Ranking the games released in 2023 that I played

People are saying that 2023 is one of the greatest years for games in recent memory. I’m not sure I agree. I didn’t play some of the biggest games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield and maybe I would have loved those but I did fall off some of the other big releases not mentioned before like Armored Core VI (I liked it and will go back to it) and Like a Dragon: Ishin! (I like it but it’s no Yakuza, will go back.)

A lot of the big games this year were fun but didn’t quite captivate me as some games did in years past. Part of that is just where I am in my life and my mood, but outside of my #1 game I’m not sure any of the games I played are all timers. Looking back at my list from last year (which I did not post) a lot of them would still be in my top 10 this year and pretty high on the list.

Still, I played 25 games released this year that I feel comfortable ranking so that’s what I’m going to do. I will say that none of these games are truly awful and I’m glad that there are no Balan Wonderworlds on the list this year. Maybe I’m learning.

25) Ravenlok

Ravenlok is a game that didn’t look appealing to me and I only played because the Game Pass Game Club selected it. While its voxel art is striking and appealing everything else about it feels half baked. It’s short, with tiny areas, cliché in its presentation of its Alice in Wonderland theme and shallow to play. It feels more like a tech demo or portfolio piece for the artists than an actual finished game, even though it’s a few hours long and has puzzles, boss fights, and everything else you’d expect. It’s just that it all feels shallower than it should and lacks impact. Ravenlok is not a terrible game but it’s so insubstantial that it left almost no impact outside the art.

24) Trinity Trigger

I bought Trinity Trigger on a Youtuber’s suggestion and because I wanted a generic action RPG to chill with. I got the generic part right, and the game’s pretty easy so it should be chill, but rather than relaxing I found it irritating for most of the playthrough. This comes down to a few design decisions, the worst of which is to have you stop moving when you attack, so you can’t run around slashing or shooting at things, you automatically have your feet planted to attack and it feels bad every time. The bland story about ancient gods and living weapons did not register, nor did the even blander characters who do not change or evolve at all during the story. It’s also way too larded down with gameplay and loadout mechanics to the point where I stopped trying to customize my characters beyond what was necessary because it was too much work. What should have been light and breezy was instead a generic slog, and though there were definitely some moments when I enjoyed myself it is probably the worst JRPG I have ever finished.

23) Planet of Lana

This is another beautiful game without much substance. A puzzle platformer clearly modeled after something like Inside but with a much lighter, though still dark, tone, this game is a joy to watch. Beautiful scenery and strong art design pulled me in but the fairly basic puzzle platforming spat me back out. This game isn’t bad on its own merits, but in a glutted genre it does not do enough to stand out.

22) Whispike Survivors – Sword of the Necromancer (Not finished)

This game is the first Vampire Survivorslike on the list. It’s like $3, cute, and simple. The hook is that your characters drop “seeds” when they die and their offspring inherit traits allowing you to build characters over time. It’s not bad but ultimately it just doesn’t have the broken interactions between abilities that make these games so addictive, and you feel underpowered and slow compared to enemies. Considering how cheap it was I don’t feel ripped off, but there’s just not enough there to make it a must play.

21) Suika Game

The well known fruit combining well dropper game. Matching fruits to create bigger fruits is addictive and the aesthetics are pleasant and appealing. It’s a simple game that does what it sets out to do, but at the end of the day it’s just another cute, good, puzzle game. Recommended but slight. A running theme.

20) Dordogne

A very pretty water color adventure game with a striking art style and a decent little story. You play a young woman returning to her grandmother’s home in Dordogne France and flashing back to her childhood and a summer she spent there when her grandmother was still alive. There’s not a lot of game here, and the story isn’t quite magical enough to match the look, but if you like pretty, short, adventure games it’s worth a look.

