2023's Games of the Year, Part 2

Yes, this is a retro video game publication, but I find plenty of time for new stuff, too.

Eligibility rules for 2023 were already discussed in the first of three parts, but I do want to make a follow-up note that I still don’t have a Playstation 5. Meaning that I’m sure Spider-Man’s latest game is lovely, but I can’t vouch for it, so it was so out of my mind that I didn’t even remember to make that note before now. But now you know why that (and whatever else of note came out exclusively for the PS5 in 2023) will see no representation here.

Luckily, I still have access to… pretty much everything else? So it’s not like this list lacks for options unless you’re exclusively a PS5 or like, Apple Arcade gamer.

Today, we’ll cover another seven of the 20 games of the year, with the final five honorable mentions at the end, as well.

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Pizza Tower

Developer: Tour de Pizza
Publisher: Tour de Pizza
Windows
Jan. 26

I am something of a Wario aficionado. I’m on the record as saying that Wario Land 3 is the greatest 2D platformer Nintendo has ever produced — yes, better than anything with Mario in it — and I have great love for Wario Land II, and even the original Wario Land, as well. It says quite a bit about these games that even a relative disappointment for the series like Wario Land: Shake It! is still a lovely platformer — the level of quality expected from these games is simply that high.

Which is why there was so much promise in just the idea of an indie developer deciding to create a spiritual sequel to the Wario Land games (and Wario Land 4’s unique style, specifically). Nintendo has left this incredible series by the wayside, as they have seemingly nothing left to say or prove with it after their four developed entries and one published one, but nothing outside of a lack of dedication and also incredible skill was stopping anyone else from picking up where they left off. Which is just what Tour de Pizza did with their debut game, Pizza Tower.

It’s basically Wario Land unchained, as, without the Nintendo of it all attached, it can be a little grosser and more outwardly violent in its approach to design, but the real thing that makes it sing, and makes it worthy of its place as a successor to one of the greats, is that it decided to make a game even more chaotic, even faster-paced, than Wario Land 4. Getting to the midpoint of a stage is going to involve some slower platforming, sure, especially if you want to slow down long enough to find the game’s many secrets and collectibles, but slow in Pizza Tower does not mean what slow does in Wario Land 4, and the run back to the entrance/exit after the midpoint, which comes with a timer, is at a breakneck pace. Also, it sounds like this while you’re escaping:

Throw in that, after defeating the final boss, you actually have to escape the entire tower on a timed run that plays differently than the paths you had already taken through various stages — it’s a significantly larger version of the in reverse, but with new paths model that each stage uses when it’s time to leave — and you can’t help but be in awe of the level design of this game.

I brought up Pizza Tower earlier this year, too, in a conversation with Jordan Minor about his book, Video Game of the Year, in relation to the way the game handles difficulty:

Instead of different modes to ease players in, the levels are the same each time, but they can be completed and you can progress without even playing huge chunks of the game. Whether you just don’t want to experience them, or they’re more work than you’re willing to put in: this means, say, finding all the hidden secret challenge rooms, or opening the locked doors you need to find the key or keyholder for, or collecting each of the treasures and all imprisoned pizza toppings, plus a second lap of a stage as you’re about to finish it, which will give you another shot at rounding out the level’s collectibles and increasing your score, but will also force you to complete the tense and fast-paced “escape” portion of the stage again as well. You could do all of that, and extend both the challenge and the length of time you spend with Pizza Tower, or you could just… not. And play through what you need to in order to make it through the tower, and then you’re done. And you’re not punished for that, so long as you find the minimum amount you need to open up the boss fights. It’s an excellent blend of approachability and challenge, that lets you jump from one to the other from moment to moment depending on how you feel at any point, without having to enter a menu.

Truly excellent stuff, and while I don’t rank these games of the year with any kind of public-facing component, I feel like I have to mention that, in a year as ridiculously overloaded as this one that required as many cuts and tough decisions as it did, Pizza Tower was an easy top five pick for me, and my favorite side-scrolling platformer of the year. Consider that 2023 also included Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which I adored (and yes, which will appear on this list), and you’ve got a sense for how good Pizza Tower is.

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Void Stranger

Developer: System Erasure
Publisher: System Erasure
Windows
Sep. 1

If you’ve played the shoot ‘em up ZeroRanger, then you’re already aware that developer System Erasure likes to pretend they’re doing one simple thing while actually doing another thing that is about as far from simple as you get. They also make games that you can’t really discuss the finer details of out loud, because they should be experienced instead — in November, I referred to Void Stranger as the “I can’t tell you anything about it but you should just play it” game of the year, and it’s still wearing that crown now. So, just know that what appears to be “just” a sokoban-style overhead puzzle game with a Game Boy or WonderSwan-esque presentation is actually much more than that, and what might appear to be a game you can sink a few hours into solving block puzzles is actually a sprawling mass full of moral and ethical decisions that will consume dozens and dozens of hours if you let it. It’s unclear to me at this point if I’ve actually gotten to the “real” part of the game yet despite “beating” it, but even without knowing that, I have no problem saying it’s one of 2023’s best.

