A Subjectively Objective Review of Video Games Released in 2023

by Jed Pressgrove

The Best Year in Gaming History or: Eating a Filet Mignon at McDonald’s

You might have read 2023 is one of the greatest years for video games or the best year of them all. You have maybe further noticed that the cited evidence for this claim involves a striking number of sequels* and remakes** — perhaps more sequels and remakes than you have ever seen acclaimed in a single year. Here’s an incomplete list of the sequels and remakes people often mention:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Resident Evil 4

Super Mario RPG Remake

Baldur’s Gate III

Metroid Prime Remastered

Dead Space

Spider-Man 2

Alan Wake II

Final Fantasy XVI

Amnesia: The Bunker

Diablo IV

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

God of War Ragnarok

Octopath Traveler II

Street Fighter 6

The Talos Principle 2

Pikmin 4

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Mortal Kombat 1

System Shock

One might get the excitable impression that the greatest game of this greatest of years should be something that can be considered a sequel AND a remake. The obvious stance follows: Resident Evil 4 is the 2023 Game of the Year. Besides its coveted status as a sequel and remake, this GOTY candidate is appropriate for two other reasons:

1. The original Resident Evil 4, released in 2005 on the Nintendo GameCube, was widely considered the 2005 GOTY. It’s also one of the most influential games of the 21st century (quick top 5: Resident Evil 4, Dark Souls, Minecraft, PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, and Grand Theft Auto III).

2. The remake doesn’t change “too much” about the original but tweaks things that some people complained about (e.g., Leon, the hero, can move as he aims his gun; he stood in place while aiming in the original).

UNFORTUNATELY, I cannot deem Resident Evil 4 the GOTY of 2023 because playing it is the equivalent of eating a filet mignon at McDonald’s.

Imagine the scene: You’ve been driving for hours. You’re desperately hungry, you need to piss soon, and your tank is past half empty, so you take the next exit with a gas station. You notice the station has a McDonald’s. “Gee,” you say to yourself, “it’s been a long time since I’ve eaten Micky D’s.” You go inside, expecting to order something lame but edible like a Double Stack or Chicken McNuggets. Instead, you’re shocked to find a new promotion: the Filet McNon for $8. You slap yourself in disbelief. You know it’s an absolutely awful fucking idea, but you can’t help it. You order the Filet McNon and specify medium rare. You get the steak in about seven minutes. It looks like a filet mignon, but it doesn’t smell or feel or taste like one (it’s certainly not medium rare). But because you were ravenous, you inhale the Filet McNon and tell other people, “It’s good for fast food.”

This story sums up what the gaming world has done: exalting a game that resembles Resident Evil 4 but has been divorced of its humor (the remake’s self-seriousness is embarrassing), its original thrills (the introductory village battle now seems stilted), its rough edges (how about that quick-time-event fight with Krauser?), its bells and whistles (The Mercenaries is the greatest extra mode of all time), and the personal auteurist stamp of director Shinji Mikami. The Resident Evil 4 remake is a counterfeit product that disposes of creative authorship and threatens to rewrite history with its perfunctory doppelgänger of a title. Developer Capcom stopped caring about making good games years ago; the company is on the lookout for the most convenient moneymakers, fruit that hangs just inches above ground. The familiar is considered fresh.

*It’s not unusual for a proclaimed greatest year of video games — or any normal year — to feature numerous sequels. Three popular years are 1998, 2004, and 2017, all of which had their fair share of sequels. For those curious, here is my personal top 10 for each of those years:

1998

1. Fallout 2
2. Starcraft
3. Final Fantasy Tactics
4. Radiant Silvergun
5. Metal Gear Solid
6. Resident Evil 2
7. Parasite Eve
8. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins
9. Metal Slug 2
10. Mario Party

2004

1. Metal Gear Solid III: Snake Eater
2. Cave Story
3. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
4. Ninja Gaiden
5. N
6. Katamari Damacy
7. Doom 3
8. X-Men Legends
9. Half-Life 2
10. Alien Hominid

2017

1. The Norwood Suite
2. Nier: Automata
3. Splasher
4. Pyre
5. West of Loathing
6. Golf Story
7. Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle
8. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
9. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
10. Steamworld Dig 2

**While remakes aren’t new in gaming, the demand for them has increased considerably in the last few years. People practically beg for game remakes on social media.

