Games I Actually Liked in 2023

Jesus Fucking Christ, everything is on fire.

If there was a Game of the Year award for “Dodged Bullets,” it would probably go to me this year for the article ideas I left on the cutting room floor this year.

Even then, It’s a crowded field. I almost wrote an article comparing Elden Ring to Werner Herzog’s commentary on the drama of Wrestlemania where I claimed that Soulsbornes were the only true pro-wrestling games. Then, I started an essay exploring the impossibility of Embracer Group being able to continue their endless acquisition spree that was outdated the second I put pen to paper due to the reveal that, following an abortive attempt to secure Saudi funding, they were shutting ten studios and laying off most of their workforce. We were all spared an abortive attempt to recap a book by book history of the World of Darkness called ‘Lest A Corncob I become’ because I decided I would do literally anything other than read crusty-ass Old World of Darkness books for a year or two.

Those really don’t compare to the mercifully unfinished article where I attempted to praise the ‘2020s Immersive Sim Revival.’

Look, it’s not my fault, alright? Gloomwood had just released its first chapter in Early Access and was quite good! We all still had high hopes for the System Shock remake to punch above its weight and prove that there was a good game hiding underneath the cavalcade of bland trailers and that godawful demo. And sure, Redfall looked like a blunder from the start, but we trusted Arkane to at least salvage an awful idea into something interesting.

We didn’t know that sometimes things are exactly how they appear, that there was no silver lining, and the wave of post-Prey 2017 immersive sims has already receded with little to show for it but a few Kickstarters, disappointing Arkane games, and indie games that will never pick up the audience they deserve for the time and energy their creators have to invest in them to meet the high standards of mechanical and systemic interaction some nerds decided 20 years ago marked you worthy not of being a “cRPG played in the first-person” but a true “Immersive Sim.”

But it’s that kind of year, really.

I used to run the strawpoll voting for a semi-ironic anti-GOTY called the ‘Scumfuck of the Year Award’ which was awarded to the games developer who caused the biggest controversy in that calendar year.

I stopped running it, because collating every games industry controversy over a year is a largely soul-crushing endeavour, and also because they became so routine that it felt like I was becoming numb to the worst excesses of the industry.

The inaugural winner in either 2015 or 2016 was Street Fighter V adding invasive anti-cheat software to the game that was quickly patched out. Denuvo anti-cheat has become so common now as to be mundane, often destroying a game’s performance on PC for the weeks it takes to crack it, as have every other form of invasive anti-cheat that does little to stifle cheating in competitive scenes mostly propped up by sketchy supplements and ponzi schemes but everything to collect metrics data on the PCs of casual players. In 2019, the final year I ran the Scummy awards, the winner was Activision laying off 8% of its workforce.

This year, losing eight percent of your workforce was table stakes.

We all knew the rapid growth of the games industry during the zero-interest-rates days of the startup boom was unsustainable, and the Covid growth proved to be equally unsustainable. Games need to be products that make money again, not just content to drive up numbers on a loss-leading subscription program, and we’re seeing every major company lay off workers, close studios, and cancel projects in a desperate attempt to restore themselves to profitability.

It has, and will continue to, get increasingly worse until the bottom falls out and the games industry fully collapses in its present form.

I think it’s going to be a first-party console manufacturer exiting the hardware business that does it.

Nintendo stopped playing the console wars game a long time ago, settling into the comfortable role of marketing themselves as a toy brand along the lines of Mattel or Hasbro. Their business model allows them to adopt technology when it is cheap and easily accessible as there is no expectation for toys to incorporate the latest technology or the most bleeding edge innovations in graphics or computer processing. Toys just need to be fun.

They will, no matter what else happens to the industry, probably be fine.

The rest of the industry will not be. Microsoft and Sony are both admitting in court filings that the cost of keeping pace in a console war that only burns in the hearts of utterly delusional fanboys is destroying them. Bleeding edge hardware is becoming increasingly expensive for diminishing returns in an era where technical innovation has plateaued, and we are nearing a point in which console manufacturers will soon have to make very serious decisions about whether that value proposition is worthwhile.