19) Jusant

A pretty climbing game about ascending a giant stone tower after a drought has come. A lot of people loved this but I was pretty lukewarm. The climbing was okay but would have been more fun if not for the stamina meter. I found the text in the collectables kind of boring and would have liked a few more routes and mechanical complexity. It’s gorgeous and atmospheric but lacking in substance.

18) Merge & Blade

A puzzle game autobattler. Drop soldiers into the playfield and match them to create more powerful versions. Cheaply made but addictive and fun. There is just enough to do during the autobattling phase (swapping and rearranging your soldiers) to maintain engagement and some of the battles can be very tense and exciting. There’s no story to speak of and the graphics are very simple, but the design shine through in the way you have to balance number of soldiers against strength and figure out how and where to place your healers and ranged units. This is a game with a limited concept and budget that comes very close to reaching its full potential.

17) Mineto’s Night Market

This is a crafting game where you, a young girl, accompany your father to a small island in Japan where the big happening is a weekly night market where you can sell crafts. The main plot is a mystery about a legendary cat and agents on the island who are searching for him. It’s a sweet little tale but very low impact. The biggest issue with the game, however, is just how grindy it is. It is extremely grindy. You have to keep collecting all your crafting ingredients over and over, with extremely limited amounts of some of them (such as pottery clay) available at any one time. You also have to craft each item for the market with no shortcuts or ability to batch craft. It becomes extremely monotonous before the game ends. There are also some annoying design choices, like having the dialog box you get for eating food for stamina block out some of the ingredient collection meters. This is a game that could have been special with a few small changes, but unfortunately those changes didn’t get made and instead it’s mostly chill but sometimes frustrating.

16) Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde

This is another Vampire Survivorslike. It’s a little more complex than Whispike and has more of the broken interactions that I really love in this genre, and it has prettier graphics and bosses, as well as a very complex skill tree, but it’s still nowhere near as good as VS itself. I had a good time with this game but it was ultimately unsatisfying. It’s just too straightforward without any great interactions or a story or many secrets. A fun time waster that worked very well on the treadmill.

15) Steamworld Build (not finished)

This is a city builder in the Steamworld cinematic universe. It’s pretty straightforward on the surface but there’s also an underground segment in the traditional Steamworld mine where you unearth artifacts and mine resources that are used in the surface part, where you recruit and manufacture items that can affect the underground mine. The game is pretty simple but entertaining enough and a very low stress low stakes experience with appealing aesthetics and a sense of humor.

14) Venba

Another graphical adventure, this one with a small number of cooking segments. It’s an immigrant story about a Tamil couple who moves to Canada. This would be higher if it weren’t so short, which doesn’t give you time to really come to care for the characters, but it’s well written and has good graphics and music. Recommended, though a poor time value at full price.

13) Karmazoo (not finished)

An online only co-operative 2D platformer where you work as a team to collect items and move towards a goal over a series of random levels. An incredibly friendly and appealing game that actually manages to get people to cooperate online, which seems impossible but is pulled off through smart design choices. The game rewards collaboration in very clever ways, like giving you hearts (currency for unlocking stuff) for holding the door for others, and combining everyone’s hearts into a pool that gets distributed to everyone at the end. It has some of the best team mechanics I’ve ever seen for playing with strangers. On the other hand the platforming itself is just okay and while the aesthetics are funky they are nothing special. At least modifier cards that everyone votes on keep things reasonably fresh. A decent game made much better by the way it structures its co-op.

12) Army of Ruin

The final Vampire Surviorslike on my list, this one in some way challenges the king. Nice graphics and extremely broken gameplay make for a lot of fun, and it has dozens upon dozens of unlocks to keep things fresh. I played this game obsessively for about 20-25 hours and got the platinum, though not all the unlocks. I liked this game a lot, though like every game in the genre it got repetitive. If you like feeling invincible and a constant drip feed of items and interactions you’ll like this.

