 So I've been playing video games for a very long time, and I've been buying them for a very long time too. And I have to say, I don't think there's ever been a better year for releases in the history of video games than 2023 was. 2020 and 2021 were so bad, I struggled to get 10 games. Last year were slightly better, but I still had a push to get the 10 games that were kind of worthy of being on the list. But this year, when I started going over the games I enjoyed enough to at least consider, there were 27 games on that list. 27 games that were good enough to at least have to rank before starting to write a script. And when all that was said and done, the list of games that had to be included in the video was just ridiculous. A full 20 games. Four that I have to put in a very brief honorable mention section, and then 16 that were so good that they have to be talked about when you're talking about the best games that came out this year. So today, let's go over the best games and the best year in the history of video games. And I went back and looked too, and frankly, I don't even think it's debatable. This is the best year in history of games, and these are the 20 games that you all should play if you haven't yet. Honorable mention, Phantom Liberty. Now, normally a DLC wouldn't warrant being on a best games of the year list, but Cyberpunk's 2.0 updated such a complete overhaul of the game's progression system that it already feels like playing a different game in many ways. Phantom Liberty fixed that progression and added a storyline that is significantly better than the main story of the base game. It's good enough, and the 2.0 update is transformative enough that it deserves to be mentioned. If you skipped on this game because you saw all the stuff about, like, terrible performance on the last-gen consoles, even though that was never a thing on PC, this thing ran great on PC from the start. But if that was the case, you should absolutely play this game now. Immortals of Avium. Immortals of Avium was a flawed game, but it was still an excellent narrative-level-based FPS game. While it suffered from weird level gaining and too many pointless cutscenes by a factor of, like, 10, it was still a pretty damn fun shooter, and it makes me sad that the game sold badly and a ton of the devs got laid off. If you like shooters, like, shooters how they used to be made, you know, like, back before everything had to be played forever, then you should check this out. Get it on sale if you have to. Diablo 4. Diablo 4 is a very well-made ARPG that in most years would probably be in the top 10. This year it's an honorable mention. There's not much more to say, really. It's a Diablo game, but 4. Final Fantasy XVI. Final Fantasy XVI released early enough in the year that it was possible it would be one of the year's best games, but the rest of the year was just insane, and Final Fantasy XVI was flawed enough and had so many cutscenes that it just can't stand with the rest of the games on this list. Still, a pretty good, if flawed game that anyone who likes video games should get to at some point. Wollong Fallen Dynasty. It annoys me that I had to play Wollong Fallen Dynasty instead of Neo3. Still, Wollong is a very, very good action game. It's too easy because parrying is absurdly OP, and the level design is very, very linear as usual, and the loot and progression system is just awful. I upgraded a weapon in the second level, and that was it. There's no random drops, there's no cool perks. You'd think that by stripping out the loot progression, Team Ninja would dial back the drops in inventory management, but no. You still get 15,000 loot drops per level, and you still have to clear out your inventory all the time, but now it's basically pointless because the whole system is pointless. Wollong is flawed and feels kind of rushed, but Team Ninja are action game masters, so even a pretty big step down in quality from Neo2 is a really good action game. But not one of the year's 16 bests. It's firmly in the honorable mention section though, which is probably why it launched as a third-party Game Pass title. You rarely see third parties launch a game on Game Pass if they think it's going to be a huge hit. Now let's get to it. Number 16. Blastphemous 2 It shows how amazing this year was that Blastphemous 2 was only 16 on this list. It's basically better than the first game in almost every way. The platforming is way less punishing, the movement feels smoother, the combat is tighter, and the graphics and world design are just as good as they were. Blastphemous 2 leans much harder into the Metroidvania side of things, and it is a much better game as a result. Again, in a different year, this would be one of the very best games, but in 2023, it's 16th. 15. The Last Faith I got The Last Faith as a gift from one of you. Thanks for that. Blastphemous 2 reviewed much better than The Last Faith, probably because this feels like a much more standard Metroidvania. Actually, looks and feels very much like the Castlevania games. And it's kind of a shame because it takes three hours to fully show you what makes this game special, and the first boss is annoyingly difficult for so early in the game. If you played this and stopped there or stopped in like two or three hours, you should go back because