Dru’s Games of the Year 2023
Great year of games and the first year that I took the time to write down each game I played as I played it. I took a few notes with each of them to log initial impressions. Came back to some of them months later after letting them marinate in my noggin. Some seemed better with age, others suffered a small deduction after some time away. I mostly play PC and Xbox and a good bit of these games were available on Game Pass. I graded on a 5 of 5 scale, the more the better. Without further ado, the best of Dru!
Baldur’s Gate III
Studio: Larian Studios
Play time: 63 hours
Platform: PC (Steam)
Score: 5 out of 5 Croissants
In a word: Essential. One of the first capital ‘G’ games I really loved was Baldur’s Gate 1. I vividly remember receiving the dark brown sleeve of 4 discs ready to be put into our Gateway PC in 2001. Wandering around Candlekeep and building my own character in a fully realized world are among my most cherished gaming core memories. I would never have imagined, back in January, that the new Baldur’s Gate would match the heights of its predecessors. After playing the latest entry, it is clear that it surpassed them.
I managed to not play the early access of BG3 as I generally want to experience ‘finished games’ and I’m so happy I waited. The high bar of memorable characters from the original Khalid, Jahiera, Minsc and more seemed impossible to match — and yet Larian Studios did. I would not have guessed that I would care for Shadowheart or Gale as much as I did some of those companions from all those years ago, but I did. Sitting at my PC for the third straight hour because I have to see what happens next felt like a mirrored version of myself all those years ago. The only aspect of the originals that I didn’t fully embrace was the combat system. Larian took one of my favorite game mechanics, turn based fighting and merged it with my favorite table top RPG, Dungerons and Dragons. The result is my the most fun implementation of turn-based combat I’ve ever played. The seamless and I’m sure extremely difficult implementation of the Dungeons & Dragons rules are seamlessly blended and result in a combat system that rewards clever tactics and ingenuity. Never has taunting a powerful enemy onto a fragile bridge with my strongest character, having them leap to safety as my range spellcaster destroys said bridge felt so damn good.
The world feels boundless and your choices feel like dropping boulders in a pond rather than skipping a stone across a creek. You may find yourself wanting to reload and do things a different way or see if you can get a higher roll on a skill check, but I feel this game is best experienced by living with your choices. I felt that there were so many choices I made that if I stopped to see which paths lead where, I would never make it to the end.
After Act 1 of the game, I started to feel myself pushing against the boundaries of the game’s narrative. While so much of the experience is incredible: its characters, acting, music & combat, the story did lose a bit of steam near the end of the game for me. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 does something that most games can’t: it pushes the limits of the medium. I’ve never been more invested in a character’s life as I was with Shadowheart, I’ve never thought so hard about how to avoid conflict as I did in the Grove (the location of the first act). The characters grow and change and strain under the pressure of the choices you make. There are things that games can do better than any other story telling, and Larian took the time to make that happen. The game pays off damn near every decision you make, often in ways that are impossible to anticipate. I can’t wait to keep playing this masterpiece for years to come. To keep poking at the edges of this game to find evermore wonder. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t perfect, but to anyone who loves games, it is essential.
Super Mario Wonder
Studio: Nintendo
Play time: 12ish hours
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Score: 4.5 out of 5 Wonder Seeds
The past several Mario games didn’t really resonate with me, so I didn’t expect a Mario game to crack my top ten, let alone my top 2. The most recent entries felt like games for ages well in my past. That was ok, I was ready to leave my great Mario memories with Super Mario World. I saw trailers for Super Mario Wonder while waiting to find out more about the Advance Wars remake. The new transformations for Mario (an elephantine Mario) was met by my eyes with a near full roll. Until the perfect combination of great review buzz and pining for a bygone gaming era hit me like a tidal wave in November. I downloaded this game and was immediately transfixed. Generally speaking, I’m not here for the ‘story’ on tap, something something Bowser is bad, something something I’m a prince and you should help me. I am here for the platforming, which feels tighter than ever, the powers which are clever and additive, and the beauty of the games levels & sound design. But I’m burying the lead, while all of that makes this a worthy entry in this storied franchise, it pales in comparison to what actually makes this game special: the titular Wonder seeds.
