Mike's 2023 Games of the Year
Published on Dec 31, 2023
It’s time once again, folks! Time for me to look back and take stock of all the games I played this year, and make note of the standouts.
2023 was a year of high highs, but I would be remiss not to mention the horrific amount of turmoil in the games industry, with seemingly constant layoffs hitting studio after studio throughout the year, as Capital draws its purse strings tighter to better suit its needs. Capitalism continues to be a monstrous machine that must be dismantled. It is my sincere hope that all those just trying to eke out a living through their chosen art form can land on their feet somewhere else, or else find something new they can love that will better support them.
I didn’t play quite as many games this year as last year, though I still played a lot. However, one tradition I seem to be carrying forward from last year is being super busy right up until it’s time for me to travel for the holidays, leaving me precious little time to work on this list!
As a result, and as you may be able to tell by this year’s header image, I’m trying to go back to basics with this year’s roundup. I hope to god I post this one before the new year. Oh, also…
I PROMISE NOT TO MAKE THIS ONE SO LONG.
This may have been the Year of the Big Game for most folks, what with Baldur’s Gate 3, Armored Core 6, and Starfield all achieving long-awaited releases, but for me, it was the Year of the Big Games I Don’t Care About. I’ve never been interested in D&D’s mechanics or bland fantasy setting, I don’t really gel with FromSoft games, and while I’ve historically loved fiddly space games, I’m not the biggest Bethesda guy, and looking at Starfield makes me feel less than nothing.
So at the very least, this GOTY list should be fairly unique!
As ever, this list consists of games that I personally played in 2023, and not necessarily games that were released in 2023. I tend not to play enough current games in a year to put together a list like this, and besides, I’m not made of money.
Without further ado, here is…
MIKE’S FAVORITE GAMES OF 2023
10. Suika Game
One of the year’s most curious out-of-nowhere sensations just had to have a spot on my list, especially after it became my girlfriend’s and my go-to time killer and we started making up cute songs to go with the game’s singular, repetitive music track.
Suika Game is one of those rare indie releases whose simplicity proves just addictive enough to pierce the veil and enter the public consciousness. It looks at first blush like any number of shovelware games littering the Switch eShop, but it’s just polished enough to feel fully-formed, and any remaining flaws are papered over by charm.
What you see is what you get with Suika Game. I love it.
9. Terra Nil
I’d been eagerly awaiting Terra Nil since playing its demo in the 2022 Steam Next Fest. The full game turned out to be more of what I saw in the demo, pretty much exactly what I wanted, but little more.
There’s no fanfare for completion, and nothing waiting past the end, save for randomized replays and higher difficulty levels, but I can’t begrudge the game for giving exactly what it promises.
Terra Nil is a lovely, peaceful experience about saving and preserving our environment, which feels… extremely good to my soul. It also provides a real, satisfying challenge and requires strategic thinking without being too harsh or locking the player into fail states.
It was one of the loveliest experiences of my year.
8. Super Mario Bros. Wonder
I wasn’t expecting a total refresh of the 2D Mario series this year, but Nintendo really hit it out of the park. Only after seeing Wonder’s updated visuals and animations did some of what I never really liked about the New Super Mario Bros series stand out, and made me wonder (haha) what took them so long.
I haven’t spent a ton of time with the game just yet, as I’m playing through with my girlfriend rather than mainlining it all in single-player sessions (a route I think a lot of people are taking with this game), and honestly, the multiplayer in Wonder isn’t the friendliest it’s ever been in a Mario game, so I’ve got to dock it a few points.
But in a year that saw old rivals competing anew with the release of a brand new 2D Sonic game (which is, uh, not on this list…), Nintendo proved they’ve still got that old magic in spades.
7. Motorsport Manager
I’ve been an F1 fan and general motorsport lover for a long time, and Cado and Rob’s run on Motorsport Manager at Waypoint (RIP) got me jonesing to try my hand at running a team of my own. I poured a lot of time and fake money into Eganworks Racing this year. Reader, I ran it right into the ground.
Surprisingly, it was this failure that sucked me into MM even deeper than I expected. Because beyond that failure, rather than a Game Over screen, was the experience of fake losing my fake job, and being relegated to a lower racing series, forced to watch someone else run the team with my name on it, and tempted by the possibility of one day returning, or even better, grinding them into dust with the team that took me in.
Motorsport Manager’s long-haul approach to a career in motorsport really pleasantly surprised me, and kept me coming back when I would’ve been perfectly happy to walk away. That alone was a real highlight of my year in games.