after that early difficulty spike, it's an otherwise very forgiving game. In fact, for the first couple of hours, I felt like it was just a decent game, but as I got further in, I came to think it was actually one of the best Metroidvanias of the last five years. The Last Faith has a huge amount of weapons, spells, collectibles, NPCs, and a full RPG stats-based progression system. It's this huge amount of stuff that makes the very well-designed maps in The Last Faith so fun to explore. A beautiful map, really excellent enemy design, and excellent bosses make it one of the best Metroidvanias of the generation. As I get older, I find myself enjoying and appreciating games that do a genre well. It matters less to me that a game is innovative than that it just does its thing thoughtfully and well. The Last Faith does Castlevania thoughtfully and well. Once again, any editor this would be much, much higher, but I just cannot recommend it enough. Number 14, Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man 2 is a weird game and that it feels like it should be much, much higher on this list when I go over it in my mind. As usual, Insomniac is at the top of their game. Combat is great. The map is basically perfect. The game has a massive amount of excellent side content and progression. It's also another pretty great story with wonderful voice acting, although the relentless positivity of it is a little exhausting for a crusty old cynic like me, but with all that said, and as great as this game is and it's really great, it feels like it wasn't very long ago that I played Miles Morales. So while Spider-Man 2 is easily one of the best games of the year, it just doesn't land as heavily as the last two have. If this game had come out in 2026, it would be in the top three. But maybe I'm a little Spider-Man doubt, I don't know. Still, an absolutely masterful action game for one of the very best studios in the world. 13. System Shock There are multiple remakes on the list this year and the first one is the System Shock 1 remake by Night Dive Studios. I played the original System Shock way way back in the day and I loved it at the time. And while I was following the remakes development, I have to admit, I was curious how a game from the 90s would transfer to modern day. Everyone loves to say that games hold your hand too much these days and this is sometimes true, but there's a reason for that. The System Shock remake shows why modern games are loaded with waypoints. I honestly think if Night Dive had added just a little more player direction, the game would be better off because there are times where, man, it is very hard to know what's going on. There's a whole section where you like have to sprint through a biologically contaminated area and, man, it can be very frustrating if you don't like stop and realize that, oh god, I forgot to turn on my biological filter that I don't even remember I picked up. Still, aside from those like crazy difficulty spikes that were very common in the 90s, this game holds up really well. The original System Shock was one of the earliest games to use audio logs for storytelling, like really heavily use them, which became an industry standard. And the progression and level design still holds up really well, even though it's definitely got a lot of that 1990s maze-like design going on. One of the coolest things about the remake is it's a time capsule of what difficulty was like back in the day. Much of the game can be absolutely punishing if you do it wrong, but then it can be totally trivialized if, like, you play with your build and your items and stuff. System Shock still stands up as the original immersive sim, and we don't get nearly enough of those, so that's why it's this high on the list. Number 12, Starfield. There's a whole YouTube genre to talk about how bad Starfield is, so if you're looking for that, I don't know what to tell you. Starfield is not a perfect game, but it is a very good Bethesda game. One of the biggest criticisms I see in those furious YouTube thumbnails is that Starfield is an outdated design. I just don't get that take, frankly. I don't get it, man. I prefer when studios work to refine their formula rather than try and reinvent the frickin' wheel. Would Starfield be better if its story was as good as New Vegas? Yeah, sure, but the story is the least important part of a video game as far as I'm concerned. I just don't care. People seem to have an issue with Starfield's combat, but I don't get that either. RPG shooters tend to be really bad, like awful. And as far as RPG shooters go, Starfield is probably the best in the genre, with only Cyberpunk coming close and Cyberpunk shooting is also very bad. Its progression and crafting is extremely deep and well-designed. It has a ludicrous amount of side quests, with a ton of them being really great and all of them being at least worthwhile. The random encounters were varied and fun. The game looks great. It ran very well on my PC, even though it doesn't have DLSS, which is annoying. It has four full companion questlines. The shipbuilding and ship progression is excellent. The planetary exploration is fun. The location design is excellent. Starfield is exactly what I would have expected. It is Skyrim in space. BGS games are what they are, man. It's been 20 