Our 24 favourite games of 2023
As voted for by the RPS Treehouse
5. Dead Space Remake
Kiera: Cast your mind back, if you can, to the very beginning of last year. The nights were dark and the last vestiges of Christmas had faded into memory. And in this liminal time of year, we were suddenly carried off to a mining ship in distant space, where the crew had gone silent and there were no apparent signs of life. With only the faint gurgling sounds and the pitter-patter of talons scraping the ground, we turned to see a long-limbed, slavering monster we thought was long dead. A Necromorph.
We are, of course, speaking about the Dead Space Remake of January 2023. As a horror fan, this game was on my radar well ahead of its release, and it didn't disappoint. In it, you step once again into the heavy and newly gussied-up shoes of engineer Isaac Clarke, sent to the USG Ishimura to investigate the sudden disappearance of the crew (and search for his girlfriend Nicole as he goes).
To the horror of all involved, which is basically just you and Isaac, you soon realise that the ship has been overtaken by a virus that has twisted and mutated the corpses of the crew into monstrous taloned creatures. As an engineer with little to no experience in fighting, you must utilise the tools around you to both survive the virus and unravel the mystery behind it. Doing it all again in the remake, of course, means the glorious return of the Plasma Cutter - alongside many other weapons to help chop limbs and sow destruction.
To the relief of many fans of the original, the remake stays faithful to the source, while introducing new rooms to explore (and plunder like the little loot goblin you most likely are) as well as updated graphics, so you can see the Necromorphs in all their strikingly grotesque glory. On that note, these iconic bad boys of sci-fi horror come back with a bang; with the aptly-named Dead Space 'peeling system' you can watch as you strip layers of flesh off of them in a panic to kill or be killed. Item economy must be managed, because there's no such thing as a quicksave. You need to visit saving stations to secure progress, which is, perhaps, the true horror for us save scummers.
Much like the original, most of the Dead Space remake is spent peeking around corners with your laser cutter firmly held high, ready to spark off at the slightest rustle. The paranoia this game induces is not for the faint of heart, but if you're a horror fan who didn't play Dead Space on its original release, know that you'll get an obscene amount of enjoyment out amplifying your own terror. The game will openly mock you in sections, leading you to rooms covered in vents where any one of them could be hosting a nasty little Necromorph, just waiting to pounce. If you like horror, light puzzles and a spectacle of gore, give the Dead Space remake a go, just don't blame me if you can't face your bathroom vents ever again.
James: The Dead Space remake doesn’t deserve banishment for the crime of Not Being Resident Evil 4. Not when it shows this much care for its craft: the visual upgrade alone is night and day, making the Ishimura even more hellish and turning the Necromorphs from generic grey meatmen to properly unsettling abominations. And besides, Resi 4 was always going to be good, but this was a series that infamously chased the action game big bucks all the way to its own demise. Dead Space, as a serious horror prospect, had something to prove, and prove it it did.
Katharine: Someone has to say it, so I will: "CUT OFF THEIR *deep breath* GROSS MUTATED APPENDAGES WITH SURGICAL PRECISION, PREFERABLY AT THE JOINT, SO THEY DON'T LEAP AT AND EAT YOU IN A SINGLE, BLINK-AND-YOU'LL-MISS-IT MOTION!"
4. Alan Wake 2
Katharine: 2023 may be a year that's best remembered for its great RPGs, but I reckon it will also go down as a pretty good year for survival horror, too. After all, it began with some of the best all-time great excavations of the genre's former glory (looking at you, Dead Space and Resi 4 remakes), and ended with what can only be a glimpse into its weird and wonderful future with Alan Wake 2.
It can be a bit of a hard sell, picking up the story of a game that first came out 13 years ago, and I would honestly still recommend playing the first one (or at least watching a recap video) beforehand to give yourself the best experience. But Alan Wake 2 still does a pretty good job of getting its players up to speed with what's been happening in the Washington state town of Bright Falls since our last outing here, and that's all thanks to the introduction of new deuteragonist and FBI agent Saga Anderson.
Saga is, hands down, one of the best female characters I've come across since, well, I don't know. Alyx Vance? Aliya Elasra from Heaven's Vault? She's excellent fun, is what I'm saying, and her no-nonsense, level-headed approach to solving a string of strange, ritualistic murders makes her feel both refreshing, capable and easy to warm to. Her outsider perspective grounds the story in a way that nervous wreck Alan simply can't all by himself, and the way she so confidently steps into Alan's old shoes of the torch-wielding, gun-toting mystery-hunter is almost enough to make the last 13 years melt away in an instant.
