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GBAtemp's games of the year for 2023
Happy New Year, everyone! The GBAtemp team wishes you all a wonderful 2024! 2023 had an incredible amount of high-profile games, whether it was first-party blockbusters or smaller indie titles. As we put a wrap on the previous year, we've decided to highlight the best of what we played throughout 2023, and recommend those games to you!
Spider-Man 2
Our first recommendation, from @GoldenBullet is Spider-Man 2:
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 caused some of the most controversy at The Game Awards this year. Many fans like myself were very disappointed that it didn’t even win a single award at the showcase. It may have not been the GOTY at the Game Awards, but it was the personal pick for myself and many others.
Despite looking very similar on the surface, the gameplay has been greatly improved. As someone who played the previous titles at the highest difficulty, I still struggled to find much of a challenge. Spider-Man 2 takes every encounter up a notch; boss fights got more complex and there are more variations in enemy types. Spiderman also had changes made to his moveset, with the added abilities adding a lot to the gameplay and making you feel more powerful. The addition to the Symbiote suit had a lot of hype and feels as powerful as I hoped. Most notable is the "Symbiote Surge," which makes Peter an unstoppable force similar to rage modes in other games. All these gameplay improvements combined with the smooth animation system make for a very fluid and satisfying gameplay loop.
Let us not forget the horrid MJ/Miles missions in the first game. The boring walking simulators were definitely improved upon. While not completely taken out, Insomniac enhances them dramatically with MJ receiving a web shooter gun that sometimes makes her seem stronger than Spider-Man. The encounters she faces are now actually fun and not a chore. Admittedly, the MJ missions were some of my favorite points of my first play-through.
My favorite part of the game: the transversal. Swinging and gliding in this game is absolutely breathtaking. You can't go back to any of the prior games because the speed and velocities you can reach are unforgettable. I go back into the game just to swing around. When the web wings were announced, many were skeptical (including myself). After the first mission, I already grew to love them. The speed obtained and seamless transition to swinging will satisfy all fans of the webslinger. The experience is completely customizable too with inclusions such as the "swing assist slider." Having the PS5 exclusivity was worth the immaculate highs of this amazing game.
None of this even mentions the story. Without going through any spoilers, it touches all the points that make a Spiderman story. Peter and Miles go through a rollercoaster of highs and lows. The introduction of Venom brought a lot out of all the characters. The battles the cast faces conclude with a satisfying ending that leaves excitement for Insomniac's next project.
Overall, I simply love this game. I patiently waited for it to come and was not disappointed in the slightest. Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 well deserves to be my game of the year.
Starfield
To contrast the PlayStation exclusive, we have @Prans giving a shoutout to Starfield.
Starfield, Bethesda’s much-anticipated space-faring open-world RPG, finally launched in 2023; adding some much-needed exclusivity to the Xbox Series S/X games lineup. While it was overshadowed by better-executed titles and you might have given it a pass, it still has a lot to offer to fans of exploration titles.
You start off as a rookie miner working on a remote planet who finds themselves joining Constellation, a space exploration organisation. In particular, you are tasked to find Artifacts, which are fragments of a mysterious device made by some past civilization, and learn more about them. This sets you and your crew off on an adventure across a galaxy, allowing you to explore thousands of unique planets and moons.
Exploration is one of the highlights of Starfield, with detailed environments and lore that flesh out the individual planet you are visiting. As you unlock and level up your character skills, you can focus on a more specific exploration approach but can also mix things up. Exploration, whether it’s to take on some intriguing side quests or just by roaming, is further encouraged as there is also a base building mechanic to the game. By scanning and collecting resources, you can build outposts that can provide resources to aid your exploration. It’s not unlike No Man’s Sky in this aspect and adds a welcome layer of variety to the gameplay.
For the first couple of missions, you’ll follow leads, travel from planet to planet in search of Artifacts while fending off hostilities. This loop feels repetitive but the settlements you visit are unique, offering diverse landscapes to explore and characters to interact with, some of whom you can even recruit to join your crew.
As an open-world game, Starfield provides you free-reign over how you tackle missions - whether on foot or on your spaceship - as well as different NPC interactions. However, some of the latter can feel dry and unconvincing, without much nuance or flow to an ongoing conversation. Having more interactions with your companion during exploration outings, even if just filler conversations would have made up for the otherwise silent process.
That said, the repetitive loop and dry narrative design pick up in the latter half of the game. I got particularly hooked on a series of later missions which I even think might have been better tackled closer to the start of the game.
There is definitely a slow burn aspect to Starfield where you get to appreciate the game more over time and this might not have been the best approach of the game. The pacing could have been better executed but if you do give it some time to sink in, you’ll get to enjoy the vast expanse of explorable planets and the mystery behind the Artifacts. As it stands, Starfield is well-suited as a Game Pass game, rather than a full-priced one; but I do hope to see more expansions in the near future that will make for a more compelling offering.
Slay the Princess, Grim Dawn, and Jack Jeanne
If you're looking for something a little more niche or indie, @Scarlet has you covered, who suggests three lower-profile releases in Slay the Princess, Grim Dawn, and Jack Jeanne.