years. I don't know what you're expecting. They're designed to appeal to a huge swath of people, not like just hardcore gamers. They've always been wide rather than deep. They have something for everyone, rather than a focus on one thing. I played Starfield for like 80-something hours, and I never got bored. BGS games are amazing because they deliver a consistent level of quality across dozens of hours and have a ton of systems so that you can always do something else when you get tired of what you're doing now. All of those ridiculous stories about Starfield's player count dropping, like, yeah, it's a single player game. How much has Spider-Man 2's player count dropped? What's the player count in Alan Wake 2 right now? A mind-boggling thing to write a story about. Starfield isn't a live service game, thank God. Remember back in the day when you bought a game and then you played that game and you liked it and then you stopped playing that game because you were done and then you bought another game? That was pretty cool. Listen, I wish BGS would hire different writers. I wish the factions were more fleshed out and the story was more serious, but I'm then wishing for something that Bethesda is not and has never been, so why would I wish for that? And most importantly, again, I just can't give that many shits about the story and games. If a game has a great story but terrible gameplay, that is a terrible game. If it has great gameplay and a terrible story, that is a great game. Starfield has a below average story and well above average gameplay and it is the 12th best game of 2023. 11. The Resident Evil 4 Remake I loved Resident Evil Village. I think it was a total return to form for the series and a significant improvement in every single way from RE7. But having played the three RE remakes now, I can't help but think that Capcom should simply start making new games in the third person perspective again. RE2 Remake was amazingly good. The RE3 Remake felt a bit short but was still just great. The RE4 Remake is basically a perfect survival horror action game. Yes, it's a remake but it's such a huge overhaul of the actual mechanics of the original that it feels like a different game while still staying true to the roots. It's also significantly expanded with levels getting larger, denser, and more intricately designed. The combat in the third person remakes just feels better than the combat in RE7 in Village. And that's probably down to how damn hard it is to make a great FPS game. I also think it's because the third person perspective somehow feels less clunky. RE4 Remake is so great it's hard to argue that the games shouldn't just go back to being third person survival horror games. After finishing it, All I Wanted was a new title in the same style. One of the most influential games of all time polished to a blinding sheen and hitting every single design goal in the genre. A masterpiece in survival horror. 10. The Dead Space Remake Dead Space was originally pitched as System Shock 3. EA said no apparently because they were licensing issues and this ended up being a good thing. Dead Space was an early pre-production as a very slow paced tank control survival horror game. Then the developers played the newly released Resident Evil 4 and realized they needed to fundamentally change everything about the design. Dead Space the original holds up amazingly well even today but the remake is a direct answer to people like me who argued that graphics don't really matter. The remake shows that actually, yeah, they really do matter an awful lot. The original Dead Space is one of my very favorite games of all time and is up there with Doom Eternal, Sekiro, New Vegas and the first Mass Effect game. So it says something that I will never play the original Dead Space ever again. There is simply no compelling argument to ever do so. The remake fundamentally improves the game in every single way. The graphical improvements are so titanic that it goes back in time and retroactively ruins the original. The progression system takes the vast improvements that were made in Dead Space 2, adds a bunch of new things and perfectly balances the entire thing in a way that makes the original games simply inferior. Level design and exploration are massively improved by expanding most levels, fixing space walking, massively fixing the turret section, improving most of the boss fights, expanding and massively improving the storytelling in every way aside from the voice acting for two characters. Nicole is improved from a lifeless MacGuffin into a real and compelling character that makes Isaac a far more believable protagonist and adding Gunner Wright's voice to the game is just a massive positive. If this was the first time I'd ever played this game or it was a brand new game, I don't see any way it wouldn't be game of the year, but I do think we need to keep remakes below totally original games. Still, as far as pure enjoyment, Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space might be the two games I enjoyed most this year. The Dead Space remake is so good that motives should be completely turned into the Dead Space studio. They should have dropped their next game and immediately started on a remake of Dead Space 2 and then made a new Dead Space 3 basically from scratch. Amazing job motive did here. Just fantastic. 