In each level of the game, there is a hidden collectible called a Wonder seed. You have to collect a certain amount of these to progress through the game. These are incredible and the reason Super Mario Wonder is so high on my list this year. Each seed takes the level you have been on and transforms it, often flipping it on its head and asking you to re-complete a part of the level in a new way. In one, your character becomes a platform that you have been jumping on to traverse the level and now you are now jumping and moving as the platform! In another water level, you must work your way back through the level except the water portions are now dry and the formerly dry portions are now water! Each of these wonder seeds do something unique and interesting. Some of the wonder seed segments last seconds while others are more lengthy but they are all a wonderful surprise!
Every level starts out by teaching you a rule. Sometimes the rule is as simple as, you will need to use your hat to glide over this obstacle without being hit. Sometimes the rule is, you can swim up these geysers. Most games would teach these rules to you, then layer them on top of each other for a final skill challenge before moving on to a new gimmick. Super Mario Wonder simply doesn’t. I know this sounds like a knock but it really works here. Each level feels like a bespoke creation that exists only to inform itself. For example, there is a level where the enemies are little fireworks that go off after you bounce on them, then you can pick them up and direct the fireworks to open different parts of the level or get collectibles. After that level, you don’t see the little guys again, but you don’t miss them because the next level has another bespoke critter or obstacle that is unique to it. This makes each level a new, fun and, dare I say it, wonderful experience. There are numerous collectibles on each level if you want to 100% the game, which I certainly will do in the months to come, but if you’re just in the mood to keep pushing forward to the next delightful surprise, that’s here too!
The game does feel a little too easy at times and it is so frustrating to barely miss a collectible in the beginning of a level then do the mental math of deciding whether it is worth it to start over and try for it again and again. The overworld of the game, where you select which levels to complete, has a share of secrets but really just serves as window dressing for the main experience. The new badge system feels a bit tacked on as I mainly used one badge throughout the game that worked best for me.
This is the perfect game to jump into for 10 minutes then get back to what you were doing. It feels good to be hanging out with my favorite plumber again.
Jusant
Studio: Don’t Nod
Play time: 3.5 hours
Platform: Xbox (Game Pass)
Score: 4.5 out of 5 Merriments
Before I played it, I thought of Jusant as that foreign film that critics love but most standard humans probably couldn’t sit through. The kind of painting that would hang in the least visited wing of an obscure art gallery. Maybe it is those things, but it shouldn’t be. Quick side note: Jusant is a perfect example of why I am a Game Pass subscriber. I would have likely never bought Jusant, but it was available on Game Pass so I had no investment, other than my time, to lose.
No character speaks a word in Jusant. The game starts and you are a child wandering through the desert and coming upon the tallest mountain imaginable. The mountain, impossibly, reaches beyond the sky and clouds above. The game doesn’t have a great atmosphere, the game is atmosphere. Although the primary mechanic in Jusant is climbing, which feels amazing, moving through the world truly feels like you are being told a story without words. There is no water in this world. As you ascend the mountain, you find pieces of a world long gone: villages, boats, ancient apparatus, temples, cairns, letters. These all serve as brushstrokes on a tapestry you fill in as you climb further and further up the mountain.
Climbing feels so good that I can scarcely imagine the countless hours of testing to get each hand hold to feel just right. To get the animation of shaking out your arm while you cling to the wall with your other. The climbing and swinging are the principle mechanics of Jusant exit only to propel you to the next chapter of this beautiful book.
You wear a furry poncho without armholes and you carry a sort of fanny pack with a little blue critter inside. The art style is striking an makes full use of Unreal Engine 5. Beautiful rays of light shine through cracks in the wall of caves. Light glitters and reflects of surfaces in a way that feels more beautiful than reality. The world becomes stranger and stranger as you ascend the mountain but it never feels like you’ve fully left the reality of our world behind.
