Rich's GOTY List - 2023, Year of the Honorable Mention

Here, amid the worst year of gaming, we got to play some incredible games.

Artists, writers, and creatives had a banner year when you look at the quality of their work. In this way, 2023 is no different than any other year, really, because that's just what artists do. They see the world, and they translate it into their medium of choice, making invisible or hidden aspects of existence visible. Artists have been making incredible work for a long time, year after year.

Surrounding the artists, however, is the realm where content is king, where the forces of capital see creative work as content, not art, and where the promise of unlimited content through AI makes artists suddenly disposable. Here, the grifters and thieves thrive. The 4-hour hbomberguy video does a terrific job outlining just how callously grifters shortcut around the hard work of making a thing and simply monetize the labor of actual creatives, passing it off as their own.

The gatekeepers of this realm do not value artists, either. I write this list a few days after Disney's Bob Iger blamed a lackluster movie opening on the fact that the writers were too caught up in having "messages" in their superhero flicks and should focus instead on "entertainment."

Capital aims everything at generating more capital for the people on top, and we have built society to accomodate what is essentially a pyramid scheme.

The perspectives of artists threaten that.

Artists don't tend to write stories about how great, good, and wise the powerful are or how they need their resources protected from the unwashed, undeserving masses. Because holy f*ck, that's clearly an awful premise to build something around. Underdogs and scrappy outsiders are frequent protagonists for a reason. This is why the people who profit from the status quo don't want anything with an "agenda." Well, that's not quite true. They want exclusively work that has an agenda of codifying the status quo.

Artists understand that perspective is not only impossible to remove from any work (no matter how seemingly facile the work) but it is essential. This is one reason AI writing and art is so poor: it lacks any coherent perspective. It is a word salad, a photocopy of a photocopy, with no point of view bringing its disparate mimicked phrases together.

The lack of POV means that even though it resembles having meaning, it doesn't. It can't.

Point of view is everything.

We all exist in the world, which is the way that it is, and we all have feelings about it. Creatives process these feelings coherently onto the page or screen, forming paths of connection with the audience. As we play a game or read a book, we start to see our world and process our feelings about it through the eyes of the work. Even if the work is light, simple, and fun. Even simple entertainment is trying to entertain us from a particular place and for a particular reason.

When I look at my list of games, I'm grateful for the talent of human beings, and I'm especially grateful for their perspectives. The Game Awards Future Class wrote a letter urging Keighly to recognize the ongoing genocide. Earlier this year I got to attend a talk from Meghna Jayanth that changed the way I think about where games fit into the world today and their relationship to capital. Despite all of the layoffs in the industry, the misery of the world, and the rampant injustices, some incredibly talented people got to share their work and their perspectives. And it mattered. Quite a bit.

With that, we come to my GOTY list. I would like to dub this "The Year of the Honorable Mention." The amount of staggering, incredible work that saw daylight this year gave me so much hope for humanity. There's a lot of awful in the world right now, but creatives shined a lot of much need light into the darkness.

Here's some of that work that spoke to me, in a rough order reflecting my feelings of the moment.

2023's GOTY - Baldur's Gate 3

There's a reason Baldur's Gate 3 continues to inspire memes and draw people in. Despite the baggage of having to deal with a 5e ruleset and the challenges inherent in resurrecting a decades old franchise, BG3 sent a shock through the world of gaming. Going into the year, I had assumed it would be a fun niche game and achieve success on par with Larian's other recent work. Instead, it ate the lunch of just about every other Triple-A game out there - particularly Starfield.

The reason, if the long preamble to my list didn't tip you off, is perspective. Baldur's Gate 3 is brimming with perspective. As a game about agency, it is filled with characters who have their own perspectives, ideas, and goals. It is a meme-able game because the writing is specific, because it has a perspective. Shadowheart, Astarion, Lae'zel, Karlach, Wyll, and even Gale are memorable in a way that what's his face with the cowboy hat in Starfield just isn't.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a landmark game that is going to change gaming for years to come. In many ways it is a sharp reaction to the path mainstream games went down, an illumination of a different, more interesting path.

Alan Wake 2

Anyone who listens to our little podcast knows that I love games that swing for the fences. The reason games like Neurocracy2049 and Immortality were previous GOTYs for me was because they took big, unique swings. Of course, Alan Wake 2 has a bigger budget than either of those games, which makes its big swing more surprising. This would have been an easy game for Remedy to play it somewhat safe and restrained. I'm so glad they gave us this version instead.