Now while others have opted to talk about one major game, I figured I’d come in here with a few smaller titles that I’ve really been getting into as the year comes to a close.
First on my docket is a short and sweet indie visual novel called Slay the Princess. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, imagine a smaller scale and more focussed visual novel-flavoured Stanley Parable. You start on a path and walk towards a cabin with one goal: to slay the princess held captive in the basement. You’re guided by a wonderfully voiced narrator, alongside an ever-shifting internal monologue. Can you kill her? Can you live with the consequences of not doing so? One full playthrough will generally take a few hours, with all achievements taking maybe 10 or so. It’s not too much of a commitment, but it’s certainly a memorable ride I can recommend if you find yourself curious after watching a trailer.
Next up is a game I really only picked up a few weeks ago but have been completely hooked on: Grim Dawn. This one actually came out all the way back in 2016, but it continues to receive support from its developer Crate Entertainment, with the latest major update dropping last month. You have here an absolutely stellar ARPG that is remarkably satisfying to work through either alone or with friends. Your options feel endless with your character being a blend of two classes, each with a wide array of skills to build around via class-specific trees, and a more general “devotion” skill tree. Loot is random and respeccing is easy, so it’s fantastic fun to just pick up and experiment with. This was actually my first ARPG, so I can’t exactly give you a grander comparison to the titans of the genre, but I can at least swear by the hours I’ve put into the game so far. It’s currently on sale for just £6 until early January, so it’s definitely one to look at if you want something to sink the rest of your winter break into.
Last on my list is a game I haven’t actually beaten, but one I have picked up and am steadily working through. It’s not exactly standard for us to give mentions like this, but this is one of the highest rated games of the year that I just haven’t seen people talking about. This is Jack Jeanne. Releasing exclusively on the Switch, Jack Jeanne is a visual novel that sees you take the leading role as Kisa, an aspiring actor enrolling in the drama school of her dreams. The catch? She needs to be picked for the leading role in the school’s final performance. And she also has to hide that she’s a girl. As an otome visual novel, you’ll be treated to some wonderful characters and genuinely fantastic writing. I can’t comment on how it all comes together, but based on what I’ve seen so far, and what I’ve read online, this is the game to pick up if either you’ve been wanting to get back into visual novels or want to dip your toe into the genre for the first time.
Ghost Trick
While it may be a re-release, @Chary still maintains that Ghost Trick is one of the standout titles of 2023.
Typically, detective games will see you solving the murder of other characters, but in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, you're seeking to solve the mystery of how you died. Coming from the creator of Ace Attorney, Ghost Trick is similarly quirky and amusing in tone, and is also a hybrid visual novel puzzle-style game. As a ghost, you can manipulate certain objects, with the goal of trying to save people from dying in the most ridiculous of ways. You have a 4-minute time limit to wind back the clock and alter fate, sometimes by tipping a lamp toward a would-be assassin, or by stopping various Rube Goldberg-tier murder machines from killing your partner. A lot of games can lose their charm when remastered or ported, but fortunately Capcom put a lot of love and care into releasing a remaster worthy of this classic. If you haven't played it yet, or even if it's been years since you originally experienced it, Ghost Trick still holds up, and is still one of my all-time favorite games.
Super Mario RPG
To compensate for the lack of Nintendo representation, @relauby recommends the Super Mario RPG Remake.
There are two basic approaches to remaking something: you can either use the original as a jumping off point and create something new that echoes it, or you can stick to the script and just make an updated version of what came before. There's merits to both approaches, and which kind of remake you prefer will probably determine how you feel about Super Mario RPG. This remake plays things very safe, with only a few minor additions or changes. Even the biggest change here, the updated visuals and music, feel fairly safe. The new songs are pretty faithful re-recordings of the originals, plus you have the option of listening to those original tracks anyway, so you're never too far from the music that's always been there. The SNES version already used isometric 3D environments and the characters had relatively detailed sprites with simple designs that don't leave a lot of room to expand on in the remake. That's not to say the two games are indistinguishable, of course, just that the differences aren't material enough for it to be interesting to see how a particular song, character or environment has been translated to the Switch. Compared to, for example, the Final Fantasy VII Remake, where there's excitement to see how its blocky, polygonal characters have been adapted to a highly-detailed, realistic setting.
Of course, that's only a problem if you're desperate to see something new. As someone who played the original a lot as a kid, it was a fun nostalgia trip to see everything recreated closer to the way I remembered it than what I actually played back then. The music is as catchy and evocative as it always has been. The environments are still bursting with colour and life. The story is still presented through dialogue boxes and pantomime, and the new character models are just as charming in their exaggerated expressions, which is key to retaining most of the humour.
While there haven't been any significant additions, what has been added is all positive. A Monster List has been added that catalogues every enemy fought and their internal monologue when analyzed by Mallow, which adds a fun, if frustrating, collectible aspect to the game. There have been a few small additions to the combat system, like randomly-appearing super enemies or a special attack that charges up with well-timed action commands, that don't change much but can break up the tedium of random encounters. The biggest addition is the post-game, that lets you fight a handful of old bosses with new gimmicks that require very specific strategy to beat. They're clever, and it's the one time the remake does anything wholly unlike the original. It's fun, especially the more straightforward superboss that ends it, but it's fairly insubstantial. Assuming you don't need to do any grinding to level up, you can run through them all in about an hour.
