Alex Zandra is a Canadian light novel author, streamer, artist and game designer. You can support her work directly on Patreon and Ko-fi, and read her books on itch. You can watch her streams on Twitch and read her infrequent microblogging on Mastodon... and while she is on Bluesky and Twitter, you probably should look for her in those other places first.

Hey folks! It's... it's been a year, huh.

In the short span of 12 months I got married, my wife moved in with me, we began the process of permanent residency application, I started writing my longest book ever, we spent months and months looking for a new place big enough for the both of us, and finally found it and moved together right at the start of January... which made it hard to start this year off on the right foot, so to speak.

It was exhausting. It's still exhausting. The fact that I'm putting this list out in March should be a pretty big indication (along with the fact that I still have yet to construct our new dining table). But we're getting there.

That new book I mentioned? What started as a bit of knight & princess body swap flash fiction turned into Her Majesty The Prince, a serial novel set in Video Game RPG Fantasy France that I'm putting out chapter by chapter. You can follow it right here along with everyone and share in the experience of an ongoing story! And to help you catch up, I've also released Act I as its own digital book over on itch. It's going to be the longest story I've ever written, and I feel it's my best work yet. I guess that's what happens when I finally let myself write high fantasy drama. (big thanks to contributing writer @Nex3 and all my beta readers!)

Despite everything, during that tremendously busy year I found the time to play games (and stream a lot of them). As is my favorite yearly tradition, allow me to tell you about the top 10 games that had the biggest impact on me in 2023. <3

Fun Mentions (Funtions)

...But first, I wanna shout out the games that didn't quite make the cut!

• As a fan of Inugami Korone and Vampire Survivors games in general, HoloCure - Save the Fans! came in at just the right time to hook me for weeks with its fun weapon combos and hilarious moveset interpretations of each VTuber's schtick
• Wildfrost's impeccable vibes kept me coming back to it again and again, what a fun deckbuilder with extremely silly character names (shoutout to Bam and Boozle)
• I played A Highland Song all the way through in one sitting and it was a profound experience I'll think about for a long time
• Do you like controlling two characters at once? I SURE DO! The fact that your two disaster lesbians text each other (and the bosses) between fights in BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart also helped it win my heart
• My wife @silverchangeling and I had a lovely, existentially disquieting time playing Slay the Princess and you should too, if only to give voice to the multiple gremlins living inside your brain
• I love a good gimmick and I love tetris inventory management so the very punny Save Room - Organization Puzzle made for a fun evening
• I never in my life thought I'd get to play another game that uses a similar TF-status-effect-as-a-game-mechanic system like I did in This Dungeon Is So Cool, but then my wife introduced me to Witch Hunter Izana
• Considering my preferred leisurely pace, @Moomanibe and I will be playing Baldur's Gate 3 for the foreseeable future and we'll have a great time the whole way through (even when that way is down, specifically into the Underdark because my knockback spell went a bit off the mark)

Dang, that's a lot more than I expected when I started writing this. If that's the batch of games that didn't make the top 10, then those that did must be pretty special, right? Let's get to it!

10. My Mad Scientist Roommate Turned Me Into Her Personal Robotic Battle Maiden?!?

You ever play a game that's so finely tuned into your specific brand of niche interests it's almost scary? When I came across this game, I had to do a double take. Gender bender storyline about a hapless protagonist getting turned into a cute girl? Long, silly title that ends in copious amounts of punctuation? Catgirl on the cover? Did I write this??

Nope! This was simply the latest in a long-running series of games by an Australian developer whose work you bet I'll check out further once I'm done with this screwball visual novel/RPG combo that wears its influences on its sleeve. This blurb on the Steam page description was all I needed to know: "Will Sam find a way out of this mess and return to their original body? Probably not, but who knows!"

There's so much to like if you've ever enjoyed any of the books I've written, so I'll leave it at that. Copious amounts of TF! Furries and anime furries! Gender questioning that's not just played for laughs! Revenge! Everything my wife and I could have wanted during our cozy weekend chill times.

