The Best Games of 2023

It is a time honoured tradition for everyone who makes content about video games to do some kind of year end list. We need to catalog the best releases from a given year. What exactly that means differs wildly from person to person. Some make false claims at having an objective list, while others focus on interesting titles they believed pushed the medium forward in some meaningful capacity. Me? I just write about the ones I had the most fun playing.

Unfortunately, I spent a lot of my limited gaming time this year entrenched in only a handful of titles. This meant that I didn’t get around to a lot of the games I wanted to play in 2023. That wasn’t my intention, but there’s only so many hours in the day for reading, cooking, cleaning, working, depression, and grinding ranked in Street Fighter 6. And Guilty Gear Strive.

Regardless, here are a few games that stuck with me.

Pizza Tower

Have you ever walked past someone in a restaurant, saw what they were eating, and went “damn, that looks pretty good”? That’s Pizza Tower. At least, that’s what it was for me. It’s the sort of game that screams for your attention, and I love it for it.

While I was a bit apprehensive about it thanks to the volume of meme reviews on Steam, I’m glad I gave Pizza Tower a shot. It’s a game I spent 35 hours playing, despite its 6 hour runtime. That should speak volumes. However, I’m not sure I’d give it a blanket recommendation. It’s one of those uncompromising experiences that delivers exactly what its intended audience is looking for. If you fall into that bucket then you’ll love it. If you don’t then you’ll hate it, and me for recommending it to you.

That aforementioned experience is a fast paced platformer, which grows on you slowly. Like a fungus. Pizza Tower is very easy to start, and can be finished with only the basics: running, jumping, and attacking. However, there’s a ranking system that will trick players with brainrot into replaying each level over, and over until they perfect it. I live for this sort of thing, so I had an immensely fun time replaying each level until I was scooting through faster than a Domino’s delivery guy.

However, what really ties Pizza Tower together so perfectly is Pizza Time. At the end of every single level, a timer starts, and players need to make their way back to the beginning before it runs out. This results in some of the most white knuckle gameplay I experienced all year. There were so many times where I forgot I was even playing a game because of how enthralling these escape sequences are. This shit is the reason why I fell in love with video games, and I’m glad Pizza Tower was here to remind me of that this year.

Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines

Office jobs have to be one of the strangest contradictions I’ve ever encountered in my life. On paper they are some of the best jobs to have. You’re never at risk of bodily harm, you don’t have to interact with petulant customers, and the compensation is always equitable. Nobody out here working an office job is wondering if they’re going to be able to put food on the table. Regardless, corporate life is almost universally hated, so much so that there are numerous pieces of media exploring this deep seeded hatred. And it’s this shared, universal hatred that makes Endless Monday such a special title. 

I could sit here giving you a breakdown of the game’s plot and mechanics, but I don’t think that’d convince anyone to actually play Endless Monday. Moreover, I could just send you to AK’s review, which is what convinced me to pick the game up in the first place.

No – what makes Endless Monday so special can’t be so easily quantified. It reminds me a lot of Office Space. Both stories present a cartoonish look of office life, but they also highlight why it’s so endlessly frustrating. Every day you spend 9 hours doing menial tasks, so that numbers on a spreadsheet go up. It’s worthless work. Your limited time is being wasted on nothing, but you’re trapped in perpetuity because you need to put food on the table. If hell exists, it’s doing this garbalingus for eternity.

Having said that, I take a bit of comfort in knowing I’m not alone. Endless Monday is a reminder that there are other people out there who feel the same way. They’re also trapped in an endless cycle doing meaningless, and unfulfilling work. If you find yourself in similar shoes then you might enjoy Endless Monday. I certainly did.

Chants of Sennaar

Ever since I completed Return of the Obra Dinn, I’ve been on the hunt for another game like it. That’s the big problem with knowledge based games: you can’t replay them. The fun of Obra Dinn, Tunic, and Outer Wilds comes from untangling the many mysteries hidden in plain sight. Once you’ve done that, you can’t do it again. Unless you hit yourself really hard on the head, and give yourself short-term memory loss.

Editor’s Notes: please don’t do that.

