Lex Luddy's Self-Indulgent 2023 GOTY List | Winter Spectacular 2023
I’m not really sure how to start this piece. I’ve spent the last month editing pieces from people across the industry for this Winter Spectacular, and most of them have taken the time to acknowledge just how rough a year it has been. Thousands of layoffs across the industry, a media infrastructure that feels like it's teetering on the brink of collapse, companies posting record profits while cancelling projects and shuttering studios, award shows that seem to have little interest in the art or the people that make it – It’s all left bad.
I’ve stewed in this grim news all year, be it working at TheGamer or guesting on Game Mess Mornings on Giant Bomb. And now, as I enter my fifth year of doing this and have more contacts and connections across the industry than ever before, I’ve never been so acutely aware of how fragile this ecosystem is and how primed it is for disaster. That’s why it feels selfish to say this has been a huge year for me. I’ve written in print for the first time, held a full-time position at a website, appeared on shows and features on my favourite games website of all time, interviewed cool people, and now, I’m here writing the ultimate self-indulgence piece. A Game of Year List. It doesn’t feel right.
It has not been helped that this year has been a profoundly rocky year for me in ways I can’t really get into. While I’ve been able to live a life I thought impossible just a few years ago, there is still so much that just isn’t there yet. I still struggle. I’m still waiting for gender-affirming care. I have to watch those around me struggle and be a support when I only just learned how to stand on my own. I’m still angry. I’m still tired.
It’s pretty clear why talking about games I liked seems frivolous, but honestly, I need this this year. There were times in my life not too long ago when I could hardly sit down for an hour to just relax. This year, I finished at least 20-odd games. It has been the first year in a long, long, long time I have enjoyed the hobby, and as a result, I’ve found a lot more meaning in what I did play. So here are my games of 2023. I fuckin’ needed them this year.
10. Final Fantasy XVI
This space felt like the triple-A toss-up spot. It was between FFXVI, Spider-Man 2, and Star Wars: Jedi - Survivor. And while I was shocked by how well realised the characters of Jedi - Survivor were, and Spider-Man 2 was the perfect open-world turn-my-brain-off game, I have to give the spot to messy, problematic, flawed FFXVI.
Final Fantasy XVI is a game with problems, big ones that are easy to notice and articulate. Its depictions of women are disempowering and frustrating, its side quests feel like the worst fetch-quests straight from the MMO the devs worked on for so many years, its story sets up a world of political intrigue for the first ten hours, only to scrap it for some Kingdom Hearts style fight-god-learn-the-true-meaning-of-friendship, and it’s at least 10 hours too long.
But all that said, I really loved playing this game. Maybe these issues being so clear actually helped. Since I could explain my problems rather than just say “Something here doesn’t feel right”, I could then look past them and dig out the parts of the game I really loved. For the most part, that meant latching onto the damn fine combat, the quieter character moments, and the genuinely staggering scale of some of the set pieces.
That and Ben Starr… Fuck, that man is unfairly talented, handsome and, seemingly, nice as hell.
9. Persona 5 Tactica
I went into Tactica with pretty tempered expectations. After all, I had fallen off the last Persona 5 spin-off, Strikers, pretty hard when I realised about 20 hours in, “Ooooooh, this is like a Musou game for, like… another 25 hours. No thank you.” So I am pretty shocked just how much I like this game. Maybe it’s the comfort of returning to these characters for (hopefully) one last time as they, like me, start to think about life after education, or maybe it was that this game drops all pretences and pretty much screams from the rooftops how political it is.
Either way, this is some of the Persona 5 stuff Atlus has done and is right up there with the Persona 5 Royal additions. It’s also probably the best-paced Persona 5 game. Instead of spending several hours of in-game time prepping for Palaces, only to then have to fight through what can feel like never-ending dungeons when you do enter Momentos, P5T’s story and structure allows you to bop between short visual novel sections and surprisingly in-depth strategy combat that never overstays its welcome.
It’s worth also shouting out that the DLC is a really solid one-shot adventure with some fun mechanical twists on the game and two of the series’ best characters getting to interact for the first time – but it definitely should have been included in the base game.
