2023's Games of the Year, Part 3

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

Dec 22, 2023

Part one covered the eligibility rules, the first seven (of 20) games of the year as well as five honorable mentions, and part two included another seven and the final five honorables. Part three has the last six games of the year for 2023, as well as my seven-year-old’s picks for her favorites from the past year.

A reminder that these aren’t in any order, so this isn’t a countdown. However, two of the three that are (still) vying in my mind for that top spot are included in this conclusion. You know, so it feels bigger.

Hi-Fi Rush

Developer: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Windows, Xbox Series S|X
Jan. 25

What a refreshing title to have drop right in our laps, as a surprise, near the start of 2023. Tango Gameworks, the Shinji Mikami-formed studio that was previously responsible for the pair of Evil Within games and Ghostwire: Tokyo, made what can be distilled down to Cartoon Devil May Cry Action-Rhythm. And that’s a sentence I didn’t know I wanted to exist until I played Hi-Fi Rush, but now that I have, hell yeah.

It’s not a perfect game. The dialogue veers a little too much into “he’s behind me right now, isn’t he” territory more often than I’d like. The combat system is all style and no substance early on, but that’s just a case of walking you through it a little too gently for too long. Once it opens up further with upgrades and enhancements and new skills, well, it all flows as well as the music you’re keeping a beat to with your attacks and dodges and parries.

What’s also a positive is that Hi-Fi Rush doesn’t overstay its welcome. You have seven passcodes to acquire in order to shutdown what’s basically a PG version of the plot from Kingsman: The Secret Service, except instead of a murderous rampage being beamed to you through a brain implant, it’s a desire to buy things from the company that installed your augmented body parts. Well, alright, maybe Kingsman is a bad comp, especially with the music angle, and I should be saying Josie and the Pussycats instead.

Where was I? Right, passcodes. The game doesn’t make you do the same progression en route to acquiring each of those passcodes. It’s not quite a No More Heroes-level of changing things up from encounter to encounter, but sometimes you fight a big tough leader enemy to close out a chapter, sometimes it’s a mob of difficult foes and the non-combat leader succumbs to you all the same, sometimes you’re on a stage fighting against someone during a massive show and trying to get the crowd behind you so that… okay actually that is pretty No More Heroes. Which, consider the source, is a credit to this game for me.

Hi-Fi Rush is just a real good time, and it’s difficult not to be swayed by its charms because of both its ambition and design. Rhythm-based combat that doesn’t overly punish you for missing the timing was a good idea, as it makes this feel like, well, like a Devil May Cry game, or other Mikami-style efforts from the genre, where you can get by without being great at things, but it’ll all work out just that much better if you are, too.

Cocoon

Developer: Geometric Interactive
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Windows, Xbox Series S|X, Playstation 4/5, Nintendo Switch
Sep. 29

What makes Cocoon’s puzzles work is this: they seem pretty difficult, pretty tough to grasp in their form. They’re intimidating, really, often due to the scope of them. The thing is, though, they’re actually wondrously designed so that, once you actually start attempting to solve these puzzles that sometimes take multiple rooms — or even worlds — to complete, it all just feels like you know what you’re doing, even when you don’t. It’s a game that makes you feel like a genius even if you aren’t, which is a difficult balancing act to achieve. Cocoon nails it throughout its shortish runtime, though, by having you exist in one world that within it has the portals to other worlds, and also you carry those worlds around in the form of orbs, and can carry one orb into another orb to keep it there as necessary, and also also the orbs all interact with each other inside each other and sometimes outside of each other in certain ways that open doors or clear obstacles or impact the environment in a way that helps you progress.

Like I said, it seems like a lot of intimidating, difficult to grasp puzzling. But it’s not! That it feels like it is and then isn’t isn’t a letdown, though, and instead leaves you with some real feelings of fulfillment. Just some excellent work from Geometric Interactive. The game’s director was Jeppe Carlsen, who previously was the game designer for Playdead’s Inside and Limbo. Those were brilliant outings as well, and it’s good to see that the switch to 3D design hasn’t changed the results.

