2023 Games of the Year - part 2

Hi! This is part 2 of 3 of my games of the year list. You can see part 1 here.

These months really solidified 2023 as an absolutely incredible year for strategy games. Games like Midnight Suns, Aliens: Dark Descent, Terra Nil, Pikmin 4, and The Banished Vault renewed my love of the genre in a deep way and reminded me of how diverse strategy games can be. In general it was an incredible gaming summer that I feel lucky to have had.

May

*That Which Gave Chase (PC) - An incredible horror experience, I loved the mechanical intensity of sledding combined with the ambience of endless snow and the increasingly creepy dialogue. A fantastic addition to surreal indie horror.

Luck be a Landlord (PC) - What makes this game stick out to me is it side steps the complexity and difficulty of so many roguelikes and makes a very simple very fun game. It's easy to just play one match and move on for the day. I ended up playing until the final 20th level of difficulty and had a ton of fun doing so. I'd love to see more leisurely roguelikes like this.

*A Hint of Purple (PC) - Reflecting on your relationships while semi-conscious in a coma creates a brutal atmosphere of honesty in this visual novel that takes place at a hospital. Beautiful music and art inspired by Disco Elysium, the story does a great job of showing how complex relationship dysfunction can be.

June

*Terra Nil (PC) - A beautiful strategy/puzzle/city builder with an emphasis on environmental sustainability. I played on easy for a more relaxed experience and I was surprised to find such a unique, challenging, and fun game where the core mechanics of the ebb and flow of restoration worked incredibly well. And goddamn do I love the visuals of getting the animals to come back!

*We Love Katamari REROLL (Switch) - It's....Katamari. It’s brilliant. It's got all the greatness of the first one with new levels and a bit more polish and even more incredible music. It's amazing and beautiful and fun and weird and one of the best games ever.

*Dream Tube (PC) - https://dominoclub.itch.io/dream-tube An excellent dystopian-lite narrative game about a person selling their dreams to a corporation and the voyeuristic relationship that can arise from the monetization of people’s private lives.

*Basilisk 2000 (PC) - https://akuma-kira.itch.io/basilisk-2000 Explore a never completed retro fantasy RPG via dev tools and discover how to progress, control the game, and explore its many unfinished secrets. An unbelievable achievement in ingenuity, this game truly blew my mind and represents so much of what I love in the indie space.

July

*South Scrimshaw, Part One (PC)- A gorgeous sci-fi naturalist visual novel about alien whales. Loss, trauma, nature, science, and life are all themes touched on in this game as it follows a newborn whale's life.

Marvel's Midnight Suns (PC) - I can’t think of higher praise to say than this game reminded me that I actually do like Marvel content. Do yoga with Blade, ponder your past with Storm, lift weights with Venom, laugh at social media arguments - this game has it all. Add to that a fantastic home base and incredibly relaxing strategic combat with a host of varied superhero abilities and you get 100 hours of pure pleasantness and joy. I felt like a kid on Saturday morning again.

Everything you didn't get to do (PC) - https://selkieharbour.itch.io/everything-you-didnt-get-to-do Build cairns on a mysterious island as a talking seal discusses mortality with you. The physical nature of the cairn building really substantiated the narrative of loving reflection on our lives.

*Pikmin 4 (Switch) - The best Pikmin game by far. They just nailed everything. Incredibly fun, so relaxing, love all the lil Pikmin, and I loved having all my cute alien friends around to speak with for a couple silly lines of dialogue. As a long time fan of this series, it’s everything I ever could have wanted from a Pikmin sequel.

*Venba (PC) - Fun cooking puzzles pair with incredible songs and a heart wrenching story of immigration, racism, and classism. Follow this loving family as they connect and reconnect over the years. It’s a perfect example of how powerful a narrative puzzle game can be, balancing the joy of cooking, culture, and family with the hardship of prejudice and struggle to give a wholistic view of these amazing characters in a short period of time.

August

*The Banished Vault (PC) - A brutal and atmospheric masterpiece of minimalist strategy. Incredibly challenging, I’m obsessed with the soundtrack and vibes of this game, and while it took a bit of time to grow on me, once I got my head around the basic ebb and flow it really hit me how truly special this game is. The level of detail and care put into it visually, aesthetically, and mechanically, is phenomenal.

*Aliens: Dark Descent (PC) - Excellent and wholly unique from start to finish. Love the execution of a squad as a single unit, love the meta mechanics of squad command, the levels are great, amazing Alien vibes, it’s an all time favorite strategy game. A little buggy but what an incredible and intense experience. I hope to replay it at some point on higher difficulty, something I rarely ever do.

*Sticky Business (PC) - Making your own stickers is incredibly fun and cute! A really smooth, really fun, cute, positive game. Making stickers really took me back to my childhood of collecting stickers in books and mashing things together.

Vampire Survivors (Switch) - I would have included this last year but the visuals made me very sick. Fortunately, playing handheld on my switch has solved that issue! I love this game, it's a masterpiece of pure fun, and the level of additional content and support it's gotten is truly amazing.

*The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood (PC) - Create your own deck of fake-tarot cards in this gutting narrative of mortality as you play an immortal witch imprisoned for centuries for foreseeing the end of your coven. There is so much beauty and love and power in this game it absolutely floored me on so many levels. I’m really thankful this game was made.