2023 Community Game of the Year

I need to get back into Pentiment... Thanks for the reminder!

I have an odd list this year. While I think this was truly a really good year for gaming, I’m looking at the last time I made one of these lists (2020? Really that long ago?) and I don’t think I’m going to have as much affection for the games here as I did for those. I find myself writing a lot about gameplay that was just fine wrapped around stories and ideas that were really superlative.

1. Dave the Diver
Dave the Diver is just charming. It doesn’t ever really put a foot wrong, and just when you’re starting to get tired of some aspect of its gameplay or environment, something changes and shifts everything around and gives you a slightly different way of engaging with the world. There is nothing Dave the Diver does that is a particular standout. Every gameplay mechanic is competent, but not brilliant. But they all come together to create a compelling, addictive experience in a cartoon world that has a surprising amount of depth.
…
Emotional depth not just…you know.

Actually, there is one thing that Dave the Diver does that is absolutely superlative, and that’s its animated 16(ish)-bit cutscenes.

2. Ixion
Mild spoilers for the opening of Ixion:
Ixion has a straightforward tutorial, running through things you’ve done thousands of times in other city-management games: place an apartment building, create a farm, build a factory. In this case, you’re doing it in the bowels of an immense colony-ship built to travel between solar systems, but the gameplay is largely the same sort of thing you’ve done in Ancient Egypt, or Classical Rome, or the colonial United States, only with a sci-fi flavor. The tutorial ends, you have been sufficiently trained in the ship’s systems, and we see a cutscene of your triumphant launch into the galaxy. A futuristic Elon Musk figure gives a very rote speech about finding our destiny in the stars, the music surges, the scene cuts to a shot of a crowd cheering as the Ixion prepares to engage its experimental FTL drive for the very first time, large enough to be seen from the Earth, framed against the Moon in the night sky. Your drive engages, and your ship blinks and disappears, thrown into the strange super-dimensional realm that allows you to travel between the stars. But in the millisecond of that launch, the Moon disintegrates, broken apart by immense energies–the engine design was flawed, miscalculated. The crowd shrieks in terror.

The builders of your ship had pushed too hard and too fast, and when you return to Earth, displaced centuries by the same miscalculation, you return to apocalypse and the functional death of humanity.

Ixion is a game that appears to be based on the gold and silver age of sci-fi, the height of techno-futurist triumphalism. Which it is, but it also takes a big dollop of inspiration from more recent, less technocratic works. Space here is big, and it is terrifying, but it is also Weird. You will encounter strange astrological phenomena, odd rock and crystal formations that might exist somewhere in the real universe, but you will also discover that the explorers that you sent to survey these formations are no longer who they say they are, their biological markers no longer matching those on record. Perhaps, it’s simply a computer error, the result of prolonged travel in high energy environments. Or perhaps it’s something…else, something that requires drastic measures. A simple decision, and the only thing that rests on it is the survival of the human race.

The innovation gameplay-wise that Ixion makes is not in its mechanics, which are all fairly standard–it’s in the environment in which those mechanics take place. City-builders are a very passive genre. Even in something like Frostpunk you’re in a very static location where events wash over you. In Ixion, you are mobile and essentially have the ability to change the local geography, relocating to get better access to resources, to escape threats, and to explore local features. It’s not an innovation that I think Ixion makes the fullest use of, but between its active nature, the competence of the basic mechanics, and the innovative atmosphere, it became one of my favorite games this year, a real sleeper that I haven’t heard many people talk about.

3. Obenseuer
Obenseuer is a game that defies a lot of attempts to define it. I’ve largely seen it described as a landlord simulator, but the gameplay ends up doing a lot of can collecting, scavenging for used milk in the garbage, building things out of scrap–it’s actually a lot closer to a simulation of homelessness than it is about managing homes. Obensauer pairs the quiet desperation of survival games with the quiet satisfaction of a lot of sandbox building games, and sets it all in a spooky version of Finland, or something like Finland, beset by invasive hallucinogenic mushrooms that cause loss of appetite, hallucinations, death, and visions of the underlying nature of the world. It’s not a visually impressive game–the overall vibe you get is something like a very heavily modded copy of Fallout 3. But the loop of scavenging for resources to upgrade your apartment to entice renters to move in to give you resources to upgrade your apartment is incredibly addictive.

