It’s 2026 now, and I still find myself looking back at 2023 as a year of dizzying highs and devastating lows. That was the year I finally found my footing as a full-time games writer, but it was also the year when brilliant, generation-defining games dropped while thousands of developers lost their jobs. It felt like the industry was tearing itself apart even as it delivered masterpieces. I tried to play everything, often spreading myself too thin, but a handful of titles burrowed deep into my memory. Three years later, these are the ten that still glow the brightest.

10. Pikmin 4

For decades, Pikmin was just that weird series with the clay-art ads in Nintendo Power. I never touched it until 2023, when I snagged a 2-for-1 voucher and needed a partner for Tears of the Kingdom. I assumed I’d bounce off the real-time strategy style—my brain just doesn’t do RTS. But instead, I fell hard. Guiding those tiny creatures, exploring a world that felt huge but delicately scaled, and hearing the whistle of my space helmet became pure comfort. It was the year’s biggest surprise: a gentle, deeply rewarding adventure I never knew I needed.

9. Hi-Fi Rush

I remember the shadow-drop announcement. I downloaded it on a whim, and within minutes I was grinning like an idiot. Everything moves to the beat—your attacks, the environment, the enemies. It’s stylish, it’s funny, and the soundtrack made my heart race. Sometimes a game just has to be pure, unfiltered fun, and Hi-Fi Rush was exactly that. I finished it in a weekend, grinning the whole time.

8. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

My PS5 was in rough shape back then—it crashed every hour like clockwork—but I didn’t care. Swinging between glass towers as both Peter and Miles never got old, and the new Symbiote story twisted a familiar tale in ways that genuinely surprised me. The side quests finally felt like they belonged, stitching the city together with heart. Every crash was a minor nuisance; reloading was just an excuse to launch myself off the Empire State Building one more time.

7. Venba

Some games bore into your soul because they speak a specific truth. Venba is a narrative cooking game about an Indian family building a life in Canada, and it wrecked me. As the son grows ashamed of his heritage and the beautiful meals his mother prepares, I saw my own teenage idiocy reflected back. I made my parents sad with my embarrassed silences, just like the boy in the game. Venba reminded me that the most impactful stories are always the most personal ones, and I carried its warmth long after the credits rolled.

6. Cocoon

From the creators of Limbo and Inside, I expected something strange, but Cocoon rewired my brain. You carry entire worlds inside marbles, then nest those marbles within other worlds, and suddenly you’re solving puzzles that feel impossible—until they click. That moment of revelation, when the tiniest movement cascades through layers of reality, was pure magic. I never once looked up a guide, because the game trusts you just enough to let your own mind be the key.

5. Resident Evil 4

The original Resident Evil 4 on GameCube was the game that pulled me back into gaming after a long hiatus. So the 2023 remake felt like visiting an old friend who had learned a few new tricks. The parry, the rebalanced encounters, the chilling glow of Los Iluminados—it was all spectacular. I played it slowly, savoring every headshot and every leather-bound save room. It reminded me why I fell in love with this hobby in the first place.

4. Amnesia: The Bunker

Terror has a new home: a claustrophobic WW1 bunker where light is currency and a monster never stops hunting you. Amnesia: The Bunker turned fear into a resource system. You ration fuel, manage noise, and occasionally fight back with a gun that feels more precious than gold. Every creaking pipe, every distant skitter made my skin crawl. It was the best pure horror experience of 2023, and I still flinch when I hear rats in my basement.

3. Alan Wake 2

I was nervous about Alan Wake 2. Everyone kept saying “dream logic,” and I usually hate when games sacrifice coherence for surrealism. But Remedy pulled off a miracle. The world really did operate on dream logic—fragmented, symbolic, emotionally true—but every solution made perfect sense once you let your own subconscious guide you. It was a horror game, a musical, a detective story, and a metafictional puzzle all at once. I’ve never played anything quite like it, and I doubt I will again.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

How do you follow up the best Zelda game ever? By making everything bigger, stranger, and even more inventive. The sky islands, the depths, the ability to fuse a rocket to your shield—Tears of the Kingdom took the sandbox of Breath of the Wild and handed it back to you with a mischievous grin. I built absurd contraptions, cried at the new dragon story, and happily lost hundreds of hours. It was better in every conceivable way, and it still feels like a miracle.

1. Baldur’s Gate 3

There are a million reasons to love Baldur’s Gate 3. The freedom, the characters, the secrets you only find on a third playthrough. But for me, this game will always be the one that captured my wife’s imagination. She had dabbled in Animal Crossing during lockdown, but here she wanted to talk about every decision, every companion, every moral knot the game tied us in. We spent nights debating Shadowheart’s loyalties and Karlach’s ending, and I got to share my favorite world—Dungeons & Dragons—with the person I love most. Even if she never touches another RPG, that shared adventure was the best gift gaming ever gave me.

2023 was brutal and brilliant, and these ten games were the lanterns that lit the dark. They still burn in my memory, three years on.