Something went wrong. Try again later

reddirect

This user has not updated recently.

6 0 1 4
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

2023 Ranked

I'm not sure whether it was increasing responsibilities at work, the pursuit of another graduate degree, or just shifting interests into other hobbies, but my enthusiasm for interactive entertainment was dangerously low for most of this past year. My gaming malaise resulted in a span of four or five months - basically March to August - where I hardly touched my consoles except to play Rock Band on Friday or Saturday night.

And then, as the leaves began to change and the nights grew longer, suddenly all of these headlines about 2023 being the greatest year in gaming since 2007 started dropping into my newsfeed, and just like that, I was right back in, now dangerously behind schedule to finish all of these massive works before the year wrapped.

Because of my slump, I had to absolutely force-feed the majority of the titles below. I felt not unlike a competitor in the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, except I'm definitely not Joey Chestnut. I'm that chump on the end who doesn't even like hot dogs that much but really wants to be a part of the moment. I dunked my buns - video games, in this horrible extended metaphor - into two Solo cups filled with water and started stuffing my face. I would have loved to spend more time with a lot of these games. I'm a sucker for a Platinum trophy grind once a game's narrative concludes, but often I was leaping head-first into the next twenty-plus hour game as soon as I skipped through the previous game's credits.

Rushed though I was, I cherished a number of incredible experiences from the year that reminded me of the power of this medium. While nearly all of the big studio releases of the year were sequels to previously established franchises, so many of them found ways to elevate or completely change the foundation of what came before. The independent games that I played this year were as creative and thought-provoking as ever. Compared to most previous years that I've built top ten lists for, I feel confident saying that I would whole-heartedly endorse any of the games I've pulled together. I'm thankful for other writers and outlets identifying a number of great choices to help curate my own list.

There are so many more games that I eventually wanted to have played but just didn't have time for. That's the way it always is. It just stings a bit more when the buffet table is loaded with incredibly delicious food. While it's still too soon to determine exactly where this year lands in comparison to others, I'm thankful for the experiences I was able to have, and my attitude toward video games is a bit more optimistic heading into 2024.

List items

  • In anticipation of Alan Wake II, I endeavored to play through the remastered release of the original game. Having missed out on its initial release, I hoped to be impressed by Remedy's usual commitment to storytelling above all else. While the characters and the setting were fun, I found the gameplay to be mostly unbearable. To date, I've only played through the first three chapters. These were chores to finish. Clunky action combat and frustrating controls were too much to overcome to want to experience the remainder of the narrative. I looked up some recap videos instead.

    Alan Wake II is as much a sequel to Control as it is to Alan Wake. Remedy is all-the-way in on its new connected universe, and I cannot wait to see where they go next. Everyone's comparing these choices to the MCU, and while that is the most popular extended universe out there, I see more connections to the "Uber-novel" that David Mitchell has been writing for the past two decades. Each of his novels is a singular story, complete with characters and conflicts, but underneath it all are a few recurring ideas and characters who show up frequently. They're the best kind of Easter eggs because they're not integral to the plot, but they reward those who've invested their time in the storytelling.

    Alan Wake II is as much about Alan Wake as it is about Saga Anderson.

    Alan Wake II is much more Resident Evil II than Resident Evil IV. Every combat encounter is slick and terrifying. Each collision with wolves or shadow-people knocks off mounds of health. Recovery items and ammunition are scarce. Even beyond the structural design of the narrative, the gameplay is fun and engaging.

  • What a year for Nintendo! While others will celebrate the sky-high ambition of Tears of the Kingdom or the revelatory restyling of Super Mario Brothers Wonder, the one game that truly blew me away, that was everything I hoped it could be and more, was Pikmin 4.

    Pikmin 4 is a generous game. At first, I was disappointed that this long-awaited sequel would have just four distinct biomes to explore. Little did I know, there was almost twice as much game left after finishing the first part of the campaign.

    Pikmin 4 is Pikmin perfected. Oatchi solves the thorny issues of navigating difficult terrains with your scattered forces.

  • Cocoon's puzzle crafting is tuned to perfection. The solution is always attainable through a few grueling minutes of contemplation. I remember clutching my face, controller in my lap, as I struggled to navigate the nesting dolls of the orbs. There were no fewer than five distinct moments that made me feel like an unqualified genius. Cocoon is gorgeous - an absolute marvel of minimalism and a modern indie classic.

  • In May, I purchased my copy of Tears of the Kingdom. I hadn't been playing games for a while, but I tried to convince myself that Zelda would be exactly what I needed to dive all-the-way back in. There are few games that have been more eagerly anticipated than the follow-up to what is arguably the best game of all time. Imagine my surprise when absolutely nothing in the first five hours managed to move my needle.

