Which games did you complete in 2023

[Watser]

As the fork has been laid to rest from the Christmas feast and we're all anxious to dig out our illegal fireworks from the shed, it is time to reflect on both our personal and professional accomplishments of 2023.
That's right, it's time to whip out your gaymer cred and show the world your list of prestigious videogames you managed to complete during the year of our Lord 2023.

Brigand: Oaxaca
DROD: Smitemastery 101
Heroes Chronicles: Clash of the Dragons
Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor
DROD: The Choice
DROD: King Dugan’s Dungeon
DROD: Halph has a Bad Day
DROD: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder
Legend of Grimrock
HoMM III: Armageddon’s Blade
Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor
Shard of Spring
Exile II: Crystal Souls
Ambermoon
DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold

Currently also playing Shovel Knight but have yet to beat the King Knight and Specter Knight campaigns and just started on Legend of Grimrock 2.

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm terrible at completing games, I always tend to quit near the end. Guess I'll think up a list of games I completed or nearly completed.

[Watser]

I'm terrible at completing games, I always tend to quit near the end. Guess I'll think up a list of games I completed or nearly completed.

I have the opposite problem. If I'm not having fun within the first 30 minutes I typically abandon a game, after that it's full sunk cost fallacy to the bitter end.

[Vaako]

Totk, Diablo2 Resurrected 4 times, BG3 9 times, RE4 remake 3 times. Also played Starfield but mainquest bug stopped me from finishing it and I got bored after 20hours anyway. Only paid for RE4.

[maidenhaver]

None of them.

[wndrbr]

This year I mostly played new games, various AAA slop.

Hi-Fi RUSH awesome slasher/character action in the vein of arcadey PS2-era games. Maybe it doesn't hold candle to the best games in the genre (such as 3d Ninja Gaiden games or DMC3), but as a casual normie I thought it was great. It's also a rare game from a major company that wasn't a buggy mess filled with anticonsumer garbage on release.

Control aesthetically and plot-wise it's super boring: the plot only exists in the first hour of the game, 99% of locations are empty offices and storage rooms, and all enemy types look the same. The game still gets two watermelons for having a really good combat system and environmental destruction. It kinda reminded me of FEAR, actually.

Resident Evil 4 Remake I still think this remake was thoroughly unneeded since the original RE4 is still amazing, but Capcom did a good job and delivered a game worth playing even if you already know and love the original. It's a sort-of a sidegrade, that's worse in some areas, but better in others.

Alan Wake American Nightmare low budget filler game that Remedy had to release to stay afloat after the original Alan Wake bombed in sales. The plot leads to nowhere and there are only three maps that you must visit multiple times (rehashed content). Well at least the combat is OK and the bonus survival mode is fun enough to play a few times.

The Last of Us Remake storyfag trash, one of thoes games that popularized this trend of making soy-infused cinematic third person action games where you play as a depressed dad, hide in the bushes, and use batman's detective vision. Never played the original and only checked this remake out to see what all the fuss was about.

Northern Journey good action-adventure-FPS-walking sim hybrid. It's not strictly a Half-Life clone, but similarly to Half-Life it constantly puts you into the various unusual gameplay situations and regularly throws at you some new gimmick, so you never know what's coming next.

The Case of The Golden Idol point and click adventure game with a focus on deduction/investigation (like Return of the Obra Dinn), where you must scour the area for clues and keywords, identify all the characters involved, and then reconstruct the chain of events by arranging keywords in a correct order.

System Shock (not remake) amazing game, in some aspects it's better than its more famous sequel. Dunno what took me so long to finally play it.

Cultic boomer-shooter from a solo dev. On surface it looks like a Blood clone (horror-fps, cultists as enemies, dynamite bundle as your primary throwable weapon, etc), but gameplay-wise it's actually closer to something like RTCW, i.e. the game's pace and mechanics are more focused on long range combat, and you are incentivized to shoot enemies in the head. It's overall fairly decent, even if derivative (like most of the boomer shooters are).

Amnesia - The Bunker a return to form for Frictional, it's a much better game than the dreadful Rebirth. It's also probably the most gameplay-heavy of all Frictional games (including Penumbra) - there's combat, both short- and long-term resource management, stealth, non-linear level design, traps, limited inventory capacity and an item box, save room, metroidvania-style area gating, etc etc. A must play for all fans of survival horror genre.

Hedon Bloodrite ignore the ugly art style and the muscular orkish women on the cover art. Barring the questionable visuals it's an amazing game with one of the best level designs i've seen. It's like a wild mixture of Arx Fatalis, Hexen 2 and Doom. The main (and only) downside is the deviantart-level character graphics.

