Some years in gaming are quiet. 2023 was not one of them. It delivered a landmark release roughly every month — giant open worlds, beloved franchises returning in style, and a handful of smaller games that punched far above their weight. If your backlog somehow survived it untouched, this is the catch-up list: fifteen of the year’s standout games, in the order they deserve a place on your to-play list.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
1. Diablo IV
Blizzard took the series back to its gothic roots. Diablo IV returns to a bleak, rain-soaked Sanctuary where Lilith, the daughter of hatred, has been summoned back into the world — and the mood is closer to the grim Diablo II than the brighter third game. The world is now a shared open map of five regions, stitched together with dungeons, world bosses and grim little towns that feel genuinely unsafe after dark.
Underneath, it is the classic loop perfected: pick a class, carve through hordes, and chase ever-better loot through a deep skill and Paragon system built for the long haul. Few games of 2023 were easier to lose a hundred hours to.
2. Hi-Fi Rush
Tango Gameworks announced this game and released it on the same day in January 2023, and it still became one of the year’s defining surprises. Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm-action brawler where the entire world — your attacks, your dodges, the enemies, even the scenery — moves to the beat of the music. Its hero, Chai, is a wannabe rockstar whose accidental robot arm leaves his heart beating in time with a soundtrack of licensed rock.
The cel-shaded art looks like a Saturday-morning cartoon in motion, the combat rewards rhythm without punishing you for lacking it, and the whole thing radiates a joy that big releases rarely risk. It is short, sweet, and unlike anything else on this list.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
How do you follow one of the most acclaimed games ever made? Nintendo’s answer was to go up and down: Tears of the Kingdom adds a vast sky of floating islands above Hyrule and a lightless underworld, the Depths, beneath it — effectively tripling the map of Breath of the Wild. A new mystery about the kingdom’s founding and a vanished Zelda gives the adventure a stronger story spine, too.
The real star is Ultrahand, the ability to fuse almost anything together — planks, wheels, fans, rockets — into working vehicles and gloriously improvised machines. It turned the game into a physics playground whose inventions are still circulating years later. For Switch owners, this was the essential game of 2023.
4. Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly
At the other end of the intensity scale sits Toge Productions’ gentle barista visual novel. You run a late-night coffee shop in a rainy, alternate Seattle populated by elves, orcs, vampires and other fantasy folk with very human problems — and you help them the only way you can: by listening, and by getting their drinks right.
Episode 2 adds new ingredients built around hibiscus and butterfly pea flowers, new customers alongside returning favourites, and a lost-and-found drawer that lets you return forgotten items and nudge stories along. It is a game about warmth and attention, best played slowly, ideally with a real drink beside you.
5. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Respawn’s sequel finds Cal Kestis five years after Fallen Order — older, wearier, and still running from the Empire. Survivor takes everything the first game did and scales it up: bigger, more open worlds anchored by the frontier planet Koboh, faster travel, and a lightsaber system expanded to five distinct stances, from dual-wielding to a heavy crossguard style.
It is also the darker middle chapter the story needed, asking what years of fighting do to a Jedi who keeps losing people. Between its swashbuckling set pieces and its quiet character moments, it stands as one of the finest Star Wars games ever made.
6. Ghostwire: Tokyo
One foggy night, nearly everyone in Tokyo vanishes, and the city falls to spirits out of Japanese folklore. You play Akito, a young man possessed by the spirit of a detective named KK, fighting back with elemental powers woven through elaborate hand gestures. The combat is striking, but the real achievement is the setting: a rain-slicked, neon-lit Tokyo emptied of people, where yokai wander the crossings and torii gates mark ground to cleanse.
It is part action game, part ghost tour — the city is dense with folklore notes, side stories and stray cats and dogs you can pet. Few games of the year had a stronger sense of place.
7. Dead Space
Motive Studio’s remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic is how remakes should be done. Engineer Isaac Clarke boards the derelict mining ship Ishimura looking for his partner Nicole, and finds the crew transformed into Necromorphs — horrors you cannot simply shoot in the head. Dead Space’s signature remains strategic dismemberment: with improvised tools like the plasma cutter, you take enemies apart limb by limb while the ship groans around you.
The remake rebuilds the Ishimura as one connected, explorable ship, gives Isaac a voice, and layers in a gruesome new “peeling” system for damage. It is scarier and more beautiful than the original, and the definitive way to play a landmark of the genre.