And yet, so much has changed during that time in Bright Falls, not least for poor old Alan, who's been stuck in the alternate reality known as The Dark Place ever since the conclusion of Alan Wake 1. His sections play like a living nightmare, bringing to bear over a decade's worth of technical advancements to create a realm where ghosts and spectres haunt the streets with menacing overtones, and the shifting, kaleidoscopic walls of reality twist and bend to the will of some greater, evil power. Alan still has his trusty torch and gun to keep the darkness at bay, but he must also use his talents as a writer to literally rewrite the scenes in front of him to find an escape. It's very artfully done, and if we ever see a more confident realisation of what it is to be trapped inside a dreamlike hellscape, we'll be in for a right old treat indeed.
Admittedly, you could argue that Alan's sections leave Saga's feeling quite pedestrian by comparison, but it's precisely this contrast between the sane, logical reality of Saga's problem-solving and the nightmarish, visceral duplicity of Alan's life inside The Dark Place that makes this game feel so uniquely singular. One cannot exist with the other, and the ways they dovetail and intersect with each other provide some of the most visually impressive moments I've seen in any game all year. Indeed, Alan Wake 2 is positively stuffed with such graphical jaw-droppers, from its (quite literal) all-singing, all-dancing set pieces to single quiet corridors where one reality bleeds into the next so convincingly that it takes your breath away. Remedy have always been experimental in the way they make their games, but Alan Wake 2 pushes the envelope even further, creating a horror experience that draws as many gasps of shock as it does of amazement.
There really is nothing quite like it, this year or otherwise, and I cannot wait to see what the next decade of Remedy games bring after this.
Alice Bee: When I played some of the original Alan Wake earlier this year, I was disappointed because nobody had ever bothered to tell me Alan is basically Garth Marenghi. If they had, I would have played it much sooner. Alan Wake 2 feels like it leans into the genre of it all much more, both taking itself less seriously (and therefore being better) and doing as much multimedia vamping as it can. It's great! And I maintain that a lot of the critical discussion of Alan Wake hasn't fully engaged with the strong element of complete and utter nonsense that I find every time I play it. Sam Lake is in it as about a million different characters, leading me to suspect that our ostensibly real life version of him is in fact not a real life person at all. Saga, canonically, has investigative ideas manually, where she goes into a Mind Place in her head, which is a replica of their field office in town, and walks around looking at imaginary files and pinning evidence to an imaginary wall before she can come to a fairly obvious conclusion. And this takes place in real time! She just goes AFK in front of people whenever she thinks! It's ridiculous (complimentary).
3. Lies Of P
Ollie: Lies Of P is easily the most accomplished non-FromSoftware soulslike I've played. It comes closer than any of them to equalling FromSoft's creativity in its enemy designs, locations, and story. But more than that, it feels like the team has taken a hard look at the "souls formula" and fixed several of the main pain points that players have had with the genre over the past decade.
If you've played Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or really any Soulslike ever, nothing in Lies Of P will throw you. It's broadly the same experience, except this time round you're playing as Pinocchio, elegantly carving your way through a ruined city overrun by not one but two separate disasters at once. There's the Puppet Frenzy, where all the puppets have seemingly gone mad and overthrown their human owners; and the Petrification Disease, which is slowly killing off the survivors and turning them into monsters. People might scoff at the idea of a "Pinocchio Soulslike", but they've done a lot of good things with the premise. It's a well-told story with a couple of good surprises hidden up its tailored sleeves.
Let's start with combat, which feels like a carefully curated mix of Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. You've got the rally system from Bloodborne, where you can gain back some of the health that you just lost by quickly counterattacking. You've got the near-instant parry timings of Sekiro, but you can also optionally use equipment which allows you to perform more powerful (albeit difficult to time) parries a la Elden Ring or Souls games. There's a mechanical tightness to Lies Of P's combat which brings to mind Sekiro, while also giving players a lot more scope for tackling enemies how they like. You can choose to parry or to dodge; to focus on whittling away health or staggering enemies for a critical blow; to stick to one of the many pre-made weapons or to mix and match handles and blades to create something entirely new. That last part is a revelation, and more games in the genre need to copy it. Give me more gigantic hammers attached to little cutlass handles, please and thank you.
What really elevates Lies Of P, though, are the little things. One of the most impactful is that once all your Pulse Cells (your healing items) are used up, you can replenish up to one more by dealing enough damage, so there's always a ray of hope while fighting a seemingly insurmountable boss at low health. They've also taken the weapon durability system from the Monster Hunter series, meaning you have to keep on top of weapon sharpness or your attacks will start to deal less damage or even bounce right off enemies. Breaking off to sharpen your weapon at the right moment breaks up the monotony of big boss fights and organically segments fights into phases, with momentary breaks in between. Or wonderful cosmetic touches, like the fact that as Pinocchio becomes more "human", he starts to gasp and groan while rolling or taking damage. And the lovely little kitty cat that prowls around Hotel Krat (your base of operations) slowly goes from hissing its distrust at you to letting you pet or even hold it. The world, story, and combat all feel like they've been lovingly crafted by a team with an eye for the little details.
