Deleted Saves: Phil's Top 10 Games of 2023
What is Deleted Saves about?
Deleted Saves is a podcast where I talk about the games that stuck with me long after I stopped playing them and deleted the save files, for good or bad, or some mix of those two extremes. It is a short form podcast, usually under 25 minutes an episode, and great to binge on a long car ride or on a lunch break. Join me for the games you know, may not know, or may only think you know, with a side of armchair philosophy, a bit of history, and just a dash of musing on the nature of videogames and how they affect us.
Many in the gaming sphere have said 2023 was a banner year in gaming, with hit after hit coming out in an unending stream of quality and success. I am inclined to agree with that idea. We were treated to a great many top-tier experiences, both originals IPs, sequels and remakes. But sometimes top ten lists encompass more than just the current year games, as you shall see. Here are my top ten games of 2023
10. Crystalis
Here’s a gem coming to us from distant 1990. This NES title is an action-adventure top down role-playing game where our nameless hero emerges from a cryogenic vault in the year of 2097 after the Great War and nuclear destruction of society in the far off year of 1997. Well, it seemed distant back then, don’t judge. But this is an otherwise simple 8-Bit sword and sorcery epic that will have you buying armor and shields and spells and hacking apart various mutant critters in search of the local villager’s themed MacGuffins to progress the story and collect elemental blades to defeat the Draygonia Empire’s destructive ambitions. I found this one on the Nintendo Switch, available on its NES retro game collection, after having never played it before, and it easily became the best retro game I played this year. I’m not even sure I saw a physical copy in the wild during the NES days. But better late than never! Nowhere near as complex as other NES RPGs like Dragon Warrior or the original Final Fantasy that debuted before it, but Crystalis is still something worth your time if you like retro games or are looking to relive a simpler time in gaming.
9. Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession
I’ve spoken a lot on my show about video games based on tabletop gaming licenses, of which Dungeons and Dragons is far and away the most common one. I even reviewed its sequel, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, and one of the most popular adventure modules Wizards of the Coast have released in the last decade for fifth edition D&D was an update to their Ravenloft setting called Curse of Strahd, in which the players try to survive against a powerful vampire lord and escape his dire land. However, I had never played this 1994 game until this year. This is a first-person dungeon crawler in the vein (no pun intended) of Might and Magic, Wizardry, or D&D’s own Eye of the Beholder series. You create two characters according to a truncated set of tabletop rules, including picking playing as a human, elf, dwarf or the like, being a fighter, thief, wizard, and are then stolen away into a land full of werewolves and vampires and can pick up two more characters along the way for a team of four. And like the tabletop game, you must try to escape the vampire Strahd’s land of sorrow. It is not very scary despite its gothic horror roots, unless getting stuck on the environment while being assaulted by enemies you cannot see as frightens you, but it is a solid entry into the storied history of D&D video games and it is a cheap pick-up if you like retro dungeon crawlers with RPG elements.
8. Infernax
Infernax is a short indie title that is a love letter to, of all things, the somewhat reviled sequels to some extremely popular NES titles, in this case Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. I have even said of Infernax that it is Castlevania II done right. In this game you play Duke Alcedor, freshly returned home to vaguely Eastern Europe from fighting in the Crusades, only to discover his homeland is overrun by demons, zombies, cultists and murderers and Alcedor must smash all who oppose him in the most gory way possible – I’m not kidding, I haven’t seen this much pixelated blood spilled on a NES clone in a long time. Infernax is a Metroidvania, and requires collecting or buying new gear and skills to deal more damage and traverse the landscape to five castles to break five seals and enter the demon-haunted central cathedral – this sound familiar, anyone? But despite the short length and familiar overtones, you will be in a for a lot of surprises with this title, and it is a worthy addition to any Steam backlog.
7. Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania
I had no real knowledge of Dead Cells as a game and had no plan to play it, until the first trailer for this entry dropped. As a huge fan of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the second I saw this weird little DLC package for a game I never intended to play I knew I had to get onboard. I don’t normally play roguelikes or rouge-lites, but Dead Cells on its own is good, like genuinely very good. The adaptability, the replayability of the levels due to its mix and match nature of design, it is just a lot of fun. I doubt I’ll ever finish the base game, but hey, it is a great game to play if you only have an hour or two between adult responsibilities. And the fact that you get to replay chunks of Dracula’s castle and fight its monsters with the cast of Symphony of the Night/Rondo of Blood-era Castlevania games quipping and encouraging your headless protagonist to help take down The Count once again, well, it is rare I recommend DLC, but if you are going to get any DLC for a game or buy a game based on its add-ons, this is the game you want in your collection.
6. Dredge
Part fishing simulator, part eldritch horror game, Dredge is an an indie title of two great tastes that taste great together, like peanut butter and chocolate. Or a Filet-O-Fish with a healthy dollop of existential dread. You play a fisherman with his own boat, piloting his way across the open ocean to a series of islands where the locals are suspicious and strange and the fish you catch look like the kind that would fit in down at the river next to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. In the daylight you fish and dredge up waterlogged parts and treasure to expand and repair your own boat, but at night the panic sets in once you are outside the ring of protective light and the things you see get much, much worse. And when you need to start collecting mysterious objects to complete a vague ritual, that ominous feeling sets in for good. The art style is reminiscent of surreal watercolor paintings and highly detailed animated construction paper cut outs, adding to the otherworldly nature of the game. Dredge as a title does not overstay its welcome, clocking in at around nine hours worth of play time, or a little more if you hunt down every secret, but it is worthy of replaying to see its alternate endings or if you just need some relaxing time puttering around gathering digital fish. Until the sun goes down, that is.
5. Evil West
I have long said the gaming world needs a third person over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4-style survival horror game where the player hunts more traditional monsters like ghosts, werewolves and vampires during the days of the Wild West. But until the day a brave company takes me up on that idea, Evil West will keep us happy. Evil West, despite what I just described, is a God of War clone, wherein you play Jesse Rentier, vampire hunter patrolling the American frontier during the presidency of Grover Cleveland, and he is the next in line to head up the U.S. Government’s secret monster killing Rentier Institute that keeps us safe from creatures of the night, and vampires in particular. When an immortal monster seeks to turn the President into a vampire and thus take over the United States as revenge for Jesse murdering her vampiric sire, things can only get crazy from there. Much like God of War, Jesse will superhero punch, shoot with a variety of modified period specific guns, electrify, messily dismember or blow up all sorts of nasty creatures and gunslinger lackeys trying to keep the West safe, destroy his target, and get some revenge of his own. There are skills to upgrade, new guns to buy, and sights to see along this linear adventure. If you feel like you need to punch vampires in the face while six shooters and a cowboy hat, this game is for you.
