Cole Carver’s Game of the Year 2023

2023 was a pretty wild year for videogames! There were a lot of incredible releases this year, and I did my best to play a good chunk of them. Some will have to wait until next year, but I’m very excited about some of the masterpieces I got my hands on this year. It was very hard to rank the upper tiers of this list, especially when the top 4 are all so tightly placed, but I’m pretty happy to talk about my experiences. Here are my favorites games I played for the first time in 2023.

Let’s Get this Out of the way

Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the best and my favorite game this year. However, I’m not going to consider it for this year’s list because I haven’t finished it. While I am 65 hours into it, and what I imagine to be a decent chunk into Act Two, my understanding is that I am not halfway through the game yet. So, it’s hard for me, in good conscience, to claim it’s the best game when, who knows, they may fumble the ball hard in Act 3! So while I have practically nothing bad to say about it and can only rant about how absolutely phenomenal it is, I haven’t gotten to smooch Karlach yet and I can’t claim it’s the GotY. So, we’ll see you next year for that one.

#10 - Pikmin 4 (Switch)

I’m so glad Nintendo finally returned to Pikmin! I wish I could say I’m a die-hard fan, but I admittedly am a big lover of the original Pikmin and fell off of 2 and 3 before finishing them. However, Pikmin 4 came at a much needed time in the year and provided some quality low stakes fun in a beautiful and charming world. While I did finish Pikmin 4, I watched Meaghan 100% the entire game, including mastering her Dandori lifestyle (the art of multitasking efficiently) and completing the postgame challenges. Whether you’re watching or playing, the world of Pikmin is a delight. It’s fun to navigate, the puzzles are fun to solve, and the music and ambient sounds are a joy to lose yourself in. Pikmin is back, baby, and I hope they make more!

#9 - Hi-Fi Rush (Steamdeck)

What a cool surprise! A game that was announced and dropped onto gamepass the same day, I decided to see what this big surprise was about and was so glad I did. This is a character action game (a la Devil May Cry or Bayonetta) but the main character has an iPod stuck in their chest and must do everything to the beat. This mix of character action, platforming, and rhythm game is full of charm and whimsy, while also being fairly challenging! I consider myself to have pretty great rhythm as a musician and even I would lose the beat when the fighting got hectic. The game starts pretty simple, mechanics-wise, but quickly builds up into something really, really cool.

Two things I want to call out that really seal the deal for me in this game: 1. The cast of characters is phenomenal. The final level and song (more on that in a sec) still gives me tingles when I think about how it all coalesces for Chai and his charming crew. 2. The soundtrack is the highlight. It absolutely bops from top to bottom. The original music is all very good for the individual stages, but the feeling of a boss fight squaring up and suddenly you’re fighting a giant robot to Nine Inch Nails is extremely effective. I still listen to the licensed music playlist on spotify all the time. That last level, man.

#8 - Hogwarts Legacy (PS5)

Had a blast with this game. It was a fantastic Adventure/RPG-lite game set in the Harry Potter world. Exploring Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the immediate area around Hogwarts is a joy. Hopping on a broom and exploring the grounds evokes a kind of wonder I haven’t felt since seeing the Harry Potter films for the first time.

Exploring the castle and the grounds is exactly what you want from a Harry Potter game and is the highlight here. You want to be able to find locations from the books and movies and you will not be disappointed. Navigating the castle and its immediate grounds is a delight. The plot is fun and the side characters are great. My biggest complaint is in the second half of the game where you are further from the castle. I didn’t particularly care about the areas further from Hogwarts, and I would have been perfectly happy continuing to experience the classes, the classmates, and general castle exploration. Even with a duller second half, the aspect of getting lost in Hogwarts, moving around in your common room, and customizing your Room of Requirement made this game a delight.

#7 - Fortnite (PS5/PC)

Meaghan and I started playing Fornite this year. Fortnite is good! We’re like 10 years late to the party but Fortnite is actually super fun! It kind of feels like playing with action figures from all these different properties in one space. I like that I can be the Ninja Turtles and grab a Spider-Man webshooter and swing to the top of a building and then snipe Pickle Rick from 400 yards away and then sing the chorus to Buddy Holly by Weezer. All while Meaghan is running around as Rey, using her Attack on Titan launchers to fly through the trees to hit John Cena with Spider-Ham’s cartoon mallet.

The game is bonkers, and it’s silly, and it’s fun! We also don’t let ourselves get worked up about it because we know that 8 year olds are absolutely crushing us no problem, but that’s ok! We just run around and do our silly little quests and play with our silly little characters! Fortnite is good!

