As far as the quality of video games released to the public this year, it was certainly one for the books. In years past, this is the part where I’d complain about how everyone was having a good time except for me, then point to all the fighting games and Fromsoftware stuff or whatever that aren’t typically for me. But I felt like this year had something for everyone no matter their taste.

However, when it comes to everything else about video games, be it the business or the culture or literally anything else, it was a dumpster fire.

I’m having a hard time squaring that. I loved many of the games that came out this year, but the love feels hollow when I think about the people who made them. Granted, I have a friend who works at one of those AAA studios you’ve read about this year. But even if I didn’t, I spent six months on the picket line with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. The line between my side of the entertainment industry and video games is so thin in my eyes that it might as well not be there at all.

But I have to find joy where I can, and I had an incredible time playing video games this year. The new games were unusually fantastic. I broke out of my comfort zone and tried some old games that wound up being particularly fulfilling. (I fell down the Minecraft hole hard around this time last year.) For the first time in what feels like forever, I got into not just one new mobile game, but two! And neither are scammy bullshit dystopian mobile market games either! Like… actual games! They still make actual games for phones! (Shout out to Subpar Pool and Gubbins.)

Put it another way: Starfield, arguably the most anticipated game in recent memory, could come out, more or less shit the bed, and it didn’t put a dent in the perception of the quality of games in 2023. If that doesn’t speak to a strong year, I don’t know what does. I just wish that quality didn’t come with so much baggage.

Capitalism. It’s bad.

Runner-Up: Baldur’s Gate 3

When I was a little kid, most of my friends had their birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, and the soda dispenser at the one we went to had Surge. I’d get a cup of Surge, then another, then another, and soon after, I’d be bouncing off the walls. I’d run around like a maniac, my friends and I would steal balls from the ball pit to throw at the animatronics, and overall, I’d would just be an annoying little bastard. Then I’d wake up on the couch, having crashed so hard that I didn’t remember one of my parents carrying me inside, and I’d feel like dogshit.

That’s roughly what my experience with Baldur’s Gate 3 was like.

I’ve only owned a PC for about two years, and BG3 was not only my first CRPG, but also my first real encounter with anything coming close to Dungeons and Dragons. Giving me both of those things at once, and also adding what occasionally feels like an infinite amount of variables to any given encounter or problem, was the equivalent of giving a little kid some pure uncut Surge. And maybe a little cocaine.

I tested what felt like every way of handling every problem I encountered. I save-scummed scenarios over and over. I redid conversations and hit F5 so many times it might count as abuse.

I couldn’t just kill the three goblin leaders. I had to set up and execute each kill so I wouldn’t be caught and have to fight my way out of the stronghold. I had to make sure nobody saw me as I destroyed the bridge I got The Drow to stand on. I had to experiment with which characters could be poisoned by Gut so I could carry out the assassination alone. I had to go through trial and error hell to figure out how to get Ragzlin without turning everyone hostile. (Honestly, I think I just got lucky on that one.)

And much like that little kid on his third cup of Surge, eventually, I crashed, and I crashed hard. I put 20+ hours into BG3, and I completely burned myself out before I even left the first area. It’ll be a long time before I can convince myself to pick it up again.

Is that the game’s fault? Absolutely not. But it’s also why Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t on my list proper. It’s too much for me to handle at this moment in time. Or to put it another way, the game’s simply too good. I’m sorry!

10. My Friendly Neighborhood

There’s a very gradual shift in My Friendly Neighborhood that I spent a lot of time thinking about this year.

It’s not that I don’t like horror games. It’s more that it’s an experience I don’t seek out as quickly in games as I would in other mediums. Scary games are scarier to me than scary movies, at least when they work, and all of this is a long way of saying that I’m a coward. You can plug one of your ears to lessen the effect of the jumpscare in the theater. If you want out of the horror in a video game, you have to stop playing.

I read about My Friendly Neighborhood, a survival horror game set in an abandoned children’s show set, somewhere and gave it a whirl. At first, I found it scary. Granted, it’s actually pretty light on jumpscares, the guns are very silly, and the enemies announce themselves from pretty far away. But there’s something about the atmosphere that got to me. The lack of any kind of human presence. The hum of silence when there aren’t any enemies around. Mix that with the high stakes of dying and the resource scarcity and yeah, it got to me a little.

