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8bitsupervillain · 3 months

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End of the Year 2023: The Games of the Year Combined List of Destiny!

So, what I wanted to do originally for this list was use one of the WWE wrestling games and have the twenty best games duke it out. Unfortunately none of them are free on the consoles, and I'm not spending seventy dollars on a goof (I might still do this soon…).

20: Diablo III

Perhaps my standards are lower than they used to be, but I had fun playing through it recently.

19: Doom 3

I disagree with the notion it's a horror game. It just plays like a slower paced vesion of the older Dooms.

18: Higanbana no Saku Yoru Ni

I enjoy a more straightforward horror yarn once in a while.

17: The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings

A fun game with a surprisingly good story that knows when to have sillier moments.

16: Dragon Age II

You push the button and something awesome happens.

15: Hammerwatch II

A fun action RPG that gave me what I was looking for when Diablo IV didn't. Also made me think about how not every gosh darned game needs to be an open world.

14: Might and Magic X: Legacy

I thought it was a pretty fun first person RPG. It doesn't really do anything new, but that's alright.

13: Demon Lord Reincarnation

A fun DRPG that uses a wonderful retro look for its graphics. Surprisingly emotionally gripping, and extremely cruel.

12: Amnesia: The Bunker

It's great someone made a new game in the style of Alien: Isolation. Kudos for using a scarcely used setting as well.

11: Dead Space

A fun remake that makes the original largely obsolete. It basically took everything the original did and tuned it up.

10: Armored Core 6

I appreciate the game didn't really dwell too long on the inherent backstabbing nature of mercenary life.

09: Class of 09 (Also Class of 09: The Re-Up)

Well that's kind of fitting isn't it? I found certain parts of this pair of games to be extremely funny, and at times surprisingly emotionally gripping.

08: Bravely Default II

An expertly crafted retro style RPG with a surprisingly strong storyline.

07: Pizza Tower

I was really surprised at how much I liked the gameplay when every single time I looked at it before hand I was left extremely unimpressed.

06: Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

I won't apologize for my love of this type of game. It's just constantly satisfying combat all the way through.

05: Potato Flowers in Full Bloom

I went in to this expecting nothing and came away with an absolutely wonderful and compelling experience.

04: Resident Evil 4

I swear I didn't do this intentionally. I love the recent slate of Resident Evil games Capcom has put out, they seem to just go from strength to strength. Perhaps one day one will steal the gold medal.

03: Umineko no Naku Koro Ni

Absolutely stellar, a masterclass in mystery story telling. There is not one wasted character in the entire one hundred and thirty hour story.

02: Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

Just as impressively designed as the first Pillars of Eternity, with a fresh new setting. Everything is a ten out of ten with this game, the story, the characters, the gameplay, the whole deal.

01: Baldur's Gate III

But this just stole the show. Unparalleled levels of reactivity and planning for most of the outlandish plans players could think up gave Baldur's Gate III the edge. I know I win no points for originality by saying Baldur's Gate III is the game of the year, but the fact is that it is.

But can you say it in red?

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8bitsupervillain · 4 months

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End of the Year 2023: Games of the Year!

Honorable Mentions:

Mortal Kombat 1

I like the story mode this game has in it, I thought it was a very entertaining eight hours. Problem is I just really don't like the way the actual fighting game itself plays. Perhaps my instinct for fighting games has been tainted from playing anime fighters and Street Fighter 6, but I just find the controls in Mortal Kombat 1 to be frustratingly slow for my liking.

Final Fantasy XVI

Another game whose story I am just loving to pieces, but there's just small annoyances in the gameplay that really stops me from putting it on the list. That and I've not completed the story, and I've begun to not put RPGs that I haven't finished on my year end lists because that can come back on me in a most irritating way. Cough, Pathfinder, cough. It mystifies me that people can play this game and come away with the idea that this is the worst games they played all year. I enjoy this a whole hell of a lot, I just don't feel right about letting it on the list since I haven't finished it.

