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47 games released in 2013 and reviewed here, best first.
47 reviews
A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.
9 / 10
A subscription MMORPG where one character can learn every job in the game, and where the story you're required to sit through before reaching the current patch has grown into a decade-plus commitment. Reviewed with Dawntrail current and patch 7.55 freshly out.
8.5 / 10
A 2007 client kept alive by its players since 2013 — every update to Old School RuneScape has to survive a supermajority vote, and that single rule shapes everything else about how the game feels seventeen years on.
8.5 / 10
Grinding Gear Games' original 2013 action RPG is still running, still free, and still adding a full seasonal league every few months — a genre-defining build sandbox that never bothered making itself easy to learn, now sharing a studio and a wallet with its own sequel.
8.5 / 10
Twelve years into Early Access, the isometric zombie survival sandbox just shipped its biggest update ever and got multiplayer back. The skill grind is still the best in the genre; the menus are still the reason half the people who buy it never see it.
8.3 / 10
A minimalist text-based incremental that spends its first act pretending to be nothing at all, then quietly reveals it was building a survival story out of firewood, huts and silence the whole time.
8 / 10
A landmark, endlessly moddable military sandbox still going strong 13 years on — now facing a fresh, well-documented 2026 backlash after Bohemia Interactive introduced a monthly subscription pass for a game whose community has spent over a decade keeping it alive largely on its own.
8 / 10
The foundational CRPG that gave Baldur's Gate 3 its name, still Very Positive and broadly beloved a quarter-century later — undercut by a genuinely disastrous April 2016 patch that broke the UI and multiplayer, and an unforgiving, famously brutal opening stretch this review verified with hard data rather than reviewer exaggeration.
8 / 10
The game that accidentally invented the incremental genre in an evening, still actively updated thirteen years later — and still the yardstick every idle game gets measured against, for better and for worse.
8 / 10
Every hero free, nothing purchasable that affects a match, thirteen years of updates, and a median recent reviewer with 1,078 hours logged. It is also one of the least welcoming games ever made, and that is not an accident of tone — it's the cost of the depth.
8 / 10
A polished isometric traffic-light management game that placed 2nd in js13kGames 2013's Mobile category — a one-line viewport fix was needed to unlock it, but once applied, a tap precisely toggles the exact light under a finger, with a visible confirmation highlight.
8 / 10
A free-to-play space-ninja shooter that has been adding systems since 2013 without ever taking one away. Genuinely one of the most generous live-service games on the market, and one of the hardest to explain to a friend. Reviewed with Jade Shadows: Constellations current.
8 / 10
A polished twin-stick-style arena shooter built for js13k 2013 - move with WASD/arrows, aim and fire with the mouse - confirmed working correctly via real movement and a visible fired projectile trail, and correctly shipped desktop-only since the control scheme is keyboard-plus-mouse throughout.
7.9 / 10
A voxel zombie survival game built entirely around a scheduled siege that arrives on a known clock and gets worse every time. Eleven years in Early Access ended in July 2024 — the core loop is still one of the smartest in the genre, but the years show in how it looks, runs and argues with its own community about what it used to be.
7.5 / 10
Alexander Bruce's solo-developed, seven-years-in-the-making puzzle game builds an entire first-person world on non-Euclidean geometry and broken expectations — reviewers describe it in strikingly unusual terms, some insisting it must be played despite admitting it often isn't conventionally fun, while a specific, recurring accessibility warning about motion sickness deserves equal weight.
7.5 / 10
Irrational Games' 2013 spiritual successor to BioShock trades Rapture for the floating city of Columbia, delivering a story reviewers still call unforgettable more than a decade on — while a genuinely huge, well-documented reviewer backlash targets a mandatory third-party launcher 2K added years after release, a real anti-consumer controversy this review takes seriously rather than dismisses.
7.5 / 10
A free ASCII-art browser game that opens on a candy counter and nothing else, then spends the next several hours quietly revealing a full RPG underneath — one of the genre's founding tricks, and still one of the hardest to pull off honestly.
7.5 / 10
An ambitious, mostly-complete open-source Civilization-style 4X built on jQuery and Snap.svg — build cities, research technology, and manage diplomacy on a hex grid — with touch-native controls confirmed to advance real game state, though several menu features (Save, Load, Help, Settings) are unfinished stubs.
7.5 / 10
A free Flash RPG turned expanded commercial release, praised consistently for a flexible skill-point character system and genuine humor that outweighs its openly acknowledged low-budget presentation — and unusually, its own fans keep telling newcomers to try the free version first.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, exquisitely designed 2D platformer widely regarded as a genre high point — increasingly overshadowed on Steam by a mandatory Ubisoft Connect requirement that reviewers describe wiping progress, blocking launches, and making one achievement outright impossible after Ubisoft took down its servers.
7.5 / 10
The game that invented the thing every roguelite now does — you die, your heir inherits, and the upgrades stay. Thirteen years later its founding criticism is still the genre's central argument, and its own sequel does it better.
7.5 / 10
Jagex's other MMO — the modernised main game running alongside Old School RuneScape on the same account — trades 2007's frozen ruleset for ability combat, twenty-nine skills and a microtransaction history it spent 2026 trying to walk back.
7.5 / 10
Klei Entertainment's Gothic-whimsical wilderness survival game, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 33,000 reviews for its distinctive art style and uncompromising crafting-survival loop — undercut by a notoriously steep, under-explained learning curve, permadeath that can erase dozens of hours to a single mistake, and a persistent complaint that content development has shifted almost entirely to its multiplayer spin-off.
7 / 10
A loving, chapter-structured homage to classic Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, bundling Book I and its sequel Book II together — reviewers consistently praise the humor and nostalgic execution, while independently converging on the same specific finding that the included sequel is the weaker of the two games.
7 / 10
