I'm sure you've heard that 2023 was both a very good year for games and a very bad year for the people who make them. Developers produced generation-defining games, and had their livelihoods snatched from them in huge numbers. A deluge of groundbreaking titles coexisted with wave after wave of layoffs that affected studios across the world.

That was the drumbeat of my first full year writing about games full-time. I started at TheGamer in 2022, but felt I finally found my footing in 2023. I played widely, but often shallowly, trying to cast as broad a net as possible, which sometim🌟es meant moving on from games before I was ready to say goodbye. These are the games that meant the most to me amid that process. Some I closed the book on, others I hope to get back to soon.

I'm just one of many editors at TheGamer, and this is just one of many GOTY lists. You can check out the rest here.

10. Pikmin 4

Until this year, the Pikmin series existed solely for me as advertising materials. I grew up an avid Nintendo Power reader, so I remember seeing the weirdly realistic ads for the original games, and the cover art is, similarly, burned into my brain from video store trips. Despite the mental real estate the series' iconography took up for me, I never actually played the series until this year. I took a chance on Pikmin 4 because I needed a game to pair with Tears of the Kingdom when I used my 2-for-1 voucher, and it was the next big Nintendo game coming out. As someone who doesn't have the mental capacity to play an RTS game, I fully expected to bounce off of it. I didn't. I loved it.

9. Hi-Fi Rush

Stylish! Fun! Cool soundtrack!

8. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Even though the game crashed once an hour due to my PS5 needing a deep interior clean, I had a great time swinging around New York as Peter and Miles, engaging in the deep but action-packed combat, and seeing the familiar Symbiote story told with a new twist. With better side quests than the original, now more meaningfully integrated into the game’s world, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 improves on just about everything the first game already did prettꦯy well.

7. Venba

Creative work that expresses the most specific possible viewpoint will always be more impactful than work aiming to broadly appeal to the widest audience. My 2022 game of the year, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Butterfly Soup 2, put that principle into action, and so does Venba, a narrative cooking game about the life of an Indian immigrant living with her husband and son in Canada. As someone who remembers making my parents sad as a teenage idiot, I deeply related to Venba’s story of a son growing up to see how much he missed because he was ashamed of where he came froꦺm.

6. Cocoon

I'm always going to check out a new adventure game from the developers behind Limbo and Inside. Though I bounced off Somerville, a game with similar pedigree that looked and played much more like those Playdead classics, Cocoon kept me going to the end with its brilliant, mind-bending puzzles that pushed you right up to the edge of needing a guide before the solution finally clicked. Traveling to worlds within worlds within worlds that were all contained within marbles small enough for the game's insect protagonist to carry was the aha! highlight of my year.

5. Resident Evil 4

The original GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 was the first game I played as I took my tentative steps back into gaming in 2016 after a college-length hiatus from the hobby. Overcoming its challenges (made all the more challenging by the sheer amount of rust I was shaking off) was such a rewarding experience that it sold me, not just on the Resident Evil series, but on gaming as a worthwhile hobby. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4's 2023 remake felt like the excuse I needed to v♈isit an old friend, and it was a spectacular excuse.

4. Amnesia: The Bunker

With its claustrophobic, yet expansive WW1 bunker setting, its omnipresent monster stalker, and its strict commodification of light in a game that makes you very afraid of the dark, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amnesia: The Bunker was 2023's best game for serving up frights while giving you modest (but significant) ways to fight back.

3. Alan Wake 2

Before 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake 2 came out, I worried that I wouldn't connect with Remedy's long-awaited sequel. The term "168澳洲幸运5开奖网:dream logic" kept coming up in conversations about it, and I tend to find that that kind of surreality pairs terribly with a video game world that the player needs to understand to explore. The highest compliment I can give Alan Wake 2 is that it didn't skimp on the logic part of dream logic. Though its levels were often held together by tenuous psychological connections, the solutions always felt right.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

A sequel to the best Zelda game ever made that is better in basically every waℱy. How would it not make this list? (But, if you want to hear my full thoughts, check out the video above).

Some Honorable Mentions I Just Didn't Put Enough Time Into To Include

🍸From left to right:ꦰ Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, Octopath Traveler 2, Dead Space.

1. Baldur’s Gate 3

There are a million reasons to love 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3. It's the most expansive, yet refined, take on Dungeons & Dragons that I've encountered in a video game. Its characters are flawed, but lovable. Its world has interesting secrets hidden around every corner, some of which you won’t discover until you replay the game in a completely different way. Its combat, roleplay, and quest design are all exquisite.

But what I'll most remember about Baldur's Gate 3 is that it was the first game to capture my wife's imagination for a prolonged period of time. She played Animal Crossing during lockdown like everyone else, but this was the first game she's played that she wanted to talk about in great detail. I don't know if that will mean a lasting love for RPGs, but even if it doesn't, I'm grateful we got to share this special game.