I played a lot more new games this year than I have in quite a while, and for me it was a good one, well above average quality and across a wider range of genres than usually grab my interest. It also didn’t have one stand-out, must-be-#1, which to be honest I am pretty fine with, I’ll take just loads of really good games all day long.
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Spellforce: Conquest of Eo - what do I even say about this? It’s designed for me much more specifically than most games; not just for me, obviously, judging by both the reception generally and our thread here, but the mechanics and design choices hit all sorts of things that I like about strategy gaming. Specific appeal rather than broad appeal tends to lead to the games that really stick with someone, though, and that’s what happened here. The thoughtfulness of the asymmetric design, just enough variety between the classes and schools of magic to make it quite replayable despite the static map, and the attention to making every layer of the game work well all combine to a game I’m still thinking about most of a year later. The UI is also really good given how much is going on at all times. When the only opponents are the AI, there’s a lot more design space to let the player do cool stuff. Obviously we need some multiplayer games, but more good strategy games with a point of view that don’t have to be balanced for multiplayer, please!
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Brotato - this is the game that I played the most this year, and by a kind of wild amount given how much of a time sink some of the other releases are. (Not to mention another 50-100 or more hours on Old World, the newest Battletech mod updates, and the FF4 randomizer.) But it’s literally the perfect game for the Steam Deck, and the best choice I’ve seen in a while for “end of the day, I’m stressed, I don’t have time or energy to get into something complex, what can I play to chill and relax before bed for a little while?” The accessibility shouldn’t minimize the quality of the design, either. I’ve got a hundred hours in this after finishing all of the achievements, and I’ll be coming randomly back to it until they come out with Brotato 2.
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Super Mario Wonder - the best 2D Mario game since… maybe Yoshi’s Island? This did a great job of dialing back the difficulty juuuust enough from NSMBU while also building in a bunch of mechanics that mostly worked. Some part of me wishes it was a little bit longer, had a couple of more worlds, a few more challenges, whatever they’re saving for the DLC, etc etc, but then again a part of the appeal of the great old 2D Mario games is that you can (re)play through them pretty quickly if you choose, and I suspect this will fit well into that model. The co-op mechanics were a definite step down from the previous game, for what it’s worth, and the badge stuff was somewhere between half and three-quarters baked. Not perfect by any means, but sticks with me more than any Mario game in quite a while.
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Slay the Princess - I don’t really play visual novels (though I suppose some might snarkily respond that I do play a lot of JRPGs). This took me, like, four hours, and I enjoyed the heck out of every minute. I wish I could give it a big full paragraph like these other games, but all I can really say is that the experience is worth the modest investment (in both time and price) for anyone who thinks they might like it even the tiniest bit.
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - I went back and forth on whether to go with Zelda or Against the Storm. I kept BotW out of my top 5 in frankly a less-deep year of releases, and while I get why people liked it, get a couple of drinks in me with the right crowd and I’ll happily take the “BotW is the most overrated game of the last decade” side of a debate. But TotK clicked with me in a way that Breath never did. I still don’t think it’s a perfect game: the combat is still not great, I’d still like more dungeons relative to the number of shrines, the inventory management and cooking and so many of the other systems are still net negatives. All of the world/story stuff worked better for me, I liked the powers and the puzzles they led to more this time around, and the random things you bump into around Hyrule felt more meaningful. (Who are we kidding, this is entirely in honor of Addison and his devotion to keeping President Hudson upright.)
Against the Storm was the first out. Honkai: Star Rail would have made the list if it didn’t have all the gacha stuff, but I still didn’t mind having it on my phone. Fire Emblem Engage was fine, but my biggest disappointment of the year - there was a long way it could have gone down from Three Houses and still been in the top 5, but it couldn’t manage it. All of the JRPG remakes were nice, maybe in a weaker year, but not 2023. The most likely candidates for inclusion that I didn’t play were BG3 and Octopath II… I guess I didn’t play Diablo IV either, several past versions of me are very confused at why I have no interest in a new Diablo release, but it is what it is.