9. Suika Game

Another game we've been playing when we have time to relax has been the strangely simple but nonetheless hard-to-put-down game of combining fruits into bigger fruits, all the while at the mercy of cruel physics. This is the game that finally broke me down and got me to make a Japanese account on my Switch so that I could play it immediately, before any North American localization was announced. One day I will see the fabled double watermelon... one day I will make two of them kiss.

8. Get In The Car, Loser! - The Fate of Another World

Speaking of breaking down and kissing, I jumped on the chance to play the latest story DLC from my favorite game of 2022 Get In The Car, Loser! that catapults our favorite party of disasters into an alternate universe that hits way too close to home.

Not that this was a surprise; if I've come to expect anything from Love Conquers All Games, it's writing that reads like a casual conversation with a friend and premises born from the things we can't shy away from. And, y'know... the past few years have been hard! So while I love games-as-escapism as much as anyone, sometimes it's important to stare our problems in the face—or have relatable characters give us a little push.

Given that the whole premise of GITCL was "what if we didn't wait until the last second to prevent something terrible, and instead stopped it before it got too bad?" it's a bit sobering to be given a glimpse into the alternate scenario where things had gotten really, really bad. But even then, not so bad that it's too late to do anything.

Turns out even when things look dire, there's still time to do something about it. As someone who transitioned late in life, it's a lesson that more or less has come to define a big part of my identity. It bleeds into how I talk, what I talk about; it's soaked into my body of work. I want to make sure others don't have to wait as long as I did before finally taking the steps to prevent a horrible outcome.

That doesn't mean I'm living a completely altruistic life. That's not sustainable. I am a bit of a sucker for narratives that involve self-sacrifice, although not the kind that's usually popular in stories like this one. A life ended for the sake of others can hit some good dramatic notes in a story, sure, but... for me, there's nothing more emotionally meaningful than a living sacrifice. Nothing more noble than seeing a person, a people, a cause, and devoting the rest of your life to it—and making sure it's a long one. That's the tear-jerker for me. That's what hits me right in the heart. As someone who's suffered a lot, and realized there were things I could do to ease or prevent more of that same suffering... it strikes a chord.

You should play this game.

Not just for the themes and the characters and the writing, even though they're fantastic. But also for the mechanics! I love games that try new things with interfaces, and having each party member just Be A Button on your controller is something I don't think I'll ever get tired of. The Fate of Another World puts a fun twist on it by having your chosen targets matter even more than in the base game, since each enemy is diegetically linked to a playing card and the hands you build by defeating them will affect how hard the rest of the fight is. That's clever as hell!

7. Dungeon Drafters

But that wasn't the only game set in a fantastic world where living beings are intrinsically tied to colorful playing cards. Dungeon Drafters was a brief but brilliant flame in my playing habits of last year, as my wife and I tore through it over the span of just a couple frantic weeks. The combination of grid combat and deckbuilding is well executed, and the fantasy setting is just so refreshing. I'm so glad to see more worlds without typical elves and dwarves and other common tropes, but entirely new paradigms (a lot of them furry and adorable). Forget about writing your name in history; do well enough here, and the fabric of magic itself will make a card all about you.

While a lot of deckbuilding games run a tight ship, Dungeon Drafters' gleeful power creep is also a breath of fresh air. If you think you see a way to exploit the system, to get infinite hands and limitless turns, and you find yourself asking "can I get away with it?" The game will grin right back and say "hell yeah, go for it."

6. Snake Farm

Sometimes that's not enough, though. Sometimes your own hubris is your biggest enemy, and a potential exploit was really just a lure to allow yourself to gloriously (and gorily) hoist yourself by your own gardening overalls. This is Snake Farm, to me.

Shoutout to Heather Flowers for making a compact and fun little action roguelike that's so fun to play (and inevitably lose at) that I found myself playing it to its inevitable end again and again and again.