11) Immortals of Aveum

A steampunk magic first person shooter with some Metroidvania elements. Very average but with good production values. The plot and characters are silly and the enemy and weapon variety are lacking but platforming and puzzles mix things up and some of the firefights can be intense in a good way. This is a game that coasts on its budget and polish. It works as a turn off your brain and shoot experience with a lot of pretty colors and impressive environments, but lacks any hook beyond its basic premise of a magic based FPS game. Competent but uninspired.

10) Super Mario RPG (Not finished)

I never played the original Super Mario RPG beyond a little bit on Wii Virtual Console. The remake looks great and maintains a lot of the charm from the original. The combat is quick and enhanced by timed button presses that let you do more damage or bloc attacks, and while the RPG elements are simple they are still engaging. I like this game and will finish it, but while the wacky characters and strong underlying gameplay are enough to make it good, it’s still a bit “baby’s first RPG.” Characters are funny but there are no dramatic stakes, replaced by lots of jokes about how much Mario loves jumping. Leveling up is unexciting, with even new skills not doing much to change up the combat and the game is so forgiving and easy you never feel threatened. It’s a great first RPG for kids but for veterans it’s charming but shallow. Unless you’ve got nostalgia for the original, I suppose.

9) Hi Fi Rush

This 3-D platformer/character action/rhythm game looks and sounds amazing, with a simple plot but surprisingly strong characters that help tie the game together. I loved the platforming, enjoyed the combat, and found the rhythm stuff a little frustrating, as usual for me with rhythm stuff. The game’s aesthetics and vibe, along with the strong characters, made for a compelling experience, but even though I didn’t find the game very hard the rhythm stuff kept pulling me out. I would have loved this game if it were just an action platformer with everything else the same. As it was I liked it quite a bit. Also I’m very tired of getting graded in games. Defeating a tough fight only to be told that you were at C quality is so deflating.

8) Diablo IV

I don’t care about endgames or builds, I just want to see a cool story and smash some skellingtons. Diablo IV provides those things well. Yes the loot is unexciting, the abilities feel uninspired, and the always online means you can’t pause. All of that sucks. But it looks great, controls well, and has a giant world to explore with lots of cool details and plenty of well-written quests to take on. The cut scenes are among the best in gaming to this point. Diablo IV is another all flash no substance game, but what do you want from me, I’m shallow? I fought demons, stopped Lilith, and then stopped playing. But I got 40 hours out of it, so that’s fair enough.

7) In Stars and Time

I picked this time loop RPG up on a whim and almost loved it. A black and white game where you play the “thief” of a party about to tackle the final dungeon and stop the evil king. Combat is based around literal rock paper scissors but this game is all about the storytelling and characters. Which are great. The time looping stuff allows it to explore themes in new context and the writing is fantastic. So why did I only almost love it? It gets very tedious when you don’t know what to do (even though there is an in-game hint system) and the restrictions on how you loop just end up frustrating and annoying. This is a game that bogs down hard in the middle; hard enough to take it from the top of my top 10 to the lower half. It’s mostly the work of one person and I just wish they’d managed to avoid the pitfalls of tedium inherent in time loop games, but they didn’t.

6) Cocoon

A puzzle game where you play a little beetle man flipping switches and entering and exiting spheres to advance through an alien world. The puzzle design is very good and the pace is just about perfect, which can be an issue with a puzzle game. As you advance you find yourself nesting the balls within each other and engaging in all kinds of other clever and unexpected activities to solve the puzzles, which are tough enough to feel challenging but rarely actually frustrate. Graphics and animations are also at the top end of the indie scale. I liked this quite a bit but though the gameplay was good and it was pretty I felt no emotional connection to the little beetle man or what he was doing. The game is incredibly alien and that makes it interesting but also makes it hard to care what happens. Inside and Limbo, games that team members for Cocoon have previously worked on, were impactful in part because of their children in peril themes, and Cocoon breaks free from that but fails to spread its wings thematically. Fun to play, nice to look at, feels like it has zero stakes.

