Every Game I Finished in 2023

Looking back at last year’s “Every Game I Finished in…” article, I made a bold resolution:

“In 2023, my goal is to tackle my most shameful backlog entries and games I’ve been meaning to replay for years. Games like The Witcher 3, Disco Elysium, hell, possibly even Skyrim and Suikoden II are in the running for games I’ve never finished. I’m also looking to replay Half-Life 1 and 2, as well as Panzer Dragoon Saga. I’m leaving it open for now, so I can go where the mood strikes me. Currently I’m playing Xenoblade Chronicles, a game that isn’t nearly as shameful as some of the ones mentioned above, but it’s keeping my interest so far.”

At the time, I had no idea what kind of year I was heading into in terms of game releases. Year-over-year, I probably played substantially less Destiny 2 than I had in previous years, yet the deluge of exciting new releases made it impossible to tackle those backlog games I mentioned above. 

It wasn’t a total wash. I did replay Half-Life 1 in the form of Black Mesa, a Valve-approved fan-made remake of the original with a massive amount of additional content. I snuck in a couple hilariously short Kirby games on my Analogue Pocket, a portable that is slowly-but-surely becoming less of a paperweight than it was when I first got it. I also replayed Alan Wake and the mini-sequel American Nightmare, as prep for Alan Wake II.

But despite my plans to replay regular old games, the highlights of the year tended to be brand new remasters of other old games. Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, and Metroid Prime were all fantastic remasters. I’m still not a fan of the original Resident Evil 4, but Capcom made so many smart changes to the original that the remake has become a new favorite for me.

One goal I set for myself last year was to focus on quality over quantity. I definitely finished less games as a result, and I didn’t shy away from longer games either. That said, I’m not sure the 75 hours I spent in Final Fantasy XVI or the 60-ish hours I spent hating Diablo 4 were the most efficient uses of time. My willingness to go down personal interest rabbit holes did lead me to play some unique favorites though, and I hope that will be reflected in my top 10 list for the year.

Speaking of which, that list is still a little ways off. I know we are well into 2024 at this point, but I’m still head-down cleaning up my pile of shame to ensure the list is where I want it. There’s a certain Zelda game that I put off for far too long, and I’m enjoying it way too much to give up on it now.

So expect a final top 10 sometime in February, and in the meantime I’ve got this big list below, plus some other article ideas swimming around. As always, thanks for reading. Here’s to another year.

Note: As usual, the list below should not be taken as definitively as my final top 10 list. These are just my unpolished thoughts I wrote down as the credits rolled, with a score I gave with my gut, rather than hours of thought. That said, enjoy!

Elden Ring (PS5) – Completed on 01/06
★★★★★
Elden Ring gets about as close as you can get in 2022 to the wonder and possibility space I felt with games as a kid in the 90s. It feels impossibly big, flexible to your whims, but unafraid to fight back. It is by far the biggest Souls-style game and it maintains From Software’s level of quality for the vast majority of the playtime. I want to play it all over again right now.

Season: A Letter to the Future (PS5) – Completed on 01/25
★★★☆☆
Review on RRC

Callisto Protocol (PS5) – Completed on 01/19
★★☆☆☆
So bad it makes you wonder how Dead Space was so good. It somehow manages to do almost everything wrong. It’s unpleasant to try to play optimally, as it constantly punishes you for leaving items behind by arbitrarily locking off areas. Deeply uninteresting story, with a cheap ending gag for DLC or something. Awful.

Dead Space (2023) (PS5) – Completed on 02/12
★★★★★
Every addition, enhancement, and change in this remake is thoughtful and additive. This is basically Dead Space remade the same way Resident Evil 2 was, as hard as that may be to believe. The care that went into updating one of my most beloved games cannot be understated. This is absolutely the better version. The way it plays with expectations and unpredictable scripting is amazing. I really hope they do this with Dead Space 2.

A Space for the Unbound (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 02/17
★★★☆☆
Review on RRC

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022) (PS5) – Completed on 02/28
★★★☆☆
A massively uneven campaign with some interesting ideas. The moments where you’re forced to craft tools and sneak around are inspired, but it doesn’t have the same intensity as the previous Modern Warfare reimagining. The multiplayer seems fun, but it’s hard to get invested knowing that Activision will force out another one of these in a year’s time.

Kirby’s Dream Land (Analogue Pocket) – Completed on 03/08
★★☆☆☆
Feels like a first draft for the much better game that Dream Land 2 ends up being. It’s fine, but it doesn’t really feel like Kirby in 2023. Without his copy ability there just isn’t much to it, and it’s all over in about 45 minutes.

