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Alex's Top 10 Games of 2023
🕑 Added 2024-01-16 16:24:27 +0000 UTC
I’ve been putting off writing this top 10 list a bit since the year started. I don’t have a good excuse for that, beyond the usual issues getting the writing motor running after a long lull, and the (hopefully) understandable lack of desire to try to take stock of what 2023 even fucking was. You do not need me to recap all the ways in which last year felt deeply, brutally wrong. Even within the narrow framework of Just Talking About Video Games, thousands and thousands of people lost their jobs last year. For everyone talking about what a murderers’ row it was for product releases, it was a straight up bloodbath for the people who make these products we so happily gobble up. As much as I want to focus on the goodness of the games I’m about to write about, it feels disrespectful to not acknowledge that the industry that produced them is not in a remotely healthy place.
And for me personally, last year had excitement, anxiety, surprise, and depression all in great quantity. Lotta peaks and valleys, not much middle ground. This year I played what was probably my last show with my band, but did so opening for a band I’ve loved for decades. I got COVID for the first time, and thankfully walked away from it OK. This year I left Queens, a neighborhood I loved immensely, after 12 years there, and we also lost a cat we’d loved for even longer than that. But we left Queens for our first home of our own, something we’ve wanted for ages, but also felt an understandable amount of terror about. Closing on this place was probably the biggest shake-up my life has had in over a decade, and while I wish our cat, our sweet Eva, could have had more time to enjoy her new place, she seemed to love the bigger, sunnier space for as long as she had.
I guess I’m just grateful that I had any peaks at all. I never take for granted that I’m in the place I’m in, and able to do the work that I do, because there are a great number of people out there willing to support what we do around here. As frivolous and ridiculous as this job can feel like sometimes in the face of everything else, I never forget that it’s because of all of you that I get to do it at all. So as always, sincerely, thank you for that.
Well. Games? Games.
10. Hitman Freelancer
I think I said somewhere during our regular GOTY discussions that we should reserve that list for new games, not new modes in old games. But for my own list there are no rules. It’s what I played and enjoyed most in 2023, dangit, and nothing dominated the top quarter of 2023 for me quite like Freelancer.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: they put a roguelike mode in a popular game that did not previously have one of those. Astounding! Here, Agent 47 is now traveling the world, taking out members of an ill-defined criminal syndicate that consists entirely of randomized NPCs from all the existing maps. These criminal masterminds have an incredible array of day jobs to hide their secret nefarious purposes, and once you’ve worked your way through the lower rungs, you take on a boss mission where you have to play Guess Who. That’s reductive, but it’s not far off. You’re trying to figure out which of the possible targets is wearing a hat AND wearing glasses AND sneezes a lot. It’s very silly, but good lord is it also a ton of fun.
What surprised me most about Freelancer is that this is the thing that FINALLY inspired me to get better at Hitman. Though I’ve played through all three games in the World of Assassination trilogy, I never got quite the same bug other folks had to keep going back for elusive targets and other special events. I’ve always been OK at best at Hitman-ing, but now I’m suddenly memorizing map layouts and NPC pathing and what have you. I extremely did not expect this, of all things, to be what finally tipped me over into Hitman obsession, but here I am.
Strangely enough, as good as the main gameplay loop is, the thing that really stands out to me is the dollop of Animal Crossing they tossed in here. 47 has a sick forest mansion/murder fortress, and as you level up you unlock new decor that lets you decide just how tacky 47’s tastes run. The interiority of 47’s off-mission life is something I’ve always found interesting, and the very idea of him owning a house with actual furniture and interior design is deeply funny to me. Especially considering he’s out about as far from civilization as you can imagine–otherwise I doubt he’d get a zoning permit for that helipad. There’s no reason for him to want modern art or a jazz soundtrack in his house unless he actually likes it, and the very notion of 47 liking anything besides cold, hard murder is a minor revelation.
My only beef with the mode (apart from it taking a LOT of play to get the upper tier items) is that if you’re going to go to all this trouble of giving him a home and a life outside of work, he needs someone else around to at least acknowledge the work he’s putting into his home. I’m saying 47 needs one too-friendly neighbor who comes around at random intervals to comment on the absurdity of his life. I’m thinking of a Joe Pera-like figure, a guy so banally normal and predisposed to long-winded chatter that dealing with him becomes a mini-game unto itself. I want Agent 47 to have to figure out how to navigate a guy who won’t stop telling him about the latest town council meetings and asking why he’s always taking a motorboat to the Maldives. It would be his toughest assignment to date.