5. Octopath Traveler II

Conversely, I still haven't finished Octopath Traveler II. I don't think I will for a while yet. But that's okay; I didn't get this game to blaze through it, or master it on repeat playthroughs. I got this game because it's a warm hug, a comfortable walk down a very long road filled mostly with things I expect, and a little bit with things I don't. And that's perfectly fine. That's exactly what I wanted.

I was a huge fan of the first game and after seeing the mixed reviews it got, there was a part of me that was anxiously awaiting the reveal of what a sequel would be. But it turns out that any fears I had were baseless: this is a natural sequel to the first game, a clear case of "what if we made another one of these but better". What exactly better stands for may not match my liking exactly, but it does for the most part, and that's plenty. I'm just eager to have another giant buffet of slice-of-life plots that may, hopefully, all intermingle into a singular epic finale... or maybe not. Who knows? I'll see when I get there.

I'm especially glad that the sequel got the same mix of protagonists as the first one: seven determined souls faced with hardships in their lifelong quest to right the wrongs that have befallen them or the people they love... and a precious country bumpkin with reasonable dreams who left for the big city and is living her best life, being all likeable and making tons of friends.

4. Rusted Moss

But what happens to the people who aren't likeable? What if your roll of the dice landed you more frowns than smiles, and a demeanor that doesn't inspire others to be kind to you? How would your life turn out then?

Especially in the middle of a conflict between humans and fae, where children with bad attitudes are indistinguishable from changeling doppelgangers, and often meet the same fate? Not all of us are blessed with a resting beatific smile, or an effortlessly cheerful disposition. Sometimes people think the worst of you for reasons beyond your control.

Sometimes everyone treats you like a monster whether or not you really are one.

I don't think I'll ever forget about what my gender therapist said to me during one of our foundational first few sessions together: "Don't worry, it won't be that hard. You smile a lot and you're friendly; people will be nice to you." I was dissolving from the inside after a decade and a half of solid denial about my gender and these words, meant to ease my record-high levels of anxiety, instead just sat in my brain for a long while. What about the other trans people stumbling through the first steps of transition who don't smile a lot and whose lifelong defense mechanisms don't manifest as friendliness? Are their hard-mode social upheavals even harder as a result, through no fault of their own?

Anyway you should play Rusted Moss.

And not just because the story's incredible and the cast of characters—protagonist Fern included—is full of very mean, very likeable people. It's a super solid metroidvania with a really neat elastic grappling hook mechanic that took me a while to learn but that felt amazing once I mastered it. It's also a tale of growing up in a world torn by a conflict that's been dragged out far longer than it should have, with humans propping up their age of iron and desperately holding back the fae from getting their turn at the wheel.

The way this game tosses aside the question of whether or not Fern truly was a changeling or simply a child with a bad attitude is as meaningful as it is blunt. Because, really, the result is the same: if the machine thinks you're a threat, it will run you over.

3. Final Profit: A Shop RPG

So... what if you try to break it apart from the inside?

Final Profit puts a different spin on the age-old conflict between mankind and fae by putting you behind the sensible eyeglasses of Queen Mab herself as she stares down the most terrifying machine that man has ever built: CAPITALISM. It has claimed other kingdoms and empires. Soon, it will claim hers. What's a ruler to do?

Start a business!

This is probably the most impressed I've ever been with a game made in RPG Maker. The developer pushes the engine to its limits, building on the basic shopkeeping mechanics until you're starting one business after another, managing multiple income streams, finding new and exciting things to sell, doing market research, making new deals with your increasingly colorful suppliers... all so that you may climb the ladder of capital and tear the entire thing down.

At least, that's the idea; Queen Mab's business plan understandably has a lot of skeptics within her court, and for good reason. Who's to say she won't be corrupted by the power she gains and the methods used to obtain it, just like every single other person who's ever tried this before? Is it even possible at all to change something from the inside? When has that ever worked?