Also in the last month they’ve introduced these new Lego and Racing and Rock Band modes and it’s so, so, so stupid that you can be in the middle of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” and then hit the Griddy while you have rests. Gah! Fortnite is great.

PS - Epic, please, I’m begging you, put Kelsier back in the shop. It’s been like 800 days. I want to give you money.

#6 - Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (Switch)

This is a favorite game from my childhood, and I think my first RPG, which set my love for the genre. This game is absolute perfection, and this remake really captured everything about it perfectly but cleaned it up into a modern version. It plays exactly the same, but it’s clean, it looks and sounds great (incredible work done once more by Yoko Shimomura), and it’s got some quality of life increases that admittedly make the original a touch daunting.

This game is admittedly super easy, but it also was Nintendo’s entry point into RPGs, and it was targeted as a way to get children into RPGS, and good lord did it work. I was so excited for this game’s release, and I demolished it once it came out. It not being higher on this list is a testament to how good the rest of these games were. Everyone should play Super Mario RPG!

#5 - Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (PS5)

This game does everything the first game did, but better! I really felt like this was a great evolution of what we got from the first game. The biggest change is that instead of it being strictly “Metroidvania” style, there was a much larger open world Hub planet, Kobo, that grew over time as you brought in more settlers and grew your crew. It was really great to see how the Hubworld changed over the course of the game, and how you could interact with areas in it via your new abilities. Also massive props to Respawn for keeping Cal exactly where he left off from the first game, and not needing to relearn all the abilities - instead the gating and progression is with new abilities! Also the new stances system is super fun for using the different kinds of lightsaber stances: whether single, dual blades, staff, or others. The last one you get was so fun I used it the entire rest of the game.

The story and cast of characters is super fun, too. I also have spent a lot of time in the last two years reading the High Republic phase of Star Wars books, and that era played a pretty large part into the story of this game in a very neat and satisfying way, so that was very cool for me. This game definitely felt like Star Wars’ classic “Dark Middle Chapter” of the trilogy, so I cannot wait to see where they go with Cal Kestis for a third game!

PS: Please put Merrin and Cal in more Star Wars media! They’re the best! Especially Merrin!

#4 - Final Fantasy XVI (PS5)

Whew buddy, I been lookin’ forward to this one! Final Fantasy is my favorite game series of all time - I even replayed, and 100%’d to the best of my knowledge, my favorite (FFVII) this year. So this game, by Creative Business Unit XIII, had high, high expectations for me, and boy did it deliver.

This game returned to Final Fantasy’s actual fantasy roots, which I have wanted for a while and greatly appreciated. The last several have had a stronger focus on industrialism and sci-fi, so it was cool to step back. Alongside that setting came a dark story about loss, environmentalism, the indomitable will of the human spirit, and destruction of tradition with an extremely mature tone. The story told here and the growth and stories of the characters is the main draw of Final Fantasy XVI, to me.

The gameplay was also extremely satisfying. Switching from something more traditional to Final Fantasy with turned based RPG and into Character Action is a pretty large shakeup that has been received very divisively. I think it worked extremely well, and the game was fun to play from beginning to end. Every time a new Eikon becomes available to you, you can customize how you worked those abilities into your build and combos and create very unique combat strategies. I played this game alongside my coworkers, and we all described combat very differently, which I think is a testament to how dynamic the game can be.

I want to talk about the sidequests. There are a lot of sidequests in this game, and they mostly come after the most incredible, exciting, and beautiful setpieces the game’s main story has to offer. So it causes the action and excitement to come to a grinding halt in order to run to place A to talk to Person then run to Place B and kill Monster and return back to place A. A lot of times. On repeat. There is a place for criticism here that it absolutely demolishes the pacing of the game, and I can agree with that criticism and began to feel that slog about halfway through. Yet, somewhere in the later part of Act 2 I began to recontextualize the sidequests (because, by god, I was going to do them all!) when I realized that the main plot was about how Clive and crew were saving the world, but the sidequests were about saving people, and helping individuals, and building communities. Once I began to place an importance on that, as well, I began to see the beauty in the small things and it suddenly lost the feeling of “this is side content.” By the end of the game, I think I had some special scenes for having helped as many people as I did, and the emotional payoff was extremely worth it. I can see how this is damning for others, though.

And oh my god that soundtrack, Soken you’ve done it again you absolute madlad. Oops all bangers. Unbelievable.

#3 - Spider-Man 2 (PS5)

Man, this game rules. It being #3 is really a crime. I inhaled this game. I still play this game, even if I’m just swinging around listening to spotify and fighting crime. It’s just FUN.

