Browse by year
350 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
350 reviews
A beautifully produced samurai-fantasy deckbuilder whose own fans keep filing the same game-hardlocking bug report years apart — the developer's last news post dates to January 2024, and reviewers are still describing identical crashes into 2026.
5 / 10
The conclusion to Compile Heart's dark-fairytale dungeon-crawling JRPG trilogy, praised by franchise fans for genuinely engaging blood-driven combat and a satisfying story payoff — badly undermined by a visibly inferior Switch-based PC port with washed-out visuals, a save-breaking audio bug, and a Steam events page confirming zero post-launch support of any kind.
5 / 10
A roguelike deckbuilder with a genuinely clever hook — you choose which enemy attack hits you — trapped inside a game that left Early Access unfinished in February 2023 and hasn't been updated since.
5 / 10
A pixel-art idle clicker built around a genuine hook — a hardcore mode that permanently wipes your progress on death — undercut at launch by bug reports and price complaints that have since given way to a calmer, more forgiving Mixed reception.
5 / 10
A NZ$2.99 click-to-build island tycoon with no ads and no in-app purchases, whose entire Steam review history — five reviews, four positive — was written inside five weeks of its November 2023 launch and hasn't gained a single new one since.
5 / 10
A well-liked sci-fi gacha shooter with unusually generous pull rates is in the middle of a live revolt after a content-moderation pass altered or removed material a large number of players had already paid for, with no compensation offered.
5 / 10
A Japanese doujin-scene idle game about looping rail carts around a base to gather materials and craft your way through dungeons, built on genuine long-term content but undermined by having no offline progression at all.
5 / 10
A genuinely underused setting — WWI trench horror — with real atmosphere and sound design, undercut by a short, thin "collect the items while a monster hunts you" loop and a cluster of real performance bugs, despite years of continued developer support.
5 / 10
A Secret of Mana homage so direct that both its critics and its fans reach for the same comparison unprompted — undercut by a self-inflicted design choice that locks its headline co-op feature behind three hours of solo play, well past Steam's own refund window.
5 / 10
A free-to-play survival MMORPG whose zombie-apocalypse crafting loop has a genuine, deeply invested fanbase, undercut by a barely-adapted mobile interface and a monetisation structure reviewers document in granular, specific detail — including a viral account of a single player spending over $2,000.
5 / 10
A cheap, no-frills automated-combat idle RPG from a developer who has released more than a dozen very similar games — genuinely relaxing for players who just want numbers to climb, undercut by a total lack of offline progress and a review base too thin and too non-English to lean on with confidence.
4.8 / 10
A US$5.99 Chinese cultivation-themed idle RPG whose own official English screenshot shows equipment names left as untranslated pinyin, whose single biggest review-corpus complaint is that the developer vanished for 17 months, and whose store description of the companion system turns out to be a garbled machine translation of a real, unsettling mechanic.
4.6 / 10
A janky, confusing Chinese indie horror game that's become a genuine cult favourite for co-op streaming with friends, undercut by real translation and puzzle-design problems reviewers say make it genuinely difficult to finish without outside guides.
4.6 / 10
A physics-based burger-flipping game built entirely around one mouse-controlled hand, with no way to rebind, retune, or replace that control scheme — which is also the single thing its own Steam reviews argue about most.
4.5 / 10
Afil Games' budget arena survivor puts a gladiator through waves of beasts and rivals with seven selectable weapons and stack-your-own-build upgrades. It's cheap and the hook works for a while, but a defense-stacking exploit, a stuck small window and a three-year-old broken achievement drag it down.
4.5 / 10
A cozy witch-farming RPG with a genuinely charming premise and a devoted minority of fans who pushed through to a satisfying story — undercut by a well-documented, largely unaddressed pile of bugs, broken quest logic and design gaps, and a public record confirming the developer effectively stopped supporting the game within three months of launch.
4.5 / 10
A small, old-school 2D RPG about the last of an elite knightly order, judged here almost entirely by two dueling player accounts — one calling it nicely balanced, the other calling its combat boring and unrewarding — because that is the entire public record nearly three years on.
4.5 / 10
A genuinely liked first-person prisoner-and-guard escape sim, undone for most buyers by a single, dominant problem its own most-upvoted review states in six words — nobody is playing it — a complaint that persisted for over a year despite the developer's own repeated attempts to fix it.
4.5 / 10
A notorious launch disaster from Arkane Austin — broken performance, an empty open world and weak AI drove a lifetime score that never recovered — but a genuine, well-documented arc followed: Microsoft closed the studio in May 2024, shipped a "parting gift" final patch as it did, and recent sentiment has risen meaningfully as the price dropped and expectations reset, even as a new complaint emerges that the game is now effectively unsupported.
4.5 / 10
A free, solo-developed bullet-heaven in the Vampire Survivors mould whose reviewers consistently describe a workable, even promising foundation buried under genuinely broken balance, unfixed bugs, and a support window that closed roughly two months after launch and never reopened.
4.5 / 10
A VR-only zombie survival RPG whose own marketing promises an open world in the vein of DayZ, but whose reviewers consistently describe something closer to a linear, fetch-quest-heavy arcade shooter with zombies that spawn out of bare ground.
4.5 / 10
A js13k 2023 dungeon crawler where every move and spell is cast by freehand-drawing one of six symbols, classified by a tiny neural network shipped inside the 13KB build itself — a genuinely inventive mechanic that works cleanly with a mouse but could not be made to register a single gesture under real mobile-browser touch emulation in extensive testing.
4.3 / 10
A small puzzle-crafting shop-management game that has received zero Steam reviews, zero configured achievements, and no public update in over three and a half years — this review is built honestly from the store's own description and screenshots, since there is no player testimony to draw from at all.
4 / 10
A 2D old-school RPG about a chosen "Maiden" fighting off invaders, openly modeled on a pair of older budget RPGs and stripped of the achievements and trading cards those originals had — read here through two one-line player reviews that flatly disagree about whether the game is even playable.
4 / 10