5) Final Fantasy XVI

This is an action game barely in RPG clothing, but it’s very pretty with a grand story, massive set pieces, and excellent performances. The actual plot is nonsense, but it’s the chocobos we meet along the way that matter. FF XVI can feel like a bunch of Devil May Cry knockoffs strung together and the underlying gameplay is not strong enough to carry the entire running length but the spectacle and the characters are enough to make it a compelling experience. This is not an RPG and I wish it were, but as a long, plot heavy, action game it’s a good time for people who enjoy its world and characters.

4) Sea of Stars

This IS an RPG and a very good one. Excellent pixel art and music, fun characters and a strong gameplay system make this a real winner. Like Mario RPG this features a timing prompts in combat to keep it entertaining but unlike that game Sea of Stars is challenging and engaging the whole time. I have some quibbles with the game, chiefly that the combat system has so many synergies that it seems like there’s always a “right” move, which can feel restrictive. Despite this it’s one of the best battle systems I’ve experienced and by far the best “modern retro” JRPG I have ever played.

3) Super Mario Wonder

Hey have you heard of this Mario guy? I think he’s going places. Super Mario Wonder finally fixes the problems of the New Super Mario series by throwing in a ton of creativity and constantly changing the rules via the Wonder Seeds. A fantastic game whose main flaws are that it’s a bit too short and a bit too easy. 2D Mario finally feels as creative and full of…wonder as 3D Mario and I’m incredibly excited for what’s next. As long as it’s not New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe 2. I would not be excited for that.

2) Spider-Man 2

This is just a super-hero open world game but it’s the best super-hero open world game ever made. It looks fantastic, it plays great, it has great acting and a good story. It has spectacle and quiet moments and a great version of New York and Mysterio. It has it all! The only problem is that it feels very iterative of the prior games in the series and the formula is running a bit thin for me. I don’t know that a Spider-Man 3 that doesn’t mix things up more will score this high for me. But for now the very solid core gameplay was enough to carry me through this huge budget polished adventure. I devoured it.

1) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

BOTW was my favorite game when it came out. Tears of the Kingdom is not quite as good, but it’s still amazing. I played this in a way I don’t play video games anymore. Obsessively. At the expense of sleep. Every free moment I had I spent in Hyrule. I didn’t quite finish it during this initial burst, which only stopped because life intervened, and when I went back to finally roll the credits a lot of the magic was gone, but I loved this game intensely. The size of the world and all the things you can do in it are mind blowing. That it runs on the Switch seems literally impossible. The building seems like it absolutely should not work. But it does. It all works. There are rough edges but it works. Tears of the Kingdom is an astounding achievement and a truly great game that pushes the medium forward in meaningful ways with the amount of freedom and variety it provides. It’s worth the six year wait. It’s just not quite as magical as it was the first time with Breath of the Wild.

Normally I'd say something like I look forward to taking these first two months of 2024 to check out some of your lower picks. Primarily Venba and Jusant - unfortunately, I've only got a couple weeks until I (imagine I) spend way too much time with Last of Us II's rogue mode and then lose the rest of my snowy days to Ichiban's Hawaiian adventures... though if I could just appreciate my Switch one more time Mario RPG'd be the game I actually regret ignoring most. But I can't even compel myself to buy Mario Odyssey, let alone Wonder, so...crap!

Like I said in my own little post I love how much people have loved the last two Zelda games, and what I didn't say is that I only own a Switch because of them. Though I also bought the first Mario + Rabbids for whatever reason, I mostly think of it as my far too fancy Vampire Survivors provider.

I often feel like I come down too hard on game stories I enjoy so I won't harp on it, but as much as I also loved Spider-Man I felt like the acting slipped a bit from the first one. Or maybe it was just the tone? To that end, I did play until a bit past the prison break in the PS5 remaster just before release and...I swear I'm not one of those guys...the new Peter was and remains bizarrely blasé to me. But as I said and you say - oh well! Swing fun, punch fun, game great.

