HomeFeatures
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Page1of5Next page
Page1of5
Page1of5
Next page
At last, every door on theRPS Advent Calendarhas been ripped open, leaving nothing but foil wrapper remnants, and the odd pixel crumb of the digital delights once contained within them. But that doesn’t festivities are over! Like a Boxing Day bubble and squeak, we’ve gathered together all of our favourite games of the year once again, this time in one handy location. If you’ve been following along with our Advent goings-on, you’ll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2023, but just in case you missed them, here’s the list in full. Enjoy!
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings
Of course, there were still loads of games we loved individually that didn’t make it into our Advent Calendar Game Of The Year list, but worry not. Our personalRPS Selection Boxesare returning for 2023, celebrating even more games we loved over the last 12 months. So make sure you tuck into those as well, which we’ll be publishing every day for the rest of the holidays. For now, though, welcome to our 24 Game Of The Year picks for 2023.
24. Remnant II
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
Ed: Former RPS vidbud Liam and I used to work together a fair bit. We put out longform vids forInventory Space, chatted about duds likeRedfalland triumphs like, errr,Sonic Frontiers, and sent each other memes of questionable quality. It was a heady time! In an effort to keep in contact since he bid the Treehouse adieu, we’ve played a good amount of co-op shooterRemnant 2together. And we are absolutely smitten with it.
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
That’s not to say Liam and I haven’t encountered some wild guns on our adventures, as Remnant 2 does theDark Soulsthing where you can cash in a boss’s gloopy material for a some form of gloopy special weapon. Liam’s got a ghostly rifle wrapped in fingers that lets him go invisible for a bit and go berserk with rapid fire, while my fave is a block of stone that zaps baddies with jets of electricity.
And the bosses! Damn are they inventive. We’ve tangoed with a selection of giant sentient cubes in a series of narrow corridors, where winning wasn’t about chunking down a health bar but learning routes to avoid a crushing. Another had us descend a winding staircase where we needed to avoid going too fast or too slowly through a deadly laser field. The boss wasn’t so much an enemy, but a nerve-shredder of a scenario.
Sure, Remnant 2 isn’t without its flaws. Namely, it’s a bit unclear at times and we’ve missed a whole bunch of unlockable classes and guns because no-one was like, “Hey pal, you might want to check over here”. But the game’s so good at leveraging its strengths - being a banger of a co-op shooter that takes you to some deadly places - that it’s a struggle to log off. In the midst of lots of 120-hour monsters, Remnant 2 is a pleasant surprise.
23. The Making Of Karateka
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Digital Eclipse
Jeremy:The gaming industry is rubbish at chronicling its own history. Hundreds of yesteryear’s big box games are impossible to play on modern machines unless you’re a retro computer collector or have a hankering for emulation. And even if you’ve got a Commodore 64 lying around or are an old hand at DOSBox, the faces and stories behind ancient games are lost to history more often than not.
Enter Digital Eclipse’sThe Making Of Karateka, which wasn’t just one of the best “games” I played this year, but ranks up there on my list of the most important electronic experiences ever. I write “game” in quotes, since this is more of an interactive digital museum archiving the genesis of Jordan Mechner’s seminal 1984 Apple II masterwork. When I say museum, I mean it - every aspect ofKarateka’s creation is lovingly encapsulated, from the rotoscoping techniques that Jordan used to capture the movements of his karate teacher to plans for an aborted sequel that never manifested, but eventually evolved into Prince of Persia.
Every flavour of Karateka you’d want is present and accounted for, from the oldies to a remaster that you might actually be able to complete with one life. |Image credit:Digital Eclipse
Lest I forget, perhaps the best part of this package is its inclusion of multiple playable versions of Karateka, from unpolished betas to the Apple II release to the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 ports. Digital Eclipse were even thorough enough to include Deathbounce and Jordan’s homebrew hack of Asteroids, two unpublished projects that preceded Karateka and directly led to its creation. If that weren’t enough, both Deathbounce and Karateka receive impressive remastered versions, with the former transforming into a slick twin-stick shooter and the latter into a shiny cinematic platformer, with sakura blossoms falling all across the first level. In a nice ode to correcting the lack of representation of the ’80s, Karateka’s remaster features an Asian protagonist on its revised box art, transforming the extremely white and blond hero of the original game (who we now know was designed to look like Luke Skywalker, according to design documents included within) into an ethnicity more suited to an ancient Japanese setting.
If you care about games history and preservation, you owe it to yourself to give The Making Of Karateka a whirl. Projects like this need to be supported, and Digital Eclipse’s efforts represent a watershed moment for an industry that is often too busy chasing the next graphical enhancement to worry about writing down its past. I can only hope that the Gold Master Series continues for many more entries and truly becomes the Criterion Collection of video games. What’s next - The Making OfKing’s Quest?UltimaV?Flashback? The possibilities are endless, and I eagerly await them with bated breath.
