2023 was a bumper year for video games, and here are ten of the best ones Lachie played!

#10 – EA Sports PGA Tour

Back in 2015 I lamented that EA had killed the golf sim genre by putting out the incomprehensibly bad Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour, which I then named as the worst game of that year (and stand by it to this day). In moving the franchise on to the Frostbite engine, they had made a game that ran like absolute garbage on the consoles of the day. On top of that, it was shockingly bereft of features that people had come to expect from the generally good-to-great Tiger Woods games that were being served up on a yearly basis before it. While 2023’s generic-sounding EA Sports PGA Tour doesn’t go all the way in undoing the wrongs of the past, it is still light years ahead of what Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour was, and hopefully will serve as a launching point to improve upon in the coming years. A strong selection of courses, a pretty solid create-a-golfer feature and career mode, and swing mechanics that just feel really good to play overall make this probably the best simulation-style golf game to hit the market in a very long time. I’m still here waiting for Clap Hanz to make another Everybody’s Golf, though.

#9 – Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Honestly this game is the one I’m most surprised to be putting on my list. Ever since Nintendo started their “New” Super Mario Bros. line of games, I’ve been very firmly in the “thanks but no thanks” category. There’s just been something about the look and the feel of the way those games played that never quite sat right with me. On this basis, I was prepared to give Super Mario Bros. Wonder a miss, but a week away from home without internet access eventually compelled me to blow the dust off the Switch and give it a chance. And you know what? They’ve finally gone and made another really good 2D Mario game, I would say for the first time since Super Mario World (which is over 30 years old at this point). In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I went and got 100% of the collectables and finished all of the extra challenge stages. So if you’re someone like me who’s been actively avoiding them for the last two decades, I think you too can finally give another 2D Mario game a chance.

#8 – Viewfinder

Viewfinder features what I think might be one of the coolest individual game mechanics I’ve ever seen in a game before. I might do a poor job of explaining it in text, but I’ll try anyway: effectively you have photographs of scenes that you hold up to eye level and then apply to the world, effectively rendering the contents of that photograph into existence. Maybe just go and watch the trailer and you’ll see what I mean. The series of puzzles that start off using this mechanic are immediately fun to solve, and then the ways that these get built on as you progress are very impressive. It’s really a shame that it only takes about three or four hours to finish Viewfinder, because some of the puzzle mechanics they’ve developed are right up there with the likes of Portal or The Talos Principle for first-person puzzle design. But putting aside the length, Viewfinder’s central hook is so cool and interesting that I would say it is absolutely worth anyone’s attention.

#7 – Spider-Man 2

I daresay pretty much anyone who owned a PlayStation 4 and had even a passing interest in anything to do with Marvel probably played Spider-Man back in 2018. With good reason, because it was easily one of the best open-world superhero games ever made, right up there with the Batman Arkham series. It should be no huge surprise that Insomniac have maintained that standard with Spider-Man 2. Getting around an even bigger New York City than last time feels better than ever, whether you’re swinging between buildings on webs, or gliding along using the newly-added wingsuit. The fact that you can instantaneously fast travel to any part of the city with no load times, while technically impressive, was mostly wasted on me because I almost always wanted to just swing through the city myself. But probably the most noteworthy thing about Spider-Man 2 is that the main antagonist this time around is Venom, the only Spider-Man villain I personally have any real vested interest in. At this point I’ve probably had my fill of Spider-Man in this format, but I’ll definitely be looking forward to seeing how Insomniac’s Wolverine game turns out in a few years’ time.

#6 – Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

It was bittersweet news to learn that this would be the final game that developers Mimimi would be putting out, having put out Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados III in recent years, both of which featured in my top ten lists in the years they were released. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew gives us more of the same great real-time stealth tactics formula that we’ve come to expect, but with a brand new coat of pirate-themed paint. The new cast of characters are delightfully written and are all interesting to play with in their own way. One of the biggest gameplay changes in Shadow Gambit is that there’s a bit less linearity in how the level progression works, and you can bring in any combination of characters that you feel like into the majority of levels, but the game also has a mechanic to encourage you to be constantly mixing up your away team roster. So with a perfect three from three record (in my books, anyway), Mimimi will be signing off with Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, and sadly leaving the niche real-time stealth tactics genre in limbo again until someone else is ready to come and take on the mantle.

#5 – The Talos Principle II

If you’re like me and you played the first Talos Principle but never actually finished it, you might be surprised to learn that the sequel actually has a (somewhat) traditional narrative this time. But then again if you’re like me, you’re not really in it for the story anyway, and what you’re really here for is a bunch of well-crafted logic puzzles. The good news on that front is that The Talos Principle II is absolutely overflowing with those. That’s not to say by the end of the game I wasn’t invested in the trials and tribulations of New Jerusalem’s philosophical robots, but I’d be lying if I said that my main interest in driving ever onward wasn’t the constant desire to find new puzzles to solve. So after about 30 hours of really high quality brain busters, I can confidently say that The Talos Principle II comfortably sits among the best first-person puzzle games with the likes of Portal 2.

#4 – Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Just to get straight to the elephant in the room, yes, Cyberpunk 2077 is fixed. It took them a long time, but after two or three years of patches, this game is now well worth your attention, and that’s before we even get to the fantastic add-on content in Phantom Liberty. Of all the things I could have guessed they would do for a story expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, a spy thriller was probably not one of them. It turns out to be an inspired choice, as Phantom Liberty’s arc is arguably the most gripping and exciting story in the entire game. Idris Elba is fantastic in his role as the experienced government agent you’ll be working alongside, as you get up to all sorts of James Bond-style antics. At one point you even infiltrate a swanky party and play roulette against French twins. So, yeah they really lean into the camp aspect of the genre as well. I don’t know if the world has completely forgiven CD Projekt Red for the state that Cyberpunk 2077 was released in. I would say now though, if you’re one of the people who turned your back on it in 2020, now is the time to find forgiveness in your heart.

