Behold, a top 10 games of 2023 written in 2026. Starfield was in various ways responsible for me never getting around to this on time, and now that I’ve finally published that review and finished the games it got in the way of, it’s time to plug the weird gap in my yearly award posts. Suffice to say that Disappointment of the Year went to Bethesda.
10 Terra Nil
Terra Nil is a puzzle game about using the environmental resources you get from building rejuvenation machines to build more machines and plants, eventually turning a wasteland back into a rich ecosystem. It somehow works as both a relaxing game and as a decently interesting puzzle depending on whether you just want to see the ending or want to hit 100% in each level. I initially said that it needed a fifth biome to feel complete, which it received in a free update in 2025. It may not blow you away, but most people will find something to enjoy here.
9 Volcano Princess
Volcano Princess is a shameless clone of Princess Maker, but that’s fine since good games in the genre are few and far between. It has all of the extra systems and minigames you’d hope for, and enough variety in its content that you can complete a few playthroughs without repeating much. I particularly liked how the daughter is written as an actual character with her own agency, which helped it feel less creepy than PM-style games can sometimes be. It does suffer from a low quality translation and from needing a bit of grind to reach the best endings, but neither issue holds the experience back too much.
8 Coral Island
Coral Island is a frustrating game, because while it is very successful at copying the best parts of Stardew Valley, Rune Factory, and Animal Crossing and bring them to a fresh Southeast Asian setting, it was also released in an obviously unfinished state. What was there at release was engaging and mostly bug-free, but entire areas of the game had yet to be implemented and it wouldn’t take long before you’d run into an area that clearly wasn’t ready yet. I still happily played for just over 70 hours, but this might have ranked much higher if the co-op feature and extra areas released in later patches had been available at release.
7 Persona 5 Tactica
P5T is as deceptive as the Phantom Thieves it stars. It looks like an XCOM-style strategy game, but it’s much more of a puzzle game. It also does its absolute best to convince you that it’s a bad game in its far-too-long first act, but improves dramatically as it goes on. The gameplay, story, and music all start out far too simple to justify the game’s existence and rapidly improve once you get past the first area. It never reaches the heights of the mainline Persona games, but the later battles are satisfying to solve and the story finds its stride about halfway through. Just don’t play the DLC, which is completely unnecessary and unremarkable.
6 Bakeru
Bakeru is actually a 2024 game going by its Western release date, but I’m using its 2023 Japanese release because it deserves to make some year’s top 10. It’s a wildly creative platformer that sees you go through levels representing each of Japan’s prefectures and doing typical collectathon nonsense along the way. It has the level design and gameplay variety to be an all-time classic, but an obsession with clunky combat holds the experience back at every turn. Still, while it may not have achieved all that it could have, this is a very fun game that I’d recommend to basically anyone.
5 Paranormasight
2023 had 5 representatives on my Top 100 games list last year, and Paranormasight is the first of those. It’s a mystery visual novel that switches between three protagonists as they live through a occult happenings in 1980s Sumida, the eastern edge of Tokyo. It’s very much a love letter to a time and place that’s rarely been seen in video games despite modern central Tokyo’s over-representation. I think the charm of that will come through even if you have no connection to its locale, and the sheer style of the music and visuals certainly will regardless.
4 Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line
Final Bar Line doesn’t change much about the gameplay from the first two games, but it doesn’t need to when they were already solid rhythm games. Instead, it adds more music from even more Final Fantasy games and expands the campaign mode into a challenging journey through the entire series. If this really is the last we’re ever going to get of Theatrythm, it couldn’t have gone out on a much better note.
3 Octopath Traveler 2
Like Final Bar Line, Octopath Traveler 2 builds on an already solid foundation. This one does introduce significant changes, however. OT2 still has the same battle system and tracks 8 stories that you can progress in any order, but it works much harder to ensure that its stories intertwine and to give you a feeling of having a unified party. The combat, music, and exploration are all as strong as ever, creating an experience that would have been a GotY contender in any year that didn’t have two games receive a perfect score.
2 A Space for the Unbound
A Space for the Unbound is a surreal coming of age story set in rural Indonesia. You’re ostensibly playing as Atma and helping him and his girlfriend Raya to complete a checklist of items to make the best day ever, but strange glitches in reality interrupt that quest almost immediately. What really makes it so special is its ability to deliver an intensely relatable experience despite being set 30 years ago in a place few non-Indonesians have ever been and having a story that quickly veers into magical realism. Despite all that, it’s almost impossible not to connect with these characters and their struggles, and the ending is really something else. I’m not the only one who thinks that, either – it may not have stood out in 2023’s critic awards, but on Steam it has a remarkable 97% rating from almost 7,000 reviews. Few games this niche can claim anything close.
1 Baldur’s Gate 3
And so we go from a relatively obscure 100% score to one that absolutely everyone has heard of. I won’t belabor the point much here because I think everyone already knows what this game is and why it’s special: a genuinely mind-blowing level of responsiveness to player choice. If you can think of a stupid solution to a problem, BG3 probably gives you the tools to enact it, and more than that, Larian may even have thought of it before you and prepared special reactions to it. It just lives in your head constantly as you think of a dozen things you could have done differently each time you stop playing. This is what CRPGs have spent decades building towards, and now that I’ve finally finished it, there was really no choice except to make it my number 1 of both 2023 and, after VLR had the title for 13 years, of games overall. There’s nothing else like it.