Genre Bests, Personal Top 10 Lists And More: One Last Look Back At 2023

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This week, we continued taking stock of 2023 with looks back at how the Switch and the Steam Deck fared, our picks for the cream of the crop among shooters and role-playing games, and more juicy commentary on everything the year had to offer.

A Switch controller appears on a pink background.

The Switch is going out with a bang. Ahead of the likely reveal of the Nintendo handheld hybrid’s successor next year, the aging hardware continued receiving an amazing slate of new games in 2023, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, one of the best entries to date in the long-running fantasy adventure series. Last year, the Switch felt like it was quietly fading away. 2023 proved that the barebones console still had a few more tricks up its sleeve, showing once again why it’s one of the most beloved gaming machines ever made. - Ethan Gach Read More

Two giant mechs square off in a barrage of bullets and laser fire.

Mech pilots have feelings, too. Armored Core VI is a game about blowing up everything in sight with a smorgasbord of overpowered weapons. But it’s also a game about vain, self-righteous men who think it’s their God-given right to take over a planet. While you only know them as codenames, characters like Snail and Handler Walter vie for power throughout the game’s story. - Hayes Madsen Read More

An image shows the right analog stick and four face buttons of the Steam Deck with a Kotaku "2023 Year In Review" badge in the top right corner.

Valve introduced the world to the Steam Deck in 2022 and it was an instant hit with countless Steam users who jumped at the chance to take their games just about anywhere. As we close out 2023, the Steam Deck remains one of the best pieces of portable gaming hardware you can buy, both on the hardware and software side of things. It’s also started a bit of an arms race in the PC gaming space, one that’s exciting to watch and, with the launch of the Steam Deck OLED, one that Valve doesn’t seem to be keen on falling behind in whatsoever. - Claire Jackson Read More

A screenshot shows Alan Wake attacking an enemy with a flashlight in Alan Wake 2.

Last year, I said 2022 was an odd year for games, with some feeling that it was largely devoid of great releases and others, myself included, finding them plentiful. But this year was even stranger, as it was better than ever while simultaneously being the worst in a long time. - Zack Zwiezen Read More

Princess Zelda is on the left and Alan Wake is on the right, their hands almost touching across their disparate realities. In the lower right, a label reads Kotaku 2023 Year In Review.

To some, 2023 was one of the best years for video games in a long time. It didn’t quite land that way for me, but that’s okay. Even if I don’t rank the likes of Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Baldur’s Gate 3 among the year’s best, I still admire the impulse they exhibit to try something fresh and new, or to make the familiar bigger and better, with orders of magnitude more intricacy and complexity than it’s ever been done. 2023 was, refreshingly, a year of big swings, in which the safe and conventional were overshadowed by the daring and visionary. My own short list of personal favorites includes two of the most high-profile successes of the year, as well as a few games that look back at visionary efforts of the past, and one intimate gem that speaks to the place games occupy in the lives of those of us who love them. - Carolyn Petit Read More

Art shows Sea of Stars, Final Fantasy XVI, and Cyberpunk 2077.

The last few years have been full of amazing RPGs, but 2023 took things to a whole new level. It was the year we got Final Fantasy XVI, Diablo 4, and Bethesda’s long awaited Starfield. It was also the year Baldur’s Gate 3 appeared and blew them all out of the water. Fans of stat-based combat, meandering side-quests, and spending way too much time navigating menu systems are eating well. - Ethan Gach Read More

A image collage shows characters from various shooters released in 2023.

2023 was yet another solid year for fans of shooty-shooty-bang-bang video games. While the Golden Era of shooters might be slowing down as the year wraps up, we still got some dang good ones, both in first-person and third-person variants, over these past 12 months. - Zack Zwiezen Read More

2023 is nearly over, finally, but at least there were some great games to get us through it, right? This year was full of great releases, but marred by myriad layoffs across sectors (including the games industry), and larger, global issues that made it hard to find the light in the dark. But video games, with their captivating worlds, moving stories, and nuanced characters, gave me a semblance of hope when I felt hopeless. - Levi Winslow Read More

Pikachu and Eevee look up at the Kotaku 2023 Year In Review badge

Pokémon’s profit margins probably don’t reflect it, but the franchise had a rough year in 2023. Without a new mainline role-playing game to dominate the series’ headlines, Pikachu and friends were, instead, shrouded in controversies throughout the past 12 months. Between Pokémon Go angering swaths of its community, scalpers making a public embarrassment of the franchise to people who don’t even pay attention to it, and Scarlet and Violet’s DLC underlining the problems ingrained within the Pokémon pipeline, the screws are coming loose on the hype train. - Kenneth Shepard Read More