Super Marios Bros. Wonder

Developer: Nintendo EPD
Publisher: Nintendo
Nintendo Switch
Oct. 20

It’s kind of wild to think that, in many other years, Super Mario Bros. Wonder would have been the resounding, easy pick for game of the year. It’s so much of what’s been missing from side-scrolling Mario for decades, and also more than what anyone even knew was missing from that particular subset of Mario games.

For Paste, I wrote about how Wonder does what the New Super Mario Bros. games never could, as they weren’t designed to (or allowed to) rise above their task of reminding you that 2D, side-scrolling Mario once existed. Nintendo finally allowed the kind of care and imagination back into side-scrolling Mario that had been seemingly exclusively to the plumber’s 3D outings for decades now, and the result is the best side-scrolling Mario since Super Mario World:

For the first time in literal decades, a side-scrolling Mario game is full of genuine surprises that makes it difficult to put down. The New Super Mario Bros. games never felt like that: even when they were good, they too often felt like a slog that went on, that were as long as they were because that’s how many levels Mario games used to have, not because that’s how many good ideas existed for the present-day Mario games… Nintendo hadn’t forgotten how to make a killer Mario game by any means, so much as the intention never seemed to be to push their best ideas for a Mario game into the side-scrolling space anymore. Everything—from the best abilities to the best music and art and level design—was reserved for the 3D space.
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Here, though, the animation and sound are excellent, the enemies adorable and enjoyable to watch. Super Mario Bros. Wonder actually looks just alright in screenshots and stills, but in motion, it’s surprisingly gorgeous, with both the art design and the look of it all wowing in a way that the NSMB games did not. It all looks and feels so new and so full of an infectious energy that compels you to seek out the next secret, the next surprise, the next moment of wonder, and the introduction of the new items—the elephant, the bubble flower, and the drill—and their incorporation into the level design was a treat. None of them are quite on the level of Cat Mario, no, but what is? They at least managed to rise to the level of joy and utility that 3D Mario’s inventive items have, and that’s more than you can say about its post-Mario World 2D cousins.

The Banished Vault

Developer: Lunar Division
Publisher: Bithell Games
Windows, macOS
July 25

The Banished Vault lays out what’s needed from you from the start, and gives you some basic ideas of how you could go about it. It’s very open about the fact that you will fail, you will die, you will need to try again. That helps, I think, with the failing, the dying, the needing to try again. When it’s not a surprise, when you can steel yourself before even beginning a mission for real, the challenge is easier to take. And it helps that The Banished Vault isn’t an unfair game, merely a demanding one. Demanding of your attention, your focus, your ability to micromanage a small fleet of ships mining and collecting and utilizing resources to build structures, to create fuel, to synthesize the precious materials needed for deep-space hibernation that keep your little band of believers alive in the inky black of space between systems.

If you don’t want to have to deal with calculating efficient fuel usage with various engines and ships and distances, if you don’t want to have to split a small crew up into many smaller crews to mine and build and synthesize on an array of planets and clouds full of gases and seemingly abandoned ships, if you don’t want to have to roll dice to avoid hazards, and risk sacrificing lives for the greater project at hand, well, The Banished Vault isn’t going to be for you. But it’s a brilliant turn-based strategy affair that feels very much like a single-player board game where failure is the most likely option for those unwilling to treat a campaign with the care that it requires.

Dia Lacina wrote one of my favorite reviews of the year for Paste on The Banished Vault, and just this week, designer Nic Tringali wrote a piece for Game Developer on how the game’s manual was conceptualized, and why it was written the way it was, so that different players with different styles of learning and referencing could all be served with it. Both pieces are worth checking out, as is the game itself if you’ve got the patience for what it requires of you.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Windows, Xbox Series S|X, Playstation 4/5
Aug. 25

There are two things that make an action game really sing in your hands. First, there’s the movement. Whether on foot or in a vehicle, whether on treads or flying or running or swimming, how you move, and how it feels to move — how responsive every action is, how well your character, vehicle, whatever moves in relation to how you expect them to move, how quick that movement occurs after the initiation of it, all of that determines, somewhere in our little series of electrical impulses that power our minds, whether a game’s movement feels Good or Bad.