You will find letters of long lost people’s that give you a snapshot of life here in times before. You will find temples and small rock cairns that remind you of lives and cultures gone by. Carefully placed conch shells are found in each section of the game that make you sit and just listen to the world around you. The pacing of this game is remarkable. There is almost always a clear path forward begging you to keep going. Your quest to the top feels important without the game every explicitly telling you so.
When you do finally arrive, the crescendo of story telling feels a bit too esoteric for my liking. The final climbing challenge is a bit obtuse. Even so, the closing moments of strangeness filled me with awe as the game’s last moments revealed themselves.
Jusant isn’t a game about the end of the world, it is a game about how many times the world ends. The depth of sadness but hope for everlasting renewal filled me entirely as the credits rolled. Jusant made me feel small enough to feel the weight of the world but large enough to carry it.
Cocoon
Studio: Geometric Interactive
Play time: 4.5 hours
Platform: Xbox (Game Pass)
Score: 4 out of 5 Worlds within worlds
Another wonderful game that may have passed me by without Game Pass. Every year a few games receive quite a bit of review buzz that grab my wandering attention. Initially, I wasn’t drawn to Cocoon. I’m not traditionally a puzzle game lover. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be. I’ve spent hours trying to love amazing recent puzzle games like The Witness, Baba is You, Swapper & Talos Principle but they always end the same way: frustration. Each of those experiences eventually devolves into my looking up a puzzle solution online, ‘I’ll just look up this one and then play the game on its terms.’ which leads to my being more confused on a subsequent puzzle, having not learned the lesson of the cheated puzzle. It isn’t a matter of intelligence (I hope) but more a failing of my patience. I’m willing to meet games where they are most of the time, but each of the aforementioned asked more of me than I was willing to give. Enter: Cocoon.
This is the first puzzle game that I can remember that blends problem solving and pacing in a near perfect dance. The game just moves. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t describe the puzzles as simple, nor as obtuse. The game teaches you its rules and only asks that you experience them.
This resulted in a cycle that I grew to love: 1. Hmm how do I get over there? 2. I wonder if this will work? 3. Nope, what if I do this? 4. WAIT, what if I do this while doing that?! 5. Holy crap it worked! 6. I’m a genius!
For me, this never grew old. The actual playing of the game is interesting enough. You start the game hatching out of the titular Cocoon as what I describe as a little fly guy. Equipped with nothing but legs, wings and a heart of iron, you set off down the path. You only ever press one button on your controller in this game. You move and you interact with things and that is it. This contrasts beautifully with the complex puzzles at the hear of Cocoon.
Without spoiling too much, many of the puzzles involve orbs that you will find in the world. You will learn that these orbs contain worlds that you can travel in and out of. Where things get spicy, clever and wonderful is when you must enter these worlds within these worlds to use the orbs. This is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t played the game but the result is nothing short of a master class in game design. The game doesn’t require genius but it does require bravery. The game is always asking you to try that thing you don’t know will work. If it doesn’t, it will likely flip the switch in your brain that will reveal the answer. The game’s puzzle climax for me happened near the end of the game when I was able to enter an orb’s world while holding the orb in question.
If you even have even a remote curiosity for a puzzle game, Cocoon is a must-play. Oh! Did I mention that Cocoon’s world is one in which technology has advanced in unfathomable ways in a form that appears to be the design of hyper intelligent bugs or that the use of color adds to the atmosphere of smallness?
The story the game tells pales in comparison to the dichotomy its arc represents. Everything is both smaller and larger than everything else. The story and art are lovely for what they are but only serve as window dressing for my favorite puzzle experience in years.
5. Street Fighter 6
Studio: Capcom
Play time: 18.5 hours
Platform: Xbox
Score: 4 out of 5 Drive Impacts
I’m 13 years old and I’ve accidentally gotten really into my first fighting game: Marvel v. Capcom 2. I’m playing the game every day, I’ve assembled my perfect team of characters: Captain America, Iron Man & Venom. All summer I’m playing and getting better. I can beat the game with one hand behind my back. I know every character’s combos and specials. I feel invincible. I say so during my next visit to my family in Florida. My cousin JP loads it up and summarily beats my entire team with a single character… We play again… I beat his first character, barely and am trounced. I’m confused, I’m demoralized, and I realize fighting games may not be for me.
