The most upsetting thing about my 291-day hiatus from this website about video games is how 2023 was probably the best year ever for video games.

The second-most upsetting thing is that I finished half of the games on my top 10 list well into January 2024. But better late than never, right?

Instead of the usual 45-pages-of-notes-in-my-phone approach I take to these GOTY posts, this year—mostly by necessity—I’m leveraging my hamster-tier memory retention to distill my thoughts into their purest form. What’s left of my gunshot-riddled recollection is probably what matters most. If that’s disappointing, perhaps you should ask yourself why you were expecting anything else from a 2023 GOTY list on January 31, 2024.

10. Spider-Man 2

I’m not above admitting I chuckled the first time.

As an early offering to my looming midlife crisis, I sacrificed my completionist attitude toward video games. Life is too short to spend it doing things you don’t want to do for a digital trophy. So it says a lot that I swung around NYC, checking off all the boxes as I went, spending 32 hours completing every side mission in Spider-Man 2. It’s probably because Spider-Man 2 is the most frictionless game on this list, in which even the simple act of locomotion is a joy.
Some terrific performances buoy an otherwise bog-standard story, but I’m glad Insomniac has taken the Arkham mantle from Rocksteady since I could not be less interested in whatever Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is shaping up to be.

9. Slay the Princess

If the Myers-Briggs test is astrology for business majors, then Slay the Princess is the same for visual novel fans. Slay the Princess is a game that you either know everything or nothing about by now, which makes it very difficult to talk about, but I’ll try my best:
“You’re on a path in the woods. And at the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a princess.
“You’re here to slay her. If you don’t, it will be the end of the world.”
Or so you’re told. After this prelude, you’re free to do almost anything you want: interrogate the quest with philosophical rigor, turn around and go home or, inevitably, climb the hill to the cabin, grab the knife on the table (or leave it) and see who or what awaits you in that basement.
Slay the Princess has an equal and sometimes opposite reaction for every choice you make. I don’t particularly love invoking The Stanley Parable here to describe this experience, but it’s not not like The Stanley Parable. But maybe more surprising is that it’s all in service of a satisfying, coherent and shockingly thoughtful ending. Though I suppose how thoughtful depends upon the choices you make...

8. Lies of P

I have no idea how the weapon fares these days, but the Holy Sword of the Ark was my bread and butter on my inaugural strength-based outing.

If you’d told me two years ago that Lies of P would be on my 2023 Game of the Year list and Final Fantasy XVI would not, I…would assume you were a time traveler, and I would spend the next two years slightly bummed out.
And personal disappointment with FFXVI aside, I would be wrong to feel that way. Lies of P is not just the best soulslike to date; it adds to the lexicon that this genre employs almost as much as it steals.
Maybe “almost” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but it’s evident that Lies of P isn’t content to simply coast on its Bloodborne aesthetic and Sekiro mechanics. The assembly system, for example, allows for much more creativity and expression by combining different blades and handles to create entirely new weapons. But my favorite wrinkle is that Lies of P enables you to recover a pulse cell (estus flask) by dealing damage to enemies, but only while you have no cells. It’s a smart way to reward taking risks by going on the offensive while you’re at your most vulnerable.
Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio stick pretty closely to the soulslike playbook, but they clearly have aspirations to leave their mark on this subgenre. For this reason as well as that psychotic post-credits teaser, I can’t wait to see what they do next.

7. Chants of Sennaar

Though you’ll be staring at a notebook for nearly half of the adventure, Chants of Sennaar is a visually striking game no matter what platform you choose to play it on.

