Video Games I Played in 2023

My yearly gaming wrap-up where I go over my thoughts on all the games I played in the past year

Well 2023 is over and it’s time for another yearly gaming wrap up post from me (previous years wrap ups were over here). I’m trying something new this year, I’m going to give an actual rating to each game I played. The rating scale will be a FOUR STAR scale, and I will not give half-stars (I feel like the excessive granularity doesn’t matter, and these 4 categories are a good way to sort how I feel about games without needing to hone in on the “exact number” too much). These are also subjective ratings, how much I personally enjoyed playing the game, not an objective statement about “how good a game this is”. Anyway here is the rating scale:

★★★★ (“Great”) - A great game that stands out among its peers by being exceptionally memorable or just doing what it does exceptionally well.

★★★ (“Good”) - An enjoyable game that accomplishes what it sets out to do. This is sort of the “default” place games end up, unless they do something special to distinguish themselves, either positively or negatively.

★★ (“Mid”) - A game that doesn’t quite live up to the standards it sets for itself, or where the negatives can’t really be ignored, but the games here usually still have something to offer that make them worth playing.

★ (“Bad”) - A game that is just bad, that leaves me feeling bad after I’m done playing it. I’m not a professional reviewer so I don’t *have* to play games I don’t want to play, so its very rare for me to play a game that I actually think is bad, or to not just immediately stop playing a game once I realize it’s bad. It happens sometimes though.

With that, lets get into the reviews (in mostly chronological order of when I played them).

Pizza Tower

Pizza tower is just kind of great, like I thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough beginning to end and have basically no complaints with it. It’s fun, full of humor and charm and personality and has this weird chaotic vibe that you don’t often see in “real” games these days (though is familiar to those who grew up playing Newgrounds web games in the 00s). Every level is unique and ridiculous, forcing everything it can into the “pizza restaurant” theme, but never drawing too much attention to it or trying to subvert the inherent silliness of it or anything. It's just pure fun. That’s all there is to it. ★★★★

Metroid Prime Remastered

Metroid Prime is one of my favorite games of all time. Big interconnected map, lots of exploration, cool abilities and all that. A great game overall that felt far ahead of its time. But that was over 20 years ago, and as is the case with a lot of revolutionary games from that time… they are showing their age. While the level design and general structure of Metroid prime still holds up very well, and the remake *did* modernize the controls, there’s a lot of little issues that they did not bother to address. Locking you in rooms to re-fight the same enemies over and over in the late game is a big one, and the game is generally easier with the modernized controls, but they still make you beat the game once before you can unlock hard mode (I’ve played the game so many times already it would have been nice to just be able to start on hard mode). I get it’s a “remaster” and not a “remake” but I would have maybe liked it to lean more towards full on remake and actually fix some of those outdated issues. As it is, it's kind of just Metroid prime again. ★★★

Returnal

Well they ported Returnal to PC so I actually had a chance to play it finally. It’s sort of interesting, because Returnal feels like a AAA attempt at a very popular genre (rougelike/lite) that’s been almost entirely dominated by indie developers since its popularity explosion a decade ago. And like, the game’s fine. It controls very well and is fun to play, but the roguelike structure doesn’t really feel like it adds a lot to it? Like the game clearly wants you to have a specific, curated experience with it the way most AAA games do, but the main appeal of a roguelike structure is the whole idea that every run is different and all of the interesting builds and emergent mechanics that can add variety to the runs. Returnal lacks a lot of that. While it's full of guns, parasites, artifacts, malfunctions, and such that are different every run, the guns are really the only thing that actually make the runs feel different, but even then there’s only a handful of guns to find. Everything else feels like generic “spreadsheet design”. Everything has positives and negatives that are almost too perfectly balanced, which makes the whole game feel a bit too uniform. The moment to moment gameplay is fun enough to carry the game through to the end despite all of that though. ★★★

Storyteller

It’s a very simple easy to understand concept (place comic panels and characters such that the comic tells the story that goes along with the title provided). It’s short (you can beat the whole thing in about 2 hours) and not too difficult, but cute and definitely had a lot of moments that made me smile while playing it when I realized what was happening. ★★★

