This article is available in both written and video format. The video shows the games in action in full 4K and 60 frames per second while I read the article as a voiceover, so if you watch the video you won’t need to read the written article that follows since it’s the same ‘script’. The video can be viewed here:
Another year has passed, and it’s fair to say it’s been one of the best in terms of game releases (even if it’s been one of the worst for the business itself). Not that I necessarily got much exposure to a lot of this year’s AAA releases, mind you: mainly because of various plate-spinning antics at the start of the year, and the small matter of the Game Boy Encyclopedia proving much more complicated than expected, yer man missed out on a lot of 2023‘s best games.
What this does mean, at least, is that my Best Games of 2023 list should be a little more unusual than the others you’ll have seen to date, because the number of AAA games featured is relatively low. Hopefully, then, my downfall will have its benefits here, as you might stumble upon something you may be less familiar with.
Because of a household illness which started on Boxing Day and is only just beginning to let up now, this video comes a little later than usual. However, now that I can string a sentence together without sounding like John Hurt playing the Elephant Man, I finally present my 10 favourite games of 2023.
As with every year’s list, there are a few caveats to bear in mind before we get started:
• This is in alphabetical order, not best to worst. I can’t be arsed deciding whether a game was my 7th or 8th favourite of the year. They’re all great: get them all.
• Before you even think about writing a comment saying this, I didn’t “forget” anything. As I’ve already explained, the reason my list looks very different from most of the others you’ve seen so far isn’t an attempt to be quirky or pretentious, it’s just because I reviewed very few of this year’s AAA games, and because this is my personal list I can only pick from what I’ve played. So no, I didn’t forget Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake 2 or Baldur’s Gate 3: they’re just all on my backlog and I haven’t gotten round to playing them yet.
That said, let’s get cracking!
Dead Space
EA’s 2023 version of Dead Space did a great job of preserving everything that made the original so enjoyable, while adding just enough bells and whistles to make it feel more modern.
Obviously the game looks significantly better than the Xbox 360 and PS3 original, but it also freshens things up by tweaking the narrative, adding new side missions, and removing some of the more annoying elements of the original game.
The clunky zero gravity sections control a hell of a lot better, the lighting improvements are night and day (literally) and the decision to give protagonist Isaac a voice means the game can retain the same story beats (though there are a few changes in there) while still making all the dialogue feel fresh.
It’s a fairly brisk 10-12 hours to play through so it’s worth a look, especially because I’d imagine it’ll be added to the EA Play library this year.
Disney Speedstorm
Anyone who knows me knows I love my karting games, and I genuinely think Disney Speedstorm is one of the better examples of the genre I’ve played (at least in terms of actual gameplay), as long as you can put up with its free-to-play nonsense.
Gameloft’s free-to-play racing game has changed a bit since its original Early Access version and the microtransactions are a lot more in-your-face than they were at launch.
As long as you can resist them, though, there’s still a great kart racing game in here with solid season-based gameplay and a brilliant roster of popular and niche Disney characters: there are now 45 racers with no sign of the updates stopping any time soon.
It’s also got one of the most ridiculous soundtracks I’ve heard in a licensed game, with the musicians seemingly getting free rein to do weird stuff with classic Disney themes. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard dubstep Bear Necessities.
Forza Motorsport
It’s been six years since the last main game in the Forza Motorsport series, and while Forza Horizon has almost become the flagship brand (despite originally starting as a spin-off) there’s still something nice about just racing cars around a track.
The new Forza Motorsport looks incredible – it’s hard to tell whether this or Gran Turismo 7 are the best-looking racing games ever because they each focus their visuals on slightly different elements – and the handling is so perfectly tweaked that hurtling your car round each track is massively satisfying.
At launch it was lacking in content and a few months down the line it’s still pretty bare-bones despite the addition of a new track and some new championships. It’s clear that Microsoft considers this new Forza a platform on which new features will be added over the months and years.
As it stands right now, though, it’s a perfect Game Pass title, because you can jump in, play a few races then jump out without having to commit 100 hours in a row to it. To have such an accomplished, brilliantly presented racing game ready and waiting for a quick race is a joy.
The Making of Karateka
Digital Eclipse’s Atari 50 was on my 2022 list, and this year it introduced its Gold Master Series, where it plans to choose a game creator or series and give it similar treatment.
Just like Atari 50, then, The Making of Karateka is a sort of playable documentary where you play through a number of timelines (a bit like museum exhibitions) and check out the images, documents and video clips included: in this case, following the early days of Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner and the making of his first major game, Karateka.
Each time you reach a part in the timeline where a game appears – be that an unreleased prototype or what have you – you then get to play that game. Because Digital Eclipse presents you these games along with their context in history, playing them feels a lot more meaningful than if they were just dumped in a multi-game retro compilation with no explanation.
This year Digital Eclipse will be releasing the next Gold Master Series game, which is based on the work of Jeff Minter. Based on Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka, I’ll be stunned if that doesn’t make my Best of 2024 list.
Mortal Kombat 1
I used to be obsessed with the early Mortal Kombat games back in the 2D days. Back in the day, if you’d asked me anything about the original Mortal Kombat trilogy and its characters I’d have been able to give you all their backstory with a level of enthusiasm that verged on concerning.
