Browse by year
350 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
350 reviews
A charming, tightly designed card-battler with a genuinely novel single-axis spaceship positioning system, whose own most-upvoted reviews — positive and negative alike — converge on the same honest complaint: not quite enough content or variety to sustain long-term mastery.
7.5 / 10
Red Hook rebuilt Darkest Dungeon as a roguelite road trip instead of a long campaign, and three years later the review corpus still splits almost exactly down that line — not a launch controversy that faded, but a genre identity change some fans never made peace with.
7.5 / 10
Two expansions and a dozen seasons after launch, Diablo IV has fixed the thing that nearly sank it — its loot — and built a genuinely enormous endgame on top. What it hasn't fixed is how much it now costs, in money and in relearning, to stay current with it.
7.5 / 10
A short, gorgeously animated swashbuckler action game starring a Three Musketeers-esque heroine, praised almost universally for its environmental combat and personality-filled presentation — held back by a divisive late-game mechanic, enemy repetition, and a short runtime some reviewers feel doesn't match its price.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based Mars colony-builder its own fans call "the game I've been looking for for decades" — SimCity and Theme Hospital without the real-time pressure — divided by a card-draw terraforming system some players find satisfyingly puzzle-like and others call too random to plan around.
7.5 / 10
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
An RPG Maker shop-management RPG about defeating capitalism by mastering it, praised as one of the best games the engine has ever produced — undercut by a persistent lack of basic quest and map tools that a genuine, years-long stream of patches never fully solved.
7.5 / 10
A medieval-themed tile-placement puzzle game where seven different structures score gold by seven entirely different rules that interact and sometimes conflict, drawing genuine comparisons to Carcassonne and Dorfromantik — a short, cheap, cleverly designed package with a few rough edges in its controls and its more random Adventure mode.
7.5 / 10
An open-world wuxia RPG spiritual successor to the beloved 1996 cult classic Heroes of Jin Yong, praised for genuinely deep freedom, customization and a sprawling martial-arts sandbox — hit at launch by a real, developer-acknowledged community/AI-assisted English translation that dominated negative reviews, and worked on continuously across more than three years of patches since.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, best-in-class open-world recreation of the wizarding world undercut by combat and side content a large share of critical reviewers call repetitive and shallow — and, since early 2025, a wave of high-vote negative reviews over a new privacy policy and EULA that reviewers say arrived with a modding update and made opting out of data sharing nearly impossible.
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
A solo-developed dungeon-crawling RPG about a captured human building trust within a monster camp, praised for real crafting depth and heartfelt writing — its genuine launch-era friction (dark caves, a weak AI companion, punishing softlocks) has been directly and repeatedly addressed across one of the longest, most actively sustained patch cycles this lane has documented.
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 serene climbing adventure whose art, sound and central mechanic draw near-unanimous praise, undercut by a consistent complaint — voiced even inside its own top positive review — that a three-to-six hour runtime and static, letter-based storytelling ask a lot for the price, with barely a third of players ever reaching the ending.
7.5 / 10
A grid-based dungeon crawler built as a direct, loving homage to 90s Might & Magic and Wizardry, rated Very Positive by a small but near-unanimous review base that mostly agrees on one thing — it's an improved version of its own predecessor rather than a bold step forward.
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 six-month side story that began life as DLC for Infinite Wealth and still plays like one in places, following Kazuma Kiryu through his faked-death years under the alias Joryu. The brawling and the finale land; the padding in between and a price tag built for a longer game are the recurring complaints from its own audience.
7.5 / 10
Read review of Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
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 dark fantasy first-person dungeon crawler openly modeled on From Software's King's Field and Shadow Tower games, praised for filling a genre niche almost nobody else makes anymore — held back by combat reviewers call mediocre, some genuinely obtuse late-game secrets, and a launch-week controversy the developer addressed personally and directly.
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 solo-developed medieval trading sim built around a genuinely novel idea — the game never tells you what anything is worth, forcing players to learn value through experience and haggling across 20 markets and hundreds of individually-modeled traders — undercut by a years-long, still-unresolved memory leak that has cost players real progress.
7.5 / 10
A Monument Valley-inspired isometric puzzler for js13k 2023 — drag golden objects with telekinesis and walk Merlin the wizard along a hand-drawn SVG castle to solve chess-piece- inspired puzzles — ranked 2nd out of the entire 2023 field, with real, developer-acknowledged rough edges on mobile that this review takes as seriously as the praise.
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
