You've probably already seen Eurogamer's top 50 games of 2023, but we didn't leave our end of year thoughts there. Big lists can sometimes feel impersonal, and as you know, individual tastes in games are anything but. So, we wanted to cobble together our collected thoughts on the games we felt shaped 2023.
This brief series of articles will, then, collect the top fives of a handful of different Eurogamer writers each day, and run for four days. The top fives aren't ordered because ordering is not what's important here - it's seeing which games were special to people this year, and hearing about why. And please, feel free to share yours.
I've been playing video games since the tape-loading days of the ZX Spectrum so it takes a special kind of game wow me nowadays. One little wow moment is good enough but then, at an age where I feel like I've seen it all, Alan Wake 2 comes along and oozes originality out of the screen. I've not even completed the game yet - I've been taking it slow, drinking it in and savouring every unexpected surprise, be it story-based, a piece of mend-bending visual trickery or even a whole damn [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]. Sure, it's a bit slow for some people, but it's worth playing just for the way that it plays with you. I doubt we'll see a game this inventive and well-produced for a long time to come.