This, the idea that Mab's plan might have a chance to succeed—not the talking birds or apple magic or interdimensional OSHA agents or the horse dimension—is truly the most fantastical element of this game.

And it's a great game, to be sure! I could not put it down, as every hour invested in it returned more ways to refine the increasingly complex business mechanics and introduced characters so surreal they put the existing cast to shame. And the fashion, gods, the fashion!

Can I take a moment to highlight just how rare it is to have a bald female lead in... anything? The positive baldness representation in this game is as phenomenal as it is out there, and it's never played for laughs by the script. That's unheard of! I never would've expected this game to give me hope in that respect.

Whether Queen Mab's mystifying plan to overthrow the Bureau of Business succeeds or not is something you'll have to find out for yourself. But don't worry; while this game is chock-full of big decisions that will test your morals and business acumen—decisions that will have consequences you may not be ready for—it's still an RPG at its core. Save once, save often. If you mess up, you can just go back and try again, and no one will be the wiser.

2. In Stars and Time

But what if they were?

Or, perhaps more hauntingly, what if the only one who could tell was you, and no one else?

(Heads up: vague spoilers about the themes of this game ahead.)

I'm a huge fan of time loop stories, whether they're in playable form or not, so I just had to check out In Stars and Time. And very soon, the game makes good on the implications of its premise. Of course it's neat the first few times Siffrin, our protagonist, realizes just how much freedom they have when they can just restart and try again. Of course they slowly realize how heartbreaking it can be to have a touching moment with someone, to get to really know them, only for them to forget everything the next day. Of course it's hard to repeatedly bang your head against an obstacle you can't seem to overcome, no matter how many times you try.

Of course you'd eventually lose your mind. Lose yourself, even.

Siffrin's story can be read in a lot of different ways. I saw a lot of myself in them; the way I used to approach relationships, for example. How my first reflex was always wondering how to solve other people's problems, asking how I could be useful to them. How easy it was for me to throw myself at a problem until I burned out. How my own happiness was always at the bottom of the list. After all, if I didn't have my friends, what did I have?

And the friends in this game are fabulous. It's not accident a lot of the games on my list this year feature top-notch casts of characters. The main adventuring party is terrific, from reluctant heroine Mirabelle to transmasc tank Isabeau, by way of actual-woman-my-age Odile and tiny bumpkin Bonnie (who's too young to participate in battles so they just pop in now and then to distribute healing items). Everyone in the fictional nation of Vaugarde has tremendous amounts of style.

Speaking of which, what are the odds of coming across another story set in Video Game RPG Fantasy France the very same year I've been writing my serial novel? I want to spend a summer in Vaugarde. Maybe drop by Ka Bue before I come back.

As vivid as the places and people are in this world of shades of grey, they can't compensate for the void of what's missing. I don't mean this as criticism; a key theme of the narrative is also something I've been struggling with myself for the past few years.

Where do I really come from?

I was born somewhere. I grew up somewhere. But my entire life—childhood, young adulthood, all of it—was lived out in a primary school play, on a bare wooden stage, set against a paper-thin backdrop. Looking back on it, whatever culture I have seems to have been fabricated wholesale, at times transplanted from overseas, dried out and packed in barrels full of salt. My family's families came here from far away, long ago, displacing others as they arrived. Our history books don't go back very far at all, but—they used to tell us when we were kids—at least they go back further than some of our neighbors. A point of pride, back then. Now all I feel is the painful twinge of a void going deeper than I could have ever imagined.

I want to decolonize myself, but I don't know how. Not yet. I've only just started.

The ties that bind me to this place and many others are faint, but they're there. I still have a lot to learn. A lot to unlearn. It's not the first time I'm ridding myself of a manufactured identity that's been pushed on me, but it's also not something I've done enough times to get better at yet. And throughout it all is the constant ache of reaching for something that's not there.

