Video Games - 2023 review
I have re-written this blog post 3 times.
I thought it would be easy, thought I could laugh in the face of game journalism. But instead I’ve spent the last 2 weeks being rather critical of game journalism and thinking about how it can even be possible to review games if you don’t finish them or physically have the time to play them to the end.
I would be a hypocrite to give a review for games I didn’t finish but also not finishing a game is generally a sign that I wasn’t really feeling it, which is a review in and of itself.
So I think the best way to approach this isn’t to say these are my reviews of games, but these are some games I loved and some I didn’t love so much in 2023 and that’s just one person's experience with them.
The good
This was a banger year for AAA game releases this year. Some long awaited games dropped and they even managed to live up to expectations.
The first AAA game of the year I completed was a hold over. I didn’t get far in Elden Ring in 2022 when we bought it, but something in early 2023 brought us back to it and completely hooked us. The early game that didn’t click with me started to make sense, I finally got a grasp on the controls and small bits of the lore felt like the best reward you could find. It also helped that I felt like I started to get really good at it and would spend a lot of my time helping other people kill bosses in their worlds.
My time with Tears of the Kingdom was greatly enjoyed, but I still haven’t reached the end. The world is sprawling and there’s a new quest waiting for you under every rock. It was cool to get a voice acted Zelda and the powers you’re gifted at the start of the game were a lot of fun, maybe even revolutionary for games going forward. It genuinely felt like a fresh way to engage with an open world. But I’ll be honest, I didn’t go about the world crafting masterpieces out of tree logs. I’m pretty sure I under-used the crafting feature compared to other people. So while I had many moments of delight and I’m sure what was done here is going to influence game development for the next 5 years, it wasn’t my top game of the year.
Fire Emblem Engage had its moments but it didn’t click for me. I didn’t care for the main characters but I did love some of the side characters and there were some honest moments in the writing that got me to laugh out loud. But it became another game where I didn’t make it to the credits.
Diablo 4 – I had never played a Diablo game before but my girlfriend has a fondness for them and the promise of couch co-op is all it takes to get me to be excited about a game. This game has some of the goriest cutscenes I’ve ever seen and the story is very dark. But the game play is a nice level of mindless and constant which makes it a great game for melting the hours away while feeling powerful.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was mind blowing for the first 50 hours or so, and then started to close up for me. I loved act 1 and 2 but then act 3 arrived and things began to feel too directed. Which makes sense, the plot lines do need to start wrapping up. But having started 3 new runs of the game in the first few weeks out of excitement, when I did have the credits roll for the first time, I honestly had no feelings of wanting to continue my other playthrough. Everything kind of fell flat.
There is a new epilogue that adds a lot more dialogue between characters at the end which people are hoping improves the ending but I’m not sure when I’ll have time to drop another 70 hours on playing BG3 again just to experience it.
The last AAA game of the year I played was Mario Wonder. I’ve loved most Mario platformers and this one has a few new developments which keep things fresh. This is possibly the easiest platformer that’s come out in a while? There are some very difficult levels that are mostly optional and very fun and stressful. But most of the regular levels never took more than one attempt when playing with two people.
Now onto some indie darlings.
Teenage dinosaurs facing the end of the world. Goodbye Volcano High is one of the most ambitious musical VNs I’ve ever experienced. I think I have about 1 hour left and I’m dragging my feet on it because I know the end will make me sad. (Finished this hours before midnight on New Years Eve!) It has a lot of interesting stuff going on mechanic wise, small little interactions that keep you physically invested in controlling the character in small ways. The music was the big selling point for me though, I’ve been listening to the the original sound track on repeat for weeks.
NUTS! I’m not exclaiming this loudly, the title is all in the cap. But the exclamation point was added by me! This game was a gem to find. A natural surveillance game where you set up cameras in a forest to watch squirrels run around in the night. A game targeted specifically at me! I found this game rather scary (you are alone in the woods and this is a big fear of mine in the real world). It’s really not scary but has some minor suspense floating about. This game is available on so many systems now, please play this game so people make more squirrel games.
