Hey, I’m Alex Van Aken! I’m a multimedia video game journalist, leading Game Informer Magazine’s video team and hosting The Game Informer Show.
Before telling you about my favorite games from the last twelve months, I’d like to thank the Giant Bomb crew for inviting me to participate in this year’s end-of-year event. I started listening to the podcast in 2013, finding solace from my anxiety in the warm personalities and jokes that filled my headphones weekly. Over a decade later, I’m writing this list while flying to a mysterious location for Game Informer’s next cover story (it’s just Canada), honored to be a friend of Giant Bomb after being a fan for so many years.
Okay, I’m going to write about some video games now. These are my favorite games of 2023:
10. Final Fantasy XVI
This year, I finally accepted the truth that the Final Fantasy series is pretty good, especially when it features veteran voice actor Ralph Ineson and the newly-beloved performer Ben Starr. Their performances aren’t the only ones worth seeing – the entire supporting cast brings highly impactful, dramatic performances that left me laughing or in tears.
The action in Final Fantasy XVI is incredible, granting stylish and impactful abilities to players early and often. I love experimenting with Clive’s dozens of abilities – each upgradable – and how developer SQUARE ENIX allows players to access more powers via quick-access menus tied to the triggers.
Lastly, I’d like to honor composer Masayoshi Soken, who scored the game’s soundtrack while battling (and beating) cancer throughout its development. You’re the best of us, Mr. Soken.
9. Coral Island
For an ADHD-haver like myself, there’s nothing better to hyper-fixate on than incidental tasks in life sims, but I haven’t had time to commit to one since Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Enter Coral Island, a 3D farming game I knew little about until it swarmed my TikTok feed ahead of its mid-November release.
While Coral Island doesn’t push the genre forward meaningfully, which feels necessary amid the current swath of farming sims, it rarely waivers in its understanding of the genre’s fundamentals and features all the activities that make it alluring to players.
Players must clean up trash, plant trees, build relationships, and cultivate a thriving eco-friendly farm to accomplish the game’s central goal of restoring Coral Island to its former glory. Your commitment to these tasks, which require a healthy cash flow via selling crafted goods, determines the island’s tourism rank.
I like Coral Island, and maybe I’ll even grow to love it if I can get Alice to date me. I just think she’s neat.
8. Fortnite
I drink more Shield Potions than water in a given day, and Fortnite has been in a great state throughout 2023. Chapter 4 kicked off at the tail end of last year, introducing Reality Augments, functioning as a mid-match perk system granting players new abilities like glider redeploys, low-gravity super jumps, and natural healing while hiding in bushes. The system was a boon for the game, incentivizing users to play more to uncover new Augments.
In addition to introducing excellent mobility items like the Battering Ram and Shockwave Hammer, the chapter presented a new map featuring Frenzy Fields and Brutal Bastion– two of Fortnite’s best locations in recent memory. Of course, in early November – barely a month after Epic Games laid off over 800 employees – Fortnite OG released with unprecedented success, celebrating the game’s history by taking players back to its first map.
The recent release of LEGO Fortnite and Rocket Racing – Rocket League developer Psyonix is developing the latter – solidified 2023 as a banner year for the game. Fortnite is one of my favorite games of all time, and I sincerely believe every developer at Epic deserves better than layoffs.
7. The Finals
While developer Embark Studios only just released The Finals during The Game Awards, I’ve been enamored with the first-person shooter through various closed and open betas all year. Set within a futuristic game show, the game tasks multiple squads with collecting and defending money caches in a gorgeous, fully destructible level. You can play as three weight classes, each filling a different role on the team, to interact with the map in various ways. The Heavy class possesses the ability to bulldoze entire buildings with its immense strength, the Light class can sneak through ventilation shafts or soar through the skies with grappling hooks, and the Medium class functions as a reliable support who can throw jump pads, launch ziplines across the map, or even heal their teammates.
The intersection of The Finals’ level destruction and high-stakes multiplayer modes have facilitated some of my favorite gaming moments of the year, often ending in my teammates and me screaming at our screens in excited disbelief. You should play this video game, especially if you’re a Battlefield: Bad Company 2 fan or love Prey’s Gloo Cannon.
Thanks to the Noclip crew for initially putting The Finals on my radar with this excellent video.