9. Armored Core 6 This won't take long. Armored Core 6 is an amazing game that takes the Armored Core formula and adds enough of the from soft dressing so it feels like a mix of old AC games and a Soulsborne game. It's basically perfect at doing what it wants to do. Its progression is a perfect mech game progression. Boss fights are great aside from a couple of needlessly frustrating ones that felt over tuned and movement is slick and fast. The only reason it's this low is that I don't really love mech games. In fact, I think I've only finished like two or three of them over the years. I'm also not a huge fan of the way Armored Core games are structured. A lot of the game is in menus and missions are on very small self-contained maps so that you're basically dropped into an arena to figure it out. It's very good. It's very enjoyable. So good in fact that it's this high up. But the core design of the game is something I like more than love. It's a testament to from soft that they can make me enjoy a mech game even though level design is one of my favorite things about games. And Armored Core 6 does not have very many interesting levels. Still, a fantastic game that's this low only because of my personal taste and not because of any objective flaws with the title. If you didn't buy it because you're like me and you don't really like these arena based mech games I highly recommend you get it. It's hard enough to be frustrating in a few fights, three in particular but that's a core feature and not a bug. The whole idea is like using mech building as a puzzle solving mechanic. Check it out. You won't be disappointed. 8. Blood West I waited to make this list until Avatar came out because I had a feeling that that was going to be really good. It turns out it is terrible and don't let anyone tell you different. I love massive entertainment. I really like the Division and I think the Division 2 is a fantastic game even if I didn't play it for a long time as a live service game. But Avatar is beautiful looking trash. It looks amazing and picking vegetables is actually like the best part of the game for some reason but everything else is terrible. Don't believe these strangely good reviews. It's boring as hell. I actually think I might do like a 7 minute video about it because these reviews really annoy me. I gotta point out just how terrible it is pretty much in every way. Anyway, while I was playing Avatar and getting increasingly annoyed and how boring it was my friend Larry asked if I'd played Blood West yet. Now somehow I had missed this game in early access and never even heard of it which means Steam failed because I like retro shooters and stealth games so this thing is like right at my alley. Blood West is one of the very best games of the year man. Now very early, very early it frustrated me because it is extremely punishing. The game is serious about stealth. Later in the game you kinda can play this as an actual shooter if you want but you die insanely fast and one mistake in stealth can quickly spiral to your death. And by quickly I mean like everything's fine you miss a headshot from stealth and 8 seconds later you are dead having an increasing debuff curse and wasted the ammo that you shot. But once you commit to the game's rules it is pretty much a perfect game. Blood West is semi open world broken into three separate maps. The majority of the game is sneaking headshotting from stealth and looting. It has an entire progression system of perks and unique weapons to find as well as artifacts with powerful effects. The game lets you craft varied builds for anything from melee to bows to buffalo guns. Enemy variety is excellent and the maps, atmosphere, and sound design are all just absolutely top notch especially from a studio with like three people. Here's the other reason I brought up Avatar before. That game repeatedly admonishes you for not using stealth. But nothing in Avatar is actually designed around stealth. Stealth games need to be incredibly careful with enemy and encounter design. Every enemy needs to be designed and placed just so. Controls need to be just so. Your arsenal needs to be just so. It's what makes a game like Dishonored a masterpiece. Every encounter feels like it was meticulously fine tuned to be tense. Blood West just nails this. Its enemy placement and encounter design is perfect, literally perfect. It's difficult enough that you have to be careful. It's difficult enough that you get nervous when lining up a headshot because missing means wasting potions or outright death. But eventually, you learn enemies and their weaknesses and you become an assassin. It is a master class in stealth design where Avatar is a $300 million amateur job. Blood West is one of the best indie games I've played in years and years. It is a 10-10. Only held down this low on the list because everything above is like a huge AAA game that's also insanely good. Number 7 Baldur's Gate 3 Put your pitchforks down, man. Baldur's Gate 3 is a towering achievement of game design. Its quest and story elements are probably the best that's ever been. I think it's fair to say that the dialogue and story here is better than any other RPG I've ever played. World design is really great and enemy variety is incredible. Progression is