Video Games 2023

Solid-state drives, and the lightning fast load times they facilitate, have allowed a certain seamlessness to assert itself in video games. While a lot of really talented developers have leveraged this data dump to zap players back-and-forth in space and time with very little pause, Remedy Entertainment have instead focused on the clash and intersection of competing realities. So while Control on PS4 (a previous example of Remedy's signature trick) was hamstrung by tedious, creeping bars interrupting these visual seizures, this year's Alan Wake 2 is able to chop-and-change surroundings on the fly, transforming the basic act of piloting a pistol-toting burnout into a psychedelic spelunk. It's not enough that ghost narratives invade and envelop real-time gameplay at key, plot-relevant points. Remedy have built entire mechanics around physically aligning our viewpoint on these fractures; rewarding careful steppers with breaks that bubble into mixed-media collages. 

A wonderful example of a non-linear action game, Blasphemous 2 relentlessly rewards players daring enough to press deeper into the unreachable corners of its sprawling map. Surrounding your leaping, dashing fanatic are pixelated descriptions of baroque super-structures that frustrate and deny progress. This is a world filled with leaking cathedrals that pierce the sky, professing exultation for a malevolent God, while paving over the fallen horrors of the previous epoch. Similarly, the game's soundtrack, composed by Carlos Viola, combines pounding, flamenco guitar with winding, melodic dirges that firmly trap the player in a turbo-charged Spanish Catholicism that never experienced The Enlightenment. This is a society steeped in mouldering horror and many obsessive forms of self-flagellation. What better backdrop for a game that demands you hurl a shrinking figure at landscapes heaving with bloodied stakes?

Motive Studios' remake of Dead Space shines even brighter than the original 2008 release, thanks to a massive shift in where the industry now apportions its time, money and talent. Back then lengthy single-player games were closer to the norm, with Dead Space crash-landing in-between all-timer Resident Evil 4 and a Resident Evil 5 that, at least originally, promised a withering, horror-focused experience. A completely different lighting system helps to cast churning flesh and metal in deeper, darker shadow but this remake's greatest strength is a rejection of the simulation physics that have so fully invaded every other game in which you are asked to manipulate an onscreen character from a third-person perspective. Movement is, instead, much more twitchy and digital. A welcome throwback for players less interested in steering lurching meat puppets. 

Poosh XL is the latest game from Adamvision Studios, a one-man dev team responsible for those fun Recharged remakes of several ancient Atari games a few years back. Like those releases, Poosh XL is blaring but basic; a one-button score attack that takes place within a neon, light-piped world and asks players to inch a ball up a procedurally generated passage. Players will struggle with progress-barring hazards; a control scheme that punishes thoughtless, rapid movement; and a instant death laser that is always hot on your heels. 

Post Void is a few years old now, if you buy your games solely through Steam, but if you're willing to bide your time and wait around for native PlayStation 5 ports, well, 2023 was your time to shine! Armed with an impassive idol head and a pistol that looks very much like a tattoo gun, players must navigate their way through strange, liminal living spaces decorated with revolting patterned wallpaper suggestive of a baked bean lava flow. Obviously the order of the day is escape, but your path to the shimmering pond that transmits you deeper into this nightmare is jealously guarded by all manner of slithering horrors. Random layouts and instantaneous restarts further massage this pleasant sort of revulsion, keeping you plugged in and plugging away. 

How do you remake the greatest video game ever made? Well, exactly like this. 2023's Resident Evil 4 may not be a 1:1 update of every aspect and avenue present in the original game but Capcom Division 1's revision smooths modern sticking points - most notably the 2005 game's tank-style controls - while maintaining the risk-and-reward loops that underline basically every aspect of that masterpiece's core gameplay. Exploration, weapon updates and the various currencies available all induce certain conflicting (and even, at times, complimentary) tensions into the piece. When the path ahead is clear, is it worth doubling back and checking nooks-and-crannies for branching paths? Does the bounty for vanquishing an even spongier variant of a mid-boss enemy outweigh the potential spend associated with pursuing it? 

Like Capcom's recent Resident Evil 2 remake, this 4 likes to trap players in a constant state of struggle. Very rarely do you (at least on a first playthrough) ever feel like you have too many health items or more than enough bullets to carelessly proceed. Separate Ways, the dirt cheap DLC that followed, is equally superb. Not only does it bait nostalgists with extra areas from the predecessor game that didn't quite make the cut several months earlier, it also introduces brand new traversal and combat mechanics that practically demand to become the new norm. On that note, it'll be interesting to see how Capcom approaches Resident Evil 5 when they (inevitably) come to remake it. Not just because of the game's depiction of Africa - which is positively Victorian - but also because these recent revisions of their classic survival horror games have remained committed to impoverishing the (single) player as a way of casting doubt on their ability to progress. 5's preference for sidekicks will mean either abandoning these design preferences or a skilful re-contextualisation of cooperative gameplay. 

Banana Bytes' Sophstar is a top-down shooter packed to bursting with selectable ships. This, at least initially, overwhelming amount of choice isn't just cosmetic preference either: each of the game's many craft play in markedly different ways, from the directions these fighters pump out bullets to the ways in which the game's defensive, teleport mechanic operates. Sophstar, the work of a one-man team from Brazil, has that same, intense flavour as a Mega Drive import cart; one that you'd likely be drawn to based solely on a painted, wraparound cover featuring an electrified, alien horror leering at prospective customers. 

Given the horrid, freebie launcher feeling of the previous entry, Capcom really only had to right the ship with Street Fighter 6. Instead, they took the idea that even-numbered entries in this series should be transformative to heart, delivering a stacked fight suite loaded with distractions and diversions that are always teaching the player some piece of situational information. The optional Easy Operation-style controls, as well as combat mechanics designed to allow a couple of opportunities to reverse a round's momentum, are especially welcoming for newer players who are happy to be instructed. For all the impatient tutorial-skippers out there though, there's always a crouching medium kick into a Hadoken. 

Lucky enough to score a Sega Master System and Shinobi one Christmas in the early 1990s, I went on the hunt for a similar game when my birthday followed shortly after. Despite being a chopped arcade port, Shinobi still offered a twitchy mix of blade-on-henchmen violence and black magic special attacks, so it was only natural I gravitated towards The Cyber Shinobi, a follow-up that, presumably, stirred mechanoids into the mix. Designed around large, detailed sprites to the exclusion of even a basic sense of accurate player control, that 8-bit sequel stunk out the system; single-handedly switching me on to the idea that branding cannot be trusted and everything should be judged on a case-by-case basis. Anyway, Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider is exactly the game I wanted to play back then: speedy, shuriken-on-cyborg violence; action trapped in a succession of burning buildings and crumbling laboratories. 

Venba, despite its sweet, sketchy art style, is a completely ruthless visual novel that batters forth in time and space, accruing considerable human wreckage along the way. For the majority of the game's hour-and-change length, players control the title character, attempting to decode a worn cookbook passed down to her by her own mother. Venba, a Tamil immigrant living in Canada, cooks for her husband and son, the latter of whom isn't shy about about pulling faces or making disparaging remarks when greeted with non-pizza foods. Short gameplay scenes revolve around the assembly of these cookbook meals - all of which look delicious - but the real meat is revealed when we are left alone with access to Venba or her son's mobile phones. Nosey parkers may well find themselves heartbroken, scrolling back through one-sided message threads in which a lonely parent heedlessly reaches out to a disinterested child.