On a cold December night, a lone gamer looks to the infinite wisdom of the heavens. His forehead glowing with IQ, the stars realign before him, breaking from the ancient mundane constellations of hunters and bears to reform as terrifying vampires and legendary pinball machines. The time has come for my end-of-year article where I describe the most flooring titles I played for the first time in the last twelve months. In purely alphabetical order, here are my top ten games of 2023.
Black Mesa
There's so much about Black Mesa that appeals to me specifically: the painstakingly textured industrial environments, the gruesome aliens, the spine-tingling Geiger counter noises. This is the one game on this list I'd played before 2023, but this was the year it came together for me. Crowbar Collective approaches the task of remaking Half-Life with enough nostalgia to loyally recreate vintage segments but enough scepticism to repair and replace the outdated. Combat is always messy, and the game's demands of me are leagues more reasonable than they were in 1998. Draped over the whole campaign is an elating techno-transcendent soundtrack. Black Mesa is proof that fans can be as capable as a professional studio of paying tribute to the classics.
Disco Elysium
For a game this bruised and bleak, Disco Elysium has some erudite prose. It may be the most poignant in the medium. It is a eulogy for the countries hollowed out by profit enterprise, lamenting the victimisation of regular people by the global omni-industry and their capture by dead-end philosophies that thrive in times of desperation. This neo-noir can bring about hope because it stares headlong into some of the most harrowing experiences a person and a society can endure and still finds some glimmer of a future beyond them. It's internalised an impressively realistic conception of historical forces and is not content to fall back on the narrative templates of other speculative fiction. So, it can gestate a world so believable, I feel like I could reach into the screen and touch it. Disco Elysium's preternatural range makes it simultaneously one of the best tragedies, comedies, and social satires I've breathed in in the last few years.
Immortality
2022's Immortality is the fulfilment of a promise Sam Barlow made seven years earlier with Her Story. To date, it is the purest and most absorbing refinement of his database exploration formula. Comprising three full movies, Immortality is as much an achievement in production as anything else, but that's not to take away from its subtextual sensibilities, which it remains piously committed to. The macabre appeal of Immortality is in peeling back the layers of film to discover something forbidden: sombre whispers about the emptiness in living your life as a piece of art.
Manifold Garden
Manifold Garden takes the perspective screws of Escher's lithographs and makes them more mind-bending than ever by realising them in full-colour interactive 3D. Impossible geometry only seems more of an affront to reality when you can circle it from every side, run along its surface, and find the absurd shapes hold. Having accepted it, we must think impossibly as Manifold Garden requires us to exploit this geometric dream logic. Understanding Escher as more than a guy who drew some staircases, this puzzler is also a kaleidoscope of minimalist modernism and tesselating patterns. Manifold Garden is the same few perfections infinitely, and that's incredibly stimulating.
The Norwood Suite
Compared to Cosmo D's earlier work, The Norwood Suite is more thematically focused but more architecturally expansive, too. It sees both sides of surrealism's coin: the power to disorient but also to delight. In Cosmo's games, the eccentricity of people and places isn't a reason to recoil from them; it implores you to step forward. The Norwood Suite specifically touches on both the joyous abandon of musicianship and the crushing weight of artistic expectations. While we often rate games based on how fun their constituent activities are, Cosmo D's settings are magical just to exist in.
Pinball FX3
Video games find a lot of their heritage in earlier non-AV arcade machines, which makes playing a pingball video game a kind of homecoming. For a form of entertainment that has existed since at least the 30s, pingball is a deceptively hard nut for developers to crack. Sure, its levels are trim compared to the endless treadmills of AAA blockbusters, but at the table, feel is everything, and a slight scuff on the physics can be a death knell for the whole project. Zen Studios more than capably rises to the task of implementing pingball's stochastic physicality. Impacts pop off all over the battleground at a moment's notice, and hair-trigger reactions are in demand. The studio then exploits the imaginary realm of the video game to fix together a number of charming fantasies you could never build from real plastic.
Polybius (2017)
Polybius is a game that's somehow even faster than Pinball FX3. I think Polybius might be faster than the speed of light; I should be giving a flashing image warning on the screenshot here. You are an absolute meteor streaking through this neon tube shooter, a wrecking ball shattering everything in its path into polygonal shards. Weld onto that berserk distorting visuals and a glistening electronic soundtrack, and you've got a game that can keep me in the zone for hours. Minimalist entertainment reaches its apex when the few elements that are included are so riveting you don't need anything more, and that's Polybius.
Umurangi Generation
Umurangi Generation is a game about freezing a moment of melancholy the way only photography can. It's a game about being an outsider as the insiders disastrously mishandle the crisis they're in charge of resolving. It's a game about watching unfolding politics in horror and documenting a vibrant street culture in awe. There is no way to play Umurangi Generation that doesn't also entail creating something, and we are innately attached to what we create, drawing us closer to the creative tools we use to forge it. Amicable to any style of approach to its levels, Umurangi was one of the few games I jumped headlong into speedrunning.
Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors is an overclocked feedback loop of acquisition and destruction. It burns short but bright, startling with how quickly it transports you from slap-fighting peons with your whip to becoming a human bombing run, burning up living walls of ghosts and ghouls. It comes alive in the numbers, in the optimally manicured slope of damage in to reward out. The impeccable tuning of its figures made it one of those rare flash-in-the-pan phenomena for a whole month there, and it deserved every moment of it.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Wolfenstein II is someone dropping a metal bucket on top of your head and banging it with a spoon, but in the good sense. Every implement wields like it could bring down the house, with my particular favourite being a spray nozzle shotgun with bullets that rebound off the walls. Every combat encounter carries the risk of death, increasing the preciousness of each scrap of armour and each beautifully unreasonable upgrade. But despite all the scopes and augments you can strap onto B.J. Blazkowicz, the arsenal doesn't feel overcrowded, because no tool is redundant. Wolfeinstein's submarine, a hive of resistance activity and bonus objectives, is one of the best hub areas in gaming, and narratively, this shooter is proof that you don't have to pick between camp violence and ethical catharsis. As Blazkowicz says, there's a lot you can get done with a Nazi and a hatchet.
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Another year has been destroyed, and a good thing, too. Honourable mentions go to Assassin's Creed: Origins, New Super Lucky's Tale, Pikmin 3, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, and Yakuza 3 Remastered. I will see you next year and thanks for reading.
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