really satisfied because you're not buried in good loot. Finding powerful items is rare, which makes exploration feel very good. The game is another one that achieves almost exactly what was attempted. So, why only 7th? Well, first of all, the game is really long, so, so, so long. Too long in my opinion. Secondly, while the story and dialogue stuff is amazing, again, I just don't give a shit about stories and games. It's nice to have, way less important than everything else. I don't like to watch 100-hour movies. The story games I've actually loved have all been tight, short things. Tacoma, Oxenfree, Edith Finch, Firewatch, Stanley Parable. All of those focus on story and they are short and concise. There can be such a thing as too much story. Then there's the fact that while I think Baldur's Gate 3 will combat very well, I simply prefer action games to strategy games. This is personal taste. I am quite positive that there's many people out there, maybe a few of you who will watch this video, that prefer strategy games to action games. But it ain't me, babe. In the bigger fights, you have to wait forever for the enemy to finish its move. It's so annoying, it blows my mind that there isn't a button to skip their move, or at least speed it up three times. Sometimes the enemy just stands there for five seconds like it's trying to decide what to do. When you have fights with literally 15 enemies, it starts to feel like the AI is playing more often than you are. It just makes a lot of the fights from mid-game onward extreme slogs. So much so, about halfway through Act 2 I turned the game down to easy because the idea of dying and having to replay 24 minute fights was horrific. Finally, the game is extremely, and I mean extremely bad at tutorializing. I have never played Dungeons & Dragons, man. I played the original Baldur's Gate games, but very little mechanically is similar. Now, eventually everything does work out, and if you Google around a bit and check out Reddit threads, you'll find all sorts of helpful quality of life shit that the game never tells you. Things like spell slots and sorcery points are very badly explained. The game's progression, rules, and combat is extremely deep, which is good, but it's also very badly explained, which is bad. And the story and world is stunning, but the pace of combat, the strategy rather than real-time systems, having to rest and long rest often, all of this really slows this thing down. And the sheer amount of story means you're talking an awful lot. I get that resting is a thing in Dungeons & Dragons, but surely the game would be better if there had been a different solution that didn't require fast traveling twice. I'm sounding very negative, which isn't actually how I feel about the game. This is one of the best RPGs ever made, but if you like action games and you're not a fan of hours and hours of cutscenes, the game is great in spite of its combat and cutscenes, not because of them. Amazing game, 7th best of the year, but you know what, man? Like, why does my lizard guy walk so fucking slow? I mean, he is so slow. Come on now. 6. Lies of P I'm sure lots of you have this higher on your list, but I had some serious issues with Lies of P in that I think the game was too punishing in many ways, and the progression withheld crucial mechanics and locks them behind a skill tree. Mechanics like the ability to get up after being knocked down? Why would that possibly be on the skill tree to unlock, or like, rolling, being useful in a Souls game, which is very weird. Lies of P is a game that is amazing the majority of time, but every few hours it drops an absurd difficulty spike on you. Like, nearly all of the elite enemies are just a slog. And literally every single boss, but one, has literally every single attack insanely delayed. That's true of almost every enemy. Did you think Elden Ring has too many delayed attacks? If you said yes, then understand, and I'm not joking here, easily 97% of all enemy attacks in Lies of P have long, awkward delays. I hate this. I just hate it. I don't understand why the new way to make games difficult is to make the player count in their head to time parries. If this is the new normal, that's going to be a problem for me. Now, with that out of the way, in every moment the game isn't using delayed attacks against you, Lies of P is awesome. It's level design is simple and extremely linear, but it's serviceable. And there are two or three levels that have the winding shortcuts that we all like so much. There's a very good amount of progression and loot to find. There's a cool weapon crafting system, the animations, movements, enemy and boss design and graphics and sound are all triple A quality. In terms of studio, this is pretty amazing. If the game didn't insist on every single enemy and every single boss delaying every single attack, so you have to memorize which enemy wants to count to three Mississippi and which wants you to count to 2.5 Mississippi, this would probably be even higher. But because it has those issues, it is behind games like Five, Lords of the Fallen. Yes, I enjoyed Lords of the Fallen in Baldur's Gate 3. Because I like souls like action games better than tactical turn based story RPGs. You might think differently, you probably do. This is a list about what I enjoyed most