Games in the Year Awards 2023

Not just the best and worst games of the year, but every new game I played in 2023.

I try to avoid pointless list-making on this blog and have thus never done an official Player is the Thing Game of the Year award. Normally, if a game is worthy of discussion, it will receive a review; that is sufficient.

But a lot of stuff came out in 2023, and I was busier than normal writing books. Quite a lot went played but unreviewed. So to round out the year, I’ve decided to publish the first Player is the Thing Game IN the Year review ceremony.

I’m going to recap every new game that I played in 2023 (regardless of whether or not it was reviewed at the point of release, as there are several games my opinion has changed on in the months since release). Then, at the end, I’ll summarize with my five best and worst games in the year.

DLCs and expansions do not qualify and will not be mentioned here. Neither do the new WoW seasons; those will be written about elsewhere

I only played new games on PS5 and Steam this year. Those will be the only platforms considered, and I’ve presented the list in two sections accordingly. The order is otherwise based on nothing in particular.

PLAYSTATION 5

Dead Space Remake

To start off: an apology. My review for Dead Space’s 2023 remake was extremely harsh. I had a litany of criticisms regarding story, an overreliance on repetitive jump scares, and pointlessly protracted level design. There was much I liked, but overall, my opinion was hardly positive.

The day after I posted the review, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to start again on New Game+. I didn’t know why. But I needed to play a little bit more before I was done with it for good.

This time, I loved it.

Knowing where the jump scares were, being aware that the story wasn’t very good, and having a sense of what the missions wanted beforehand turned Dead Space from an okay-but-frustrating game to an absolutely fantastic one. I no longer was bored by the length of some levels, but found myself desperate for them to go on even longer. I thought the shooting was much better than I’d given it credit for. I enjoyed every second.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much that, for the first time ever, I regretted how critical I had been.

I debated taking down or editing or rewriting my review. In the end, I let it stay up. I still feel like all of my criticisms are valid. But these things seem much more minor to me now when compared to the joy of dismembering necromorphs and finding new power nodes. Dead Space is simply fun. It is engaging, engrossing, and entertaining. That is the highest praise any game can receive.

So I apologize to Dead Space and its developers. This is an excellent game, if flawed; any sci-fi gamer should pick it up.

Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2, alas, deserves no apology. Since writing my review I have had no desire at all to return to it, and I’ve deleted it from my PlayStation 5. I don’t know whether I dislike this game or the next on this list more, but both are high on the list for my least-favorite AAA games of 2023.

Diablo 4

Shortly after writing my non-review for Diablo 4, I sat down to keep playing. My sorceress became stranded in a jungle. After walking around for two hours, struggling to find the next objective, I made it to the next zone.

There, the quest promptly bugged. I had one enemy left to kill in a zone before proceeding; there were no enemies left. I was locked. The only way to break free would have been to restart the entire quest.

This was more than I was willing to do. I haven’t played since.

I have no praise to offer. Worse than anything else, Diablo 4 is boring. It is tedious and uninspired. It isn’t abjectly unplayable, but it does suck, and you shouldn’t play it.

Hogwarts Legacy

I bought Hogwarts Legacy with the full intention of writing a review for it on my blog. Deranged political screeching aside, I wanted to seriously ask whether or not it was a good game.

I made it five minutes in before an NPC “theyed” me. Despite having obviously made a male character, and despite having chosen a male “gender identity,” no NPC in the universe could tell whether I was a man or a woman.

No one talks like this. I had to turn the sound off and ignore the story thenceforth.

I did end up beating the game, but I didn’t feel like I had much to say. Hogwarts Legacy is a basically fine open world wizard simulator. The spellcasting mechanics do a good job of making the player feel like a powerful magician, and I admire a combat system completely centered around magic—it’s very unique, even if it doesn’t always work. Traversal is fun, on the whole, and there are a few memorable quests.

So it’s fine. It’s a fine game. But it’s also laden with obnoxious and unwelcome crafting and base management mechanics, and it does an unimpressive job capturing the atmosphere of Harry Potter (or its own setting). That’s all I have to say.

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

Yet another game I had intended to review, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor ran poorly on my then brand-new PS5, and I thought it was worse, overall, than the previous game. I did beat it, but the gameplay had me frustrated, the level design was almost always unnecessarily confusing, and the open world elements were tedious. The story continued with all of Fallen Order’s vices and represented a misunderstanding Star Wars, but lacked any of the small glimmers of Chris Avellone brilliance that shone through the first game’s characters.

