Let's talk about some games.

I played so many games this year. Currently, my list sits at 47. No, they didn't all come out this year and also no, that isn't all of them. I didn't bother to count the Netflix edition of Dead Cells I just downloaded and played for an hour on my Retroid Pocket or the ROM hack of Super Tecmo Bowl I'm halfway through a season wherein I can play as Kirk Cousins and Justin Jefferson on my Vikings instead of...whoever was on this god forsaken team whenever that game (still a top 5 football game btw) came out.

MISSED

Okay, that's all to say I played a lot of games but not every game. This was a standout year even when thinking about standout years in games. There was simply too much to play - especially late on - even for me, a person who plays ritualistically every night for a few hours. Here’s a few I missed or are coming out just a tad too late that I would undoubtedly have considered for this list.

Pikmin 4

I saw this picture of Pikmin picking up and moving a GameBoy Advance SP and instantly knew I would be into this. I played Pikmin 1 and 2 on my GameCube and enjoyed them but never touched 3 despite being 1 of the 12 Wii U owners out there and just kind of fell off anticipating new entries in this franchise. But from everything I've seen and heard, Pikmin 4 is going to change that. This game is going to happen soon for me and could easily end up in my top 5 which is why it's the first game I wanted to call out here.

Armored Core VI

Despite FromSoft games often making or even topping my GOTY lists - particularly Elden Ring and Sekiro have taken my top spots before - there's no doubt that these games are intimidating. They're sometimes a little tough to work up the courage to be like "okay, I am ready to handle this now" when I'm mostly just looking to relax with my hobby. Once I break through that threshold though, I'm sure AC6 will be there to meet me.

SteamWorld Build

Coming in just a little hot in this game of the year season, SteamWorld Build is one I just have a feeling about. I've liked EVERY SteamWorld game. I like city builders and games where once you build one thing it leads to the next thing. Hoping I get to this one soon.

GAMES THAT DIDN'T COME OUT THIS YEAR THAT I PLAYED THIS YEAR

I'm kind of a purist when it comes to Game of the Year lists because if there aren't a few rules to abide by then what are we doing? I will consider any game that received a release in the given year, even early access games, but it may receive A LOT deductions for simply being a port or SOME deductions for being a remaster, etc. but one thing I will never include in my Game of the Year list are games I played this year that didn't come out this year. A little puritanical maybe, but these are the rules. Here's a couple non-2023 games I fell in love with this year.

Metroid: Zero Mission

I got a Retroid Pocket 3+ for Christmas last year and didn't really know how much use I'd get out of it. Since then, I've finished multiple games on it and love that little thing. It's no secret that rhw GBA and SNES are two of the ageless consoles and I think the GBA is especially so. I played both Zero Mission and Fusion this summer and Zero Mission is perhaps my favorite Metroid game now. The sentiment I keep returning to for Zero Mission - especially compared to Fusion - is that in all ways it is pleasantly challenging but never obtuse. Some of the older Metroid games can venture into obtuseness and while that does come with the territory, Zero Mission's lack of this makes for a downright gleeful experience back to front. Probably my favorite handheld game ever made.

Resident Evil: Village

This was a great year of playing Resident Evil games for me. I played RE4 6 times to get the platinum trophy and had a great time doing so. RE4 is still my favorite of the series, but man RE8 gives it a real run for its money. It moves a bit away from the straight laced horror of 7 and returns to the FUN of 4. I ended up playing this 3 times (also getting the platinum trophy) and could've done more if I'm being honest.

MY 10 FAVORITE GAMES OF 2023 (and if they made me cry)

Alright then, maybe time to talk about what I've played that actually came out this year for some kind of a list? However, right off the bat I'm going to cheat and name a couple of honorable mentions because it'd feel weird not to.

Honorable Mention: Alan Wake 2

When I finished this game I was red hot on it thinking it would come in high on my list. As I sat with it though, I realized more and more how some of its aspects didn't sit quite right with me. Don't get me wrong, this game is brilliant and basically any other year would receive true list placement. Alan Wake 2's environment work, metanarrative play, and commitment to its aesthetics is basically second to none. It is a honed product through and through. However, it is night and day how much better of a campaign Saga's is over Alan's. Alan's sections feel bland and at worst annoying in comparison. Saga's story and gameplay environments are so rich that basically all of the game's best moments happen within her sections (the elder care home, the first chapter, Coffee World). It's an uneven experience, but it is also risky, thought provoking, and ultimately a masterful game that bothered me just enough every so often to bump it down.

Did it make me cry? No.

Honorable Mention: Metroid Prime Remastered

A tribute to how well the GameCube has aged. While the RE4 Remake is a pure remake, Metroid Prime Remastered is barely more than the original game in a lot of ways and it's amazing. It looks sharper and it has dualstick controls. That's literally all Metroid Prime needed to feel like a game made in 2023. This was the year of the GBA and GameCube era for me in many ways. I played Metroid Prime Remastered, the RE4 Remake, Twilight Princess HD, Metroid Zero Mission and Fusion, and Zelda Four Swords Adventure.