My 2018 GOTY was Return of the Obra Dinn, in which you play a 19th-century insurance investigator trying to get to the bottom of why a ship carrying 60 sixty passengers returned to port without a single soul onboard.
It was the greatest form of personal wish fulfillment I’ve ever experienced in a video game.
I love mysteries, but more than that, I love the simple act of deduction. Luckily for me, Chants of Sennaar is nothing but deduction. It’s a remixed retelling of the Tower of Babel in which you, a humble traveler, are tasked with navigating to the top of a tower inhabited by five very different (but maybe not so different) societies. The problem is they all speak a unique language, and you don’t speak any of them. So you must use your surroundings and a healthy dose of context clues to discover the meaning of individual words. And just as in Obra Dinn, you’re occasionally afforded an opportunity to confirm what you think you’ve learned as you go.
I truly can’t remember the last time a game made me feel this clever. I would rather risk this game being less clear to you all than even giving one puzzle solution away because it’s that rewarding. The only thing keeping Chants of Sennaar from placing higher on this list is an occasional lack of trust in its core conceit—there are some mildly annoying stealth sequences (and I love stealth games), particularly in the game’s second chapter, though they don’t overstay their welcome.

6. Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is genuinely scary, but Bright Falls is a joy to explore. It’s worth eavesdropping on every citizen of this weird town.

While we’re on the subject of experiences that speak directly to me and no one else, Alan Wake 2 has a functional corkboard with string used for extensive mystery solving, all housed within deuteragonist Saga Anderson’s mind p(a)lace. It’s also a story within a story that also happens to be about stories. Alan Wake 2 is meta and not annoying about it, which automatically qualifies it for this list. But it’s also bursting with passion and care and recklessness and creativity that fly in the face of what is conventionally allowed in games of this scope. They put a whole-ass short film into a latter chapter, and it’s entirely missable!
Alan Wake 2 is so confident that what you’ll see will blow you away that it doesn’t waste time worrying about you won’t. It’s not the best survival-horror game on this list, and it makes some questionable mechanical decisions—like how maddening it is that replenishing a flashlight battery is an uninterruptible action in combat. But that’s such a silly complaint in the face of what Alan Wake 2 achieves. I would gladly spend the rest of 2024 solving cryptic nursery rhyme riddles in the remote corners of the Pacific Northwest if I could.

5. Misericorde Vol. 1

Katherine with a ‘K’ is one of the more outspoken nuns at Linbarrow Abbey.

I actually wrote about Misericorde Vol. 1 last year and everything I said then is still true. Maybe it’s even more true. Not only was it the best visual novel I played last year, but it might’ve been my favorite writing of all the games I encountered in 2023. In a year of Alans Wake, Baldur’s Gates and Spider-Mans, it isn’t lost on me that the video game narrative that has lived rent-free in my head all year is this one. Luckily for us all, vol. 2 seems to be right around the corner.

4. Resident Evil 4 Remake

Leon and Ada are the most enduring ship in the RE universe for a reason, and longtime fans will find a lot to appreciate about their relationship in this remake.

The original Resident Evil 4 is my third-favorite game of all time. But truthfully, when I heard RE4 was next up to bat for the remake treatment instead of, say, Code: Veronica, I was confused and disappointed.
Well, I was wrong. They made it better, somehow. And a little worse in some indescribably tiny ways (making the signature red dot sight an attachment is a real headscratcher). But it’s astonishing how unrecognizable this game is from the original at times. Almost every scenario has been reworked in some way, usually for the better. Ashley’s characterization stands out most of all in the sense that she’s actually a character now instead of human-shaped luggage.
A tiny part of me misses the tank controls, and deciding whether to move or shoot added a nice layer of strategy to the proceedings. But Leon’s foes are more dangerous to compensate for the added maneuverability—I died more in the cabin survival sequence in chapter 5 than the entirety of the original game (I started on hardcore mode for my first playthrough). Trying to recreate Evo Moment #37 with knife parries will never get old.

3. Street Fighter 6

Chun-Li is one of the eight original World Warriors returning to the base roster of Street Fighter 6.

