Concluding 2023 with Some Picks

Everyone keeps saying 2023 was the best year for games in history, or as SkillUp puts it, is one whose JPEG compilation of box art will be passed around ten years from now as we all discuss the best year for game releases and get nostalgic. Ever since ending my tenure at DualShockers at the beginning of 2017 I have no longer kept up on the latest releases in terms of play. I still keep a finger on the pulse in regards to watching, reading, and listening to others sharing their time with the latest releases, but even then I’m not so sure this year isn’t one we are simply telling ourselves was the “Best Year Ever.” I question anytime I find myself thinking along the lines of, “where are the good games?” that I should make sure that it isn’t that they don’t exist but that I’m simply not looking. After all, some of the entries in OpenCritic’s Hall of Fame for 2023 are ones I haven’t actually heard of/paid attention to, such as Videoverse, Against the Storm, and Jack Jeanne. And separate from the tangle of mainstream games coverage, how many times do people share their picks of obscure and overlooked games published on Itch.io? While games such as: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Dave the Diver, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Alan Wake 2, Dead Space, Diablo IV, Pikmin 4, Final Fantasy XVI, God of War Ragnarok: Valhalla, Starfield, Armored Core VI, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Super Mario RPG, Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat 1, Madden, MLB, FC [formerly FIFA], NBA 2K, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, and, as always, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III may dominate the conversations, commercial market, and mindshare of the year, this alone doesn’t mean we are doomed.

Shortly after starting my vacation for the end of the year I deleted all time wasting scrolling apps that I hadn’t already rid myself of, including Discord. I had a lot of things I wanted to do during this time and never enough time to do them all. Same as last year, I barely finished half of what I wanted but I was able to squeeze in some last minute entries in my yearly round up of things played, watched, read for the year and make my recommendations. I’ll try and keep it brief for each entry.

2023 was the year I really got into Warhammer 40,000 and its expansive fiction world. What started as simply watching lore videos by Luetin09 on YouTube to fall asleep to and run as background noise at work turned into me seeking out a beginner’s guide to the fiction via books to read to help supplement my reading challenge shared between my wife and I (whose finish line yielded 40+ books for her and 22 for myself). The consensus among online forums was that the Eisenhorn trilogy was the place to start and it truly lived up to its reputation. Hereticus, the finale to the trilogy, is one whose events have stuck with me the longest out of almost all the books I’ve read this year. After two books of building relationships and familiarity, Hereticus brings it all crashing down. Through it all you also get to watch Eisenhorn’s wall between his morals and fall to heresy come down as well, and the consequences to those around him are the ones I continue to relive in my memory. It helps that this year also saw the release of two Warhammer games I had great interest in: Boltgun and Rogue Trader.

Boltgun is a Doom-clone or “Boomer-shooter” that takes the foundations of the original Doom and its subsequent clones and translates them into a Warhammer 40k context. It is the little touches that make Boltgun go beyond being a cheap entry into the current fad. Your space marine sprints and thuds with big controller rumbles, when you stand still for too long they will take out divine scripture and read it, there are countless taunts that have no gameplay effect and are purely for mood. When aiming your chain blade time slows to a stop and you are magnetically pulled towards your target, often rendering them to gibs of flesh. The time between shotgun blasts is perfect to kill and then gib a pink demon, stopping it from spawning two lesser blue demons after death. Some of the “secrets” in all the levels aren’t complex, and I often found myself sprinting through areas I expected a big fight in, but Boltgun remained a real highlight for its speed, aesthetic feel, and just as a great way to exist in that world as a space marine tearing into cultists and demons of the warp of all kinds. It is for these reasons that I ended up revisiting it near the end of the year for another jaunt through.

Rogue Trader is a CRPG from Owlcat Games, who previously developed Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, two very systems heavy CRPGs in the vein of classic Infinity Engine RPGs such as the original Baldur’s Gate. Rogue Trader is not as systems heavy as either of those games but still retains a lot of the elements, namely lots and lots of skill checks, turn based combat with lots of different abilities that are required to all be used in unison on the harder difficulty, and lots of text dialogue to read and talk through. My time was mainly spent in the beta prior to its full launch in December, where I completed Act I but ran into a progression bug that would not allow me to continue to Act II. Despite this progress killer, I was still quite happy with my time spent, and have started a new character for the full release, with the intention of playing a Heretical character as opposed to the devout Imperium character I first ran with.

Aside from a handful of Warhammer novels I also read one of the classics of science fiction literature, Dune by Frank Herbert. I completely ate it up. I had watched the Dune films from both David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve, but as with pretty much every adaptation, the source material is so much more. Novels, more than any medium, allow the reader to occupy a character’s mind that is so much more complete and tangible than games or film, and this allows them to do so much more with simple conversations than either other medium can do. A dinner table scene on film can hold certain subtleties depending on the script, actors, director, and other such factors, and games are still attempting to find ways to frame conversations beyond the shot, reverse-shot, but in a novel what is but a conversation becomes a testing of loyalty, of intent, of balancing reaction. The meme of inner monologues for characters such as Light and L in Death Note, specifically the tennis match, are somewhat of an apt example of how this interior monologue can become ridiculous, but Herbert in Dune never reaches such excess.