To me, Alan Wake 2 is the ultimate homage to creative work. I've outlined how devalued it is in society, so seeing it matter (to paranatural extents) is tremendously rewarding. This is a game full of original music, film, photography, prose, and poetry. And it's all incredibly compelling. Typically, when you see one artistic medium expressed within a different artistic medium, it doesn't land. This is not the case with Alan Wake 2. Despite being about art literally causing tremendous harm, it's actually a love letter to art.

Creepy, horrifying, hilarious, exciting, and thought-provoking, Alan Wake 2 continues to linger with me and has made me very excited for where Remedy goes next.

Octopath Traveler 2

Octopath Traveler 2 would be getting a larger portion of the conversation if it had come out later in the year and/or if Baldur's Gate 3 didn't exist. Octopath 2 deserves better.

It is revolutionary, narratively speaking. The Canterbury Tales style and smartly constructed series of short narratives building to a larger picture made it an RPG that effortlessly swings between a big grand epic and smaller, intimate moments. Improving on its predecessor in just about every way, Octopath Traveler 2 is also full of unique characters with interesting perspectives. Its job-based character system and surprisingly robust loot options leave plenty of room for interesting strategic play and unique set ups. It is wild to think of a game as big as Octopath 2 as a hidden gem, but I suspect this is going to be a game that RPG lovers are going to keep on discovering in the coming years.

Moonring

It wouldn't be a TheHarpoMarxist GOTY list without a game like Moonring. A free drop from Fable developer Dene Carter, this is a stunning iteration on an old school Ultima style game. Carter also understands the value of when to hold back information and lore, and when to center it. Moonring uses its unique color palette, gorgeous score, and evocative imagery to draw players into a surprising narrative. It is crunchy but approachable mechanically, and narratively it feels alien but familiar in delightful ways.

Lies of P

There is simply no reason Bloodborne-meets-Pinocchio should work. It is truly absurd that it does. And even absurd that, in a year that saw a lot of folks looking to mimic From's signature style, Lies of P was the clear standout. This is because it brought its own ideas to the table. The weapon system, where any top half of a weapon can be affixed to any handle, creates so many options. Unlike most games that copy from From, Lies of P has a perspective on how it wants to handle parrying and dodging. Most surprisingly, it has a perspective on the original novel of Pinocchio as well as a robust understanding of the perils and pitfalls society faces as robotics and automation continue their ascent.

Labyrinth of Zangetsu

You ever just want to roll up six adventurers and send them into a dungeon? OF COURSE YOU DO. Everyone wants this. Labyrinth of Zangetsu is an incredible dRPG. With a beautiful, ink-based art style that sparing deploys color to terrific effect, it manages the neat trick of scratching your Wizardry-nostalgia button while improving and iterating on long-established dRPG mechanics. There are some clever puzzles and plenty of dastardly traps to navigate. This is a game which might just live on my Switch forever.

Armored Core VI

From's bleak and beautiful take on mech action is a triumph for the kind of gamer that wants to review specs and approach exciting, fast-paced combat like it's a puzzle. Typically, the turn-based gamers are the ones rewarded for careful gearing up and detailed reviewing of stats. Armored Core VI brings the mental thrill of strategy gaming into the twitched-based world of third-person action. It also sees From software engaging with a different kind of storytelling. While retaining the bleakness of a Dark Souls game and relishing From's ability to be restrained, Armored Core VI is suprisingly vivid in its depiction of characters and is more overtly plot-driven than other From games.

The Iron Oath

2023 was a tremendous year for ragtag mercenary companies getting together to scrap for resources and equipment while expanding their roster, gaining renown, and starting to rake in the big bucks. Wartales, Jagged Alliance 3, and Phantom Brigade took a lot of the oxygen in the merc room, but the best mercenary game in 2023 was The Iron Oath: an indie game with unique classes, deep but digestible systems, and a surprisingly gripping revenge narrative that struck all the right notes for me. Perspective is again critical here, with The Iron Oath being deeply interested in the passage of time. Timers and equipment degradation can be tricky to translate into fun gameplay, so The Iron Oath favors expressing ideas about time in other ways. Stay in a dungeon too long, and things will start going south as morale tanks and units become exhausted. The recovery time for injuries feels real. Time comes for all your units, as fresh-faced rookies age into hardened veterans and eventually retire. Even the world of the setting, which faces a sword of Damacles of its own, feels the weight of time.