Chants of Sennaar follows a similar mold, but you’ll be translating language across a 5 floor tower. Each floor requires players to work out a handful of words in the local language, and then you move onto the next floor to do it all over again. It’s the kind of puzzle game where you’ll piece things together using a variety of assumptions, logic, and context clues. For example, if there is a particular phrase that keeps coming up at the start of every conversation then it might be a greeting. That’s the level Sennaar is operating on.

It has a bit of a slow start, but Sennaar quickly balloons out to explore the full breadth, and depth of its gameplay mechanics. My favourite part is when you begin translating between the different languages despite not having an identical lexicon of words to work with. This asks players to really consider the intent behind the message they’re translating similar to what real world translators have to do. It’s a truly compelling puzzler, and easily the best head scratcher I played all year.

Hi-Fi Rush

When I think of the word nostalgia, as it relates to games, there are 2 titles that immediately spring to mind. The first is Shovel Knight, which deliberately attempts to ape games from the 8-bit era. The other is A Hat in Time, which does something similar, but targets a period of time about 15 years later when 3D action games were first stumbling onto the scene. Both games feature numerous modern tweaks, but capture the spirit of the games they’re emulating.

It didn’t dawn on me until recently, but that comforting feeling of nostalgia is why I liked Hi-Fi Rush so much. It’s a rhythm action game, which is already a strong premise, but the thing that puts it over the top for me is how it made me feel. Playing it reminded me of a time when I didn’t have work, or responsibilities constantly dominating my thoughts. Instead, I’d think about how much fun I was going to have playing games once I got home from school. There’s a simple joy to that juvenile thinking, which I’m really missing from my life right now. Thankfully, Hi-Fi Rush provided me a temporary reprieve from my blasé daily existence.

The killer music, and fluid gameplay also make a solid case for Hi-Fi Rush. You can possess 2 left thumbs, and still have a fun time playing the game. This makes Hi-Fi Rush the second game on here that is easy to pick up, but challenging to master. I don’t know what to tell you – that’s simply a winning formula in my books. It’s as easy as that, folks.

Potionomics

Earlier in the year I played Potion Craft, and lamented how I wanted more from it. I found the flexible crafting system compelling, however the total lack of substance in the rest of the title left a bad taste in my mouth. Little did I know, there was another game that did exactly what I wanted: Potionomics. As it would turn out, it’s pretty freaking good.

The strength of Potionomics doesn’t stem from a single facet of its gameplay, but rather how all of its different elements coalesce. It’s the kind of experience where each goal you complete naturally feeds into the next, which provides this kind of infectious momentum where I couldn’t put the game down. In a lot of ways, Potionomics reminded me of Stardew Valley because I’d try to do something, and would then end up doing half a dozen other things in support of that goal. Then I’d look up at the clock, realize 3 hours went by, and wonder what the hell happened.

Potionomics also has a devious way of tricking the player into liking the majority of its cast. All of them are vendors that offer essential services to your success as an alchemist. However, as you start to get to know them, each vendor will give you new cards for the haggling mini-game that’s used to drive up the sale price of your potions. They also offer steep discounts to their favourite customer. This naturally pushes even gameplay driven players to engage with the story elements of Potionomics, and the cast are a hell of a lot more endearing thanks to their active contributions to your overarching success.

Wildfrost

I feel like there’s this subgenre of game that only exists in my head called games that are like Slay the Spire, but aren’t Slay the Spire. I realize that probably sounds insane, but what I’m looking for is more specific than simply another roguelike card game. I want something that clearly iterates on Slay the Spire, but isn’t so derivative that it immediately becomes stale. After 270 hours, I’m sufficiently bored of Slay the Spire. I’d like something new. But not too new. I need a Goldilocks level of new. It’s gotta be just right.

That’s what Wildfrost is: it’s a riff on Slay the Spire with a handful of new ideas. You have 2 lanes to defend, and the ability to recall your minions to heal them. It doesn’t sound like much, but it gives both the deck-building, and card playing phases of the game a completely unique cadence. To play Wildfrost like another card game is to doom yourself to repeated failure. It’s only when players embrace the unique flow of the game that they’ll uncover a whole wealth of strategy. There’s so many whacky, unexpected combos to discover, and that makes Wildfrost such a joy to play.