The winners of the prestigious awards I don't have:

10: Hammerwatch II

I am not immune to hyperbolic statements. Sometimes I'll read a statement that just knocks the wind right out of me for its audaciousness, especially when it's a needlessly combative statement comparing two games to each other. A writer for PC Gamer, I believe, did a preview for Hammerwatch II where he compared it to Diablo 4 and just raked D4 over the coals while talking about how Hammerwatch II was what he wanted from it. I played the demo and thought it was a nifty little game. I had never played the original Hammerwatch so I couldn't compare it, but I liked what the demo offered me. It's a very fine time waster game, much as that might sound like an insult. I think it's a good game to play to just sort of keep my hands busy while doing other stuff. It's a nice little ARPG, and I think it's a fun game to just mess around in.

09: Demon Lord Reincarnation

For the longest time, even while playing it I kept thinking the games name was Demon Lord Resurrection. I don't know what it is but something in 2023 just reignited my love for Dungeon RPGs (DRPGs, or Blobbers as they're apparently known, for some reason), I was spoiled for choice this year Wizardry came out with two games, and then I saw this. I was instantly drawn by its delightful lo-fi aesthetic, the crunchy look of its low resolution late eighties graphics style. I love a good strictly monochrome visual style, and I was highly impressed by this game. It's a challenging DRPG, a surprisingly straightforward one that's not weighed down with pretension. Despite its relative simplicity I also found it a game that is extremely emotionally draining because of how captivated I found myself getting by the plights and trials of my small bands of doomed adventurers. Outside of a sentence when you recruit them there's nothing really to endear you to the characters, but it kept happening to me every time. I would beam with satisfaction and pride when they manage to scrape through a tough fight. I would become extremely morose when a total party wipe happened. It was a surprisingly touching game, and I wonder if the the emotional experience would have been lessened if the game had been slightly less monstrously cruel?

08: Amnesia: The Bunker

Cards on the table here I didn't expect to actually play this game. I've played past Amnesia games and I haven't really liked any of them so I wasn't particularly sold on going back to the Amnesia well for another chance to be let down. I'm glad I did though because this is a very fun, surprisingly tense game to play through. It is also a source of massively untapped, but extremely great comedy as well. In the game during your exploration of the bunker you find yourself in you come across hand grenades and a bevy of locked doors. The game lets you know early on that you can break locked doors. So with no idea where to go, or what to do, I decide to use the grenade as a lockpick. I throw the thing at the door when the monster who hunts you down throughout the game rounds the corner right next to the door. My grenade bounces off his face, and detonates. Me and the monster have similar thoughts and immediately run back the way we came away from the explosion. It was such a funny experience, it really made me appreciate the game more.

07: Dead Space

Confession time here as well: I didn't think Dead Space remake was going to be any good. Can't really justify why, I just went about my life hearing about the remake and just sort of internally groaning at the idea of playing it. It's Dead Space, the series doesn't stand out in my memory as particularly great, this remake sounds like a waste of time and effort, etc. etc. But time rolls on, and I decide what the hell, I'll give it a whirl. I quite liked it, and it makes for a really interesting comparison of remakes when you look at it next to Resident Evil 4. They seem to have taken off some of the rougher edges and just made the remake a more tightly put together experience. I find the idea of one day these guys getting to remake Dead Space 3 to be an interesting thought experiment. On its own however, I think Dead Space (2023) is a very fine time, and I definitely recommend it if you're looking for a good horror shooter. Especially if you have access to a time machine, and an Xbox Series X and buy it when it was on sale for the ridiculous price of $5.

06: Armored Core 6

Tis very fun building your customized robot and seeing how it performs combatwise against some of the biggest jobber enemies in the universe and some of the cruelest, most vicious opponents that can be put in a game. This game made me realize something about myself. The cruelest thing a game can do is plant the seed in my head that my plans can work. I will throw myself against the wall repeatedly far past the point of reason if I think a plan of action can work for a given situation. If it had the decency to just kill me and prove that I need to revise my plans early on I would absolutely do so. But if I can get a boss down to the last third, or quarter of its life bar I will keep trying this same plan again and again. Only I'll do so slightly harder. If you played the game you probably think I'm talking about the usual suspects that have arose from the controversy surrounding this game, but as far as I've seen I'm the only one who really had an issue with the boss I fought for multiple hours (the boss of the mission: Intercept the Red Guns). Never before has privatized corporate warfare looked so visually stunning. So all that said, I think you should get in the robot. Because we dig giant robots. Incidentally people who complain about giant robots being "unrealistic" are very annoying.