I didn’t hate Jedi Survivor. I also didn’t like it, and a review at the time would have been scathing. The only thing that excited me was the Blaster + Lightsaber stance unlocked about halfway through, which lived up to my expectations. It’s a microscopic thing, but there are no other action games where the player can use a sword and pistol at the same time. This is obviously a fantastic idea for a game about being a Jedi. I was generally impressed with how Survivor pulled it off.

But I don’t have much else to praise. It’s almost completely left my memory.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Rogue City was a blindside broadside of a game and stands out as one of 2023’s major highlights for games. My review was so gushing in praise that I don’t know what I could possibly add. I don’t have much of an urge to revisit it (yet), but I stand by what I said: games like Rogue City are why I love videogames.

AC: Mirage

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage was supposed to return to the series’ roots. Set in Baghdad during the Golden Age of Islam, it would be a callback it the original game. A more focused experience. It would take fewer than 30 hours to 100%. Assassin’s Creed would finally be good again.

Given the above factors, I was anticipating Mirage with unfounded optimism all year. The resultant game proved nothing like I’d hoped. I knew I was going to hate it after the tutorial, and I only made it an hour or two beyond that.

The story is incoherent even by AC standards. The combat is barebones. The stealth is flourishless. Even the graphics and animations are ugly. It’s just another boring Ubisoft game, although Baghdad is certainly beautiful from up high.

Assassin’s Creed and I may be done with each other permanently after this. It’s not a series that’s for me anymore.

Red Dead Redemption Remastered (Honorable Mention)

I gave in and bought Red Dead Redemption’s PS5 re-release in October after I realized it was the best version of the game that would ever be released, since it could run at 60fps, and no remake would ever come. Growing up, RDR was my favorite game. I adored everything about it. I played it endlessly.

I’ve only beaten it once since 2010. I usually play through the first act, then lose interest.

This time I made it to the third act. Then I lost interest.

RDR looks decent in 4k and feels fantastic at 60fps. But it hasn’t aged very well. As much as I like the story, the Rockstar storytelling structure feels antiquated and artificial in this advanced year of 2023. The horse mechanics are terrible, and the shooting is no better. I never made a conscious decision to give up on it, and I still might finish it before the year is out, but if I do, it will only be through a sense of duty to my 12-year-old self.

Red Dead Redemption will forever remain a keystone development on the road to modern (good) open world game design. But I’m not sure I can recommend it to anyone who’s never played it before.

STEAM

Baldur’s Gate 3

Bugs nearly soured BG3 for me after an amazing time playing Act 1 in Early Access. I went on a legendary binge of this game upon its release in August, and although I liked it a lot, the cracks were hard to ignore—especially when I lost several hours of playtime and nearly my entire 100-hour save.

It seems like most of these issues have been ironed out, and some of my criticisms of the story have also been patched in one way or another. Larian’s support for the game post-release has been extraordinary, and I hope it continues.

But my second playthrough of the full game did not go well. I resolved myself to play a Dark Elf sorcerer, to romance Astarion, to see the game as a non-Origin PC, and to be as evil as possible in every scenario.

I wanted to test the game. I wanted to see its limits. I wanted to see what broke.

The answer was everything. The evil path, a path much less traveled than its counterparts, was broken in almost every way. I encountered an endless cascade of bugs and technical issues. My dialogue options rarely reflected how I was feeling, and the evil companion, who you can only recruit by being horrifically evil, turned out to be a good girl after all—she was just mind controlled! She didn’t want to be bad!

Great. I did. And I only didn’t kill you because I, myself, am evil. So… the writers didn’t think this one through, huh?

In the end, I made it to Act III and quit. My choices did not feel honored. As a custom non-Dark Urge character, the Origin questline was replaced with… nothing. Literally. There was simply less to the game. Sorcerer sucked profoundly compared to Magician at level 11-12, and I was sick of constant combat. But it was the romance with Astarion that pissed me off for good. I made it all the way to the end, and he demanded that become this thrall. If I told him no—which of course I would, because I was playing as an evil dominatrix sorceress dark elf—he broke it off between us.

Uh. That’s the resolution? That’s it? Are you kidding me?

Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe it was bugged and something skipped—this seems probable. But whatever the case, this pissed me off so much that I lost all desire to play. It felt totally wrong for the character and like a violation of how our relationship had proceeded up to this point. I was an hour or two away from getting my “Beat the game on hard” achievement, and I never got it.