For the Love of Heaven, You’re Not SquareSoft

Playing Sea of Stars is like opening an ornate can of sardines — no beautiful packaging can elevate such a dull meal. The game’s presentation suggests Chrono Trigger on steroids. The graphics and sound effects are undeniably detailed, but all the audiovisual proficiency in the world means zilch when the vision amounts to easygoing nostalgia for the 1990s. This is no Iconoclasts, whose pixel art depicted the bizarre, provocative effects of supernatural creation. Sea of Stars is pretty in that predictable video-game-industry way: It wants you to cheer on the developers for their hard work behind the scenes.

At least Sea of Stars is visually competent. For all its pride about the 16-bit era, it forgets the adult melodrama in Final Fantasy IV and VI, the spirituality in Earthbound and Illusion of Gaia, and the constant plot twists of Chrono Trigger. The story in Sea of Stars has the dramatic intensity of a paddle-ball demonstration and the psychological insight of an episode of Barney & Friends. Any narrative that allows a character as foolish as Garl to flourish can’t be taken seriously.

The combat in Sea of Stars showcases the lowest form of inspiration. SNES RPGs introduced several notable tweaks to turn-based battles — ideas like Final Fantasy VI’s character-specific mechanics and Super Mario RPG’s timed button presses have profoundly impacted the genre. In recent history, Zeboyd Games and Terry Cavanagh have made turn-based fights more urgent and calculative with entries like Cosmic Star Heroine and Dicey Dungeons. Sabotage Studio, the team behind Sea of Stars, only musters an encyclopedic approach that echoes what has come before: combos, interruptions, and so on. The developer’s one noticeable wrinkle to tradition is a resource called Live Mana, which flies out of struck enemies and can be absorbed by your party members to boost their attacks — a reward system that attempts to conceal its mindlessness with flashiness. Even more disappointing is the paltry number of techniques for each character. No amount of daydreaming about the SNES days can rescue Sea of Stars from mediocrity.

The Gaming World’s Memory Continues to be That of a Hamster

Baldur’s Gate III has impressed me far more than Baldur’s Gate II, which has always been the blandest of revered RPGs. But the praise for it has been comical and ahistorical. Phrases like “unparalleled level of freedom” and “It’s everything you’ve ever loved about any roleplaying game, with +1 to all stats” imply nobody remembers the first two Fallout games, Planescape: Torment, or The Witcher II and III, not to mention classics like Earthbound and Chrono Cross. Back in 2019, many people acted like Disco Elysium was God’s long-delayed gift to RPG fans; four years later, Baldur’s Gate III seemingly erased Disco Elysium’s existence. Going by some reviews, one might think the game invented voice-acted dialogue during cutscenes!

A Zelda/Mario/Fire Emblem Realization

After subjecting myself to the clichés, contrived surprises, and clunky innovation of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Fire Emblem Engage, I think we need a superhero who kills off media franchises. Or maybe a demon who corrupts them with modernism. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Online Divorce Court. Super Mario Liposuction and Fitness Journey. Fire Emblem: Polyamorous Pickleball.

Where will these franchises go next? More importantly, why care? These games have lost their elegance and exhausted their potential. You can’t even compare them to corporate property as limited as James Bond. At least the eternal spy movie phenomenon reflects something about politics, sexuality, and culture. I encourage all souls to stop feeling obligated to pay allegiance to neverending sagas. The less time we dedicate to the old, the more chances we have to discover greatness.

My Unranked Top Games of 2023

Mr. Platformer

Starts as an ode to Pitfall. Ends as a troubling avant-garde revelation about the hollowness of completionism. Super Mario Bros. Wonder wishes it had as many compelling jumps. Terry Cavanagh is the best auteur in video games.

