Channel J: My Tentative Top Games of 2023 List

I say tentative in the title because I plan on catching up for all the years I missed and releasing “game of the year” articles sometime at the end of this year, but I wanted to put this one out now because out of the few games from 2023 that I played, I thought that some of them deserved at least one mention while 2023 is still a relevant topic.  I didn’t play as much as I would’ve liked, but here are the gems out of all of the games and demos that I manged to play.

 

Bear Lisa
Developed and Published by GAMEFOX

Let’s get the weirdest case out of the way now.  Bear Lisa is a nongram puzzle game starring a girl who is accidentally cursed into the form of a bear cub and she finds herself helping to rescue a village full of people who have been cursed into animal forms.  They’ve at least been given humanoid animal forms, so they can still function as a society, but they don’t want to be animals for some reason, so Lisa sets out on a quest to defeat the sorcerer, and the player moves the story forward by solving nongram puzzles.

What’s weird about this game is that it was released in 2023 and then suddenly deleted again before the year was over.  For some reason, every trace of it was removed from the Internet and the only proof I have that the game ever existed is that I played it and I still have the game.  They didn’t delete my copy of the game, but then again, they’re not Sony or Discovery.

Each chapter contains several pictures that the player is supposed to assemble from nongram puzzles, most of which are on the easy side, even the 20×20 grids.  Even with the constant interruptions to solve puzzles, some of the pictures only require 9 puzzles to solve, but even the ones that require more don’t break up the flow of the game.  It’s strange to think of a nongram game as having a blistering pace, but that’s what Bear Lisa has.  It’s just a shame that no one can play it now, because it certainly made my short list for game of the year.

 

Changeling Tale
Developed and Published by Helmet Fox

This is one of the games which I tried the demo of and it’s a strong enough game that I want to include it in my short list for game of the year.  That and it was released so late in the year that most people probably haven’t finished with it yet.  As of this writing, it’s not been out for more than a week.  It’s been a few years in the making, and it shows.  The writing is superb and the art is fantastic.

The story centers around a young man who has returned from war.  Malcolm finds himself in the middle of a rather unique situation, for as he romances the young women from the MacLeod family, they start to change into something not quite human.  The attractive singer Jessie transforms into a wolf, the meek Marion turns into a cow and the independent rebel Grace turns into a sea dragon similar to the legendary Nessie.

The developer is up front with the fact that the game is not finished.  The initial release covers the main story with branching paths for romancing each of the MacLeod girls, but much DLC is planned for the future which will flesh out the story and offer Malcolm more romance options to pursue.  Whether they can fit into the story remains to be seen, but the game is good so far and it’s pretty rare for DLC updates to retroactively drag a game down.

It’s games like Changeling Tale which make me wish that people didn’t jump the gun with their year end lists.  The Game Awards are handed out in very early December, but the nominees are announced in November.  Most people start making their “game of the year” lists before December is even over.  Games that come out in the last few weeks are, in essence, ineligible for awards no matter how good they are, because no one thinks to say “Game of the Year 2023 Plus The Last Couple Weeks Of 2022”.

 

The Jackbox Party Pack 10
Developed and Published by Jackbox Games

After being disappointed in 9, I found myself actually enjoying 10 quite a bit.  9 leaned too much into retreading Fibbage for the fourth time instead of perhaps refreshing a fan favourite that hasn’t received a sequel yet.  10, meanwhile, does just that by including a sequel to one of the only party pack drawing games I’m willing to play.

Tee K.O. 2 joins enjoyable original games such as the time traveling trivia game Timejinx, a game which feels a lot more fair than the good-in-theory Quixort from 9.  Quixort unfortunately failed in the research department.  I recall a question about horse movies didn’t take into account that there were two movies with the title My Little Pony: The Movie and which penalized a team I was watching on Twitch for treating it like the 2017 film when the question expected them to know it meant the 1986 film.  There were also questions in Quixort which required knowledge you would only get by working at Jackbox Games, so it felt like a very unfair trivia game.  I know they’ve been trying to make trivia games that allow for players who aren’t good at trivia to compete with those who are, but Quixort was not great at times.  The Wheel of Enormous Proportions from 8 was more successful, where someone could score a lot of points in the trivia rounds but everyone else can catch up when spinning the wheel between the trivia rounds.