In Early Access, I would have rated BG3 at 100/100. After my first playthrough, all bugs considered, it was more like an 85/100. After this third full playthrough, my opinion was about 40/100. BG3’s “evil” path blows. It’s really bad, probably in part due to now-fixed technical issues. I hated almost every minute of it.

I still like BG3. It might be the best game I’ve played this year overall, still. But to say my opinion has plummeted as the months have passed would be an understatement.

Wartales

I played Wartales extensively in Early Access but held off revisiting it until its full release. As a hardcore strategy/tactics game it isn’t the kind of thing I would normally review on this blog, but I did like it a lot, and I was eager for more content.

The ultimate version I ended up playing a few months ago was solid. Not amazing, but good, with a lot of great incentives design and engaging gameplay. I still like Wartales.

In the end, I never finished it. I made it to the final zone before losing interest. I found managing my mercenaries to be increasingly tedious as time went on, and every combat encounter felt very similar. I’d still like to go back and beat it—but honestly, at this point, I doubt I will.

Rogue Trader

Not only did I have every intention of reviewing Rogue Trader as my final official review of 2023, but I had already started drafting that review at the time I decided I wouldn’t be able to do any such thing. A small section of this article will have to suffice instead.

Rogue Trader is brilliant. Its ridiculously crunchy combat is as odious as it is addictive. The depth of the systems is artificially created through complexity, and for the first ten or so hours I found this infuriating. But once I got used to some of its intricacies, I found that I was unable to put it down. Rogue Trader siphoned my life away all week like a genestealer. I stayed up until 5am playing it, three nights in a row.

The story is surprisingly good, too. I mean very surprisingly. The characters are all distinctive and interesting, with one or two exceptions, and the dialogue manages to capture their voices with immaculate ease. But I feel that the writers were too reliant on pet names—“Shereen, Elantach, Lord Captain”—to find the voice of a companion in dialogue. It’s also very overwritten.

I’ve accused other games, like Disco Elysium, of being insufficiently trimmed during the editing process before making it to the final game. But Rogue Trader is about twice as pointlessly verbose as DE, and it’s a much less story-obsessed game.

Being a good writer isn’t just writing lots of good dialogue and prose. At least as important is the ability to know what to cut out—and especially in dialogue, Rogue Trader could have been significantly trimmed down.

Yet even so, I was completely rapt by the story (although I skimmed an awful lot). I was absolutely loving Rogue Trader.

Then I made it to Act IV, and the entire game broke.

I wrote in my Steam review that Rogue Trader is to Warhammer: 40,000 as Knights of the Old Republic 2 is to Star Wars. I can still think of no better way to analogize its predicament. I waited patiently for this game to leave EA for years, but the last third of its campaign appears to be literally unplayable. I had only minor issues leading up to this point, but within an hour in Act IV, I:

• …had a dead character I never recruited give me council on how to manage my colonies;

• …was requested to tend to an emergency on the bridge that never came;

• …went to a planet for a mission that never triggered;

• …discovered that any item that gives +AP didn’t work;

• …realized that half of my abilities were doing nothing;

• …had a conversation between my Eldar GF and my Seneschal that took place within a wall, while both parties were on opposite sides of the ship;

• …had a meaningful meditation session with my Eldar GF where she was absent and had no portrait;

• …had my space marine companion clone himself;

• …saw that half of the building chain pre-requisites did not exist;

• …and started to find countless text errors in dialogue, which was otherwise, up to this point, flawlessly edited in every respect (aside from rare singular “theys”).

I had so much fun in Rogue Trader up to this point that I would normally have pressed on anyway. But I basically can’t. The game is entirely broken. Nothing works. I’m going to get softlocked if I continue. So I’ll wait.

Rogue Trader, if fixed, will be the best 40k game on the market (for those of patient temperament) and one of the best cRPGs ever made. As it is, it’s literally unfinished.

Battlebit: Remastered

Battlebit took the world by storm earlier this year, and as a fan of old school Battlefield games growing up, I knew I had to give it a try. By the time I finally stopped playing I’d logged about 30 hours, and I decided I couldn’t continue.

I don’t play multiplayer games anymore (except WoW). I play multiplayer shooters only on rare occasions. And I am laughably bad at Battlebit. I can barely manage a 1:1 KD, and often do worse. It just isn’t my kind of game. I’m sure I would have liked it as a kid, but I’m not a kid, and I don’t.