That feeling didn’t last. Some of it was the repetition of the lines the puppet enemies constantly spew to themselves and at you, but it was also because you simply spend enough time in a space and you get used to it, even when new areas of the map unlock. A certain monotony was on the cusp of setting in, but then I discovered, by accident, that you can help out some of the more imposing puppet bosses.

I’ll leave out the details of that encounter. (For those who played the game, I’m talking about the puppet in the main stage.) However, after said encounter, I asked myself a question: Are all the puppets lingering around this game actually “enemies?” Yes, they attack you and the things they shout can be particularly… unpleasant. But there’s ample evidence to suggest that they’re not necessarily attacking you out of malice. In fact, they might not even be aware that they’re attacking you at all, and their actions might not even register to them as an “attack” in the first place.

Sure enough, there’s a reason all this is happening, and that reason is tragic in ways I wasn’t necessarily expecting. As I said, I spent most of 2023 on the entertainment industry picket lines, and the sight of abandoned creative spaces and sets stirred certain feelings in me. But the tragedy actually goes further beneath the surface and reaches back to why we bother making art for children in the first place.

I realize that’s a lot to pin on the silly horror game where you shoot evil puppets with golden metal letters. But art’s weird sometimes.

9. Alan Wake II

I read screenplays and short stories for something that partially resembles a living and I give writers feedback on their work. Though it’s a seasonal gig, I still read a lot of stuff every year, and thus I feel at least somewhat qualified to say that Alan Wake is a terrible writer.

I’m not saying he’s without his merits. (Nor am I saying that I’m any better, for the record.) His mastery of syntax is strong enough to be able to form a coherent sentence or two and he ticks just about every box you need to be considered competent. But I’ve always subscribed to the theory that talent alone isn’t as important as what you do with it, and Alan’s sole value seems to be summoning nouns and calling them “dark,” a word he seemingly uses every other sentence. The dark man in the dark room in the dark place with dark thoughts.

Moreover, the way he talks about his work and his writing is insufferable. But in this case, I don’t mean that as a complaint. The intolerability that gushers out of him whenever he talks about writing is what makes him a little too tangible to me. If you’ve ever taken any kind of creative writing class, he may seem a little too familiar to you as well.

The problem is that I can’t tell if Alan’s a shitty writer on purpose or by accident.

I think most people would say that Remedy is well aware of the fact that Alan Wake writes books for the beach and the airport. But the thing is that I’ve played the first two Max Payne games, and Alan’s writing sure does sound an awful lot like Max’s inner monologue. You could argue that Remedy does a decent job lampshading the insipidness of Max’s noir musings and Alan’s Stephen King-y scribblings. But there’s a fine line between winking at the audience and shining your light on your faults as a crutch, and something about the tonality of Remedy’s hints at self-awareness don’t always strike me as intentional.

Even if all that weren’t true, there’s still such a sense of authorship and creativity in this game that I’d still love it, and it’s on this list because I had an incredible time playing it. I just had to get that off my chest.

Anyway, Alan Wake II is a very good video game.

8. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Were you to make a line graph of my time with My Friendly Neighborhood, it would look like a rollercoaster. There’d be a steep ramp-up when the premise was fresh and the novelty was still there, followed by a drop once said novelty wore off. It would go up when something made me laugh or I encountered that scary ass fucking thing in the endgame I failed to mention earlier and down when I got stuck on a puzzle or something like that. You get the idea.

The line graph for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor would just go up.

It wouldn’t start at the bottom of the graph, but it would definitely start below the middle. I thought Fallen Order had some effective story ideas, particularly in the context of being a Star Wars game, and some fun combat. And then it started fading from my memory almost immediately after I finished it.

So my expectations were low, but when I started playing, a few things stood out to me. The maps were easier to navigate. The lightsaber haptics felt really good. (I don’t know how or why I’m still wowed by haptics, but here we are.) Turgle. “Hey,” I asked myself, “Do I like this?”

