currently working on digital art and 4 video games.
one, you can play soon. the second, you can play later. the third, maybe in a year or so. the fourth one will be done before i die.
2023/12/8 Gaming 2023 Recommendations of games you probably don't know
In early 2023, I made myself a letterboxd account and challenged myself to recall every movie I had ever watched. Around the same time, I had the thought of doing the same for all video games I’ve ever played. I started making a list in Notepad. At some point, this list became a spreadsheet. This is my idea of a good time. I should have seen this coming for me, when I was 11 years old, my Dad had a fully alphabetized collection of like two thousand CDs on several shelving units spanning from the floor to the ceiling.
And so I started my video game spreadsheet, on which I listed games and the platform I played them on. This video is not about that spreadsheet. When I made that spreadsheet, I also decided to make a list of games that I played for the first time in 2023. This blog post-like entry is about the best games in that list that you haven’t heard of. I played 190 games for the first time in 2023. A little wading through my games backlog, a little unemployment, you know how it is. Some of the games were new releases. Most were not. Some are a few years old, and others, a few decades old. At first, I was planning to write about all 190 of the games in the list. Eventually, I came to my senses. You don’t need me to tell you that Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe is great, nor Ultrakill, nor Pizza Tower, nor VS Puyo Puyo Sun, nor Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, nor Super Mario Bros Wonder, nor Demon’s Souls 2020, nor Bloodborne, nor Tetris Effect Connected, nor F-Zero 99, nor Sega Ages Virtua Racing, nor Cadence of Hyrule, nor God of War Ragnarok, nor WarioWare: Move It!, nor Super Mario RPG Remake, nor Mario Hoops 3 on 3. I do want to briefly explain why all but 1 of the games in my 2023 games list are old games.
There will always be more old games than new games. No matter how you define “now”, this current moment, it will remain true. We can infer from this mathematically that there will always be more great old games than great new games. This works with movies and music, too. Due to the instant availability of old music, it’s probably more obvious with music than other types of media.
These are the 9 best games that I played for the first time in 2023 that you likely haven’t heard about.
1. Pyo by Cassie. This tiny indie game can be found on itch.io, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves the WarioWare minigame Pyoro, which is also known as the DSiware game Bird & Beans. It’s basically a Pyoro-like game about protecting the player character from endless falling beans that destroy the floor. Just like Pyoro, it’s a really fun arcade-style high score game. The only direct carryover from Pyoro, though, is the way that beans fall and destroy the floor, everything else in Pyo is brand new. Namely, the way that you deal with the falling beans and build your combos is more about fast movement and quick reflexes. It has a type of movement that’s absolutely frenetic, where the challenge in getting a high score is being able to corral your momentum as quickly and accurately as you can. Another evolution / deviation from Pyoro is how the floor can be repaired. In Pyoro, the only movement is left to right, but with the jump in Pyo, this allows for the floor to transform into strange platformery shapes the longer your run continues. Every Warioware game has a new arcade style minigame featuring Pyoro, but the secret is that only a select few of those are any good at all. The new one in Warioware: Move It! is just okay. Pyo by Cassie is a great Pyoro-like game.
2: Atomic Runner is a Data East Genesis game based on a Data East arcade game. It’s a horizontal shoot 'em up mixed with a side scrolling platformer. This type of genre-mashup is more common now than ever, but in 1988 in the arcades and 1992 on the Genesis, it’s pretty novel. But it’s more than just interesting- it’s also good.
3: Mr. Saitou is a 3 hour long text and light puzzle adventure game. It’s a side story set in the world of Rakuen, Laura Shigihara’s 2017 text and light puzzle adventure game. Both of these games are cute and wonderful. Rakuen is amazing, and Mr. Saitou is very cozy too. If you haven’t played either, you should play Rakuen.