Resident Evil 4 Remake

Ok so remember when I was talking about the Metroid Prime remaster and how that game is amazing but also showing its age? Well, guess what. The same thing applies to Resident Evil 4. Amazing game, but also super dated at this point. However, this is an actual proper remake of the game. And its fucking amazing. Like this is the absolute gold standard for what a remake of an older game should be. I haven’t played RE:4 since the first time I played it in like 2007 or so. And yet the remake felt deeply familiar the whole time, every area was like “oh hey I remember this!”. But the actual wild part is… this is a completely new game. Like at some point I was like “wait… I don’t remember this boss being like this” and I looked it up and it made it apparent that they changed like everything in the remake. Bosses that didn’t age well? Redesigned. Annoying mechanics? Removed. Controls? Modernized. Enemy behaviors? Reworked entirely to play better with the modernized controls. Even story beats and characters were rewritten and adjusted to fit better with modern sensibilities. But you don’t NOTICE this while playing, because it was all done with care and reverence for the original. They successfully managed to make a game that feels like how you remembered the original being, instead of just being a direct port. This is what a remake SHOULD be. ★★★★

Counter Strike (CS: GO and CS2)

So I usually play some sort of shooter game with friends in the evenings regularly, previously that was call of duty warzone but oh boy they really fucked up that one didn’t they? Anyway once counter strike 2 was announced I figured it was maybe time to actually learn how to play counter strike, so we started playing CS:GO instead. The playerbase is older than that of call of duty, so you don’t have 13 year olds screaming the N word at you over voice chat all the time. Instead you have fully grown 30 year old adults screaming the N word at you over voice chat. 

Anyway that’s not a problem when you play in a group of 5 and I do have to say this game is very fun and surprisingly deep. It’s super refreshing playing a game that is confident enough with its mechanics and balance that it doesn’t feel the need to shuffle everything around with a balance patch every month. The game doesn’t change, so you can *actually* feel yourself improving the more you play, since it doesn’t soft-reset your skills all the time by making you unlock new guns or resetting the balance.
CS2 fixed a ton of annoyances that made CS:GO feel a little bit inaccessible to those of us who did not grow up playing the game (like letting you have the crosshair actually follow the recoil, which is a HUGE improvement). Kinda dumb that they didn’t keep all the modes like arms race, but whatever. The game’s fun. ★★★★

Dredge

A “Lovecraftian fishing game”. Such a promising concept, but unfortunately the game is kind of a boatload of missed potential. The game started strong, but petered out really quickly as I maxed out my boat about halfway through the game just playing normally, and then there was no motivation to keep catching fish on your own beyond that, so the game becomes just about doing the biome puzzles (which become sort of atrociously tedious in the last 2 biomes)

There’s no puzzle or resource management on which fishing rods to use either since you can just use the 2 best rods together to fish everything, which is a shame since trying to fit odd shaped rods together seemed like it would be fun… if you ever had to do that. Fish rot too fast and inventory fills up too fast meaning all “fishing excursions” last one day, big bit of missed potential there since needing to prepare for a "long trip" would have been a fun motivation to earn money and stock up on supplies. Story also kind of sucked, the motivation of the main character ("bring back a dead girl") is hidden until the ending of the game like it's some kind of spoiler… but the game had a bit of a motivation issue anyway so why not make it clear why I’m doing all of this earlier? The Lovecraftian stuff is neat but the game never like, tests you on it. There's no fish that require you to “go insane” in order to catch them, which would have been a neat way to tie that aspect into the rest of the game. The potential was there for this to be an amazing game… but it's kind of a shame it wasn’t. ★★

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

It’s a really bold decision to just reuse the same world as Breath of the Wild and do a direct sequel in it. For a game that is entirely focused on exploration, they chose to place you in a world you already explored? That is an INSANE decision. Yet somehow, they made it work.

While BotW was a very pure and focused game, TotK is complex and messy. BotW gives you some basic ass zelda items in the start, that are pretty simple but have a lot of emergent behaviors to them that you have to learn how to use to make your way through the hostile world. TotK gives you fucking godlike powers of creation right at the start and says “You can do literally fucking anything with this, go wild”. Ultrahand is almost overwhelming with how flexible it is when you first get it. The other mechanics sort of feel secondary to Ultrahand and Fuse but they have a whole lot more use than like, the ice block did from BotW (and time rewind in particular is so good at cheesing puzzles). But you know, it is a sequel, so that complexity is warranted. Breath of the Wild still exists if you want that more pure experience. But I already had that, so giving me these powerful complicated tools feels appropriate. 

Exploring the same world again proved to be a really unique experience that I have not had in games, where the main motivation for exploring is “hey I wonder what happened to this area I remember from BotW, how is this NPC doing now” like you want to go check in on all the friends you met in the first game, since its 5 years later. It’s really cool.

While at the start the sky seemed more interesting to explore than the depths, later on the depths proved to be the far more interesting area. The way the surface and the depths related to each other was really fun to figure out, and because the light roots and the shrines lines up with each other I was actually able to get 100% shrine completion without needing to look up any guides (something that I eventually had to resort to for the last couple shrines in BotW).