Boneraiser Minions

Another Vampire Survivors follower, only this time the imitator surpasses the popular landmark (and with no sleazy overlong allusions to casino games every time you open a damn treasure chest). Whereas Vampire Survivors featured a fairly predictable leveling system, Boneraiser Minions encourages mad-scientist ingenuity with its intimidating slew of crossbred demonic helpers, bizarre relics, and environmental traps and bonuses. This is what playing as the Necromancer in Diablo II should have been like. And yes, Boneraiser Minions has enough juvenile sex puns to make one wonder whether the developer is in junior high school.

Baldur’s Gate III

Baldur’s Gate III rejects its predecessor’s biggest weakness: those real-time skirmishes in which dull-looking avatars awkwardly swing their weapons at one another until someone perishes. The turn-based contests in Baldur’s Gate III marry the high-stakes drama of an XCOM firefight with the kookiness of an experimental puzzler. And while the writing can be quite goofy — I despise the Telltale-Games-esque messages about whether your party members approve of your decisions — the outlandish scenarios are charmingly depicted.

Gravity Circuit

Mega Man remade into a cathartic beat-em-up. The whole point is the style with which you pummel the nuts, bolts, and other components out of irritating robotic forces. The Capcom fanboys who complained about my damning Mega Man 11 review should expose themselves to the precarious levels and chained attacks of Gravity Circuit. The only thing that dampens the action is superfluous character dialogue.

Pseudoregalia

“Game feel” is one of those tortured gaming phrases that can haunt anyone who has a smidgen of dignity. Pseudoregalia nonetheless brought the term to mind because no 3D platformer has ever felt this precise and dynamic. I would rather play Pseudoregalia than any of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 games that inspired developer rittzler.

Void Stranger

A sense of ominous nihilism hangs over this enigma. Not since Solomon’s Key have single-screen quests aroused so much curiosity about secrets that may or may not exist. Once you become accustomed to the puzzles, you find a tree that offers the option of rest. Resting literally closes the game. When you return to Void Stranger (perhaps bringing the vestiges of your own dreams into the game world), you see visions of a time when the protagonist isn’t trapped in stacked basements. But the nightmare again surfaces and the puzzles shift and any confidence you may have had about grasping the meaning of it all vaporizes. A part of me doesn’t want to peel back the layers of Void Stranger. The mysteries are enough.

Pizza Tower

This is psychologically unstable art drenched in pop smarts. What if the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog was a sign of excruciating anxiety? What if the transformations of Super Mario Bros. were feverish and awkward instead of empowering? Pizza Tower exposes the feigned emotions of big-budget games as dog treats for stressed-out populations. It acknowledges the insanity of life and gaming. I get nervous looking at it.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder: Weirdness as Formula

by Jed Pressgrove

Since the release of Super Mario Bros. during the 1980s, Mario games have moved away from hard-nosed platforming and aesthetics that elicit a mixture of emotions, morphing into a franchise that peddles a smarmy brand of joy. Super Mario Bros. Wonder doesn’t alter this business plan. It frequently reflects the series’ evolution toward back-patting game design.

The pandering in Super Mario Bros. Wonder is over the top, like a person who compliments you 30 times within minutes of meeting you. When you stomp an enemy, text like “Good” and “Great” explodes into existence near your mind-blowing (read: largely routine) actions. After entering a new world, you get a Wonder Seed — an item you collect to open up paths in the world map — handed to you. Some stages amount to excuses to give the player more Wonder Seeds, offering no resistance, no adversaries, no puzzles, no thinking. At no point did I lack lives, flower coins (used to purchase badges, extra lives, etc.), or Wonder Seeds. There’s an abundance of riches, a dearth of obstacles to progress, a feeling nothing can stop Mario. The tech industry might label this a streamlined, optimized user experience.

If you have difficulty, you can wear a badge for various advantages. One badge triggers an alarm when you’re near important items, another adds extra blocks throughout a stage to make platforming easier, and so on. Forgive yourself for assuming that some badge abilities, such as the parachute hat and grappling vine, might need to be strategically selected to complete mandatory segments of the game. The powers are optional and only necessary for the Badge Challenge levels, all of which pose little issue and allow the player to die without actually losing lives.