Wanted: Dead (PS5) – Completed on 03/11
★★☆☆☆
A game that seems to sidestep fun at every opportunity. Yes it is challenging and has a certain amount of depth to it which some will enjoy, but Wanted: Dead is so unattractive, so unpolished, so uninspired from a story-telling perspective that you can’t convince me the challenge is worth enduring. Comparing this to something like Earth Defense Force or Deadly Premonition fails to acknowledge that those games have some truly strong elements to them amongst all the jank.

Kirby’s Adventure (Analogue Pocket ) – Completed on 03/19
★★★☆☆
This fan-favorite Kirby game didn’t work for me. Slow-down, imprecise controls, and a weird mean-streak of trolly game design put me off. By the end I felt like the game was designed to make you avoid copy powers because it would punish you for taking them so often. It’s still mostly a brisk Kirby game with the hallmarks you expect (and importantly the first one to fully establish them), but it was irritating enough that I just wanted it to be over.

Metroid Prime Remastered (Switch) – Completed on 04/04
★★★★☆
Very close to a 5/5, but a late game fetch quest section felt like some truly unnecessary filler in a game that was already a very satisfying length. For most of its playtime, this is what I’ve always wanted Metroid to be. You have to really explore the world and return to old areas again and again, where they are broken wide open by your new powers.

Hi-Fi Rush (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 04/16
★★★★★
I think if I had a game like this when I was a kid I would have died with excitement. Hi-Fi Rush is a kinetic Saturday morning cartoon mixing Bayonetta and a rhythm game into something absolutely brilliant. It’s so colorful, beautifully animated, dynamic, and incredibly fun. Games are so rarely this fun to play AND this thrilling to experience. It’s going to be tough to beat at the end of the year.

Resident Evil 4 (2023) (PS5) – Completed on 04/30
★★★★★
A better game in every way, taking the very influential bones of the original and putting a much needed coat of paint on the whole thing. Every silly, corny, B-movie character from the original is either improved drastically or kept just ridiculous enough to maintain the spirit of the original. Gone are Ashley upskirts and throwing her in dumpsters, now she’s a little more modest and a lot more charming. The interactions between her and Leon here are adorable. Meanwhile, the game is darker, scarier, and grosser than the original, feeling much more in line with the RE series as a whole. Top it off with great combat that walks a line between action and ammo scarcity, and this is basically a masterpiece.

Bayonetta 3 (Switch) – Completed on 05/06
★★★☆☆
Bayonetta 3 is an absolute mess. It feels like Platinum had a billion ideas for the combat, spent years perfecting them, and then rushed to finish everything else about the game. There are SO many weapons and abilities and the combat IS incredible, but the level design is a repetitive mess, the story is ill-conceived even by Bayonetta standards, and the game looks horrible. Visually this is one of the ugliest games I’ve ever played. Bayonetta 1 on Switch looks much better.

God of War: Ragnarok (PS5) – Completed on 05/23
★★★★☆
2022 was really the year for overstuffed Sony AAA sequels, huh? God of War: Ragnarok has more of everything from the first game, more loot, more slots, more optional quests, more tangents in the main story path. It’s a harder game that asks you to navigate build-crafting at the higher difficulties. It’s a single player game you can invest into like a live-service game. Every step of the way it struck me as too much, and not as elegant as the first game, which I lovingly 100%’d on hard mode. Don’t get me wrong, everything here is very-good-to-great (especially the massive optional area), but even the most delicious meal can become unappetizing when you’re given 5 plates of it.

Jedi: Survivor (PS5) – Completed on 06/03
★★★★☆
An improvement over the first game in just about every way. The charming cast returns with new additions and an even greater Mass Effect feel due to the bar you return to over and over. The combat still isn’t the highlight, but it is certainly more refined and fun on the normal difficulty. The highlights here are the traversal, exploration, and character moments. Some of the jumping sequences and story highlights feel like brushes with greatness, reminding me of Respawn’s incredible Titanfall 2. At this point I have a lot of confidence that a third one of these is going to be pretty special.

Layers of Fear (2023) (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 06/12
★★☆☆☆
A demonstrably worse game than the original that goes out of its way to dismantle many of the things that made it scary. All the while it does very little to address the bizarre amount of stolen ideas contained in the original games. I played 30-40 minutes of the original game after finishing this remaster and found it to be far more effective. I was genuinely startled a few times, when most of the remaster left me flat.