I doubt we’re ever going to get much else added to this mode given that IO is onto other things, but that’s OK. I’m still having a blast jumping into runs every now and again. I imagine I’ll keep doing that at least until I can unlock my basement drum set.
9. Tape to Tape
A couple of early access things really grabbed my attention this year, and this goofy arcade hockey game was absolutely one of them. Nobody makes good hockey games anymore. OK, that’s probably too bold a statement to be making given that I have spent no time researching beyond what the EA game looks like every year, but that game is not in a good place. All I know for certain is that I haven’t played a non-EA hockey game for the number of hours I spent with Tape to Tape probably since NHL Hitz was a thing.
Somehow, this is also a run-based game. You start out a run with one persistent character and one of a few possible pre-made characters with decent stats, then the rest of your roster is filled out with low-rung chuds. You move along a world map jumping from game to game, with some randomized events filling out the margins. The teams you face are all of the goofy variety. The first boss team is a team full of refs that cheat. Another one is eldritch cultists. Another is disco guys.
All of this is rendered with a pleasantly cartoonish presentation. It’s a very slapstick version of hockey, but the shocking thing is that it’s also good hockey. It has the right mix of over-the-top hitting and just-loose-enough scoring to remind you of the old arcade greats. Obviously with it still in early access there’s still a bunch of the game left to come, but the current campaign loop is still a bunch of fun as-is, and it’s even got multiplayer–assuming you don’t mind sitting some friends down in front of the computer.
8. Lethal Company
Here’s the other early access gem that knocked me out this year. Or chewed me up. Or summoned a giant mannequin and murdered me. Whatever one you like best.
Fundamentally, this is an extraction game. You and (optimally) a team of friends work at a space corp that has you bopping around a bunch of moons looking for space garbage in abandoned bases. That’s not a cheeky description. You are picking up hunks of metal, broken engines, stop signs, airhorns, whatever is highlighted and carryable. None of this stuff is good or important, but it is worth money at the company store, so safety be damned you are going to collect this stuff. Every one of these places has at least a couple of different lifeforms that want to kill you immediately. These range from fantastic alien beasts to gelatinous blobs and the occasional straight up ghost. None of them make a lot of sense, but that’s completely beside the point.
Comedy in games is hard. Making comedy out of multiplayer experiences is even harder. You have to embrace the fact that something very stupid is probably going to happen to you when you’re playing Lethal Company, and it is the game’s ultimate triumph that it delivers that stupidity so often and with such magnificent timing that it never becomes frustrating when the aforementioned stupid shit kills a run dead. And to be clear, it’s not that the game loop is no fun or anything. The little bits of exploration, and the game’s use of directional audio when working as a team, is enough to form a pretty harrowing experience–or it would, if the game were more interested in being harrowing. Like, yes, there are jump scares and violent deaths, but they also have an arachnophobia mode that changes the in-game spiders into the word “spider” in moving block letters. That’s the mindset we’re dealing with here, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Again, there’s still seemingly a fair amount of development left to go on this thing, but the foundation is already a ridiculous good time. Can’t wait to see what else the developer cooks up for it down the road.
7. Remnant II
Gotta give Brad all the credit for this one being on my list. I don’t even remember if I touched the original Remnant from the Ashes or not (I think maybe I did, but not for very long), and I doubt this one would have made it onto my radar were he not so effusive about it. It’s just not the kind of shooter I typically get into–I don’t like Destiny that much either, if we’re being honest. But in spite of all of that, digging into it with Brad and Vinny this year proved to be one of the more memorable experiences I had with a game all year.
It’s not as much the mechanics for me. I think all the different class builds and loot and all that were just fine, but I’ve never had the kind of loot lust necessary to really lock in with these sorts of games. The shooting is very good, but not so good that it knocked me over. It’s also not the story, which is sort of nonsense in about a half-dozen different ways, but largely agreeable. It’s the world designs, and the sheer variety of places to explore that really got me. One minute you’re plugging away at an extra-dimensional labyrinth full of sentient cubes, the next you’re fighting Definitely-Not-Bloodborne-People in Definitely-Not-Yharnam. It’s a shocking level of variety, and all those worlds feel pretty expansive and stuffed with interesting secrets.
This is also a rare game that got me thinking about various boss encounters days after the fact. There were a couple of points during the course of streaming it–specifically, the labyrinth cube boss and the mother mind–where in the moment I was just all sorts of irritated about the level of coordination and tension involved, but later I found myself thinking how damn clever those fights were. I’d almost say the same for the abject fucker that is the last boss, but that one ended up with more of a grudging admiration than anything else. Truly one of the most disorienting fights I’ve had in a game.