Starfield worst game of the year and a massive letdown. I used to like Todd Howard and enjoy bethesda games despite them having a ton of issues, I even liked Fallout 4. Well not anymore. Starfield was so bad it killed Bethesda for me, I hope they go under. What a piece of **** jfc.

Alan Wake 2 barely interactive movie-game with a really bad gameplay-to-cinematics ratio. Most of the "gameplay" you either watch cutscenes, listen to inane dialogues, slowly walk through some wooded area while accompanying an NPC, or do the "investigation" (****** minigame that cannot be failed). Would've probably rated as the worst game I played this year, but Starfield took the cake.

Colony Ship OKayish scifi rpg. Kinda expected more with all the hype, but unfortunately it's blatantly unfinished and has lots of annoying little issues. The plot is sort-of decent until you start thinking it through and realize that it falls apart at its seams, the RPG mechanics and the build variety aren't well thought out, the learn-by-use progression system makes the game feel too metagamey, etc etc. Let's hope it's not the last Iron Tower outing, and Vince will get to make "Dungeon Rats in Space".

Vietcong Czech-made FPS game set during the Vietnam war. Has some high highs (goofy but endearing plot, diverse mission design, some realism elements without going full into milsim territory, graphics), but also really low lows (certain action-heavy missions barely work with the whole realism theme, lots of annoying and frustrating game design decisions). Sovlful eurojank.

I also replayed Quake 2 (the recent remaster) and Resident Evil 5-6 (played them in coop with a friend).

and I also played, but didn't finish Betrayal at Krondor, Divinity Original Sin 2, Pizza Tower, Gujian 3, and Expedition Conquistador. Will likely finish all of them next year (except for Gujian 3 which i didn't like).

[Roguey]

Taking everything I wrote in the What Game Are You Playing? thread and summing it up in one post

MSX Metal Gear - A product of its time that showed potential

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - I wrote a review of this exhausting thing

Mafia - got it for free, didn't like it

Kingdom Come: Deliverance - otoh, thought this one was all right

The Darkside Detective - cute casual adventure game

Resident Evil 3 Remake - downgrade from 2 but still liked it more than 1

Silent Hill 4 - grew on me after an awkward beginning

Ion Fury - okay, goes a bit downhill halfway through

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary - some frustrating parts, but okay

The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild - some okay content with some systems I didn't care for

Metal Gear Solid - wasn't as much of an improvement over the MSX game as I hoped it would be

Halo 2 - liked it much better than the first one

Sonic Adventure DX - some good songs with terrible physics, gameplay, writing, and sound editing

Halo 3 - didn't wow me as much as 2 but comparably entertaining

Super Mario Odyssey - pretty fun

Demonicon - amusing eurojank

Halo 3 ODST - okay with some annoying aspects

Hitman 3 - weakest of the Assassination World

Halo Reach - liked it as much as 2

Metroid Dread - all right, but three of those late-game bosses were too demanding for my tastes. Took over an hour to beat and left me with wrist pain

Bound by Flame - Spiders' worst RPG, didn't like it

Hard West - okay enough, liked the mood

Pikmin 3 - pretty neat

The Technomancer - better than Bound by Flame, not as good as Mars War Logs

Disco Elysium - Surprisingly ended up liking this

Yakuza Kiwami 2 - okay, incredibly stupid ending

Terminator: Resistance - a better sequel than any movie after the second one

Desperados III - all right, though the difficulty becomes too demanding for my tastes in the last parts

The Outer Worlds - okay, certainly room for improvement

Drakensang - 0sacred memed me into playing this, I hated it all the while, motivated mostly by the babes

Halo 4 - liked it well enough

Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children - mixed feelings

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition - bland and generic

Terminator: Resistance Annihilation Line - more of the same, so still good

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark - funny, but didn't like it as much as the first one

Doom 3 - inferior to both Doom and newDewm

Call of Cthulhu - could have been better, could have been a lot worse too

Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil -an improvement over the base game at least

Weird West - not great, but not too bad either

[GhostCow]

Atomic Heart was the only thing I enjoyed enough to take to completion.

[Oyster Sauce]

I feel like I've gotta find a game completion tracker as nice as AniList. My sense of time is awful.

[WhiteShark]

I feel like I've gotta find a game completion tracker as nice as AniList. My sense of time is awful.