Second is the challenge. That’s not to say that easier action games lack satisfaction: so long as what you’re being asked to do falls within the realm of what you’re capable of doing but doesn’t just happen in a way that feels automatic or inevitable, you will experience some level of challenge, and the satisfaction that comes from surmounting it. Challenge could come from performing a violent ballet of attacks and parries and dodges, and coming out of it not just on top, but unscathed: the challenge is in the attempt at perfection. Challenge can come, too, from a battle of endurance, of knowing you will take damage, of knowing losing, not just winning a little uglier than you wanted, is a real possibility.

Image credit: Steam

What makes Armored Core VI one of the most incredible action games I’ve played in ages is that it is everything I just described. Well, besides the swimming — you’re piloting a mech, after all, and mechs are very tall. Playing Armored Core VI feels like choreographing a battle between mechs in an anime. It’s all just so smooth, so sleek, so impossibly responsive, with the kind of reactions and instinctual movements I equate more with a shoot ‘em up where there is no time to think, only to live, than with an action game required of you so often. It combines this incredible movement with as much challenge as you could ask for. None of it impossible, all of it simply waiting for you to figure out what is needed of you in order to be up to the task in front of you. You must fight, you must build, you must tweak, you must be as flexible as your ever-changing, shape-shifting mech is capable of being, if you are to figure out the secret to defeating Armored Core VI’s many midboss encounters and boss fights and tests of endurance.

Losing a dozen times to one boss might not sound like a great time to everyone. But luck is not what will cause you to eventually find victory. Learning from your mistakes will help. Outfitting your mech with new weapons, new arms and legs and movement stats and defensive abilities and boost capabilities will, when partnered with your education, be your salvation. You might not need to use that specific version of your AC, your mech, again. But when you do put together that specific build, constructed from the knowledge you’ve gained in defeat, and then you win? You’re not just going to be thrilled, but feel like you could run right through a wall, too.

That the game is designed to be played multiple times, with the challenge increasing each time out, only adds to the experience. You’ll spend dozens of hours in a single version of the campaign, mastering your mech in its many forms, discovering the buried secrets of Rubicon, and switching allegiances as a mercenary about as often as you switch builds. And then you can do it all over again, only different this time. And you’ll want to, because that’s what Armored Core compels in you: a constant return to take on the challenges before you, because you know that you have to know if it’s within you to succeed.

Bullet Points dedicated an entire issue to Armored Core VI for a reason, and you should read all of it. Just an excellent game, maybe the best one from a year overflowing with titles that you could make an argument for as such.

Alan Wake II

Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Epic Games Publishing
Windows, Xbox Series S|X, Playstation 5
Oct. 27

Admittedly, I loved the original Alan Wake despite its flaws, and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is an underrated little gem. So I was primed and ready for Alan Wake II, basically. It still managed to blow me away, though, and not just because there’s a fucking rock opera musical number tied to the gameplay in the middle of the thing that features Sam Lake doing a choreographed dance routine that I’m going to be thinking about for, I don’t know, ever.

I love how Alan Wake II doesn’t even attempt to answer all of the questions it raises, whether they’re big or small. Some things just are, and they’re for you to wonder about, or admire, or dismiss, and move on. It manages to continue this Remedy Universe thing without being overbearing about it. (If you’ve played through already and are about to disagree because you’re assuming there will be a more direct back-and-forth with a Control sequel, remember that we’ve got a bunch of Wake II DLC to get through, first. At least tell me I was wrong then if that proves true.) There are parts that don’t quite work, but they all just roll off, anyway, since so much of what’s here not only works, but does so resoundingly. Alan Wake II is obviously a big budget AAA title, but it shows something that the AAA space seems to need a desperate reminder of, which is that taking chances and trying to do something interesting and different is valuable. Alan Wake II plays like it has the spirit of a weird AA or wildly ambitious indie, if a publisher had mistakenly handed the developer a check meant for something AAA. And the FMV integration is just… honestly it’s hard to believe how incredible it all is considering that this isn’t just the entire game, but instead merely a key component of it, but that’s where that “extra” money went.

