After the turbulence of the last few years, 2023 felt like something of a return to form.
My partner and I bought an apartment together. She took her first steps into the world of game dev and showed off her first demo at PAX Australia. I made it to Blizzcon, nabbed a highly commended nod at the Lizzies and managed to publish some of the more ambitious long-read feature articles that I’ve had sitting in drafts for far too long.
What a year. Anyway, here are the best games I played during it.
Honourable mentions: Brass Birmingham, Gotham Knights, Ozymandias, WoW: Dragonflight, Warcraft Rumble
10. Trepang2
Before we get stuck into it, I need you all to know how agonisingly close Gotham Knights was to stealing the number ten spot on this year’s list. WB Games Montreal’s evolution of the Arkham formula is messy and flawed, but I could not put it down until I had wrung every ounce of open-world action out of it. It wouldn’t be out of line to call it the Assassin’s Creed: Unity of Batman games but I say that as someone who likes Unity more than most other Assassins’ Creed games.
Unfortunately for the Bat Family, Trepang2 rules. Developed by Trepang Studios, it’s a throwback that takes everything I love about the F.E.A.R. games and strips out most of the plodding and problematic supernatural nonsense. It’s a fast-paced tactical shooter that gives you a bucketful of fun abilities to use and guns to blast away enemies with and then throws you into situations where you have to use every tool in the box to scrape through.
Trepang2 tapped into my fondness for a simpler era of scrappy shooters that sits between the boomer shooters of yesteryear and today’s battle royales and extraction shooters and delivered in spades.
9. Immortals of Aveum
As soon as I heard the words “Wizard Call of Duty” I knew that Immortals of Aveum was something I’d have to track down at some point out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. More than just novelty though, there’s something refreshing and endearing to me about a single-player first-person shooter experience like the one offered here. Much like Trepang (and unlike most AAA FPS games nowadays), Ascendent Studios’ debut title isn’t attached to any sort of live service or online multiplayer offering.
The writing in Immortals can be hit and miss, but the lore and cast involved feel right out of a Brandon Sanderson fantasy story in a way that can’t help but grow on you over time. These trapping also make for a perfect match to the sprawling Metroidvania-like levels that you’re left to traverse and the arsenal of arcane weapons that the game puts in your hands.
I have played significantly worse games with much better reputations than the one attached to Immortals of Aveum and while it seems like a sequel is a bit of a long shot right now, I can’t help but hope that Ascendant Studios gets a second stab at the concepts it’s playing with here.
8. Diablo 4
For all my many criticisms of the game (and especially the lukewarm state of it at launch), Diablo 4 is still a new Diablo game. Even if it doesn’t leave me quite as satisfied as its predecessors, Blizzard’s bloody hack, slash and loot-em-up has never played so well nor has the grim setting of Sanctuary been so well-rendered. I keep returning for more, and every time I do Diablo 4 gets closer to being the game I wish it were.
7. Meet Your Maker
When I was younger, user-generated content was a buzzword in the prime of its life. It’s since lost its lustre, but Meet Your Maker is a powerful reminder of just how much a good creative toolset and effective incentives can add to the shelf life of a given title.
As I said in my review of the game, “Meet Your Maker might be a game where you find your own fun, but it’s been masterfully tuned to make that process as frictionless as possible.”
6. Diablo: Hellfire / DevilutionX
The first Diablo is a game that’s been lodged in my head like a haunted soulstone since I played it as a teen. Having recently read David Craddock’s Stay A While And Listen books, I felt inspired to revisit it. To my delight, I found new joy in an old game that I’d beaten before by jumping into the Hellfire version of the game available on Good Old Games.
The first Diablo doesn’t just hold up. It remains exceptional and undiminished despite the many years that have passed. Then, I went even deeper down the rabbit hole and installed DevilutionX, a modern open-source port of Diablo. This unholy and unofficial remastering of one of the best games of all time makes it run so well on modern hardware that it’s genuinely scary. Zooming out and seeing almost the entirety of Tristram rendered on a single screen feels as forbidden as it is freeing.
5. Phantom Liberty
Despite the technical mess it was at launch, I still held out some hope for CD Projekt Red’s foray into the far future. It took the studio a few cracks to properly strike gold with The Witcher. The idea that it might take a few tries to do the same with Night City never felt too out of pocket.
The arrival of this year’s 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty answered that optimism, overhauling so much of what didn’t work about the base game while adding what is probably the single best questline in the entire game. As per my review, “It took a little longer than expected, but CD Projekt Red finally learned to make a good version of Cyberpunk 2077. Now, it feels like it’s only a matter of time until it can put together a great one.”
4. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
Armored Core is one of those classic mech action series’ I’d always admired from afar but never quite managed to get into. However, as someone who got fully FromSoft-pilled ahead of last year’s Elden Ring, I was primed to do just that with the sixth instalment in the franchise dropped back in August. The iron-clad arsenal here is as gorgeous to behold as it is to use and the writing is deliciously drenched in the nihilism that only the life of a mercenary can provide.
More than anything else though, it’s the straightforwardness of Fires of Rubicon that makes it stand out like a sore thumb nowadays. There’s not a drop of live service gaming here, nor is there any fat on the critical path. It’s incredibly difficult to hit that sweet spot where you manage to feel powerful while also pressured to use all the tools at your disposal but, fortunately, it turns out From Software are pros at this.
3. System Shock Remake
As someone who grew up reading PC Powerplay, the second System Shock will forever loom large in my memory and my mind. Despite that, I’ve never played the game that came before it. Still, I always wanted to and Nightdive’s ambitious reimagining provided the perfect avenue.
This space station isolation thriller is gorgeous in motion but doesn’t deviate too far from what makes Looking Glass’ immersive sim tick. Psychonauts 2 aside, I can’t think of any other case where I’ve backed a game via crowdfunding and come away quite so thrilled with the final results.
2. Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3 was always going to be a big deal to the crowd who already love CRPGs, but it feels like everyone underestimated just how big that audience is nowadays. Actual play projects like Critical Role, Worlds Beyond Number and Dimension 20 have taught an entire generation of tabletop gamers how to be fluent in the ruleset that powers Larian’s epic RPG.
That alone gives Baldur’s Gate 3 a pick-up and play quality that older CRPGs couldn’t quite manifest. Add to that the fact that EA has spent almost an entire decade failing to make another Dragon Age game and the stratospheric success of Baldur’s Gate 3 starts to make a bit more sense.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Larian’s sprawling RPG earns its spot alongside the classics of the genre with memorable characters, gorgeously rendered locations, thorny storylines and satisfying turn-based combat.
1. Alan Wake 2
Given how much I enjoyed Control and how fond I am of the first Alan Wake, I very much expected that Alan Wake 2 would be my kind of game.
Remedy’s supernatural sequel takes everything the developer has learned over the last thirteen years and blends it into its most accomplished title yet. Remedy’s ambitions for what it can do with the medium of video games have always pushed the boundaries, which goes further than ever before here. Better still, it doesn’t lose track of the game part along the way.
Alan Wake 2 takes the survival horror formula laid out by the likes of Resident Evil and makes smart tweaks that tag in the fundamentals laid out by the first game while winding you into a tension that’s easy to grapple with but hard to ever fully escape from.
As I said in my review, Alan Wake 2 is a medium-melding masterclass worth the wait.
Fergus Halliday is an editor at Reviews.org Australia and a regular host on the We Review Stuff podcast. You can follow his work on Threads, or take a trip back in time to see his work as the former editor of PC World Australia.
Image: Image: EA, CD Projekt Red, Night Dive, Kotaku Australia
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