In 2023, I vowed to change my habits and fall back in love with what I cherish most about gaming, including immersive stories, fantastical realms and magical combo moves.
The previous year had me stuck in a gaming rut. In 2022, I rarely strayed from playing Overwatch or its sequel Overwatch 2. While both are great games, they don’t have a story and are instead based on a sort of rote gameplay. So much of my life felt turbulent that I played Overwatch—the support character Brig is my main here, by the way—out of a sense of comfort. It didn’t challenge me or ask anything from me except pressing the same buttons ad nauseam.
The past year became something of a gaming renaissance for me. And wow, what a year to jump back in. From mega AAA titles to indies, 2023 was a feast of a year for gamers, and I dove back in with gusto, traversing a world of inventive originals, sequels, remakes, indies and big-budget stunners. Not everything I played had explicit queer themes or characters, but much of it did; and even when it didn’t, there was something queer at the heart of what drew me to each game. What follows is a list of the games that most enthralled me in 2023, the games that brought me characters worthy of great novels and gameplay that still subverted expectations in my third decade of play.
Octopath Traveler II
Playstation 5. 2023
Let’s just get one thing straight: this list will mostly contain RPGs because, well, that’s what I play! Having been a lifelong fan of the genre, I was excited when the first Octopath Traveler came to Nintendo Switch in 2018. However, my problems with the game mounted quickly: the combat was far too slow, making each individual battle feel never-ending. The story was too much of a slog and, after the first act of walking around the map to get each character, there was quite a stark level gap, requiring literal hours of grinding, given the slow battle pace. I’m not sure I made it 10 full hours.
When the sequel was announced, I didn’t think I’d dive in, but I kept hearing from friends that this version was much improved. I had a hard time believing that. Why would a game that was a critical and commercial success even bother to make changes? But I was wrong: Octopath Traveler II is a vast improvement on every level. The battles flow much better, the level of grinding is minimal compared to its predecessor, and the stories feel like they have much higher stakes. The female characters, especially, feel much more well rendered in the sequel than its predecessor. (Primrose’s story of sexual assault and revenge in particular received hefty critical backlash in 2018.) Octopath Traveler II more than earns a spot on this list for being one of my favourite gaming experiences of 2023, but it also taught me that some studios are willing to listen to criticisms of well-reviewed games and to think about the person holding the controller.
Midnight Suns
Playstation 5. 2022
I know what you’re thinking: this game came out in 2022 and was a massive flop! Well, having come out in December, it missed out on a lot of year-end lists and I’m here to rectify that, because Midnight Suns is one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time. For those unfamiliar with the story, you play Hunter, a brand-new hero who happens to be the offspring of the game’s Big Bad, Lilith (a similar but different incarnation of the main villain of Diablo 4!), who works with a patchwork cast of Marvel characters to save the world from her evil plot. The story is simple enough, as it is with most superhero fare, but the game’s mechanics and script really shine.
Upon its release, some people just didn’t vibe with Suns’ battle system, which eschews the usual button-mashing of superhero-based action RPGs and replaces it with a deckbuilder system, where players use cards to command their heroes to take action. But the battle system not only worked for me, it also made Suns a wholly unique playing experience that was unlike anything else on the market. Victory in most battles takes a high level of strategy, having to weigh which of your heroes can act, think about what cards you have left in your deck, all while tracking the number of moves you have left in your turn. For people who love Marvel, and especially the X-Men, you’ll also love its depiction of the beloved team’s female characters, who really make up the centre of the narrative, such as Magik and Scarlet Witch.
Superhero games are usually overtly masculine button-pushers; in contrast, Midnight Suns is something of an oxymoron: a slow superhero game that asks its user to employ tactics and strategy, all while learning about a very deep, complex relationship between a mother and child.
Chained Echoes
Nintendo Switch. 2022
While we’re in December 2022, let’s get this one out of the way too; I played Chained Echoes in the early days of 2023. It’s a small indie RPG that punches far far above its weight in terms of story, style and gameplay. Echoes accomplishes a rare feat: it’s both a look back at the Japanese RPGs we loved in our collective youth, while also bringing enough to the genre to make the game feel new. My love of the format was renewed.
As with many RPGs, Echoes takes place in a prolonged war, this time between three kingdoms where you control up to eight characters, led by the protagonist Glenn, who has far more hues and shades to him than the average RPG protagonist. Much like Octopath, I was surprised by how much I came to care for the 2D sprites I was walking around the land of Valandis.
What really surprised me about Echoes was its battle system. As someone who has played a lifetime’s worth of turn-based RPGs, I could tell that the makers of Echoes wanted to both respect tradition and to innovate. With that, you get the game’s Overdrive bar, a mechanic unique to the game that forces you to make more calculated decisions among your movepool. If you haven’t yet taken a dive into the game’s world and you are looking for an indie game to support, I cannot recommend it more highly.
Sea of Stars
Playstation 5. 2023
Speaking of indie RPGs, I’m happy to report that Sea of Stars managed to capture an audience when it debuted earlier this year. In my review of the game for Kotaku, I wrote lovingly about the game’s smallness, something that still sticks with me to this day. Like Echoes, Stars is a game with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and other earlier JRPGs on its mind. But while Echoes was looking for ways to complicate and innovate in terms of mechanics, Stars is happy to stand on principle and, dare I say, even pare back some mechanics in order to let the fundamentals of the genre shine.