The other thing that really cements Wildfrost as its own beast is how the final boss works. Every time you win, your old deck gets turned into the new final boss. This then requires players to find some new fangled BS strategy that’ll be able to beat their previous overpowered combos, which results in this constant toilet spiral where you’re cursing yourself for being too good at the game. It adds a much needed layer of depth that is completely absent from other roguelike card games where the final boss is pulled from a static pool. It’s also just a really fun gimmick, which naturally pushes players to explore new counters to familiar winning strategies. Heck, writing about it made me want to play another run of Wildfrost, and I genuinely can’t think of a better endorsement than that.

Street Fighter 6

Surprising absolutely no one, the only game I was looking forward to this year was also one of my favourite games to play. Shocker – I know. I think it’s probably more surprising that Street Fighter 6 made this list, and Guilty Gear Strive didn’t. However, Strive’s online service continues to degrade with every subsequent patch. By contrast, when I go to play Street Fighter I press 3 buttons, and am in a match. Turns out that fighting games aren’t as fun when you’re a ranked goblin, and the online play doesn’t work. Thankfully, Street Fighter 6’s online is fire.

It’s not just the fantastic online that makes Street Fighter so gosh darn good: it also has a bevy of useful training mode features. I know that probably feels like a weird thing to focus on, but fighting games have so much feature disparity between different releases. Indie fighters regularly move the genre forward in leaps, and bounds while the bigger names tend to…not do a whole lot. Street Fighter 6 putting the effort in to have a mountain of in-game tutorials, training mode options, and even a modernized control scheme is something to be recognized, and applauded. It demonstrates a willingness by Capcom to lead the charge for the next generation of fighting games.

Street Fighter is also just really fun to play. That’s probably got everything to do with my love for playing Manon, but I also like the new drive mechanic, and the cast of (mostly) diverse characters. Every match has a real sense of dynamism depending on how your opponent chooses to spend their drive gauge, and character specific tools. For example, I haven’t run into another Manon player who plays quite the same way I do. That’s kept things interesting as I’ve slowly climbed to Diamond rank over the past several months, and has made Street Fighter 6 my fighting game of choice throughout the year.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone, and their dog has already declared Baldur’s Gate 3 the greatest game ever. It even managed to beat out The Legend of Zelda at every meaningful awards show this year, and inspired numerous developer meltdowns because the game is apparently too good. I wish that was a joke, but some developers are genuinely concerned that their aggressively monetized, half-finished future releases are going to be heavily scrutinized thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3. Honestly, I hope they are. I don’t expect they will be, but it’d be a nice change of pace.

Regardless, Baldur’s Gate 3 really is that good thanks to the flexible nature of the game’s story-telling. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Wildermyth: both games successfully prompt the player for their input while orchestrating the events of the story. This means that 2 players could have completely different experiences playing through the same section of Baldur’s Gate 3. As an example, my friend and I had totally different solutions for traversing the cursed fog that envelops the landscape throughout Act 2. He used his silvertongue to score a king’s escort into the local cult’s stronghold, and was given a magic lantern that would protect him on his travels. I ambushed the same escort party, and stripped a lantern from their captain’s corpse. Naturally, the cultists weren’t pleased when I eventually showed up.

It’s Baldur’s Gate’s potential for permutations that makes it so interesting to play, and talk about. Far too many role-playing games are interested in telling an epic story at the cost of player agency. There’s certainly room for these types of experiences, but it’s nice to see a game of this scale commit whole hog to player freedom. We’re unlikely to see anything quite like it for many years to come, which makes Baldur’s Gate 3 all the more special.

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Well, there you have it folks. 8 of the coolest games I played this year. It should also be said that I wanted to include Valheim on here, but decided against it because the game ain’t done yet. Once it’s finished, then it can make an appearance on one of my year-end lists.

Also, I know some of you sticklers out there will want to know which ones are my tippy-topist picks from the year. Honestly, I’m not sure, but if you put a gun to my head I’d probably say Pizza Tower, followed by Hi-Fi Rush. Those 2 games, more than anything else I played this year, reminded me why I spend so much time engaged with this hobby.

Anyway, thank you for reading, and for the support throughout 2023. I don’t write exclusively for notoriety, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me a warm-fuzzy knowing people enjoy reading my written work. All the best to you, and yours in 2024.