4: Dharma Doujou is a game that I learned about by it having a speedrun showcase in Summer Games Done Quick 2023, run by Lizstar. This recommendation is about the Super Famicom version. It’s an arcade-style puzzle game about sorting blocks and it’s really fun. Dharma Doujou has the best aspects of this game genre, it’s easy to pick up and learn how to win one level, easy to control, but eventually it’s on you to figure out effective strategies to win. This type of game peaked in the 90s, with Dr. Mario, Puyo Puyo, Super Puzzle Fighter, and Panel De Pon, and it’s a real treat to play a new one, even if it’s actually from 1995, and just never really gotten exposure outside of Japan. Of course, there are real new players in the genre- Dreamshot Fantasia is a new game in this genre that’s live on Kickstarter right now, and I hope it succeeds.
5: Celeste Mario’s Zap & Dash by w7n is a romhack of the first Super Mario Bros that is so far removed from its source material that it hardly feels like a romhack of Mario 1. It can be better described as a new game that uses Mario 1’s engine as a starting off point. I make this distinction because there are so many brand new mechanics in this game, not just to do with player movement, or how the game scrolls, or how the heads up display works, or how the game displays text, or the save feature, but all of that and more. It takes inspiration not just from Celeste, but also 2022’s Celeste.smc by MarkAlarm, a Celeste-like Super Mario World romhack that asks of its players not just to master Celeste-Super-Meat-Boysian challenges, but also to do them while managing Super Mario World’s Mario momentum physics. Celeste Mario’s Zap & Dash is a little kinder on that front, stunting Mario’s classic momentum-based physics and paring it down to more Celeste-like movement. Both of these romhacks are technical marvels, and worth checking out.
6: Konami Krazy Racers is a Game Boy Advance launch title by Konami from 2001. It looks a lot like Mario Kart Super Circuit, the third official Mario Kart game, which was a few months late to be a launch title for GBA. Super Circuit is notable for being one of the worst Mario Kart games, but the new surprise for me in 2023 is that Konami’s Mario Kart knock-off game that released first is actually better than Mario Kart Super Circuit. I’m not sure how much new interest this game could possibly garner in 2023, or even that it necessarily needs any new players, but it is a good kart racing game that certainly flew under the radar for me, and I’m glad I gave it a shot.
7: Sin & Punishment is one of the most impressive looking and sounding Nintendo 64 games. It is a Treasure game through and through, in the same vein as Alien Soldier. Stage after stage of unique gameplay setpieces and increasingly challenging, but learnable boss attacks and patterns to dodge. What makes this game more impressive is that it’s Treasure’s first fully 3D game, and that the conception of the game project that became Sin & Punishment was the president of Treasure looking at the Nintendo 64 controller and saying, why don’t we make a game where you hold the left side of the controller instead of either obvious option. Classic contrarian Treasure. The game ended up so fully formed and so feature-rich for a Treasure game because it was co-developed by Nintendo R&D1. It finally released in North America for the first time in 2007 on the Wii’s virtual console, and now it’s on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. With that kind of exposure, it’s doubtless the most well-known game in this list, but I don’t know anyone my age who has played it, so I’m giving it this shout out. Sin & Punishment is part of the rich history of rail shooter games, post-Star Fox and Panzer Dragoon, and pre-Killer 7 and Kid Icarus Uprising. In 2023 I also played Panzer Dragoon remake and Panzer Dragoon Zwei for the first time, and I would recommend both of those games too. Panzer Dragoon remake goes on sale on steam for like $2.50 fairly often, and it’s well worth that price. That’s less than renting a movie!
8. snail-world by nizakashii is a free game on itch.io that you can play in-browser right now. It’s a fantasy zone-type cute ‘em up with what I would consider a cool, distinct art style. The gameplay is very, very fantasy zone, but I don’t see that as a negative in any way. If anything, we need more fantasy zone-like shoot ‘em ups. Onion Games’ Black Bird is also in the same boat. Short, cozy shoot ‘em ups are good.
9. Boku No Natsuyasumi 2 got an English fan-translation by Hilltop! Play this game.
What lesser known games did you find in 2023? Let me know.
check out these gifs lol