This is still in pretty early access, so I expect I’m naming this one way ahead of other GOTY votes. But I think it’s one that you’ll be hearing from in the future.

4. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
Jedi Survivor picks up where its predecessor left off, doing everything a little more smoothly and competently.

The protagonist, Kal Kestis, is a bit unfairly maligned in some circles as being uninteresting. I think that’s a fairer criticism in the first game than it is here, where the weight of the choices that Kal has had to make begin to start forcing some internal faults in his personal philosophies and relationships . And while Jedi Survivor as a series is more interested in exploring Star Wars landscapes than getting deep into the personal lives and feelings of its characters, it doesn’t abandon them entirely. So when big emotional moments in the narrative come, they feel earned. And the romance in this series is quietly one of the more convincing and satisfying romantic arcs in video games, one that does a lot to rescue Kal’s reputation as a bland protagonist, and places him firmly in a relationship and family dynamic where he has strong gravities and frictions. But I’m also a big Cameron Monaghan fan, so I’ve always been inclined to like Kal Kestis.

As a game, what Jedi Survivor does is lean into the Metroidvania aspects of Dark Souls in a fun and rewarding way. I’ve never been a big fan of any of the major Souls, so I can’t speak to those aspects, but combat in this series has always felt pretty good, and to my mind is the best implementation of light saber combat outside of Beat Saber.

This game feels a lot like Assassin’s Creed did for a number of years, a quietly innovative and competent game that didn’t get a whole lot of critical attention until after it started putting up really big sales figures three or four sequels in. It’s really what I want out of AAA gaming, and I hope that we’re going to see more out of the series.

5. El Paso Elsewhere
El Paso Elsewhere’s lead developer makes a lot of choices that would probably be extremely bad ideas if done by other people. I don’t know how eager I would have been to play this game had I known that the lead dev voiced the main character and that the music featured tracks that he wrote and rapped himself. But the thing is that he’s really good at all of it. I’m not about to get in line for an El Paso Elsewhere album drop, but I found myself muttering “get your numbers up, boy get your numbers up” along with him while running through Hell’s basement, gunning down vampires.

El Paso Elsewhere’s gameplay is theoretically based on Max Payne, and you use the same diving bullet time mechanic that Max Payne first innovated. Only you don’t really. EPE is a pretty straightforward boomer shooter, and the enemies don’t shoot back a lot. Which means that you don’t end up using the bullet time mechanic–it’s more effective to maintain a steady platform with which to shoot oncoming vampires and werewolves. This would seem to be a pretty big dealbreaker, but it didn’t bother me much. The combat was engaging and the levels were designed by a bunch of old Quake and Doom modders, so the encounters are constantly changing in interesting ways.

But El Paso really shines in its atmosphere and its narrative. You are descending between worlds, dropping into a hole created by the process by which your ex-girlfriend Draculae means to end the world. It should not come to anyone’s surprise that a relationship with Draculae ended up being an abusive one. And this game is…less of a metaphor of an abusive relationship and more of a description of an actual abusive relationship, albeit one where the abuser is hundreds of years old and has magical powers. Xalavier Nelson’s voicework here as John Savage is so perfectly balanced between bravado and exhaustion and sadness that it creates a perfect noir character, a mixture between Harrison Ford as Han Solo and, uh, well, Harrison Ford as Deckard in Blade Runner. You spend a long time alone with John Savage talking to himself, psyching himself up to survive another encounter with the teeming hordes of intra-Hell. So when Draculae finally shows up and speaks, it’s a bit of a shock. Because instead of a centuries old voice of unimaginable evil, she has a completely young, contemporary voice, pitched almost a little bit high by Emme Montgomery, who is doing a fantastic job at matching Nelson. And the first conversation that she and the protagonist have is the awkward sort of thing that happens when you run into someone unexpectedly after a breakup. The pair encounter each other repeatedly with a complete lack of antagonism over and over again as John descends through Hell, and these conversations are largely wistful, or sweet recollections of memories they shared. This is to the point that you start to wonder whether El Paso Elsewhere is gearing up to do a Braid, to reveal that John was actually the abusive one, something that might make sense given the violence that he’s inflicted on the thousands of monsters between himself and his destination. But El Paso Elsewhere is not interested in being that particular flavor of Clever. It’s interested in telling the story of an abusive relationship, and when John starts describing the things that Draculae has done, asking her why, how could she have done this, the doubt sloughs off like old snakeskin. I’ve been fortunate to have avoided these types of relationships in my romantic life, but this is the thing I’ve noticed when I’ve met someone who I know has inflicted horrific emotional violence on a friend of mine–the degree of normalcy that they’re capable of. They can be charming, funny, even introspective, and you only ever catch a hint here and there of what they’ve been secretly holding inside of them. This is Draculae, a true monster metaphorically and figuratively, but also very human–someone who has the self-awareness to ask if what she is doing is wrong, but also possesses something within her that drives right through that self-doubt and into self-righteous cruelty. This portrayal is where El Paso Elsewhere really shines, and if I have a demerit to give it, it’s that you have to shoot an awful lot of vampires before this part of the story really starts to heat up.