You don’t expect a puzzle-based roguelike to have the kind of narrative depth that Void Stranger does, but as we’ve seen two games in now, that’s just kind of how System Erasure does things. This is one I’ll keep on playing, peeling back layers of and learning more about, well beyond this writing.

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Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

Developer: Xeen
Publisher: Square Enix
Windows, Nintendo Switch
Mar. 8

Square Enix’s best effort in 2023 came in the form of a visual novel with branching decisions. (And you know it’s their best because they forgot to market it.) The narrative itself is fascinating and pulled me in with ease — seven (or nine, really) curses specific to a particular city in Japan all become active at once, held by characters you control and others you do not, and you’re all gunning for a chance to resurrect someone dear or at least important to you through their use, which obviously comes with all kinds of moral quandaries to process — but it’s the way it’s told that really sells it all and makes it a wondrous experience.

Paranormasight borrows some of what made Vanillaware’s incredible 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim work, in that it encourages you to experiment to open up every possible pathway, not just the “real” or “correct” ones, in order to flesh out the world, the characters, the story. What’s a little different from 13 Sentinels, however, is that the game kind of happens outside of the game, with it actively encouraging you to consider that, as the player, you have knowledge that the game’s characters do not. This results in being able to solve some puzzles the character otherwise would not be able to, or to somehow manifest items into the game world by simply being aware of the existence of them and the possible need for them later on. Oh, and for some real Metal Gear Solid Psycho Mantis battle fourth-wall breaking moments, too.

It breaks down its genre and its narrative in compelling ways, and avoids winking too hard at the player in the process while doing it. Just a fantastic game that more people should experience, and since Square Enix didn’t bother to tell anyone about it — I had to find out it even existed from Sorrel Kerr-Jung’s tweets about it — well, now you know.

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Turbo Overkill

Developer: Trigger Happy Interactive
Publisher: Apogee Entertainment
Windows
Aug. 11

Probably the easiest way to explain Turbo Overkill’s whole vibe is this: it’s a first-person shooter where you start out with a chainsaw leg, and by the end of it, you can have a second chainsaw leg, and also two chainsaw arms. The guns are all great, they have some thoughtful secondary fire features that all end up being useful (or, at the least, very funny to use) and the balance of it all is wonderful, but in the end, you can have four chainsaw limbs at the same time, and you will be happy about that.

Turbo Overkill had been in Early Access for some time, but it received a full 1.0 Windows release in mid-August of this year, and then a further update in the fall that made it actually work on the Steam Deck and for those who wanted to play with a gamepad instead of mouse and keyboard. This final product, in all its boomer shooter retro FPS graphical glory, rules. It could have very easily been overstuffed: with guns, with enemy types, with options, with things to do. But it leaves so much open to your specific way of wanting to play, between the various weapons having multiple uses, the customizable upgrades that let you do things like, say, recover health with every chainsaw leg kill, that it doesn’t ever get close to doing what turned some folks off from DOOM Eternal. Meaning, you don’t have to utilize every aspect of the game in every encounter, you can just mess with what you want and be perfectly fine. There are some segments where you’re “corrupted” and only one gun will work for you, sure, but those are little challenge segments, not an entire game made out of being told what to do.

Your chainsaw leg, by the way, isn’t just wielded around with a short range. You use it to perform sliding attacks over long distances, so you can wipe out a long line of foes, double back to get the ones you missed, go flying and jumping through the air to perform a chainsaw leg dropkick on foes close by or ones sitting on a platform unaware about what’s about to happen to their faces once you connect. You can even use it on bosses, though, obviously, they’re going to take way more damage and make you pay for being too close in a way standard foes won’t. Still, the option is there, and you don’t even have to be perfect at these games to utilize it.

It all just feels so good: easily one of the best first-person shooters that’s hit the market since Titanfall 2, and the best one I played in 2023. I’m excited to go back and play it all again on a higher difficultym, as I know what’s waiting for me is a combination of deadly slides, long distance platforming jumps and dashes, and imaginative sci-fi weapons in a cyberpunk universe. And four chainsaws, of course.

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Schildmaid MX

Developer: HitP Studio
Publisher: HitP Studio
Windows
Mar. 24

Another game that was already out prior to 2023 in some form, but this year brought its full version, and in doing so also moved the title out of being on itch.io alone and onto Steam as well, with console ports to practically everything on the way, too. Schildmaid MX is a horizontally scrolling STG in the vein of series like Darius and Gradius, but it has quite a few hooks to itself that make it stand out among a crowded field.

