If you’ve been around me at all this past year it should be pretty obvious what my game of the year is for 2023. So much so that I almost don’t feel like writing a GOTY piece, much like I’ve skipped out on it over the past two years. However, there were so many great games that came out this year that it feels like a disservice to not write out something acknowledging some of them before I go ahead and write another few paragraphs gushing about you-know-who. This will be a “top five” list, which is in actuality a “top four” list but I thought five sounded better.
#5: Something I Didn’t Play
There are a few games I wanted to put in this section since every year there’s games that I think look cool but I miss due to console access or just a lack of time. I was originally saving this slot for Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which I’m currently playing and I’m enjoying it quite a bit as an evolution from Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3. But there’s been a few minor design issues that are bothering me and the Video Game Awards just finished up so I’m feeling some pressure to get my GOTY set out as well, which means Cursed Crew just has to fall by the wayside right now. The rest of the games I haven’t played but lots of people frequently talk about (Final Fantasy XVI, Alan Wake 2, Cocoon, Dead Space‘s remake, etc) could easily be here and probably would be so just pretend one of them are in here and feel content that whichever one you like is on this list. I hope to get to them eventually once they’re on PC and/or I have the time.
#4 Armored Core 6
I had rushed through the first of Armored Core 6‘s three endings back in September because it was second on a very long list of games I wanted to play this fall. After I finished Ghostrunner II I went back to Armored Core and was immediately struck by not only how easy it was to pick back up but also how well it controlled. The bindings are very intuitive and your mech is incredibly responsive (outside of occasional lock-on issues), which are both things I mentioned in my review at the time but damn if I didn’t notice and appreciate it immediately upon my return to the title. I also really enjoyed how there were alternative missions and new unlocks in the second and third “campaigns” as well, even if the majority of the missions were the same.
Why it isn’t my GOTY: While I was replaying the missions I got REALLY bored by the gameplay loop of fighting weak little robots in between actual challenges. There’s only so many times I can kill “adds” with one to five bullets before I just start zoning out, and while every mission can’t be endless mini-boss fights I wish it felt like the missions weren’t just two to four mini-bosses with a bunch of fodder in-between. When I was playing Elden Ring I was talked into the idea that an excess of repetitive content shouldn’t be considered a detriment to a game where that content is mostly optional, but I don’t think Armored Core 6 gets a pass in this instance since the game is clearly designed to be played multiple times for all the unlockable parts and endings.
#3 Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The quality of games this year aside, there were two reasons I wanted to do a GOTY piece and this is one of them: to give my unpopular opinion about the latest Zelda game. I got most of the way through my Tears of the Kingdom review when I realized it was nothing but the same two points on repeat for two thousand words, so I scrapped the whole thing but still wanted to talk about Tears in some capacity. Make no mistake, the game is great from a design perspective in the details that you come to expect from Zelda games. I love starting fires to create bursts of heat that lifts you into the air, Link’s progression from wearing rags and hitting enemies with sticks to fancy armor and iron shields, and some of the map designs choices that help with natural exploration. And the building mechanics! I could spend hours looking at all the creative things people have made and posted online, especially the giant robot death machines, the airplanes, and the occasional musical instruments. Most of all I actually really liked the story as it felt like this was one of the few games that actually lived up to its name of being “The Legend of Zelda,” with a focus on Zelda’s own adventures that inspired the minds of her people and affected the world thousands of years later.
Why it isn’t my GOTY: While the build mechanic was a great addition to the formula that Nintendo established in Breath of the Wild, it at really feels like the ONLY mechanic at times. I love the item variety in the earlier Zeldas and how that leads to different kinds of puzzles and exploration, but Tears of the Kingdom plays out every non-combat situation the same way: here’s a problem, here’s a convenient LEGO set nearby to help you solve it. Yes, there’s many different problems and the gameplay system allows for many different solutions. Yes, there’s a lot of items that you can wave around and glue together to make almost anything you can imagine with the tools at hand. And yet “build a solution yourself” gets pretty grating by the 500th cart or car or sled you’ve produced, especially when the Switch isn’t physically up to the task of maintaining what you’ve built for long. The Depths also felt like a half-baked area, with some symmetry with the overworld to help with navigation and a few surprises in the darker corners, but not nearly enough interesting things to justify the space that it takes up or the penalties that you suffer for traveling through it. Overall it’s a great game that embraced its new mechanics a little too hard, much like Batman Arkham Knight and its Batmobile, and I really, really, really hope that we get a gameplay revamp of some kind in whatever the next Zelda will be. I do not want to do shrines and repetitive story beats due to the open world for three games in a row.