and not what game is objectively good or objectively bad. I enjoyed Lords of the Fallen more. Also, it's like one quarter is long and has no cutscenes. I also seem to be one of the only people on earth who thinks Lords of the Fallen is a significantly better game than Lies of P. Lords of the Fallen got mixed reviews for many people and I do not understand this, like at all. This year with the strange hatred for Starfield, which is exactly what anyone should have thought it would be, how did you think Starfield would be anything other than exactly what it is and the odd reaction to Lords of the Fallen really has me now not trusting reviews at all. Every review on YouTube seems like it's more concerned with validating the opinions of others rather than giving it on its impression of the game. Either way, the reason I like Lords of the Fallen better than Lies of P is that the level design is orders of magnitude better. Lords of the Fallen's levels are winding and complex. They constantly loop back on themselves in interesting ways and it makes exploration a core part of the game where in Lies of P that's basically non-existent. You move through levels in Lies of P. You explore areas in Lords of the Fallen. And outside of combat, level exploration is the most important factor for me and his souls like. It's why FromSoft's games are the best. It's why I think the Surge games are two of the greatest games in the genre and it's why Woe Long is in the Honorable Mention section instead of up here. When you take that perfect level design a fully interconnected world and then add in the Umbral Lamp which fundamentally changes the levels and adds constant tension with ratcheting difficulty and never-ending mob spawns. You have perhaps the best level design ever in this genre and that includes FromSoft. It is that good. The Umbral Lamp is pure brilliance. Lords of the Fallen has great progression system, excellent loot, really excellent enemy design and fantastic encounter design. Not one boss has delayed attacks and almost no enemies have them either. There was a bunch of complaints that the game spams you with enemies. This is massively overblown first of all but yes there are a bunch of ambushes and spam in the game but listen man if you want these games to remain challenging there's only a few ways to do it. You can have every enemy be like Guitar Hero where you have to count in your head and wait for him to swing or you can carefully craft encounters that push you to the limit with movement and positioning. Lords of the Fallen chooses the latter and it's a better game in my opinion as a result. This is close to a perfect souls like as far as I'm concerned and it's the most Dark Souls one in style since the Surge one. A huge winding complex interconnected world with difficulty coming not from delayed attacks but from difficult encounter design. Boss difficulty is spot on with a third of bosses being killed in the first try another third requiring like three attempts and the last third requiring three to five attempts. There is no boss that will require you to fight at fifteen times until you've memorized every delayed attack. If that's your thing you probably like Liza P better and again this is taste but that's not my thing. Lords of the Fallen is one of the best games in recent memory for me. I love it. I played it three times before I put it down and I deeply hope there's DLC and then a sequel. What a huge success. Number four Jedi Survivor Jedi Survivor had serious and real issues with performance on PC at launch. I have a decent but not amazing PC 4070 with an i7 13700K and the game still had massive stutters consistent frame drops and hilariously if you used raytrace global illumination on the second planet it breaks the game. It would crash every single time I left the hub world and the game does not save very often. It doesn't save every time you sit down at a checkpoint I don't know why but it doesn't. In fact I was infuriated at this and stopped playing until I happened upon a reddit thread explaining that turning off raytracing on the second planet fixes the crashes. So that's not great. Games shouldn't launch in a state like that. Still I pushed through all of those stutters and FPS that would go from 90 to 55 every few minutes for seemingly no reason to finish the game. Because it's a very good game and I don't even really give a shit about Star Wars I'm like old enough to have seen Empire Strikes Back in the theaters and I still don't really care about Star Wars so it has nothing to do with that. Most of the complaints that Respawn got about the first title were simply fixed this time. Progression was massively improved there's a degree of build variety that the first game completely lacked and there's enough progression items to find that aren't ponchos so that exploration is meaningful and fun. Enemy variety vastly improved and level design is like top notch that's one of the best things about this game it's extremely impressive the Metroidvania elements of the first game are hugely expanded as each area is full of places you can't access until later and the game has quite a lot of actual skill based platforming and quite a bit less uncharted climbing so that is also a huge huge improvement. Combat and movement is still a bit clunky for souls like