In a world where games take hours to download and can take up hundreds of gigs of memory on a hard drive, Stars stands out for telling a small story with very few characters—only six playable ones—very well. And, like Echoes, Stars gets us to care deeply about its coterie of misfits and lands one of the year’s most emotional gut-punch sequences. Bring the tissues.
Baldur’s Gate 3
Playstation 5. 2023
On the other end of the complexity spectrum, is Baldur’s Gate 3, in which every single interaction you have with even a random person in a random building can send you on an hours-long sidequest. While Stars and Echoes rely on simplicity to tell complex stories, Gate’s motto is “more is more,” and it dazzles. Most people reading this have probably already taken a dive into the super queer and super sexy AAA title. For those who haven’t, just know that not only can you make your character any gender—including outside the binary—you can also have sex with any character, regardless of their gender. But the thing about BG3 is, once you’ve taken the initial dip, you realize the pool is much deeper and more profound than it comes off at first.
For those unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, or who have yet to warm up to turn-based RPGs, BG3 might be a bit too slow. But that slowness becomes an asset in its deft hands. This is a game where you have to slow down. Hell, even clicking on a random object too fast could cause you to end up in jail, either having to break out, pay a fine or reboot your game to get back to your last save point.
It’s hard for me to sink too many hours into a game; I usually feel myself aching for finality around the 40-hour mark. Despite having to take a few breaks here and there, I stayed with Baldur’s Gate far longer than that time frame and was glad I did; getting to the eponymous city and exploring it was far different than the roaming emphasized in the game’s first two acts. Sticking with BG3 pays off and the reward is a singular gaming experience that will stay with you for a long time (or until you start your second playthrough with a completely different race and class).
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster
Playstation 5. 2023
Spending so much time with games like Echoes and Stars, which pay tribute to the RPGs of yesteryear, and Baldur’s Gate 3, which shows off the power of modern consoles, brought an ache for contrast, which was satiated by the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, which brought the first six games in the Final Fantasy series to my Playstation 5.
Going back to play these games was a bit like learning gaming history. There are now tropes and clichés in genre gaming that exist because the first games in the Final Fantasy established them. Playing through these early games, I thought about a time before the vast world of online gaming, where people couldn’t just look up cheats and guides and walkthroughs. There was a time when it was just you and the map. Another treat, as a gamer, was to watch the games grow in complexity, in terms of story and character, as the entries in the story went on. I don’t suggest playing these because they’ll blow your mind (then again, some of them will!), but because it’ll be like participating in gamer history.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Switch. 2022
Learning gaming history doesn’t only mean diving into the most important entries in the world of video games. In a world of remasters and remakes, returning to the games that were important to us in childhood was a big theme for 2023—I mean, aren’t we all stuck in a peak cultural moment of nostalgia? With that, I downloaded and replayed some of my favourite side-scrollers from childhood, namely the arcade games featuring my favourite pizza-eating turtles.
Shredder’s Revenge brings back the arcade games we love—in fact, I need one for the X-Men Arcade Game and The Simpsons, as well—while also updating it by upping the number of characters in the roster, including April O’Neil, whose iconic yellow jumpsuit and Rachel-esque coif of hair are playable for the first time, a siren call to my queer, queer heart.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Playstation 5. 2023
I was looking to scratch my nostalgia itch when I downloaded Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. To this day, my favourite gaming system of all time is the Sega Dreamcast, and I have many fond memories of playing one of its crown jewels, Jet Grind Radio. Though we are still remakeless in that department—there was a sequel that came out for Xbox in 2002—Bomb Rush Cyberfunk acts as a sort of spiritual sequel or remake from the same studio. As with Radio, players in Cyberfunk control a skater (or biker or skateboarder) and tag random walls with graffiti as part of an ongoing turf war among rival skate teams.
At the core of Jet Grind Radio is a critique of the over-militarization of the police, as an increasingly farcical police presence attempts to curb your graffiti. In Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, as with Radio, that means having to tag police to get them off your back, while eventually having to tag homing beacons, surveillance cameras, helicopters and more. And rather than trying to update the game in terms of graphics, Cyberfunk leans into the retro styling that its predecessor was known for. And it serves the best gaming soundtrack of the year.
Super Mario RPG
Switch. 2023
It’s hard to have nostalgia for a game you’ve never played, but when I heard that Super Mario RPG was coming to Switch, I was highly excited. Despite her enduring popularity, Peach rarely gets a spotlight in the Mario series, especially outside of racing or beat-em-up games. Getting to clobber Goombas as my favourite princess was already a draw, but as I played, I was pulled into the game’s unique blend of Nintendo humour and Square Enix mechanics.
While I was attracted by what I knew about Mario, I stayed for what was new (to me, once again) in the game, including characters Mallow and Geno, a different spin on a usual Mario story and an easy-breezy RPG, in which you can be in and out of battles in mere seconds.
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