The Best Games of 2023

There is a version of this argument that focuses on scope, on the sheer quantity of reactivity Larian packed into every corner. That argument is correct but it misses the point. What Baldur's Gate 3 actually did was prove that a large-scale RPG could be authored with genuine intention, where player choices feel weighted because the writers trusted the player enough to let things go genuinely wrong. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and deserved to beat a field that included two legitimate all-timers. The competition was real. The result was not a surprise.

Cocoon, from former Inside designer Jeppe Carlsen, is one of the purest puzzle designs of the last ten years. The mechanic, carrying entire worlds inside orbs and nesting them within each other, produces moments of genuine spatial revelation that most puzzle games chase for their entire runtime without finding once. It was nominated for Best Independent Game at The Game Awards and lost to Dave the Diver, which is a charming game but not a more original one. That result was fine at the time and feels more wrong the longer 2023 recedes. Cocoon is the one to revisit.

A thousand planets, most of them procedurally generated wasteland interrupted by copy-pasted outpost layouts. Starfield is Bethesda applying its formula to a setting the formula cannot carry, because space exploration requires a sense of genuine discovery and the game delivers the opposite: the feeling that you have already seen this before, because you have, three biomes ago. The removal of seamless travel, which is arguably the single design decision that defines all the best space games, was not a bold artistic choice. It was a tell. Starfield is not a bad game. It is an expensive, heavily promoted, deeply mediocre one, and that is harder to forgive.

Hi-Fi Rush was a surprise Game Pass drop in January, announced and released in the same breath, and it is the most unalloyed fun any game delivered in 2023. Tango Gameworks, previously known for The Evil Within series, made a rhythm-action game where everything pulses to the beat and the whole world is in on the joke, and somehow the joke never gets old. The tragedy is that Microsoft shut Tango Gameworks down in May 2024, less than eighteen months after Hi-Fi Rush won Best Action Game at The Game Awards. The game still exists. The studio that made it does not. That sits uneasily.