Best New Games of 2023 (That I Played)

There were a lot of great games that came out in 2023 but it feels weird to mention that without also mentioning that it was a pretty lousy year for the game industry. Layoffs and closures were everywhere so it's a shame that an otherwise great year, in hindsight, will be forever marred by the business decisions that undercut the creative work on display.

As for my list, I know there are a ton of things I wanted to play but didn't get around to so this list is, obviously, only including stuff I actually played. I'll put up list covering my favorite older games that I played last year in a few days, and I'll also have a separate post up after that that'll cover some honorable mentions and other things I enjoyed from last year.

10. PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

Paranormasight is a flawed game but it's one I absolutely enjoyed playing. It's a Square Enix published visual novel that launched last summer to relatively little fanfare and it's got the bones of something special. There are sequences that play out like a puzzle game, the art looks striking (particularly in motion) and the characters are all relatively likable. Its structure, too, is neat. I have some issues with the story at the heart of it all, but it was a fun ride nonetheless and an energetic one.

9. Jusant

The newest release from DON'T NOD, Jusant is a bit of a departure for the studio. It's a dialogue free (though with a fair amount of text to read) game about climbing a very very tall structure and it plays, to be a bit reductive, like the climbing sequences from an Uncharted or Tomb Raider (or otherwise similar action-adventure game). It feels remarkably tactile due to its controls requiring you to be cognizant of where your characters hands are relative to the handholds available to them so in my mind I was constantly thinking of Bennet Foddy's GIRP (though, of course, much less awkward) and it kept me engaged throughout.

8. En Garde!

En Garde! is an action-platformer that reminded me of the low-stakes criminal fun of Sly Cooper and I feel like that should be enough of a recommendation for you. If, for some reason, you need more, it puts you in the shoes of a Spanish vigilante taking on a corrupt government with her rapier and was a constant joy to play through. The combat seems simple at first but gets surprisingly dicey once enough enemies get involved, and the writing was consistently fun and snappy. It's not an incredibly long game but as a result it left me wanting more which is way way way better than the alternative.

7. Sony PlayStation's Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man 2

This game isn't radically different from its predecessors but, for me, that's a good thing. I love me some Spider-Man and this game has two Spider-Mans. Spider-Men? Spiders-Man? Anyway, it's a solid followup to the other Insomniac games and, like the others it takes the story in an interesting direction. Even if I may not be a fan of all of the narrative beats it follows through on, it's more comic-booky Spider-Man stuff that manages to keep Peter Parker and his tumultuous life (and Miles's, too) in focus and doesn't solely tell a story about costumed heroes and villains punching each other (though there's definitely still a lot of that).

6. Baldur's Gate 3

This game is so doggone big. I mean jeez. I've spent well over 100 hours in it and I'm pretty sure I haven't even started "Act 2", there's just so much #content to see and experience here. The coolest thing, though, is that all of it is exceptionally well-made. There are so many small details that, thanks to years of early access, have been able to be polished and refined to such a degree that no one route or approach feels like it received more attention than another. 

I suppose, oddly, that that may be why it isn't higher on my list. Every time I boot into this game I look at the scene before me and I feel, ever so slightly, intimidated by the choices I have open to me. I love that it's boiled DnD 5e into a single-player experience that someone like me (someone, uh, without friends) can play and enjoy and I imagine I'll be chipping away at it for the foreseeable future but it wouldn't feel right ranking a game I haven't even finished above some of the later entries on this list so I'm setting it here. Maybe, in hindsight, this could even be my #1, but for now it's firmly in the middle. It's very good, just maybe too much game for me right now.

5. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

I'm ashamed to say I also haven't completed this one but dang are the few hours I've played impressive. I love so much about this game but every time I sit down to play it I come to the unfortunate conclusion that platformers just don't do it for me any more. I can see the artistry on display here and I can appreciate everything that went into this but when I sit down to play a video game, despite the fact I love this and want to see all of it, I almost never choose something like this. I still intend to finish it, however, I just wanted to explain why it wasn't higher. It feels like something I should have played more of than I did.

4. Amarantus

To be quite honest I don't know why this has stuck with me as long as it has but I have very positive memories of this game. I've mentioned it a few times but, if you've forgotten, it's a visual novel about a bunch of young adults plotting a coup and it deals with the sorts of tensions you might expect about a bunch of conflicted teens and twenty-somethings in a country in the midst of a war. It's not without its faults but it has some solid characters and a few difficult, messy decisions to make which was exactly what I wanted out of it.

3. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

I'll admit, it feels a bit weird to put an expansion to a game I already loved so high on this list but when it's as good as this was I feel like excluding it would just be petty. The addition of Phantom Liberty's story content, alongside Dogtown and everything 2.0 added, is quite frankly astonishing. This is a pretty noticeably different game to the one I played after it's 1.5 release when you get into the nitty-gritty details. It's still Cyberpunk, but they've added so many quality of life features and overhauls that this at times almost feels like the sort of thing you'd get from a next-generation re-release rather than an expansion and I highly recommend it to anyone who even remotely enjoyed the original game.

2. The Invincible

Perhaps more than anything else, what's striking about this game is just how strong the writing is. Sure, individual plot elements may seem passe or familiar but, for a video game of this nature? It is very good science-fiction. I could go into plot details or talk about the ways in which it isn't just a straight adaptation of the novel of the same name, but what's important here is that it's a semi-interactive science fiction story that feels like you're in the shoes of its protagonist and there's not a whole lot else of this quality that I can think to compare it to.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this tops my list. I've gone into great detail about how I adored games like Elden Ring and, yes, Breath of the Wild for how expansive their worlds were and despite the fact this is built on the back of a setting I was already largely familiar with it still managed to surprise me on a regular basis. I played BotW in early 2017 and a lot has happened in my life since then so it was fun to revisit its brand of Hyrule after all this time.

It's taken something as solid as that game and doubled down on its physics and systemic interactions to make something incredibly fun to play with. People could do wacky things with the mechanics of BotW but an entire game built around strapping rockets to things or using fire to make a balloon float or tying things to your horse meant that those sorts of hijinks were flat out encouraged by the game design.

Earlier this year one of those "best games of all time" trends was going around and while I'd usually mention Breath of the Wild on those, Tears of the Kingdom gave me pause. While I do absolutely think that game is worth playing and does certain things that this one doesn't, I don't know if I see myself ever revisiting it because this game is frankly just... more of it. More complex interactions and tools at your disposal means that the end result is just more fun to toy with, full stop.