I made a table in Obsidian to track the games I play, though I can't post the list for this year with confidence at the moment because it's on my other computer.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Trails into Reverie. I played on Abyss difficulty and had to levelgrind during the first chapter. I got stuck on the first few bosses for hours, but after that it becomes significantly easier, and then by chapter 3 it's disappointingly easy except for the final boss. Story is a mixed bag. I liked the Erebonians but hated Crossbell. Lloyd was shoehorned into a story he had no business being in and once again makes an infuriating decision at the climax. The quality of the English localization was a little wonky compared to prior games. Soundtrack was overall decent.




Kuro no Kiseki/Trails into Daybreak (with fan translation patch). I wrote a review of it here. I found the new setting of Calvard to be very lackluster. It isn't romantic like Liberl or Erebonia was, it's just a decadent modern 1st world nation. The main cast was overall unlikeable, only character I liked was Bergard but he doesn't join until 70 hours into the game. The antagonists were weak and the story is a boring slog for the first 70 hours. The game has nicer presentation than prior Trails games, though. Soundtrack was a step down from Reverie, with only a small handful of tracks worth adding to my favorite's playlist. I played on nightmare difficulty but the game was braindead easy, never challenged me. I am not optimistic for the future of this franchise.





Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword, a visual novel/SRPG hybrid. I started this years ago and then dropped it because it was too hard. I started a new playthrough a couple months ago and buckled down and studied the mechanics. The hardest part was chapter 3 where you invade Malorgian and have to defend a town, capture five more towns, break the mana crystals and kill the timed superboss. I got stumped on that one for a week but it was smooth sailing after. You don't need to level up everyone, just two or three parties really and divide them between groups with low magic resist (and thus need a blue spirit's ice banisher skill) and groups with high magic resist (which can tank an enemy red spirit's AoE spell). Story wise, I found the characters likeable, the plot was tightly written compared to other VNs and kept my interest all the way through. The soundtrack was fantastic, I added almost every track to my favorite's playlist and I checked out the composer's discography which sent me down a rabbit hole of discovering even more great music.

The game is old, so if you're AMD you have to tweak Radeon settings to get it to scale up to fullscreen, or if you're on Nvidia then you have to use Magpie.





World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

• Dragonriding is fun, but not as fun as GW2's Griffon riding, as unlike GW2 you can infinitely gain height and thus soar over and ignore the environment, whereas in GW2 it is very difficult to gain more height than you started with, so you have to actually fly through the environments, which is challenging and fun. Also, if you play a big character like a Tauren, then you are forced to use the Proto-Drake mount since it's the only dragonriding mount that doesn't look comically small for its rider.
• The devs reverted to the old talent trees which makes building your character a chore as the handful of meaningful talents are buried in a plethora of meaningless +2% HP nodes. Wish they had just stuck with the MoP talent trees that respected the player's time and only showed the choices that actually mattered.
• The new support class, Augmentation Evoker, is fun, but I hate the tumblr scalie aesthetic of the Dracthyr.
• Profession points now being timegated means that people who don't play year round are punished and can't break into the market.
• The environments look okay. Skyboxes look nice. I liked the Waking Shores are with the rock pillars and the waterfalls, the twisted Primalist areas, the final room in Vault of the Incarnates, the underground zone of Zaralek Cavern, and the Emerald Dream zone.
• The soundtrack was a mixed bag, mostly forgettable but the Emerald Dream patch had some good tracks.
• For raids, I liked the Raszageth fight at the end of Vault of the Incarnates, mainly for the aesthetics of the room. I liked Echo of Neltharion where the boss is raising earth walls trying to separate the raid and he's punting people across the room. A lot of the Amidrassil fights were fun, particularly Tindral where he is constantly shifting forms and you have to fly on your dragon and chase him. Unfortunately the game continues to poorly tutorialize boss mechanics, so you have people running away when they should be stacking because they think it's an AoE, or people bringing AoEs to the rest of the group when they're supposed to drop it off away from the group, and people getting blamed for AoEs they weren't carrying because of how poorly differentiated the visuals are, etc.
• The questing experience was mediocre. Each Dragonflight questline has you follow a pathetic wimp male NPC who has to be lectured by stronk female leaders. Wrathion got robbed of his storyline as the inheritor the Earth-Warder by a passive cow. I guess the final stretch of the Azure Span where you fight off a Primalist army with Khadgar, and the final stretch of Thaldrazsus where you're travelling through time was a little fun. The Blue Dragonflight questline had surprisingly good voice acting, I wish that the rest of the game's dialogue was on that level. Malfurion was written out of the story and didn't get to show up during the Emerald Dream patch. The Titans are made out to be evil strawmen. The new writers clearly detest Warcraft and wish they were writing something else.