Forspoken

Forspoken is an incredible Triple-A action game that was on the receiving end of harsh criticism that was completely overblown. Its sins were no greater than any other Triple-A game playing in that budget range. A terrible demo combined with a slow, poorly written opening led a lot of people to overlook one of the most spectacular games of the year. Oh, and the racism. Our society has a lot of room for quippy white guys, but none for quippy anyone-else. Which is a shame, because Ella Balinska delivers an incredible performance, particularly in the late game.

My most memorable action sequence this year came from what was essentially a random encounter in Forspoken. There's a scene where you stumble across a zombie horde—a true horde. Taking advantage of a new engine and what the PS5 can do, Forspoken littered this scene with enemies. It was a technical marvel that ruined horde encounters in other games. Fast forward months later, when Final Fantasy XVI was trying to convey being outnumbered with waves of 8 enemies at a time. I couldn't help but think of Forspoken: hundreds of foes surrounding me and the dread of actually feeling outnumbered. Attacks coming from everywhere, no chance to breathe. Desperately trying to find openings to fire off spells and thin the horde. Final Fantasy tried to lean on music and stakes, but it just didn't compare. Clive hardly broke a sweat.

Games (and many forms of media) tend to fall apart toward the end. Less time is spent polishing these sections often lead to diminishing returns. This makes sense, as more players will see the start of the journey than the end, but Forspoken saves its best narrative and gameplay punches for the late game. Once Freya has all her powers and you, as the player, have wrapped your head around its unique mechanical choices, Forspoken dials in narratively and it absolutely sings. The clumsy writing of the first half gives way to much more personalized, effective, and well-paced storytelling as the mechanics all click together beautifully. I hope this game finds its audience in the future, and then gets a Dragon's Dogma style treatment. It more than deserves it.

Season: A Letter to the Future

Season was one of the first games I played in 2023. It had a challenging development process, but what they put together is easily one of the most beautiful games of year. The perspective regarding the passage of time, the idea of apocalypse, and what it means to document something before it ends will gut most players. Season is a powerful, thoughtful gem of a game.

Honorable Mentions:
I could probably have a GOTY list that has thirty games on it. Instead, I've got The Year of the Honorable Mention. Below are other games, super deserving of being on a GOTY list. I'll break them down with some Bespoke Honorable Mention categories.

---The Tentpole Releases That Could Reasonably Win GOTY Most Years But Here They Are on an Honorable Mention List---

Tears of the Kingdom - TotK features some amazing design choices. More narratively compelling to me than BotW, I have no doubt we'll feel its impact on game design for years to come.

Jedi Survivor - Though I bounced off of the first Star Wars - Jedi game, Survivor hooked me.

---The Good Goth Games (GGG) Honorable Mention List---

The Last Faith - I love me a Castlvaniod, and though The Last Faith doesn't come armed with many original ideas, it is extremely fun with a surprisingly large map, tight combat, and interesting puzzles.

Redemption Reapers - The characters were my "emotional support goths" for early in the year. Another terrific mercenary-based strategy game.

---The Don't Be Fooled By the Childlike Graphics and Themes, These Games Punch Hard Honorable Mention List---

In Stars and Time - A beautiful time loop RPG that covers a lot of hard ground with wit, humor, and grace. A deeply egalitarian game that was close to being on my main list.

Sea of Stars - This indie RPG has garnered a lot of good attention for a reason— it's terrific. The combat is tight, the characters are fun to hang around, and the exploration is wonderful.

---The Old School Gamers Rejoice Honorable Mention List---

Caves of Lore - Another indie RPG gem that deserves more time in the spotlight. Like Moonring, it owes a lot of what it's doing to Ultima (though more Ultima 6 than Ultima 4 or 5). In an ordinary year, I would have gone much deeper down this delightful rabbit hole.

Shardpunk: Verminfall - Tactics lovers will feast on Shardpunk when they discover this exists. It came from nowhere and surprised me. Deliciously balanced and loads of fun.

---The One Last Honorable Mention That Could Very Well Have Made the Main List if it Didn't Have a Producer Being a Total Jerk Publicly---

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader - Despite being naive to Warhammer, Rogue Trader immediately sucked me in. A deep tactics game, with lore that feels like Jane Austen having a splatterpunk nightmare vision of hell, Rogue Trader is a game I look forward to being lost in this holiday season. I'm disappointed that after what seemed like relatively robust romance options in WotR, Owlcat has regressed. The producer's statements are totally weird and unacceptable. And that casts a pall on an otherwise absurdly fun game. Like I've been saying, point of view matters. More than ever.