Mad Games Tycoon 2
A deep, one-time-purchase game-development tycoon that over 2,300 English reviewers rate more highly than its own predecessor — as long as you're happy solving its systems rather than expressing yourself through them.
8 / 10
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Games released in 2023
219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
Browse the reviews
219 reviews
(the) Gnorp Apologue
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
Thirsty Suitors
A surreal breakup-simulator that mashes turn-based RPG combat, skateboarding and competitive cooking into one story about confronting your exes and your family — Very Positive at 97.2% across 248 reviews, with a tiny but sharply consistent negative sample naming the same two soft spots, clunky skating and combat that turns repetitive, against writing and art almost nobody disputes.
8 / 10
Unnamed Space Idle
A solo developer's sci-fi idle game with over ten interlocking systems and players who have logged thousands of hours apiece. The reception is Very Positive, and the one recurring complaint is that late-game progress stops rewarding curiosity and starts demanding one correct answer.
8 / 10
Viewfinder
A puzzle game built around one genuinely brilliant idea — photographs you place in the world become the world, letting you reshape reality by swapping what a picture shows for what's actually there — undercut by a runtime and a script that its own fans agree don't live up to the mechanic carrying them.
8 / 10
Wartales
Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.
8 / 10
Astral Ascent
A Hades-and-Dead-Cells-flavoured roguelite metroidvania whose art, combat feel and hub writing draw strong praise for its opening hours, with a consistent, specific counter-argument that its meta-progression grows passive rather than build-defining once the difficulty ramps up.
7.5 / 10
Backpack Hero
Backpack Hero turns the inventory screen itself into the entire combat system — item shape, orientation and neighbouring slots decide what a fight looks like, not a separate stats page. A look at whether that idea, and the game built around it, survived the jump from a free browser prototype to a finished commercial release the developer has since gone quiet on.
7.5 / 10
Barotrauma
A submarine survival-horror sim where the alien monsters outside are rarely the reason a run ends badly — its own review corpus is unusually consistent that the biggest threat is the crew, whether through griefing, incompetence, or seven years of accumulated engine jank.
7.5 / 10
Bramble: The Mountain King
A Nordic dark-fairytale adventure whose art, music and folklore draw close to unanimous praise — repeated inside its own top positive review, which admits to hand cramps from "tedious" trial-and-error platforming — while Steam's own data shows nearly half of buyers still see it through to the end.
7.5 / 10
Cobalt Core
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
Darkest Dungeon II
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
Diablo IV
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
Farlanders
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
Final Fantasy XVI
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
Hogwarts Legacy
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
Honkai: Star Rail
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
Jagged Alliance 3
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
Jusant
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
Legends of Amberland II: The Song of Trees
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
Lethal Company
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
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
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
Limbus Company
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
Luck be a Landlord
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