2023 was a fun year overall, for me personally, but also pretty terrible for the world at large. Free Palestine. Here’s a list of games I’ve played and why they’re in my top ten. Solidarity for the working class.
Shapez is a streamlined factory management game where the things you build are colored shapes in their most abstract senses. Starting very simple and quickly building up the complexity, I had a really good time with a game that was not too concerned about optimizing and making the most of limited resources. Creating complex patterns of machines that would take shapes and colors, cut them, rotate them and fuse them without any kind of stress was really enjoyable. It became a bit too complex for me at some point and I couldn’t really figure out what to do, so I dropped the game, but otherwise I had a great time!
I don’t really consider myself a big Baldur’s Gate fan, I had dabbled in the first two game in a very limited capacity, but I was too young to really enjoy these at the time and couldn’t wrap my head around the THAC0 systems and other intricacies of dungeons and dragons. I had always heard that they were good games, but as the times went my bread and butter was more like the Dragon Ages and other more action-RPG oriented titles. The allure of playing one of these games in co-op really drew me in, and the buzz was positively glowing, so I went into Baldur’s Gate 3 a bit unsure. The uncertainty didn’t last long, this is an amazing game.
Salt & Sanctuary is an interesting 2D Souls-like with an artstyle and overall control feeling that really turned me off. It’s a bit of a bummer, because it also felt like a metroidvania in some capacity and the skill tree/item systems were really speaking out to me. Ultimately it was a bit too “floaty” and unprecise, while at the same time requiring too much precision, for me to stick with.
Hob is a cute little zelda-like adventure game with a minimalist UI, no dialogue and a clean artstyle. Controlling the titular Hob, you solve puzzles by using your mechanical arm, fight enemies and explore the world. I really wanted to give it a shot, but after barely a few hours in, I was completely stuck and decided to give it up after some more mindless revisit of all the locations I already had access to.
The bar was incredibly high for Diablo 4, the expectations were probably impossible to meet and the realities of game development in the year of our lord 2023 for a company like Blizzard seemingly was writing on the wall that it would embrace the “live service” moniker in ways Diablo 3 hadn’t in the past. I love action RPGs, they’re probably up there as my favorite genre of game, I also have a lot of fond memories of Diablo 1, had a ton of fun with Diablo 2 and played Diablo 3 to hell and back. How does 4 fare against the legacy of its predecessors? Not perfectly, but pretty well, I’d say!
The Messenger is pretty neat, with great chiptuney music, impressive pixel art and tight gameplay, it’s a Ninja Gaiden-esque love letter that evolves into an interesting dual-world metroidvania after you think the game might be over. I was turned off by the writing of the game, which kinda clashed with the overall themes, but still had a pretty good time with it!
Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos reminds me of A Link To The Past in an okay-ish way, a special kind of affect that I would attribute to other games from my past like Graal Online. A somewhat fine experience, Rogue Heroes is a bit unfocused and makes strange decisions on the multiplayer side, but overall I had fun with my friends playing it. It’s certainly neat and if you’re in the mood for some co-op adventuring, it might occupy your time for a bit!
XCOM 2 is the fantastic follow-up to the reboot of the franchise of the same name where you play a covert militaristic group trying to save the world from aliens by sending soldiers on missions, managing your resources and attempting to accomplish certain objectives under a time pressure in order to avoid a wide range of dire consequences. I had a great time playing it on the easiest difficulty with a large dose of save scumming, but regardless of if that’s the way XCOM should be played, it’s just a good time.
Forager is a pretty neat game where you collect resources, build things, fight monsters, level up and go through an upgrade tree for your various tools, buy more land to explore, complete quests, unlock plenty of skills and complete challenges. My experience with it was a rollercoaster of mixed feelings - at first it was pretty slow and the upgrades were incomprehensible, but then progression became too fast and the upgrades didn’t come quick enough. I had a good time with it, but it lost focus too rapidly for me.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a really unique adventure game where you navigate a fake internet-alike as a moderator of sorts, trying to ban offenders and helping people with their problems by solving puzzles, installing apps and navigating through a lot of early geocities/90s-inspired nostalgia. With great humor and pointed design, it was an interesting experience, but I couldn’t really get into it and kinda checked out of figuring out everything by myself at some point.