If I have one small complaint, it's… uh. One of the really important aspects of Breath of the Wild was that you *could* just go kill Ganon right at the start, whenever you want. Your main quest is kill Ganon, you know where he is, you can just go do it. It flavors the game as a player-driven adventure. You want to do all the other stuff so you can get powerful enough to kill Ganon. Even if you never actually go kill him right away, its very important that you CAN. And well, TotK copies that straight up. Though they try to pretend that you don’t know where he is… he’s exactly where you expect so you can just go kill him and win. Mission accomplished. The problem is, TotK has TWO main quests, not one. “Find Princess Zelda” and “Kill Ganondorf”. But Zelda just shows up if you kill Ganondorf without finding her on your own first, making that one… entirely optional. The “Find Princess Zelda” quest is super interesting however, and I wish they would have just made it mandatory. It feels like the perfect counterpart to “Kill Ganon” from the first game, instead of a clear goal that you have to prepare to tackle, its a mystery to solve. Zelda is out there in the world, you can just go to her right from the start, but the problem is you don’t know where she is, and you don’t know what to look for, so your adventure is based around trying to solve that mystery and discover the solution. It’s a cool mission that should have been mandatory!

Anyway I wouldn’t even have a nitpick that minor if I didn’t think this game was amazing, so Tears of the Kingdom is my GOTY ★★★★

Diablo IV

They added an open world to diablo. I think the builds and loot were more interesting that diablo 3, but its been so long since I played III that I don’t even remember if that’s true or not. So much of the game feels weirdly not thought out, especially regarding the overworld. The horse feels like it got tacked on last minute as a solution to traversal being tedious, but then they were like “ok well if you can run past all the enemies then what’s the point of the overworld” so they shoved in barricades to force you to dismount and then put a weird cooldown on getting back on the horse and it's just tedious and frustrating. It's fine at being an addiction loop, but not much more than that. ★★

Wildfrost

So I’ll admit part of why I bought it was cause the game had a lot of negative reviews complaining about ONLY difficulty but saying the game was good otherwise, and hey I like difficult games so why not? But like, ok so those reviews aren’t like wrong or anything, but I think the complaints stem not from it being difficult but from the way that difficulty forces you to play the early game in a really tedious min-maxy way if you wanna actually win. Every fight, a loot goblin shows up, and instead of rewarding you for killing it, it rewards you for attacking it as many times as possible. 4 gold each attack. So in fight 1 (the easiest fight), you have to delay actually winning the fight by keeping 1 enemy alive and making sure you don’t accidentally kill it while you hit the goblin with as many snowballs or 1 damage attacks as you can. This is the way every successful run starts, and oh boy does it get tedious after a while!

I am aware that they put a content update out that supposedly fixes some of the balance issues, but the game doesn’t have a ton of variety either and I kind of exhausted what there was of it before that update came out anyway. ★★

Armored Core VI

Would not have cared about this game if it wasn’t made by Fromsoft. They’ve been making consistently amazing games for the last decade that hey I’ll give this one a shot. I think most people who bought it did for the same reason too. A positive reputation will do that.

I put 4 shotguns on my mech and then pretty much one shot every boss from then on out. It’s fun. The mission structure of the game feels a bit dated, like a PS2 era game where you select missions from a list and then play the level. The game is good, but it doesn’t really feel *special* the same way Fromsoft’s other games have been. ★★★

Baldur’s Gate 3

I’ll start off by saying that this is not the type of game I normally like, and I knew that going in. But BG3 made enough of a splash this year that I felt a duty to at least give it a try and see why people like it so much (especially since we’re working on our own tactical RPG with some DnD influence right now as well, it’s worth knowing what others are doing in this space too). I’ve played a little bit of DnD with friends before so I’m not completely blind to the mechanics.

So yeah, this game is definitely cool. The heavily branching quests feel like they go deeper than any other game has done, the combat is neat and actually interesting, there's a lot of emergent storytelling present. I built a Rogue and wanted to deception my way through as many scenarios as I could. I tricked a “smart” ogre into repeatedly helping me in combat by promising to pay him double next time instead of paying him now. It cannot eventually go wrong. 

I hate that you can save scum the dice rolls. “You don’t HAVE to save scum though, just roll with the bad results”. But that’s not really true… I deceptioned my way past a door with a series of good dice rolls, then ended up dying in combat in the house I tricked my way into. The game respawned me before those dice rolls. I had to save scum to get back on the “canonical path” that I had been on. That was my story, I wanted to continue along that path, and the game made me save scum to do that. 