Spider-Man 2 adapts the iconic Symbiote storyline as well as Kraven’s Last Hunt, among setup for some others in various side content throughout the game. Spider-Man is my favorite individual character IP ever, and I know I tend to be extremely picky about how Spider-Man is handled, and this was delivered perfectly. I could not be more pleased with the usage of Kraven or the Symbiote storyline. There were even some fun twists I didn’t see coming that put my jaw on the floor, even as a longtime comic reader! I just want to say massive props to the performances of all the actors for the game - there is so much emotion being punched to the audience from these stories and they delivered in spades. And Tony Todd is a champion for being a terrifying Venom.

The gameplay is really more of the same, but cleaned up, refined, animation resmoothed, and with a few new tricks up its sleeve. If you liked the first two games this one is an absolute blast and you cannot go wrong. I’ll be playing this one for a long time and I cannot wait for whatever they have in store for the DLC stories!

#2 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

I’m going back and forth on this being my #1 or my #2. It’s such a close race. Tears of the Kingdom is such a perfect game for me. It’s certainly my most played game of 2023. I loved every single second of this game. I loved the sky islands, I loved the depths, I loved revisiting the ground layer and seeing the changes that have occurred since Breath of the Wild. Uncovering the mystery of what happened to Zelda is wild. Finding and retrieving the Master Sword is incredible. And what really just hammers it in is how well they stuck the landing. The ending is phenomenal fun, a giant spectacle, and chock full of heart. Once the final fight is over - they didn’t have to let you [do the thing]! It could have been a cutscene! But they put it in your hand to [do the thing] and it’s more satisfying and powerful for it.

And all of that is just talking about the story and mystery! The gameplay is some of the most fun that gaming has to offer and why gaming is such a unique medium. From the bigger picture it looks a lot like Breath of the Wild, which I also praised for having an unbelievable layering of intricate systems on top of each other to create interesting relationships and mechanics. That concept hasn’t gone anywhere, and has in fact been added to. But the addition of the Ultrahand ability has really taken that knob and cranked it to 11. Being able to adhere almost any two things together to create something new, and function like you would expect based upon individual properties, almost shouldn’t work. And it assuredly should not run well on the Nintendo Switch, and yet here we are. You can build some truly incredible things and the game will just let you do that. I built a podracer! Does it work well? No! But does it work? Yes! Smarter people than me on the internet have built functioning Mechs! Conveyer belt torture chambers for enemies! Auto cooking stations! Lake freezing traversal systems! Hoverbikes! Pitchforks that fly in circles around you! Crucifying Koroks! Anything! Why not!? And the game is so smart for using the depths and the Yiga Clan as a method of teaching the player what kind of neat things can be done to make vehicles for exploration and combat. I continue to love the bite-sized shrines (and caves in this game!) that teach you concepts and then challenge you on them, so that you can take into the larger game.

This is Nintendo at their most brilliant and everyone should play Tears of the Kingdom. It may even be the best game… but…

#1 - disco elysium (switch)

Disco Elysium is an experience. It’s pretty hard to describe well, I think. So many of the other games I played and loved this year were games that were fantastic evolutions of what came before, but I’m ranking this so high because it is truly the most unique experience I had that truly wowed, thrilled, and devastated me. The amount of times throughout the course of this game I said, “I am too stupid for this game.” or “I truly do not understand this.” is uncountable, and yet I kept going into something beautiful and, frankly, absolutely fuckin’ bonkers. I don’t feel like I’ve had to explain what most of the other games on this list are, but this one I do.

Disco Elysium is a Classic Isometric RPG. You awake as a hungover man on the brink of death from drinking heavily the night before. You do not know your name, you do not know where your clothes are, you do not know what your job is, what year it is, what city you are in, what the political landscape is, what anyone around you means when they say half the things they do, or any other amount of “what the hell is going on?”. The thing that you do know, is that your brain is broken and is broken up into 24 different Skills (that you’ll put points into) representing different aspects of your brain, personality, or ability - such as: Logic (your ability to make logical connections), Electrochemistry (your baser instincts, and understanding of drugs and sex), Interfacing (hand-eye-coordination), and Volition (your moral compass). And each of these parts of your brain talks to you as if they were characters. You have a sort of dissociative personality disorder where they speak to you and help you interact with this world - and massive props their voice acting, some of them are absolutely phenomenal.