From the outside looking in, Big Pharma seemed like one of these “factory games” to me, where you would manage a pharmaceutical company, trying to build machines and combine products into more and more efficient medicines while discovering new technologies and improving your setup at your pace. I was a bit disappointed with the scenario-based approach of the game and the more puzzle-based systems. Big Pharma is probably really neat for some people, but it didn’t scratch the itch I wanted personally!
Grounded is a neat little twist on the survival genre where your characters are shrunk down and must content with hunger, thirst and the dangers of insects roaming around a backyard while exploring every nook and cranny for resources, power ups and secrets. I had a good time going through the story, even the next thing I needed to do wasn’t clear at times and there were some slight hurdles in the progression that felt more frustrating than challenging. Overall, a cool game!
Owlboy is a beautiful, inventive and unique 2D platformer full of heart where you play an owl against incredible odds and danger, flying around, carrying other characters and using their weapons while dodging dangers, fighting bosses, collecting coins and participating into different gameplay sequences that keep you on your toes. For all its beauty and care, I didn’t have that great of a time with Owlboy. I felt like the controls were a bit confusing and made combat something that could go downhill very fast.
Antimatter Dimensions is a recent idle game released on Steam where you buy dimensions to create antimatter. You buy dimensions that create dimensions that create antimatter until the point where you can reset the world, buy upgrades and start again. There are a lot of challenges to complete, achievements to unlock and the numbers get really big. That’s kinda what turned me off from the game; it seems like forward progress only meant that the number got bigger through some extra layers above the basic gameplay and at no point I got curious about what I could be unlocking next.
Clicker Heroes 2 is the ill-fated follow up to the web idle game of the same name, attempting something quite daring - being a non free-to-play idle game on steam - so that got my interest when it was announced. Because of many factors, the development of the game didn’t go so well and the early access phase was as far as it went. I had still bought it, so I wanted to give it a look and see what was there. It was a bit of a mess for sure, some mechanics felt underbaked, others were quite interesting but underutilized, and overall there was nothing that grabbed me in the game.
Dicey Dungeons is an amazing roguelike where you play a Dice adventurer going through a few floors of a dungeon, fighting enemies by throwing dice and using equipment via the numbers you’ve thrown, getting new stuff, improving it, using special character powers and limit breaks in order to overcome a wide array of colorful and sometimes tricky foes. A great game with really good music and mechanics, I had an absolute blast with it, even if I regretfully couldn’t stomach taking the time to do everything in the game.
Wizard and Minion Idle (WAMI) is an idle game inspired by NGU Idle, which I reviewed about six months ago. The basic concept is fairly simple, you cast spells to accumulate “Attack” and “Defense” which you use to go through “stages”, unlocking gameplay mechanics and features that all synergize together to ultimately improve your attack and defense some more. These features were a bit more engaging for me than they were in NGU and I had a good time with WAMI! I wish I could’ve stayed with it until the ‘end’ but at some point progression felt like it was dragging on forever and I didn’t know how to improve it, so I stopped.
Vampire Survivors, on paper, is an incredibly simple game; You have a character that you move around and it automatically attacks enemies on-screen, of which there are a whole lot. You get new weapons and abilities as you kill enemies and collect experience, and at some point you either get overrun or survive for 30 minutes, after which the level ends. There are a lot of things to unlock - new characters, items - and mechanics that get introduced as well, so playing it almost always feels like getting progress towards something new, which is incredibly addicting.
McPixel 3 is the sequel to a puzzle game I really enjoyed back in the day; McPixel 1. Filled with humor and surprising nonsense, you had to solve a bunch of levels where there was some danger or situation that needed to be defused, oftentimes in strange ways. There was a great element of replaying levels in order to find all the gags hidden away. The sequel fares really well, but adds a few systems that I didn’t particularly enjoy and fumbles on a few minor things, which luckily doesn’t make a big hit on my overall appreciation. I did everything there was to do in McPixel 3 and I strongly recommend it!