2023 was a rough year. The industry saw unprecedented layoffs despite sky-high profits, as c-suite executives ruined thousands of lives in the developer, publisher, and media spheres to avoid taking even a shred of personal accountability. On a personal level, I feel like I spent most of the year low-key sick, mostly due to caring for a second, high-needs hatchling in the Dinos clan. I also spent the last 8 months in an absolute crush of work. I recognize that I’m incredibly fortunate to have spent the entire year not only employed, but able to work from home more than 80% of the time. That said, this is the most exhausted I’ve felt in a new year in a very long time.
I’m going to be honest: after Jess and Jason were laid off last January, I wasn’t sure there was going to be a Giant Bomb website to publish my 2023 Game of the Year blog / list (blist?). I haven’t watched nearly as much video content here as I’ve wanted to (see being sick / exhausted in the last paragraph), though I’ve kept up with just about every podcast. Many of the games I play are good podcast games; when you have 1-2 hours in a given night for personal entertainment, you learn to multitask. Consequently, taking a night just to recover feels “unproductive”, which is a piss-poor way to evaluate your personal time. Perhaps this context helps explain my top ten list, which is one that I’ve been looking askance at for the entire month of December. I wondered “is this really my GOTY decision?” and whether I screwed up by prioritizing the wrong games. But I really do like my list, even if I’m disappointed by a handful of titles that I thought would be shoo-ins.
Apologies to the following games, which I ran out of time or just lacked the wherewithal to play at the right times: The Banished Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Ember Knights, Endless Dungeon, In Stars and Time, Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, Mortal Kombat 1, Phantom Brigade, Shadows of Doubt, Slay the Princess, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Under the Waves, and Wild Hearts. I hope I have time to play most of you before I forget you exist.
(Game screenshots mine unless labeled otherwise; feel free to use the images I uploaded)
Not Ranked (So I Can Cheat and Exceed Ten Entries), Board Game Edition:
Dorfromantik (left) - Many of you have probably played the video game, and I'm happy to report that this version of it is also good. I’ve played several rounds of this with 2-3 people, and it’s been a really good time. It’s kind of a soft “Legacy” game, in that you work on a campaign that unlocks achievements and new boxes of content. It’s my new favorite cooperative board game, surpassing the basic version of Pandemic. I also played it once with my 4 year old, and she enjoyed placing the tiles. I’ll make a tile fiend out of her yet!
Flamecraft (right) - Holy shit is this game adorable! It’s ostensibly competitive, although you can play it as amicably as you feel like. Collecting cute dragons and building a fantastical town are rewards in their own right, as far as I’m concerned. This game is definitely going to be a staple in my house for years to come, and its praise around the industry is well deserved. It was a little too complex for my daughter, but she did want to look at every single piece of art for a long time.
10. Cocoon (Xbox Series X)
I’ve found myself disappointed with every purported heir to the legacy of Limbo and Inside. 2022’s Somerville felt really rocky in its gameplay, and Planet of Lana lacked any sort of propulsion outside of its initial moments. Cocoon addressed all my gripes with its peers by being a brilliantly designed puzzler that limited its scope to its biggest strengths. The game seamlessly (and often quite subtly) places you in a setpiece where you have exactly what you need to solve a given puzzle, and nothing more than that to artificially bump up its complexity. Light touches such as making repositories for world-spheres disappear once they’ve exhausted their usefulness keep the focus on solving, avoiding any sense that you need to double back. And if you want to double back anyway, the save states were incredible (one for every percentage of completion!). A flawlessly crafted game that occasionally makes you feel like a genius, AND it only takes 5ish hours to complete? Pretty much a must-play for any parent or person with otherwise limited time.
9. Everspace 2 (PC, Xbox Series X)
I played a couple hours of this in early access and was immediately hooked. Shelving it in favor of its 1.0 version turned out to be a great decision, because I kept popping into this game for about 8 months of the year (finally beat it two weeks ago!). The best thing about the game is how it devotes its resources to its core strength: excellent ship combat. I absolutely love boost-strafing and swapping through interesting weaponry to feel like an invincible starfighter. Just about any combat sequence can feel incredible, though the conclusion to the main storyline was a level even above that. It’s also full of adorable B-game goodness; I had it pegged as German-made before I even googled the developer’s location (Hamburg). While I didn’t explore it too much, there’s also postgame arena battles that greatly resemble the rifts in Diablo III. If you’ve been looking for something you can hop into for anything between 15 minutes and several hours, you basically can’t go wrong with Everspace 2.