Did it make cry? No. Too cool of a game to cry in.

Honorable Mention: Venba

A wonderful game about being an outsider. I can only imagine the impact this game would've had on me had my life story been at all similar to these characters', but I think that speaks to how good the story telling is here. There's not much more than 90 minutes or so to this game and the amount of empathy I felt for this family as a whole and for each individual in that short amount of time could not have been higher. It's a beautiful experience inside and out.

Did it make me cry? Yes absolutely. Multiple times.

10. Cocoon

Cocoon is a puzzle game, yes, but what is so masterful about this game (even though it has fantastic puzzles!) is its movement, looks, and sound design. My god it is nice to move your character in Cocoon and that feeling of fluidity carries over to every aspect of the game. Its puzzle solving never feels out of grasp, its visuals are smooth as butter, and it always feels properly contained even though this is like Inception sometimes going multiple layers deep - a world within a world within a world. It's a lot, but also appropriately minimal. The sound design is perhaps the biggest highlight though - I implore you to listen to the Remap Radio podcast interview with the devs of this game to better appreciate the sound design. Remap interview: COCOON posted 11/1/23.

Did it make me cry? Almost.

9. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

The amount of ideas Mario Wonder throws at you is something else. Every level feels like its own mini adventure. There are preciously few levels that don't feel like some kind of revelation in platforming whimsy. The online multiplayer mode is what took me by surprise with Wonder and I wasn't expecting how much fun it would be to traverse a level with a couple other players helping each other along the way but without getting in each others way. It's Journey-esque in a lot of ways which is bizarre to say about a Mario game. I'm a little shocked how much I liked this since I'm not really a die hard 2d Mario fan but here we are.

Did it make me cry? Ha. No.

8. Jusant

Speaking of Journey, Jusant takes what is special about something like Journey and gives it to you as a solitary experience. What really works here is the environmental storytelling and the core gameplay. With the amount of mediocre climbing that is in AAA games (Uncharted, Horizon, etc.), it's kind of a bold proposal to make an entire game around a very similar mechanic, but mediocre never even enters the equation here. The base mechanic is so much more interesting than just holding a button (you're swapping shoulder buttons as your hands pretty much ala Grow Home or the monkey suit in Astro's Playroom) and the use of pitons to hang from, swing from, and to use as save points is not only very fun, but kind of an ingenious combination of mechanics for one item. The narrative leads to very emotional crescendo and is accompanied by climactic musical and environmental swells. Oh, and the visuals are wildly good.

Did it make me cry? You bet it did.

7. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

I'm a Star Wars fan, sure, but what I really like about Jedi Survivor, the Fallen Order sequel, has relatively little to do with Star Wars. Survivor is a jack of all trades basically. It's really easy to rattle off elements of 4-5 game types to describe Survivor. It has Souls combat without the punishing difficulty. It has Uncharted style exploration. It has a Nintendo 64 collecathon aspect to it. It has a large open zone map structure like The Witcher 3 or Dragon Age. Turns out when you combine a lot of tried and true fun systems into one giant game with some Star Wars confetti coming out of the whole thing I'm going to like it. This is a clear upgrade over Fallen Order and expands this great series into something much richer.

Did it make me cry? Actually yes!

6. Dredge

The atmosphere of Dredge is wholly engrossing. There's just enough spooky mystery to the narrative that combining that with the open ocean and upgrading your rickety boat to survive the various phenomena you encounter makes for an experience that is simultaneously tense and addictingly pleasant. More than any other game this year, I could not put down Dredge. I was at 100% completion far too quickly and loved every minute of it. The game loop of short bursts out at sea during the day catching all the fish you can to sell and upgrade your boat to catch bigger and better fish and push along the story is so addicting. It leads to some really fun emergent moments like seeing how far you can push it into the night before you risk being taken by either a sea monster or your own madness.

Did it make me cry? No.

5. Baldur's Gate 3

There's a world where Baldur's Gate 3 could have been my game of the year this year. It's everything everyone has said it is. It is the most densely packed choice driven narrative RPG to date and it's not even close. The amount of possibilities Larian Studios accounts for here is mind boggling and it deserves every accolade it has received and will continue to receive. Why isn't it higher for me then? It's a good question and I'm not even sure I have a great answer. In my heart of hearts, I know I played this game limping through it a little bit. I was apprehensive if it would even be a thing I'd like as I don't have a long history with the CRPG genre and bounced off the first Divinity game from Larian so my expectations were set accordingly - especially to start. This game is just straight up hard at the beginning to a newcomer. Reloading fights sometimes 10+ times to succeed and be battered and bruised for the next encounter not knowing if I'd have the resources to rest or not prior to the next one was so much to juggle mentally that I had to drop the difficulty to easy. This, to be clear, is completely fine. I don't mind needing to drop the difficulty in games at all if it makes for a more fun experience for me, but it was the WAY it felt difficult that irked me a bit. There aren't always ways to improvise a fight once you are within it to succeed if you've been depleted from a previous one often meaning rolling back a save from 20-30 minutes ago...if I remembered to save at all. Alas, I got into a great groove with it once on easy and began understanding the systems more deeply and ended up loving the game, but the roadblocks I encountered would be enough to get many to jump ship and I'm just not sure those roadblocks had to be there. I also missed two characters in the opening chapter completely without any knowledge until I watched a stream of someone playing. That kind of sucks, but there is certainly something to be said about how unique to me my playthrough of BG3 is compared to anyone else's. It felt like MINE and that's not something just any game can do. Despite my hiccups with it, as you can see, it's number 5 on my list. I loved this game and it opened my eyes to what games can achieve in story telling and character work.