Speaking of Evo Moment #37, some of you basking in the glory of the current Capcom renaissance may not remember just a few years ago when the company couldn’t move an inch without stepping on a rake. The one-two punch of a botched Street Fighter 5 launch and the travesty that was Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite was, at the time, at least, like a death knell for The House that Street Fighter Built.
But looking back, it’s obvious that we owe Street Fighter 6’s glowing reception to those missteps in 2016 and 2017. Street Fighter 6 launched with world-class rollback netcode, robust (and silly) single-player content in the form of its World Tour mode and true accessibility via its new Modern control scheme. And it does all of this while offering the truest vision of simple-to-learn, difficult-to-master system mechanics the series has ever seen.
The Drive meter is more important than even your health bar, and it grants immediate access to a suite of offensive and defensive capabilities. But lean too heavily on it and you’ll find yourself in a perilous burnout state, shifting the momentum of a round instantly in your opponent’s favor. Fighting games are a delicate dance of fast, high-stakes decision making, and rarely has it felt so rewarding to contemplate your own options—or how to limit your opponents—in a two-dimensional space.
In any normal year, Street Fighter 6 would be a shoe-in for my No. 1 spot, but this isn’t any normal year.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom features one of the more memorable clashes between Link and Ganondorf in series history.

I’ll just say it: Tears of the Kingdom makes Breath of the Wild look like a prototype. The secret sauce in my GOTY rubric is how often a game makes me quietly whisper to myself “How did they do that?” while playing, and TOTK forced this thought out of me at least once an hour. Take, for example, Ascend, one of Link’s new powers that does exactly what it says. Barring an obscenely generous height restriction, Link can warp to just about any surface directly above him. It doesn’t surprise me at all to learn that Ascend started out as a debug mode for Zelda developers to quickly exit underground caves. What DOES surprise me is that the entirety of TOTK’s considerable game space is developed with Ascend in mind—it feels like cheating, but rarely are you playing with ideas that these developers hadn’t already considered and actively encouraged.
The same is true of Ultra Hand, which allows Link to fuse almost any two objects together. It’s this power that has led to the insane compilation videos of Link building everything from medieval torture devices to Gundams.
But TOTK is better than BOTW in every respect. For the first time in God knows how long, we finally have a narrative befitting of the name “The Legend of Zelda.” Her heroism serves as TOTK’s emotional center, and it’s way past time that we got a playable Zelda in a mainline game.
While understandable, it annoys me a bit when people proclaim that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom aren’t Zelda-like enough, when to me they are the perfect distillation of everything that makes the series great. Both games make curiosity central to every facet of the Zelda experience—combat, exploration, puzzle-solving, etc. In many ways, they are the most Zelda-like games since the 1986 original.

1. Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 represents an enormous jump in cinematic quality from Larian’s previous work. It’s a good thing, too, as you’ll be watching your share of cutscenes during a likely triple-digit hour count.

Y’all have no idea how much I went back and forth between this and Tears of the Kingdom for the No. 1 spot. But the moment that solidified it for me was a microcosm of what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 truly special. One of the more infamous third-act encounters sees your party squaring off with Raphael, a magnificent bastard who serves as both the angel and devil on your shoulders throughout your adventure. This Disney villain of a man is so conceited that he sings his own theme song. But if Raphael becomes affected by either a Silence spell or Hideous Laughter in the course of your fight, you stop hearing his voice during the song. The devil really is in the details.
I’ve been playing D&D and Pathfinder for 15 years, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is a more reactive experience than any of the campaigns I’ve played in. That’s not a slight to any of my dungeon masters over the years—it’s just that Larian is a studio of approximately 450 dungeon masters.
Equally impressive is how Baldur’s Gate 3, a story in which you and your fellow adventurers are infected with parasites in the opening hours that will slowly consume you from within, has its theme of lost agency echoed throughout your party members’ personal journeys. Shadowheart, Astarion, Karlach, Lae’zel and the rest of the gang are instant contenders for the most memorable group of companions I've ever encountered in a video game.
It’s absurd to feel like you’ve only scratched the surface of a game after 146 hours. I’d normally say I can’t wait to forget this game and play it again, but given the sheer number of permutations available through your in-game decisions, I won’t have to try very hard for a fresh experience.

Honorable mentions: Paranormasight, Blasphemous II, Hi-Fi Rush, Octopath Traveler 2, Final Fantasy XVI
Permanent actual No. 1 for all time but excluded from this list for fairness: Metroid Prime Remastered

Jan 31 Top 10 video games of 2023