I played a little more, and as it went on, it kept introducing more ideas. There are constant additions to the styles of combat you can use and new platforming mechanics that do a fantastic job building on one another. I was having fun. Way more fun than I thought I’d be having.

Then, at a certain point, there’s a story twist I didn’t see coming, and the narrative built on that twist in ways I found compelling and emotionally engaging. So not only was I having fun but I also… cared???

I realize all that sounds somewhat condescending. However, maybe it’s my bubble, but it sure feels like people are bouncing off the model for non-Nintendo AAA games, particularly the Sony ones that feel like they’re holding your hand or the homogenous Ubisoft/Bethesda sandboxes. For me, sometimes I actually want a relatively mindless AAA game just to take my mind off things. But I’m certainly not immune to the pushback either, and there was a part of me that was wondering if this moment was ever going to come.

My point is that I don’t take the basics for granted anymore when it comes to the big releases. They may offer a special idea or two, but I don’t assume those moments will be anything other than fleeting. Survivor isn’t without its flaws, but for me at least, it’s fun, it tells a decent story, and it puts clear effort into many areas a lot of its AAA peers don’t beyond just scope and graphics. It’s a AAA game that feels like it was made by human beings. It’s nice to know those still exist.

7. Tchia

I don’t know why I keep going back to My Friendly Neighborhood, but here I am doing it again.

My Friendly Neighborhood found a way to wring meaning out of the inherent contradiction of being a horror game that isn’t scary. On a similar note, Tchia might be the warmest, most feel-good game I played this year, a game many people would be quick to call “cozy,” yet it’s also a game where you wage war against industry, capitalism, and colonialism. You wage said war in as friendly a way as you can, given that you don’t kill anyone. But you do sabotage factories, depose evil dictators, and give the land back to the people.

Or maybe it just felt that way because of some fortunate timing. The anti-colonial themes of Tchia are pretty apparent, but they’re not the parts of the game that stood out to me for the first two-thirds or so. That, to me, was the warmth. The clear passion and spirit on display in every corner of the game as I ran around flinging myself from trees and turning into birds.

Then, as I was reaching the endgame, I went and saw How to Blow Up a Pipeline. With thoughts of revolutionary sabotage on my mind, I went into the final missions, which involve destroying the villain’s cloth factories. “Oh shit,” I thought, “Am I about to blow up a pipeline, metaphorically speaking?” And blow up a metaphorical pipeline I did in this adorable game about revolution.

This juxtaposition might feel contradictory to many. Cozy games typically deal in low stakes and they don’t make you think about things like oppressive bureaucracy or the muck of capitalism or the retention of ancestry and identity in the face of cultural erasure, all of which is to say nothing of the rich leader literally sitting on a throne and eating children. However, that juxtaposition is also what makes this game special to me because it demonstrates the humanity at the core of the experience. It’s a messy balance to try to maintain. One most people will spend their lives trying to find. You know, all that Inside Out shit.

And it’s not just the humanity of the game’s content, but its creation as well. I’ve reached a point in my time with games where I value heart more than polish (despite the next two games on this list and the previous two as well) and I’m not sure I played anything with more obvious benevolence behind it than Tchia. It’s the feel-good game of the year, whether your definition of “feel-good” is simply vibing out in nature or throwing a bomb down a factory exhaust pipe.

6. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

It’s a 2D Mario game that’s better than the vast majority of 2D Mario games in recent memory. Sometimes I need innovation and challenge. Sometimes I really don’t.

5. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

At a certain point in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, you unlock the web line. It is, essentially, a tightrope you shoot from your hand. If you’re standing on a ledge and there’s another ledge across the room, you can not only shoot a web line and make a connection between the two, but you can also shoot more lines from the one you’re already standing on, allowing you to make a de facto spider-web.

Not long after you gain this ability, you start using them in the stealth sections. I’d shoot a web line, then another, then another, and I’d use these lines to string up enemies from above. I went through this routine a few times, but then at one point, I bothered to look up to see what I had done. I discovered that I was making these fucked up hanging goon murals on the ceiling, and from that moment on, I started going out of my way to make them more and more elaborate. You could argue that the web lines make stealth too easy, but I liked the idea of some boss seeing what I’d done to his thugs and being just a little taken aback. The whole point of Spider-Man is that he’s always outmuscled. Yet here I was, feeling intimidating.

