The Top 15 Games of 2023

Last year I played 112 games, across 1,200 hours.
Here are the best of them.

15. Diablo IV
Very fun combat and leveling loop, especially with friends. Lots of room to play it as casually or hardcore as you want to.

14. Jusant
Best climbing mechanic in any game. Very relaxing. Gorgeous visuals. Fantastic ending. Love me some short and sweet games.

13. Starfield
Not the second coming of Christ some people expected. What we got was an RPG with choice driven storylines, lots of customization, interesting characters and amazing art direction. Not revolutionary, but a great experience.

12. Spider-Man 2
Insane levels of polish. Very flashy gameplay that sacrifices depth for smoothness. It's fun and bombastic all throughout, but doesn't bring anything new to the table.

11. Dave The Diver
Great gameplay loop that keeps getting richer and interesting in surprising ways. There are "I'm doing *what* now?!" moments every two hours.

10. Hi-Fi Rush
Dripping with style and character in all areas: combat, art direction, animation and writing. Innovative combat design. Great music. Short and extremly sweet.

9. Venba
Short story-heavy game about an Indian mom wrestling with her son's assimilation to American culture. Most of the gameplay revolves around cooking traditional Indian food for her family. Can be played in one sitting. Made me cry.

8. Dredge
Gameplay loop that combines fishing mini-games with Resident Evil/Tetris-esque inventory management. Throw in a Lovecraftian story about what's really going on at this weird town, and you got a fantastic >10 hour game.

7. Cocoon
Great puzzle game that's elevated by some of the best art direction of last year. Puzzles consist of going through worlds within worlds, like the layers of dreams in Inception. Seems complex, but a 10 second clip explains it a lot better.

6. Sea of Stars
Amazing old school 16-bit RPG reminiscent of legendary JRPG's like Chrono Trigger. A mix between turn-based combat and timed button presses makes fights fun. The story and characters are very fleshed out and deep. Garl is one of my favorite characters in years. This one also made me cry. Medium length game (about 30 hours) that feels like a long journey across a lot of interesting places full with interesting people.

5. Lies of P
Basically Pinocchio + Bloodborne. The best Souls-like not made by Fromsoftware (and better than some FS games -gasp!). Really fantastic combat, amazing boss battles, great story and gorgeous art direction. Like all Souls games, it can be very demanding, requiring precise timing, learning boss attack patterns, etc. But also equally as rewarding once you've beat a boss after an hour of trying.

4. Chants of Sennar
Biggest surprise of the year, best puzzle game in ages. The game tasks you with learning 4 made up languages just by contextual clues around the environment. All the languages are cleverly though out, have tight internal logic, and thus allow for many "Aha!" moments that make you feel like a genius, while simultaneously wondering just how much smarter than you the game designers are.

It's a single player game, but I loved playing it with Jela and collaborating on the puzzles. I beg you to give it a try. It is leagues better than what I can articulate here, and unlike anything you've ever played.

And now for the big ones

These 3 games are incredibly special for vastly different reasons. So while I'm confident they are head and shoulders above the rest, I'm not ranking them against each other.

So in no particular order:

Baldur's Gate 3

I've never played a game with this level of player choice in both combat and story. It is almost unfathomable the lengths this game will go to, to make even small choices have tangible impacts. You will make choices within the first 10 hours of this game that will bear fruit literally 130 hours later. As if having multiple dozen-hour branching storylines driven by player choice wasn't enough, the way those intertwine seems downright irresponsible.

The scope of this game...I'm not even sure I understand its size, after 100+ hours. It is truly an "epic"; what The Lord of the Rings is to books. A long and rich journey full of adventure and some of the deepest and most fleshed out characters across different storytelling mediums.

While my Top 3 aren't ranked, I think within the context of the year, BG3 is arguable the best game.

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

We've talked at length about this game. One of the most incredible, open, reactive, fun and impressive sandboxes in all of gaming. The level of player agency afforded through the games mechanics, economies, physics, building system, weather effects and enemy AI is unparalleled. And it's all happening in real time on a console almost 9 times less powerful than a PS5...with no bugs.

I love games that constantly say “Yes” to the player. “Oh, I need to get to the top of this tower…I wonder if I can make a series of ramps by gluing wooden doors together. “ “Yes.” ”What if I take a door, glue a balloon on top and make a bonfire below it to make a hot air balloon?” ”Yes.”

Pretty much every puzzle, enemy encampment and boss battle can be approached in literally thousands upon thousands of ways. Making that a possibility is such a design and engineering feat.

While I think that BG3 is the closest thing to an objective Game of the Year for 2023, I think there's a strong argument for Zelda: TotK as the best game...ever.

Alan Wake 2

This game lacks the incredible mechanical depth and polish of Zelda. It lacks the epic and branching storylines and deep customization of BG3. the combat ranges from "that was kinda fun" to deeply frustrating.

But my God if this isn't the game I think about the most, even moths after rolling credits.

AW2 is what you get if you combine Stephen King + Resident Evil + "House of Leaves" (IYKYK), mix different forms of media on top of each other, and have all those layers interact and comment on each other.

Is it a game about a man escaping a supernatural entity to save his wife? Yes. Is it about writing, and music and game development? Yes. Is it commentary about the importance or triviality of storytelling? Yes. Is it also about the studio that made the game, their previous games and their legacy? Also yes.

In this game the real-life Game Director and Writer, Sam Lake, plays a character, Alex Casey, who is both part of the main story and also a character in a book within the game's universe, written by the protagonist, Alan. At one point Alan goes to a talk show to promote his new book. This scene is a live action segment, in which Alan meets Sam Lake, who in this scene is playing the actor who plays Alex Casey in a film adaptation of Alan's book. I promise that makes sense in context.

The most striking aspect of AW2 is that it feels, at the deepest level, like a work of art made by one person's vision. It is an auteur game in a way no other game this year feels like, and not unlike Kojima games, or films by Hayao Miyazaki. Every square inch of this world feels intentional; every word carefully chosen. You might not like some of the choices, but someone made choices.

This game has burrowed itself in my mind like few games ever have, in spite of its many, many shortcomings. I wish combat was better. I wish the overall experience was smoother. But this game says something. I will take new, original, janky, intentional and memorable over polished sameness any day of the week.