#3 – Alan Wake II

Have you ever played a sequel that was so good that it makes you wonder if you were actually wrong about the game that came before it? That’s pretty much where I’m at with Alan Wake II. When the original Alan Wake came out way back in 2010, I thought it was maybe an ok-to-good game but it ultimately didn’t really hook me in. 13 years later, Alan Wake II has so thoroughly entertained me that it’s making me think I should go back and give the original another try. There’s really no-one out there making games quite like this. For the most part you’re wading through dark psychological horror, but then every now and then you’ll come across a TV showing something like an ad with two Finnish twins promoting their coffee-themed amusement park. Then of course there’s the infamous “Herald of Darkness” segment, which, if you somehow haven’t managed to have spoiled for you yet, maybe just take my word for it and start playing this game without looking up anything about it, because that part alone is unhinged and bizarre in the most incredible way. Ultimately the point I want to make is that the line this game rides between horror and absurdity is done absolutely masterfully. Between Control and now Alan Wake II, developers Remedy seem to have really found their feet in balancing good gameplay with director Sam Lake’s fourth wall-breaking meta-injected storytelling. As if I wasn’t already going to be buying Control 2 the day it comes out, now I really can’t wait for it to see what Remedy comes up with next.

#2 – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

In what turns out to be a repeat of my 2017 Game of the Year list, Nintendo’s sprawling open-world Zelda epic has finished in second place to a 100+ hour RPG that wooed me after I’d already finished the former. This is of course taking nothing away from Tears of the Kingdom, which despite all initial appearances looking like it was just going to be glorified Breath of the Wild DLC, turned out to be actually superior to its predecessor, and is even arguably in the conversation for the best game of the entire Zelda franchise. Yes, it takes place mostly in exactly the same iteration of Hyrule that we ran around in Breath of the Wild, but in a lot of ways I actually found it was enjoyable to be able to revisit familiar areas that I haven’t seen since 2017. On top of that, there’s an entire underground world that’s just as big as the overworld, as well as the multitude of sky islands you can visit. Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule felt like an enormous world already, and Tears of the Kingdom has literally doubled it and then some. But the area that Tears really stakes its claim for the best in the franchise’s history is in the story. I honestly think this might be the most well-told and most thought provoking story that they’ve had in a Zelda game to this point, and it’s all punctuated by arguably the best final boss fight they’ve ever given us. I haven’t even mentioned the new Ultrahand feature, which lets you lash together custom machines that range from handy and practical to unhinged nonsense that completely breaks the game, or alternatively a bunch of needlessly elaborate ways to torture Koroks. Tears of the Kingdom is a genuinely tremendous game that pushed the Switch to its absolute limits, and serves as the perfect coda for the Zelda franchise ahead of Nintendo’s next console.

Game of the Year 2023:
Baldur’s Gate 3

Surprise! The game that has swept basically every Game of the Year award in 2023 is also getting mine. I’ve got the impression that a lot of people feel like Baldur’s Gate 3 came out of nowhere in the middle of this year to take the world by storm, but I can say from a personal perspective (having played most of the first act when it was released in early access way back in 2020), this game was pretty much penciled in as all but a certainty to be my favourite game of 2023 as soon as they confirmed its release date.

Dungeons & Dragons, while enjoying an unprecedented surge in popularity as a tabletop game over the last decade, has been seriously struggling in the video game scene. Neverwinter Nights was probably the last officially licensed D&D video game I can remember that was any good, and that came out all the way back in 2002. In the interim there has been some real garbage released with the D&D license attached to it (the less said of 2021’s Dark Alliance reboot, the better), so it was going to take something huge to lift things out of the mire. Enter Larian Studios, hot off the success of Divinity: Original Sin 2 (a game that I wish I could get in a time machine and go back to 2017 to tell myself that I’m an idiot for not playing at the time, because it probably would have been my game of the year back then too), who basically tell the D&D IP holders that they want to be allowed to make the next game in the Baldur’s Gate series. And thank whatever god you believe in that they were allowed to.

The list of things that makes Baldur’s Gate 3 great is a mile long, but by far the stand-out is its cast of characters, both hero and villain. All six of the main companions that you’ll recruit are so well-written and engaging that its a shame you can only travel with three of them at a time, and it’s testament to this that almost no-one can agree on what the “correct” main party composition actually is (but it’s Shadowheart, Gale and Lae’zel, just for the record). Then of course there’s the likes of the devil Raphael, who without even being the main antagonist throughout the story, frequently manages to steal the show as the villain you love to hate. There’s so much depth to every character that it made me want to immediately roll a new character and start over with a new party as soon as I’d finished the game for the first time, and for a game that took over 100 hours to finish once, that’s saying something. The beautiful visuals, the affecting soundtrack, and the absolutely superb writing obviously warrant a mention as well, but I’ve already spent far too long gushing about this game. 

I really can’t stress enough just how much I loved playing Baldur’s Gate 3. From the day it was released it occupied almost all of my free time for three weeks until the credits rolled. It’s such a profound achievement in all aspects of game design that multiple other developers have literally come out and said that people shouldn’t use it as the standard to which all other games be held going forward, and I don’t think I can remember any other game eliciting that sort of response before this. But it honestly just is that good.