because the game is realistic animations but it's really good for like a Metroidvania action game. The story is really excellent for an action game I know I said I don't care about it if it's in there that's nice. Level design, progression world design, combat there's just a ton of shit here one of those games like Starfield that does nothing amazingly well but does a huge massive ton of stuff pretty darn well. Well enough to be one of the better games of the year aside from performance at launch it is a huge improvement in every single way over the first game. By now I assume the performance is fixed so if you didn't play it at launch I highly recommend checking out if you are a fan of action adventure games. Number three, Remnant 2 Remnant 1 was a great game Remnant 2 is basically Remnant 1 but bigger, better and prettier. This will be a pretty short one here because it's really just Remnant 1 but with more stuff more levels larger levels, more bosses way more secrets to find better exploration, better boss fights way way way better progression aside from the totally pointless and idiotic decision to have a perk point cap which they walked way back in the DLC by the way proving that they were wrong and the literally 95% of players who said this is asinine you're wrong please fix it were correct. I can't say enough good things about this game it's one of my favorite games ever a totally innovative shooter souls like and it has a ton of polish for like a double A studio weapons, progression, level design puzzles, secrets, replayability an entirely new class system with skills and perks that are impactful without being overpowered and then like halfway through the game you discover that it actually has a tiny Tina style dual class system hidden away for you to discover or I guess find on reddit if you're unlucky. I'm happy to say that I stumbled on this myself and was blown away at how cool that was. Remnant 2 was a masterpiece a game I'll be playing for years now just like I did the first one but we need the rogue light survival mode back please it is a must. This shit is on game pass now so if for some reason you haven't played it and you like challenging games with four different difficulty tiers to climb and procedural campaigns that means you will not see everything from multiple playthroughs. Download it now a masterpiece I absolutely loved it. The third best game of the year and one of the best years ever for gaming. Number two tiers of the kingdom I do not love breath of the wild it took me seriously like five different starts to finally push through the massively boring first 10 hours of that game to see why people loved it so much. Now I don't agree with those people I think it is not even close to being one of the best Zelda games. In fact it's kind of a boring and repetitive open world game in most ways but eventually I did discover all the little interactions that the game has. Combat is very bad and healing by opening the menu is just so tedious but yes I finally discovered that breath of the wild is a very good game. When I gave it one last chance about three months before the sequel. Tears of the Kingdom has many of the same issues as the first game. It is absurdly annoyingly huge you spend literally hours fucking walking around doing nothing combat is below average the game is obsessed with wasting your time and NPCs talk so stupidly slow that you have to constantly mash A to get their terrible kindergarten quality dialogue over with so you can go back to playing the game in meaningless, utterly pointless dialogue. It has all of that shit. Tears of the Kingdom revels in annoying you and wasting your time. But somehow in spite of hours of that shit that makes me want to throw my switch into a speeding semi truck it is also a masterpiece. It's so chock full of insane physics, weather status effects, enemy behaviors brilliant map design that it makes a mockery of other open world games like you'd think this level of physics and interactivity wasn't possible because it's so obviously awesome and yet there's so little of it in gaming there's like Hitman Arcane games BGS games to a lesser degree and then Tears of the Kingdom where you can take a stick and an enemy's skull and make a weapon or take like 50 logs and build a bridge somewhere you're not supposed to go or build Godzilla it's like Gary's mod or a weird PC sandbox physics game but married to a ridiculously huge AAA open world adventure game puzzles and Breath of the Wild were pointless and simple a massive waste of time I did them because I had to in order to make the game less toxic puzzles and Tears of the Kingdom are fantastic almost all allow free form solutions they're so good it constantly feels like you're breaking the game like you're given a collection of junk and the developer just crosses their arms and watches as you MacGyver a solution exploration is excellent because they're simply way more stuff to actually do in this game a ton of fun side quests and interesting places to find progression is fully based on exploration combat is still a major flaw of the game as it's simply not good enough but because the physics stuff is so goofy it's always entertaining and near the middle of the game once you've gotten a bunch of good stuff it becomes less tedious in fact the weapon