6. Citizen Sleeper
I don’t have anything super new to say about Citizen Sleeper that hasn’t been said in a much better way in a lot of other places. I will say that it’s interesting to see the tabletop Powered by the Apocalypse system start showing up in video games. Your familiarity with that system may determine whether you think the game is super easy or not.

7. The Mortuary Assistant
I’m not a guy who gets much out of horror, and particularly horror games. I’m not very squeamish and worked as an EMT for awhile, so blood and gore don’t do a lot for me. I’m also difficult to surprise, and jump scares in video games largely become an issue of predicting which closet something is going to emerge from. The Mortuary Assistant made me have to log off and walk around in a bright room for awhile. It gave me nightmares.

The thing that this game gets that so much horror does not is that fear is about anticipation and lack of control, and the Mortuary Assistant is so good at manipulating both of these things. Much of the basic gameplay loop comes from a pretty straightforward recreation of the embalming process, removing bodily juices and replacing them with embalming fluid. It’s a procedure of about seven or eight steps that you will do exactly the same way in exactly the same order every time. But at least one of the corpses that you are embalming is possessed by a demon. It’s your job to identify which of these bodies contains the demon and perform the proper rights of banishment. Which means at any time, the body that you are manipulating in an already grotesque fashion can do…anything. It could talk to you, it could sit up. You could turn around and realize that the body is not there–where is the body?! Could it bite you as you’re trying to wire the jaw together? Maybe! Reach out and grab you as you’re inserting the eyelid covers that keep the eyes closed? Sure! And that’s not to mention all the other manifestations taking place within the mortuary: the shadow creatures, the woman in white, the mimic. They could all be causing strange and horrible things to happen all just outside of your frame of vision, and there is nothing you can do about it other than to just continue the work of embalming.

One of the most terrifying things that you do in this game is to move the body. You do this by facing the body with its head towards you, hitting the interact button that functionally locks you to the gurney and the body and then moving backwards towards the morgue where all the corpses are kept, and where the lights frequently go out without warning. The body that you are carrying, possessed or not, seems to stare directly into your eyes the entire time.

This is Mortuary Assistant, and while I can’t make a universal recommendation due to how utterly unsettling it is, it’s easily the most affecting game I played this year, and one I’ll be thinking about for a long time, hopefully during daylight hours.

8. Baldur’s Gate III
The mystery for me with Baldur’s Gate III is why I don’t like it more. It’s exactly the kind of old-Bioware game that usually drives me into a fugue state until I’ve finished. In Renata Price’s recent GOTY wrapup she mentions that despite the obvious care and skill in design, that it failed to make much of an emotional impact on her, an experience that I also had.

9. Aliens: Dark Descent
I recently watched the director’s cut of Aliens, mostly because of this game. I think in my mind, Aliens the movie had a lot more about space marines gunning down hundreds of xenomorphs as they charged from one end of Hadley’s Hope to the other. In the director’s cut, it’s clear that while encounters between space marines and xenomorphs are louder and less one-sided than the traditional exchanges, they largely end in the same place: a group of terrified humans huddling barricaded in the dark as the Aliens try to claw their way in. I think this misremembering may have created some tension in the reception this game has received, particularly if you only played the early hours.

