It’s still a little early to call it, but 2023 is almost certainly going to go down as the best gaming year since 2017.
Already this year, players have gotten The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Resident Evil 4, Venba, Dead Space, System Shock, Octopath Traveler 2, Street Fighter 6, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Hi-Fi Rush, Dead Island 2, Pikmin 4, Final Fantasy 16, Metroid Prime Remastered, Fire Emblem Engage, Diablo 4, Remnant 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals, and Baldur’s Gate 3. If Sea of Stars, Starfield, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Alan Wake 2 don’t fall flat on their faces, we may be looking at an all-timer, folks.
After taking a break from the hobby in college, 2017 was the first full year I started paying attention to games again. That coincided with my having a full-time job for the first time. I lived with three other people in a small city so my rent was cheap, and I had plenty of disposable income to devote to buying every new game with good reviews.
I fell in love with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which would have been enough to make it a good year, but developers kept throwing heaters. I played What Remains of Edith Finch, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, NieR: Automata, Prey, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Dream Daddy, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and Super Mario Odyssey in the year’s remaining months. I kept discovering 2017 games well into 2018, as I picked up Night in the Woods, Hollow Night, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus when they came to Switch. Eventually I got to Divinity: Original Sin 2, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Tacoma, too. There were so many games that I even wrote an article about The Best Games Of 2017 That I Finally Played In 2018 and it had 10 worthy entrants.
Part of the reason I had time to play all those year-old games was because 2018 was fairly barren. There were some big triple-A games released — Monster Hunter: World, God Of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Red Dead Redemption 2 — but they were few and far between. The year’s standouts were mostly indies, and I didn’t click with many of them. I liked Celeste and Guacamelee! 2, but I spent most of the year waiting for anything that connected as much as everything seemed to in 2017.
In 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 I played plenty of good games, but until now, there hasn’t been a repeat of 2017’s avalanche of games. Thanks, in part, to the many delays caused by COVID, 2023 is it. I’m excited about games and there are so many things to try that I can’t keep up. It’s fun, but it also can’t last. When so many developers are firing on all cylinders, it means that we’ll be waiting a few years as they reload. That’s fine; it’s the reality of game development. But it means that I’m trying to appreciate the embarrassment of riches 2023 is serving up in the moment. We won’t see its like again any time soon. The good news is there are so many games coming out this year that you can just treat 2024 as 2023: Part 2.