Nintendo plays it safe with the curveballs in Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Every main stage contains a Wonder Flower that, when touched, turns the game wacky for temporary thrills. Placing all Flower-induced quirks aside, Nintendo’s telegraphing of any incoming weirdness robs the proceedings of awe. One might even predict a twist based on a level’s enemies, structure, and title. Like Doom (2016) and its suspense-killing Gore Nests, Super Mario Bros. Wonder announces and warns us of its craziness. (Readers who complained about Wonder Flower twists being spoiled by reviewers fail to realize a lot of things, including the truth that Super Mario Bros. Wonder dampens its own potential irony, as well as minor facts of Western society life such as freedom of the press and the right to critically talk about specific parts of a game without including a warning for people who constantly bombard themselves with information, who never think that perhaps NOT CONSUMING any written or audiovisual material about Super Mario Bros. Wonder could result in a more surprising experience when they finally play the game.)

The Wonder Flower dynamic nods to the Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy level in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, the kookiest Mario title of them all. The distinction between touching Wonder Flowers and touching Fuzzies is illuminating. In Yoshi’s Island, the Fuzzies populate the environment as a menace. You avoid them and their disorienting consequences unless you want to be deviant. Unless you want to get messed up and stumble around. The Fuzzies are the most compelling drug in video game history (even Jet in Fallout 2 can’t compete), backed up by a wonky, mind-in-the-gutter aesthetic. Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy has reverse-psychology genius, a superego-versus-id truth.

The Wonder Flower has no psychological or philosophical whimsy to it. We are encouraged, instructed, even mandated to find the flowers, consume them, and have our high. Nintendo fulfills its promise of gameplay wrinkles to the consumer, stage by stage. The player, even the dunce in many instances, gathers the rewards (Wonder Seeds). The Wonder Flower, this engine of innovation, becomes part of a familiar cycle. I began taking for granted the short musical bridge initiated by the collection of the plant, that sonic reminder of one’s entry into wonderland. But in Yoshi’s Island, you’d have to be numb to listen to that demented horn sound upon colliding with a Fuzzy and not be struck, or tickled, by the absurdity.

The magical effects of Wonder Flowers vary. They transform enemies, platforms, Mario, and more. The game repeats some of these ideas to capitalize on untapped hijinks, only to the further detriment of surprise. In World 1, the Bulrush Coming Through level boasts a mostly innocuous stampede of bulls. This is followed later by the more challenging Bulrush Express, but the conceptual repetition prevents astonishment. Similarly, every battleship stage leans on the same predicament: Bowser targeting the player via a reticle. The significant delay on the villain’s explosive shots undercuts any sensation of danger. These episodes amount to dull bureaucratic formalities.

At their best, Wonder Flowers provide an abrupt break from the standard platforming (as when Mario is controlled from a topdown view) or provoke us to believe a particular type of Mario could punctuate an entire game. Wubba Mario, or Red Goo Mario as I like to say, epitomizes this latter possibility. Wubba Mario slides along walls and ceilings with marvelous, slimy tactility. This version of Mario is not merely fun to control. It’s placed in environments and situational drama that push us to immerse ourselves in a different style of play. Too many other times Mario’s transformations register as gimmicks as opposed to exciting fragments of a hallucination. Rolling around as a spiked ball is a hollow God Mode. Scooting about as a spongy platform in confined spaces leads to unimaginative solutions. Hiding behind trees as a Goomba is Metal Gear Solid for dummies.

The criticisms above may embolden the Nintendo fans — or, worse, those “it’s not made for you” people who would struggle to criticize a McDonald’s hamburger — with their digital water pistols. The aggressive accessibility and cheeriness of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, these ingenious folks would argue, is there for the kids, as if:

• Five-year-olds didn’t fall in love with the less patronizing original Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
• Children only gravitate toward the lighthearted, gentler things in life.
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s invincibility options aren’t enough — every player, no matter their age or brain development, needs to be showered with infantilizing yelps of praise and gifted scores of Wonder Seeds.
• Sharing a personal opinion on a game is committing a grave crime against mass marketing and consumerism.

BUT IF I HAD CHILDREN!