Dark Descent is not a game about mowing down everything in your path, it’s about carefully choosing your engagements and keeping the hive’s attention as low as possible until you can complete your objectives. Game-wise it plays like something between a very focused Company of Heroes where you can give move orders to the squad but not to individuals. Each individual has powers that can be activated and directed, but the decision was made, correctly I think, that moving individual soldiers would have been too involved. Overall the gameplay is fun but not particularly deep. Success is determined more by how you situate your squad and where you put fields of fire moreso than what you do when the pulse rifles start to go off.

Probably the best thing I can say about this game is that I found myself rewatching the Aliens movie because of it, and because it kept creating situations that reminded me of those movies. A lot of your energy is spent watching an Alien stalk past as your movement scanner beeps faster and faster, hoping that it will turn and leave your poor beleaguered marines alone. A lot more of your energy is spent scavenging for ammo and resources so that the next time the Alien turns the wrong way, you won’t be facing it down with pistols and harsh language.

10. Wildhearts
It’s hard to talk about this one without talking about Monsterhunter, and it’s hard for me to talk about Monsterhunter because I’ve only ever played a little bit of it. The thing that has always made me bounce off of Monsterhunter is, well, the part where you hunt the monsters.Wildhearts is EA’s bald-faced attempt to steal a little marketshare from Monsterhunter. By all accounts, it’s been unsuccessful, and Monsterhunter remains the superior game. I’ve never been able to really get into Monsterhunter though, and the primary one is that I don’t like any part of the premise, and I’ve never really dug the aesthetics. Wildhearts does a little emotional dodge on me that shouldn’t work but does: you’re not hunting animals, creatures who live in the world and have little lives and pains and joys–you’re hunting spirits, creatures that aren’t supposed to be here, that have grown or made sick in a way that is destroying the surrounding landscape.

The art direction is incredible. Each of the monsters that you face are huge, distinctive, and have a sense of wrongness to them that often emanates into the environment. The giant beaver that you face early on creates a sickly orange sap that covers and kills its surrounding environment. The first monster you face, a giant rat, wields a huge tumor on the end of its tail like a mace. There is less a sense that you are slaughtering creatures for their teeth and fur, and more that you are culling sick animals from the ecosystem. Functionally nothing’s really changed, but that’s all I need here, just a sop to the idea that I’m not wiping out buffalo like Wyatt Earp.

The characters in this game are also surprisingly charming, with a lot of internal motivation and attitude packed into less than a dozen or so lines of dialogue. It’s just a charming game, one that takes a lot of inspiration from Princess Mononoke, and is all the better for it.

Honorable Mentions
(I’ll fill in some things about these in a later edit)

11. Spirittea
Spirittea is a Stardew Valley-style management game, wherein you run a sauna for spirits. It takes a LOT of inspiration from Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away, closely following the mechanics of the operation of the ghostly bathhouse in that film. The spirits are based on traditions in Japanese Shinto and each have their own personalities, likes, dislikes and bathing behaviors. And they range in size from a single tile to huge nine tile spirits that take up most of a bathing pool.

The thing about Spirittea is that the management side of things is somewhere in the fine-to-passable range. It’s entertaining enough for a little while, but doesn’t really have enough complexity in design or actions to feel satisfying. The base game is a sequence where you have to saw wood to keep the boiler fed, wash and dry used towels, and lead the spirits to their place in the baths. This last part is the most important, as some spirits don’t like other spirits, some foul the waters, making other spirits unhappy, and many of the spirits have different sizes, or roam around within the tub. So placing the wrong spirits together will lower their happiness, which will lead to a lower payout. In theory, this is a great mechanic, with the likes and dislikes being masked, so you have to keep in your head which spirits don’t like other spirits (this is all based on which season a spirit belongs to, so it’s not that difficult, but it is very easy to assume a spring spirit is actually a summer spirit, and so on). I think the problem is that a lot of the numbers are masked, so it’s not clear what effect your actions actually had on any individual transaction. And overall, it’s not clear if your actions have any strong effects at all.

