Mostly Normal Monthly #0014, January 2024
Chris's (@VGOccasion) Favorite Games of 2023
Honorable Mentions
Daily Puzzle Games made a major impact on me at the end of the year – shout out to Puzzmo’s feature that lets you play their Crossword’s coop. Long time listeners to the show will remember me gushing about Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger’s excellent Good Sudoku, so leave it to those thoughtful designers to add features that make the old standby Crossword puzzle approachable and fun. I just wish there was an app instead of a website, but I am sure that has something to do with them offering subscriptions. I have also fallen victim to playing the New York Times’ Mini Crossword and sharing my score with some of my family members, reminiscent of our daily competitions in Wordle.
A Short Hike is delightful and made for one of the most satisfying and emotionally cathartic evenings of my year. If it had come out in 2023, I would be debating putting it at… Number 2 or 1 in this list. Yes, maybe even over the obvious #1.
Marvel Snap has continued to steal my soul and attention through its engaging and fast paced cardplay.
Top 5 Games of 2023
Five – Starfield Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
I started Starfield and Knights of the Old Republic right around the same time, which definitely turned out to be a mistake. Partially because that meant trying to start two RPGs at the same time, and that has never been a good decision. So only one could survive, and somehow it was NOT the hottest new Xbox exclusive of 2023. I was very excited when creating my spacefaring bounty hunter Jane Seagull (meant as a play on Spike Spiegel from my favorite show ever – Cowboy Bebop). Jane made it off New Atlantis (I think that’s the name of the starting planet) and landed on Mars, met a cool bounty hunter, and then proceeded to climb a big structure in a kinda interesting platforming side-quest. Then, I proceeded to ignore the game for the rest of the year while dabbling in the Nintendo Switch port of BioWare’s 2003 Star Wars epic (well, it probably felt epic in scope 20 years ago at least). I admire KOTOR for demonstrating that BioWare had all the key pillars of what would make me love the Mass Effect games figured out and in a Star Wars wrapper. Plus, I found many among the game’s cast of characters delightful and intriguing, so I was fine with overlooking the… less than stellar Auto-Save system (so much lost progress).
Four – Venba
Venba is a touching narrative game that gave me a whole additional layer of admiration for South Asian cuisine. The game also boasts a delightful soundtrack, moving writing, and interrogates a familiar story of generational difference with compassion for the elder and younger parts of its immigrant family. It also plays in about two hours and makes for a great “play a game instead of a movie” date night.
Three – Jusant
In the “Year that Chris Climbed Mountains” the best climbing wasn’t even in my #1 game. Jusant adds a layer of real-world mountain climbing mechanics over Zelda’s tried and true stamina management to make for some of the most delightful climbing and exploration I’ve ever engaged with. The gameplay has a hypnotizing rhythm where your left hand maps to your left trigger and right hand to right trigger, and before long I was fluently alternating hands while climbing all sorts of environments. The climate change-inspired narrative and gorgeously realized world of seafarers after the tide rolled out created a beautiful vision of resilience in the face of climate catastrophe and leaves room for hope for change, even if it takes the future generations to accomplish it.
Two – Cocoon
I think Cocoon is one of my favorite games ever, and I suggest everyone give it a chance. It is a perfectly mind-bending but approachable puzzle game. Every moment of the game feels handcrafted and thoughtfully designed. Each puzzle is a small clockwork contraption designed to make you feel like the smartest person bug in the world. Its world design is both icky and beautiful, pulsating with sci-fi imagery – in one of the boss fights, the floor looks like… hot dogs. This game rules.
One – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Tears of the Kingdom features some of my favorite items from other Zelda games. I found the Biggoron’s Sword. In 2023. In a chest. In the Depths. After exploring a cave structure that ended in a large opening with a miniboss fight. A lot of ink has been spilled about the ways this game takes its predecessor (my favorite game… ever) and blows it way, way up (and way, way down). The new powers completely recontextualize the familiar base map that the game builds on and remixes. And if anyone knew me in college, I would frequently argue that a good remix improves on the original. So of course the remix of my favorite game ever is my game of the year for 2023.