Where Tinejinx potentially fails is that its questions are all history related and most of them are rather easy to Google.  I had a match where I was playing against someone who just looked up all the answers and pretty much ran away with the game.  If the game provided maybe ten less seconds to figure out each answer, that might make it harder to cheat, but I’m sure most people who want to will still find a way.

By far my favourite new game in 10 is a rhythm game called Dodo Re Mi.  As far as I can tell, it’s the first rhythm game offered in a Jackbox Party Pack, and it’s incredibly fun.  Not only are players competing with one another for the best score, they’re also working as a team to play enough perfect notes to appease a carnivorous plant who might eat them if they fall short of their goal.  The game also allows players of all skill levels to participate by offering an opportunity to pick easier or harder instruments to play, and my proudest moment so far was beating a rhythm game veteran by choosing a Hard instrument and scoring more perfect notes than the veteran who chose a Very Hard instrument.

Dodo Re Mi had to have been in development for a while, considering how well it functions.  You can play it both on cell phones and in a web browser using your keyboard.  There is, as far as I can tell, no input lag.  I play a note, it immediately records that I played it instead of waiting a moment and letting the note pass by before acknowledging that I tried.  After playing my part in a song, the game will play back everyone’s efforts together and if we pleased our plant overlord, we live to chirp another day.  The best thing is, the game is as long or as short as you want, with each round only taking about five to ten minutes, so it’s perfect for if you want to end your Twitch stream soon but you still have a few minutes left to play something and you don’t own the original Jackbox Party Pack with Lie Swatter in it.

 

 

My Tentative Game of 2023:

Goodbye Volcano High
Developed and Published by KO_OP

Part visual novel and part rhythm game, Goodbye Volcano High is a game where a meteor is about to crash into the planet and kill all life, so a group of friends in their senior year of high school must deal with having their future stolen from them and come to terms with the best years of their lives being the only years of their lives.

The game stars Fang, a non-binary pterodactyl who is trying to start up a band, but their friends seem to want to do different things with their lives, putting Fang’s dream in jeopardy.  It doesn’t help that there’s a literal apocalypse hanging over their heads and most of what Fang and their friends want to do end up becoming impossible as a result.

Although the Dungeons & Dragons style side plot where the friends play “Legends & Lore” eats up more chapters than I would’ve liked, I was pretty invested in Fang’s struggles to make their band work and I also enjoyed the mystery of Fang’s secret admirer.  There is definitely room for multiple playthroughs, not only because certain PSN trophies lock you out of others and thus the Platinum requires playing the game more than once, I also felt like I wanted to see what happened when Fang got together with their secret admirer, because in my first playthrough, I chose to focus on stuff other than romance.

The rhythm game sections are also pretty chill and I never felt overwhelmed by them.  Although there isn’t an on screen scoring mechanic, I still popped a trophy at the end which indicated that I scored over 90% on all of them, so it seems like I didn’t suck.

Some of the rhythm game sequences are pretty touching, like when Fang is forced to play solo and unplugged when the power goes out during a competition, or the very end when Fang and their band are partying at the literal end of the world.  In all, I look forward to revisiting the world of Goodbye Volcano High sometime in 2024, not only to grab some of the trophies I missed out on the first time, but also to experience the story again in new and interesting ways.  I’m not ready to say goodbye to Volcano High just yet.

 

And there is my tentative list of games that I felt were good enough to mention in my game of the year post.  I plan on experiencing more of what 2023 has to offer, including finishing games such as Cross Tails and Final Fantasy XVI and trying out games that piqued my interest including This Way Madness Lies and Mice Tea.  I also want to catch up on games that I was going to play from previous years too, and then at the end of 2024, I’ll be able to finally award my Game of the Year for not only 2023, but for the last few years as well.  This is pretty much an excuse for me to tackle my backlog and try to finish a bunch of games that I’ve been meaning to beat.