Like one of last year’s excellent shoot ‘em ups, Drainus, you don’t actually want to avoid bullets all the time in Schildmaid MX. Instead, being hit by an enemy bullet will trigger a shield that then absorbs additional bullets as energy to power your special attack, as well as increase your multiplier and score. Every time you defeat an enemy, this shield absorption meter refills a bit, so you can create some wildly lengthy chains over time, especially on higher difficulties, that will send your score through the roof. Bullets aren’t the only issue, however, as there are also plenty of missiles, including homing ones that you have to actively dodge and confuse through a button press, to avoid, and they can be easily lost in the massive array of colorful fireworks happening on screen at basically all times. Oh, and if your shield absorption meter runs out, you then can’t be touched by anything or you’ll die: those bullets that just fed your multiplier and special attacks will turn red, and they will now kill you until your shield can recharge. Did I mention yet that the screen is basically always full of bullets?

Schildmaid MX has a lot going on, but it eases you in. There are multiple difficulties that don’t just change things like how many foes will appear on screen and how difficult they are, but also the fundamental nature of the game changes. Jaeger, the introductory version of the game, lets you restart any stage from a checkpoint whenever you want to in order to perfect your run. Krieger gets rid of the checkpoints and the continues: you’ve got your initial lives and whatever you can earn via extend, and that’s that. Chimera allows you just one ship to choose from instead of the usual three, and while it’s the most powerful one in the game, the game also ends when you die once.

I was not kidding about the amount of stuff on screen. This is actually kind of mild. Image credit: Steam

There are also EX versions of Jaeger and Krieger, which make more difficult foes appear sooner: this is good for building up a multiplier chain early, but also bad for trying to survive. Oh, and there’s a rank system in Schildmaid MX, too, so the better you do, the tougher it’ll get. The good news is that surviving a level without dying also increases your base multiplier, so when things do inevitably become more difficult due to your success, at least you’ll be able to score more points faster than before.

In the Jaeger/Krieger (and EX) modes, there are a handful of stages with three levels within them, and when you’ve completed enough loops of these, you’ll fight the actual final boss of the mode. Along the way, you might unlock secret bosses that’ll help boost your score, and you need that to earn the extends that it’ll take to get to that final boss.

It’s an excellent horizontal shooter, and a great entry point for people who aren’t particularly confident about this kind of game. The Jaeger mode really does acclimate you to what the game is up to, and Krieger will show you that you still have more to learn even before you get to the EX version. Can’t recommend enough if you’re even sort of interested in the genre.

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Dredge

Developer: Black Salt Games
Publisher: Team17
Windows, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One, Series S|X
Mar. 30

Dredge feels a lot like sailing around in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker [complimentary] if every couple of minutes Wind Waker actively tried to make you lose your grip on reality and sea monsters tried to murder you [again, complimentary].

Or maybe it was a rock.

That’s the thing about Dredge. You’re a sailor without much of a memory, but you’ve got a boat and a debt to pay, and there are fish in the sea you can catch that’ll fetch a quality price, assuming you can get back to port in time for them to still be fresh. That sea is as beautiful as it is angry, its denizens strange and unsettling, and that’s when you aren’t even tired yet. Once fatigue sets in, all bets are off. Is that actually an enormous sea monster? Is that island really there? Are you about to crash? Can something that doesn’t exist hurt you? Or did it only not exist before your tenuous grasp of reality become further strained?

There’s a haunting story at the heart of Dredge, and you’re not just a supporting character in it, even if it feels that way at first. It’s worth discovering what it’s all about on your own, but before you do, know that it really might just be a rock. Until it isn’t, anyway.

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Developer: Nintendo EPD
Publisher: Nintendo
Nintendo Switch
May 12

A game that went well beyond what people thought the Switch was even capable of at this point in its lifespan. A game that had other developers wondering how the hell Nintendo even managed to do what they did within. A game that served as a reminder of what’s possible with time, trust, and continuity: all but a couple of the developers who worked on the original Legend of Zelda also worked on Tears of the Kingdom nearly four decades later, which is… well, there aren’t many studios out there with that kind of retention, you know? Whether self-inflicted or not. The game is practically a miracle on multiple levels.

And yet… I’m not sure it’s better than its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. Granted, I’m a person who enjoyed No Man’s Sky more when there was less to do, so maybe BotW’s relatively quiet and loneliness just spoke to me in a very specific way that Tears of the Kingdom cannot, given its emphasis on building, both thematically and in literal practice. All that being said, even if it’s not as good as Breath of the Wild (to me), even if it’s not the best Zelda ever, it’s still a stunning achievement that’s as good as anything else that released in 2023, if not better. Also, you can make a Godzilla short film in/with it if you want.