But Spirittea’s real strength is that it’s secretly an adventure game, one where you are ferreting out lost spirits, unmasking them so that they will become patrons at your bathhouse and stop bothering the local humans. Each of these spirits is a little mini-mystery that you have to solve by gossiping with the locals, finding the right items, and paying attention to different subtle cues within the game world. The spirits all have really fun designs, and it’s all very whimsical; something like a cross between Pokemon and Monkey Island.

12. Jagged Alliance 3
It’s just a solid update of Jagged Alliance 2! We were asking for this for decades and it turns out just doing a solid update of Jagged Alliance 2 is a pretty good game! f*ck!!!

13. Dredge

14. Need for Speed Unbound
Need for Speed Unbound is the negative image of the Forza Horizon series. Horizon wants to be Copachella with cars, an expensive, colorful production that brings in so many name brands and rockstars that it can’t help but be cool through sheer force of economic and cultural willpower. It wants to give you a ton of cars, call you superstar, make you do the latest approved dances, and customize yourself with stuff that could both be conceivably cool and also purchased at Target. Need for Speed wants to be the Fast and the Furious. It wants to be street level, it wants to run from the cops and it wants to be a little bit cheesy and a little bit obnoxious. If it’s not obvious, I vastly prefer the NFS style, along with its progression system and theme of underground racing. Unfortunately the driving model just isn’t nearly as good as Horizon’s, with a drift system that I think is supposed to be easier to use than a simulationist model, but in practice feels really difficult to predict and less effective than just plain breaking traction and spinning your wheels. But all that goes by the side when I’m side by side with a police car and an opposing racer and I send one into oncoming traffic and the other into a concrete pillar (they’ll be fine) leaving me with the lead in the race. The races in NFS are chaotic and can favor very different types of cars depending on the terrain and course, and if it just had Horizon’s driving model, this would be something like a forever game for me.

15. Terra Nil

16. Robocop Rogue City

17. Everspace 2

Yeah, if you listen to Friends at the Table or The Adventure Zone, each show has done a few seasons using various games in the Powered by the Apocalypse family. It's a really strong core system for encouraging cooperative improvised storytelling (hence it being a favorite of those podcasts), and it also works remarkably well to do this kind of narrative game.

(As kazooka says, though, familiarity with the system will DEFINITELY let you see the exploitable seams of Citizen Sleeper a lot more easily.)

Yeah the pass/neutral/fail is pretty cool just from a couple hours. I'm a little worried about one timer that is coming up in a couple cycles...

Dang is there a thread for this game? It's way more compelling than it has any right to be for such a simple interface.

Is it that first big timer? If so, that one definitely got me, and I restarted after — but I kind of wish I hadn’t, and that I had just gone with the flow.

1. PC: Project Zomboid
Still in early access but it is the game I played the most of. The main thing for me was the mod support. I made the game into something I really liked.

2. PS4: The Last of US Part II
I liked it for the story. Gameplay and pacing weren't that good.

3. PC: Vampire Survivors
Odd concept for a game. Half the game plays itself. Still coming up with overpowered builds was fun.

4. PS2: Michigan Report From Hell
A oddball game where you babysit reporters trying to get that big story in a world that has gone silent hill.

5. PC: Marvel Midnight Suns
This would have been rated much higher if I didn't run into game breaking bugs. I went from loving the game to please make it stop.

6. Switch: The Persistent
Another buggy game. When it worked I was having fun. Finding out the best way to deal with enemies was fun. Dying because the game stops letting me switch weapon was not fun. Interesting thing about this game is it is a port of a VR game. I think it would be much better in VR.

7. PC: Realms of Magic
What killed this game for me was the RNG. I would have to gather X of something and X only showed up randomly. I get you need to farm some items but plants don't always give seeds. I liked base building and character building. I liked coming up with ways to kill thing I'm sure wasn't intended. Those random fetch quests just kill the game.

Doh, and by Curse of the Golden Idol I mean the Case of the Golden Idol. A game I love so much I don't remember it's name

What, like this? It's actually really fun.

My time (no pun intended) with 5D multiverse chess had convinced me that there's literally no other option than to play it badly.

Like a good half of my scant wins were entirely accidental.