8. Resident Evil 4
It’s wild how Capcom has refound its footing in the last six years. It’s hard to remember now, but around the release of the PS4 and Xbox One, there were constant rumours and murmurings of the company being bought or merging with a platform holder or publisher. Capcom released three Lost Planets, and it never felt like they knew what that series was meant to be; Dragon’s Dogma was incredible and sold approximately 32 copies worldwide; Resident Evil was lost in a woods of its own lore and obligation to bombast; Street Fighter 4 sold less with each re-release – and it wasn’t like Street Fighter X Tekken helped the narrative; the publisher even released a damn Sour Patch Kids Game, tried to reboot Strider and Dark Stalkers, and Remember Me is a thing that exists now.
All that time, though, it really felt like Monster Hunter’s presence on the 3DS was a thing keeping the company independent right up until the launch of Monster Hunter: World, and since then, it has been banger after banger coming out of Capsule Computers. With games like Devil May Cry 5, Resident 7, the RE2 remake, and Monster Hunter Rise, Capcom feels like it has direction again. But even with all that, it was hard not to feel hesitant about the idea of an RE4 remake. Based purely off of how many people heap praise upon that original release, how many times Capcom themselves have re-released the original, and the near mythos that has built up around that game and its history and impact, it just felt like this was going to be an exercise in mass disappointment.
Somehow though, some-fucking-how, Capcom tweaked, tuned, modernised, and improved RE4 in all the right ways while still holding onto its schlocky charm and camp tone. It feels like everything that could ever be said about RE4 has already been said over the years, and yet, here we are, talking about it all over again.
7. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom
Welcome to “I Didn’t Finish It Block”. I fucking loved both of these next two games but I just can’t put them higher having not seen credits.
Breath of the Wild is maybe the most important game of all time to me. Not because it's one of the best games of all time or anything, but because of when I played it – in a child and adolescent mental health in-patient ward on my own for hours. Just… wandering… being free… Not being sick.
I don’t think I can ever bring myself to go back to BotW. Despite my love for it, it would hurt too much. That’s why Tears of The Kingdom was so important for me on my journey. Finally, I can put Breath of The Wild behind me. There is a new world to explore, a bigger, more open one that stretches from sky plateaus to seemingly endless caverns. A world of freedom full of possibilities thanks to Link’s new ways of interacting with everything around him. Link has moved on, and so have I.
6. Baldur’s Gate 3
BG3 did something quite remarkable. It got me to play D&D. Freed from the restrictions of syncing up schedules and finding anyone that could DM, Baldur’s Gate 3 does a ridiculous job at yes-and-ing any idea you have. It's rare for a game to feature one or maybe even two characters that get absorbed into wider gaming zeitgeist and fandom. BG3 has no less than a dozen characters that have their own fanbases and already feel timeless.
It might be rough around the edges, but its endless acclaim seems testament to the fact that a game doesn’t have to be perfect to be your favourite. Sometimes things break, and parts aren’t perfect, but hell, if these flawed characters have taught us anything, it's that some things are more important.
5. El Paso, Elsewhere
El Paso, Elsewhere is about broken people, broken people who hurt, and hate each other, who love and scare each other. What starts out as an over-the-top, supernatural send-up of Max Payne quickly turns into something that I’ll be thinking about for years to come.
James Savage, for all of his monster slaying, shotgun touting, barely coherent monologues, ultimately isn’t that way because he’s a hero. It’s because he’s a victim. A game that could have coasted on nostalgia, vibes, and the occasional rap number is, instead, one of the most thoughtful depictions of abusive relationships and scars they leave forever on the abused – and even on the abuser.
4. Hi-Fi Rush
Hi-Fi is a damn delight, you guys. It's hard to overstate how badly I need its bluesky optimism and gang of loveable losers at the start of this year. Chai, Korsica, Peppermint, 808, CNMN, and Macaron were a group of idiots I could count on for a few days during a very isolating start to 2023.