The combat is neat. One encounter, this strong (boss? miniboss) enemy kept doing a war shout that would knock my party members off a ledge down into a pit of spiders. I died like 10 times before realizing… hey what if I just push him into the spider pit instead? And I did… and it worked. That was cool. 

But the combat is also agonizingly slow, especially when you die and restart a few times. This did not really fit well with me being able to only play an hour or two of it a day, when combat encounters would take multiple real life days to complete… I just slowly lost interest in playing over time. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future when I can really dedicate some time, but for now, ★★★

Chants of Sennar

Chants of Sennar is a puzzle game where you are exploring a society where you don’t speak the language of the society. Characters will talk to you in a language you don’t understand, signs will be posted in the same language, and you have to learn what the symbols mean via context clues, slowly building up an understanding of the language these people speak so you can use that to solve puzzles. You can type your best guess for any given symbol, and then that guess shows up under it, and seeing it show up like that on other dialog boxes or signs can help you understand if your guess was correct or not. Like hey, I thought this word meant “hello” but this guy just said that to me then walked away? Oh maybe its like “Aloha” where the same word means both hello AND goodbye depending on context? Or hey, maybe I guessed this word wrong and just had to live with the incorrect guess until it really stopped making sense? Wait, was this whole language right to left instead of left to right? Double meanings, wrong guesses, inaccurate translations, it's a really cool thing to uncover on your own the more context you find.

Here’s the thing though. I kind of lied. The game I described is not what Chants of Sennar is. It’s *almost* what it is. And if it actually was that I’d be putting it up there with Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn as one of the best adventure puzzle games of all time. But it fucks it up entirely with ONE mechanic: The notebook. Shortly into the game, a notebook pops up and makes you match symbols to pictures. If you correctly match all of the pictures on a page, it confirms that those symbols mean that picture, and locks them in and corrects whatever you typed for the symbol into an official, canonical translation. As soon as this happened I basically shouted NOOOOO at my computer. Don’t do this! The game didn’t NEED that! This isn’t Obra Dinn, the confirmation that you translated the symbols correctly is the ability to actually solve the overworld puzzles! All of that stuff I mentioned about living with mistakes or letting me be confused as to why my best guess translation didn’t match up exactly… gone. That never happens. The game confirms that what you thought was “hello” means “greetings” and then the next thing that happens is you see someone say “goodbye” using that symbol and walk away. When you get to an area of the game that features a right-to-left language, it literally never even lets you be confused about that, the notebook immediately opens and it immediately confirms that the language is right to left with the first page of symbol matching, before you even have a chance to be confused about it. 

So the game kind of just ends up being a generic puzzle game that is aesthetically about languages, but actually just about matching symbols to pictures and then solving generic adventure game puzzles. It’s a shame since it's so close to being amazing. It just needed to not get in its own way like that. ★★★

Lies of P

I love the Fromsoft souls game so when people were hyping up lies of P as “the first non-Fromsoft souls-like that actually gets it” it definitely piqued my attention. So I played through it and like, it's fun I guess. I mean they’re copying a lot of mechanics directly from some of the greatest games of all time, and they do a pretty good job of that, so of course it's at least good. 

The level design is pretty lacking though, so the real meat of the game is the boss fights. And they’re fun for a bit, but sort of quickly become kind of bullshit, with the difficulty feeling more cheap than fair. Lunge attacks where the boss will slide towards you on the swing so you can’t visually judge the safe distance from looking at the size of the weapon, surprise second forms that are the “real fight” that you can’t practice without going through the time-wasting first form every time… weird attack combos with no real rhythm and weird delays that are impossible to sight read so you just have to memorize the timings… rapid attack sequences that give few opportunities to hit back… attacks that will only sometimes continue only if you try to go in for an attack. I mean, a lot of this has shown up in the late game bosses of Fromsoft’s games too, but in lies of P it feels like every boss is a “worst of” montage of this kind of stuff. 

And well… I kind of disagree that it “actually gets it”. Lies of P is pretty well executed, but most of the good stuff about it is just a pretty much direct copy of Fromsoft’s stuff, and most of the bad parts of it are the the things they couldn’t or didn’t copy directly (the level design, the P-organ stuff, the weird timer tree, etc). And that indicates to me that they don’t actually deeply understand the genre, more that they were just quite good at copying. That’s enough to make the game enjoyable for the most part, and the team clearly has talent, so I am curious to see what they do next. ★★★

Sea of Stars

Not usually a fan of RPGs so I kind of ignored this until I realized it was by the same people who made The Messenger (a game I did enjoy), so I figured I’d give it a try. And like, it's well made and the graphics really are incredible (I got programmer stunlocked for a bit trying to figure out how they did some effects), but the game itself is kind of bland. The battle system has a couple of neat gimmicks with the lock system and the charge attacks but it's not enough to remain interesting for more than a few hours, but this is a 30+ hour RPG. No real character customization or builds, and level ups and new weapons are just basic stat boosts. 

