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219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
219 reviews
The Phantom Thieves trade the Metaverse for a grid-based tactics spin-off, carrying over Baton Pass and weakness-exploiting combat into cover-based skirmishes. Sharp presentation and a near-unanimously praised soundtrack sit on top of a short campaign that most of its own reviewers say is priced for a much longer game.
6.5 / 10
A tense, tactically excellent SWAT shooter whose lifetime score is still recovering from a massive, well-documented 2025 review-bomb after the developer retroactively censored the PC version to match a new console release — recent sentiment suggests the wound is healing, but slowly.
6.5 / 10
A dark-fantasy SRPG that plays like Fire Emblem's positioning and team-attack system taken further, whose combat and soundtrack draw real praise from committed players — while a launch price its own reviewers called unjustifiable still shadows the game even after patches and a permanent, deep discount.
6.5 / 10
A faithful, genuinely loved power-fantasy shooter that nails what fans wanted from a RoboCop game, undermined by a chronic crash-and-corrupted-save problem that hasn't faded with age the way launch bugs usually do, compounded by publisher Nacon's real 2026 insolvency filing.
6.5 / 10
The clearest case in this library of a Steam score that has become a historical document — a Mixed badge earned in 2023 sitting on top of a game that, three years and a flight update later, its current players mostly recommend.
6.5 / 10
A taskbar-dwelling pixel-pet companion app from solo developer Ascalon Games, released free in May 2023, later moved to a one-time NZ$4.49 purchase with Steam Workshop support for custom pets added in January 2025.
6.5 / 10
A visually faithful Tolkien survival-crafting game whose negative sample is dominated by a genuine promise-versus-delivery gap — the store page promises resettling and restoring a thriving dwarven kingdom, but reviewers describe a mostly solitary escape through repetitive, procedurally generated tunnels that nobody ever comes to actually live in.
6.5 / 10
A free seasonal ARPG that borrows the Torchlight name and little of its soul, built instead around a genuinely deep hero-trait talent system, gacha pets that quietly cross the line the developer said it wouldn't cross, and a trade market that taxes you on the way out.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed idle clicker about breaking open an endless supply of chests, with five branching skill trees and a rarity-tiered treasure log underneath the numbers. Genuinely deep for its price and free of any monetisation tricks, undercut by a save-loss bug that keeps costing long-term players their progress three years after launch.
6.5 / 10
A fantasy hero-collector that grafts real tower-defense strategy onto the gacha RPG formula, praised for genuinely spectacular presentation and a free-to-play track reviewers call unusually generous for the genre, while gacha odds stay undisclosed and top-tier purchases climb to NZ$160-plus a pop.
6.5 / 10
A frozen-apocalypse city-builder that plays fair for the first month and then quietly hands the server to whoever's alliance has the deepest wallets — the honest question isn't whether it's generous early on, it's where that generosity actually stops.
6.5 / 10
A genuinely inventive Monster Hunter rival, launched at a premium price in a state so broken that its own launch-week reviews accused EA of "buy now, patch later" — and, seven months on, EA reportedly considered ending support altogether, a story Steam's own aggregated press coverage keeps returning to years later.
6.5 / 10
A charming desert gardening-survival hybrid, genuinely loved for restoring a wasteland into bloom and hugging frogs along the way, undercut by an unpopular mandatory data-collection agreement at launch and a development pace that appears to have stopped roughly 16 months in while reviewers were still asking for polish.
6.5 / 10
Team Ninja's fantastical Three Kingdoms take on the Nioh formula has real fans of its deflect-driven combat, but this review's negative sample is dominated by a catastrophic launch PC port — fps drops tied to specific in-game actions, including crashes on deathblows — that remained a proportionally large complaint well over a year after release.
6.5 / 10
A 3D coin-pusher arcade game wrapped around a lich army-building RPG layer, released November 2023 after its solo developer publicly paused production over the Unity pricing controversy, and still receiving support patches in August 2026.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed, Portal-inspired puzzle game built to show off path-traced lighting, adding a genuinely clever dual-dimension twist — undercut for a consistent share of players by floaty movement physics and a portal gun that lacks Portal's own funnelling.
6.4 / 10
A genuinely well-regarded text-based interactive novel with real fans of its writing and world, undercut by an undisclosed cliffhanger ending — this is Book 1 of an unfinished series, a fact the store page doesn't state plainly — plus real grammar errors and a romance structure some players didn't sign up for.
6.4 / 10
An open-world action RPG about sand-surfing across a desert world with a sentient gauntlet, launched to "Forspoken 2.0" comparisons and a co-op bug so severe it became the single most-upvoted review the game has ever received — genuinely improved since by patches that recast a voice actor and reworked combat, though the co-op flaw was still being reported in 2025.
6 / 10
An absurdist, story-first adventure from the cult studio behind Priest Simulator, whose devoted fans love its surreal comedy — but whose "simulation" store tags mislead buyers expecting real brewing-economy depth, and whose UI still lacks basic accessibility options years on.
6 / 10
Colossal Order's sequel to the beloved city-builder launched into one of the genre's most severe, well-documented disasters — severe performance failures, a "fake" simulation several reviewers describe finding through direct testing, and a real CEO controversy over blaming the community for backlash. This review can confirm, via the developer's own communications, that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox split entirely in November 2025, with a new studio, Iceflake Studios, now credited by a real, growing share of reviewers with a genuine turnaround since taking over development in 2026.
6 / 10
A WWII RTS that launched to a genuinely damning "sold as finished, played like early access" verdict from its own franchise veterans, still defended passionately by players with literally thousands of hours logged — and still, three years on, carrying one specific, unaddressed complaint both camps agree on.
6 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded "ratoidvania" whose hand-drawn animation draws near-unanimous praise from the same reviewers who call its combat sluggish and unfair. Two years of free post-launch updates, including a new survival mode, show a developer that kept listening — the controls just never fully caught up to the art.
6 / 10
A genuinely fun, gory open-world zombie brawler whose Steam release — arriving a year after the game's original 2023 launch specifically to escape Epic Games Store exclusivity — forces Epic Online Services onto players anyway, producing some of the angriest, most-detailed technical reviews in this library's coverage.
6 / 10
A cozy magical farming sim that survived its own near-death experience — two rounds of studio layoffs, an announced shutdown of its online features, and a last-minute rescue by a new publisher just days before the servers were due to go dark.
6 / 10