    So I found myself alternating between moments of absolute awe and absolute frustration. I would oscillate between the thrill of diving into the depths for the first time and illuminating a vast swath of shadow and then trying to solve a shrine puzzle by taking forty-five minutes to hastily stick four pieces of metal together, only to have them collapse and end up scattered back to their original locations.

    Tears of the Kingdom is overwhelming. It possesses some of the most ambitious scope and design flexibility I have ever seen. But at the same time, its sheer commitment to allowing the player to do anything made me want to tap out.

    And then, last week, something just clicked. I can't even explain what. I was twenty hours in, and I just became transfixed by the world. I discovered the meaning of certain sequences, I uncovered new hidden elements of the world that I wanted to discover. I made my way into the depths. THE DEPTHS! Forget the sky, the depths are where the real fun happens.

    This is all to say, I finally was able to tune my personal radio into that of Tears of the Kingdom's. While I may always have a soft spot in my heart for those cultivated adventures - Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Windwaker - I understand why so many love these open world games. I'll never be as creative in my approach to problems here, but that doesn't mean I can't stand slack-jawed in wonder of just how a team of humans pulled something like this off.

  • Chants of Sennaar makes language and translation the central challenge. I was at first a bit hesitant to try this one out. I had bad memories of the frustrations caused by Tunic's similar reliance on the player not knowing the language of the world. Chants of Sennaar avoids the problem that game faces by providing the player with a notebook similar to the in Return of the Obra Dinn where correctly matching up visual representations with the corresponding symbols will permanently fuse the ideas together. Few gameplay moments this year were as satisfying for me as finally defining a set of symbols in this world.

    Some of the mandatory stealth sequences are frustrating, but just about every other moment was brilliant. I think Chants of Sennaar could be rage-inducing for a number of players, but I've enjoyed whittling away an hour or two at a time with this wonderful puzzler.

  • Can you believe the first New Super Mario Brothers came out almost twenty years ago? Who's new now, sucker!?

    I think we take 2-D Mario for granted. We assume that this type of platformer, this series that has been so instrumental for so many of us in our coming-of-age, just happens. The teams at Nintendo who have crafted these experiences do so with such ease that it doesn't always feel like a revelation when it hits. Mario Brothers Wonder celebrates this franchise with such enthusiasm that it is irresistible.

    Mario Wonder is so full of vibrancy and clever ideas. Comparing it to the 2-D installments from this all-time franchise from the past two decades only underscores how necessarily and celebratory this latest iteration is. A lot of folks are celebrating the multiplayer components here, but the game is so great that it doesn't even need those bells and whistles. It seems like each level introduces a new enemy type, and from a series that has been relying on bad mushrooms with feet and turtles for the past forty years, that's massive. The Wonder Flowers are always unexpectedly entertaining. What a year for musical sequences in popular games, huh?

  • Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a whole lot more of everything - more villains, more combat encounters, more narrative, more abilities. As satisfying as the game can be to play, I found that I was having the most fun when I was able to just zip around from point to point accomplishing specific tasks. The story here is compelling enough, but lengthy cut-scenes sometimes left me hankering to get on with all this yapping and get back to swinging. The central conflict worked less well for me here than previous games, including Miles Morales, which is, I think, my high point for this series so far.

    Spider-Man 2 is the sleek and lovable version of open-world games defined by the previous console generations. There's nothing ground-breaking here. It's just polished as heck.

  • Back when it was called Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the game that would eventually be known as Final Fantasy XV promised a beautiful fusion of the action-oriented gameplay of the Kingdom Hearts Franchise and the serious-seeming narratives of other proper video games. To my adolescent mind, no game could possibly be better. Final Fantasy XV finally did come out nearly ten years later and never quite hit the highs it shot for. It was easy to blame the convoluted nature of that game's development for its inability to realize its true vision.

    Imagine my surprise when, with relatively little fanfare, Final Fantasy XVI turns out to be exactly that type of game, giving Kingdom Hearts II a run for its money as the best Kingdom Hearts game of all time.

    The highs of Final Fantasy XVI made me delirious. For as frustrating and flat as a majority of the side quests are in this game, the boss fights soar and scream above much of modern gaming. Each massive encounter ups the expectation, constantly endeavoring to make me question how they could ever top what came next. So while I can understand how others struggled to finish this one, I really loved most of my forty or so hours with it. Reusing popular summons from past games makes this installment feel like a proper celebration of the franchise.

