Coming out in March because I didn’t think of it in January, and with an asterisk because this is actually the best games I happened to finish in 2023. I play way behind the current trends, getting most of my games from Humble Choice and Humble Bundles, so this isn’t really “who was the best in a specific year” as it is a treasure chest of recommendations for people who, like me, like to wait until the dust has settled and pick up only the games that are well-regarded in the aftermath. That means this list is limited to games with a completion date in 2023, as logged on my How Long To Beat profile. I don’t like trying to figure out exact rankings, so these are in alphabetical order.
Borderlands 3 is the best in its series by a hair, and I’m pretty confident the only reason most people disagree with me is because Borderlands 3 released in a world where nobody wanted Borderlands games anymore. When Borderlands 2 came out, people were desperate for shooters that didn’t take themselves so seriously, so the jokes being hit or miss was fine. By the time Borderlands 3 came out, everyone was sick of quips and action-comedy, so it was really grating when half of Borderlands’ quips weren’t even good. But Borderlands 2’s ultimate powers were things like levitating a bad guy with psychic powers or turning invisible or summoning a robot buddy. Cool, but not as cool as piloting a twelve-foot tall mech suit bristling gatling guns and grenade launchers.
Depending on how you looter-shoot, you may also find Borderlands 3’s completely broken item rarity system to be annoying. Good weapons drop with about the same frequency as in Borderlands 2, but you can’t trust the item rarity at all. Your mainstay assault rifle for the next 5-10 levels may well be a white common rarity while you walk right past gold, allegedly legendary weapons of the same level. Borderlands 2 introduced a lot more environmental variety to the series, but I still like Borderlands 3’s maps better, especially for the inclusion of a wartorn city. I get why Borderlands 2 avoided this, it succeeded because it was a breath of fresh air and every other shooter had a wartorn city in 2014, but I ignore the trash to play the highlights, so I was never playing every shooter.
The Case of the Golden Idol is an amazing mystery solving game that makes solving mysteries actually feel like solving mysteries. Examining a scene for clues and putting things together rather than the adventure game thing where you rub every object against every other object until the plot progresses. I absolutely adore this game, it’d probably be my game of the year if I were doing that.
Far Cry 3 is actually good. Much like Assassin’s Creed IV, just the name of this series causes people to reflexively spit these days, and since the problem is stagnation, that means that going back to older games probably won’t remind you why you loved the series ten years ago. Far Cry 6’s problem (so I’ve heard, haven’t played it yet) isn’t that it’s a worse version of Far Cry 3, but that it’s basically the same as Far Cry 3. But I didn’t have a decent PC or current gen console when Far Cry 3 came out, and when I went back and played it, I still liked it alright, even though I couldn’t get the PC version working right and had to resort to console controls. In fact, my favorite of the series is actually Far Cry 4, even though that’s Far Cry 3 but again, because that one works fine on modern computers so I could play with a keyboard and mouse. I’m still giving this spot to Far Cry 3 because, in terms of recommendations, this is the one that made people like the series. I’d recommend Far Cry 2 separately, because it is a very different experience, but I completed that one in 2022.
Fobia, St. Dinfna Hotel is an odd duck, in that it’s probably at its strongest in the middle. It definitely feels like it was built in order and the early game got most of the later-stage love. Early on it pours the atmosphere on heavy, leaving you unarmed in a ruined, haunted hotel full of monsters. Once the stage is set and before the ghost train gets old, it hands you a pistol and tells you to get to work, exploring the hotel to uncover its horrible secrets. This section of exploration in the middle does a fantastic job combining survival horror resource pressure with masterfully executed atmosphere. The problem is that eventually you get downstairs into the secret biolab in the basement. It doesn’t look as interesting, the plot takes a turn for the pretentious, and the gameplay can’t find anything new to do. The ending isn’t terrible, but it is pretty average, which sticks out compared to the incredible quality of the middle. Ultimately, I think the game would benefit from a major overhaul that focuses on a relatively simple story. Silent Hill’s lore is hard to piece together, but it is not a convoluted story of time travel and predestination. The town is just haunted.
Hades doesn’t really need any introduction. Much like Supergiant’s Bastion back in 2011, the only thing to say is that yes, it really is that good.
Just Cause 3 is the only good Just Cause game. That’s being a little bit harsh on the others, but Just Cause 1 was definitely in the “good for its time” category and Just Cause 2 is just frustrating with how they did all the work to make all the assets to make a good game and then failed to make the UI functional. Just Cause games are a carnival of gunfire and explosives, I don’t want to go on a frustrating scavenger hunt for the last destructible object in an enemy base so I can clear it, just put a big glowing icon on my map and give me the satisfaction of the base being 100% destroyed. This isn’t Morrowind, I’m not going to be more immersed if you give me diegetic directions to follow.
