I was talking to my colleagueEric Switzerabout our Game of the Year lists earlier this week, and I came to a realisation. I’ve got a lot more room on mine for flawed indies thanks to a dearth of horror on my list.Chants of Sennaarwas the particulartopic of discussion, with its sewer levels and alchemist lab being points of contention that take away from an otherwise stellar language puzzler, but there are a few titles that will probably make my list thanks to triple-A releases not suiting my tastes this year.
Spoiler warning, but I think Chants of Sennaar will make the cut. It may or may not make Eric’s. But I know already thathe’ll have Alan Wake 2 high up on hisandResident Evil 4will probably make an appearance. Elsewhere on the site, I fully expectParanormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjoto put out a good showing, and the aptly-named World of Horror might make a late push, as couldSlay the Princess. Ad Infinitum, Switchback, Amnesia: The Bunker, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Sons of the Forest also provided 2023 with some scares, and each may appear on some of TheGamer’s various GOTY lists. In the words of Features Editor Switzer, “Damn there was a lot of horror this year, huh?”.
I tried branching out, I really did. I was told that Resident Evil 4 was the most influential horror title of the past two decades, so I tried to play the remake. Nuh-uh. Alan Wake 2 got rave reviews, so I jumped in, hoping that the author at its centre would be a Stephen King-shaped touchstone to pull me in. Nope, nope, nope. Thejump scares may be revolutionary, but they’re still jump scares. I played Dead Space to its finish, but it wasn’t good enough to warrant a spot on my list by nature of feeling a little generic and the plot being written by a band of apes armed with typewriters.
The closest thing you’ll find to a horror game on my end of year roundup in Dredge, which is spooky at best. That’s the precise kind of horror I enjoy, The Shining-esque tension and Lovecraftian abominations. I don’t want disgusting zombies jumping out at the screen.
I can’t help but feel I’m missing out slightly, but if there was any year I was going to get into horror, it would be 2023. I gave the best games my best shot, and they just weren’t for me. But that’s the beauty of gaming, right?
When TheGamer’s Editor-in-Chief wrotea warning about cramming in games before the end of the yearso you can vote on which is best, she didn’t write it to make you play fewer games. She wrote it to tell you to enjoy the ones you have played. Why speedrun Cocoon in three hours when you can spend twice that amount of time marvelling at the architecture and diving into orbs? Well, the same goes for genre.
I’m not going to suffer through Resident Evil 4 to see how the mechanics interact, I won’t understand what iterations it has made on the original, and I won’t enjoy a second of zombie-infested action. Instead, I’ll play through some 3D puzzle platformers that offer little-to-no instruction and operate exclusively on vibes and clever brainteasers.
That’s the beauty of gaming. I can thoroughly not enjoy some of the biggest hitters this year, and still I’m struggling for space on my Game of the Year list. But the most important takeaway I have from all this is not to force yourself into something you don’t enjoy. This is meant to be fun, after all. In the wise words of Eric Switzer: “life can be scary enough, I get it”.
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