Games of the Year 2023

The Narrow Path of Time

Games are important. “Play” is a fundamental human function, like learning or creativity or remembering embarrassing things you did in 5th grade. At least, that’s how I justify my lifelong obsession with games. As someone a bit (cough) NeuroSpicy, media in general has been an incredibly important teacher to my entrapped left-brain of how “normal” people interact, make choices, and navigate the world. 2023 was, professionally, incredibly overwhelmingly busy, but while I gave up most TV/movies and fiction reading for 2023, games still mattered. Judge all you want.

Here’s where I found joy, exploration, story, challenge, escape, community and solace in 2023.

Baldur’s Gate 3

No single creative work has been more important to my development as a human being than Dungeons and Dragons. As a pre-teen kid in the 1970s, “White Box” D&D dominated my imagination — or at least, the skimpy ruleset full of contradictions gave a place for my fantasies of escaping rural Massachusetts to meld with Tolkein and Anthony and Donaldson and Moorcock.

BG3, a third-person-view, turn based implementation of the current 5th Edition D&D ruleset, is an IV drip of nostalgia, but also an incredibly polished and straight up fun game in it’s own right, even if you’ve never played D&D before. In fact, I’ve recommended it to quite a few folks who are interested in playing D&D in meatspace, because it actually teaches you the core game extremely well.

But more than just rolling dice and hacking at monsters, BG3 captures the much more important part of D&D — making interesting decisions about the human condition. The companions (and baddies) you encounter over the amount i’ve played (perhaps half the 80-ish hours I’m told the game lasts), are genuinely interesting, well written, and better acted than most Netflix protagonists. The decisions they/you have to make about their place in the world, their alliances, and mostly about the kind of people they want to be, are worth the entirety of the game.

Some evenings, BG3 is a way to “play a little D&D” to escape before bed. Some Sunday mornings, BG3 is a well-told story I lose myself in, visiting old friends.

I’m pushing 60 at this point, and I still play D&D in the real world at least once a week. BG3 is a fantastic bridge for those times I can’t be around the table with friends.

CyberPunk 2077

Jack-in, hack the nets, install some wetware and go run missions for shady characters in the streets of an all-to-plausible near-future city. As a fan of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and that whole crew of 1990’s Cassandra’s, I find gritty, urban sci-fi settings somehow very approachable, The initial release of Cyberpunk three years ago was anything but approachable — it was a buggy mess that I stumbled through, with occasionally interesting writing, broken mechanics, and a whole lotta style.

In 2023 the developers finally finished the game, with the launch of the “Phantom Liberty” DLC. During a vacation week I plowed through the whole expansion and a lot of the original content, and as a narrative experience (occasionally well-acted by Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves) I found it to be absolutely absorbing. As I get older, my appetite for the endless murder-fest of a modern First Person Shooter has waned, but CyberPunk gives just enough of a veneer of unreality to the proceedings that I can stomach the violence, and the game rewards being sneaky and political just as much as being a psychopath. I’m sure there are lots of things folks don’t like about the storyline or the way certain people are groups are treated … which is a big point of the game story as well … but for me, it sits in a sweet spot between “we’re just doing this to be edgy” and “we’re actually making interesting social commentary.”

And it’s gorgeous. It’s one of the most arrestingly beautiful (if gritty is your jam) games I’ve ever played. With all the patches and work they’ve put into the engine, on my 3-year old mid-spec gaming PC, even after I’ve long finished the game, I find myself firing it up now and then just to hop on a motorcycle and drive around Night City in the rain, listening to the ersatz radio.

The game is a mood.

Against the Storm

BG3 and Cyberpunk absorbed the only “big time” I had for games this year, but I played a few much smaller, coffee-break type games as well (often in airports or hotel rooms.) Against the Storm is about building a small town of beavers, foxes and such in an inhospitable forest. It’s a very simple city-builder type game — chop down some trees, build some houses, mine some clay, make some pots, plant a field, don’t starve.

It’s cute enough that it feels light, and the strategic difficulty ramps delightfully as you learn the systems, but each individual game lasts only perhaps 20-30 minutes while being a unique experience with variations on resources, abilities, and so on. Win or lose, between games you upgrade skills and resources for the next round, making it a “rogue-like”.

It’s delightful.

Dave the Diver

Speaking of delightful, how about a game that’s 1/3 fishing, 1/3 resource management, and 1/3 exploration? That’s Dave the Diver. The conceit is literally written for me. The main character’s name is Dave (check), who’s a bit at sixes and sevens about life in general (check), who loves Scuba diving (check) and sushi (check). He’s fond of spending time on farms (check), meeting new people in small-group controlled settings (check), and probably looks better in 8-bit than photoreal (check). I feel seen.