It is a good game at its core. But I have a lot of criticisms. I think armor on headshots is insane: you can nail a head with a .50cal at 1000 yards in this game, and your reward will be a blue hitmarker—and no kill. Armor in general pisses me off badly, because it does nothing but punish accuracy and reward respawning. But worse is the progression scheme, which is just oppressively slow. I’m level 30 after playing 30 hours. I need to get to level 200 to unlock the gun I want.

No thanks.

Starship Troopers: Extermination

Although still in Early Access, I want to briefly mention Starship Troopers: Extermination to recognize it as an extremely promising mass co-op PvE shooter. In Extermination, 16 players build a base and/or gather supplies and wipe out bugs across an alien planet, generally coming down to wave-based survival.

It’s still early. Good progress has been made, but I’d like to wait for the next big update before playing much more. But I really like what’s currently there. Bug dismemberment physics will elevate the game from good to great, and I’m hoping we get a few more guns soon.

Aliens: Dark Descent

At the end of my review for Dark Descent I wrote that I intended to immediately restart the game on Hard and see where it took me. I never did end up getting around to playing it again. But that shouldn’t be taken as a criticism. Dark Descent remains every bit as good in my mind as I said it was on release, and is likely much better. The post-launch support has been robust and impressive, and many of my issues will have been fixed by now.

The story is unfixable, alas. But the rest of the game is still worth it.

System Shock (2023)

I strongly disliked System Shock’s remake this year, despite years of anticipation. I had almost forgotten about it, somehow, until I noticed it in my Steam Year in Review statistics.

As of December 2023, I stand by everything I wrote. My opinion hasn’t softened at all. I don’t have much praise to offer. Gloomwood, Blood West, and Amnesia: The Bunker are all much better ImSim-likes for you to spend your time on. System Shock is only good for being an example of what games were like a long, long time ago.

Starfield

Starfield is another game that my non-review didn’t go far enough in chastising. Every time I see an ounce of praise for it, I want to tear out my hair. I can’t stand this game. It’s as bad as anything on this list, but also lacks any soul or inspiration. It’s exactly what I don’t want out of AAA gaming. But I’ll leave my ranting there.

Atomic Heart

At the time of my review, I thought Atomic Heart had about as much going for it as it did against it. But the scales have gradually slipped over the year, as I forget what I disliked more and more with the passing of the months.

Looking back now, considering all of the far worse games that have come out this year, I would say that Atomic Heart is a good—but flawed—game. It’s a decidedly AA Russian BioShock knock-off, and you know what? It’s fine.

Boltgun

The long-awaited Boltgun brought Warhammer 40,000 to boomer shooter territory with this low-grade Doom clone. Despite a critical consumer reception, I deliberately held off from reviewing Boltgun, because I thought it was so unbelievably bad.

I love boomer shooters. I also really like Warhammer. But Boltgun is the worst retro FPS on the market. It has no progression schemes, bad weapon design, ugly art (it’s not “retro”—it’s cheap), terrible boss fights, and without any question the worst level design of any game I’ve ever played. Its fantastic reviews on Steam are almost all from people who played it for an hour or two, gave it a thumbs up because it’s Warhammer, and then never played it again. They certainly never beat it.

But I beat it. I beat the whole thing. Now listen to me when I say: stay far away. Boltgun is a cash-in on WH40k and boomer shooters. It’s nothing more than that.

Kill the Crows

Kill the Crows is not a cash-in. It’s an obscure Korean-developed Western top-down arena shooter, released for $5 on Steam a few months ago. I can’t say that it’s my kind of game overall, but I gave it a try anyway, and I’m glad I did. It nails the Western aesthetic and has a great selection of six-shooters. I 100%ed it in a few hours on release, but a recent update added in a lot more for me to do.

I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m pretty bad at it, so I might not ever. But if you want revolvers to shoot or birds to kill, and you have a podcast to listen to, Kill the Crows is an excellent choice for a game to play.

Amnesia: The Bunker

I’ve never played the original Amnesia, but the moment I read The Bunker’s premise, I was sold. I bought it instantly. I’m not a huge fan of survival games in general, but this seemed to be a World War 1 horror ImSim-like in the style of Aliens: Isolation, and that was enough for me.

I beat it. But I’m still not sure what I think. While I like almost everything that The Bunker is trying to do, it’s an uneven experience, sullied by some poor balance—the revolver sucks and rat combat is annoying—and an unfortunate yet undeniable fact that, for a horror game, it isn’t very scary.

