Top 5 Favorite Games of 2023
Here are my top 5 favorite games of 2023.
6 Games
While this is far from the best game I've played this year, there is no denying that every artistic decision made here is tailored to everything I like about games and films--from creating abstractions within a space to layering of FMV to create something incredibly horrible and beautiful. I love this game and everything it strives to accomplish.
1
I dream about Norco a lot. I dream about Kay's vision of her family at the end of the world, the sadness that comes from the passage of time and the surrender of your life in service of a decaying capitalistic structure that takes no prisoners. Norco is equally contemplative and somber as it is humourous. It is a masterpiece that I would highly recommend to anyone.
2
There's a scene in Omori where you have to go on a quest to collect a friend's photo album that another estranged member of your friend group has stolen from them. After being given the runaround, you finally find what you're looking for at this person's house. You go back to your friend's house to give their album back and you realize that they live literally one screen over. Small moments like this, where the game details the ways that people grow apart as life moves on after a trauma are what make this game stick with me.
3
A pleasant suprise, wish I had given it a chance sooner. The Evil Within is so good at building tension, having memorable set pieces, playing with the form in ways that still feel fresh today. Sadly marred by a geniunely awful back third, but the highs are so high here for me.
4
The narrative of Signalis didn't really hit for me. Not to say that it's bad by any means, but it feels like well-trodden ground for the genre and--while it has its moments--didn't do anything that stood out to me. Most of my enjoyment of this game comes from the aesthetics--how it feels to play, the loud POP that comes out of every shot of your bullet, the viseral screams of the monsters on screen as you're traversing these spaces, the striking 2D pixel art style which makes up for the "communism bad" aspects of the game for me. Signalis is great, and I desprately want to play it again soon.
5
This is an honorable mention since I didn't finish it. Team Ninja is incapable of making a game that doesn't feel like its made on a shoe string budget. The loot system in all of these games are so fucking annoying. Co-op implementation almost feels like an after thought, with progress lost if a co-op mission is created and/or disbanded mid-mission. It's a mess. And yet. It feels so fucking good to play, and having multple friends gang up on one hopelessly stun-locked enemy will always make me laugh.
6