A “day” in game takes about 30 minutes, which is a perfect amount of time that I occasionally have in a real-world day. The core loop takes you from a surprisingly fun little fishing and underwater exploration mode, as Dave (the Diver), moves on to some resource management of a fish farm and regular farm, and closes each night at a Sushi bar where you play a short minigame to maximize the revenue of your enterprise. Each step is different, has interesting decisions to make, and in the case of the actual “catching fish” part, is reasonably challenging and rewards skill development.

It’s not a game you sit down with for 40 hours and “finish” — it’s a game I picked up for a few minutes here and there, off and on, all year.

LiftOff

I don’t really want to look, but I suspect I spent more time in Liftoff than any other game this year. Liftoff isn’t really a game — it’s a simulator for First-Person View Drone flying.

I’ve been obsessed with flight since I was a very small child. In the 1970s I build big balsa gliders to huck off the ridgelines in Western MA. By the 1990s I had my pilot license and was training for Sportsman Aerobatics competition … and then I started having regular seizures and lost my license.

Since the 1990s I’ve been trying to get my “flying like a lunatic” fix any way I can. Flight simulators on PC have been the default, and I’ve logged countless hours just cutting circles in imaginary skies. Last winter, however, I went down the rabbithole of building and flying FPV drones, and it’s been like discovering a new favorite food (or perhaps, pharmaceutical). Here’s me flying this fall:

With HD goggles on and a halfway decent drone/controller setup, the experience of flying like this is so close to being in an actual aerobat that it takes significant self control not to tense up my legs when pulling up hard to avoid fading out from the Gs. But despite being a remote control pilot of all manner of 3D capable planes and helicopters, flying an FPV drone is *hard*. It is in fact the hardest and most rewarding hand-eye skill I’ve ever learned.

Because it’s hard, you don’t learn to fly by chucking a few hundred bucks of parts you took a weekend soldering together into the air and seeing how it goes: you practice on a simulator, just like you learn any other skill in the modern world. Liftoff is the “default” simulator for FPV drones (there are many others). With almost any computer of any vintage, all you need is a cheap RC controller and a USB cord, and your in the virtual air (and honestly, once your good in a simulator, you can fly in the real world. Straight up. It’s a near 1:1 transfer of skills.)

If you’ve ever had any interest in either flying in general or drones in particular, I highly recommend experimenting on the simulator to see if it’s for you. It’s definitely for me. And anytime I see some wild trick online, I hop into Liftoff and see if I can figure it out.

Magic: The Gathering Arena

I started playing Magic on paper in 1993 with the “Arabian Nights” expansion in the unexplainably large basement dining area of the Carls Jr. on Market Street in San Francisco, and I’ve been dealing with the addiction ever since. I have long, long since given up playing magic with actual cards. Since 1993 I have been through two rounds of collecting, competing, and then auctioning off giant many-thousand-card sets.

I thought I was well and truly out, and then, of course, they had to release a good online version. The business model of Magic remains pretty abusive: while in Arena you don’t buy “packs” of cards, in the end, it’s still all too easy to shovel money into the mouth of the beast.

But …

Darn it there’s just nothing like competitive drafting in Magic. In a draft game of Magic, each of eight players opens a pack of cards, picks one, and passes it on. You do this three times, leaving each of the eight with a hopefully playable deck, which you then play against your draftmates.

Drafting removes all “pay to win” from the game. Everyone has the same cardpool. It rewards knowing the card set being drafted (there are over 27,000 individual magic cards ever made, of which maybe 150-300 are in any given “block” that you are drawing from at a time), thinking on your feet, and developing a deck in realtime often from garbage you didn’t want. While there are very basic rules, the genius of Magic is that the rules are primarily on the cards themselves, so every block is wildly new and different in terms of strategy.

The combination of complexity, rigid structure, and the poker-like nature of reading your draft table based on what cards you’ve been passed, is like heroin for someone with my neurospicy traits. So I go through phases, usually a few months long, where I jump back in, brush up on the current block and pay Hasbro something like 10 bucks for 2 hours of generally losing badly at Magic drafts.

It’s like scratching my brain directly with a loofah.

New Hotness in ‘24?

While I have no idea how much time I’ll have for games this year, I’m sure I’ll continue to fly drones, play my weekly D&D game, and get sucked into Magic once in a while. But other than that:

Hades 2

I played the original to absolute exhaustion. I have played every game every made by SuperGiant to exhaustion.

Path of Exile 2

Been playing seasons of the original for years, and while I seriously doubt ill have the time to really dig in, I’m very interested in what they do to this alread-better-than-Diablo-clonel.

Skull and Bones

Assassins Creed: Black Flag is one of my top 5 games of all time, so any time you make a game where you can sail around on a pirate ship and occasionally blow something up while singing a sea shanty, I’m all in.

Helskate

Tony Hawk developers making a game about skating in hell against demons? Yes please.

What are you all lookin’ forward to?