durability system feels much better balanced this time because you can make the most powerful weapons out of the mangled corpses of your defeated foes so combat actually has a purpose this time in Breath of the Wild combat is literally a chore I ran past it whenever I could there's no XP and the combat is very very poor mechanically so there's like no reason to do it ever in fact every single time you fight in Breath of the Wild you are hurting yourself because you're wasting time and resources for no benefit and unlike Sekiro combat isn't good enough to be worth it just for the joy of it but combat in Tears of the Kingdom is encouraged because I want to make a club out of one monster's arm and a boss's molars that's what I call fun Tears of the Kingdom is so well designed it's number two on this list even though I want to murder every single NPC and I want to flay the stable master guy alive so it doesn't take four dialogue boxes at 45 seconds every fucking time I try to get my horse one of the greatest open world games ever made and again man a game that is a powerful challenge to every other open world action game with its interactivity play Tears of the Kingdom and then try to play AC Valhalla it's embarrassing and finally the highly subjective best game of 2023 according to my very peculiar in particular tastes and quirks is Alan Wake 2 Alan Wake 2 is a bog standard third-person survival horror game if you played the Resident Evil remake games you have played Alan Wake 2 mechanically luckily it just so happens to be a rock solid highly polished perfectly balanced ridiculously smooth as silk bog standard third-person survival horror game just on that nearly perfect implementation of third-person survival horror movement and combat Alan Wake 2 would be one of the best games of the last few years but there is so much more to it than that remember I said several times that story doesn't matter in a game if the gameplay is boring like Sekiro could have literally no story at all and it would be the best game ever made and Far Cry 6 could have an amazing story and it would still be a boring video game but when you combine a perfectly designed gameplay experience with one of the best designed video game narratives ever you get one of the best games ever made Alan Wake 2's dream-like narrative design alone is a massive achievement it manages to make a game about a thriller horror novel that feels like reading a thriller horror novel voice acting is universally fantastic dialogue writing is like best in all of video games good and the story itself is a work of art that operates on multiple levels it's a horror game about a supernatural power it's a powerful character piece about people and their inner demons it's a surprisingly compelling exploration of the nature of art itself and it's a story about the narcissism inherent in making art of any kind and it's also like a spooky tale about scary monsters it's all of those things and then it's also an extremely ambitious absurdist piece with a level that has you shooting monsters while a live action video from a rock opera about Alan Lake's life plays on huge screens all around you then there's the graphics and animation which are stunning there's the progression which is just perfect there's the non-littier nature of the story that tells two character's stories sequentially while still managing to remain totally clear and understandable it is full of deep lore and mysterious questions to unravel taking all of Remedy's games and weaving them into one extremely cool cinematic universe Alan Wake's level design is perfect survival horror level design winding and maze like with shortcuts and locked off areas there's a ton of progression items and resources to find so fully exploring each map is rewarding tense and fun the difficulty on normal is just right for a first playthrough never feeling like you have to repeat a ton of shit but always keeping going your toes it's almost perfectly balanced for the average player and there are difficulty levels for second playthroughs or people who want it harder or people who just want to get the vibe and narrative or people who want to get through the game really quick to get footage for their best games of 2023 video. Wake's levels are actually narrative puzzles where you shift levels around yourself to progress Alan Wake 2 is a very standard genre piece at its core it is a survival horror game it's the video game equivalent of the airport horror novels that Alan Wake writes in game but just like George R.R. Martin's fantasy novels are elevated beyond the genre by the sheer quality of the writing Alan Wake 2 is elevated beyond the survival horror game by the scope of its narrative ambition the flawlessness of every single gameplay design and the kind of writing that simply doesn't happen very often in games and in fact literally never happens in big triple A genre games it's like Edith Finch mixed with Resident Evil 4 one of the greatest games ever made and very very easily the best game of 2023 okay I really am probably going to do that avatar video man I don't hate this game but I don't understand why a bunch of people are saying it's great I've seen a bunch of headlines like oh avatar is what Far Cry should be no it is not oh man alright thanks for coming see you next time bye