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350 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
350 reviews
A cartoonish demon-slaying roguelite that earns genuinely enthusiastic praise from the small handful of players who found it, undercut by a Steam news feed that shows exactly two patches — both in launch week — in the nearly three years since, for a game still asking full Early Access price.
6 / 10
A solo-developed factory-and-idle hybrid that grafts a miniature Factorio-style belt economy onto a prestige loop, released in July 2023 with roughly five stated hours of content and an open-source codebase.
6 / 10
A cheap, unabashedly Legend of Mir-flavoured idle RPG from solo Chinese developer okyakusama, built around a three-class autobattling party, an enormous rebirth ladder, and a near-total absence of real-money spending.
6 / 10
A free Vampire Survivors-style bullet heaven starring a shrine-maiden mascot, landing Mostly Positive on genuinely fun core combat — undercut by a rough Early Access start, a divisive late-2024 overhaul, and a wave of reviews confused by store tags that don't match what actually ships through Steam.
6 / 10
A gorgeous Viking village-building colony sim praised for its presentation and satisfying core loop — held back by clunky, poorly-explained mechanics, at least one persistent progression-halting bug, and a genuinely serious complaint that the game shipped its full 1.0 release without any defined ending or endgame goal.
6 / 10
A ground-up Unreal Engine 5 remake bundling both original Layers of Fear games, their DLC and new connective content into one package — whose own returning fans keep saying the same thing, backed by a real, measurable gap: the 2016 original still holds Very Positive 88.4% on Steam against this remake's Mostly Positive 79.0%.
6 / 10
A small-team medieval fantasy survival-crafting sim, still in Early Access years after launching as Survival Craft, whose multi-profession depth and steady patching have won a genuinely enthusiastic core following despite persistent complaints about onboarding, combat and a punishing death mechanic.
6 / 10
A cheap, atmospheric suspense visual novel set in a fictionalized, decaying Japan that lands Very Positive on its mystery and voice acting — complicated by a live, unresolved dispute in its own reviews over whether its art is undisclosed AI-generated work.
6 / 10
A small-team passion project built around a "cute mares" premise, combining a choice- driven visual novel with a point-and-click adventure and light RPG systems — beloved by a devoted niche fanbase for its charm and self-aware humor, held back by genuinely bare-bones production values that a sustained, multi-year stream of free content has only partially addressed.
6 / 10
A trap-dungeon builder-versus-raider game whose own fans and critics converge on the same diagnosis — a reward structure that pays only for kills, not fun, flooded the community with unbeatable "killbox" levels — and whose support appears to have wound down roughly a year ago after a real, multi-season run.
6 / 10
A real-time Mystery Dungeon-style ARPG whose signature "Living Dungeon" gimmick — walls and floor tiles that shift and spawn as you explore — is criticized by a wide range of reviewers as an annoyance rather than the dynamic challenge it was designed to be, while a separately-added endless endgame mode gives dedicated players real, if narrow, depth.
6 / 10
A cheap, small-scale Korean co-op roguelite about scavenging zombie-overrun regions by day and defending a hideout by night -- Mostly Positive from a modest audience, genuinely fun with friends according to most who tried it, but held back by real, repeated multiplayer bugs and no public matchmaking to find them with.
6 / 10
A short, RPG Maker-built Japanese folklore action RPG starring a shapeshifting nine- tailed fox spirit, beloved by a small, devoted fanbase for its character writing and art — undercut by real technical rough edges, easily-missed key story beats, and a specific softlock design flaw that this review's research confirms was never patched.
6 / 10
MDickie's 3D remake of his own School Days recycles the Wrestling Empire combat engine into a chaotic school-life sandbox -- genuinely funny for the built-in fanbase, but saddled with camera and control complaints that have gone unfixed since launch, and a recent trust problem over undisclosed AI-generated content.
6 / 10
A charming, Evil Genius-styled boot camp management sim whose base-building and art direction win consistent praise, dogged from launch through three years of updates by the same complaint — reviewers keep calling it a "waiting simulator" with too little strategy underneath.
6 / 10
A gorgeous, fan-service-heavy turn-based JRPG that repeatedly draws the same reaction from its own most devoted audience — "I really wanted to like this" — before describing combat so easy it can be won by mashing one button, and pacing padded with backtracking through the same small areas.
6 / 10
A NZ$7.39 idle tower-roguelite whose developer sold a $1.99 DLC for basic stat tracking, apologised and moved the information into the base game the same day the backlash hit — but whose most detailed, veteran-idle-genre critics argue the 2024 expansion buried the genre's core promise under RNG-gated progression and a zone-pushing "noob trap."
6 / 10
A cheap, 40-minute jump-scare walking simulator from a solo Russian horror developer whose public history with Steam's refund policy gives this specific, short, achievement-friendly format real, verifiable context beyond the game itself.
6 / 10
A tiny-scale survival-crafting game about insect-sized humans fending off giant bugs, frequently compared to Grounded — with a persistent, three-year-long complaint that even its official 1.0 release still plays like unfinished Early Access.
6 / 10
A cheap, stamina-driven bullet-heaven roguelite that earns real credit for refusing to auto-attack like its Vampire Survivors-style peers, undercut by a recurring, independently-repeated complaint that its upgrade grind asks for far more time than it gives back.
6 / 10
A stamina-combat action RPG whose opening third earns real praise for weapon variety, environmental art and a genuinely rewarding weapon-mastery skill system, undercut by a back two-thirds that reviewers say recycles enemies and thins out content, corroborated by Steam's own data showing barely one in eight buyers ever finishes it.
6 / 10
A farming sim with classes, magic and dragons, sold for twelve dollars with a hundred and seventy-four dollars of DLC behind it. Its recent reviews have collapsed to 74% — and most of them aren't about the farming.
6 / 10
A Waterworld-flavoured survival crafting game still in Early Access, whose real fun core loop is undercut by genuine base-corrupting bugs and security concerns — and whose "abandoned by the developer" complaints, common in 2025 reviews, are directly contradicted by an active, multiple-updates-per-week patch history running right up to this review.
6 / 10
A genuinely unique premise — a disgraced writer who literally dives into books to steal fictional items — undercut by combat reviewers call unnecessary filler and dialogue choices that a striking number say don't meaningfully change anything.
6 / 10
