2023 was a year of contradictions for the gaming industry. Many people smarter than myself have pointed out huge discrepancies in massive, successful sales periods for mega publishers that dominate the industry while an estimated ninety-thousand jobs were lost this year. Israel’s genocide in Palestine has benefited from the United States providing munitions (including white phosphorous), and video games like Halo and Call of Duty serve as propaganda arms of the United States military. At the industry’s own “Game Awards”, developers and creators were quickly shuffled offstage (except of course, for Keighley’s own favorite boy, Hideo Kojima) in favor of more skits and speeches from Hollywood celebrities. As a fan of games, it’s been lovely to be treated to so many wonderful experiences this year. It also feels like the industry is on the verge of a major reckoning – the profits keep rolling in but the foundation feels diseased and unhealthy.
All that said, let’s take a look at some of my favorite games of this year, presented in release order.
10. Hi-Fi Rush
Something has to be said about how gutsy it is for a studio like Tango Gameworks, mostly known as a horror studio (it’s three prior major releases being The Evil Within and it’s sequel, followed by Ghostwire: Tokyo), to make its next project a bright, bouncy, comedy rhythm action game. It’s even gutsier to launch it the same day it’s announced with zero marketing lead-up. Hi-Fi Rush would deserve accolades for such a swing to begin with. What a lovely surprise then, that it’s so damned good on top of it. Adding rhythm as the central mechanic that the entire game is built around is genius – it takes the character action game and gives it an entire new layer. What’s even more incredible is how far the game takes this mechanic, providing each stage its own unique identity, challenge, and charm.
9. Vernal Edge
For my money, the best quick measure of a Metroidvania’s quality is the delta between the verbs available to the player from moment one and the ones available at the end. It’s a testament to the challenge of designing stages and encounters that are interesting and fun when a character can only jump and attack and when they can practically fly through the stages, barely touching the ground as they bounce, parry, and chain attack across multiple screens. Vernal Edge, by this metric, deserves to stand alongside the likes of Hollow Knight and Super Metroid. The secret sauce of Vernal Edge is the commitment to character action mechanics and inputs (on a 2D plane) and movement mechanics that require consistent, precise input from the player. The protagonist, Vernal, is an endearing, prickly sort that reveals more about what she refuses to discuss with NPCs than what she does. The story is mostly told through implication, and piecing it together from the character dynamics proves to be a great hook to keep the exploration enticing.
8. It Comes in Waves
The third release from Merlino Games (led by developer Antonio Freyre), It Comes in Waves is an atmospheric third person shooter about atonement and what we preserve. The player character is the “Outcast”, someone who has committed a grave but unknown wrong against a small community on an unknown desert planet. To repent, they must travel into the wastes to ferry a “specimen” worn on their back. Once the specimen is fully grown, they may deliver it and receive repentance. The gameplay is simple – you collect items that contribute to the specimen’s growth, and must fight off raiders while also maintaining your hydration level. If you die in the desert, the game is over and must be restarted from the beginning. It’s incredibly atmospheric, and nearly everything is left to implication and imagination. Clearly inspired by 60s and 70s sci-fi aesthetics, It Comes in Waves is a masterclass in foreboding. Despite the simple gameplay, the friction of the constantly draining hydration provides a consistent pressure – never allowing you to stray too far from your task despite the incredible formations and alien architecture half buried in the sandy wastes.
7. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
I’m not very well-versed in visual novels, so it may seem quaint to those deep in the Steins: Gate or Umineko trenches, but Paranormasight has some of the most interesting meta-mechanical interactions I’ve seen since the original Metal Gear Solid. By fully enveloping the player and the format into the story and interactions, it creates an intensely immersive experience simply by folding the medium into the narrative itself. A fascinating, multi-layered murder/mystery tale revolving around seven key pieces of Japanese folk-lore, Paranormasight feels like watching a master magician at-work. There’s a constant sense of tension and unease, and even characters whose perspective you’ve embodied feel untrustworthy. The less said about the game the better, as going in blind is a core part of the experience.
6. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I’ve already talked at length about the narrative failings of Tears of the Kingdom, but despite that blemish, I would still be lying to say it’s any less than one of my favorites of the year. I still think Breath of the Wild is better – it places more restrictions and friction on the player, which I think makes for a more interesting world altogether. What I admire most about Tears of the Kingdom is its boldness and playfulness. It doesn’t always work, and often times, can be more frustrating than fun, but there’s simply no other game with this size, scale, and budget that allows the player this level of mechanical freedom for approaching challenges. It’s the moments inbetween narrative beats that are the “real” story of video games, and Tears of the Kingdom is like a narrative factory - pumping out interesting stories constantly. It’s a game that I admire more than I like, and despite my reservations I do hope it marks a new era of Nintendo that’s less afraid to get weird with it.
5. Street Fighter VI
There’s not a lot of thematic waxing I can do about a fighting game. It’s one of my favorite genres because they’re really about mastery – learning a set of systems so intimately that you can predict your opponent’s next move and execute on a series of commands that can counter that give yourself the upper-hand. It’s about securing your turns and denying the opponent theirs. It’s about resource management and memorization and all the other things that video games have come to be about over their 60+ year history. I’ve never been a fighting game expert but I can usually hold my own – it didn’t take me much time to climb to floor seven of Guilty Gear: Strive’s tower, for instance. What a joy then, when I booted up Street Fighter VI for the first time with twenty years of Street Fighter under my belt, selected Juri, and then proceeded to have my ass absolutely handed to me by the people online for the next several hours. Street Fighter VI is like learning to ride a bike all over again, and starting from scratch was thrilling. The fact that a 30+-year-old series can re-invent itself to this degree is a testament to the designers at Capcom and to the robustness of the format that they popularized back in 1991. I adore Street Fighter VI for making the climb fun again.
4. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Austin Walker said it best during his now DMCA’d tweet about the game (re-upload here) – it’s just damned good to see Armored Core again. FromSoftware, having created an entire genre of video games, returned to their beloved mech action series gloriously. Armored Core is back, and it’s louder, faster, more ambitious, and better than it’s ever been. FromSoftware took several lessons they’ve learned over the last ten years and used them to polish the formula to a mirror-sheen, bringing all the joy and complexity of building the perfect machine and marrying it to their peerless action design. Elden Ring was a phenomenal, but extensive mess, and it’s such a joy to see FromSoftware return to their restrictive, mission based design. Each arena has been fine-tuned to provide a series of challenges press the player both mechanically and creatively with each new build of their mech. The boss design is some of the best in FROM history, with thrilling, climactic, and visually stunning encounters at a tremendous scale. Armored Core VI is a triumph from every angle.
3. El Paso Elsewhere
I’ve already written at-length about what an incredible game El Paso, Elsewhere is. It changed me. I’m a different person on the other side of this experience than I was before I sat down to play it. It’s an experience that only solidifies itself as one of my favorites upon further reflection. I find it interesting that, in the same year, we got both a modern, polished Remedy game, as well as a tribute to some of their earliest works (the original Max Payne). It’s a fantastic example of the ways that the medium has grown both in terms of maturity and ambition that these two could exist. Strange Scaffold’s masterpiece truly understands the heights that can be achieved when taking a mechanical foundation as solid as the original Max Payne and giving it the ludonarrative complexity it deserves, creating something not just in tribute but deeply personal and affecting during the process.
