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219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
219 reviews
Frozenbyte's fifth fantasy co-op puzzle-platformer is, by wide agreement, its most gorgeous entry -- and its most persistently broken in the mode the series is built around. Steam has it at Very Positive, but a third of its English-language negative reviews, spanning three full years, describe co-op desyncs, lost progression and crashes that were never fixed.
7 / 10
A solo developer's nearly two-year passion project, a procedurally-generated first-person voxel mining and exploration game with light AI-uprising narrative, released for NZ$1.49 in June 2023 with a perfect, if very small, positive review record.
7 / 10
A retro pixel-art shooter whose sound design and lore fidelity draw ecstatic praise, set against a specific, achievement-verified finding — echoed by the game's own top-voted review — that only around one in ten buyers ever finishes it, corroborating a real structural complaint about locked-arena repetition and mapless backtracking.
7 / 10
A character-based co-op action RPG that launched into Early Access on 17 August 2023 to what reviewers called one of the worst MMO launches in gaming history — hour-long server queues, a punitive premium-currency cash shop — then, after its original publisher's games division shut down months later, was rebuilt by its developer into a one-time purchase with microtransactions removed entirely.
7 / 10
A decade-refined mobile hit about reading a rival's mood in a pizza order — charming, funny, and still selling the same diamonds it sold on your phone.
6.7 / 10
Read review of Good Pizza, Great Pizza - Cooking Simulator Game
A genuinely novel deckbuilding RPG that fuses poker hands with fantasy ability cards, wrapped in lush, fully-voiced presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, but close to half of its negative reviews single out the same confusing interface, and a quarter raise the poker system's luck swings as a real fairness complaint rather than a taste issue.
6.5 / 10
A hand-drawn, ambitiously huge metroidvania set in a ruined fantasy world -- reviewers are close to unanimous that the art is gorgeous, but well over half the negative reviews sampled for this piece raise the same specific complaint: a map so large and under-signposted that players spend hours lost rather than exploring.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed text RPG whose entire world — every location, enemy, item, crafting recipe and combat outcome — is generated live by an LLM rather than authored in advance. Very Positive across its Steam review history, but the negative sample converges overwhelmingly on one thing: the AI itself, arbitrary and occasionally incoherent, sitting between the player and every choice they try to make.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$4.79 satirical idle clicker that spent two and a half years as "Install-Fee Tycoon," a beloved parody of the 2023 Unity pricing controversy, before a June 2026 rebrand retargeted its wit at the AI industry — a pivot its own Steam disclosure describes with a wink ("we used Claude Code to help us with... the code, bro"), and which a vocal but small minority of longtime fans call a betrayal of the original joke.
6.5 / 10
A fully-voiced, deliberately shock-comedy visual novel sequel about a chaotic late-2000s American high school, overwhelmingly beloved by its target audience — and, since September 2024, shadowed by a disputed public controversy over its creator's past conduct that a meaningful minority of reviewers now cite as their reason for stepping back.
6.5 / 10
A generation-ship RPG from the Age of Decadence developers, offering genuinely outstanding writing and consequential choices aboard a decaying vessel bound for Proxima Centauri — hobbled by combat and skill systems a large share of its own fans find genuinely frustrating.
6.5 / 10
A gorgeously painted, nostalgic coming-of-age story whose watercolour art draws near-universal praise, undercut by a consistent and specific complaint — echoed even by its fans — that the interactivity underneath is shallow, clunky and short enough that many players never see it through.
6.5 / 10
A turn-based dungeon crawler from the Rivals of Aether universe whose art, music and writing draw near-universal praise, while its central dice-drafting combat system is the subject of a genuine, ongoing argument between reviewers who find real strategic depth in it and those who describe the same mechanic as a tedious, exploitable stalemate generator.
6.5 / 10
A dwarf-themed idle mining sim that spent the better part of two years in Early Access before its July 2024 1.0 launch, built around floor management, cloneable dwarves and a slow climb toward daylight.
6.5 / 10
A mining-and-combat idle RPG, the follow-up to the popular browser game Haste-Miner 2, still running fresh monthly contests more than three years after launch — despite a prestige system some 2023-2024 reviewers say breaks the entire economy the moment you use it.
6.5 / 10
A handsome Edo-era Holy Grail War from Koei Tecmo and Type-Moon whose biggest problem is its own marketing — buyers expecting a full musou battler from "the king of musou games" instead found a visual-novel-heavy story with occasional single-arena fights, playable as only one protagonist throughout.
6.5 / 10
A NZ$2.24 fantasy settlement-builder that most players finish in an afternoon, and does the rare thing of treating that as a feature rather than a flaw — the ending achievement clears more than half the playerbase, an almost unheard-of completion rate for the genre.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed clicker built entirely around torque and gear ratios instead of the usual number-go-up currency, whose biggest complaint — confusing, under-explained mechanics — the developer was still actively rebalancing as recently as June 2026.
6.5 / 10
A souls-like that launched broken and clawed its way to "Mostly Positive" through two years of relentless post-launch support — only to reopen the wound in 2026 by bolting on kernel-level anti-cheat that a fresh wave of reviewers say they can no longer trust.
6.5 / 10
The best-designed digital card game in years, attached to an acquisition economy where the complaint isn't that you can pay to win — it's that you can't reliably pay to get the card you want at all.
6.5 / 10
A post-apocalyptic tactical RPG from Mutant Year Zero's creators whose art and atmosphere draw near-universal praise, undercut by a genuinely contested balance debate — cover that one reviewer tracked failing 396 times in 432 attempts, ability cooldowns that don't reset between fights, and a design its own most-upvoted defenders feel compelled to argue for.
6.5 / 10
A satisfying first-island crafting loop that thins out badly afterwards — 93% positive lifetime, 80% across its last hundred reviews, and a free prologue that some players think is better designed than the paid game.
6.5 / 10
A free-to-play cozy MMO that survived its own studio nearly collapsing under it — Singularity 6 laid off around 40% of its staff across 2023 and 2024 before Daybreak Game Company bought the studio outright, and the game that emerged is still being patched roughly every three to four weeks in 2026. What it hasn't fixed is a monetisation model that increasingly charges real money to actually use rewards you already earned by playing.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely fun physics-based brawler undermined by an offline/local-play promise the developer confirmed it never intended to keep, gacha-style loot mechanics in a paid game, and a regional split so sharp English reviews sit at 89% positive while Simplified Chinese sits at 67%.
6.5 / 10