Diablo 4 (PS5) – Completed on 07/08
★★★☆☆
A loot treadmill through and through, Diablo 4 spends far too long invalidating the loot you got 15 minutes prior. The entire loop ends up feeling like a chore despite the core gameplay feeling better than ever. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the end game, but I feel like I’m only doing it out of curiosity, not because I’m compelled and having a ton of fun. The grimdark presentation is a step up from Diablo 3, but it’s also not as evocative as it could be, and the story is just weird, ending like a wet fart. All the biggest moments were spoiled in trailers and demos.

Amnesia: The Bunker (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 07/09
★★★★☆
An absolutely dire, hopeless, panic attack of a game. This is survival horror at its purest, with a foundation of resource management, puzzle-solving, and exploration in a small setting you spend a lot of time in. The AI of the enemies can be a bit annoying, leaving you stuck in closets waiting around for far too long, and the story didn’t really grab me, but otherwise this is a masterclass of horror. It’s a game so oppressive in its mechanics, systems, and presentation that I suspect many horror fans will just tap out.

The Greyhill Incident (PS5) – Completed on 07/14
★☆☆☆☆
Yeesh. Outside of the fact that The Greyhill Incident isn’t too challenging, is relatively polished, and mercifully short, there is nothing here to recommend. The writing does the majority of the damage, with a setting that can best be described as a serious take on the South Park episode about UFOs. Anal probes, tinfoil hats, and government conspiracy theorists make up the bulk of the storytelling here and it is truly dire and joyless. There’s a small amount of “so bad it’s good” going on here, but I wouldn’t recommend playing it unless you’re doing it for a video series or something.

Viewfinder (PS5) – Completed on 07/16
★★★★☆
A traditional first-person puzzle game with an incredibly strong hook, Viewfinder often feels like magic, even if the tropes of the genre wear a little thin. The actual puzzle solving is full of jaw-dropping surprises and devious solutions, making it a must-play for fans of games like Portal, The Witness, and The Talos Principle. The story beats and structure just don’t really amount to too much, with some cringe-inducing dialogue early on and a plot that really feels like it was built around the puzzle designs more than anything. This is a puzzle-forward experience, and if that’s okay, then don’t miss this.

Arcade Paradise (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 07/28
★★★★☆
A great premise that just misses the mark in terms of storytelling and pacing. The collection of arcade games range from serviceable spoofs to truly great twists of classic games. I got genuinely invested in some of the puzzle games. I just wish the rate that you unlocked things was a bit faster and that the selection was a little more ambitious. Also the dad plot is something that could have been really genuine and heartfelt but was played for lame comedy.

Black Mesa (Steam Deck) – Completed on 08/01
★★★★☆
A very good unofficial remake of Half-Life 1 that ultimately botches the landing by getting a little too ambitious. Turning the endgame trip to Xen into nearly half of the total playtime makes Black Mesa a lot different, but also a lot longer. The first half of Xen is immaculate, but as it goes on, and on, and on, it shows the value of an editor. That it overly taxes average machines and becomes pretty unplayable on a Steam Deck by the end only sours the experience more. That said, there are also a lot of really smart additions to HL1. It feels a bit more like HL2, the story has more going on, it’s totally worth playing for long-time fans.

Remnant II (PS5) – Completed on 08/16
★★★★★
A breath of fresh air that oozes creativity at every turn. What is Remnant? At its core it’s a 3rd person shooter Souls-like. But, sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a horror game, sometimes it’s tic-tac-toe against a statue. Remnant II is so unafraid to challenge a group of 3 players it is astounding. Its greatest accomplishment is widening the possibility space for online cooperative games. I dare Destiny 2 to get this risky! My only complaints are that the story is pretty weak, and that the randomization can result in bad luck and playing the same levels over and over.

Atlas Fallen (PS5) – Completed on 08/17
★★★★☆
Let’s call that 4/5 a bit of a “reviewer’s tilt” or something. Atlas Fallen is a super janky game with some stiff voice acting that’s hard to ignore. The best parts of the game—namely, the combat and exploration—are also janky and unpolished. Your attacks often don’t connect with enemies, the monster variety is extremely limited. Most of the exploration is similar to the Skyrim-style “glitch up a mountain” approach. And yet! I found Atlas Fallen to be really fun! It felt like a salve to two super big, super-polished releases—Diablo 4 and Final Fantasy XVI—because it was clearly made to be enjoyed, designed with love, and limited by time and money in ways that make it feel less like a bad game, and more like a solid 8/10 game of the Xbox 360 era. This is exactly why I play so-called “B-games”.

