As we get into the final hours of the year, it’s time to reveal our overall Game of the Year 2023 winner!
We’ve run through a dozen categories up to this point, looking at solo and multiplayer, and graphics and audio, breaking down each of the main platforms, and picking out our highlights in each. Naturally a few games have risen to the top, featuring heavily in multiple categories, and they’ve obviously been front runners when considering our overall Game of the Year 2023 award.
We’re highlighting the top three, as usual, but let’s rip the plaster off and reveal our winner…
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the culmination of over a decade of growth by Larian Studios. Starting with Divinity: Original Sin, the studio stepped back to a classic cRPG style of gaming, and established the genre’s appeal thanks to a Kickstarter funding drive. That was immediately the studio’s highest-rated game to date, only to outdo themselves a few years later with Divinity: Original Sin 2. Having proven themselves, Larian secured the license for the Baldur’s Gate name, reviving the classic RPG series and embracing the latest Dungeons & Dragons rules for the game’s core.
But Larian weren’t content to simply switch RPG rulebooks, embarking on one of the most ambitious CRPG projects possible. The game engine was seriously enhanced to allow for a much more flexible camera, delightfully detailed environments and characters, the studio worked for years with a team of actors to have all of the characters not only voiced, but motion captured as well, and the story might always follow the same main path but has so many possibilities within that for yourself and companion characters to always create a personal feeling experience.
Baldur’s Gate 3 also gets about as close to the traditional tabletop D&D experience as is possible, leaning into the kinds of shenanigans that players love to get up to. There’s plenty of things to interact with, there’s plenty of options available to you in a given scenario, and then there’s the chance and risk inherent in actions being determined by the roll of a die. That’s both when exploring the world and in combat, where players were quick to realise that yes, the game really will let you just fling enemies off ledges.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise how good this game ended up being, given the game’s path through Early Access on PC for the last three years, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is our Game of the Year 2023.
Alan Wake 2 – Runner Up
Good things come to those who wait, and Alan Wake fans have certainly had to wait a good long while for a sequel. Remedy Entertainment were forced to take the winding road before they were able to tell the next chapter in Alan’s story, but when they got the opportunity to do so, they absolutely nailed it.
Shifting gears from the action of the Xbox 360 original to a survival horror game really suits the continuing adventure, as Alan battles through the horrors of the Dark Place to try and claw his way back out to freedom. Meanwhile, there’s the weirdness of the real world with FBI profiler Saga Anderson investigating a string of ritualistic murders that wouldn’t be out of place in a prestige TV series. There’s common ground between the two for gameplay, but an individualistic spin on the puzzling, as Saga enters her mind palace and uses her intuition, while Alan holds power over the world by rewriting it around him.
TV is obviously a massive inspiration here, as Remedy invoke Twin Peaks throughout the setting of Bright Falls on the one hand, while playing with horror techniques and disorientating visual effects that blend in live action video, overlaid images and more.
All in all, Alan Wake 2 is a phenomenal accomplishment, and a worthy runner up for Game of the Year.
Hi-Fi Rush – Runner Up
Hi-Fi Rush was a game that nobody was expecting, announced and released by Tango Gameworks on the same day, all the way back in January. That, and the way that Microsoft puts all their first party games straight onto Game Pass, meant that this game had boundless capacity to surprise and delight.
And delight it did. On the visual side of things, Hi-Fi Rush nails the look and feel of a Saturday morning cartoon, and leans into its hero’s uniquely musical abilities throughout. With an MP3 player embedded in a prosthetic arm’s power core, Chai now sees and feels music throughout the whole world, the mixture of licensed and original music making so much of the environments move and pulse to the beat. That then feeds into the gameplay, which mixes Devil May Cry with Patapon as you try to unleash combos in time to the music to gain extra damage.
Hi-Fi Rush is one of the real standouts of the year, and well worth playing.
Honourable Mentions (in alphabetical order)
That’s our Game of the Year wrapped up, but what about you? What was your personal GOTY 2023?