It is conceivable, but the lowered difficulty setting ("Explorer") apparently prevents promoting characters into a multi-class.

Thanks to staygold, Eleima, and anyone else that may be assisting with the thread this year. I appreciate y'all!

Aside from my trip to Japan, 2023 was a hard year for me and I'm not sad to see it go. I do have 8 games that I want to talk about though.

Short List

Past GotY Lists

1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

My favorite part of TotK might not be the game itself but the events surrounding it's release. I was in Japan around launch and being able to participate in the convenience store lottery to win merch for the game, seeing the advertisements everywhere, visiting the Nintendo store, and posing with the life size statue of TotK Link were a delight as a long time Zelda fan. The Zonai designs also reminded me of the Chinese pottery that I saw at the Nezu museum there as well.

I will say that this is the only game on my GotY list that I haven't beat but I feel like 90+ hours is way more than enough to judge how I feel about it. The new powers really add a lot with ultrahand having a variety of uses with the ability to put things together and ascend with rewind was super helpful in a pinch. There was a moment in the game that took my breath away and I'm sure most people who have played this game knows what it is. So beautiful. The story, characters and art show a world that is so carefully crafted.

2. Resident Evil 2 Remake

Resident Evil 2 Remake is a combination of the slower, key-finding, puzzle solving Resident Evils of yore and the fast paced, action Resident Evils of more recent times. I played Claire route A and then Leon route B and the way they complemented each other and culminated in a true ending was really nice. Mr X and the various lickers were a horrible great time too. Marvin (un)lives on in my playthroughs. Screw the "Organ Trail" part of the sewers too. Nope. Nope. Nope.

3. Catherine: Full Body

Puzzle games usually aren't my thing but since it was part social sim and was so well regarded, I though it was worth a shot. What resulted was the words "Edge! Edge! Edge!" being burned into mind into all eternity as I scrambled up blocks to the top of the tower to face a terrifying boss that was related to Vincent's life. It starts out easily enough but gets harder as you go along. The Rin romance story line that I pursued was surprisingly wholesome.

4. Metroid: Samus Returns

My saga through the Metroid series continues. I think this does what all the games in the series does but extremely well. Your progression is a marvel to watch as you go from a weak, powerless Samus to fully powered and I felt like fist pumping every time that I pulled off a particularly challenging melee counter. Metroid Dread probably is the better game but this is the Metroid game that I beat in 2023.

5. A Plague Tale: Innocence

I am bad at the stealth so it's a miracle that I was able to get through this game. What drew me to it was the mid 14th century France setting and the relationship between the siblings. I feel like there is a tendency in games centered around escort missions to resent the npc that you are escorting but I never felt that way about Hugo. You want to protect him and wish for a happy ending for both of them. The mechanic involving manipulating hordes of rats was really unique and used in a lot of fun ways. Not for the faint of heart though since it gets pretty gory.

6. Yakuza 5

I think Yakuza has taken Assassin's Creed's place as my favorite comfort series. Not a whole lot changes from entry to entry but it's a lot of fun regardless. Yakuza 5 suffered from some pacing issues since it had 5 different playable characters but I liked all their different side stories. One moment you are a taxi driver, then a bear hunter, upcoming pop idol, baseball player and so on.

7. A Short Hike

A game this cute has no right making me tear up like this.

Anyways, very sweet game and I recommend playing without looking up anything beforehand.

8. Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Out of all the games in this trilogy this might be my favorite. It focused on exploration rather than the combat and I thought it was better for it.

Other games I played in 2023

This was actually my GOTY in 2021, and the devs have been very actively sweating away at it ever since, gathering tons of community feedback. While I didn't expect it to be a smash hit at release, I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention.

It lets you play the interesting part of a builder over and over again, throwing in enough curve balls each match and gradually opening up new elements such that it never feels stale. You definitely develop a set of core strategies over time on how to approach different starts, but it's exceptionally rare that things go to plan and you wind up having to adapt, particularly at the higher difficulties where you'll often be sweating those last couple of points to get you over the victory line in time.

Time to stop buying meat games I guess?

Nearly unavoidable. A surprising number of games this year had a fishing and/or cooking focus.
Some might even consider BG3 a meat game.