Fast forward a few decades and I haven’t really ever felt the same way about a fighting game, until now. I was in a gaming lull and indulged the fighting game itch and I’m so glad I did. I mainly jumped on due to the robust single player and I was not disappointed. The campaign is equal parts tutorial for each of the games diverse characters and batshit stories (a la the Yakuza series which I have only begun to dip my toes into). The custom character creator is nothing short of bananas. The monstrosities this game will allow you to create are hilariously horrifying. I’ll allow you a quick moment to google ‘crazy SF6 custom characters’…
Street Fighter 6 oozes personality, which I found odd for a franchise that has been going for so long. I found myself forming opinions on fighters based strictly on their portrayal, only to find out their move list later. You basically start the game as wannabe fighter chump, meeting the other playable characters throughout the world and are able to select them as your ‘master’ and learn their moves. The single player is shockingly robust, even if it overstays its welcome. By the end of the narrative, I was rushing through dialogue and skipping side quests to charge to credits. You equip gear, you have equipment and consumables, its a lot and much of the aforementioned is not super additive. But if you just want to run around punching people on the city streets, you can! Is there a weird difficulty curve in the final act of the game? Definitely! But Dru, if you have all these problems with the game, why is it even on this list?
Because the fighting feels so damn good! The new Drive system. Simply put, a new gauge on the screen lets you execute an unblockable hit as well as an unhittable block. The Drive gauge is not the ice cream on this fighting sundae but it is the cherry. The fighting feels fluid and visceral. The animations on special attacks are engaging and sometimes hilarious. I gravitated towards a ballerina named Manon that is new to the series. She is a grab character, a first for me, who uses judo and ballet to beat ass. My created character, based not very loosely on my girlfriend, became an ass kicking machine as I lured opponents into close range and would judo toss them to the ground with ferocity and grace.
Tuning out the multitude of story text and running from fight to fight in a semi open world was a delight. From beating a wannabe superhero to fighting legions of gang members with tv boxes on their heads, the fighting never became tedious over 30 plus hours. The single player lets you mix and match 'master’ special moves to create a specific move set to your character. By the end of the game, you become an unkillable badass, until the final boss…
Once I finally conquered that devil, I strode into the multiplayer lobby with the confidence of a 13 year old Dru only to walk away with the humility of that very same boy. The difference this time, I will probably keep playing Street Fighter 6, even if I can only beat the CPU.
6. Dave the Diver
Studio: Mintrocket
Play time: 6.2 hours (and counting)
Platform: PC (Steam)
Score: 4 out of 5 Excellent Cutscenes
The pixel art boom is here to stay and one of its best came out this year. Dave the Diver is exactly what it looks like with the addition of surprising depth. Is this a fishing game where you catch fish and run a sushi restaurant? Yep. Is it also a pokemon, evacuation shooter, survival management, rogue lite rpg? Yes. It is all these things and somehow more.
Dave the Diver starts with the titular Dave diving into a mysterious cove for fish. Pretty quickly strangers start showing up and layers upon layers of game get added to the game. You receive a pokedex-alike to catalog fish caught, you upgrade your spear gun to do different damage, you get a net to catch smaller fish, you get explosives to fight bigger fish, you upgrade your storage capacity to catch more fish, etc. These pieces of the puzzle are doled out at a semi-rapid pace and results in the feeling of constantly unlocking more to do. The my primary issue with Dave the Diver, at times, was that I could never master one thing as there were always more objectives being unlocked.
The second half of the game happens after your done fishing and you turn your fish into sushi for your burgeoning restaurant. This side of the game becomes a management sim that is also surprisingly robust. The game’s highlights for me have occurred here as your head chef unlocks new recipes with flourish and panache. You win over a food critic with your delicacies and this is met with one of many amazingly animated cut scenes.