22. Neyasnoe
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/sad3d, ИЛЬЯМАЗО
Alice0:It’s your big night out! Hit up a bar, drink, dance, chat with friends and strangers, steal drinks, smoke, take drugs, get your blood pressure taken, scoff a kebab, visit a book shop, catch plague from petting giant rats seething in crumbling apartments, get your cybernetic implants checked at a back-alley clinic, drink, smoke, visit a gallery, drink, chat, travel to other districts, drink, smoke, eavesdrop on existential conversations, and pet rats. What a night! You’ve seen so much! Been so many places! Found so many curiosities as you poked about! Talked with so many people! Drank so much! Smoked so much! Danced so much! So why does your life feel so empty?
It’s a first-person explorer set around sections of a grim post-Soviety city. All you strictly need do is find the point which will progress you to the next neighbourhood, the next level. But what’s the hurry, what are you doing in your life that’s so important? Take your time and explore. Like in It’s Winter, it’s not immediately clear what sort of game it is, what sort of world, nor what you can do here. Follow this surreal winding tunnel which bores through a building and you might find a strange underground waiting room with devices you don’t understand. What’s in this rooftop? Can I help these strangers at all? Are the consequences to stealing this? Who even am I? Will you ever find out the purpose of your three stats, Loneliness, Corporeality, and Reflexion? It feels full of secrets and mysteries even after completing it twice, an illusion so delightful that I don’t want answers lest I discover quite how flimsy it is.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/sad3d, ИЛЬЯМАЗО
It’s not a cheery game. It’s exciting to explore as a player but everywhere feels tired and desperate for our character. While much could be set any time in the past 30 years, others show it’s actually the future. It’s an unchanging grimness. Some characters have hope or plans to change their lives and find something better, to leave the city, but I don’t feel that for myself as I steal drinks and stumble around the dancefloor, a lack of hope I try to temporarily drown with hedonistic routine. I understand some folks don’t want to touch anything coming out of Russia these days but Neyasnoe does at least not feel remotely glorying.
Also, Neyasnoe has a feature I want in every game: auto-dancing. If you’ve had a drink and walk onto the dancefloor, you automatically start pulling shapes, waving your arms wildly as you wobble around. Lovely stuff. It has some of the most alarmingly authentic first-person drunkness too, really nailing that feeling of lurching inertia. Pretty game, too.
21. Cocoon
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Annapurna Interactive
I’ve heard some puzzleheads haven’t clicked with it because it’s not complicated enough, which is fair! But I don’t think that’s what the game sets out to do. Yes, it wants to prod and tickle your brain a bit, but I’d say it’s more like a massage. As you roll over the metallic knots of the world with your marbles, it presents you with interesting little problems and, crucially, a sense you’re undoing the wrongs of some corrupted, godlike insects. Unfurling the world is the real treat.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Annapurna Interactive
And as you unfurl, the patter of your insect lad’s feet and the plop of your marbles provide a soothing accompaniment to relative silence. What this means is when the synth soundtrack kicks in, it elevates whatever you’re uncovering or about to uncover. Again, even little snippets of a tune or the odd jingle can help push you towards a new discovery.
If you’re a fan of insects, not a fan of puzzles, or like both things, I’d urge you to give Cocoon a go. It’ll add some nice relaxing energy to your Christmas.
Alice Bee:Cocoon is one of those games that’s quite hard to explain, because conceptually it has a bunch of layers to it, but in the course of playing it you can hold those layers in your head like tissue paper and understand them all. It starts to get confusing if you think too hard about it. It’s like looking at a magic eye picture, if a magic eye picture contained more magic eye pictures, and also there’s a nice beetle.
20. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
Image credit:Devolver Digital
In Deconstructeam’s sumptuous, adventurousvisual novel, you’re an exiled seer, Fortuna, who is bodging together her very own custom deck of Tarot cards with the assistance of a menacing, yet surprisingly likeable (indeed, sort of romanceable) Behemoth. Over 10 hours or so, you resize and mash together props and backdrops using an MS Paint-style editor, unlocking sets of pre-written associations in response. You then use these cards to scry the futures of the other witches – old friends, old rivals and a smattering of new faces - who come to visit your lonely asteroid refuge. In the course of performing each reading, you play cards in response to each character’s questions and so, steer the plot, without ever setting foot outside your astral home.
There’s also, of course, a tension between what the developers tell you the cards mean, and what you intended as their creator within the game. Part of the fun is this feeling of amicable disagreement with Deconstructeam over the correct analysis of, say, a card depicting a host of angels with trumpets sticking out of their bottoms. (Yes, that’s one of mine.)
Image credit:Devolver Digital
Page1of5Next page
Page1of5
Page1of5
Next page
