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219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
219 reviews
An atmospheric, deliberately opaque occult-librarian sim from the Cultist Simulator team — genuinely singular writing and world-building, wrapped around a learning curve so steep and under-explained that a large share of its own reviewers describe needing external spreadsheets just to keep up.
7 / 10
A solo-developed idle aquarium game that nails the cozy, screensaver-adjacent fantasy of collecting fish, but leans so hard on one buy-raise-sell loop that its rarest rewards become a months-long grind with nothing else underneath to fall back on.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Kickstarter-backed farming sim whose "1.0" release in late 2023 shipped with main quests literally marked "work in progress" — a real, widely-documented letdown for long-time backers that the game has spent the time since quietly living down.
7 / 10
Motive Studio's remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic remains Very Positive across nearly 70,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as one of the finest remakes ever made — a reputation undercut by a real, severe, persistent Denuvo-caused stuttering problem and a mandatory always-online requirement for an entirely single-player game, both of which this review can confirm went unfixed after EA redirected developer Motive Studio to other projects roughly two months after launch, with the studio's own pitches for a sequel subsequently rejected.
7 / 10
A beloved hybrid of Vampire Survivors, Diablo-style gearing and Hades-style god powers, still in Early Access nearly three years after launch — with even its most loyal fans now openly asking whether it will ever actually finish.
7 / 10
A NZ$5.99 idle RPG that dresses an 11-skill crafting-and-progression system up as a joke about spinning a fidget spinner impossibly fast, from a solo developer who patched constantly through Early Access and then went almost completely silent after the September 2023 1.0 launch.
7 / 10
A racing sim whose lifetime Mixed badge is largely a launch fossil — six years of development produced physics and handling reviewers call the best in series history, wrapped around a thin, buggy content package at launch that two-plus years of sustained weekly updates have genuinely turned around, with recent sentiment running well ahead of the storefront number.
7 / 10
A cyberpunk parkour-slasher sequel whose core movement and combat still land for many players, set against a real, substantive split between fans who call it a masterful upgrade and veterans of the original who argue new open-world sections, a stamina meter and unskippable dialogue traded away exactly what made the first game tight.
7 / 10
A genuinely inventive mashup of Brotato-style horde combat and Backpack Hero-style inventory Tetris, widely praised as one of the more distinctive bullet-heavens around — dogged by a support history that swung from apparent abandonment to a "We Hear You" comeback and console ports within the same year.
7 / 10
A noir-western action-platformer whose fluid movement and art draw strong, consistent praise — reviewers compare its platforming favourably to Celeste — undercut by a title weapon gimmick that a large share of players say never gets used in genuinely interesting ways, and a story that leans heavily on narrative weight it hasn't earned.
7 / 10
A gorgeously styled action roguelike casting you as an overworked Death cleaning house on a rogue corporate afterlife, whose Early Access growing pains have mostly faded — leaving a more current, specific complaint about late-game difficulty spikes and level variety in their place.
7 / 10
A free-to-play multiplayer idle RPG built openly in RuneScape and Melvor Idle's image, adding a genuine social and clan layer those single-player idlers don't have — undercut by paywalled skills, expensive cosmetics, and an "idle" framing that some players say demands more constant attention than it should.
7 / 10
One of gaming's most notorious commercial flops of 2023 — an independently verified $125 million budget, half the studio laid off within months, EA later handing 100% of net revenue to the developer — sits at a genuinely solid 72% positive on Steam, with reviewers criticising clichéd dialogue and poor optimisation while frequently defending the combat and expressing real sympathy for a game whose commercial failure outpaced its actual reception.
7 / 10
A cosy, genuinely inventive horror-comedy about running a 1980s late-night radio show while a killer stalks your callers, undercut by minimal gameplay some reviewers call closer to a visual novel — and by a VR version that was marked for Steam before launch and never arrived.
7 / 10
A lovely four-hour game about scrubbing an alien ocean clean, 98% positive, whose only real complaint was the price — and the price has since fallen 70%.
7 / 10
A pixel-art automation game that grafts Factorio-style conveyor belts onto a Forager-style hand-gathering loop. The first ten hours are genuinely charming; the back half turns into a long wait for timers to finish, and a cluster of recent reviews accuse it of bundling data collection players can't fully switch off.
7 / 10
A Mostly Negative badge on one of the best-designed shooters ever made — and the single most-upvoted criticism of it, at 21,456 votes, has been edited by its own author to say most of it no longer applies.
7 / 10
A co-op heist shooter whose Mixed lifetime badge is a fossil of one of the decade's worst launches — always-online even solo, missing basic menu options, paid DLC sold mid-disaster — set against a genuinely verified three-year recovery that has its most recent reviews running 78% positive on the back of monthly updates and a peer-to-peer overhaul.
7 / 10
A gorgeous voxel-art fairytale action RPG, the finale of Cococucumber's Voxel Trilogy, originally launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass in 2023 and now available on Steam as an enhanced "Legendary Edition" with reworked combat and bosses.
7 / 10
A "Dark Souls but with guns" sequel widely loved for its procedurally varied worlds and co-op — undercut at launch by a performance controversy specific to its era, with reviewers treating "built with DLSS in mind" as corporate cover for skipped optimisation.
7 / 10
A real-time idle town-builder that deliberately explains almost nothing, and genuinely keeps growing while the game is closed — the rare idle game its own biggest fans call "the anti-idle game," at the cost of a sizeable share of players who never work out what to do.
7 / 10
Capcom's genre-redefining fighting game remains Very Positive across nearly 78,000 Steam reviews, widely credited with the best netcode and most accessible entry point the series has ever offered — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent, mathematically verifiable complaint that its premium currency is deliberately priced so purchases never divide evenly, a pattern independently described in near-identical terms by reviewers spanning tens to well over a thousand hours.
7 / 10
A genuinely inventive "reverse city builder" about restoring wastelands to life, praised almost universally for its concept and art, undercut from launch by a length-and-price complaint even its fans echo, and more recently by a major free content update that split longtime players over how "chill" the game is supposed to feel.
7 / 10
A stylish witch-fantasy narrative game whose tarot-deck-crafting hook and Deconstructeam pedigree draw strong praise, undercut by a widely repeated complaint that the story pivots midway into a management sim many reviewers found tonally jarring, and that the marketed branching choices resolve into little more than two endings decided by one mid-game question.
7 / 10