I might be inflating this slightly because I just had a good old time playing this with my Nextlander dudes, but I also think there’s a really solidly designed co-op experience here. I don’t have enough patience to stick with games that are this sort of challenging unless I’m having fun, and I definitely had a bunch of fun with Remnant II.
6. Humanity
There are few things in this world I love more than a weird puzzle game, and Humanity’s one of the weirder ones to come along in a while. You play a glowing magical Shiba Inu who controls rivers of flowing people. You have to get those people across obstacles and to whatever the stage goal is. Those rivers of people will, in a Lemmings-like way, just wander in a big straight line toward wherever you point them. As you are sussing out their optimal path, those people keep flying off of whatever cliff happens to be in front of them. There’s a metaphor in here somewhere, I just know it.
The game’s art style is minimalist, but impressive for the sheer number of little bodies it can put on the screen. It’s strangely mesmerizing to watch them leap to their deaths in huge waves, and crash against the obstacles that litter the various stages. It’s like a human water feature.
Hypnotic visuals aside, the actual puzzle game underneath is also fiendishly clever. There’s a terrific variety of puzzles and level designs, which is impressive considering this is the first game this studio has ever produced. They weren’t even a game developer before this. The company is a creative firm that previously worked on experimental art installations. They were responsible for a recent redesign of Tokyo’s public toilets. That’s what these folks were up to before Humanity. That’s just wild.
5. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
If I may steal a line from America’s Sweetheart Matt Kessler here, The Man Who Erased His Name really didn’t need to exist. This is the game that fills in the blanks about where Kiryu Kazuma has been since the end of Yakuza 6, and gives context to his brief cameo in Yakuza 7. I don’t know that the world needed a 20-ish hour game explaining where he’s been hanging out all this time, but boy howdy am I glad Ryu Ga Gotoku made one.
First and foremost, this is a throwback to the Yakuza games of old. That’s slightly weird to say considering there has been exactly one of these that featured turn-based battles instead of beat-’em-up brawling–and that’s to say nothing of the two Judgment games, which are also basically just like this–but that turn-based one is the most recent game, and the upcoming sequel signals that that’s going to be the style for at least as long as Ichiban Kasuga is your main protagonist. So what you get here is one last ride with the Kiryu of old, albeit a slightly modified one. He’s still got all his Dragon of Dojima moves, but he’s also got a bunch of secret agent weapons too. Turns out ol’ Kiryu’s been doing dirty jobs for the shadowy criminal faction revealed in Yakuza 6, and maintaining his fake death all this time. That is, of course, until circumstances conspire to drag him back into the open and make him square off against various antagonistic forces, as well as join an underground fighting league, rekindle his love of pocket racing, and hang out with FMV hostesses whenever the mood strikes him.
Calling this a more bite-sized Yakuza feels wrong, because again, this game took me more than 20 hours to get through. That IS a lot smaller than the 60-80 hours a regular one of these runs nowadays, but it ain’t nothing! And even with that shorter length, this game struggles a bit with pacing out what it has, dropping a couple of very obvious filler sections in the middle to pad things a bit. But the meat of the story is ridiculous and gripping enough to make up for that, and the old beat-’em-up action is just as satisfying as ever. There’s a couple of great new characters in the mix too, including the jack-of-all-trades who helps Kiryu and all the people of Sotenbori, Akame, and the Omi Alliance bigwig Tsurono, who keeps getting you deeper and deeper into the insane plot. Ostensibly, this game’s entire reason for existing is to whet your appetite ahead of Infinite Wealth, and it certainly does manage to do that. But even taken as a stand-alone experience, it’s just nice to touch base with Kiryu again, and to know that he’s still kicking around in this world, helping whoever it is that needs it, all reason and self-preservation be damned.
4. Sony's Insomniac's Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
As I was putting together this list, I was kind of shocked to realize just how few games from the AAA space I even had in consideration. There were a few others I seriously considered (Forza, Tears of the Kingdom, Mortal Kombat, SF6, etc.), but for one reason or another, those games didn’t resonate with me this year as much as these other games did. Spider-Man 2 is the one gleaming exception, and not necessarily because it’s that much better than all the rest of those games. This is a case where I think it ended up being a just-right mix of release timing, amount of game, and level of polish coming together to keep me hooked long enough to see it through.