It’s practically two games in one, with the first featuring new protagonist, FBI Special Agent Saga Anderson, in a pretty Silent Hill-esque adventure. Except her mission is wrapped up in Alan Wake’s reality-bending one, which begins to change her life and side of the game in terms of both the gameplay and its narrative, and her life. Her partner, Alex Casey, shares a name with the detective from Wake’s series of novels — who is similar to but legally distinct from Max Payne, Remedy’s character that’s owned by Rockstar, and oh, Alex Casey is portrayed by Sam Lake, who portrayed Payne in those games, and voiced by the late James McAffrey, who voiced Payne — which is a coincidence unless isn’t, because wow does this get hard to keep track of the deeper into it you get, the more the lines between reality and fiction blur for both the characters in the game and for you at home.

Wake’s side of things should be familiar to anyone who played the DLC packs for the original Wake or played American Nightmare, except it’s… more? In every conceivable way? The desperation of it all is so obvious here, and more believable, as if Wake really has been trapped in the Dark Place for 13 years now, both his and its powers grown in that time. It makes it all wildly unsettling, especially the more the two sides interact with each other, with Wake and Saga being wrapped up in each other’s lives in ways neither of them comprehends, even if they think they do.

It’s not perfect, by any means, but that’s part of the charm for me. It’s a big, messy experience, one that didn’t fear taking big swings, and while there are times where maybe the swings are a little too big, or the referential winking a little too much, I’m not sure you get the rest of the package without this mission statement of being Too Much whenever possible. A game doesn’t need to be perfect, to be frictionless, to feel perfect. Wake II is certainly full of friction and imperfections, but I might not have played a better game in all of 2023, anyway.

Maddie’s Games of the Year

Once again, let’s ask my seven-year-old daughter, Maddie, about her favorite games from 2023. They’re not all new to 2023, but hey, they’re new to her, and I’ve got a column dedicated to that sort of thing here, so it’s allowed. The words you see from here until the exit paragraph are hers, after a prompt of, “Tell me what you like about [game].”

Splatoon 3: I like changing my outfit, and battling other people is fun! My favorite team to be on is pink and my second favorite is purple, but I like the battles even when I’m not pink or purple.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder: YOU CAN TURN INTO AN ELEPHANT! The Wonder Flowers are so much fun! They make dancing piranha plants and the Ninji Jump Party level.

Super Mario RPG: Peach and Bowser work with Mario?! I love that. I know how to read now, so I can play this game, and I like to.

Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time: The thing that I like about Crash Bandicoot is that I can play as Coco, and I can unlock fun skins when I’m really good at a level. [Editor’s note: We have got to do something about that horrid terminology.] I want to play the old Crash Bandicoots next, like mommy did!

Kirby Fighters 2: I like climbing the tower in story mode, because you get to fight a bunch of bosses. Shadow Kirby is tough, but I still like fighting him. And I can play Kirby Fighters 2 with all of you!

Maddie just turned seven, and received a Switch Lite for her birthday: it felt like the right time to see how she handles it from both a responsibility point of view and in getting a bit more freedom in her day. So, one, obviously she’s been compensated well for her work in these end-of-year wrap-ups, and two, I’m guessing next year’s lineup will be pretty Switch-heavy, since she’s uh, not exactly Alan Wake II age.

Though the kids did love watching Armored Core VI, and even picked up on the fact that it wasn’t a robot game, but one with mechs. Maybe next year we can get Finn’s picks in here, too.

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