The depths alone are incredible: that Nintendo managed to bring back the same map from Breath of the Wild, but also have it be completely different and in triplicate, is a wonder on its own. That it all fits together so seamlessly and is connected in multiple ways only adds to that. I have my nitpicks — the dragon’s tear memory system isn’t as satisfying to discover as the photo locations that trigger memories from BotW, for instance — but Tears of the Kingdom is bonkers in pretty much every way. A beautiful game I plan to revisit again after already spending nearly 120 hours in it this year, which is not a thing I almost ever say about something of this length and scope.

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Honorable Mentions

Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed: You can argue that Future Redeemed isn’t actually a game, but it’s as much of a game as any other expansion that’s the size of an entire game has ever been. It takes place earlier in the timeline of Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s world, and answers some lingering questions from the original game that anyone invested in the narrative and its characters will want to know about. The combat has been tweaked a bit, in the same way Xenoblade Chronicle 2’s expansion, Torna: The Golden Country modified its own systems for the shorter experience, but remains a rewarding time. And really, it’s just more of what Monolith does so well in every way. Will it convince you to get into Xenoblade if you aren’t already there? No, but that’s because it’s the exclamation point on a decade-spanning project that you already should have been invested in.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Into Reverie: Trails into Reverie serves a similar purpose to Trails in the Sky the 3rd, in that it brings together practically every character in this series’ arc plus some new ones besides to truly put to bed said arc, while also more than hinting at the direction that’s to come for the long-running, basically episodic series of RPGs. It’s completely impenetrable if you aren’t already a Trails sicko, but as I’ve already argued that this is good behavior that should be encouraged, I won’t do so again in this space.

Gimmick! Special Edition: Gimmick! released in Japan in 1992, as a late-life Famicom gem that understood what that hardware was capable of, and pushed it to the limits. It’s notoriously difficult, but has been even more notoriously absent: besides a release in Scandinavia, it never left Japan, not once. It didn’t end up as an import title for any iteration of the Virtual Console, despite Sunsoft putting plenty of their other properties on those services, and until 2023, there wasn’t a re-release of any kind outside of an arcade edition which, again, was for Japan.

Now we’ve got this special edition, though, and it’s now a more approachable game thanks to a rewind function as well as the ability to save states. Gimmick! takes a lot of practice to get right: it’s a platformer that doesn’t tell you very much about what any single part of it does, and what you’re capable of is actually pretty complicated, since you can fire projectiles that you can also ride around in order to reach place you otherwise would not be able to. The ability to try and try again to get things just right gives more people the opportunity to see what’s special about this weirdo, and, even better, it’s multiplatform in addition to having a worldwide release, so it’s no longer stuck on an aging system in two (2) countries.

Dordogne: I played Dordogne in one sitting, which is more a testament to how much it gripped me than its length, which is admittedly short. You play as Mimi, who has returned to the home of her grandmother, just off the Dordogne river in France, following her passing. You spend the game evoking memories of Mimi’s childhood, learning about her relationship with her grandmother who she knew on a first name basis, and you do so through exploration and some light puzzles. It is both a very sweet game and a sad one, and all arranged so that you want to know what went down that caused this rift — still ongoing — between Mimi’s family that kept her from coming back to this house she seemed to love so much until the person who lived within, whom she also loved, was no longer there. Make a bowl of popcorn when you can settle in for one evening with a game, and be prepared to feel a few ways about things.

Remnant II: I never played the first Remnant game, but the reception to its sequel was so positive, and I without something specific to play at that moment, that I decided to dive in. It ended up being a quality blend of third-person shooter and melee, with some really cool ideas about how to build up a character in a game with leveling and skill upgrades and gear to perfect without constantly repeating the same areas again and again to farm. For one, the various levels you’ll play are random, in the sense that the path you’ll follow in one playthrough isn’t necessarily the path you’ll follow in another, which changes maps, encounters, and the bosses you have to defeat, as well as the quests contained within those maps. And second, you can start a non-narrative side campaign specifically for the purpose of playing the maps and quests and bosses that aren’t in your version of the campaign, which will help you gain additional levels, build up skills, and complete your arsenal. And it lets you do all of this while simply putting your campaign on pause: no need to reroll your character and start all over, though, you can do that, too, if you want to go in that direction.

I haven’t played in a bit, but when I did around release, I also had a mostly pleasant online multiplayer experience with people who seemed like they actually wanted to work together and help. And hey, no voice chat, just vibes, so a perfect experience in that regard for me, a dedicated online multiplayer avoider.

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