6. Risk of Rain
This game gave me whiplash before I ever installed it. I loved the original Risk of Rain, and even its sequel, but the thought of a remaster gave me pause. The announcement screenshots looked gorgeous, but the original just came out not too long ago. Did we really need this? Then I remembered 2013 was ten years ago. Oops.
Just like Risk of Rain 2’s foray into 3D before it, Returns pleasantly surprised me by both feeling necessary and instantly proving that Hopoo and Gearbox had pulled it off.
The addition of characters, items, and abilities from RoR2, the extremely fun Providence Trials to play through between runs, and the fact that everything has been reworked into a cohesive whole rather than feeling cobbled together, proves Returns’s worth as a love letter to/definitive edition of some excellent roguelikes.
5. Steamworld Heist
2023 brought with it the demise of the Nintendo 3DS eShop, and was coincidentally also the year I decided to hack my 3DS, which I wholeheartedly recommend. As a result, I started sifting through some old classics that I never got around to in their heyday. I decided to finally give the Steamworld games a shot after seeing some high praise on Cohost, starting with Steamworld Dig, which was a joy.
But I really got hooked when I moved on to Heist, a 2D turn-based tactics game in the same universe as Dig. The writing is sharp, the mechanics are delectable, and it all just keeps moving you forward in a really satisfying and addictive way. The game has just enough going on without feeling bulky, the balance feels perfect.
Having played two of their games now, it really feels like the folks at Image & Form have a great feel for setting achievable goals and rising to meet them. I can’t wait to play Steamworld Dig 2.
4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
How does one begin to talk about perhaps the most anticipated game of the year? They did it. They blew it out of the park. The new Fuse power is so fun and interesting. Ultrahand was an ingenious way to ensure countless social media posts. Not even mentioning The Depths in any of the game’s marketing materials? Inspired.
ToTK had some high expectations to meet. Breath of the Wild is a hard game to follow, even for the people that made it. I think they mostly met and exceeded those expectations.
It was sort of a bummer that Zelda was once again whisked away and unplayable, despite no evidence to the contrary before release, but I do think her story was genuinely cool this time around. I have yet to finish the game, so that may change, but what I’ve seen so far has been pretty sick.
What’s keeping me from gushing over this game the way I would have about BoTW is something that I’m not even sure is a fault of the game itself, which is that I think I might be over games of this size. There’s just so much to do and see, and while getting distracted by some delightful side quest felt novel in BoTW, here it just felt a little too overwhelming.
Looking back at the 100+ hours I spent with it, I know that I loved ToTK, want to finish it someday, and that it deserves this spot on my list. I just need time to recover from my open world burnout first.
3. Sea of Stars
I was ready to be disappointed in Sea of Stars from the jump. It bills itself as a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger (an impossibly high bar to begin with), and it was also a game I backed on Kickstarter (my track record there is not great). However, after pushing through a somewhat awkwardly paced opening few hours, I grew to love it so much that it became one of two games I 100% completed this year.
The key to this enjoyment was to stop comparing it to Chrono Trigger. Nothing is ever going to be Chrono Trigger again. Sea of Stars’ weakest point is probably its story, and so holding the game to the standard of Chrono Trigger was always going to breed disappointment. Sea of Stars’ story is simple but effective, with more than enough to pull me forward to the end. And despite its relatively simple story, a lot of its characterization felt very strong. Liking the characters went a long way toward keeping me around.
What I really loved about Sea of Stars, and a big reason I bothered to 100% it, was having a robust but manageable amount of side stuff to do. It contains an addictive board game called Wheels, with new challengers in each new area of the map. There are collectible Rainbow Conches to find throughout the world, but there are only 60 of them, not 999, and most of them can be found in the course of simply playing through the story. There’s also a quiz master, which I’m sort of a sucker for in RPGs like this.
The fact that all of this side content gates the real final boss and true ending makes the fact that it all feels extremely doable all the more appreciated. I love a long, beefy RPG as much as the next guy, but come on. I have a life.
The combat is fun and just deep enough, the environmental puzzles are dead simple but still satisfying to execute, the world map and environment design are stunning, and the set pieces the game drops at key moments in the story were absolutely jaw-dropping.
In all, Sea of Stars is a wonderful addition to the RPG canon from an indie studio that hopefully has a long and bright future ahead of it.