I’m not trying to undersell how good Spidey Deuce is, because it is an extremely enjoyable One Of These. It’s the same core open world design the last couple of Spideys have had, but with a slightly less checklist-y feel than the first game had, and more to do than Miles Morales had. I’m, uh, split on the dual-protagonist storyline. Miles and his development as a full-blown Spider-Man takes a backseat for large chunks of the story as Peter works out his issues with his good buddy Harry, a gaggle of hunters working for Kraven, and a bunch of slimy symbiotes coating everything in the city. It’s not that I hate Peter Parker or anything, but Insomniac’s interpretation of his aw-shucks heroism is something I personally find much less interesting than Miles’ journey.
But those complaints aside, I’m genuinely impressed that Insomniac managed to stuff this game so full of villains and plot twists while avoiding the feeling of bloat that plagues so many superhero sequels. This is half a game about Kraven and half a game about Venom, and they manage to thread the needle making both those villains feel like they actually belong in this story together. The swinging around New York is as good as it’s ever been, and the wingsuit addition is a hoot. I love that I can swing over to Brooklyn and Queens now, though it’s very funny that the vision of both those boroughs is “the parts with all the condos and office buildings, and one neighborhood in Forest Hills”. And all the symbiote stuff is genuinely fantastic. Once the game turns you loose with some of those powers, the combat takes on a whole different flavor. Some of the animations they cook up when you’re going full Venom are some of the most dynamic looking fighting I’ve ever seen in an open world game.
I imagine it’ll probably be a while before we ever see a Spider-Man 3, especially with Insomniac on to Wolverine next. That’s just fine with me, because after Spider-Man 2, I think I’ll be full-up on Spider-Man-ing for a good long while. A heavy, but very satisfying meal.
3. Alan Wake II
Alan Wake is the one Remedy thing that more or less escaped me the first time around. I did play the first game when it came out, but I very definitely did not finish it, which is unusual for me and this studio. For god’s sake, I finished Quantum Break! Something about Wake the First’s blend of action with its supernatural trappings didn’t quite fit together for me. Felt more like a germ of an interesting idea without the toolset to fully execute on it. Suffice it to say, I do not feel the same way about Alan Wake II.
Whatever tentativeness that first game might have had is long gone in this sequel. This is Remedy properly unleashed, giving themselves over to the In the Mouth of Madness-ness of Wake’s original premise, but also infusing it with an enormous amount of their unique brand of hallucinogenic weirdness, a brand they've clearly been honing in the years since that first game. If I’m being completely honest here, a great deal of my appreciation for this game comes from its presentation and the quality of its production. The way the game blends FMV with in-engine cutscenes is astoundingly good, the voice performances are terrific across the board, and the story is of the rare breed that can crawl all the way up its own ass and still find its way through to the other side. The gameplay on the other hand is…fine? Good at times, even. I just never quite gelled with all the mind-palace stuff, and though I know the two games are going for something very different, engaging with Wake II’s combat just kind of made me miss Control.
I know, I know, it’s an apples and oranges comparison. It’s just that, for me, Control was the game where I felt like Remedy had just about perfected the style and flavor of game they like to make. All the things they’d learned from Max Payne and Alan Wake (and even Quantum Break) funneled into an action experience that I still think about to this day. I mention this only because I’ve seen a lot of people say this exact thing about Alan Wake II, and it’s not that I disagree with them, necessarily. It is merely my take that Wake II is a triumph of visual style and storytelling, slightly less as a survival horror game.
More than anything else, I think I’m just thrilled to see Remedy having fun again. For as grim as the story can be at times, there’s so much frivolous nonsense around the edges of this thing, so much goofy charm, that you can feel the studio beaming with pride in every sequence. That pride is in no way misplaced. They made something genuinely great here.
2. El Paso, Elsewhere
If there’s a common thread between the top two games on my list, it is audacity. They’re both bold swings that connect in ways both surprising and wonderful. El Paso, Elsewhere is definitively the smaller of the two, but also the biggest thing developer Strange Scaffold has attempted to date. Its creative lead, Xalavier Nelson Jr., has established himself as someone with a distinctive voice. Even in stuff like An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs and Sunshine Shuffle, there is a degree of thoughtfulness that underlines all the very silly things that happen in those micro-budget productions. El Paso, Elsewhere finds Nelson and his collaborators way out on a limb compared with what they’ve attempted previously, crafting a tribute to Max Payne bullet-dodging that pushes well beyond mere homage into something genuinely kind of beautiful.
The game’s protagonist, James Savage, is most definitely a Max Payne-like figure, prone to fits of depression, pill-addiction, and monologuing. But he’s not a rogue cop, and this isn’t New York. Savage instead starts out his mission on a dusty old highway on his way to a motel in El Paso, Texas. You see, his ex-girlfriend is a vampire lord, and she’s about to engage in a ritual that will very likely end the world as we know it. Armed with a few different guns, a head full of pills and despair, and the ability to do some elite Matrix-dodging shit, James has to work his way through a supernatural labyrinth full of ghouls and werewolves and innocents that need saving before Draculae can end it all.
