I expected 2023 to be a great gaming year before it started. But now that it’s almost over, the games that have blown me away have largely surprised me. And the games I fully expected to become obsessed with… well, I haven’t finished them.
There are some exceptions, of course. I’ve lovedZeldasince I was five,Breath of the Wildis one of my favorite games ever made, and I’ve been breathlessly followingTears of the Kingdomsince the first trailer dropped in 2019. There is no universe in which I didn’t spend 100 hours exploring its world. I did exactly what I expected, and I had a great time.
But the rest of the games I’ve gone deep on this year have surprised me. I was keeping an eye onBaldur’s Gate 3from afar, expecting to play it when it Misty Stepped its way out of early access. But I couldn’t have expected it to bethe gameof my fall — the one I would come back to over and over as others fell by the wayside. After Tears of the Kingdom, it’s the game I’ve sunk the most hours into this year and I’m still only in Act 2. That’s as someone who never made it far inDivinity: Original Sun 2and hasn’t played the originalBioWaregames. Barring a major eleventh hour release, it will be my game of the year, and I was barely thinking about it in 2022.
Meanwhile, Starfield, the RPG I had been eagerly awaiting since it was announced, only held my attention for about five hours. This is partially a matter of (no pun intended) space. With Baldur’s Gate 3 taking up over 100 GB of my PC’s storage, I just had to deleteStarfieldto make room for other things. Sometimes you just gotta download something, and Starfield’s sheer planetary bulk made that difficult. But it was also that the checklist nature of the game’s exploration got to me in the same way it got to a lot of players. I just didn’t feel like I was playing an open-world game. I felt like I was doing errands. I may come back to it later in the year, but at this point it seems like too much game with too little reward.
I was similarly eager to get my hands onFinal Fantasy 16, but only played about 10 hours. I was intrigued by the Game of Thrones-inspired story and afterFinal Fantasy VII Remake became one of my favorite games of 2020, I fully expected FF16 to be two great tastes that taste great together. They tasted okay, but the levels were boringly linear and the side quests were dry as the desert. I keep telling myself I’ll go back and finish it, but I tell myself that about good games, too.
While Starfield and FF16 didn’t grab my attention,Hi-Fi Rushcame out of nowhere to become one of my favorites of the first half of the year. Tango Gameworks cel-shaded rhythm action game was kept secret until its launch on Game Pass back in January, and it turned out to be a really fun surprise. In fact, it’s representative of how 2023 has turned out as a whole. I expected it to be a great year for games, but the games that made it great were games I often didn’t even know existed in 2022. As much as I wish Starfield and FF16 had lit my world on fire, this is still a good place to be.
