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65 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
65 reviews
Square Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy as a single-character action game with a Devil May Cry pedigree and the most ambitious set pieces the genre has ever staged, then paid for it with the party control, gear depth and build variety that used to define the series.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based sci-fi RPG that bets its entire retention strategy on writing rather than combat, and mostly wins that bet. The Weakness Break system is a genuinely good reason to play manually, right up until Quick Clear and auto-battle quietly convince you not to bother.
7.5 / 10
The first genuine successor to a beloved 1999 tactics classic in over two decades — a competent, often very good mercenary squad RPG that a vocal share of the original's veteran fanbase says simplified too much of what made Jagged Alliance 2 legendary.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's co-op scavenging horror-comedy that became one of the defining games of its era, still funny and still tense two years on — while its own reviews increasingly argue about whether the person who made it has moved on from it.
7.5 / 10
A free turn-based RPG built from world literature, run on a coin flip, updated every fortnight for three and a half years — and criticised almost exclusively by people with two hundred hours in it.
7.5 / 10
A slot machine you build synergies into, with rent due every few spins. Players credit it as the game that taught Balatro the trick — and the gap between the two is exactly what its critics complain about.
7.5 / 10
A one-person, text-first incremental about running a school of wizards that keeps almost everything on a single screen of menus, and turns dying to a boss into the moment its retirement system finally starts paying off.
7.5 / 10
A hundred-and-eighteen-hour median playtime and 92% of recent reviews positive — this is one of the best crafting RPGs anyone has made. It also sells a multiplayer mode with no story in it, and NZ$122 of small DLC on top of a NZ$70 game.
7.5 / 10
A deeply weird, deeply charming farming and creature-collector hybrid that resolves disputes with dance battles instead of combat — arriving on Steam years late and still trailing a genuinely ugly 2019 controversy that has little to do with the game itself.
7.5 / 10
An auto-battler where you never touch the character directly, animated entirely in ASCII art, and built around Stonescript — a real scripting language for programming your own companion's combat behaviour instead of just watching it fight.
7.5 / 10
Nightdive Studios' remake of the genre-defining 1994 original remains Very Positive across nearly 13,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as a remarkably faithful, lovingly crafted recreation — a fidelity that cuts both ways, as the review sample consistently describes the remake preserving the original's genuinely cryptic, maze-like navigation right alongside its atmosphere, and this review can confirm the remake's own development nearly collapsed entirely when the project ran out of money partway through.
7.5 / 10
A one-purchase incremental about drilling through an entire solar system, planet by planet, where the reward for mastering one resource is a permanent buff instead of a bigger number to stare at.
7.5 / 10
A free, open-source desktop pet with 51,500 reviews at 98.3% — 84% of them Chinese — and a cloud of malware accusations that turn out to trace back to one mundane, long-fixed bug.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based CRPG that hands you a voidship, a dynasty's fortune and the Imperium's blessing to do almost anything with both — built on a career system that turns absurd by the final act, and shipped rough enough at launch that its current, patched shape is a genuinely different game to review.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeously presented card-battler roguelike whose steep, deliberately punishing difficulty split its launch reception sharply — genre veterans defending it as fairly hard rather than broken, newer players describing runs so polarized that skill barely seems to matter.
7.5 / 10
A hands-off map simulator where you paint borders, spawn AI-controlled nations and then watch them conquer, ally, revolt and collapse across thousands of simulated years. The scenario tools and Steam Workshop are genuinely excellent; the combat resolution underneath them is close to a coin flip, and that undercuts the "simulator" the title promises.
7 / 10
An atmospheric, deliberately opaque occult-librarian sim from the Cultist Simulator team — genuinely singular writing and world-building, wrapped around a learning curve so steep and under-explained that a large share of its own reviewers describe needing external spreadsheets just to keep up.
7 / 10
A solo-developed idle aquarium game that nails the cozy, screensaver-adjacent fantasy of collecting fish, but leans so hard on one buy-raise-sell loop that its rarest rewards become a months-long grind with nothing else underneath to fall back on.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarter-backed farming sim whose "1.0" release in late 2023 shipped with main quests literally marked "work in progress" — a real, widely-documented letdown for long-time backers that the game has spent the time since quietly living down.
7 / 10
Motive Studio's remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic remains Very Positive across nearly 70,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as one of the finest remakes ever made — a reputation undercut by a real, severe, persistent Denuvo-caused stuttering problem and a mandatory always-online requirement for an entirely single-player game, both of which this review can confirm went unfixed after EA redirected developer Motive Studio to other projects roughly two months after launch, with the studio's own pitches for a sequel subsequently rejected.
7 / 10
A gorgeously styled action roguelike casting you as an overworked Death cleaning house on a rogue corporate afterlife, whose Early Access growing pains have mostly faded — leaving a more current, specific complaint about late-game difficulty spikes and level variety in their place.
7 / 10
A free-to-play multiplayer idle RPG built openly in RuneScape and Melvor Idle's image, adding a genuine social and clan layer those single-player idlers don't have — undercut by paywalled skills, expensive cosmetics, and an "idle" framing that some players say demands more constant attention than it should.
7 / 10
A lovely four-hour game about scrubbing an alien ocean clean, 98% positive, whose only real complaint was the price — and the price has since fallen 70%.
7 / 10
A pixel-art automation game that grafts Factorio-style conveyor belts onto a Forager-style hand-gathering loop. The first ten hours are genuinely charming; the back half turns into a long wait for timers to finish, and a cluster of recent reviews accuse it of bundling data collection players can't fully switch off.
7 / 10