8. Starfield (Xbox Series X)
The temptation to qualify why I like Starfield is at times overwhelming. One of the several blog drafts I discarded this year was about finding the fun in Starfield, and I couldn’t figure out how to articulate the ways Bethesda makes it difficult to do so. But once I got past the initial few hours of Space Fallout 4, I found myself enjoying the game a lot. I’m a Mako Pervert when I play Mass Effect, so that probably has a fairly large impact on enjoying the glacially paced exploration. Navigating the menus to get to a new planet also doesn’t bother me, probably due to the aforementioned Mass Effect fandom. But since I’ve already hit a reflexively defensive posture, let me share my top moment with this game. I went to a random system because I wasn’t able to reach my destination in a single hyperspace jump. Not wanting to just immediately boot up another fast travel, I decided to explore a bit. I came across an abandoned space station that turned out to be a casino, which also was entirely zero-G. After poking around for a little while, I found that the casino was infested with "Spacers" (aka hostile freelancers), some of whom were tens of levels higher than me. I found myself in a pretty frantic battle for survival, and using the lack of gravity is what saved me. I could boost myself into combat, hit both slugs on the shotgun I was using, and the recoil force would propel me back away from enemies. I chose my attack points wisely, used my quick strikes to eliminate a single enemy, and I eventually whittled the Spacer force down to their single most powerful member. I lobbed grenades and mines around corners, getting some potshots in when I could, before finally finishing the job with a shotgun. I then explored the rest of the weird luxury station at my own pace. All told, this was probably an hour of action, but I can recall few gaming moments that surpassed it in 2023.
7. Resident Evil 4 (2023) (Xbox Series X)
I truly don’t know how Capcom does it. RE4 is probably the most beloved game the development team has made, and this remake not only surpassed it, but it also defined the pinnacle of remaking a game. All of the other modern RE games have been more heavily tilted towards survival horror, but the action here is snappy and impactful. The auto-sort button is a revelation for a game that basically spawned a genre of inventory management. The Ashley portions didn’t suck shit! The minecart level rules now! The merchant side quests were all handled very well, and the shooting gallery is a refreshing comedic break from the oppressive environments. My only knock against the game is that the island levels were once again somewhat tedious, although the game certainly handled those areas better than I expected. But for every island moment where the action became tiring, there were times like the “open world” section in the lake, where your freedom in choosing your destination contributed to the horror rather than marginalizing it. Village is probably still my favorite Resident Evil game, but I’ve been getting the itch to replay this one again recently. Frankly, I don’t see why I should resist.
6. Against the Storm (PC)
Every so often, I get a December surprise in these rankings. I was fully prepared to write about my former #10 game (Dredge) before Against the Storm stuck a titanium rod into the spokes. It is, essentially, an RTS game minus the military units or direct control over the builders (though not as hands-off as, say, Majesty). I’ve always been way more into the economy building in games like Starcraft, the early Warcrafts, and Age of Empires; Against the Storm appeals to that impulse and takes it further with roguelike elements and upgrade trees. Even though everything gets wiped out every cycle, it’s always an opportunity to rebuild better and faster than before. The gameplay loop at every stage is immensely satisfying, and each session feels different even when I pick the same unlockables thanks to the glade events. Being able to pump up the speed to 3x lets me minimize waiting, although I go into such a Zen state that I’m usually content to zone out with my laborers. My only knock against the game is that I lost my original save thanks to a Game Pass-specific bug; I bought the game in the winter Steam sale and have been mainlining it there instead. If city builders and/or RTS games have ever held any appeal to you, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.
5. WarTales (PC, Xbox Series X)
A couple of Extra Lifes ago, I watched Dave Lang dig into this game a little bit. Something about it just instantly resonated with me, so I picked it up in early access. This game doesn’t tell you at all how to play it, even moreso than Starfield (jeez, that game can’t win anything!). Figuring out all of its idiosyncrasies turned out to be a large part of its appeal for me, as I led my ragtag group into scrapes I didn’t think I would survive. But the best thing about this game is not the excellent XCOM-like tactical combat or the entertaining troupe management. It’s how the game never stops introducing more and more and more new wrinkles. Whether it’s a rat infestation level where you see how long you can keep your mercenaries safe from infection, or an abandoned village where coming in with a large party guarantees a battle with zombielike creatures, there’s always something unexpected. Figuring out what secrets lay inside my first tomb was one of my favorite sequences of the year. It was gratifying learning my first song for my bard to perform a Guitar Hero minigame in a tavern. Figuring out that leveling up my squad leveled up meters in another screen that would let me further level up my squad in more specific ways (scholarly, merchant, thievery, etc.) was just icing on the cake. The combat system was a refreshing take on tactical turn-based combat, with much more player agency than most games. Every class had multiple viable paths to head down, and you don’t even appear to have a limit on the number of people you can take into battle. WarTales is a game I’ll be playing for years, and I haven’t even checked out its new piracy and naval combat DLC yet.
