Magic Research
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
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Games released in 2023
219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
Browse the reviews
219 reviews
My Time at Sandrock
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
Ooblets
A deeply weird, deeply charming farming and creature-collector hybrid that resolves disputes with dance battles instead of combat — arriving on Steam years late and still trailing a genuinely ugly 2019 controversy that has little to do with the game itself.
7.5 / 10
Planet of Lana
A visually stunning sci-fi puzzle-platformer that draws the same LIMBO and INSIDE comparisons its critics use against it, praised almost unanimously for its art and music while a large, specific share of its own reviewers argue the puzzles never move past their opening ideas.
7.5 / 10
Star Ocean The Second Story R
A faithful, HD-2D remake of the 1998 fan-favourite that reviewers rate Very Positive and trending upward two years on, built around genuinely praised character writing and a deep private-action system, dragged down by companion AI complaints, an always-online requirement and a handful of specific, documented localisation changes from the Japanese original.
7.5 / 10
Star Wars Jedi Survivor
A well-regarded continuation of Cal Kestis's story that launched as one of the most notoriously broken PC ports of 2023 — sentiment has genuinely recovered since (recent reviews run well ahead of the lifetime score), but performance and crashes remain the single most common complaint in this outlet's sample even three years later.
7.5 / 10
Stone Story RPG
An auto-battler where you never touch the character directly, animated entirely in ASCII art, and built around Stonescript — a real scripting language for programming your own companion's combat behaviour instead of just watching it fight.
7.5 / 10
System Shock
Nightdive Studios' remake of the genre-defining 1994 original remains Very Positive across nearly 13,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as a remarkably faithful, lovingly crafted recreation — a fidelity that cuts both ways, as the review sample consistently describes the remake preserving the original's genuinely cryptic, maze-like navigation right alongside its atmosphere, and this review can confirm the remake's own development nearly collapsed entirely when the project ran out of money partway through.
7.5 / 10
The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak
A soft-reboot entry point into Nihon Falcom's long-running Trails series, praised by newcomers and veterans alike for its new protagonist and combat, with a genuine, well-documented localisation dispute — multiple independent reviewers report English subtitles diverging from the original Japanese dialogue — that this review reports factually rather than adjudicates.
7.5 / 10
Read review of The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak
The Talos Principle 2
A gorgeous, ambitious philosophical puzzle sequel that expands everything the original did, which a large and vocal share of veteran fans argue is exactly the problem — bigger worlds, more dialogue and easier puzzles than the tight, focused original they loved.
7.5 / 10
To The Core
A one-purchase incremental about drilling through an entire solar system, planet by planet, where the reward for mastering one resource is a permanent buff instead of a bigger number to stare at.
7.5 / 10
Venba
A deeply personal, one-to-two-hour narrative cooking game about a Tamil family immigrating to Canada, whose story draws exceptional, culturally specific praise even from critics who otherwise dock it hard for a runtime and cooking mechanic reviewers consistently argue don't match its original asking price.
7.5 / 10
VPet-Simulator
A free, open-source desktop pet with 51,500 reviews at 98.3% — 84% of them Chinese — and a cloud of malware accusations that turn out to trace back to one mundane, long-fixed bug.
7.5 / 10
Wandering Sword
A debut game from a small Chinese studio brings authentic wuxia storytelling -- the genre of Jin Yong's martial-arts novels -- to a gorgeous 2D pixel-art RPG, and Steam's audience has responded overwhelmingly. The praise is earned, but a persistent, years-unresolved UI and localisation problem and real pacing complaints keep it short of a flawless recommendation.
7.5 / 10
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
A turn-based CRPG that hands you a voidship, a dynasty's fortune and the Imperium's blessing to do almost anything with both — built on a career system that turns absurd by the final act, and shipped rough enough at launch that its current, patched shape is a genuinely different game to review.
7.5 / 10
Wildfrost
A gorgeously presented card-battler roguelike whose steep, deliberately punishing difficulty split its launch reception sharply — genre veterans defending it as fairly hard rather than broken, newer players describing runs so polarized that skill barely seems to matter.
7.5 / 10
WitchSpring R
A remade PC version of KIWIWALKS' beloved mobile witch-training RPG series, drawing genuine "game of the year" praise from longtime fans — alongside a smaller but specific, multiply corroborated concern about how the game frames its magically-aged young protagonist.
7.5 / 10
Age of Wonders 4
A fantasy 4X that reviewers call one of the genre's best for its faction-building system — sitting under a DLC schedule so relentless that "Age of DLC" has become the negative-review corpus's own nickname for it.
7 / 10
Ages of Conflict: World War Simulator
A hands-off map simulator where you paint borders, spawn AI-controlled nations and then watch them conquer, ally, revolt and collapse across thousands of simulated years. The scenario tools and Steam Workshop are genuinely excellent; the combat resolution underneath them is close to a coin flip, and that undercuts the "simulator" the title promises.
7 / 10
Aliens: Dark Descent
A tense, genuinely acclaimed stealth-RTS squad tactics game in the Alien universe, undermined by a specific campaign-blocking bug that reviewers report as unfixed from launch in 2023 all the way through 2026, capable of destroying 40-plus hours of progress with no warning.
7 / 10
Assassin's Creed Mirage
A smaller-scoped "return to form" for the series whose Steam launch was marred by a severe Ubisoft Connect authentication error, but whose more durable complaint is that the game itself feels generic and forgettable relative to the franchise's high points — sentiment has since recovered meaningfully as launch-specific issues faded.
7 / 10
Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles
A roguelike deckbuilder that swaps cards for dice and damage/block for a dual Purification/Corruption system -- gorgeous, genuinely inventive, and Very Positive on Steam, but close to half its negative reviews cite overwhelming complexity and a similar share cite dice variance that several reviewers call unfair rather than merely risky.
7 / 10
Atomic Heart
A "Soviet BioShock" action RPG whose art direction and alternate-history setting draw close to universal praise, wrapped around combat and pacing reviewers describe as repetitive, a divisive talking-glove companion, and a real, documented controversy over its Russian developer's funding ties that this review reports rather than adjudicates.
7 / 10
Blasphemous 2
A competent, well-liked dark-fantasy metroidvania sequel whose own fans argue it's a step down from the original in atmosphere and platforming, undercut further by a game-corrupting boss softlock that reviewers report as unfixed years after a patch was supposed to address it.
7 / 10