Next up, a game about fate, tarot cards, witches living in space: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. I loved the art for this as soon as I saw it, and the game idea instantly hooked me. I finished this and instantly started playing it again. One of the most unique games I’ve played in a long time.
A game I played for the first time this year that’s been on the top of a lot of peoples charts was Slay the Spire. This was a lot of fun and it’s cool to see the game that likely launched the wave of card based combat that is so prevalent right now. I got through the flow only once and I can see there is much more to the game that I would enjoy but there are too many games to keep playing this one over and over.
The game I had hesitated to play after hearing about it for months was Vampire Survivors. And the only reason I gave it a shot was because I had a 3 hour flight to fill and it can be played for free in offline mode on a phone. This game absolutely slaps and is a classic version of “more than meets the eye”. Just a little weird game that took off overnight, can be bought for 3$ and is super addictive.
And now for the only AAAA on the list (and likely in existence): Genshin Impact. I come and go with Genshin but I’ve played for nearly 3 years straight at this point. While its basic gameplay mechanics aren’t super impressive and I don’t recommend this game to most people due to it being a gatha game, it does keep me coming back. There is something very captivating about watching the evolution of this game, its place in the world, the huge projects Hoyoverse undertakes, and the ridiculous crossovers. I can’t look away from it.
The meh
Dredge was an early release for the year and one I had on my rader from its demo release in 2022.I was pretty hype for this one, it does a lot of things I love: Weird occult magic in a small isolated town with a bunch of scary underwater creatures. Unfortunately the game fell flat in a lot of areas for me, there were things in the demo I was hoping to see more of but some of those parts of the game didn’t feature as much in the full game (ferrying questionable stuff, struggle to stay alive, development of NPC stories). There have been some expansion since I finished it so I am a little curious to see if the new content would change my opinion but I don’t have the urge to return to it just yet.
The first game I finished for the year was Spirifarer, a very beloved indie game that I enjoyed the first 10 hours of but then fell into a repetitive slump. I didn’t love the main story arc and rushed the ending just to get things over with.
Hi-Fi Rush was a surprise drop. I loved the art style and the fact that it was a rhythm combat game. The story was even decently fun with some good over the top characters. But I fell off of it after about 5-10 hours. There ended up being a bunch of powerup management and that’s something that often turns me off games pretty quickly. Basic concept = lots of fun, developed concept = too much for me.
Analogue Pocket
This post has already gotten too long and I haven’t even managed to mention all the GameBoy games I’ve been playing on our new Analogue Pocket. So I’ll just say GameBoy games are still great, almost shockingly so. My current obsession is playing the French version of Pokemon Fire Red, a game I think I’ve played 3 times in my life already. And I’m now eyeing up games easily over 10 years old for the start of the new year.
Kylie’s State of the Game
While most games I played ended up in my “good” category for the year, it’s a little strange to say that there wasn’t a game that surpassed my current top three. (I’m counting Elden Ring as a last year game as that’s when it came out and I finished it before almost all the other games I played this year so it feels like forever ago, I honestly thought it was a year ago).
Elden Ring – Hades – Inscryption
Everything I play is compared to those games right now. If I see even just a screencap of those games I want to go and play them again. NUTS came close but it was a pretty small indie project that we won’t see much more of. Baldur’s Gate 3 is technically impressive with it’s huge branching choice system but stumbled at the end and having experienced many bugs in my playthrough (a major one even ruined a dramatic boss fight and story beat) it just can’t stand up to my current top three.
With all these big games dropping this year I’m not sure what to expect for 2024. I’m sure there will be some more stealth drops that will catch the gaming world off guard, but I don’t have anything that I’m waiting for beyond the Elden Ring expansion. So maybe I’ll have time to catch up on some older backlogs for once.