Mechanically, Lies Of P is one of the best Soulslikes I've played, even including FromSoft's many masterpieces. And while it does feel at times a little monotonous in its machinations compared to the endless surprises of, say, Elden Ring, the fact that a team that isn't FromSoftware can put out a soulslike this good is something that should be celebrated by all fans of the genre, even diehard Souls fans. I'm getting ahead of myself, but... I've a suspicion that Lies Of P 2 could end up being their magnum opus, and a strong contender for the best soulslike out there.
Alice0: I still think it's very funny to reboot Pinocchio as Bloodborne.
2. World Of Horror
Alice Bee: World Of Horror came out at just the right time for me. I played a lot of big, flashy, competent games this year that were enjoyable but quite bland. Smoothed out for a frictionless experience. World Of Horror is a game that is deliberately all sharp angles that make it difficult to hold on to. In a great way, though. It's a horror roguelike-ish, in which every run at the game (which can take a few minutes or about an hour, depending on your luck) is an attempt to stop a terrible Old God from consuming the world, the entry point being the town of your school-age protagonist.
This is a fairly grasp-able horror game set up, but World Of Horror mixes things up. The Old God - which could be one of several, each time you play - is being summoned at the top of the local lighthouse, which has five locks. Each key is collected by completing the investigation of a strange case around town, also semi-randomly drawn from a pool of many options, and which are usually inspired by a Japanese yokai or the work of Junji Ito, or both. It is singularly unsettling seeing e.g. a woman with an unnatural sharp-toothed smile running from ear to ear rendered in 1bit black and white line art (which was all made in MS Paint). Or maybe it's not black and white, maybe you randomised the colour before you started and it's in grey and turquoise.
As you investigate your cases you have to visit different places around town, leading to random encounters that can damage your health or psyche, or lead to something useful. The order you do things affects your play through. If you get the case where a janitor is making the swim team into mermaids, and you pick the resolution that burns down part of the school, not only will you then be burned for the rest of that run, but you won't be able to visit that part of the school, which is where you can find gossip or potentially pick up someone to save the world with you. You can find a stuffed toy in one encounter that is useful when you're trapped in your flat with a ghost.
It's beautifully specific and idiosyncratic, which you know I love, and the number of layers you can chip away at as you play is excellent. There are spells! Weapons! Bonuses to find! World Of Horror has a lot of depth, and it's the first time that the loop of learning through failure has actually clicked with me (because elsewhere my brain is unable to get out of the groove that failure under any circumstances = bad, to be avoided). To play something so unapolagetically strange and user-unfriendly - but with design intent - in 2024 was a real blessing.
Alice0: I always found World Of Horror's pace as a roguelikelike story kinda RPG doodad meant the trial-and-error of learning everything was too off-putting to put serious time it. Playing it well feels like an exercise in playing it wrong enough to learn correct paths and actions and reactions and such. But maybe this is a problem with me and how I approach roguelikelike games. As a game to bumble through, I had a great time with World Of Horror for a while before deciding I'd had my fill. Sure, I'll never accomplish everything but I saw many terrible things and died horribly, repeatedly, and who could ask for more from encounters with the Old Gods?
Edwin: I loved the early access version of this I played back in... 2020, possibly? As Alice0 says there's a hefty element of trial-and-error but it's in keeping with the theme of "vainglorious tinkering in the face of forces beyond comprehension". What I particularly liked is the range of bespoke story setups and supporting mechanics. OK, so every yokai encounter tends to involve a fight and a bit of stat/resource management, but I remember one where you're given a whole separate mapscreen to explore. I'm looking forward to trying the full thing over Cthulhumas.
1. Baldur's Gate 3
Alice Bee: Sometimes at RPS we like to swerve expectations by picking an indie game with levels half an hour long and that costs a fiver instead of the biggest game of 2022, and sometimes we swerve the swerve by picking the same Game Of The Year as everyone else. It's been a year of very good games, but one did stand out (and not because, disclosure, Adam Smith, the man I killed to get this job, was reincarnated as the lead writer on BG3). Baldur's Gate 3 does a big save-the-world-from-great-evil RPG quest, but it's such a dense tapistry woven from so many threads: companions like a nerdy wizard and an emotionally wounded vampire; an assassin woman in a meat dress; big brains; hags; politics; talking to cats; sentient mushroom civilisations; goblins getting tanked; multiple murders...
I mean sure, you have to do a lot of Wizards Of The Coast-compliant official Dungeons & Dragons combat, which is simultaneously the thing you spend the most time doing in D&D and also my least favourite bit of D&D, but Baldur's Gate 3 gives you many options around that. It doesn't always give you help to discover those options, but by God there are loads at every stage, up to and including the noble art of barrelmancy. The game is like a puzzle box, with so many buttons to press and switches to find and flip, and the fun is that you can and should experiment to find different approaches. Once you get over the fact that Baldur's Gate 3 is quite hard it's actually rather freeing.
