The MMNTech GOTY Awards: Games I enjoyed in 2023
Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals. Hopefully Santa graced you with some great games in your stockings this morning. Unfortunately, 2023 hasn’t exactly been the best year for video games. It’s to the point where I’ve decided to forgo the usual Best of the Best. Not that there hasn’t been anything good this year. However, I feel the bar has gotten so low that games that were once a soft 7-8 a decade ago are now considered a hard 9-10. Of course I like to think I have some standards, and nothing has really managed to meet my expectations of greatness. So instead I decided to focus not on games I think are the best, just the ones I genuinely enjoyed over the past year, in no particular order.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed (Monolithsoft)
Future Redeemed is the story expansion to last year’s GOTY winner; Xenoblade Chronicles 3. While it’s a DLC, it’s certainly meaty enough to match many stand-alone titles, clocking in at about 20-30hrs depending on your play style.
The story chronicles the adventures of the City’s founders, whom we’re introduced to us in the base game as statues in the Hall of the Founders. The story takes place several hundred years before the base game, following N’s destruction of the original City. Matthew (chav Noah), is searching for his sister Na’el (thicc Mio), who has gone missing, along with other survivors. We then find out that Z is not the only god-like being trying to control of the world of Aionios.
Future Redeemed is basically a love letter to the entire Xeno franchise, while also tying a nice bow on the Klaus saga. Rex, Shulk, and Alvis all return as playable characters. We also get a few new faces, along with solid voice acting. The story doesn’t go quite as deep as the base game, but still drops some pretty big implications for the entire Monolith catalogue.
Things haven’t changed much gameplay wise. Which is a good or bad thing depending on how much you liked the base game. The Collectopedia mechanic has been fleshed out to give rewards for finding certain items, discovering new places, or defeating enemies. You can then use these rewards to enhance your characters’ abilities, in place of the class and skill system. A beastiary has also finally been added. The interlink forms from the base games have also been replaced with tag team attacks similar to Torna: The Golden Country.
Overall, this acts as a satisfying finale for Xenoblade, and is a must play for fans of the franchise.
Pizza Tower (Tour De Pizza)
I absolutely adored the original Warioland games. Unfortunately, Nintendo hasn’t made a new one for a long, long time now. Fans have certainly been asking, but for some reason the House of Mario would prefer to relegate their greedy, farting anti-hero to the Warioware microgames series. Which has kind of left a bit of a void in the puzzle-platforming genre. Well, what would happen if you took Wario’s gameplay, then combined it with the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog, and gave it a 90s cartoon art design? That’s how you end up with Pizza Tower; a crudely irreverent game about a broke, Italian pizzamaker trying to save his restaurant from an evil, sentient pizza.
If you’ve played Warioland 4, the gameplay loop here is very similar. You go through levels trying to collect pizza toppings, before hitting the end goal, and racing back to the start before the timer runs out. Unlikely Wario, the gameplay is far more designed around speed than the various transforming powerups. But those are here too.
Pizza Tower is fast paced fun, that throws up a pretty decent challenge. Especially in its boss fights. This is one of those games that I enjoyed, but admittedly am not very good at. Honestly, it’s one of the finest indies I’ve seen in a while, and it truly deserved the buzz it was getting at the beginning of the year. It’s pretty cheap too, so don’t miss out on it if you’re hungry for more garlic based shenanigans.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo)
I did not care for Breath of the Wild. In fact, I named it one of my most disappointing games for 2017. A decision which I still stand by. It wasn’t a terrible game by any means, but it had a lot of flaws that didn’t make it an enjoyable experience. Its sequel Tears of the Kingdom though is a good example of how a few seemingly minor changes can really elevate a concept beyond the sum of its parts.
I had said that crafting was one of the better things that was added to BOTW. For TOTK, Nintendo went absolutely whole hog with it. The game lets you, literally, glue random junk onto other junk to create even better junk. Weapon not hitting hard enough or getting a bit worn out? Try fusing it with another weapon. Can’t get through the Gerudo desert because of the heat? Try gluing a sapphire to your shield. But it doesn’t stop there. The game lets you create all sorts of crazy contraptions, from air bikes, to your own Guardian war machines, to diabolical Korok torture devices. The options are limitless to the point where an entire community of Hyrule engineers has emerged to find new ways to cheese the game.
On top of that, we get some new features like actual companions that follow you around and help in fights, better dungeons, better shrine puzzles, and twice the overworld to explore. It’s not perfect, but it shows that there’s still room to innovate on the Zelda formula.
The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog (Sega)
On March 31st of this year, the official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter page announced that a new direction was coming for the Blue Blur: “he’s dead”. Yep, the very next Sonic game would have the chili dog chomping spiky boy biting the dust. Of course we all thought it was an April Fools joke. Then the game dropped on Steam.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog in reality is a clever parody of Murder on the Orient Express. Amy had brought her friends along for a murder mystery party. Sonic draws the short straw and ends up getting the part of the victim. Except something goes horribly wrong, and Amy discovers him completely unresponsive. So she teams up with the train’s waiter, who I named Cheezus in my playthrough, to solve who did it.
This is more visual novel than a game that has you pointing and clicking to solve various puzzles as your search each train car for evidence. Of course the conclusion is entirely expected. However, for what essentially is a meme game, and a free one to boot, it’s actually really well done. Puzzles are decent but not too hard, the art style is great, the music is solid. The whole thing just oozes with its own self-referential charm.
