Alexander's Top 10 Games of 2023
Street Fighter 6 is landing on my list de panzazo because I didn't play enough of Baldur's Gate to include it. Act 1 gang, rise up!
It's tough trying to find the same hype that I had playing Street Fighter IV on the Xbox 360. I don't think I ever put as much hours trying to get good at a fighting game since and I don't think I ever will. This isn't to say that I don't think 6 is as good. My main thing is that I don't think I'll ever be in that kind of place in my life, or have the same friends with the same free time. Getting older is so wack. Street Fighter 6 is cool as hell, though.
I think for immigrants Venba's themes are well worn ground. Food is perhaps the most powerful anchor to one's culture. Venba is beautiful, touching, and deeply relatable to me as a first born child of immigrant parents.
Make sure you eat something before jumping into this one. I'm pretty sure I ordered Indian food the day after.
#8: A Space for the Unbound
I don't think there's a game on my list with such a stark difference with the level of enjoyment I had between the narrative and the actual play. At times A Space for the Unbound can be extremely tedious.
A lot of the play involves solving puzzles, usually with a pen and paper at hand. That stuff can be nice, however the brief but constant loading in between areas really strained my patience. There's also empty calories in the form of fetch quests that trip up the pacing.
In the end, once credits rolled, those complaints melted away. It's a gripping fantasy story about community, bullying, domestic abuse, anxiety, and depression wrapped in gorgeous, detailed pixel art. And there's an achievement for petting all the cats.
Hi-Fi Rush feels like the remake to a long lost Sega game that they developed for the Xbox during their messy Dreamcast console exit. It's tough for me to describe why it's on here. I think I just genuinely miss this tier of game existing. Like, this game had fucking music from Zwan in it. Zwan.
I don't know, man. It's a vibe. It's really well animated, the characters are bright and goofy, and the rhythm infused third person action combat smacks.
I think this was the first game I completed on my Steam Deck in 2023. Actually, I think it's the first game I beaten front to back on it period?
#6: Super Mario Bros. Wonder
I know it's in to trash the New Super Mario Bros. games but I genuinely never had any strong positive feelings for that first DS game and it only lead to further my resentment for that series. They just made so damn many of them.
Mario Wonder, with its Wile E. the Coyote ass animations is so damn refreshing. I think this is probably the best implementation of the self governed difficulty levels, too. A kid can breeze through a lot of these levels, but being a completionist can get brutal in a satisfying kind of way. It's just so nice to be excited for a 2D Mario game again.
Part visual novel, part art-house movie, Mediterranea Inferno takes you on vacation with three Italian twinks trying to move past their Covid-19 lock-down trauma. It's funny at times, but quickly veers into some deeply uncomfortable situations. Also, it can get spooky.
It's an important game, but please heed the content warnings.
There's something alluring to me about the Persona Social Link system and any time a game decides to mess with that kind of thing I'm game to give it a shot. Eternights' main sell was "dating action game", so, there it is.
The gist here is there's an apocalypse and your player character gets his arm cut off and replaced with a magical one that can transform into, I think, anything? It's a sword for 98% of the game that you use to kill monsters. It's in third person and for the most part it's an OK action game. You get a skill tree and all that and your buds help you fight, though I think the combat truly shines in the back quarter of the game.
The game's whole thing is that you've got a time limit for when a dungeon has to be completed and you can either choose to progress through it or spend time with your friends, who are mostly female.
Now, to my surprise there is a male character that joins your crew late in game who can serve as a love interest and I was curious to see how that would play out given the homophobia present in the games with which it was inspired by.
The same sex story is, I feel, the most interesting route. It flips the corny harem trope on its head and you get what I believe is the most touching and fulfilling end given that character's relationship to the plot. It's respectful in a way the rest of the game wouldn't suggest it.
At some point in the story your characters are falling from up high and to save everyone the player character turns his arm into a bra parachute because in a quick panic he remembers seeing them on one of the girls in your group. It's childish as hell to be sure, but there's a lot of heart here and I can't wait to see what this one man studio does next.
And I'd like to request for more RPGs to be sub-20 hours like this one. It does wonders for pacing.
I kinda' just melted into Jusant. This game is gorgeous and the danger free climbing was so meditative during some really dark and ongoing political unrest. It feels selfish to even say this but it felt good to get home and get lost in something that provided very little consequence.
Fuck Joe Biden and free Palestine.
Sega can keep Jet Set Radio. Team Reptile understood the assignment.
Look, there's a lot you can do to modernize Jet Set and I'm sure Sega's got their top engineers on it but fuck all that. This shit with its simplified graphics runs at 90 FPS on my Steam Deck. It's got all the vibes down and it manages to improve on the mobility and graffiti systems.
Like Hi-Fi Rush I just miss this tier of game but, like, x10 for this specific series. It improves on the concepts of the games that inspired it. I was eating here.
#1: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I don't think I have the capacity to express what Breathe of the Wild meant to me when I first played that game back in 2017. It's gotta' be my favorite game of all time. At least, it was? Still is? It's a toss up. Both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild have surprisingly different philosophies and it sort of depends on how I'm feeling. All this to say that Tears of the Kingdom is a genuine master piece.
I'm sitting here trying to think of where to even begin. Is it the physics driven world that doesn't seem to break no matter what nonsense you throw at it? Do I talk about the fact that this is the most touching Zelda story to date? How about how the Colgera boss fight theme smacks? Why does this game look so good off like 2011 hardware?
Tears of the Kingdom embodies play. It begs you to be curious and creative. A sanbox with a capital S. My favorite game of 2023 and favorite game period?
Best Games of 2022 in 2023
2023 was stacked, but I had to make room for some stuff that I missed the previous year. If I do this list again the 2023 in 2024 section is gonna' be a damn mess.
I played Melatonin in December of 2023 and it came out December of 2022. i'm so sad it took me a whole year to check it out.
It's got cozy little Rhythm Heaven-like micro games that take place within an insomniac's melatonin infused dreams. It's dripping in pastels and good vibes.
Each level, or "night", has 4 or 5 stages that you navigate kind of like a Mario overworld. You'll walk to, say, the "Work" stage where it runs you through a brief tutorial. There you get a feel for the song and the beats you need to match with button presses. Once you get through that it begins your real run. Rinse, wash, repeat.
I like it a lot. The visuals are super pleasant and it's really satisfying when you nail those perfectly timed button presses to the beat of the music. I only just started it but felt compelled to throw it on here.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me
This one's tough to talk about. I feel like I don't need to be taking up oxygen in this conversation.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a short Game Boy game about sex work and trauma. This game isn't enjoyable, but it is profound and important.
Again, please heed the content warnings.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
If this game had come out in 2023 it would be my number 2.
You begin life on a colony as a 10 year old. You, your parents, and the other colonists escape an Earth on the brink of collapse and crash land on a barely habitable planet. From there you live your life through to adulthood, making choices along the way that affect you, your friends, and the overall colony.
There's a card system that carries a lot of your decision making as a sort of stand in for something like a skill check or a random dice roll. You obtain cards through specific actions and relationships. It's not the greatest mechanic but it's serviceable and feeds well into the gameplay loop.
The game ends when your character turns 20 where your story concludes in one of many different outcomes, but that's not where it stops. The game has a time loop mechanic. You're meant to roll back in on a NG+ and see a lot of the different ways the game could end where you're meant to "fix" mistakes you made in your first playthrough. It works really well and is a core part of the experience.
I binged this game for a whole weekend. I could not put my Steam Deck down. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is Young Adult fiction at its peak and in a year full of platitudes, "one of my all time favorites" feels like it has very little meaning, but man this one of my all time favorites.