But whatever, RPGs are about the story right? Unfortunately it’s also a bit weird. Like its fine I guess, but this game is a *prequel* to The Messenger, and a decent amount of the plot is just resolved in the worst possible way. The main villains for the first half of the game just get teleported into the future to become bosses in The Messenger. It’s not a satisfying resolution to anything and it makes the game feel like it does not stand on its own, merely here to be auxiliary to The Messenger.

Half way through the game sort of teased a switch to 3D (mirroring the way The Messenger switched from 8 bit to 16 bit when you entered the second half), but that was just a tease and didn’t amount to anything. I almost feel like they wanted to do that switch but had to cut it for scope reasons. This game needed something like that to make it special and not just a basic snes RPG, but it didn’t have anything like that. ★★

Super Mario Wonder

The Best 2D Mario since Mario World. But it’s not like there was much competition there anyway… pretty much just the blandcore New Super Mario Bros. And I guess Mario Maker… but that’s a weird comparison to make. Either way Mario Wonder is pretty good, fun times all the way through. But other than the wonder flowers (which were cool) it kinda just felt like every other 2D Mario. Nintendo does a much better job carving out unique identities for the 3D Marios, it would be nice to see them apply that to a 2D one sometime. I 100%’d it in a weekend and then never thought about it again. ★★★

Suika Game

I made a watermelon once. ★★★

Mosa Lina

It’s a physics puzzler with a decent amount of emergent interactions between objects. From a large set of hand designed tools and levels, it picks a random set of tools and a random set of levels and you have to beat those levels with the tools provided. Sometimes it's impossible, but most of the time when you think it is there is actually some weird emergent interaction that you’re overlooking. It’s definitely a unique design and pretty neat for what it is, though it sort of lacks the longevity I would want out of this kind of game. ★★★

Bombe

This is a weird one for sure. It’s minesweeper… except you don’t actually solve the puzzles. Instead you build an automation one rule at a time that can solve more and more minesweeper puzzles automatically with each new rule added. If you liked Zachtronics games the way I did, this will definitely stunlock you for a few days, if you can get past the janky interface. ★★★

Dave the Diver

I kind of hated this game lol. The best way I can describe it is that this game kind of feels like it’s allergic to itself. The game never lets you breathe, it never lets you settle into a nice fun little game loop where you go fishing and then sell sushi so you can upgrade your dive gear to explore deeper and get rarer fish. As soon as it thinks you might be getting comfortable it pulls you away to do some tutorial, or listen to a guy tell you how to farm, or make you play some weird minigame, whether you want to or not. And this never lets up. Even the main exploration does this, you’ll enter a room that has a puzzle and it just won’t let you solve the puzzle. It will freeze control, pan the camera to a button, pan back to Dave and then Dave will say some shit like “I should go press that button!” and then give you control back. It does this literally every time there’s a puzzle, even in the final area of the game. I’ve played video games before! I fucking know I should go pull that lever! Stop taking control away from me!

The beginning of the game sort of feels like a 2D Subnautica, earn money to upgrade dive gear to go deeper and deeper. And if they kept that up this game would have been cool. The sort of promise that that was what the game was about is the main thing that kept me playing it…  But it very quickly bottoms out, and then you have to run errands for the sea people for 10 hours. Bullshit like “please go catch me 4 crabs” and dumb fetch quests. And boss fights that feel completely out of place, including the “kronosaur” which is the glitchiest most unfinished feeling fight in the game, right at the end. Every additional hour I played made me hate the game more and more and as soon as I saw the credits I uninstalled it so I’d never have to play it again. ★

Cobalt Core

It’s a cool setup for a deckbuilder, like the positional aspect to it is slick, but man the cards and relics are just so bland and boring. Most of the cards offered as rewards are barely better than the starter deck cards (and it even sometimes just offers starter cards on rewards screens). The best strategy seems to be just upgrade the starter deck cards so they cost 0 asap and then barely take any new cards unless they serve a very specific purpose or combo. The game is cute and the base mechanics are very good, so I hope they manage to update the game or do a DLC that can make the rest of it more interesting eventually. There’s a ton of potential there. ★★★