4. Baldur’s Gate 3 (PC, Xbox Series X)
Let me be clear that I like Baldur’s Gate 3. Normally this would be self-evident by its inclusion onto this list, but I feel the need to clarify based on most of my experiences being frustrating. I appear to be a magnet for bizarre glitches, like when Gale was unable to take any actions aside from casting feather fall on himself, so I did that and shoved him safely off a cliff to get him to move. Or the total lack of signposting (or mention of the word “undead” in my Paladin's tenets) earning me Oathbreaker status because I did something that I thought was in line with the Ancients I worship. My partner, who has finished the game and is halfway through a second playthrough, has probably witnessed me encounter more glitches in the much shorter time I’ve played than the entirety of her experience. I’ve had an easier time on the console version, but I still watched someone’s brain float several feet above their body within the last few days.
It’s a testament to how well-crafted the story and gameplay are that I consider BG3 one of my favorites of 2023. Obviously D&D, particularly 5th edition, is one of the most user-tested methods of entertainment in the entire landscape of games. But D&D is also not an easy system to pick up, and it’s to Larian’s credit that the rough edges are so nicely smoothed over here. They made the large suite of bonus actions fun and interesting, to the extent that I have a Cleric in an upcoming D&D session fully bought into the shove lifestyle. This game is the promise of the various Bioware games, particularly Dragon Age, finally fulfilled. The party member cast is the best ensemble since the Normandy could still fly. The voice acting (particularly the narrator) is outstanding, perhaps one of the greatest crews of all time. Most importantly, it lets me scratch that D&D itch when I can’t get a group together or time doesn’t permit it. It’ll be very interesting to see if the well-deserved accolades for this game results in a regular Baldur’s Gate series, at a time where Wizards of the Coast needs a new format to keep their game relevant. I hope this is the reality that comes to pass.
3. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (Xbox Series X)
Admittedly, I’m a total mark for From Software games, a fact evidenced by their most recent two releases being my Game of the Year (Sekiro in 2019, Elden Ring in 2022). But this is also my first Armored Core game, aside from playing demos of the early entries. This developer’s golden touch continues, as no other game in recent memory has made me feel so goddamn COOL. I took a number of videos of me beating bosses and groups of enemies just because it all looks sick as hell. The Arena was particularly fertile ground for this practice, and watching the delayed explosion after your final strike on an opponent never stopped feeling incredible. The campaign is also filled with unforgettable moments, chief among them the “I won’t miss” sequence from V.IV Rusty. The economical way the story was doled out to Raven was distinctly FromSoft in a fun new flavor. Fortunately, I didn’t need a 4 hour YouTube explainer to give me the details on what was transpiring.
If there’s any knock I have on the game, it’s that at a certain point, there was clearly a “correct” loadout for advancing past enemies. I would get absolutely wiped by a boss, and rather than experiment with my weaponry and defenses as I did for early opponents, I just slapped on the Songbirds and gatling guns to put the new antagonist down for good. This is mostly a me problem (see above complaints about limited playing time), but I’ve seen others discuss this issue as well. It’s a testament to how goddamn fun this game is that it didn’t diminish my enjoyment. It turns out an overpowered pummeling of an enemy that wiped the floor with you is highly entertaining in its own right, and I’m glad the developer didn’t try to overcorrect and remove this kind of thing from the game after release. I do hope that I can eventually beat the final boss, because the New Game + mode sounds very interesting.