90% of this game is moving around and reading (or listening to the excellent voice acting). The rest comes down to making dice rolls for things you want to do. With your brain skills you can attempt to do many things - do you have high Endurance and want to shoulder rush through a blocked door? Roll the dice. On a successful roll, your character will charge right there, but on a failure you may take a point of damage and your character may not be inclined to try again. Then you’ll have to figure out another way into that place, or never get in there at all. This system of skills and dice roll checks allows for a HIGH variance experience when playing this game. For example, Meaghan played an intellectual character for her playthrough and I played a big beefy idiot. She had an Inland Empire skill high enough where she could talk to her Necktie, and I relied on my sense of the breeze and Electrochemistry to tell me “which way the wind is blowing in this town.”

So you’ve entered into this world and you’re figuring out what is what, what to do, what is going on, and you go from there. There’s been a murder, are you involved? What should you do? Do you engage with local communities who are upset, or happy, about it? Do you begin to take a stance with different groups in the area? Do you form a political alignment? Do you discover Communism and vow to revitalize it? Do you love the money, the hustle and grind and join the Liberals? Or risk taking constant mental damage (yes, literally!) and join with the Fascists? These kinds of alignments can have a massive impact on the game and yet are such a small part of it.

For a game that takes place in a single city block and is really about political discovery and growth, it is really one of the most moving pieces of art I’ve ever engaged with and I’m thrilled I invested my time with it. I want to play it again with an entirely different character and see where those dice take me sometime. Disco Elysium is one of the best games I’ve ever played, but because of what it is I have a hard time recommending it to anyone. But if the above sounds like something you’re curious about, you owe it to yourself.

And much, much love to Kim Kitsuragi, my beloved.

Best Game Actually - archipelago (pc)

Okay but I really want to talk about this thing. This was actually my favorite gaming experience of the year. I’m not counting it in “the list” because it’s not really “a videogame” in the traditional sense, but it involves videogames and was certainly the most fun I’ve had playing games in years.

Archipelago (http://archipelago.gg) is a tool that takes randomizers and mixes between multiple clients and players. I’ve spoken before about what a randomizer is, specifically with Ocarina of Time, but the short version is that it takes all the chests and minigame rewards in the game and shuffles them all around randomly while still guaranteeing the game can be finished. So instead of finishing Dampe’s Race and getting the Hookshot in Ocarina of Time, it could give me a blue rupee, or the Bow and Arrow or anything else! Randomizers have become my favorite way to experience old games I love because it revitalizes them into a new puzzle - it takes the thing you know backwards and forwards and puts a new twist on it.

So what is Archipelago then? Well, it does this between players and even crazier than that it does it between games. The list of supported games is on http://archipelago.gg/games. Meaghan and I do them often with Ocarina of Time (me) and Stardew Valley (Meaghan) where I could open a chest and find her fishing rod, for example. Or she could donate something to the museum and it send me my Minuet of Forest song! It makes the pool of items to find absolutely massive, and everyone playing has to work together to help everyone in the pool beat their respective games.

There’s also a built-in Hint system where you can get the location of specific items you’re looking for, and it’s fun to build a priority logic train of what you need amongst your friends: “Okay, Meaghan can finish her game if she gets Strawberries, which are behind my Phantom Ganon, so I need Bow, which is behind Elena’s Milk so she needs Cows, which are behind Zach’s Lt. Surge.” Now suddenly everyone has a target to strive for to help Meaghan win!

And a lot of the fun of this comes from the joy of a large group of people in a Discord server together trying to work through this massive puzzle together. Chaos ensues, mistakes get made, checks get forgotten, hints get passed, memories get made, jokes ensue - it’s truly the most fun I’ve ever had playing games. We also have formed this trend of whoever is the last person to finish we jump on a screenshare and watch them finish, and that’s always so exciting to know that we conquered it! We’ve had some pretty exciting seeds this year, including “The Nightmare Seed” that resulted in all of us having some “worst possible locations” for hidden items, and it felt so great to power through that one. The most exciting was a FOURTEEN player seed we did amongst friends where we all were playing some variation of the games: Ocarina of Time, Stardew Valley, Link to the Past, Pokemon Red, Pokemon Emerald, Kingdom Hearts 2, Chrono Trigger, Sudoku, and Mario 64.

Archipelago is a delight and it is chaos in its finest form. I want to do a thousand more of them. I’m so glad I bullied my friends into trying it and we’ve maintained the discord server community and spin them up fairly regularly. I love seeing new games being added and the developers supporting a wide variety of games. I hope to spread the net and get more folks engaged with it in 2024.

!Hint Light Arrows

Please where are my Light Arrows?!

Additional Games I Played This Year:

Pokemon Violet
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core -Reunion-
Iron Man VR
Vampire Survivors
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
It Takes Two
Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line

Games I’ve started but I’m saving for consideration in 2024:
Sea of Stars
Baldur’s Gate 3