At another point, you unlock a series of side quests revolving around the Brooklyn Visions Academy, the prestigious private high school Miles and all of his friends attend. In a vacuum, some of these quests may feel perfunctory. However, maybe this is just me being in my 30s and having a little bit of emotional transference from the Spider-Verse movies, I found myself invested in helping these kids out, and I found all these quests charming. (Particularly the prom-posal one.) After I was done with them, the students banded together and got me the Boricua Suit. The suit I’d spend the rest of the game wearing. Much like a suit you get in the Miles Morales solo game, I loved the idea of them seeing me wearing it, and it doesn’t hurt that it looks dope.

Not long after that, I did the mission where you play as Hailey, Miles’s deaf romantic interest. In order to put you in her shoes, the game mutes just about all of the noise as you play as her, and you communicate with people via sign language and her phone in order to track down a graffiti artist who vandalized a flower shop. I found this little quest quite moving, not just because of the representation, but because of Hailey’s motivations. You’re not tracking down this artist to chastise her, but rather to let her know that you like her work and there’s a community of artists who will happily accept her. That kind of thing gets to me.

There are a few more of these more heartfelt moments I could talk about. The quest where you help a woman find her grandfather or the moment with the birds or the Harlem Museum exhibit (which might be my favorite gaming moment of the year). But I mention all these things because they exemplify what I like the most about the Insomniac Spider-Man franchise: They’re very good at getting me to give a shit about what I’m doing. Whether it’s the tiny degree of expression I felt I had with my web line nightmares or helping out a bunch of high school kids, I felt like everything I did in the game actually mattered. It also sure doesn’t hurt that it’s also fun as hell, even if I thought the experience as a whole was a bit more uneven than Miles Morales.

Narrative in video games. Turns out it’s good!

4. Venba

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years consuming media about the cultural importance of food.

My last bit of beach reading was Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, about Zauner exploring her cultural roots through Korean cuisine as she attempts to cope with the grief of losing her Korean mother. I’ve also read similar books, be they works of fiction or little blurbs in the cookbooks I’ve acquired throughout the years. I’ve watched many a documentary about the importance of cultural foodways and how industrialization and capitalism put those practices at risk. (I would highly recommend Gather on Netflix.) I’ve consumed who knows how many videos on cooking channels in which the presenter cooks a dish related to their ancestry and explains said dish’s significance to their culture.

The point is that the importance of the ties between culture and food has been stated so many times that it’s something I take for granted. The sky is blue, water is wet, and what we eat says a lot about who we are and where we come from. Yet it’s exceedingly rare that I sit down and make any of the dishes I read about in those books and watched in those movies. Sometimes it’s because the ingredients are hard to come by, or maybe it’s because I’d need to buy expensive kitchen equipment. Or maybe I don’t have the time. If only there was some kind of interactive medium that could roughly simulate the experience of making these dishes!

Cue Venba.

It’s one thing to read about food and to watch it be made. It’s another to actually make it, even if only virtually. To use all these tools that you would never use otherwise and understand the intimacy and the patience needed for certain parts of the process. To go through it over and over again until it becomes second nature. Venba tells the story of an Indian family who moves to Canada and struggles to assimilate. It’s an affective well-told story that adds substantial emotional depth to all the virtual cooking you do. But even without that context, I found the food preparation mechanics profound enough in and of themselves.

It should also go without saying that this game will make you murderously hungry.

3. Pizza Tower

Wario might be my favorite Nintendo character.

I love his design. I love his games. But most of all, I love what he represents. A Japanese entertainment company tasked themselves with creating a villainous counterpart for Mario, and after they put their heads together, what they came up with was a fat crass scammer business magnate who loves riding a big dumb motorcycle, farting, and generally being a piece of shit. Wario is the embodiment of late-stage capitalism. Wario is an Ayn Randian nightmare. Wario is America. However, he’s also a Nintendo creation, so he still somehow manages to be pretty charming in spite of those qualities.

