Ndi’s top ten games of 2023

I don’t always vibe with gacha games, but Reverse: 1999 has taken the gacha formula and transformed it into something truly special. This game is packed to the brim with weird and wonderful characters, like fluffy dog Pickles, walking scarecrow Rabies, and the literal Sputnik satellite, and that makes pulling for new characters an absolute blast. Not only has Reverse: 1999 perfected its gacha mechanics but it also happens to be an excellent RPG. The turn-based combat system manages to be highly strategic without feeling overly complicated. Tearing through enemies is a ton of fun, and the over-the-top battle animations make every fight exciting. It’s really raised the bar for gacha, and that means every other title needs to step up its game.

Have you ever stumbled across something unsettling and tried to learn more, only to find yourself falling down a terrifying rabbit hole? That’s what it feels like to play World of Horror, a 1-bit adventure game inspired by Junji Ito and creepypasta. The object of the game is simple: solve five mysteries and save the world from an eldritch horror, but pulling off that objective is easier said than done. World of Horror has all the creepiness and scares you’d expect from a horror game, but it’s also a wonderfully challenging puzzle box. Figuring out how to avoid monsters, murderers, and cosmic threats is tricky, but it’s also a ton of fun. No matter how many times I failed to save the world, I always wanted to try again.

It’s been a pretty amazing year for games about catching fish, but Dave the Diver managed to be the best angling adventure of them all. What’s especially great about Dave the Diver is that it’s not just a fishing game: It’s a hectic restaurant management sim, a gorgeous undersea adventure, and a heartwarming game about helping out your friends, even when they don’t deserve it. Dave the Diver is jam-packed with different systems and gameplay mechanics, but no part of the game feels undercooked. Even simple tasks like upgrading your weapons are accompanied by detailed and hilarious animations. It might be a game about working two jobs, but Dave the Diver is one of the most relaxing titles I’ve played all year.

Farming games are everywhere these days, but Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a beautiful reminder of what makes the genre special. It has everything you’d expect to find in an agricultural title, like crops, cows, and chickens, but it switches up the standard formula by speeding up the age of time. Every so often, A Wonderful Life jumps years into the future, allowing it to tell a story that spans an entire lifetime. Over the course of my playthrough, I got married, had a kid, and watched my little one grow up. Watering tomatoes and shearing sheep might not sound all that thrilling, but there’s something about building an ordinary life that feels downright magical.

The first Octopath Traveler was a pretty solid RPG, but the sequel blew me away. Octopath Traveler 2 takes everything great about the original—the gorgeous HD-2D graphics, the branching storyline, the job-based battle system—and makes it a million times better, resulting in an RPG that feels like a long-lost classic. Creating eight interesting characters isn’t an easy feat, but every member of Octopath Traveler 2’s cast is worth getting to know. The standalone character stories are stellar, but my favorite parts of the game were when their narratives intertwined. Playing through eight stories took a long time, but Octopath Traveler 2 made it worth my while.

The less you know about Paranormasight going in, the better. That makes it a little hard to explain why it’s one of the best games of the year, but trust me on this one: It’s the rare visual novel that absolutely everyone should play. What I can tell you about Paranormasight is this: It’s a fascinating horror mystery filled with twists and turns. The story and characters are both phenomenal, and some of its puzzles are so clever I’m still thinking about them. If you take a chance on Paranormasight, you’ll be glad that you did.

Even though Sea of Stars is an ode to games of the past, it’s not content to just coast on nostalgia. It takes the best parts of classic RPGS—the lovable characters, the intricate worlds, the addictive battle systems—and brings them into the 21st century. The story is briskly paced, the combat is consistently involving, and the gameplay can be customized in all kinds of ways. Playing Sea of Stars made me feel like I’d wandered into a world where developers never stopped making 2D games. It’s not just an homage; it’s a beautiful evolution of the SNES RPG formula. It pays tribute to some amazing games, but it’s good enough to stand on its own.

I have played more than 250 hours of Wildfrost, which is an insane thing to say about a game that came out this year. It might look like a run-of-the-mill deck-builder, but something about it kept me coming back over and over and over again. Maybe it’s the extremely challenging gameplay, or maybe it’s the ridiculously cute cards. One thing’s for sure: It’s a game I could happily play every day of my life. The permadeath and punishing gameplay won’t appeal to everyone, but even at its most brutal, Wildfrost never feels unfair. The high difficulty level is hugely motivating, and it makes every successful run feel like a spectacular victory. Roguelike deck-builders are one of my favorite genres, and Wildfrost is everything I want a deck-builder to be.

Slay the Princess presents the player with a seemingly simple choice: Do you slay the titular princess, or do you spare her? From there, it manages to take that decision in a thousand different directions, each one stranger than the last. Sometimes I did kill the princess. Sometimes I hung out in the woods. Sometimes I got eaten alive by a terrifying beast. No matter what I opted to do, Slay the Princess always managed to surprise me. All of my favorite games share one rare, memorable quality: They showed me something I’d never seen before. I’ve played thousands of games, but I’ve never experienced anything like Slay the Princess. It’s a choice-based game that questions the very concepts of free will and decision-making, and that feels genuinely groundbreaking.

It’s hard to what life was like before Tears of the Kingdom. How did I manage to live in a world where I couldn’t pick up my Switch, fight a skeletal Moblin, knock off his arm, glue it to my sword, and whack him with his own bony appendage? To paraphrase Carly Rae Jepsen, before Tears of the Kingdom came into my life, I missed it—so, so bad. There are a million different games inside of Tears of the Kingdom—a classic Zelda adventure, a prettier version of Garry’s Mod, a nightmarish horror title—and I love every single one of them. Tears of the Kingdom isn’t just my favorite game of 2023; it’s one of the greatest games of all time. It might be a sequel, but this is the kind of game that comes around once in a lifetime.