that there’s an optional upgrade you can get that lets you increase the game’s frame rate.
- Teslagrad 2 [Rain Games, 2023]: A dramatically expanded Metroidvania sequel that shifts focus from narrow paths of magnetic attraction/repulsion platforming puzzles to momentum-based traversal through wide open areas. Blazing across the map was a ton of fun once I had the full moveset at my disposal.
- The Case of the Golden Idol [Color Gray Games, 2022]: A clever and nasty Obra Dinn-like, which is to say a murder-mystery puzzle game where you observe a frozen moment in time and use logical deduction to reconstruct the grisly sequence of events. I still need to check out the DLC, and I’m looking forward to the recently-announced sequel.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom [Nintendo, 2023]: While not as revolutionary as its predecessor, exploring Hyrule felt far more novel and exciting than I expected for such a direct sequel, and the fact that the freeform construction afforded to you by the Ultrahand ability works as well as it does is nothing short of a miracle.
- The Telwynium: Book Two [Powerhoof, 2022]: Considering how goofy Powerhoof's other point-and-clicks have been, I never expected I'd be this invested in more serious fantasy storytelling from them, and yet here we are. Eagerly looking forward to checking out Book Three once its second half is out.
- Three Lilies and Their Ghost Stories [milk+ visual, 2023]: A yuri ghost-story visual novel anthology that runs the gamut from spooky period romance to sci-fi dystopian thriller. None of it ever gets as dark as their previous VN Soundless, which was genuinely a really upsetting and disturbing read, though I'd definitely still suggest minding the content warnings. I think my favorite story was either “Suburb” or “City”, but I enjoyed all three.
- Vampire Survivors [poncle, 2022]: Learning that the developer previously worked in the gambling industry was not remotely surprising given the extremely addictive nature of this semi-idle roguelike. Took me a bit to figure out how to throw together effective builds, but once I did, it's just mindless enough to make for the perfect podcast-listening game.
- Violet [Jeremy Freese, 2008]: Another 50 Years of Text Games recommendation, this time a very funny one-room parser IF where you try to overcome countless distractions and write 1000 words of your dissertation while an imaginary version of your girlfriend Violet serves as the narrator and tries to keep you on task. I needed a couple of hints to complete it but the narration and increasingly absurd puzzle solutions were more than entertaining enough to make up for the occasional bit of obtuseness.