When we use the word “charming” in the context of video games, we typically mean it in the Mario Wonder sense of the word. Colorful, whimsical, pure. But the opposite can be just as delightful under the right circumstances. In the end, we love Wario because not only is he a classic scamp, but because he’s intentionally a scamp, and his awfulness is played up for laughs.

Pizza Tower is a faithful recreation of the Wario Land games, which I loved playing as a kid. But it’s also, in a way, Mario Wonder ran through a Wario filter.

Both have a level and gameplay design largely dependent on single-use gimmickry, what with the Wonder Seeds in Wonder and the conception behind the unique mechanics in every level of Pizza Tower. However, the difference is their purpose. Mario Wonder wants to charm you while building on the core pillars of a beloved franchise. It offers refinement, polish, beauty, and bliss. Pizza Tower, on the other hand, offers crudity, anarchy, puckishness, and Microsoft Paint.

Moreover, every corner of this game, from the art style to the gameplay to the music to the menus to everything you could possibly grade a game on, is designed to communicate every ounce of that mischief. There’s an intentionality behind this game that, to me, is not only hilarious but endlessly endearing. I had a blast playing it, and when Mario Wonder was released later in the year, I kept giggling because it felt like this game was unknowingly making fun of it. Pizza Tower is goblin energy in video game form.

Also, Peppino Spaghetti is a god king.

2. Cocoon

I have a few friends who never clicked with the Playdead games. They argued that the puzzles weren’t challenging and the pace wasn’t working or some weird argument about indie pretentiousness that I’m never going to fully comprehend. If they’re not for you, hey, they’re not for you. However, I’d argue that all of the above isn’t necessarily what those games are selling.

Playdead games are less about how you’re doing what you’re doing and more about what you’re doing in the first place. They offer tone, be it the expressionistic nightmare noir of Limbo or the oppressive sci-fi dystopia of Inside. You play a horror game to get scared. You play a Playdead game to get deeply unnerved because shit’s fucked. Hey, some people enjoy that!

Cocoon isn’t a Playdead game, but it shares their lineage in not just key personnel, but in a certain emphasis on bringing all of its elements together for the sake of tone. In this case, I’ve never played anything that feels this alien.

It’s not just that you need to open up a hole in the ground to gain access to something in the floor. It’s that the mechanism by which you open said hole is unzipping a gross fleshy fluid sac zipper. You don’t just lead around the big robot bug. You pull it by its stretchy mechanical skin sphere. There’s a sense of progression and coalescence to everything you’re doing. That everything you’re doing is leading somewhere. It’s hard to say what, but whatever it is, it feels like you’re never going to fully comprehend it even if you could.

Nothing feels like this game. Everything about its world is bizarre and otherworldly, as if from an evolutionary lineage and biology not meant for the human mind. Yet I obsessed over it and I had to keep going. I’d leave my play sessions transfixed and I was eager to tell my friends about it. But what could I tell them? “It’s a game where you’re a bipedal cyborg bug guy and you’re running around with these contained world spheres that you can also jump into that also have a unique power for you inside of each one—” and it was about at this point where I realized I sounded like an insane person.

In that sense, Cocoon might be the most video game ass video game I played in 2023. No other medium can offer an experience like it. Yet despite all of its extravagant sounding ideas, it’s also remarkably simple to play. You move and you interact with a single button. That’s it. The most rudimentary interactions lead to so much emotionality and depth.

God, I love video games sometimes.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Yeah, it’s a boring predictable pick. But what can you do?

Honorable Mentions

BattleBit Remastered
Chants of Sennaar
Dave the Diver
Dead Island 2, specifically in co-op
Goodbye Volcano High
Hi-Fi Rush
Lethal Company
OTXO
Oxenfree II: Lost Signals
Pikmin 4
Planet of Lana
Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance (sic) of the Slayer
Sludge Life 2
Viewfinder

Will Play Someday

Any one of the many remasters and remakes this year, the vast majority of which I didn’t get around to.
Gravity Circuit
Misericorde Volume One
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
Pseudoregalia
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew
Stray Gods
Thirsty Suitors
I’m sure there are others.