The rhythm-stylish-action gameplay is obviously fantastic, and the music is killer. But the moments where Hi-Fi is at its best is when it highlights what these characters can do when they work together. The use of licensed music helps elevate these moments by adding a punch to them that makes them hard to forget. The Invaders Must Die break in to Vandelay technologies, The Perfect Drug final boss fight, and the pick of the litter, The Joy Formible’s already epic Whirring building over the course of a 15-minute long sequence where each character gets a moment to shine and prove their worth all does so much work to hit home the importance of Chai’s new found-family. And I am just a sucker for it all.
And hell, they even made a fucking Zwan song fun and cool… IN 2023… FUCKING ZWAN!
3. Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
I played a lot of Ryu Ga Gotoku games in the last 14 or so months. Judgment, Lost Judgment, Like A Dragon Ishin!, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 3, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6 (not to mention returning to Yakuza Like A Dragon for guiding at work), and finally at the tail end of this year Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. That’s a lot of Yakuza, and you’d be forgiven for thinking I grew tired of this series, often defined by its iterative design, but nope. Even when playing the worst games in the series (*cough* 3, 4, and the Saejima chapter of 5 *cough*) there was always something fulfilling to find, be it small side character interactions or absurdly comedic moments.
Whether it be following labyrinthine plot threads, feeling out the boundaries of each game's slightly different beat-em-up combat, or engaging with any of the countless substories and mini-games, it always felt like I was living in the world. It's somewhat surprising that after all that, one of my favourite games from this series now is Gaiden, a game that seeks to deconstruct the Yakuza franchise from top to bottom. While the mainline games have ventured forth into a new turn-based era, Gaiden looks back one last time to really break down what it means to be a Yakuza game, and more importantly, to ask “Just who is Kiryu?”?
It might have a shorter runtime than other games in the series, but in that time, it drills down into Kiryu’s emotional turmoil, years after he had already become something of an unfaltering demi-god. For the first time, we get to see Kiryu unable to fix things, and it's breaking him. He’s jaded and cold in a way we’ve rarely seen before. It’s a game built on hundreds of hours of gameplay, countless friends and enemies, and the mythos of a man with no place left in the world anymore. It’s not the best place to jump in. January’s Infinite Wealth looks to be a better starting position. However, Gaidenis a game that couldn’t exist without two decades of character building and gameplay refinement, and it's a richly rewarding experience for those who have immersed themselves in this man’s life for all those years.
2. Alan Wake II
I really don’t think I have too many more words left to describe my love for Alan Wake II. It is just profoundly encouraging that such a singular, weird, and stunning game can be brought into reality by a team of dedicated creators, working together for 13 years to create a piece of art.
Alan Wake II feels like it's from another dimension. We don’t get games like this. We hardly get movies, or books, or weird internet community wikis for made-up shit like this. It feels like a game tailor-made for me and weirdos that like weird shit that I like. I truly love that it exists.
1. A Space For The Unbound
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a trend in my own GOTY lists. My game of the year is never the *best* game I played that year, sometimes it's not necessarily my *favourite*, it is, however, always the one I can’t stop thinking about.
Hardly a day has gone by since I reviewed A Space For The Unbound that I haven’t thought about the game, myself, and Raya and Nirmala. I gave it four out of five stars at my old job. I regret that. I should have fought to give it five out of five.
To really explain why A Space For The Unbound means so much to me, I’d have to spoil the whole game and go into some emotional depths I really don’t have the energy for at the end of this year. However, what I will say is this. Very rarely can any words do service to the feeling of loneliness we feel in our worst moments. That emptiness is so hard to describe. A Space For The Unbound captures that, and what’s more, it captures how when you feel like that it paints your view of the world, those around you, and everything you do in a way that only ever ends in more pain.
It shows just how hard and arduous it is to fight back from that sort of depth of despair, and how even when you have someone fighting right by your side, you can feel like the loneliest girl in the universe. But it also shows that you can fight back, and fight back, and fight back, and eventually, you can do things you thought impossible. You can stop living with the sole intention of thinking about and regretting the past, and instead, live for the days ahead full of more impossible things that you’ll do.
It might take a long, long time, but it's never too late to start living, and A Space For The Unbound knows that.
