10. Dordogne

The summers of my youth seemed to stretch on endlessly. Mornings were spent poring over the latest spoils from the local library—Dahl novels and Hergé comics, spread across my bed like a print collage. Afternoons were spent outside, kicking around soccer balls and doodling on the pavement with sidewalk chalk. When it got too hot outside, we would pile into air-conditioned basements and while away the hours playing air hockey and Mario Kart. This routine would repeat, day after day, but it never got boring. Each page I read in the morning provided a new adventure to be pantomimed in the afternoon on a suburban lawn or in the woods next to the nearby creek. There was always wonder and excitement, but never tension or pressure.

I most associate that unhurried vibe with Hayao Miyazaki’s idyllic My Neighbor Totoro, with which Dordogne shares a lot of similarities. Instead of rural Japan, the game sets the action in southwest France’s Dordogne department, on the bank of the eponymous river. Protagonist Mimi returns to her grandmother’s home to reminisce about a summer she spent there in her childhood, kayaking to nearby caves and buying vegetables from the local market, filling a scrapbook with Polaroids of her adventures. The younger Mimi wanders around solving simple puzzles against gorgeous, hand-painted, watercolour backgrounds. Miyazaki isn’t the only anime director whose work is evoked here: the lush greenery in the outdoors and detailed water animations call to mind Makoto Shinkai’s films, particularly The Garden of Words and Weathering with You. But the subject matter—an intergenerational family drama—feels like something out of a Mamoru Hosoda or Naoko Yamada film. Un je ne sais quoi’s Dordogne takes all these influences and elements and combines them to make one of the most beautiful, touching, and intoxicating narrative adventures of the year. May its summer never end.

9. Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Mario Mario has done it all. He has rescued Princess Peach more times than he can count. He has earned a medical degree and used it to prescribe a dangerous amount of pharmaceuticals to his Mushroomian patients. He has even used his magical hat to possess all manner of fantastical creatures in a way that has disturbing philosophical implications for identity and consciousness. What is left for Mario to do? Which peaks remain for Mario to summit?

Super Mario Bros. Wonder aims to answer that question repeatedly, each time proposing a new response. No idea is too ridiculous for the Brooklyn plumber’s latest 2D adventure. It feels like the result of Nintendo’s junior designers playing Mad Libs while Shigeru Miyamoto had his back turned, and by the time he turned around again, it was too late for him to prevent the Internet’s pachyderm fetishists from having an absolute field day. One level sees Mario and his pals marching in a Piranha Plant parade. Another transforms a 2D platforming stage into a top-down action arena. You never know quite what to expect with Wonder, which is exactly what makes it such a valuable addition to the Mario canon. Now what else is left for Mario to do? I don’t know; let’s distract Miyamoto again so we can find out.

8. Backfirewall_

2023 was a year of massive labour upheaval in the games industry. Over 9,000 workers in development and publishing lost their jobs due to a mixture of greed, incompetence, and callous disregard for fellow humans on the part of C-suites across the industry. So many coders, artists, and community managers were exploited by owners of capital to turn a profit and then discarded the second they no longer proved immediately useful to the bottom line. It didn’t matter that throwing away institutional knowledge would lead to increased costs down the line; anyone who wasn’t goosing this quarter’s numbers was seen by shareholders as a liability. 2023 will be remembered for the deluge of fantastic titles it delivered us, but it should also be remembered for the employment bloodbath it left behind.

With that in mind, Naraven Games’s Backfirewall_ is perhaps the most 2023 game on this list. What appears at first to be a Portal 2 knockoff, complete with a software character played by a stammering Stephen Merchant soundalike guiding you along, slowly reveals itself to be a much deeper rumination on capitalism, labour, and the importance of knowing one’s self-worth. The journey takes players through a Tron-esque imagining of a mobile phone’s innards, solving a mixture of physics puzzles and adventure-game brainteasers. I was constantly astonished by the game’s cleverness and how it kept me on my toes. To spoil exactly where the game’s twisty plot goes would be to blunt its message. All I’ll say for now is that Backfirewall_ is at once an ode to the value of labour and an elegy for the obsolete, both of which are sorely needed in these times.

7. Hi-Fi Rush

Between all the cinematic sad-dad adventures and thuddingly self-serious murder simulators—yes, I’m aware I’m being redundant—sometimes it’s hard to remember that video games can be, y’know, fun. But then an exuberant, cel-shaded rhythm brawler gets shadowdropped out of nowhere to remind us of a time when video games could evoke the pure euphoria of play. We become middle-schoolers in our parents’ basements, our Doritos-stained fingers gripping a Duke with one hand and fist-pumping with the other as we yell, “Heck yeah, this flippin’ rules!” Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush feels like a lost OG Xbox cult classic, uprezzed for the modern era. Everything you remember from early-aughts gaming is here—the bright alt-rock soundtrack; the mixture of action and platforming gameplay; and even the Saturday morning cartoon vibes, complete with corny jokes and cheesy dialogue. Hi-Fi Rush‘s rhythm brawler combat is, like the best gameplay systems of the era, easy to learn but difficult to master. Anyone can roll credits by button-mashing; however, if you want to chase high scores, then you’d better lick the nacho cheese dust off your fingers and get practicing, bud. But regardless of whether you’re in it for the fun or the l33t Gamerscore, Hi-Fi Rush is a concentrated dose of pure joy. Down in the dumps with another story about a disappointing father? Inject 10 cc’s of this game, stat.