Fort Solis (PS5) – Completed on 08/26
★★☆☆☆
Review on RRC

Final Fantasy XVI (PS5) – Completed on 08/31
★★★☆☆
A game of the highest highs and the lowest lows. This is Final Fantasy at its most audacious, with battles reminiscent of Asura’s Wrath. These fights are the highlights of the game, but they also make up a small percentage of it. In between are fetch quests, busy work, and long, dry conversations with unimportant characters. This is a 70 hour game that should have been 20 at most. It’s in desperate need of an editor. But worst of all, the story and world have some serious flaws that are hard to ignore. Women are either ignored or portrayed in actively shitty ways and its slavery narrative is something the writers were clearly not prepared to handle.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (PS5) – Completed on 09/09
★★★★☆
There is an incredible economy of scope to Armored Core VI. Without From Software’s fantastic art and tech, the simplicity of presentation here wouldn’t be too far off from an Earth Defense Force game. All of the character moments and story beats are told through voiceover. Not a single human character was rendered to tell this tale. This allows them to focus entirely on world design and mech combat. Rubicon is vast and intimidating, even with the game having a strict mission-based structure. The combat gets better and better as the game goes on. That said, Armored Core VI is, at its heart, a really refined, high quality PS2 game. That won’t work for everyone; nor will the difficulty spikes, which can actually get to be pretty irritating at times. Despite loving AC6, I did find its old-school mission based structure exhausting at times.

Alan Wake Remastered (PS5) – Completed on 09/25
★★★☆☆
First of all, this isn’t a great remaster. Audio is a mess and dialogue is hard to hear most of the time. Alan’s feet seem to get stuck in the floor. It’s not great. That said, the bigger issue is that the original Alan Wake is kind of repetitive and annoying. As much as I enjoy some of the storytelling, I don’t find the original very fun to play anymore. Enemies seem to be designed without regard for how fun they are to deal with. The end result is that I’d groan my way through long combat sections, waiting for tiny morsels of storytelling. The DLC ironically has most of the best moments.

Mortal Kombat 1 (2023) (PS5) – Completed on 09/26
★★★★☆
A great entry that isn’t hugely innovative, but still a ton of fun. The combat can feel really stiff at times, but the smoothness comes from learning the combos. I wrapped it up quickly because it was a rental, but I found myself wishing I had more time to learn characters and really get invested in it. The story feels like a brighter, sillier, Marvel-inspired tale, but it works. It’s stupid and uses tired multiverse tropes but it’s very fun and entertaining.

Starfield (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 10/08
★★★☆☆
Vanilla, mid, hampered by flawed ideas and an overcommitment to them—this is Starfield. Everything about this game is washed out, muted, lacking in strong convictions. Companions are dry compared to those found in games like Mass Effect. Romance options are chaste and awkward. The world, quests, and stories seem to be about capitalists, criminals, and cops all the way down. You don’t spend much time with common people, or anyone with a progressive opinion. The end result is a game that feels politically inert or worse, a weird fantasy land for conservatives. Generally, the game can still be fun at times. Faction quests are strong. But, the main quest twist is infuriatingly tired. New game plus is a weird thing to focus your entire plot around.

Cocoon (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 10/11
★★★★★
A masterpiece. I think some may struggle with the small moments that require decent hand-eye coordination out of nowhere. Others may find the later challenges fairly difficult considering how smooth the experience is early on. I think that’s fair, but as someone who loves a challenge, Cocoon is just about everything I could hope for. The fact that it just starts, no instructions or direction, no dialogue, and masterfully weaves a weird-ass adventure and teaches you its mechanics? This is the rare kind of game that shows what the medium can be at its very best.

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (Steam Deck) – Completed on 10/14
★★★☆☆
An overall better playing game than the original Alan Wake. Kind of a bummer that you loop through the same 3 levels multiple times, but the Mr. Scratch live action elements are great. Dabbles in the extremely male-dominated attitudes of the Xbox 360 era in a way that’s very out of character for Remedy.

Venba (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 10/15
★★★★☆
A short but sweet experience with incredible production values, Venba is a little slice of life story with a Tamil-speaking family. It’s a great time while it lasts, but I’m not sure it will really leave an impression. The story tries to be messy and complicated, but comes off as a little simplistic. The cooking mechanics are inoffensive, but hardly engaging. That said, the sights and sounds elevate it all.

