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Saltsea Chronicles, put more simply, is triumphant. It’s up there (amongst very tough competition) for the best game I played this year. I found its measured and realistic portrait of the collectivist society it portrays extremely hopeful. It pushes the medium forward, as cliche as that may be to say, in its insistence on theorizing the specifics of a social and political philosophy to its conclusion.
Besides that hitch, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a largely commendable sequel, building on what’s come before it in smarter ways than I’d put past most AAA titles. It’s an impressively lean and refined take on the open world structure that gives me hope the future isn’t just endless growth. Its familiarity is both a crutch and a boon that Insomniac manages to spin in a mostly good light in order to tell a story we’ve seen before with some key changes that make it land more impactfully than I’ve seen it done in quite some time. Though it sometimes struggles to use the entirety of its cast to great effect, I think what it does accomplish is no small task and more than anything, sets up an exciting future for characters I’ve grown remarkably fond of and can’t wait to see more of. If you’re wondering whether or not this title delivered here and now though, rest easy knowing that yes, it absolutely did.
In spite of it all though, CD Projekt Red has struck it out of the park. Cyberpunk 2077 finally shines the way it was always meant to. I hate talking in anything that resembles platitudes, but Phantom Liberty is an honest-to-goodness triumph. It’s not just the narrative I hoped for out of the original game, it’s everything it ought to have been. It properly sands away the rough and occasionally raw elements and designs of the base game and sharpens its best parts into a weapon like little else. It doubles down and makes it clear this is a world worth telling stories in. It more prominently and earnestly wears its heart on its sleeve, all the while delivering characters and consequences that hopefully ripple outwards in brilliant and bold new ways. It’s everything I could’ve wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to be.
Yet another solidly designed, thoroughly enjoyable, predictably weird, unoriginally off-the-wall Assassin’s Creed game. May they make 13 (or 29) more.
No genuinely good game has ever been hurt by being too easy, though. With El Paso, Elsewhere Strange Scaffold has given us one of 2023’s great games—one that’s in constant conversation with the medium’s past, while simultaneously brushing against the emotional and intellectual boundaries of games. And it does it all with one hell of a sense of a style. El Paso, Elsewhere’s greatness lies not in the excellence of any one of its single components, but in the consistently high level of quality found across all of them. It does everything it tries to do exceedingly well, with sound, image, story, and interaction combining into a uniformly great package. Game designers can learn a lot from El Paso, Elsewhere, and perhaps even act on that knowledge, if their publishers let them.
If I have a major issue, it’s that just as this sensation is fully kicking in, this relatively brief journey comes to a close. The problem isn’t so much the game’s length but that it only reaches its full potential in this last hour or so as it bounds towards its climax. Also, while the ultimate conclusion doesn’t necessarily undermine what came before, it doesn’t quite elevate it either, as its fairly straightforward demonstration of what it’s all “about” is somewhat clumsy compared to what it more elegantly achieves through its mechanics. Still, even if it doesn’t entirely stick the landing, Cocoon’s mind-warping puzzles and well-realized setting make for an out-of-this-world experience.
When I think back on my time with Armored Core VI, I can’t help but think about my fondness for the voices over the radio. The way Rusty was so cool when he showed up to help bail my ass out. Or the progression of Carla calling me a tourist. Then all the arguments and shared triumphs with real world friends over which bosses were too hard and which weapons were too cheesy. The way we share this game with one another. From Software manages to make connections in small, delicate internal ways, and also big messy explosive ones that I don’t think they can possibly plan for.
Gunbrella ultimately fizzles out, playing its strongest card upfront and stumbling as it attempts to follow it up with something meaningful. For what it’s worth, playing with the eponymous central mechanic is never anything but a joy, but the rest of the game around it, however, never flies quite as high as you do. While the world it builds is a compelling and stylish parallel to our own present and future anxieties, it does little else but reflect them. A great sense of style and killer accessory can’t carry all the ambitions of Gunbrella, a game that certainly wants to tackle a great deal of subject matter and design ideas, but should’ve probably settled for fewer than it did.
Playing Starfield makes me want to play games that explore space and games that were made by Bethesda, but it doesn’t make me want to play Starfield. It tries to give us the universe, but it’s so weighed down by its own ambitions and a fundamental lack of inspiration that it can’t even get into orbit.