#2 Resident Evil 4 (2023)
The second reason I wanted to do this GOTY piece was to remind everyone how good Resident Evil 4‘s remake was. My goodness was this game better than it had any right to be, taking what was close to a perfect game and not only modernizing it but somehow making it even more of both an action and a horror game. The characters were a little less fun but were more well-rounded, many of the bosses were much better, and the only things I really had to complain about were knife durability, some scripted forced runaway segments, and two voice actors whose only crimes were not sounding like the iconic performances that came before them. They even managed to make Mercenaries more engaging for the masses with a set end point to strive towards and a much more arcadey feel (that I’ll admit I still have mixed feelings about). I’ll say it again: whether you loved the original or you never heard of it, you should give this year’s Resident Evil 4 a try.
Why it isn’t my GOTY: For this past week I was teetering on the edge of pulling a last-minute switch and making REmake 4 my GOTY, especially since it seems doomed to not win as many awards as it deserves. All my complaints were so minor it didn’t seem fair to leave a game as great as REmake 4 as the second fiddle to a game that has far more technical and execution issues. I came to terms with it by primarily looking at the two games from the standpoint of replayability. I’ve already replayed REmake 4 once (pistol and knife only, was a lot of fun) and will definitely replay it again, but there are a few parts in the game that I absolutely hate and will always dread revisiting, not to mention that there really isn’t that much new to see or do once you’ve played it once. Neither of these gripes are a problem for my GOTY, so REmake 4 is unfortunately given second place. But it’s a very nice second place, on a higher dais than you normally would stand on for second place, and with a very shiny medal.
GOTY: Baldur’s Gate 3
No one’s surprised. I touched on this a little in my review but what really sets BG3 apart from so many other games for me is just how much content there is in the game that most people would never see. Thank god for the internet and all the people that are playing the game in slightly different ways so we can all experience the greatest moments together. There’s just so many fantastic little touches like characters having contextual greetings, unique sound effects and voice lines based on their classes or actions, special dialogue if they die in certain ways, etc that are almost non-existent in so many other games. The feeling of actual effort and care that went into the game is hard to ignore once you start to notice it, and coupled with the fantastic voice acting and solid D&D mechanics makes it a GOTY in a year against so many other contenders. Which of course isn’t to say that all of the games I mentioned had any less love put into them, but it’s a combination of these factors that that pushed BG3 ahead in my book.
Why it almost wasn’t my GOTY: The technical issues are a big reason why I was on the fence about BG3 recently, as I always give games a hard time for lots of glitches or other things that just don’t work properly. Recently I returned to BG3 for both its new epilogue and a second playthrough as the Dark Urge (having a great time, thanks for asking) and was immediately hit by several bugs such as the UI completely disappearing in combat and the ground vanishing beneath my feet in a cutscene, which was definitely a splash of cold water on my enthusiasm. The only reason that this isn’t undermining BG3 on this list is because of how much effort the devs have been putting into fixing all of these errors, with not only weekly/biweekly patches but also new endings, a new epilogue, and new ways to recruit certain characters. Generally this kind of free content support is something planned months in advance, so the fact that they’re doing it all in response to fan feedback is incredible and makes me far more forgiving than I would be otherwise. Especially when compared to the sorry state so many other games that launched this year were in on release and still are in as I write this.
Looking ahead: I just wanted to take a second to remind everyone that there’s no way in hell that 2024 will be as good as 2023 and to temper your expectations accordingly. Look at it this way: there were so many amazing things that came out this year that you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on anything you missed. I’ll be doing at least two more BG3 playthroughs and catching up on some games that have been sitting in my backlog for a while, like Midnight Suns and maybe the Dead Space remake. Not to mention Persona 3 Reload and Stormgate, which I assume I’ll be mentioning a lot in the coming months. See you then.