8. A Space for the Unbound
From Indonesian studio Mojiken comes one of the most heartfelt games of the year. Set in a small Indonesian town in the late 1990s, it follows Atma and Raya, two high-school sweethearts facing the end of school — and, increasingly, the end of the world. Atma’s power to dive into people’s minds and untangle their troubles starts as a gentle puzzle mechanic and becomes the key to the town’s strange, unravelling reality.
The pixel art is gorgeous, the cats are plentiful, and beneath the supernatural mystery sits a tender story about anxiety, memory and growing up. It is the quietest game on this list, and for many players it was the most affecting.
9. Street Fighter 6
Capcom’s flagship fighter came back swinging. Street Fighter 6 is built around the Drive system — a single gauge that fuels parries, rushes and devastating Drive Impacts, and creates a risk-and-reward duel in every round. Veterans get all the depth they expect; newcomers get the genuinely welcoming Modern control scheme, which trades some moves for simpler inputs.
The package is generous in a way fighting games often are not: a full single-player World Tour mode where your created fighter learns from the series’ legends, a social Battle Hub, and rollback netcode that makes online play feel local. It set a new standard for how complete a fighting game should be at launch.
10. Final Fantasy XVI
The sixteenth mainline Final Fantasy is the series at its darkest and most cinematic. In Valisthea, a land dying as its Mothercrystals drain the aether, nations go to war through Dominants — people who transform into colossal Eikons. You follow Clive Rosfield across decades of his life, from a teenage tragedy through revenge to something larger, in a story told with unusually grounded, political weight.
Combat is full real-time action, built by a designer from Devil May Cry, and the Eikon-versus-Eikon set pieces are among the most spectacular boss battles the series has ever staged. It is a bold reinvention that still feels unmistakably like Final Fantasy.
11. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life
This remake of the beloved GameCube farming game does something no other farming sim attempts: it lets you live an entire life. In Forgotten Valley you build a farm, court a partner, marry, raise a child — and then keep going, through chapters that age your family and your character across a lifetime, with your choices shaping who your child becomes.
The remake modernises the visuals, adds new events and festivals, and keeps the gentle melancholy that made the original a cult classic. Plenty of farming games will fill a season; this one asks what you want from a whole life.
12. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Team Reptile made the spiritual successor Jet Set Radio fans had been waiting two decades for. In the city of New Amsterdam, crews on skates, bikes and boards battle for turf the only way that matters: by covering the city’s walls, billboards and rails with graffiti, chaining tricks into enormous combos while the funk soundtrack refuses to sit still.
You play Red, a graffiti writer with a cybernetic head and a score to settle with the man who took his original one. It is stylish to its bones — cel-shaded, saturated and effortlessly cool — and mechanically it is pure flow.
13. Starfield
Bethesda’s first new universe in decades is a spacefaring RPG of genuine scale: more than a thousand planets to land on, a customisable starship that is yours down to the corridor layout, and a main quest that sends you across the Settled Systems hunting mysterious artifacts with the explorers of Constellation. It is Skyrim’s “go anywhere” spirit translated to the stars — survey alien worlds, join factions, smuggle, bounty-hunt, or simply build a quiet outpost and watch two suns set.
Its New Game Plus twist, which reframes the entire story, is one of the boldest structural ideas in a big RPG. If you like your games enormous, this is the year’s biggest box of space.
14. Mortal Kombat 1
Despite the name, this is a reboot: Fire God Liu Kang has restarted history itself, building a New Era where old enemies begin as strangers, brothers, or something stranger. Familiar faces — Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Mileena, Raiden — return in reimagined roles, which gives the story mode a freshness the series has not had in years.
The fighting introduces Kameo fighters, a partner system that lets you summon a second classic character for throws, breakers and spectacular tag-team Fatal Blows. The series’ trademark gore is present and cartoonishly excessive, but the real draw is how inviting the whole package is, from the cinematic story to the seasonal Invasions mode.
15. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Insomniac put both of its Spider-Men in one game, and the result is the year’s best superhero ride. Peter Parker and Miles Morales share a New York expanded to include Queens and Brooklyn, swapping between heroes as Kraven the Hunter turns the city into his hunting ground — and as a certain black suit begins changing Peter in ways his friends can see.
The web-swinging remains the most joyful traversal in any open-world game, now augmented with web wings for gliding between towers. The dual-protagonist story earns its emotional beats, the Venom arc lives up to its billing, and the whole production is a showcase for what the PS5 can do. And if lists like this are your thing, you may also enjoy my pick of the PlayStation games so good I’d experience them again for the first time.