Xbox, in particular, is ceding ground on hardware in every single territory but is presently content to be winning ‘the streaming battle,’ a war over environment-destroying server infrastructure in some of the most water-scarce regions of the planet presently contested between Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that will further make gaming a hobby a more niche and exclusive hobby of those who can afford high-speed internet infrastructure and unlimited data-caps, on top of the vastly more important ecological consequences.

Sony is still reliant on hardware. They’re the big fish in an increasingly drained pond, probably because Microsoft are the ones draining it to cool all their server farms. They’ll stick with gaming hardware and first-party development until the wheels fall off, if only because they have very little else in their tank in an era where video game film adaptations are becoming an increasingly sure-fire bet to make a few hundred million dollars at a time where Sony Pictures desperately needs to retain market-share as the Big Six studios becomes the Big Five studios and soon, if rumours of a Warner Bros. Discovery/Paramount merger are to be believed, will become the Big Four.

The VR Craze is dead and buried, and was always only ever going to attract a niche market of luxury consumers like every VR Craze before it. Mixed Reality was a non-starter. Unity and Epic Games have the knives out ready to carve off pieces of an industry becoming increasingly reliant on third-party engines to keep up with consumer expectations. PC gaming continues to be a barely disguised monopoly ruled over by Valve, as Epic’s aspirations of founding the True Steam Competitor (for real, this time) seem to be fading away as they sell off their recent acquisitions and start tightening the belt on Unreal licensing to studios in the film and animation industry.

Through all of it, developers and everyone else working within the games industry face increasing precarity and uncertainty.

Venerating basically anything that the burned out husk of a ‘AAA’ gaming industry did in 2023 feels like enabling its worst impulses; celebrating the machine that chews up even the developers who produce the few triumphant works of Actual Interesting Art the industry holds aloft every December to justify its continued exploitation of workers. Baldur’s Gate 3, in all its reprehensibly horny glory, became the consensus favourite for Game of the Year among all the major press outlets, only for its director Sven Vicke to state in his Twitter thread accepting the TGA’s GOTY 2023 award that the entire production team at Wizards of the Coast who had provided Larian Studios the total creative freedom to develop the game how they had wanted had all been laid off that same week.

So for 2023 I am going to tell the commercial games industry to go fuck itself and focus on the games from independent creators that rekindled my love of the art-form:

MYHOUSE.WAD

How far does a good mystery take you?

myhouse.wad was the biggest mystery of the year, a game that appeared out of nowhere into the milieu of Doom modding forums and garnered immediate and fervent interest due to its mysterious blend of obtuse level design tropes, modern analogue horror and internet culture, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

It was the talk of the internet for weeks, as more and more of its layers were peeled away like a Peter Molyneux cube and the themes and imagery scraped for deeper analysis. It’s a story of childhood nostalgia revisited through an adult lens, love and loss, coping with unimaginable tragedy, gender identity, mental health and family trauma. Above all else it was the work of an impossibly talented designer with a keen eye for the visual and mechanical language of DOOM and how to extract the absolute best out of its toolset and the community-driven tools that have kept the engine supportive and relevant over the past thirty years.

I played it around launch, interpreted the story-- with all its haunting liminal spaces, hospital visits, dwindling prescriptions, and hostile bathrooms-- as a narrative of childhood dysphoria giving way to ultimate happiness. I came away from MyHouse feeling that it was a coming-out narrative of learning to accept yourself and keep a romantic relationship together through your or your partner’s transition when it seems like the whole world might be against you, and left content after finding the ‘S+A’ love heart considered to be the ‘true’ ending that it would probably be my favourite game of the year.

Was it the designer’s intended explanation? I had no way of knowing, and I didn’t really care. Art is as much in the hands of the beholder as the beheld, and when the artist is hidden or obscured to us, it gives us a chance to really digest the work on its own terms.