It's easy to lose myself in a place like Vaugarde, to see people thriving, sharing in the common knowledge and habits and unspoken language that draws them closer together. It's easy to want it. To crave it. To seek a way to preserve it, no matter the cost.

But it's okay if I can't find a way to get to where I want to go right now. I have time. I can keep trying, no matter how many times it takes.

Did you know that I'm still not sure how I managed to transition?

I can't imagine my past self ever having the courage to do it. How did I know it would turn out okay? How did I know where I was going, or how to get there? I often joke that in that moment I felt as if my future self had reached back in time, took my hand, and pulled me forward. I can't explain how else I made it here.

I can't imagine how I could have ever done it alone.

I was really scared, back when I took that first step; when I gave up on the only relationship keeping me afloat, when I dragged myself kicking and screaming into a tomorrow I couldn't envision yet. I was terrified of failing. That fear had held me back for so long that I had forgotten it was even there. But at that point, I was ready to accept it. I was ready to try and fail, because even that was better than staying where I was.

It took me fifteen years to escape the loop I was in. Maybe more.

And I didn't do it alone; over many tumultuous months and years, I found community. I found family. The people who had truly been there for me all along were still there, through thick and thin, even when I wasn't a great person to be around. Even when I messed up. They were soon accompanied by the peers and friends I made as I figured out who I really was, and opened myself up to the possibility that I deserved to be happy just as much as they all did.

Because in the end, it's impossible to do everything yourself. It's unsustainable to exist entirely for others. You deserve more. You deserve so much more. You deserve joy. You deserve community.

1. Void Stranger

You deserve family.

You deserve friends who will tell you to give a game another chance when you bounce off of it due to rough edges, or a bad experience, or a predictable-in-hindsight trap laid to teach you a lesson but which only served to expose a wound that had laid dormant for ages.

I'm so glad I decided to return to Void Stranger, because this game may very well have irrevocably altered the course of my life.

Sequel to Zero Ranger in more ways than one, the main reason I gave the second game by System Erasure with a name that ends in -ranger another chance was thanks to the other Mega Man streamer with a name that ends in -andra. (Thanks Vox!)

Because this game rubbed me the wrong way right from the start. Right from the very beginning. But what else was I supposed to do, when given a choice I could very clearly tell was poisoned? I'm no stranger to being thrust into impossible situations by people who know more than I do, who have more power than I do, who are only too keen to come back later with a smirking I-told-you-so as soon as the true consequences of my choices are revealed. I've heard this song and dance before.

The only way to win is not to play.

But tempers cooled, the wounds of trauma closed up again—if only temporarily, as is always their way—and I gave this game another shot. I had to know what happened to the characters I had already grown attached to. Because, let's face it: I will never be normal about knight and princess stories ever again. Not after the book I've been writing this past year.

And so despite the sinking dread that I had already messed up, that it was too late to hope for anything better, I persevered.

It turned out that in this game just like the previous one, failure doesn't mean the end. It can be an end, to be sure, but that doesn't mean things can't go on. That doesn't mean you can't pick yourself back up and try again, in the hopes that this time, things will be different. After all, now you know; if not better, than at least more. And no one can take that away from you.

I don't want to say too much about Void Stranger. This is one of those special games, ideally experienced with as little knowledge as possible, because the discovery is part of the fun. The less you know about what kind of game it is, the better. System Erasure sure does love to upend our expectations for the most surprising results.

That said, it's not a complete misnomer to call this a Sokoban-style game. It's not inaccurate to say it's a love letter to Game Boy classic roguelike Cave Noire. It will go further, to be sure, but that's a good starting point. I'm not a great puzzle game player, but once I got far enough, it didn't matter anymore. I didn't care. My mind was at work deciphering deeper mysteries.

This singular obsession was quite funny, in retrospect, as it echoed that of the protagonist. We know little about Gray; all we see is a black square, a hole that she willingly leaps into. The rest we pick up along the way, and let go when it suits us.