    I loved this cast of characters. Cid's gruff demeanor makes him one of the best representations of that character in this franchise. I found the brotherly relationship between Joshua and Clive to be heartfelt, but then they DNA-digivolved to form an even stronger monster and every pleasure sensor still intact from my adolescent brain radiated with the intensity of a hydrogen bomb.

    I wish the very end played out a bit differently than it does. It's a testament to just how much fun this game can be when at the end of the year, those low points don't even register, and all I'm left remembering is how indescribably awesome those boss fights were. Titan! Bahamut! Ultima! No game this year made better on a commitment to providing big, loud, dumb action like this one.

  • It was about twelve hours in that Jedi: Survivor really began to convince me that this sequel had a bit more nerve about it than its predecessor. Survivor emphasizes fluidity of movement as much as it does combat. Rather than being confined to the hallways and narrow pathways of the previous game, Survivor opens movement up to a semi-open world level. The game's performance is still rough around the edges. Cal Kestis is still fairly bland as a leading hero. But there's heart to this game that detractors of the first game should endeavor to cast aside in order to give this one a fair shot.

  • Alien is one of my favorite films of all-time. The absolute isolation of space, the palpable tension, the short running time. It's a lean piece of science-fiction horror. The first time I saw Aliens, I was expecting similar cinematic greatness. How many would argue that the film is even better than the first? Maybe it was because I was expecting another film tonally similar to the first, but Aliens didn't grab me. It's a fine action film, but what was initially a darker, more subtle narrative became a roaring, machine-gun blasting action stomper. Still enjoyable, but not the best version of itself. Resident Evil 4 is the Aliens of video games. An excellent, enjoyable action romp, but missing the crucial components that made me love the previous installment so much.

    I'm so much more excited by puzzles and locked doors than combat arenas and a whole bunch of kicking.

    Is this the part where I say that this was also the first time I've ever played through Resident Evil 4? I don't have any nostalgia for this setting or this narrative. It's goofy as heck, but I don't dislike that. I think Resident Evil 4 also suffers by being the second survival horror game I played through this year, and not to spoil the list (Who am I kidding? You had to scroll past it to get down here!) but that other survival horror game was pretty much everything I want in one, so this one just couldn't measure up. Is anyone excited for the Resident Evil 5 remake in 2026?

  • Dave the Diver is a charming not-quite-Indie that continually surprises by how much variety is available to the player. Diving is just one sliver of the overall experience here. Ironically, the diving was probably the component of this game that I enjoyed least.

    A lot of the cast of characters here are hilariously realized through some stylish cut-scenes.

    A relaxing and potentially addicting sequence of loops that never quite sank its hooks into me like it did others.

  • After the double-stuffed year of games we've had, it's hard to believe Hogwarts Legacy also came out in February. Divorced from its weighty context, Hogwarts Legacy is the type of game that I, and countless other millennials, have been fantasizing about for decades. Having a Hogwarts to explore, full of secrets and passageways, is a delight. Combat is repetitive and generally uninspired. It's frustrating that despite living in a world full of endless possibilities, your wand is most often used as a gun, thumping glowing red blasts at hordes of enemies. My wife, mostly a non-gamer, devoured this one.

  • Only one chapter in. Tactics are classic Fire Emblem, but the story and character designs are frustratingly dull after the incredible Three Houses

  • Viewfinder is a game that has a singular great idea. The first time you impress a photograph onto the world and that bridge you're seeing in a picture frame becomes a tangible pathway you can walk across is magical. Unfortunately, there are not many other surprises.The game is brief and the puzzles are never outrageously taxing. But the content wore on me over time. There were some fantastic indie puzzle games this year that could be frustrating in the moment, but after a gaming session concluded, I was always excited to return later to pick at it anew, often making satisfying progress. Viewfinder could not maintain my interest, even though its also probably shorter than those other games. To date, I still haven't finished it.

    The attempt at stringing a narrative through these puzzles was less than successful. When the characters aren't compelling and the puzzles aren't satisfying, there's less here to be excited about. That conclusion was only strengthened by the excellent offerings also on display within this genre.

  • As glossy as the graphical fidelity is, The Finals is seriously lacking in identity. There are a boatload of live service shooters begging for your attention and wallet contents. Are people out there really convinced after a set of hours with this game that this one is worthy? What's to be excited about? The destructive environments are technically impressive, the weapons handle well, but the lack of coherence behind the world and the moment-to-moment motivations keeps the game from being anything special.

  • ***Not ranked!

    Haven't gotten into space yet. Maybe someday!
Load Comments