Purely taken as a shooter, El Paso, Elsewhere is some solid, meat and potatoes stuff. You run around the various levels, monsters warp in or jump out of closets, you shoot them. Easy-peasy. If things get hectic, you have the ability to leap and slow down time, just like our good buddy Max. The game’s visual style is best compared to an N64 game running in a PC emulator. In just about any other context, I feel like I’d describe a game that way if I was trying to insult it, but I don’t mean it that way at all here. What the team manages to wring stylistically out of that limited visual palette is pretty incredible.
What really shines is the story, though, and a lot of that is owed to Nelson’s performance as the main character. If this were just a matter of someone doing their best impression of Max Payne, I doubt it would have been nearly as memorable as what he turns in here. It’s a deft blend of Payne’s penchant for purple prose with a greater self-awareness of the inherent ridiculousness of what’s being monologued about. And it never veers into generic “so THAT happened” territory, thankfully. I’m not saying having the person who wrote the character give it its voice is the sort of thing more games should do (absolutely not), but Nelson clearly has a gift for both prose and delivery. His performance, and Emme Montgomery's performance of Draculae, makes the scenes that depict the history of their relationship incredibly compelling.
That’s the audacity of El Paso, Elsewhere. It takes audacity to say “I’m going to make a Max Payne, but make it my own.” It takes audacity to say “I’m going to voice this main character that I wrote, and it’s going to work.” It takes audacity to not only drop some incredibly sick hip-hop into the middle of your supernatural shooter, but also rap those songs yourself. Nelson and Strange Scaffold should be on more people’s radar. These folks have the juice, and I’m hoping for big things for them in the future.
1. Thirsty Suitors
Truly, there is no bolder game I played in 2023 than Thirsty Suitors. Bold in character, bold in spirit, bold in visual palette, bold in every facet of its execution, really, Outerloop Games pulled together an incredible array of influences and ideas in this one, and somehow put them all together in a way that just works so, so well.
This is a kitchen sink kind of approach to game making. You’ve got a bit of the dirtbag homecoming story of Night in the Woods mixed with a little Scott Pilgrim ex-battling, the real-world turn-based battles of something like a Persona or Like a Dragon (complete with wildly over-the-top summons), a rhythm-based cooking game, a lightweight skateboarding game, and a smattering of rhythm mini-games–one of which is required to correctly high-five a dog every time you encounter him. That’s a lot, and Thirsty Suitors’ biggest achievement is finding a way to balance all of it, and doing so with tremendous energy and confidence.
The game’s protagonist, Jala, is a fuck-up, but a self-aware and repentant one. Early on you learn she left her hometown in a bit of a rush, running away with a woman neither her family, nor her various exes approved much of. She’s back to try to make things right, which involves doing JRPG battles with her former flames, trying to win back the approval of her acerbically charming mother, and trying to reestablish contact with her unforgiving sister. Each day in the game is spent running errands for the union of exes, run by your most potent former flame, Tyler, and cooking up meals in front of your mother as she criticizes you relentlessly. If you’re the sort of person who has a lot of childhood-based stress based around moms without mercy, I promise this stuff goes down easier than you might think.
For a game that is mostly about both non-stop relationship drama and the stresses of growing up in an immigrant family, Thirsty Suitors is, if anything, unwaveringly upbeat. Not in a way that’s cloying or oblivious, but one that sees the possibility of joy in every aspect of its characters’ lives. There’s a lot of soul-searching they have to go through as they work stuff out with Jala, but it’s all rendered with such vibrant, colorful energy and sharp humor. At least a half dozen of my favorite characters this year came out of this story, not the least of which is Jala’s dad, a guy who just radiates warmth and understanding in a way that stuck with me long after I’d finished the game. Bounding over to the couch to end each in-game day with him was probably my favorite part of the whole experience. Well, that and Uncle Hinti. Uncle Hinti has “best frequently appearing head” in a 2023 game locked down.
I spent a while trying to decide if I was inflating this one in my mind based entirely on vibes. Look, the vibes were fucking off this year. I found the joys where I could, and there wasn’t a moment I spent playing Thirsty Suitors where I didn’t find myself smiling about what it was doing. Just a delightful surprise in every way.
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Comments
Chad
So sorry for your loss. I have always been impressed by your writing, banger of a list
Ricktor_Black
It may take you a while to wind yourself up to write, but when you do... It's totally worth the effort. Great list and entertaining read.