Having not played as many games as you did, and generally preferring the big spectacles that seem to be driving the studios that produce them increasingly mad, I am curious if FFXVI ranks so high for you primarily because it put money on the screen. Not a criticism! I just found that I most enjoyed that game, especially in the latter half (which was, what...25 hours long...) when it was not doing the big dumb thing. They were paced just right, and I agree with what seems like just about everybody who finished the game that Bahamut stole the show...but Titan also kinda ruined it, both because it was so impossibly God of War III-type huge and, to my mind anyway, was a total disaster of an experience.

Last comment is that I keep feeling the urge to download Sea of Stars, especially because it's still included in PS+, but I can't push the (mostly very strong) criticisms I've heard regarding its writing/English translation far enough aside to do it.

@nodima: Thanks for reading.

Venma can be finished in less time than it takes to watch a movie, so if you're really interested over the next few weeks it's a pretty easy thing to fit in. I wouldn't recommend playing full price for it but if you have Gamepass or see a sale it's a decent time.

I didn't directly compare the first Spider-Man and Spider-Man too but I would definitely agree that Kraven is much campier than Doctor Octopus was. In general the first Spider-Man had a much more grounded tone to it, but compared to most games the acting was still excellent in the second. The story itself had significant flaws, but not many more than your average Superhero movie. I don't know what you mean about new Peter. As far as I know they just swapped out the character model, the actor is the same. If you mean the new character model is blander than the original....I agree. It's a downgrade.

I think FF XVI ranks so high because of lack of strong competition. Last year it would have been around 11 or 12 to me, right above Sonic Frontiers but below Pokemon Scarlet. I was lukewarm on a lot of games this year and Final Fantasy XVI was definitely in the "mixed feelings" category. I did not have the same reaction to Titan as you did, but I like God of War III quite a lot. I did enjoy quite a lot of the smaller moments and quests and such, but the basic combat loop got pretty boring to me before the end (even against bosses) so the spectacle fights at least provided variety. Variety that didn't exist anywhere else in the game, since there are no minigames or other activities. Now I'm getting mad about some of the design choices again.

Sea of Stars suffers from having bland protagonists but I don't really understand the criticisms of the writing or especially translation. Are there some slight translation issues? Yes. Are the protagonists bland? Yes. The story in general is not that great, though some of the characters are quite good, but it's in line with RPGs of the era it is evoking. But I would say the game is still better written than the vast majority of indies and the translation issues are more of the "fun throwback" type than genuinely distressing. This whole discourse just confuses me. It's definitely not a game I would suggest playing for the story but it's also not a game where the story bothered me in a substantial way.

@bigsocrates: On Peter, you got me. I did not and will not go nuts over it, but the original Peter seemed much more expressive to me. The performance seemed robotic in the remaster, but I'd hoped it'd improve once it was The One. But it didn't. It remained what it was. But yes, and I think of course, I really enjoy Yuri Lowenthal as Peter. I just feel if I were hosting a completely non-problematic casting couch, the previous face, or maybe a dozen other faces, make more sense than what we've got. That being said...it's a comic book story, so who cares?!

(I mean, other than the first Spidey-game made me tear up a few times, and like several critics I struggled to care about Peter's regular guy life at all this time.)

Sadly I don't own an XBox, so I'll just be keeping my eye on Venba for a while (though $14.99 doesn't really seem all that bad - I bought Virginia for that price, and woof!)

As for Titan, more than anything the style of music they scored it with was good for a quick laugh before I struggled to figure out if it was either a parody of or homage to late-2000s anime music videos. If it read like I was dunking on God of War III, I very much wasn't - I meant to say I felt like that fight completely biffed it (non-90s kids, I'm saying it tried and sucked) and that's all.