Immortals of Aveum (PS5) – Completed on 11/02
★★★★☆
Feeling like a lost first-party Sony title in almost every way, Immortals of Aveum is a AAA fantasy-magic FPS with many of the hallmarks that draw in players to games like God of War, Spider-Man, and Horizon. The best part of the game is the combat, which does the Sony AAA thing of using every single button on the controller, but manages to stay engaging and readable. The level design hurts the combat a bit, but strictly in terms of gameplay I was hooked. Rounding out that fun combat is a nice layer of secrets, puzzles, and exploration (alongside an inoffensive gear system) that keeps everything just non-linear enough. Now the story, which is flashy and full of real actors doing performance capture, is where the game misses the hardest. At times it is sincere, genuine, and heartfelt, but so much of it is regurgitating Marvel dialogue while spouting an endless stream of proper nouns.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) (PS5) – Completed on 11/21
★★★☆☆
Unpopular opinion: this one is more coherent, more fun, and more entertaining than last year’s Modern Warfare 2. The open world missions are uneven but the freedom keeps the gameplay engaging. The multiplayer seems pretty messy, but I never play it long enough to really know how good or bad it is. Still, my opinion still stands that the MW1 remake was a series’ high-point and they should have taken a break then and there to foster that game. The annual grind is still a massive turn-off.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (PS5) – Completed on 11/27
★★★★☆
Insomniac does it again! And by that I mean they have made a very good and fun game full of awkward writing, weird contrivances, and predictable storytelling. The team jumps through ridiculous hoops to provide meaningful context in sidequests where you are doing very video game-y puzzle solving. It can result in some very goofy situations, even by comic standards. That said, occasionally it really nails the whole package. For the rest of the time it’s breezy and fun even at its most flawed. I just wish they could really nail a Spider-Man story on the level of something like Into the Spider-Verse. I really hope they tell a truly Miles-focused story next time around, because the Miles game is still the best of the three entries.

Lords of the Fallen (2023) (PS5) – Completed on 12/09
★★★★☆
Playing it a bit after launch it’s clear this one came out way too soon. The game you’ll play a year from now will probably be a lot closer to the “Dark Souls 4.5” they aspired to, as ridiculous a claim as that is. This is the closest a Souls-like has felt to being a straight-up Dark Souls clone. Thankfully it does that while having some original ideas, like the lamp and Umbral world. It even does some things better, making projectile and magic combat feel integral and well-integrated. I also really enjoyed the way boss fights were designed, as most of them punished you for button mashing but made it really easy for the average players to learn and defeat. Still there is a lot to be fixed and some areas are rougher than others. Level design was top notch though and was consistently the thing that kept me playing longer than expected.

The Talos Principle 2 (PS5) – Completed on 12/19
★★★★★
Talos Principle 2 did not need to go this hard. A city hub with conversations and choices, a lovable cast of characters, a branching story, and clever exploration make this sequel a massive and ambitious journey. Yes, at the end of the day it’s still all about solving puzzle rooms just like the first one, but the new mechanics are excellent and all the extras surrounding them make it feel like a real epic. The finale chunk of puzzles was devious and the story went in some wild directions. Most of all, it’s just nice to spend hours puzzle solving and thinking about little philosophical thought experiments.

Tchia (PS5) – Completed on 12/26
★★★★☆
If Tchia came out when I was young it probably would have become one of my favorite games. The weird, kinda fucked-up story, delivered through really well framed cutscenes, is such a treat. Baby-eating, blood-spewing headless chickens, and yet, it still has the values and tone of a game for kids and teens. The navigation is also a step up from Breath of the Wild. Butt-sliding down a mountain, jumping onto the tops of trees, sling-shotting through the air, only to then possess a bird and take off into the sky, is such a cool stream of moves that it’s undeniable.

Alan Wake 2 (PS5) – Completed on 12/28
★★★★★
Alan Wake 2 may be the most flawed game that I unequivocally give a 5/5. The highs are so high here. This is Remedy swinging for the fences with all of their lovely weirdness. From evocative horror, to twisty Twin Peaks-style storytelling, musicals, short films, lakeside rock concerts, and so much more, Alan Wake II has more big cool moments than probably any video game ever. The big flaw here is the issue that trips up Remedy every time: the gameplay isn’t as refined as their genre cousins. They get SO close here, but the glitchy controls and animations make unbalanced,frustrating encounters feel so much worse. There is an easy path to cleaning up combat though, and if they can patch it up, there is a nearly perfect game to be had. I love Remedy and this is their best game, warts and all.

Jusant (Xbox Series X) – Completed on 12/28
★★★☆☆
The critical path of climbing and moving the wordless story along is slight but engaging and beautiful. The climbing mechanics remain interesting, if not ever challenging, through to the end. The biggest flaw here is the utterly massive amount of collectible text that makes the game feel painfully overwritten. I never skip story, but here I couldn’t handle reading these news-article-length letters and lore dumps. Ignoring them resulted in a better game, but it still never had the major highs of something like Journey or The Pathless.