This game lives and breathes with its self-referential dialogue and over-the-top characters, even at the cost of a central narrative that involves finding a lost city of merpeople. The game can sometimes feel a little ‘too cute’ for its own good but the depth of all of its systems make it hard to put down. I’m not quite done with the game but I’m so thankful I picked it up. The cutscene animations of your Otaku gunsmith are worth the price of admission.
7. Advance Wars: Reboot Camp
Studio: Wayforward (Nintendo)
Play time: 35+ hours
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Score: 4 out of 5 Well-Placed Rockets
What a year! I am treated to not one but two of my all-time favorite games getting a new entry! If I had an all-time clock that tracked how much I played every game in my life, Advance Wars would likely crack the top 3. I loved the original Game Boy Advance games and played them religiously with my cousins.
I would play the campaign over and over until I could get an S grade on every mission. It was surprising how quickly the knowledge came flooding back when booting up this remake. Aside from the updated graphics, little has changed with Reboot Camp. This is both its greatest weakness as well as flaw.
On the one hand, I’m thrilled that a younger generation has a chance to play and fall in love with this game the way I did all those years ago. On the other hand, aside from not requiring link cables or handing the Game Boy back and forth to play multiplayer, not much has changed. I would kill for some sort of multiplayer lobby or non-archaic map sharing function. I’d love a matchmaking system where I or myself and a friend can team up and play against others online without having to seek out a group on the internet. Maybe a ranked matchmaking that pits the best of the best against the each other. Or a spectating mode for folks to watch others play as they wait in queue.
Additional maps also wait to be conquered in the games also unchanged War Room mode. Although there are no new maps, the leaderboards are a welcome returning feature.
This incredible game feels like little more than a refresh of a damn near perfect game I already loved. The cynical side of me thinks that Nintendo had this game made at low cost to test the market for a theoretical sequel. If that is true, I hope the sales proved worthy enough. I don’t mind the new age of Fire Emblem games but would love to see a turn-based combat game like Advance Wars to be reborn again.
Still, polished gold is gold and I loved every minute of my time with Reboot Camp, I just hope I don’t have to wait so long to see Andy and friends again!
8. Forza Motorsport
Studio: Turn 10 Studios
Play time: 10 hours (and counting)
Platform: Xbox (Game Pass)
Score: 4 out of 5 Well-Executed Turns
I’m as shocked as you are to see a racing game on this list. Not since the Need for Speed: Underground games have I really sunk my teeth into a racing game. Sure, I’ve dabbled in the occasional Forza Horizon but the stakes never felt high enough. Enter Forza Motorsport.
The franchise has now been outshined for years by its aforementioned arcade style cousin but this game is among the best of the series. My problem with sim style racing games has always been the same, difficulty. Its so hard to find the not too hard but not too easy line for me in these games. I like to play racing games with a podcast in my ears and not be white knuckling the controller the entire time. I also don’t want to consistently be leading every race for the last few laps. Forza Motorsport introduced subtle changes to alleviate these issues for me.
Options! The game makes it clear how good you are. As you adjust the difficulty options, the game lets you know what place you are likely to finish. Each option of difficulty also increases the percentage of in game currency pay out you receive for races. This created a perfect blend of matching the difficulty of the game with being successful at it for me to try and maximize my currency while still finishing in the top 3 most races. I turned off the driveline except for turns, I turned off the anti-lock brakes for more of that delicious moula and I placed myself near the back of the pack every race until the game tells me it thinks I will finish between 3rd and 6th.