And Sea of Stars...I'm fully going off Jason Schreier and Tim Rogers here, but the former found several ways to couch his critiques in acknowledgements that ESL can be daunting while the latter very flatly (and probably exaggeratedly, as he's wont to do) described the text as an absolute bummer to read. Me being a guy who had an English teacher for a mom and was the asshole begging other kids to get on with it during Romeo & Juliet lessons in middle school and him being a guy who hath done made Japanese (and yes I know the studio behind Sea of Stars is decidedly not Japanese) wade in English waters...I know, I should see for myself, but one guy who's smart on purpose and one guy who's smart on accident, both of whom I trust, were mean about it. So here I am.

@nodima: Peter Parker's regular life in Spider-Man 2 is much less compelling for a number of reasons, not the last of which is the lack of Aunt May. They did a good job with that in the first game and fumbled hard in the second. I also think the way they integrated Mary Jane into the game is a part of the issue, but we're not playing Spider-Man for Peter Parker's private life, and I think they did a somewhat better but still imperfect job with Miles (the split protagonist is also part of the issue here.)

$14.99 for under 2 hours does seem like a lot to me but YMMV. If I had absolutely loved the game I might feel differently. Instead I just liked it.

I thought the fight was okay. It all definitely had a 2012 era throwback jankiness to it but I liked the ambition and variety. Again, none of the combat felt great to me so I didn't really mind a somewhat janky fight. To me it wasn't super memorable in a good way but at least it was different, so I liked it more than the endless normal boss fights that had me really bored towards the end.

I'm pretty sensitive to translation issues and writing too, but, again, if you grew up in the 90s playing horribly translated RPGs this is no worse. But this is one you play for the combat, art, and music more than the writing (though I did like some of the characters.)

I just don't understand why people think this was some massive red flag on the game when a TON of games, including huge budget games developed in the US, still have horrible writing.

Sea of Stars is better written than Redfall. It's arguably better written than Immortals of Aveum. You can say that writing matters more for an RPG and that's true, it does, but, again, most of the classic RPGs from the 90s had much worse translations and I can still enjoy those today.

@bigsocrates: All very fair. Except…I’m always fascinated by how game players perceive value. I spent $30 to see Poor Things in a theater last week. It reminded me that even if I didn’t get Baldur or Zelda, I still got 30+ and 70+ hours out of $60-70. That’s one fun per dollar!

Sure, I might think I coulda spent them dang $15 on a Train Simulator locomotive (supposing I had that game) but I honestly think it’s pretty rare when a game doesn’t give what it got.

My love of the Spider-Man games extends towards the slow burn setup up and payoff of Miles Morales as a fantastic character. I think you're doing a good job when you can sell a life-long Spider-Man fan in his thirties on a *NEW* Spider-Man I might even prefer over the original the way things are going. Looking forward to the next game, I hope they switch things up with a Miles/Ghost Spider duo and let Pete retire.

I was on board with the story all the way until the ending which got pretty classic Disney Marvel bonkers. Definitely appreciated the more grounded conclusion of the Sinister Six and Otto in the first game.

Hopefully they return to more street level fantasy for the third game. I dont know why they always try to go for bombastic high stakes when personal stakes are always so much more satisfying... and they've demonstrated they have the caliber to write pull off well done character drama.

@junkerman: Miles Morales has obviously become a big cross-media breakout character and one of the more recent superheroes that has actually caught the public imagination. I think he works well in the games and it's a super likable version of the character.

The story was fun in a camp way. There's a lot of silliness in there but that's not necessarily bad in a superhero game.

As for why they go for bombastic high stakes, it's a game and they want the big bombastic set pieces. They want the Sandman fight and the Lizard fight and the spectacle. They intermix some smaller moments but I will say that in the SpiderMan games the quiet gameplay sequences are among the worst. I hate walking around as Peter cleaning the house and such because it's slow and boring.

Hmm, dunno about this Mario fella - I mean, a dumpy lil' plumber guy in overalls, how's this design gonna catch on?

Feel the love for TotK radiating! Magnificent experience indeed.