It’s unfortunate that Sea of Stars doesn’t entirely stick the landing considering everything else about it is riveting to see and be a part of. It wears its influences on its sleeves, but rarely feels burdened by those expectations or particularly shackled to them. In fact, it fights tooth and nail to stand apart and wonderfully accomplishes it. It’s beautiful to look at and a joy to listen to, and I could get lost in its warm and fun fantasy over and over. There are also places that Sea of Stars goes that I want to share just about as much as I want everyone to find for themselves. If you’re at all familiar with the studio’s oeuvre, you know the delightfully weird places Sabotage enjoys taking its games, and how smoothly it translates retro aesthetics and mechanics into the modern era. In short, Sea of Stars is a magical game well worth playing just for the thrilling and heartfelt adventure it delivers.
There’s nuance in these stories—look to the attempts, successes, and failures of just about any other fantasy RPG—but Arcadian Atlas either doesn’t know that or doesn’t want to admit it in favor of simplistic moralizing. The moment to moment writing falters too, meaning that no matter where you look for growth or substance in the game’s story and characters, you’re bound to smack into walls of derivative tropes and bland archetypes. As much as it wants to resemble the classics, Arcadian Atlas can’t help but feel pared down and simple; in a word, it’s modern, born from a philosophy that subtracts more than it adds before dressing it up to appear otherwise. Yet despite its weaknesses, Arcadian Atlas is easy to pick up and breeze through, ensuring that its brand of tactics-lite gameplay will almost definitely be someone’s gateway into an infinitely more complex and rewarding genre, even if it struggles to conjure those strengths for itself.
Disney Illusion Island ultimately proves to be more Disney than Metroid. That makes sense: they’re selling this game based on Mickey and Minnie, after all. If you’re a Hollow Knight or Ori fan looking for something as challenging or emotionally powerful as those games, you probably never expected a game starring Goofy to deliver on that. Illusion Island gives us what it promised: a light, fun Metroid-style game with multiplayer, built around Disney’s most beloved characters, and that’s ideal for younger players and their friends and family. You’d have to be seriously goofy to find any fault with that.
Before I decided it was time to break from playing and settle in for the long process of writing my chronicle of the Auriga Vault, I sent a signal to my Carpathia, far away in another ocean entirely. It read: I was wrong. It’s not the men having a bad time. It’s me. And I’m loving every horrible minute of it.
Remnant 2‘s just kind of got all the trappings necessary for me to keep sitting down for hours on end and drown the rest of the noise out in its cacophony of demon/robot/fae/rock-monster/evil village-slaying goodness.
Street Fighter 6 should be on your fight card. It’s the new standard in fighting game excellence.
Despite some steps forward, Survivor finally settles for falling back in line and humming an all-too familiar tune.
I've rarely played a game with a more satisfying and simple loop in an intriguing and dubious world I just wish I could've seen more of. Between the cults (yep, this game has got those too) and the sort of unexplained nature of Why This Stretch Of Sea Is Like This™, I think it's actually a world ripe for even more exploration. But even if nothing more should come out of it, Dredge is a wonderful experience in smooth sailing over choppy (maybe even supernaturally charged) waters.
And despite some skepticism about how its historical period would be portrayed, the early turns of its story hooked me thanks to its marriage of murder-mystery, subterfuge, and deeply felt brotherly bonds. Unfortunately, these points of familiarity eventually proved incompatible with the kind of politically charged tale it was trying to tell. While most of my time with Ishin! was a delight, its closing hours are a mess due to its inability to reconcile the series' naivety and optimism with the complexities of history, resulting in a sanitized portrayal of the past that is both bewildering and somewhat troubling.
Few games hold the distinction of both making you want to delve further into their world, while also compelling you to step outside into our own. With Season, you can get lost in the animators' artistic work for myriad hours, but the overwhelming experience of this game will inspire you to savor our world, too.
Wild Hearts is a great success that takes the template laid out by its competition and strikes out on its own with the addition of an invaluable new tool in the form of the karakuri. That magical string not only holds the game together, but lets it stand tall at the end of the day. Sure, you can boil it down to Monster Hunter meets Fortnite, but also if you stop and think about that for a second, that idea kind of rules, and so does Wild Hearts. All the while, it makes smart tweaks and skews heavier into style rather than simulation, allowing Wild Hearts to step out of the shadow of giants and carve out a space for its own.