(Heads up: vague spoilers for this game ahead. If I've piqued your interest, go play it—it's worth it. I'll wait. You can always come back and read the rest when you're done. <3)

But I wasn't alone; far from it. The most fun I had playing this game was discovering it together, first with my wife @Silverchangeling who was an absolute beast at conquering mechanical puzzles, and then with my dear friend @Nex3 with whom I teamed up to tackle the narrative and meta puzzles that spiraled out so much further than any of us could have predicted.

I wrote down notes for this one. Sketched out solutions, drew up diagrams, pored over screenshot after screenshot trying to squeeze every last drop of meaning. @Nex3 and I exchanged sprawling notes as we slowly but surely leapfrogged our way to solving the last few mysteries that were keeping us from further endings. I stayed up late streaming the game; much too late, on some days. But it was worth it, culminating in a final hurrah as the both of us streamed our way to the final ending. One of them, at least.

To call any of the endings 'true' would be a mistake, in my opinion; System Erasure's games are about cycles, about different kinds of loops. Any ending could be true. Hell, all of them may as well canonically have happened, depending on how you look at it. Some of them are more bittersweet than others. Some resolve a little bit more neatly than the rest.

I have a favorite, though.

It's not the happiest one, but it is the one that rings the most true out of them all. It's the one that involves success, but also a failure of sorts. The one that involves being put in an impossible situation and making the best decision you can with the tools at your disposal. The one that involves a promise, kept no matter what.

It's really, really hard to live for someone else. It's unsustainable; it wears away at you, no matter how strong you are. Because when you get down to it, no one's invincible. Even the most loyal knight can't keep going forever on duty alone, it's not enough. You need more.

You need to find joy.

Joy in community; joy in seeing the triumphs of others, joy in achieving the same for yourself. It goes both ways, even across time itself. There's only so much we can do for our future selves if in doing so we deprive our present selves of what they need. We need to make sure that the person we are now can thrive, or else the wait for the person we'll become will be too long, too difficult. We can't run on promises alone.

I mentioned earlier that this game probably changed the course of my life.

When I emerged from the loop I was stuck in, when I transitioned and finally began to become a person, I looked back at the life I had been caught in all these years. I dodged a bullet, in a way; I dodged several. My ex and I hadn't had any children yet, which avoided having to put them through an ordeal I knew all too well, having lived it as a kid. Besides, once I was free from the parental pressure to have children, I realized that I didn't have any strong feelings about them one way or another. My ex and I also hadn't put a down payment on a house yet, which meant I had narrowly evaded a financial ordeal I might still be trying to escape to this day. I was free, in more ways than one.

But it turns out that it's easy to mistake the absence of feeling something for the sensation of feeling nothing.

Sometimes the single desire was there all along, hidden beyond the void, waiting for you to make the connection. And once you reach out to it, once it can be seen, once it can be felt... there's no going back. There's no forgetting it, no matter how hard anyone tries.

Many times in my life, I thought it was too late for me to have what I wanted. I thought dreams came true for other people, and that I ought to content myself with what I could get. It's hard to emerge from that kind of comfortable suffering. I never thought I'd make it this far.

I never thought I'd know what it's like to want to have children.

There's something cruel about wanting something you can never have, but there's something equally triumphant about finding a way to get there regardless. Endings will always be a part of our lives, no matter how hard we try to avoid them; it's impossible for anything, much less everything, to last forever. It's important to learn to accept that. It's important to learn how to grieve for the dreams we'll never achieve, and find joy in the ways we can still make some part of them come true.

This is Void Stranger to me.

If everything is cyclical, then failure is not only inevitable, it's something we'll experience again and again. But then so too can we learn to bear it more gracefully, to learn from it, to accept it as part of life. If there will always be a future self to yearn for, then we have to make sure our present self can make the journey. We have to care for the person we are right now. Because we deserve it.

Because we deserve to find joy.

Let's give ourselves the chance to feel it.

Let's keep making wonderful things together. <3