Sure, not going to lie, I would jump at the chance, jump like Mario, to play Super Mario Bros. Wonder with my hypothetical kids, because I was married once, for four years, with a stepdaughter and stepnephew and stepniece, and a sister-in-law and brother-in-law, and we would convene to play Nintendo games, my personal favorite being Bowling from Wii Sports, because I had this wrist rotation that guaranteed a strike, and I love being the winner, doesn’t matter if my opponent is a seasoned veteran or a child not old enough to sniff high school, does not matter, my self-esteem needs victory and praise, as well as irritation and frustration and indignation from my competitors, ANYWAY, we all played New Super Mario Bros. Wii one time, and even though I consider the New Super Mario Bros. series to be profoundly unessential, just an excuse to say you’re playing a traditional Mario game in the 21st century, I got a kick out of hearing my sister-in-law remark about her fumbling throughout New Super Mario Bros. Wii while her son tried to show her the ropes, and it was a blast guffawing with my family members while hopping around and dying as Mario and Luigi and Toad and blah blah blah, hell, I was a kid once and would play the battle mode in Super Mario Bros. 3 religiously with my younger sister, yes, little girls play video games, it’s not a big deal you conservative and liberal and moderate reprobates, so yes, indeed, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is most likely fun for kids, who also hold McDonald’s in high regard, thanks for the revolutionary and enlightening thoughts, you insightful scholars of media markets!

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The second half of Super Mario Bros. Wonder flirts with excellence.

The better half couldn’t have come at a better time: World 3, Shining Falls, is the nadir of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The locations in Shining Falls are more like amateurish demos than fully realized stages. The Sugarstar Trial: Across the Night Sky features the worst Wonder Flower effect of the game: a constant flow of shooting Super Stars that allow the player to mindlessly run through everything. Similarly disappointing is Hoppycat Mario. This form revolves around a great idea (ultra high jumps), but multiple levels do nothing remotely intriguing with the ability. World 3 defines anti-climactic with its final stage, which features basic follow-the-coins jumps. The least Nintendo could have done is transcend a moderately interesting Super Mario Maker fan creation.

World 4 saves Super Mario Bros. Wonder by giving the game a compelling sense of place. The map for World 4 evokes desert mirages and teases hidden corners of ancient architecture. The best level, The Desert Mystery, has Mario ripping the bandages off mummies and pulling cords to manipulate stage elements like platform height and item placement. These mechanics enrich the setting’s personality, inviting you to engage in a sensational type of archaeology. The level climaxes with the task of chasing a rogue Wonder Seed to foreboding techno music. Finally, Super Mario Bros. Wonder subverts its cautionary, ingratiating tendency of handing everything to the player.

The last two worlds, Fungi Mines and Deep Magma Bog, continue to push the exploratory inventiveness of World 4. They deepen the feeling that Mario could get lost. They highlight the difference between manufacturing content and designing environments as convincing illusions, vessels of atmosphere, and lived-in habitats. They have unforgettable identities, just like Pipe Land did in Super Mario Bros. 3. They’re quirky, precarious, and foreboding. Matter-defying rifts, collapsing columns, fossilized dragon bones, moving doors with monstrous jaws — such characteristics vivify these places given to ruin, corruption, and destruction.

Different factors water down the immersive spells of these worlds. Nintendo packs in far too many levels like the Badge Challenges, KO Arenas, and Break Times, these feeble and emotionally inert odes to tutorialization, stat-based achievement, and designated relaxation. The graphics, while full of neat details, look like what we should expect from Mario, especially if earlier this year we walked out of a theatrical showing of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. As surreal as Super Mario Bros. Wonder strives to be, its rounded aesthetic is so carefully processed and on brand that the darker moments of the game pull their punches, akin to brothers facing off in a mixed martial arts contest who can’t help but think about their worried mother.

There is no truth in advertising: The concept of “wonder” should entail the exact opposite of the foreseeable, the explainable, and the comfortable. As with the last two Legend of Zelda games, Nintendo neither redefines nor refines its intellectual property. It reinforces its myths and upholds its by-committee values. Super Mario Bros. Wonder achieves an appreciable number of impressive moments because child-like experimentation remains a talking point for the company. If only Super Mario Bros. Wonder could let go of the Pavlovian design strategies, it’d be a near masterpiece.