I found, after watching the dozens of video essays and playthroughs surrounding the game out of a sense of curiosity as to what other people took away from the experience, that people had drawn similar conclusions and vastly different conclusions and that all of them seemed equally valid in a game that leans heavily on mood and tone and deliberate obfuscation of the creator’s identity in order to support the fiction of the game.

People dug deeper, as people on the internet tend to do whenever something is a mystery. The rest of the layers began to be unpeeled. A series of now-deleted tiktoks by the designer’s ex-wife, the ‘A’ in the S+A, revealed in the initial buzz around the game’s release that The House was a real house, the designer a real and very much alive person, and the game a personal project made to cope with tragedy during a difficult period of their now ended marriage.

She recently (as of writing, in December 2023) posted another Tiktok video asking fans of the game to stop asking her about The House or her former marriage. She just wants to move on.

The MyHouse speculation took on a voyeuristic quality, the game the quality of equally oversharing stories of masculine vulnerability like Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear and Jay Z’s 4:44, and as with all art about men expressing vulnerability there is now an awkward pall over the game. It went from the talk of the internet to another forgotten mystery ‘solved’ by internet sleuths, with no regard for the intentions of the designers or the comfort and safety of any of the very real people involved.

Do I view the game differently, after all of this? Yes, absolutely. I have always struggled with separating the art from the artist, so having some semblance of the ‘true explanation’ being pried unwillingly out of the hands of the designer definitely colours the game. I focus on different aspects now, view parts of the game in a much different light, and cringe at moments I used to think were very heart-warming.

Do I still recommend myhouse.wad? Absolutely. There’s so much to love there even without the mystery surrounding the game. It’s a deeply tragic and at times darkly funny game about loving and losing, told through the medium the creator loves, and left on the internet for an audience that’s as passionate about that medium as they are to explore.

Thief: The Black Parade

It's honestly really funny that I wrote the bulk of this article before the Thief anniversary, so I haven't dug into The Black Parade as much as I would want to as a self-respecting fan of the immersive sim genre. What I can say is this: Thief finally has its Knife of Dunwall. Go play it. Immediately. It's free! Every game on this list is free!

TRAUMAKT~4.SEXE

This one was just mean, as a trans femme who was still ostensibly going by Zoë in 2023. Always count on DOMINO CLUB to provide games that trigger highly-specialised psychic damage you didn't even know you had.

corru.observer

For the last few weeks, I have been relentless in recommending corru.observer to people.

It’s an uphill battle, for two reasons. Firstly, because everyone is busy with things like ‘the holiday season’ and ‘spending time with their loved ones’ and ‘working long hours in their jobs.’ Secondly, because so much of the experience of corru.observer is interesting in that very specific and frustrating way that’s very difficult to explain without spoiling a lot of the very fun early game reveals.

I will say this: it is a browser-based adventure game made by an extremely talented web developer, and that you should experience its absolutely unique and beautiful take on the ramifications of first contact with intelligent alien lifeforms for yourself. Remember to ask Moth for advice if you get stuck.

It’s also quickly becoming a hub for community creativity through mods like ziyamod made by fans and collaborators who want to explore the setting from different perspectives, which is something that has me very excited for c.ob going into 2024.

It’s a short offering to the great demon Yhabalchodath this year, but I think our blessed mother of the infinite maws will be sated for another twelve months. Game of the Year 2023 is Metroid Prime Remastered.

Merry Christmas, and thank you all for your support over the first full year of the site! It’s been more successful than I could’ve possibly imagined, and I’m so grateful for everyone who shows up and reads my weird little blogs about industry news and weird dives into the media I love. 2024 can and will be better year for games as an interactive artform if we fight for it. Play weird games. Play free games. Support independent artists. Go looking for the art you want to see in the world and never fucking let it go when you find it. See you next year.