2. Sea of Stars (Xbox Series X, PC)
I don’t consider myself a nostalgic person, but I occasionally get a strong hankering for a 90’s era RPG. Normally this manifests by replaying Chrono Trigger or a single digit-entitled Final Fantasy game (Tactics if I’m feeling naughty). Sea of Stars immediately scratched this itch, and then already hit the replay rounds late last week. I simply cannot recommend this game enough, and it’s one of my two personal 10/10s of 2023. The battle system is so simple that it really doesn’t fundamentally change past the first couple of hours, and yet I never got tired of it. The engagement on hitting timed attacks and defense definitely helped, but I think having incredible art and music made the experience perfect to cozy up to at the end of the long day or on a lazy morning. The plot (past the opening hour or two) was very engaging, particularly once you completed assembling your party. The twin protagonists, Zale and Valere, were mostly blank canvases, but they sure picked a hell of a friend in Garl. The rest of the main cast all had great moments, but it would be hard to argue that Garl didn’t completely steal the show.
(Spoilers ahead)
(End spoilers)
I don’t know if Sabotage is planning on making a sequel to this game in the near future (or ever), but they absolutely knocked it out of the park. I would love to return to this world, and it would be incredibly fitting if it was through a polygonal adventure that occasionally disrupted canon and had a cool evil cat dad and a baby daughter clone and… I may have gone too far.
1. Alan Wake II (Xbox Series X)
Like many people, I didn’t care much for Alan Wake. When this game was announced, I assumed it would be a complete afterthought, fodder only for the most hardcore fans of Remedy. Sure, I enjoyed Control, but it was also a profoundly frustrating game in many ways (and failed to make even my retroactive top ten for 2019). So consider me as surprised as anyone to not only find Alan Wake 2 as my Game of the Year, but the easy choice. I was completely hooked on the story, thanks to its superb writing, narrative, and acting (given a shaky accent or two). Honestly, I haven’t enjoyed prestige television for a long time, and the story here got its hooks in me like nothing since the first season of True Detective. But it was being able to immerse myself in the world, poke around its dark corners, and uncover its secrets that pushed it over the top for me. This game possesses both bombast and restraint. As often as it flamboyantly struts in its live action sequences, it masters the quiet moments. For example, after filling out a nursery rhyme about a wolf that took a child, I was convinced they would have me fight a Taken wolf. The game built up anticipation and let me build my own tension. The wolf never came, at least not in that sequence. It’s a supreme level of confidence to let a small puzzle in a minor sidequest do all its own talking without the temptation to toss a random encounter in there to spike some neurons.
The gameplay, while not as polished as Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space, fit the theme better and did exactly what it needed to do. I certainly had high-octane encounters in those other games, but finding out I was fighting multiple Taken instead of one dramatically changed the calculus of battle. As Alan, trying to figure out which shadows could harm me and which were just there to scare me was constantly running through my mind. The result is a claustrophobic experience, which is expertly broken up with town sequences and quieter locales. Saga’s desperation to save a child that only she knows is fine resonated strongly with me (for obvious reasons). I played a mixture of medium and easy difficulty, and I found it fun in either case; I mainlined easy thanks to having limited time and desperately wanting to push the narrative every night. Although I found myself underwhelmed by the supposed juggernaut of 2023 (as far as gaming quality went), Alan Wake 2 is an unambiguous success, one that feels so different from the typical AAA dross that gets praised to death. It was an unforgettable experience, and one that I will shout from the rooftops for everyone to play. Games can still be something bizarre, unexpected, and unapologetically themselves even in an increasingly homogenized mainstream. For that, Remedy deserves its flowers, and I will damn sure check out the next thing they release.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the sau-www-nah.
Honorable Mentions: I really, really wish I could have found a place for Dredge. It does run out of steam after a certain point, but it was tough to give it #11… I’m so glad that Dan discovered the greatness of Cobalt Core, because it’s the best roguelike deckbuilder since Monster Train. Now please put it on mobile… Jusant was another game that hit hard, I just wish playing it had been more fun… Like A Dragon: Ishin! cemented my newfound Yakuza (er, LAD) fandom… I played a ton of Forza Motorsport and I don’t regret a minute of it… Finally, Luck Be A Landlord hit 1.0 and became my go-to mobile game. I’ve been guillotined six times!
Dishonorable Mentions: Why did Exoprimal have to be online and pvp? I liked so many things about it, but being trapped in a live service game is a miserable state of being. I will retract these complaints if it turns out to be a test for a Dino Crisis remake… Redfall is truly a boring piece of junk, and the worst game I played in 2023 by a long shot… Finally, just the heartiest fuck you to every layoff-happy executive in the gaming industry. I hope the weight of the lives you ruined in 2023 haunts you like the goddamn Marley brothers in the only Christmas Carol movie worth watching.
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