2. Baldur’s Gate III
Never count Larian Studios out. It’s frankly a miracle that a game such as Baldur’s Gate III exists, considering the level of depth and complexity that’s being attempted here. The biggest issue with any game that attempts to adapt Wizards of the Coasts’ immensely popular Dungeons and Dragons system is that the best part of any Dungeons and Dragons session is the push and pull between game master and player. It’s collaborative story telling, and video games by definition cannot react to every possible player input in the way that a human being can. Baldur’s Gate III still doesn’t achieve the “true” DnD experience, but its easily the closest that any game has come. The simple amount of permutations of any given major encounter in the game simply boggles the mind. Even more incredible are the game’s depiction of intimacy. As Luke Plunkett once put it for Kotaku, video game sex generally “looks like two mailboxes clanging together”. Compounding that problem, video game relationships often boil down to enticing the character to put enough “points” into a “romance bucket” for a certain character until it unlocks some special dialogue and, potentially, a steamy scene. Then things generally go back to normal. There’s not a lot of room for relationships to feel real in video games because characters, by nature, have to remain in constant possible states for all players. Liara from Mass Effect can’t have to much work put into a romance because she’s only one of many possible romances, but because she’s also a core party member for characters that may not have romanced her. Baldur’s Gate III puts so much emphasis on each character’s relationship with the player’s own that it’s staggering. My relationship with Karlach (the plucky, awkward tiefling barbarian) actually evolved over the course of the game. What began as flirting slowly became more and more intimate. I made choices that hurt her, that made me feel terrible, that she eventually forgave me for. All of this reflected within the dialogue and the history of our relationship over the game. It’s the closest any game has come to providing me with a sense of intimacy between a player-created character and a member of the cast. It’s a truly spectacular achievement.
Baldur’s Gate III has many issues – a heavily bloated final act, bugs, mechanical pitfalls, you name it. But I will always remember it as a towering achievement in the medium, a storytelling juggernaut, and the game that made me feel attached to a goofy, buff, tiefling.
1. Alan Wake II
The video game industry doesn’t get a lot of stories like Alan Wake II. Remedy studios has always felt like a scrappy underdog. They make extremely tight, weird, thrilling action games that tend to struggle a bit financially. They’re almost always underrated, and in the case of the actual game not being too great (Alan Wake), you can count on them being thick with atmosphere and strong creative choices. I had written off the chance of ever seeing a sequel to Alan Wake until 2019’s fantastic Control. Even then it didn’t feel real – there was no way that Remedy was finally going to have the kind of financial stability to put together a sequel to a thirteen-year-old clunky action game about a pretentious writer wandering in the woods with a flashlight and a pistol. What a joy then, that 2023 brought Alan Wake II, which is not only fantastic in its own right and an improvement in every aspect to the original entry, but feels like the culmination of every lesson Remedy has learned over its long, rocky history. Alan Wake II took so long to make because it couldn’t have happened before now. Remedy couldn’t make Alan Wake II without first making Alan Wake, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Quantum Break and Control. And what an achievement it is. Easily the most singular vision and creatively robust experience in recent memory, Alan Wake II doesn’t feel like the work of one person (writer/director Sam Lake is certainly in the “auteur” conversation, despite this) but rather a united creative team. How incredible that Remedy has created its own “universe” which, in a post Disney/Marvel world, feels stale and tired, and make it fresh and new. See, a huge thematic core of Alan Wake II is the art reflecting back on and changing the creator. About creator reckoning with what they made. By joining their games into a single universe, Remedy allows this metatextual aspect become text. It’s so masterful in taking player expectations into account and flipping tired narrative pitfalls into huge swings that it boggles my mind. It’s something so special that it frankly defies reason, I feel lucky just to have witnessed something like it in my lifetime.
References:
Ivan, T (2023, December 11). It’s estimated that 9,000 games industry jobs have been lost this year. videogameschronicle.com
Plunkett, L (2011, April 8) Very Good Reason Why Video Game Characters Shouldn’t Get Naked. kotaku.com.au
Austin Walker (@austin_walker) (2022, December 9). with full respect to the actual trailer soundtrack, which whipped, please enjoy this snapshot into what my brain sounded like while the armored core 6 trailer played [Post] https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20https:https://x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20//x.com/austin_walker/status/1601089856347975680?s=20
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