I’ve been a busy, busy man this year. I’ve been working with Null Signal on keeping Netrunner alive and well, sharpening my skills as a developer, working on my first video game(!!!), and honestly just watching way more movies and TV than I ever have before.
Here are the six games I played enough of this year to feel confident enough to add to a list that is basically a summary of the best games I played enough of this year to feel confident enough to call my best games of the year. Make sense? Good.
6. Lethal Company
These days I find it easier to game socially. After hearing the buzz on Lethal Company, I convinced a few friends to pick it up with the promise that at any moment we could initiate “BattleBit Protocol,” a term developed from the time we bought BattleBit Remastered and all simultaneously refunded the game after 30 minutes. That moment never came.
Going in blind on this one was crucial. Figuring out exploration, enemies, items and objectives all while engaged with proximity voice chat was crucial to building a shared experience. The fact that we would split up, experience calamity ranging from hilarious to downright frightening, and reconvene at the ship to share our stories made me feel more engaged with this world than many of the AAA open world games I dipped my toes into. Also the game is just downright hilarious at times. I laughed harder than any other moment this year when me and two friends were being chased back to the ship by alien dogs only to have a sandworm pop out of the ground and eat my comrades just mere feet from the ship. Do yourself a favor and grab this game to play with your friends, I cannot recommend it enough.
5. Puzzmo
I have been following Zach Gage’s career for over a decade. Arguably gaming’s most-interesting mobile-first developer, Zach has always had a knack for modernizing classic puzzle games. When I heard that his next project was not a game in the traditional sense, but rather an entire platform that serves as a digital version of a newspaper’s puzzle page, I was thrilled.
Getting into Puzzmo while it was still in beta was a big part of my enjoyment. There were limited keys, and you could only claim one by being one of the first ~200 people to do well enough on a puzzle. Once I was in, though, I found myself returning daily. I have a few friends who I occasionally compare scores with, and there is a leaderboard so my gamer brain is firing on all cylinders when I’m able to see that I am in the ~20th percentile for speed when it comes to crossword solving. Even if there was no community aspect, I would still be enjoying Puzzmo. Wordle and the hundreds of clones it produced showed that we as a society were severely lacking in compelling browser-based games, and I’m hoping we see even more advancements in the coming years.
4. Baldur’s Gate 3
What is there to say at this point that hasn’t been said. The scale, the systems, the writing, the performances - all crafted with a level of passion and care that is severely lacking in many other marquee gaming releases.
If I hadn’t played 60 hours of Divinity II while deeply depressed in the middle of the COVID lockdowns, I don’t think I would have given this game the time of day. I’ve been much more of a casual gamer these days, opting for experiences where I can also be listening to a podcast or watching One Piece (oh my god I watched so much One Piece this year), but BG3 kept me full engaged.
Unfortunately I was so all-in on the game that I had played through almost the entire thing before it had received any patches. I suffered not only minor annoyances like performance issues in some of the more densely-populated areas, but also huge questline-breaking bugs, which really stopped me from enjoying it as much as others. That being said, now that the game has received sizable performance, bug fix, and content patches I have started a second playthrough. I can tell this will be a game I continue to revisit and will only grow fonder of in the years to come. Even though this isn’t my game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the canonical game of the year, and one of the great accomplishments in gaming.
3. Counter-Strike 2
It’s no secret that I love games with deep systems and a learning curve steeper than Lombard Street. My experience with Counter-Strike prior to 2023 was mostly limited to my middle school gaming club, where I could be found buying a negev and running around Dust II doing my best Scarface impression. I played about 30 matches of CS:GO, placed at the second-lowest ranking possible, and called it quits.
I made friends with some Valorant enjoyers over the last couple of years and found the game impenetrable, even for a freak like me. If I wanted to be competitive, not only did I have to learn the complexities of an incredibly low time-to-kill shooter, I also had the MOBA issue of having to learn all the abilities of all these sexy freaks like scary poison lady or Moroccan Dracula.