6. A Space for the Unbound

Mojiken’s A Space for the Unbound is many things: a retro-styled point-and-click adventure game with puzzle mechanics that call Psychonauts to mind (no pun intended); a love letter to both old-school arcades and suburban Indonesia in the ’90s; and a trippy narrative that plays out like an absurdist Your Name. But most importantly—and perhaps most surprisingly—it is a touching story about trauma, abuse, and recovery. The emotional tightrope A Space for the Unbound walks is extremely narrow: the game has to be both unflinching and uplifting, without ever devolving into melodrama or mawkishness. That it successfully pulls this off while also boasting clever puzzle mechanics, gorgeous pixel art, and a dollop of delightfully bizarre humour is a testament to a deft directorial hand.

5. Misericorde: Volume One

“Rule 63 Name of the Rose” is perhaps too glib a description for XEECEE’s Misericorde. But the two works share more in common than an abbey setting and a murder-mystery plot; both apply a postmodernist lens to historical fiction. The Name of the Rose seeks to dismantle the edifice of supposed of logic and reason, revealing it to be built on a shaky foundation of unreliable heuristics rather than careful consideration of one’s assumptions and their implications. Meanwhile, Misericorde questions the idea of absolute morality, positing that morality is both malleable and contextual. In fact, the title has a dual meaning: a “misericorde” is a type of short dagger—perhaps a murder weapon?—but it can also refer to to a room in an abbey where some monastic rules are relaxed: a reification of morality’s malleability and contextual nature.

Much of this visual novel’s plot unfolds in the titular room as its protagonist Hedwig, an Anchoress who lived in isolation for most of her life, comes to terms with the fact that the outside world is a much more complex place than what she imagined from between the four walls of her former cell. The public face that her fellow sisters wear doesn’t always match the way they behave in private, when monastic restrictions may not apply. As for the nuns’ literal faces, they’re drawn in a soft, anime-esque art style that contrasts with the harsh, dithered backgrounds. The colour palette is black and white, with greys used only sparingly to provide some shading. And the soundtrack juxtaposes jazz timbres and tonalities against the organs and open octaves of early Renaissance music. Public and private; softness and harshness; white and black; concordance and discordance—contrast is a motif that runs throughout Misericorde‘s first volume. No one set of rules can accommodate both ends of these spectra, posits Misericorde. Not bad for genderswapping the work of Umberto Eco, eh?

4. Pikmin 4

Real-time strategy is not a genre known for its tactility and responsiveness. Typically, you order a unit to attack an enemy, and then you watch as it slowly trundles its way over there, stands in place a few metres from the target, and then fires, slowly whittling away at the opponent’s health bar. In Pikmin 4, by contrast, the titular critters fling themselves at enemies, emitting a goofy, high-pitched battle cry as they soar through the air to land on enemy’s back. Then, the pint-size pugilists go to work, whacking away at the enemy as fast as their tiny bodies will let them while she tries to shake them off. In spite of its simplicity, it’s visceral and thrilling in a way that few games—let alone strategy games—can manage.

Pikmin 4 may seem pared-down for a strategy game, but it’s also a puzzle game, an action-adventure game, an open exploration game, and a tower defence game, all rolled into one. Its gameplay loop is elegant and addictive, making the urge to play one more in-game day hard to resist. It’s also a vibrantly colourful visual feast, squeezing every last drop out of the Switch’s aging hardware without dropping a single frame. New additions to the series, like Rescue Pup and bestest boy Oatchi, keep the proceedings feeling fresh.

The Pikmin franchise has never been a runaway sales success for Nintendo, and in spite of an amazingly strong showing in Japan, the fourth entry in the series is no exception. Maybe the series’s unique genre blend is too confusing for an elevator pitch. But perhaps niche appeal is key to what makes the series so special. Pikmin 4 is a downright weird game, and I loved nearly every second of it.

3. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood

What do you do after the beast has been slain? Deconstructeam’s strikingly purple-hued visual novel, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, takes as axiomatic the twin deaths of capitalism and patriarchy. Free from their shackles, cosmic covens roam the stars, spreading (or sometimes hoarding) their wealth and knowledge. However, this is not some socialist mirror of the Fukuyaman end of history. There are still difficult choices to be made about how to allocate resources and respond to external forces. Wealth abounds, but so do complications.