Did it make me cry? Misty, but no tears.

4. Humanity

There's a bit of theme or a trend in some of the games I've really loved recently and that is that they enable you to play in a way that feels unique to you. In Humanity, there is often only 1 solution to a puzzle, but the route you take to get there could vary immensely from player to player. There's a bit of depending on the AI of your little humans (especially once they can have lightsabers and blasters lol) that leads to some really funny and cool scenarios. This is one of those puzzle games where I would sit staring at the screen without the controller even in my hands looking for a solution, then realize what I was doing and mutter to myself about how much fun I was having. The puzzles are so well balanced providing a perfectly fair amount of challenge to complete as well as additional rewards in every level to push yourself a little further. Humanity also boasts my favorite music from any game this year using human voice tones which act as synths to construct a very organic feeling electronica soundtrack that never gets old no matter how many times it loops as you're staring at puzzles.

Did it make me cry? No.

3. Marvel's Spider-Man 2

The first Spider-Man from Insomniac was my favorite game of 2018 and this sequel outdoes it in basically every way. It is light and breezy to play with an effortless web slinging, wing suiting, sling-shotting movement system, free flowing cooldown based combat with plenty of fun gadgets and skills to unlock, and seamless loading, fast travel, and graphical implementation. It balances this with a weighty story that is very on the nose, but also full of real emotion. It is brilliant how much heart Insomniac was able to inject into every character and every mission - even ones that seemingly have no business being as emotionally resonant as they are. Spider-Man 2 has a platinum trophy achievement percentage of 20% and beyond the fact that it's perfectly achievable, I think that high of a completion percentage speaks to how fun the entirety of this game is. Much like Jedi Survivor, the map clearing in Spider-Man is just fun. Everything moves so fast it never feels like you're on one project for too long. The story and theory crafting that comes from all of the reveals is peak comic book bullshit where a lot like video games, sometimes it's more fun to think about what's coming next instead of just enjoying what's currently in front of you.

Did it make me cry? Yes. Sobs abound. Yes.

2. Resident Evil 4 Remake

As mentioned before, I played this to completion 6 times in a row. One regular run through, a couple speed runs, a couple on the really hard difficulties. This game is rewarding initially and keeps giving the more you go with incremental rewards to make subsequent new game plus runs faster and more ridiculous. The base experience has been great for almost 20 years and while the remake changes a fair amount of it for the better, the spirit of the original remains unchanged. I played through this nearly 10 times on my GameCube back then and with how obsessed I was with this remake, RE4 is assuredly in my top 3 most completed games ever and frankly, it just doesn't get old. The pacing is perfect. When you want a big action sequence, it gives it to you. When you need a little break from the spooks and just need to explore a little bit, that section is right on cue. The slow escalation of bigger and badder enemies and more intense locations in perfect harmony with the ludicrous story and characters makes this so hard to put down. It's scary, it's funny, it's serious, it's dumb, it's beautiful, it's disgusting. RE4 is an all time great and the remake also makes it one of the best playing modern games currently available.

Did it make me cry? Too scared/happy to cry.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

No matter how celebrated this game can be, I also feel like people have tried their very best to suppress how good Tears of the Kingdom actually is this award season. Maybe it was like how LeBron James didn't win the MVP every year during his prime even though he was technically the best. It's no fun to reward the best all the time and sometimes other people (things) need to have their moment. Or maybe some are a little bored of Zelda. After all, this is more or less the same art, the same map, and the same tone as Breath of the Wild that came out 6 years ago, but I think the comparisons beyond the surface level are about as much as I can stomach. Tears of the Kingdom is exactly what I want out of a video game and I had no idea that this is what I would want before playing it. It is everything Breath of the Wild is (a top 3 favorite game of mine) with the gas pedal pushed a bit further down, the top down, and radio blasting. It's more in all the right ways, but it is not only just more. What is so invaluable is the additions Nintendo made like ultra hand and ascension that make every other video game feel like they're preventing you from having a good time by being so restrictive. Ultra hand specifically provides a means to play with this sandbox as much as your imagination will allow. Games feel like living things a lot of the time, but they're also just equations within a set of rules. TotK removes any notion that you can't do what you want to because of mathematical limitations even if they do exist. It's a game that made me feel like a kid again much like Breath of the Wild did - lost in my own world even though it's one millions have experienced with me. I figured that feeling may have been lightning in a bottle with BotW, but TotK proves that the Zelda team is always capable of fostering this franchise with the most deft touch, even when it feels like it's peaked.

Did it make me cry? Yes, a couple times. Out of sadness and awe.