After I was done tinkering with the options, I entered each race. Just like Forza’s prior you have many choices of variety of real life cars. I love picking the ugliest hunk of junk for each type of race and besting all the other sleeker vehicles. Unlocking parts for each car is as arbitrary as it is fun. The devs had a weird problem to solve, we have a robust system of adding different parts to our cars. How do we stop players from just choosing the best equipment to make the numbers go up the most? I love the solution they came up with but it is sure to rub some folks the wrong way. A completely arbitrary points system to where the more you drive the car, execute turns, passes and victories in the car, the more the points go up, which unlocks better parts for the car. I love this decision as it reveals the devs intention for fun over reality. The other half of this equation that guarantees a great racing game is…
Feedback! The game gives you feedback while racing. Each turn you are graded on a scale of 1-10 for execution and are awarded points in real time for your efforts. Each pass, each section of track, all of it, points points points. This immediately reinforces good driving habits. Take that turn wide, get a 2.7. Next lap, come in a bit slower and get a 5.1. Keep going until you are consistently grading 8.1 on this difficult turn. This makes the game as much about execution as it does about speed. That moment you get a 10.0 on a turn is pure elation, but there’s two laps left and if you want to finish first, you’ll need to execute just as well again and again. This loop became a therapy that made me really engage with a driving game for the first time in a long time. Losing myself between the lines hasn’t felt this good in a long time.
9. Dredge
Studio: Black Salt Games
Play time: 5.5 hours
Platform: PC (Steam)
Score: 3.5 out of 5 Mutated Fish
When Dredge came out at the beginning of the year, the critical buzz was impossible to ignore and I got swept up in it enough to make the purchase. I’m not typically a spooky game boy but images of a lone tug boat navigating the mysterious seas struck a chord in me. Dredge is 2 parts fishing sim, 3 parts spooky mystery & 1 part inventory management. My thinking was that the fishing and inventory would hook me hard enough for me to get through the spooky.
The fishing is simple enough and includes dredging up materials to make your boat better. Dredge makes use of a standard upgrade system that is, at times, quite tedious. Start with small inventory, slow ship. Collect materials to upgrade these to medium. Collect materials to upgrade them again and so on. Servicable, but like I said, a bit tedious. Dredge also creates a system of catching different fish by organizing them by biome. Some fish are ‘Deep’ some fish are ‘shallow’ some fish are ‘volcanic’. This was intriguing at first but you are only able to have so many different types of fish catching apparatus and I personally found the system a bit too dense. I found myself questioning, which net to use, which dredge to use, which hook to use, etc. I’m sure this is a pleasurable tight rope for some to walk, but not I.
I was shocked to find that Dredge’s spooky bits really spoke to me. The spookiness and dark, tumultuous atmosphere form a perfect marriage of fear I found thrilling in the early game when I sailed a bit too far to get back to harbor before dark. The game introduces so many clever mechanics to get your heart pumping as you dodge obstacles that weren’t there in the daylight as you race back to safe harbor. I vividly remember the first time I encountered ‘another boat’ out in the darkness. The encounter left me wide eyed and clicking in a panic. I do have issues with the game limiting your time spent out at night with an arbitrary Sanity Meter. Dredge depicts metal illness, but undercuts its complexity. The result takes a layered and complicated situation and replaced it with a blinking sanity meter. I don’t necessarily believe that trying to tell a story about mental illness shouldn’t be done in games, but, if it is done, it should be so with tact and care. I’m not sure they hit the mark here.
I lost steam after upgrading the heck out of my boat and blazing through several chapters of story. You travel to different biomes and solve some fairly rudimentary puzzles. I’m likely nearing Dredge’s credits but, by the time I had reached what looked to be the final biome, I had wriggled the narrative hooks out of my mouth.
10. The Last Spell
Studio: Ishtar Games
Play time: 38.4 hours
Platform: PC (Steam)
Score: 3.5 out of 5 Min-Maxed Stats
If someone were to build a Dru game, that game would have a lot in common with The Last Spell. Roguelite elements, basebuilding, tower defense, pixel art, tactical & turn based combat. This checks so many Dru boxes. Medieval setting featuring a vague apocalypse? Sold!