2. Moon
From a brand new, classically-styled RPG, we move now to a port of an old game that billed itself as an “anti-RPG.” My girlfriend got me Moon for Christmas, and I meant to wait until the new year to play it. I’m so glad I didn’t, as it almost instantly rocketed to the top of this list based purely on how different it is. Hopefully that’s not just recency bias. Moon is absolutely doing the “don’t you feel bad for being the main character in a video game” thing, but it’s special because it’s thankfully so much more than that.
Moon could almost be better described as a puzzle game, its entire world one big enigma running on clockwork cycles that allows you to unravel more of it the more you solve. I love how elegant its main mechanic is. Basically, you come into the world with a limited amount of time to walk around and do things before you run out of energy and fall asleep, losing your progress. But the more puzzles you solve in the world (which take the form of slain monsters whose souls you need to save), the more your allotment of walking-around time grows, allowing you to do and see more before you need to find a bed to rest and save your progress.
And so the world reveals itself to you in this expanding radius of places you’re able to reach before passing out. It’s a really effective way of both parcelling things out at reasonable pace, and also making the player feel complete ownership over their own accomplishments.
Putting aside the mechanical, Moon is also dripping with character. It’s right up there with Earthbound in terms of delightful weirdness, from a talking bird who runs a travel agency, to a ghost who wants you to feed the people in the portrait hanging on the wall of a mansion their favorite foods. This game is setting a new bar for fantastical settings in video games for me.
I haven’t finished Moon yet, and I don’t know how much more awaits me, but I have a feeling I’m most of the way through at this point. Wherever else the game takes me from here, and however it ends up, I know I’ll always cherish my time with this unique little gem.
1. MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection
I enjoyed a lot of great, original, inventive games this year. But I need to let nostalgia win this time. See, MegaMan Battle Network games are my games. They’re the games I played at the most important, formative time of my life, on a handheld console that was mine alone. I love them dearly. And Capcom did an exceptional job in honoring their legacy.
First, Capcom got us hyped out of our minds by airing the old MegaMan NT Warrior anime in a marathon on Twitch and YouTube for a limited time leading up to the release of the game. Then, they gave the game a PET-like homescreen featuring a fully-animated MegaMan voiced by Andrew Francis, the original voice actor from the anime. They cleaned up all of the in-game text with a modern font, making it more readable on today’s screens. They added online functionality, making netbattling and chip library comparison (two integral parts of the experience of these games) possible on modern hardware. They used the original Japanese versions of the games as their base for all regions, restoring the Boktai 3 crossover that was cut from Battle Network 6 in regions outside of Japan (something important to me specifically). They added a way to access special battle chips and patch cards only available at in-person events around the time of the games’ original release.
They actually went back and fixed the god-forsaken music bug in Battle Network 6 that kept the danger music playing even after you’d cleared the game and defeated all the copybots (yes this does deserve its own graf, real ones know).
Pile all of this on top of the usual Legacy Collection trappings Capcom is becoming known for, like an art gallery, music player, and tons of screen resolution, wallpaper, and filter options, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a snapshot of the real, actual legacy of these games.
The six games in the series (ten if you count all versions) are split across two volumes. I’ve only played Volume 1 as of the posting of this blog, but I’ve definitely seen everything I need to see in order to place the collection firmly at the top of this year’s list. I had a blast playing Battle Networks 1 and 3 for the first time in my life, as well as 100% completing Battle Network 2 for the second time in my life, but the first time without using cheats.
The games themselves, of course, play exactly as they did when I was a kid. Everything has been preserved with the utmost care where preservation was possible and/or preferable, and where changes were made, they too were made with care and consideration for the original experience.
There isn’t anything I wish Capcom had done differently, or anything I can think to add. I simply couldn’t have asked for a better, more faithful celebration of a series of games that has meant so much to me. They did right by these games. For all these reasons and more, the MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection is my perfect 10 of 2023.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Patrick’s Parabox
- Excellent puzzle game that I just came to a little too late in the year for it to make the list.
Phantom Brigade
- Love the conceit for this one, but in practice it just didn’t grab me like I thought it would. A bit bland.
Puzzmo / Gubbins
- Two new daily puzzle things popped up this year! Each is great for its own reasons, and worthy of a slot in your routine.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
- FINALLY got around to playing this one after replaying Human Revolution and absolutely loved it. Shame Eidos never got to finish this trilogy.
Filmechanism
- Started the year with this cute little puzzle platformer. As has happened with many puzzle games, I mainlined it until it got harder than I was interested in pursuing any further.
MISSED CONNECTIONS
Alan Wake II
Void Stranger
Cocoon
Trine 5
Pizza Tower
Thanks as always for reading! Feel free to leave me a comment about your own year in games! Til next year!