Favorite games of 2023

Reposting my writeup of my favorite games from 2023, originally posted to Cohost. This post is recent enough that I still stand by everything I wrote back then.

For a year in which I could have really used some escapism, and during which I spent two whole months on vacation, I weirdly didn't play a lot of video games, let alone new ones. Apparently I only finished four of them? Anyway, I have things to say about some of these games, so here we go:

7: Resident Evil 4 Remake

This game wasn't originally on this list. Not because it was bad, but because I didn't even remember I played and finished it until my pal Gnomebitten reminded me it existed.

I do kind of resent this game, though! It's the first time a remake of a Resident Evil game has felt outright unwarranted to me, since the original already plays a lot like a modern 3rd person action game. I've only played the original RE4 twice, and I spent a lot of my time spent playing RE4make thinking "damn, the original was so good, I should play it again." RE4make, while a great game, is superfluous. A lot of what was good about it was already good in the original, and what the original lacked in graphical fidelity, it more than made up for in charm. I'm more tempted to replay RE2make and RE3make (both of which I've already replayed multiple times), than I am to replay RE4make.

That new Sekiro duel with Krauser is really good, though.

6, 5, 4: Lunacid, Cavern of Dreams, Pizza Tower

I originally wrote separate entries for these, but Cohost randomly and inexplicably decided to turn into a completely blank page as I was writing this, and I couldn't retrieve what I had written up to that point. I guess I'll start using the "save draft" button more often.

(I haven't had this kind of problem with Flounder so far!)

I'm too demotivated to rewrite what I already wrote about these games, but there's a reason I don't feel too bad about lumping all of them together this time: it's because I haven't finished any of these games. I've spent 7 hours with Pizza Tower, 2 hours with Cavern of Dreams, and only 30 minutes with Lunacid. These games are all poster children for what my time with new video games looked like this year. I hope to finish all of these games in 2024 though, because I really enjoyed my time with every one of them. Especially Lunacid. God, what an incredible first impression for a game to make! Why have I only played half an hour of it? Why aren't I playing it right now??

I still haven't gotten back to any of these, by the way. Still would quite like to, though. Especially Lunacid...

3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Breath of the Wild didn't click with me the same way it did with other people. I enjoyed it, but I didn't experience nearly as much emergent gameplay as everyone else. The game's various systems simply didn't coalesce in a very interesting way during my playthrough. Not only that, but the exploration was nowhere near as transcendental for me as it seemed to be for other folks. For all of the game's difficulty, the exploration was too frictionless for me. All it took was a bit of cooking prep to negate most of the game's traversal challenges, which in turn took most of the adventure and sense of discovery out of the world. The example I keep coming back to is how the tutorial teaches you to cut a tree down and use its log as a bridge to cross a chasm. Soon after, the game gives you a paraglider, which negates having to make a bridge like that ever again.

Tears of the Kingdom still mostly failed to deliver the sense of discovery and exploration. However, it *did* deliver adventures -- and misadventures -- in spades. They solved that paraglider problem by making all alternative options more practical, more fun, and more tempting. Like, sure, I could just paraglide across a canyon, but there's a pile of rockets just lying around here. Why wouldn't I cut a tree down, strap one to it, and ride it across? Or build a catapult to launch the rockets across, and use them on that puzzle I see in the distance? And then launch myself, only to fall into the canyon and accidentally find something else?

Tears of the Kingdom is a game where you're meant to bring your own fun, and it's better at that than most games I've played. This could have easily turned out to be a game where you only cycle through the same two or three reliable solutions to problems, which would then just make it "Breath of the Wild with jetpacks" or whatever. But they've managed to make the creativity aspect of the game so compelling, that I found myself constantly trying different things willingly, and only resorting to tried and true tricks when I became seriously impatient with something.

The game is entirely too long, it took me over 200 hours to finish it, and I still have unexplored parts of the underground left. This is probably the most I've ever spent on a single playthrough of a game, even surpassing my first Elden Ring playthrough by like 60 hours. Games shouldn't be this long. That said, I still enjoyed most of those 200+ hours.

2. Prison of Husks

This tiny, single-developer game captures what I love about From Software's games more than any other "soulslike" I've played. Games often learn the wrong lessons from Dark Souls, both mechanically (Lords of the Fallen) and aesthetically (Demon's Souls remake). Prison of Husks is the only game I've played that feels like a spiritual successor to that experience of getting lost in these worlds for the first time.

It starts with the surface-level comparisons: the game's level design is reminiscent of the Tower of Latria. The color palette calls the Shrine of Storms to mind. There's no ambient exploration music. Everything feels decrepit, abandoned, long-forgotten.

That's good and all, but it's not enough. Art decisions aren't the only thing that contribute to a game's atmosphere, the gameplay experience does too! Sure, you could slap some fog in and spooky sounds to make a game appear more mysterious, but if your game's map is just a corridor with occasional forks in the road, then the straightforwardness of the game's structure directly conflicts with the mystery you were trying to build.

What Prison of Husks does so well is build mystery by not only obfuscating the layout and size of the map, but also the size of its possibility space. It slowly offers the player more and more glimpses of what could happen, items and rooms without obvious purposes, some of which do end up actually serving a purpose eventually. There are tons of secrets and details, big and small, to constantly encourage the player to keep playing, keep poking around, keep experimenting, keep asking questions. What's this black fog on top of the roof? What's this closed door? Is this archway an illusory wall? Wait, I can break crates? Are there not enough keys to open all of these jail cells?

I want to also stress that Prison of Husks isn't just a love letter to Demon's Souls, it's very much its own thing. The doll aesthetic and all of the low-key text make it feel like a very personal, almost comforting experience. The theme of harm befalling feminine dolls also feels very trans and maybe also gay (complimentary). That's not my world, but it gives the game its own identity, and a personality that feels endearingly mid-2000s emo. This is the cold, dark, and very gentle place the painter girl of Ariandel was talking about.

1. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

If you know me, then this top spot should hardly surprise you, though I will say that I had my doubts at first. Chapter 1 is slow, the missions are simple and mostly feel like going through the motions. Chapter 2 sets up a couple of important things, but it still is difficult to gauge where the story is headed. It isn't until the final mission of chapter 3 that the narrative truly starts to come together in a satisfying way, and from there on out, it becomes much easier to get invested in what's happening.

The final chapters are riveting, and on subsequent playthroughs, even the lousiest of chapter 1 missions become recontextualized, which makes it much easier to appreciate the worldbuilding that they were doing.

AC6's narrative is both new and old. On the one hand, this character-focused story is far outside of the wheelhouse that From Software has been in for the past decade and a half, it's very refreshing to hear characters having actual dialogue with each other. When was the last time you heard two NPCs truly hold a conversation in a Fromsoft game? On the other hand, the story also feels like a sci-fi spin on the same ur-story that they've been telling in their games for the past decade and change. Someone once said:

when they burned the library of Alexandria the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes

This is yet another Fromsoft game about burning the library of Alexandria, in a manner of speaking. Setting the world ablaze was already an old plot point in Elden Ring, and it's even older in Armored Core 6. And yet, now they've done it so many times that we've wrapped around to the point where it's interesting again. It feels less like a retread, and more like a remix. It provokes thought, retrospective comparisons with previous games, and speculation on what could come next.

Oh yeah, it's also really fun to play.