You play as one such complication, Fortuna, exiled from her coven for foretelling its downfall. Her tarot deck confiscated, she makes a deal with a demon to build a new, custom deck using the elemental energies she harvests from the universe by doing readings with these cards. Much like her former coven, Fortuna (and by extension, the player) must make decisions about resource allocation: certain interpretations of card draws may present more immediately tantalizing narrative threads, while others may offer better resources for constructing new cards, thereby expanding the set of narrative possibilities down the road.

This tradeoff forms The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood‘s skeleton. Fleshing it out are rich, evocative dialogue and a spellbinding space rock soundtrack that swells into crescendos of guitar and synth at climactic moments, evoking the prog greats of the ’70s and ’80s. At these times, cymbal crashes accentuate the emotional potency of Fortuna’s decisions, making each one feel weighty and momentous. Capitalism may be dead and the patriarchy buried with it, but Fortuna may still hold the fate of the universe in her hands.

2. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

Society allows one to grieve a death, but not a life not lived. Having faked his death and now living under the thumb of the secretive Daidoji Faction, Like a Dragon/Yakuza series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, assuming the comically obvious alias “Joryu,” has precious little time or space to grieve. After all, who cares that he’s been separated from the orphans he raised and they now all think he’s dead? There’s work of dubious morality and legality to be done!

This work forms the bulk of Kiryu’s life as an agent of the Daidoji Faction. It can feel at times like he’s Groundog Daying the first three stages of a Kübler-Ross speedrun. Kiryu has access to two fighting styles for his Daidoji Faction work. The first is Agent, focused on crowd control, which gives Kiryu an array of gadgets that would make Bond envious. There’s a spiderweb shooter than can grab enemies and tie them up, a drone that draws aggro away from Kiryu, a cigarette bomb for AOE damage, and of course, rocket shoes for jetting around combat arenas like a superhero. Fighting like this is pure action-hero escapism, a denial of the reality in which Kiryu finds himself. The second fighting style is Yakuza, mostly comprising Kiryu’s traditional moveset. This is the ideal way to take on enemies one-on-one. Each punch is personal, fuelled by the anger Kiryu has not only at his opponent, but also at the circumstances in which he finds himself. Finally, Kiryu spends his time between Daidoji missions bargaining, pleading with his handlers to relieve him of his duties. This never works, and thus Kiryu remains in the cycle, doomed to fight, fight, and fight some more.

It’s only towards the end of the game, after the main antagonist has been defeated, that Kiryu is finally allowed to move forward. Here, depression and acceptance combine into a single stage: catharsis. Much has been made of Takuya Kuroda’s performance as Kiryu in this moment, but what he accomplishes here is doable only by someone who has been inhabiting a character for the better part of twenty years. It’s a reminder that even amid all the arcade games and hostess clubs and goofy side quests, the core of the Like a Dragon is its beating, loving heart.

1. Chants of Sennaar

Language and culture are inseparably intertwined. Learn a language, and you’ll something about the cultural context in which it’s spoken. Learn about a culture, and you’ll have a better appreciation of the nuances of its language. This concept is essentially the basis for Rundisc’s isometric point-and-click adventure, Chants of Sennaar.

Inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel, the game sees its silent and unnamed protagonist ascending a tower rendered in Moebius-style flat shading, solving puzzles and translating logographic languages along the way. Each section of the tower is occupied by a different culture, each with its own language and customs. Translating parts of a language can give clues about how to solve environmental puzzles, and puzzle solutions can give hints on how to translate a language.

And how clever these puzzles are, sometimes being confined to a single room, and sometimes stretching over the entirety of a tower section like an intricate clockwork contraption. Solving these puzzles can feel like a prolonged “Eureka!” moment, as you realize how the solution can inform the translation you’re in the process of doing. Just one of these moments is special; having over a dozen of them in the course of regular play is truly amazing.

In the early going, it can feel like Chants of Sennaar is running interference for the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines cognition. But as one progresses through the game, that gets turned on its head, and one quickly discovers commonalities between its languages. The existence of these links, both linguistic and cultural, is really what Chants of Sennaar wants to leave us with. It reminds us that bridging the gaps between all of us is possible, as long as we put in the effort.

Honourable mentions: Birth; Class of ’09: The Re-Up; Connections; Like a Dragon: Ishin!; Master Detective Archives: Rain Code; Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo; Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer; Starfield; Venba; We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip

My list remains the same as it was at the end of last year.

1. Platformer Toolkit
2. The Last Cube
3. Lost in Play
4. Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County
5. ANNO: Mutationem
6. Kirby and the Forgotten Land
7. Xenoblade Chronicles 3
8. NORCO
9. Neon White
10. Pentiment