I was a big fan of the way your choices layer up like a Hollywood-handshake-winning puff pastry. Crisp flaky battles, where you drop chadeliers on goblins and rain magical hellfire on cursed shadows, stack between slippery social interactions to persuade a nobleman to fuck off out of his house, or romance your favourite companion. So many quests you persue turn out to be linked to something else you were already working on, or lead to something useful. I freed an artist in Act 2, went to visit him in Baldur's gate in act 3, and found he'd been cursed by an evil portrait in the attic. Off I toddled to find a necromancer, and the necromancer asked me to find some escaped ghouls, and didn't that lead me to a mysterious murder that had happened on the beach? And so on, and so on. Aside from your gang of misfits, who are authentically sweet and annoying, everything in Baldur's Gate feels alive in a way games rarely do any more.
There's a direct to DVD action movie (starring sports entertainment superstar The Edge) called Money Plane, which is about a casino where nothing is illegal because it's on a plane. In this film, Kelsey Grammer says "you wanna bet on a dude fuckin' an alligator? Money Plane." I kind of think this is the ethos of Baldur's Gate 3 - I don't specifically know if you can bet on the outcome of someone fucking an alligator, but you wanna turn into a cheese after getting in a fight with a djinn? You wanna walk in on a bugbear and an orc mid-coitus? You wanna sneak into hell? Baldur's Gate 3.
Ollie: I've never finished a CRPG, not once. I love them, and I spend hours in the character creator putting together the perfect fantasy specimen. And then somewhere along the way, I fall off the bandwagon. Baldur's Gate 3 continues this tradition in grand fashion, with probably the best character creation music the world has ever known, followed by one of the very best CRPGs - or even straight-up RPGs - we've ever seen. And I still haven't finished it. At this point it's fairly clear that this is a me problem. Though it's admittedly also because Baldur's Gate 3 is so goddamn huge. So much to see, so many choices to make, so many enemies to Thunderwave off clifftops.
I may not have finished it, and at this point I'll probably have to start again from the beginning, which is always my Achilles' heel with these games. But boy, am I looking forward to starting the Baldur's Gate 3 journey again. I long for those first moments inside the Illithid Leviathan. But this time, I'm determined to keep both my character's eyes in their skull. And look, I don't want to make this into a big thing, I'm just saying that I'll gladly slaughter every last one of my other companions if it made Karlach happy.
Alice0: Very excited for a future mod to edit this down to a manageable hour or two.
Kiera: It may be an odd thing to admit when it's my job to write about them, but sometimes I go through a 'no games' phase. This is when I find myself lacking the motivation to play anything at all and I'm not in the mood for any one genre. I picked up Baldur's Gate 3 relatively late on, after the initial hype phase had passed and it managed to invigorate my enthusiasm for RPGs again.
As a regular Dungeons & Dragons player I knew I'd love it, but it genuinely surprised me how good it is. Baldur's Gate 3 introduces a world where choices actually have consequences and I feel like I have an impact on the world, which is the highest praise I can give a game. I know there's always a temptation to resist something that's popular or considered 'mainstream' but this is one of those rare occasions where the hype is genuine. If you love RPGs you must give Baldur's Gate 3 a go! You can talk to Yorkshire cows and Scottish eagles, that's reason enough to play.
Edwin: I'm still in Act 1. I'm told it's the best Act, so I'm trying to drag it out, but I also feel a strong inertia born of Cool Anecdote Overwhelm. Baldur's Gate 3 exists to me as a million oddball headlines and forum gossip about e.g. people reverse-pickpocketing demons to make them explode. There's still a game in there somewhere, right? Or does it now exist exclusively on Reddit?
Ed: And I've only just reached Act 2. But my time with the game's shared with two other pals as a way of keeping touch, so sessions aren't always possible week in, week out. When they do happen, though, we're fully absorbed for hours. We haven't played a game together that's commanded our attention quite like BG3, and we've learned to embrace where our poor decisions take us. Often, it's two hours spent in a single fight trying to break out of prison. And we've learned that every fight is significant. In fact, that everything is significant. I genuinely don't know if we'll ever play a co-op game as good as this once we're done - in 2046.
Katharine: Honestly, any game that lets you a) turn yourself into a wheel of cheese, and b) still have everything function as if that were a perfectly natural and expected consequence of your ill-timed magic probings after said transformation... Just outstanding work, Larian. Baldur's Gate 3 is going to be one of those all-timers we'll be talking about for years to come, and it's precisely because of daft nonsense like this that allow it to stand head and shoulders above everything else released this year.