As much as I’ve enjoyed the recent Mortal Kombat games, though, I’d be lying if I said I had a full grasp on the storyline these days: I’ve had no bloody idea what’s going on in the otherwise impressive Story modes. By rebooting the series with a timeline reset though, Mortal Kombat 1 has pulled me back in, in a big way.
The Story mode in this game is both comprehensive and comprehensible, which is nice to have. It’s also immaculately presented, making it probably the best-looking fighting game I’ve ever seen.
Add to that a Kameo system which, while not entirely original, does give the fights a bit more variety, as well as pre-order DLC which lets you play as Jean Claude Van Damme, and I couldn’t be happier.
Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On
The original Pocket Card Jockey was released on the 3DS a decade ago in Japan before coming to the west in 2016. At the time I thought it was an underrated eShop puzzle game that not enough people got to enjoy.
Ride On is essentially a remake of that 3DS game and plays more or less the same with a few extra mechanics added on for good measure. Given it’s an Apple Arcade release it once again finds itself available to a smaller audience than it deserves, but if you have access to Apple’s subscription service, you absolutely should give it a go.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s basically a horse racing game in which your success is determined by how well you complete rounds of Solitaire Golf, where you remove cards in numerical order.
It’s a simple concept which takes five minutes to learn, but the fact your horses retire after a set number of races, and you have to continually breed new ones with different stats each time, means you could put tens of hours into this game and still feel like you’re making progress.
RoboCop: Rogue City
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Teyon’s RoboCop game, given that previous efforts by the studio included the average Terminator: Resistance and the awful Rambo: The Video Game. As it turns out, Robocop: Rogue City is the best adaptation of the 80s action hero I’ve ever played.
Although it’s an FPS at heart, it plays to the strengths (literally at times) of the main character, focusing less on strategic cover mechanics and more on wading into a sea of bullets, shrugging them off and shooting at bad guys’ heads until they explode.
Add to this some fun detective-based scanning sections to mix up the pace a bit, and some top-notch script work that places its tongue in its cheek without being ‘wink, wink’ every two seconds, and you’ve got a game that’s just big dumb fun from start to finish.
In a world of season passes, time-limited FOMO events and shoehorned multiplayer, it’s lovely to play something that has none of this.
Sonic Superstars
Any time Sega tries to release a modern Sonic game that feels like the Mega Drive originals, it goes one of three ways: 2D pixel graphics and surprisingly accurate (like Sonic Mania), 2.5D and a mess (like Sonic 4) or 2.5D and not quite there but still fun in its own way (like Sonic Generations).
Sonic Superstars bucked the trend by finally giving us a polygonal 2.5D platformer which really does play remarkably similar to the original Mega Drive Sonic games, along with a bunch of new visual flourishes to bring that classic gameplay into the 21st century.
It’s not all great news: the much-flaunted co-op mode is a bit of a disaster, because given how much the series focuses on speed you almost always get one player zooming ahead and everyone else falling off the edge of the screen before they have the chance to catch up.
Play it on your own however, and it’s a brilliant new Sonic game, one that’s so good you’ll happily play through it again with all five characters. Yes, five.
Super Mario Bros Wonder
The Super Mario series has always been my favourite, but ever since Super Mario Galaxy back in 2007 every new entry has been a bitter-sweet situation for me because I’ve invariably ended up reviewing them, meaning I’ve had to enjoy them pretty quickly so I can fire out a verdict.
Super Mario Bros Wonder marked the first time in more than a decade and a half that I’ve not reviewed the new Mario game, so I decided to make an occasion out of it and made it my Christmas game, deliberately choosing not to play it until my book was done and I could relax with it.
If it hadn’t been for all the other reviews and its 92 score on Metacritic, I might have thought that the fact I got to play through it patiently and in my own time for once was one of the reasons I was enjoying it more than any 2D Mario game since the 16-bit days. It’s clear that the consensus agrees, though: Super Mario Bros Wonder is an absolute masterpiece.
It also happens to be the first ever game my daughter has properly gotten into, and the sheer fact that each day now inevitably brings up the phrase “daddy, can I play Mario” at some point instantly makes it one of my all-time favourites by default.
Under the Waves
Finally, let’s end on a moody note. Under the Waves was one of the first games released under Quantic Dreams’ new Spotlight indie label, and really stuck with me long after the credits rolled.
It has you playing as Stanley, a diver who’s taken on a months-long job working at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the hope it’ll help him come to terms with a personal tragedy. Hijinks ensue (or lojinks in this case) and Stanley ends up struggling with both the past and his sanity.
Under the Waves already came with its own built-in tension, given that a lot of it is about experiencing traumatic events in a tiny wee submarine deep underwater, and it was released shortly after something similar didn’t go so well for a group of people in real life. Other than this unfortunate coincidence, though, it certainly does enough to justify its own existence.
Without getting into spoiler territory, though you can probably guess where I’m going with this, it’s a particularly powerful game if you’re a parent, and the final decision which determines which of the two endings you’re going to get is heartbreaking no matter which one you choose. Now that I know what it’s about I don’t think I could ever play through it again, but I’m grateful I did.
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