Browse by year
350 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
350 reviews
A solo-developed first-person survival-adventure whose launch was derailed by a viral TikTok describing a completely different game, followed by more than two years of the most aggressive, sustained performance-patching this review has seen from any single-developer release.
6 / 10
Harebrained Schemes' pulpy 1930s take on XCOM-style tactics landed Mostly Positive with players, and cost publisher Paradox Interactive a confirmed $22.8 million write-down within a week of release -- a commercial disaster that split the studio from its publisher, ended patch support, and left global achievement data showing only 8.8% of owners ever finish it.
6 / 10
A visually striking Lovecraftian metroidvania about diving into murder victims' dying memories, undercut at launch by clunky controls and poor optimisation the developer never fully resolved before formally announcing, in a farewell post nearly two years later, that support had ended for good.
6 / 10
A Bronze Age Total War entry that launched to accusations of being an overpriced Troy reskin — then did something this library rarely gets to report: Creative Assembly publicly apologised, cut the price from $59.99 to $39.99, and issued partial refunds to every existing buyer.
6 / 10
A single-player idle fantasy RPG about climbing an endless tower with an auto-fighting hero, undercut for years by one specific, unresolved launch bug that still locks some players' computers up on startup — and now winding down as its developer moves on to a successor.
6 / 10
A sci-fi roguelite built around a genuinely inventive parallel-universe fusion mechanic, praised for its art and animation, undercut by controls a large share of reviewers describe as unresponsive and floaty next to genre benchmark Dead Cells, plus real progression-blocking bugs that outlasted the patch meant to fix them.
6 / 10
An emotionally resonant underwater narrative adventure about grief and isolation, sold to many buyers expecting a Subnautica-style survival game and undercut for keyboard-and-mouse players by controls the game itself warns you to avoid.
6 / 10
A free Steam idle game about vacuuming dust into oblivion that a large share of its own audience openly calls a copy of Leaf Blower Revolution — and, three-plus years into Early Access, still hasn't shipped the 1.0 its own roadmap once promised for this year.
6 / 10
A stylish, Sega Saturn-inspired action platformer marketed as a metroidvania, built around Devil May Cry-style combo combat — praised for its distinctive art and satisfying movement, and criticized by a substantial share of reviewers for a genre label its actual level structure doesn't deliver on, plus real, specific combat encounter design complaints.
6 / 10
Reviewed the same day as its predecessor, this sequel draws a genuinely different complaint than the original — rather than being measured against Advance Wars for tactical depth, Wargroove 2's dominant criticism is excessive, often unskippable dialogue and exposition, alongside a specific features trade several longtime fans see as a net loss.
6 / 10
A charming, well-liked Vampire Survivors-style roguelite whose marketing promises explicit content it doesn't deliver — and whose main menu has carried a completely non-functional "Extra" button since launch, still unrepaired three years and one bug-fix patch later.
6 / 10
A stylish co-op survival roguelite about wizards who shoot rather than cast, widely described at launch as feeling rushed and early-access-like — and, as of June 2024, permanently frozen in that state after developer Galvanic Games officially disbanded.
6 / 10
A US$2.99 solo-dev idle collectathon — Pokemon's capture loop grafted onto a Forager-style island economy — that Steam's own review corpus calls "Mixed" for reasons that are mostly about launch-week polish, not the underlying design, from a developer who patched hard for five months and then quietly moved on to other projects.
5.8 / 10
A visually striking underwater city-builder whose post-apocalyptic survival premise promises real struggle, but whose actual build-research-wait loop draws consistent, specific comparisons to a much easier Anno — pretty to look at, reviewers say, with too little game underneath.
5.5 / 10
A cosy casino management game whose own defenders say critics judged it by the wrong yardstick — it was never trying to be SimCasino, and the reviewers who wanted a hardcore tycoon sim with real failure states were always going to be disappointed by a game built to be impossible to lose.
5.5 / 10
A solo developer's xianxia sect-leader idle RPG that keeps a real slice of its audience playing for a thousand-plus hours, undercut by a Mixed reception built almost entirely around detailed reviewers calling it a near-identical reskin of the developer's own earlier game, Weapon Shop Fantasy.
5.5 / 10
A neon cyberspace tower-defense roguelite from Clockwork Origins, released September 2023 with co-op and versus multiplayer, card-draft upgrades and weekly challenges, undercut by a design that gives you exactly one tower to defend with and no say over the maze around it.
5.5 / 10
A stylish roguelite spin-off of the beloved Dungeon of the Endless that split its own fanbase over how far it strayed from the original, undercut further by a co-op design where only the host earns progression and a detailed, highly-upvoted account of the game's DRM and telemetry connections.
5.5 / 10
A zombie-survivors auto-shooter that bolts a permadeath mercenary camp onto the Vampire Survivors formula, then largely stopped receiving new content the year after it left Early Access. The base-building risk-reward loop is genuinely distinct; the 330-achievement grind underneath it is not.
5.5 / 10
A visually striking open-world action RPG whose parkour-and-magic traversal genuinely splits opinion between reviewers who call it a highlight and those who find it repetitive, but whose dominant, heavily-corroborated complaints — quippy, widely mocked dialogue and poor launch performance — proved severe enough that Square Enix dissolved developer Luminous Productions into itself barely three months after release.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed vocational simulator that genuinely delivers for the specific, passionate niche audience who wanted exactly this — real trucks, real destruction physics, compacting trash until it's gone — undercut by a near-universal complaint that there's simply nothing else to the game once that novelty wears off.
5.5 / 10
A small solo-developer idle RPG built around an unusual, deterministic combat system where attacks never miss, set in a dark, revenge-themed take on Brazilian folklore — genuinely liked by a tiny, dedicated audience, though its story mode remains explicitly unfinished and the game has gone without a content update for years.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developed turn-based Roman gladiator management game with a genuinely satisfying opening hook — training novices into champions — that exited Early Access into what its own reviewers describe as a thin final state, with no further updates in over three years since.
5.5 / 10
A dark fantasy colony strategy game steeped in Slavic folklore, praised for its art, voice acting and Darkest Dungeon-style sanity management even by players who can't recommend it. The mechanics underneath rarely earn the same trust, and day-one paid DLC on top of a NZ$61.99 base game became the review corpus's loudest single complaint.
5.5 / 10
