Browse by year
219 games released in 2023 and reviewed here, best first.
219 reviews
A US$2.99 solo-dev idle collectathon — Pokemon's capture loop grafted onto a Forager-style island economy — that Steam's own review corpus calls "Mixed" for reasons that are mostly about launch-week polish, not the underlying design, from a developer who patched hard for five months and then quietly moved on to other projects.
5.8 / 10
A visually striking underwater city-builder whose post-apocalyptic survival premise promises real struggle, but whose actual build-research-wait loop draws consistent, specific comparisons to a much easier Anno — pretty to look at, reviewers say, with too little game underneath.
5.5 / 10
A cosy casino management game whose own defenders say critics judged it by the wrong yardstick — it was never trying to be SimCasino, and the reviewers who wanted a hardcore tycoon sim with real failure states were always going to be disappointed by a game built to be impossible to lose.
5.5 / 10
A neon cyberspace tower-defense roguelite from Clockwork Origins, released September 2023 with co-op and versus multiplayer, card-draft upgrades and weekly challenges, undercut by a design that gives you exactly one tower to defend with and no say over the maze around it.
5.5 / 10
A stylish roguelite spin-off of the beloved Dungeon of the Endless that split its own fanbase over how far it strayed from the original, undercut further by a co-op design where only the host earns progression and a detailed, highly-upvoted account of the game's DRM and telemetry connections.
5.5 / 10
A zombie-survivors auto-shooter that bolts a permadeath mercenary camp onto the Vampire Survivors formula, then largely stopped receiving new content the year after it left Early Access. The base-building risk-reward loop is genuinely distinct; the 330-achievement grind underneath it is not.
5.5 / 10
A visually striking open-world action RPG whose parkour-and-magic traversal genuinely splits opinion between reviewers who call it a highlight and those who find it repetitive, but whose dominant, heavily-corroborated complaints — quippy, widely mocked dialogue and poor launch performance — proved severe enough that Square Enix dissolved developer Luminous Productions into itself barely three months after release.
5.5 / 10
A small solo-developer idle RPG built around an unusual, deterministic combat system where attacks never miss, set in a dark, revenge-themed take on Brazilian folklore — genuinely liked by a tiny, dedicated audience, though its story mode remains explicitly unfinished and the game has gone without a content update for years.
5.5 / 10
A dark fantasy colony strategy game steeped in Slavic folklore, praised for its art, voice acting and Darkest Dungeon-style sanity management even by players who can't recommend it. The mechanics underneath rarely earn the same trust, and day-one paid DLC on top of a NZ$61.99 base game became the review corpus's loudest single complaint.
5.5 / 10
A genuinely ad-free, purchase-free idle RPG from a solo developer players consistently praise for listening and staying active — undercut by a thin, repetitive core loop that even a large share of its own fans concede has "not much to it."
5.5 / 10
A cheap idle collector-battler from solo developer okyakusama, built around gathering AI-illustrated banshees and gambling on skill-book rerolls, undercut by thin late-game content and no offline progression at all.
5.5 / 10
A cheap fitness-themed clicker from the same solo developer behind Idling Gears, still receiving updates as recently as last week — undercut by an achievement asking players to log in for 365 days straight when most of the game's own reviewers say there isn't 365 days of content.
5.5 / 10
One entry in a whole shelf of near-identical cheap idle RPGs from the same solo developer, with genuine long-term depth for players who push through — and a first hour so poorly explained that one reviewer called it "the easiest refund of my life."
5.5 / 10
A genuinely no-click idle farm-management game about cat fairies tending crops and minerals -- charming and well-built for its first several hours, but Steam's own achievement data shows the overwhelming majority of players stop long before the back half of its content, and price-versus-length is the review sample's single most repeated complaint.
5.5 / 10
Cold Hours' free pixel-art clicker nails a charming opening few hours, then buries its own idle promise under an offline-time cap, an autoclicker-favouring economy and a premium currency that gates full completion.
5.5 / 10
A cheap, fairly-monetised idle RPG about auto-battling demons with a squad of exorcists and spirit pets -- functional and honest about its price, but its own Chinese-speaking audience (89 of its 100 reviews) calls it a near-copy of the developer's two previous idle games, and its tiny English-language review sample flags a rough machine translation.
5.5 / 10
The game built to match its own fake advertisement, and one of the highest-grossing mobile titles on earth. Rated 4.7 by nearly half a million people, mocked everywhere else as a bait-and- switch — and both of those are accurate descriptions of what happens after you install it.
5.5 / 10
A charming, Pokemon-inspired monster-collection game with a genuinely fun core loop that its tiny review sample still enjoys — held back by real, repeated UI and control complaints that several reviewers feel give it an unfinished, Early-Access-adjacent feel despite shipping as a full release.
5.5 / 10
A Nordic-folklore action roguelite that launched with a secretly always-online requirement for a single-player game, patched it out within months after backlash, then wound down development entirely by October 2023 — leaving real structural complaints about exploration and weapon variety permanently unaddressed.
5.5 / 10
A beautiful feudal-Japan village-builder that both its critics and its own defenders keep measuring against Medieval Dynasty — and finding wanting, with clunky combat, broken enemy AI and a grind so pronounced that building a single house can demand its own sub-loop of crafting.
5.5 / 10
A free 2023 idle-management game about breeding demons, undead and warlocks from the top of each faction's chain down — Mixed across 867 reviews, with a long-running, well-documented complaint that its offline progress is a rounding error and its pacing is tuned around a NZ$56.99 token pack.
5.5 / 10
A janky, PS2-throwback sword-and-gunplay action game that split opinion at launch and has just weathered a fresh, verified controversy of its own — a retroactive, initially undisclosed swap to AI-adjusted store page art that the developer has since publicly disclosed and clarified doesn't touch the actual game.
5.5 / 10
A ground-up Unreal Engine 5 remaster of one of survival gaming's biggest franchises, sold as a paid upgrade that a huge share of its own reviewers say carried over the original's bugs while demanding hardware far beyond what the visual improvements justify.
5 / 10
A free-to-play auto-battler that blends Auto Chess, idle RPG and CCG mechanics — its own Steam review corpus agrees the battles work, then splits hard over whether the gacha hero system and ad load are worth putting up with.
5 / 10