Super Mario RPG is exactly the kind of game Nintendo needed right now. It so perfectly addresses fans' complaints about the recent Mario RPGs, it almost feels like an admission of wrongdoing on Nintendo's part. Let's hope, for the sake of future Mario RPGs, that the fact that they recreated this game so precisely isn't an indication of their ability to keep making the kind of games fans want.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
With so many solid games releasing throughout the year, you might have missed @KiiWii's top game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a late entry into the possible GOTY realms, landing at the end of the first week in December, but it’s definitely worthy of mention as it thrusts forth the dual pedigrees of its game creators and its spectacular film lineage.
With Ubisofts traditional cookie cutter game-design blended with James Cameron’s titular blue protagonists. AFOP is a more refreshing take on the rapidly aging Far Cry tropes that feels reinvigorated and gets incredibly granular with the plethora of cinematic reference material at its disposal.
With exploration of Pandora at the helm of this FPS you are free to carve out your own hunter-gatherer experience across the vast sandbox-landscapes and biomes with your trusty Ikran at your beck-and-call should you need a swift evacuation or to scale the impressive landscapes quicker than on-foot and more agile than using a Direhorse.
Tasked with uniting the tribes and fending off the RDA bad guys, frontiers doesn’t stray too far from the story as we know it so far but does venture into its own identity through expanding the western frontier and allowing you to use interesting controller mechanics to harvest fruit and materials from the environment respectfully of Eywa.
On top of cooking various ingredients together a la Zelda TOTK, you will find garment & armour fabrication, modular weapon upgrades, ammunition crafting, and character defining options available by the bucket load. There is a heck of lot going on in the menus, which juxtaposes with the almost HUD-less in-game experience and can feel a little overwhelming in places before you get a handle on what you need to focus on and improve on to level-up your personalised Na’Vi.
The alien jungles, swamps and vistas look incredible overall and the vegetations sheer variety, colouration and visual language is a fantastic treat to traverse through as you hunt down clues, find tech & character upgrades, and locate more missions & side quests to undertake.
Avatar wows with its visual cues as much as it does with its soundscapes, vocal and motion captured acting because it has a phenomenal amount of dialogue and cut scenes for you to uncover and absorb.
Sadly repetitive nature of the combat encounters and the outposts you discover along the way detracts from the otherwise fascinating story of the Na’vi vs the RDA through the main story missions. That said it’s engaging, intriguing throughout and highly recommended for those with a penchant for the Far Cry series of games or a love for the movies!
Baldur's Gate 3
And of course, what would any GOTY 2023 list be, if we didn't mention the most talked about game, and @RyRyIV's personal recommendation, Baldur's Gate 3!
Say, remember when I said that my review on Baldur’s Gate 3 was going to be the end of my time covering the game for GBAtemp, and that it was my final thoughts on the game? Psych.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a discussion about 2023’s Game of the Year without giving Baldur’s Gate 3 its proper respect. After spending three years in early access, with hype and excitement slowly building the entire time, the game finally dropped this year and proceeded to absolutely vault over all expectations; smashing records for subsequent players on Steam, doing crazy sales numbers in its first 72 hours, and delivering something that’s becoming all too rare these days; a full experience right out of the box, with only some minor items and cosmetics locked behind the “paywall” of a deluxe edition. For the low price of $69.99, gamers around the world were treated to a game that they could experience fully and completely on day one; no microtransactions, no pay to win, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours worth of content to enjoy, with the experience only being added to in the months post release, at no additional cost I might add. There’s a reason that studios around the world are begging this to not be the new standard for video games going forward; even though it absolutely should be, and in my mind? Already is.
From the perspective of an addict who’s been following this game like a religion since the early access release in 2020, I don’t think that there’s any game that can even come close to deserving Game of the Year nearly as much as Baldur’s Gate 3 does. This game delivers on something that most games can only dream of, by creating an experience that accounts for nearly any choice the player can make, from both in-game choices and decisions from character creation. Combine this with rockstar voice acting, including lines to address the consequences of nearly every choice, and the inherent randomness of the dice rolling mechanic, and you have a game that’s nearly impossible to have the same experience twice. Bundle that with the aforementioned hundreds of gameplay and content hours, an epic score, and a studio that doesn’t just hear fanbase feedback, but goes out of their way to implement it? Yeah. It’s a hard sell for me to believe any other game could come close to being this worthy. It’s easy to say that all games are a labor of love, but that love shines like a diamond in Baldur’s Gate 3.
With that said, now that we've talked about our favorite games this year, we'd love to hear what the GBAtemp community played and enjoyed this year. Are there any recommendations you have that you've been eager to share? Or, perhaps nothing from 2023 interested you, and you're more so looking forward to 2024!
Last edited by KiiWii,