This is run based game. You are given a well to defend and you build your little town from the ground up while defending it from hordes of zombies, demons and stinkers. You build armaments, walls & even inns to lure more a few more heroes than your starting three. You start with a few randomly generated folks with random stats and weapons. Some do magic, some fire arrows and some just bonk with the best of them. They level up and the serotonin hits hard every time you get to increase one of the hero’s stats that have been randomly selected. This was the start of what ultimately became my problem with The Last Spell. The random.
The combat mechanics feel good when the game is working as intended. When I perfectly executed a complicated turn for one of my heroes and left legions of enemies slain in my wake, the feeling of greatness was inescapable. If only every turn was as satisfying to complete. The early game is a walk in the park. I didn’t have to pay attention to what skills my heroes had or what weapons they had equipped. Fast-forward to two villages later and my squad is being crushed half way through the village defense. The difficulty curve turns fast and hard. The spike in difficulty doesn’t feel good. The enemies do get some varied abilities but they mainly just have more health and do more damage. If your heroes have randomly gotten stronger in the wrong stats or the weapon you made in the armory you built doesn’t translate well to any of your heroes, you feel like you aren’t losing because of skill but because you were on the wrong end of a few rolls of the die. This is where the pieces of The Last Spell don’t quite fit together. The difficulty curve wouldn’t be as painful if players had more control of their heroes and their items. The lack of control of hero upgrades wouldn’t be so painful with a less punishing or more varied difficulty curve.
I didn’t dislike most of my time with The Last Spell but after failing the mission I was on for the upteenth time, I couldn’t bring myself to plunge another village into darkness.
Honorable mention: Good games that didn’t make the cut.
Cities: Skylines II
I loved the first game but the sequel feels a little too bare bones for now. Just like the original, I’m certain this one will age wonderfully and I can’t wait.
Venba
Short, sweet and beautiful. The story of a southeast Asian family that has moved to Canada. I’m susceptible to these types of family stories and Venba delivers. The actual game is akin to fairly simple cooking mini games that serve up as much love and loss as they do delicious flavor. Be warned, this game packs an emotional punch I wasn’t quite braced for.
Madden 24 (sigh)
It’s good this year. Fewer exploitive plays and blocking that doesn’t feel like a complete crapshoot. Not nearly perfect but good enough for me to buy yet again to play franchise online.
Phantom Brigade
Ughhghghghggh I love-hate this game. The combat system is ingenious but almost hardly anything else about Phantom Brigade works. The game’s overworld feels empty and the campaign stakes are nonexistent. Hopefully this game has laid the groundwork for an amazing sequel some years down the line.
Backlog Baddies: Games I really wanted to play that I just didn’t have time for.
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew
The swan song from one of my favorite developers of recent years: Mimimi Games. Loved Shadow Tactics and Desperados III. Can’t wait to play this one with all the dlc when the whole bundle gets discounted some time next year.
Diablo 4
Seems like the kind of game best enjoyed with a group of peeps and after numerous updates. I’ll play this one on sale and when some of my gaming peeps bite the bullet at the same time.
Jagged Alliance 3
Looks so cool and a sequel to a game I never beat, as I didn’t own a copy, but I have always been fascinated with. I’ll snatch this up during the next deep cut sale.
Critical Miss: Games the world loved that I just didn’t gel with.
Hi-Fi Rush
At the onset, the art style and humor didn’t really work for me. The music timing based combat was cool but didn’t have the juice to grab me for more than a few hours.
Alan Wake 2
I love great acting in games and this game seemed to be a showpiece for that and more, but just a little too spooky for me. Not my cup of tea.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Didn’t connect with Breath of the Wild and felt the same way here. I want to like it, I do. Just couldn’t get there.
2023 was a hell of a year for gaming, arguably one of the very best. Its hard to balance this reality with the constant news of gaming development studio layoffs. At the time of this writing, the number is well over 6 thousand. People pour their hearts and souls into keyboards all over the world to produce these games. An industry that generates the amount of money that video gaming does should have more stability than this and I hope it finds a way to steady the ship.
I feel absolutely blessed to be engrossed in this hobby in what feels like a golden age. If only I had the time and money to sink my teeth into everything at the video game buffet!