4. The Callisto Protocol
This is a somewhat controversial entry on this list. The Callisto Protocol comes to us from the original creative team behind Dead Space several years after EA famously shut down their original studio, Visceral Games, as the Dead Space series was not bringing in Madden levels of cash. It looked an awful lot like the game and studio that inspired it from the trailers, including monsters in space, guts and gore, and jump scares. But when Callisto Protocol came out, many critics derided it, well-known YouTubers made big shows of deleting the game and doing take down videos, and generally it got panned. But here’s my hot take: y’all were dead wrong about this game and don’t try to argue because you made a bad decision. The Callisto Protocol takes place inside Black Iron Prison on Jupiter’s moon Callisto, where our main character shoots, dodges, and bashes with a stun baton his way through armies of mutants while trying to escape, only to realize he may have had a hand in the disaster that surrounds him. Melee combat is the primary hook for this title, which I found refreshing in the endless shoot ‘em up clone factory that is modern games. And the jump scares are definitely there, the same as more famous titles. But regardless of its good points, The Callisto Protocol had quickly fixed bugs on launch, did so poorly financially and the backlash was so asinine that developers left the industry and we will probably not be getting a sequel, which has nothing to do with the events of the actual game itself. Oh well I guess.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
This is likely one of the top games of many people and many game outlets this year, and it does deserve the position. Possibly the most expansive open world Zelda title yet and the rare direct sequel, in this case to Breath of the Wild, we find Link trying to solve all of Hyrule’s problems once again from the ruins of the gravitational push and pull of the personalities of semi-demigods Zelda and Ganon, like being the third wheel on the world’s worst date. At first I didn’t “get” this game, as it is such a departure from the usual formula, and we know how much Nintendo likes to keep the formula’s of its flagship titles the same. But after a few hours of scouring the land, making goofy contraptions and Rube Goldberg machines out of Hylian post-apocalypse junk, gathering stuff and exploring the egg-like temples for the heart and endurance upgrades, I decided just to follow the main quest and I finally “got” the game, as the dungeons related to the main quest and having the spirits of your holy warrior friends follow you around is way more fun than just wandering the landscape looking for junk and treasure. Sure, the developers could have carved huge chunks off the map and shaved about twenty hours or so off the game run time to make the game more dynamic and focused, but it is fluid, gorgeous, a good cartoony living world, and possible one of the best games that has ever been produced for the Switch, a minor miracle of production and engineering that games its caliber on other platforms require a hundred gigs or more of hard drive space to render successfully.
2. Dead Space Remake
While The Callisto Protocol crashed and burned in the public eye, EA stepped in and said “Hey, you want Dead Space again? We got your Dead Space right here, pal!” and gave us Dead Space Remake, a complete one-for-one remake with extras of the original 2008 release of this survival horror classic. And when I say classic I mean one of the best of the survival horror/action horror games of all time, full stop. We return to the USG Ishimura with a fully voiced Isaac Clarke, so we finally do not have to pantomime our way through the game while our companions order us around, we can actually panic as monsters jump out of vents in real time! The whole game was revamped to make more sense, making the ship one whole vehicle you could explore over and over, and in some case you will have to once you find key items or upgrades to return to previous areas. The upgrade nodes for the weapons no longer require wasting nodes on unused spaces to advance, the monsters and characters look better and the darkness more oppressive, and the HUD is still on Isaac himself, allowing for more of the screen to be seen. If you played the original all the story beats are the same, so it is more like coming home after a long time away, just with a quality of life upgrade. This was a great return to a series that was lambasted at first but has become a classic as the years have gone on, but as it is unlikely EA will spend the money to give its sequels the same treatment because, again, this game didn’t make Madden levels of cash, at least it was a nice bit of service for the fans.
1. Resident Evil 4 Remake
Well. Well, well, well. Since it seems everyone was in a remake mood these past few years, Capcom decided to keep up its current trend of remaking the early Resident Evil games and set the pace as our lord and savior remake leader by gracing us with a ground up reworking of one of the most influential games of all time, Resident Evil 4. When the original came out in 2005, I was simply blown away by the depth and breadth of this game, especially considering the games that came before it. The remake returns us to rural Spain with former Raccoon City police officer turned private Presidential security force Leon S. Kennedy, but with a much darker tone and much less goofy action movie monologuing, which I know many thought was a downgrade but I saw as nothing but a positive. This Leon doesn’t trade quips with 80s action movie bad guys, he just puts a bullet in them (which usually doesn’t work), but he can now parry chainsaws with a hunting knife, so we didn’t totally get rid of the unreality. This Ashley is more humanized and more helpful, this Luis not an ethnic slur and is an actual person, and this Ada is… well, Ada, just toned down. The enemies are more worthy opponents, things hit harder, and the overall game is more fleshed out. Capcom decided to keep the final stage military island compound, but you can’t get everything you want in life. In the end though, Resident Evil 4 Remake remains an amazing game and will likely be the tops of many people’s game of the year lists this year. For now at least, the Capgods reign supreme.