Science Fiction is a favorite genre of mine, and a great podcast to find some of the lesser known but excellent writing within that genre is SFUltra from Sean McTiernan. Solo podcasting can be intensely difficult as you have no other individual to play off of or utilize to give yourself time to break or gather your thoughts, but Sean has been doing this form of podcasting for quite some time now and never seems to run out of things to say or trips over himself, and his picks have frequently been added to my own ever growing backlog of “to read” titles. 

I’ve been deficient on the movie watching front as well. This was another dismal year of only watching 14 movies, 9 of which were new to me and only 6 of which are from this year. July was a great month though, Asteroid City, Oppenheimer, and Barbie all released and were all enjoyable. Asteroid City is my favorite of any release this year. Wes Anderson continues to do his thing, but I found Asteroid City with its framing device of a live production of a documentary about the play called Asteroid City to be reaching nearly as high as my favorite of his, The Grand Budapest Hotel. An often pointed to conversation within the film is my favorite bit as well, in which Jason Schwartzman tells Adrien Brody, “I still don’t understand the play.” and Brody’s response is, “You don’t have to, just keep telling the story.” It is the sort of encouragement for doing something like this, writing for whom? My own satisfaction? A perceived audience? A hopefully existing audience that could grow? I don’t quite understand fully why but here I am, continuing to type despite it all.

A close follow up is the duo of Oppenheimer and the book it adapted, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Can a man’s entire life be summed up in 180 minutes of film? Can it be properly captured in all its essence and detail in 700 pages of thoroughly researched biography? No, but I do think often about how often we try to capture and share pieces of people long dead, who can no longer share their ideas, their memories, however fractured they may be, their thoughts and opinions and experience. So often when reading the book did I come across names being dropped with a brief explanation, clearly knowing that behind that name and brief summary existed an entire person with as much life as I currently am living but who is no longer present and exists now in such small detail. The best of us get movies, the Elvis’, the Oppenheimer’s, the Leonard Bernstein’s, but the rest of us, will we even get an entry on Wikipedia? Will we just be a name existing on an obituary listing of the local paper after we’re gone?

Lastly we come to Alan Wake 2, the best video game of 2023. First, I want to give a dishonorable mention to Starfield and a favorable mention to any and all YouTube videos that spend 7 hours disassembling that game and why it sucks. I was a hater from the start and even then that game still disappointed me with how much of a waste of time it was. Anyway, as a Remedy-head, I was pretty much guaranteed to like Alan Wake 2 the moment they showed Sam Lake’s face as a fellow FBI agent with new protagonist Saga Anderson. I knew he would be playing Alex Casey, the cop Alan Wake wrote and found success through before the events of the original Alan Wake game. The late James McCafferey providing the voice to Sam Lake’s lips just made it all the more sweeter as a modern reimagining of Max Payne, the games Remedy found success through before the long and arduous development of the original Alan Wake game. It also helped give certain sections of Alan Wake 2 a feeling of prototyping a future game in a current game, as Remedy is in production of remaking Max Payne and Max Payne 2 with modern tech, a trend only gaining more and more popularity after the string of successes by the Resident Evil remakes and the Dead Space and System Shock remakes.

Talking about Alan Wake 2 is like talking in circles (perhaps even a spiral) as the game does not exist in conversation separately from its creation, from its creators, or from its sisters in development and release. Shawn Ashmore appears as Tim(e) Breaker and is taken into the Dark Place early on by Warlin Door, a role originally meant for the late Lance Reddick, who portrayed Martin Hatch in Remedy’s 2016 game Quantum Break, alongside Shawn Ashmore. Are you following? Alan Wake 2 refuses to exist in the silo of an IGN review which seals itself off from all other outside writing under the assumption that you have to create with the idea that the reader knows nothing outside of what you are currently writing. It is a piece of transtextuality, going beyond just being a metatextual work. It also introduces its own new additions to the greater Remedy fiction, mainly in the introduction of Saga Anderson. While her Mind Place was mainly a menial task to complete to trigger the next phase of the story, I found myself stuck to her chapters over Alan’s right to the very end where I had to switch back in order to unlock the finale. Alan Wake 2 is a dual protagonist tale, and at a certain point you unlock the ability to freely swap between playing as Anderson in the Bright Falls area or as Wake in the Dark Place, manifesting as Noir York City the setting of the Alex Casey (Max Payne) novels (games) of Wake’s (Remedy’s) fiction.

A recent update introduced The Final Draft, their New Game Plus mode with some new stuff added in and a new difficulty, Nightmare, both of which I’ve started during my vacation along with a replay of Alan Wake via the remastered version as I’ve always replayed the original Xbox 360 version via backwards compatibility. Alan Wake 2 is many things, and I am still surprised at how much praise and awards it has received over the course of the end of year processions every major site engages with at this time of reflection. To me it continues the new Remedy tradition of coalescing its previous works while also expanding on it with new work that will inevitably be rewritten and recontextualized in future releases. And it serves as the conclusion of the work done between Remedy and James McCafferey, voice of Max Payne and here Alex Casey, who sadly passed away on December 17, 2023.

Lastly, and most importantly, I must mention that the games industry continues to grind up and spit out talented individuals by the thousands. The further along the timeline of history we proceed the closer we are to the point of no return, of being killed and killing each other for the rich. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”