05: Class of 09 (and Class of 09: The Re-Up)

Just goes to show the power of becoming somewhat popular on Twitter I suppose. Never heard of these two games until someone I follow on Twitter reposted some scene from The Re-Up, and then I got intrigued in what the game was actually about. I was expecting a rather low effort western developed VN where they would brag about how unlike those silly other VNs this one is about the plot. I didn't expect the funny ha ha visual novel about a teenage sociopath to actually affect me emotionally, or to have some pretty relevant and deep messages about society in a way that doesn't really beat you over the head with its message. I'm counting these as one game because there really isn't much that's different between entries, and it works really well as a double act.

04: Pizza Tower

To be completely honest with you when I first heard of Pizza Tower I was not impressed. I didn't care for it, it didn't look good, and so I wrote it off and moved on with my life. Somehow, some way it dug its claws in, eventually I take another look at it, "that could be fun," I say to myself. Unfortunately this was at a point where I wasn't willing to gamble on buying things, so I went to websites of ill repute and acquired it. I played a couple levels, and I'm struck with an intense feeling of "it's fine." But in November I was compelled to give it another shot, and this time it really stuck with me. Just as a pure gameplay experience I greatly enjoyed my time with Pizza Tower. Just running through the levels on the purest base level is great fun, but eventually the game starts filling your mind with the idea of trying for these higher skill level attempts. Maybe you could make your run through a level just a touch better than you'd done it previously.

03: Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

Nioh set in the Three Kingdoms period in China. The process of game development is a fascinating mystery to me, you spend multiple years making these elaborate things that must fire off just so, that the slightest mishap can doom weeks or months of development time. Eventually you get so adept at the process you're able to bang out these large hundred hour games on a near yearly basis. Wo Long takes the formula of Nioh that has been tinkered, and improved upon in Nioh 2, Stranger of Paradise and releases this, fundamentally the ultimate distillation of the process. I love this game, I love the general feel of the gameplay, the hamminess of the voice acting, it all just comes together in a beautifully crafted and wonderful experience. I know it will never in a million years happen, but it's my earnest hope that Blizzard one day taps Koei Tecmo to make a Diablo version of these games. But as it stands I will be more than happy to replay this game to get my fill of a level-based Soulslike. It works well to differentiate it, because not every damn game needs to be an open-world experience.

02: Resident Evil 4

I admit to a certain wariness when this remake was announced. How far is Capcom willing to take this concept? What will they do when the time inevitably comes for them to remake Resident Evil 6? Or after that, will they remake RE7? Start the process over again? Also I feel a certain dread because they keep putting these out on a yearly basis, something's got to give eventually. Anyway I have a tremendous amount of love for the RE4make, it is such an utter delight to play that I've done gone through multiple times in 2023 alone. Which astounds me, because much as everyone claims the original Resident Evil 4 as one of the all time greats I was never the biggest fan. I prefer the remake of the first Resident Evil myself. And the release of the Separate Ways DLC was such a masterful shot in the arm that it improved what I feel was already a nearly perfect game. Also not to derail the conversation too much, but I don't understand people who say Resident Evil 4 shouldn't be in consideration for a GotY (from more popular sources) because it's a remake. It's a silly thing to try to exclude the game over. That said, given what they've learned from Resident Evil 7, 8, and the remakes I think Resident Evil 9 just might be the pinnacle of the series when that comes out in 2025.

01: Baldur's Gate III

I bought Baldur's Gate III back when it first came out in Early Access. I never really planned on playing it during that period, but I know how it goes with Early Access games, the price always goes up, and I wanted in on the cheap. The thought was I would play the first two Baldur's Gates in the meantime to get myself good and prepared for the sequel made decades later by a completely different company. I never did, the two versions of the originals still sit unplayed in my GOG account. Well maybe like a minute was played to verify they would actually run, but you get my point. I went into this thinking it would be fine, nothing particularly groundbreaking, but a decent enough adventure. I was not prepared for how the game completely obliterated my expectations. Just the sheer size and scope of the interactivity is mind boggling to me, the fact they have seemingly planned for every stupid and wild idea the playerbase could come up with astounds me. You don't need me to tell you why Baldur's Gate III is good, hell odds are you've probably played it yourself. I just think it's really commendable how the folks at Larian seem to just have accommodated every single type of person with something in this game that would just sink its hooks in them.

Also have you seen Minthara?