My biggest criticism is the main villain. The Bunker is an obvious Alien: Isolation rip-off (without a motion detector), and everything invented to substitute for the motion detector feels just like that—a substitute. Meanwhile Isolation works precisely because of how frightening the xenomorph is, but the goopy Clifford that we meet here in 1916 France is simply not intimidating. He’s just a dog with a funny face.

But it’s atmospheric, and it has some great, memorable levels. When the player is on the edge, working against the clock, just barely evading death but still making it from one zone to the next, it’s a very compelling game, and tense as hell. The problem is that this only works so long as you aren’t dying. Once you die, it’s tedious, not scary, and you get to see how silly the dog really is.

I recommend The Bunker overall, mostly for how cheap it is, and I’m glad I played it. But it didn’t leave a huge impression on me.

Trepang^2

Trepang^2 is Fear-inspired FPS that I played for the purpose of a review. It seemed like my kind of game: a fast-paced action-heavy shooter with old school sensibilities and dual-wielded shotguns.

But ultimately I found it to be totally uninspired. Its major innovation is that it has bullet time and that you can jump pretty high. These things are okay, I guess, but the rest of the mechanics are copy-and-pasted from a thousand other indistinguishable shooters. Its Crysis-style weapon mod system is bizarre and misplaced, given the two-weapon system and emphasis on running and gunning. Guns are too inaccurate and enemies are too bullet spongey. It’s ridiculously short, even for its low price, and the levels are awful.

Trepang^2 isn’t bad or offensive enough to hate, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, except for a dollar or two. It’s just not that interesting.

En Garde

En Garde is swashbuckling simulator about tickling Spaniards to sleep with a rapier. It’s sort of a third person Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, but with a Renaissance theme and G-rated aesthetics. I have to admire any game with such a strong identity, and although I found it to be pretty short and a tad frustrating in places, it’s the sort of bedrock indie game that keeps the industry afloat these days. I think it would be a good, inoffensive game for young kids. That’s about all there is to say.

THE BEST AND WORST GAMES OF THE YEAR

So that is the complete list of every new game I played this year. But which were the best—and which were the worst? This is really what you’re here for, so I won’t hold back any longer: here are the top five best and worst new games of 2023. Unlike the above, games released from Early Access are eligible for these awards.

I’ve already spoken my peace on each and linked to any relevant reviews, so refer to the above for explanation.

The Worst

5. System Shock

4. Spider-Man 2

3. Diablo 4

2. Boltgun

1. Starfield

The Best

5. Dead Space

4. Rogue Trader

3. Baldur’s Gate 3

2. Aliens: Dark Descent

1. RoboCop: Rogue City

An honorable mention is owed to Blood West, which is disqualified from this list for being an Early Access game released in a confusing way. I likely would have considered it my GotY last year, had I bothered to award one.

I knew straight away that Dark Descent and Rogue City were my two favorite games this year, but it was still a hard list to compile. I haven’t and likely won’t ever play these two as much as I have BG3 and Rogue Trader, yet there’s something about them that towers over my memory. They were fantastic experiences begun with low expectations. They’re what truly stand out to me in 2023.

It's possible that BG3 deserves the #1 place. There’s no question that its first act is the best RPG I’ve ever played. It is excellent on every front. But there are holes in the rest of the experience, and my replaythrough showed how thin the illusion of agency is in most places. For these reasons I’ve demoted it to #3.

As for Rogue Trader, its spot really belongs to Blood West. The technical state of its release is inexcusable. But I’m including it anyway, because it’s a relentlessly addictive game and an excellent cRPG. I like it so much that, much as with Blood West, being fucked over by bugs seems like a small issue.

This isn’t meant to be a list of the games that I thought were literally, objectively best, but the ones I liked the most—and with all said and done, this is that list.

A Final Word On 2023

There’s no doubt that 2023 was an excellent year for games, especially indie and AA. But this was also the first year in gaming where every single game I played had major, game-breaking technical issues. I encountered severe bugs in every game listed above except Dead Space. From performance issues to save file corruption, there has never been a glitchier year for video games—even from major AAA releases like Spider-Man 2, which are usually polished.

This cannot become normal. If games need to be smaller to have fewer issues, so be it. But we cannot have an industry where it is normal to experience crashes, save loss, and to become trapped in walls multiple times per playthrough. That will hold us back far more than having shitty award ceremonies or too many live service MMOs on the market.