Just Cause 3 understands this. If you pass within 20 yards of something you can blow up or hack or whatever, the game will stick a marker on your map to let you know. Taking over enemy bases and liberating enemy controlled villages is an expected part of gameplay, not something for rabid completionists picking over every inch of the enormous map. Just Cause 3 doesn’t just scoot over the edge into being good enough, it finally takes the disparate elements present in Just Cause 2 but unconnected to each other and plugs them together to create a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
The Legend of Tianding is a sidescrolling beat ’em up game about Taiwanese Robin Hood resisting the Imperial Japanese occupation in 1909. It’s got a fantastic art style, it’s fun to play, and its plot and characters are lots of fun. I don’t know how many of them are based on existing legends (Liao Tianding himself was a real guy, but the game is definitely following his life very loosely), but either way they make a good story with cool boss fights. It’s easily the best win from the Humble Choice for the whole year (although worth noting that Case of the Golden Idol and Hades were both recommended by friends, so they’re not in the running for this very specific category – but the vast majority of new games I got in 2023 were through the Humble Choice, so not many games are excluded).
Honorable mention to Majesty, I beat this game a bazillion times but there’s some stone age DLC from 2001 I never got around to and finally completed, and I decided to call that the date of completion. It’s a fantasy RPG setting except you play as the king in a throne room giving quests, using bounty flags to direct heroes and building up a town full of blacksmiths and marketplaces where they can buy upgrades and such. A fantastic strategy game with unique mechanics, very good at pulling off a wry tone that nevertheless takes itself seriously.
Midnight Fight Express is a topdown brawler game in which every criminal in the city is participating in an attempted coup and you have to punch all of them in the face. It has a gonzo tone of rat monsters and stripper assassins, it’s fun to play, and its plot and character arcs are simple but endearing. I was glad the two main characters got to have a happy moment together at the end, and sad by the unresolved ambiguity as to whether or not one of them was bleeding to death during it.
Spiritfarer is a sail-y around-y game, although it largely ditches the usual trading mechanics to instead have you gathering resources to build a big ol’ boat that allows you to build houses for all the departed spirits you are ushering in to the next life. Also it turns out that you’re dying in a hospital bed the whole time. I’m spoiling the twist because it’s dumb. The game presents itself as being about dealing with loss and it’s good at that, but it ends by pretending it’s about coming to terms with your own death, and it’s bad at that, because the cozy nature of the game means there’s no countdown and certainly no Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. You choose when you die. In terms of dealing with the loss of others, the game is great at portraying how senility kills every recognizable part of someone until the body left behind is barely recognizable even if it’s technically alive, at making you miss your best friend because she’s the one who showed you how to do the early game mechanics that stay relevant the whole way through and now you’re doing them alone, at showing someone’s struggle with cancer and the slowly dawning realization that she’s not going to win, at the sudden shock when the jovial uncle whose jovial excitement was so infectious just being gone, totally without warning or any chance to say goodbye.
You can tell I was frustrated by my business flops in autumn of 2023 and relying a lot more on video games that I knew would be fun to play to make up the difference, because StarCraft is also something I finally beat that year. I’d beaten the core game in high school, but never got far into Brood War against the much cleverer AI. I’m cleverer too, but I hate defiler micro, so I still wound up cheating my way through two of the last Kerrigan missions. Still calling it complete, though, the point of my completion list is not that I’m great for beating these video games, it’s that these games are good enough to hold my attention long enough to beat them, and if they only get there with cheat codes, that still counts.
This War of Mine is one that you’ve probably heard of and which I actually completed much earlier, but didn’t realize it. This is because This War of Mine’s bad endings feel just as canonical as the good ones. You’re civilians trapped in a warzone, and you might survive or you might not, and both of those feel entirely plausible. The game is much more forgiving than you might think given its premise, doing things like sending a lone survivor a randomly selected ally so that you’re never counting down the days to inevitable death, and seeding the map with locations like the home of an elderly couple who are completely helpless to prevent you from robbing them blind of their significant stores of food. You ideally don’t want to do that last one, but the game trusts you to figure that out for yourself. “Steal the food” isn’t an option in red text, it’s just a thing you can do while the helpless old man begs you to leave him and his wife in peace.
And if you get really good at the game, these things become completely unnecessary. It is totally possible, with enough game knowledge and mastery of the controls, to rapidly arm yourself and go through the city’s criminal element like a scythe, then pick over the remains for a fortune in food and materials. But while that’s possible, realistically speaking what you are actually going to do is give the crims a wide berth unless you are absolutely desperate and focus on surviving, or else you won’t do that and you will not survive. And this is what makes This War of Mine work. Being a survivalist badass isn’t a hardcoded impossibility, but it is completely impractical without significant game knowledge. Just like in the real world, yes, there is someone out there with the skillset to not just survive but thrive in a warzone, but you, specifically, are probably fucked.
I honestly don’t know if Zeus: Master of Olympus is actually good or not. It’s definitely not terrible, but it was a game I played when I was eight and which, on replays, gives me the satisfaction of being much, much smarter than an eight-year old. Babby Chamomile struggled through even early adventures. Adult Chamomile found that even the Trojan War wasn’t particularly difficult (on Mortal difficulty, which is the default but also only 2/5 difficulty, but I’m not particularly interested in becoming the all-time greatest player of a 25-year old city builder game that nobody cares about anymore).
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