You’ve probably already seen Eurogamer’s top 50 games of 2023, but we didn’t want to leave our end of year thoughts there. Big lists can sometimes feel impersonal, and as you know, tastes in games can be very personal. So we wanted to put together another kind of list, something that would show you – on a more personal level – the games that we, the people who write for Eurogamer, really enjoyed this year.

This brief series of articles will collect the top fives from a handful of different Eurogamer contributors, and we’ll publish a handful of them each day for four days. We’re not ordering the top fives because it’s not really about that this time – ordering things. It’s more important for us, here, to give you a sense of why.

Oh and please feel free – in fact, feel encouraged – to share your top fives below.

Matt

Mediterranea Inferno

As far as elevator pitches go, solo developer Lorenzo Redaelli’s summation of Mediterranea Inferno – “a sadistic game where you can torture three bourgeois twinks and push them towards the most horrible and gruesome endings” – certainly does the job, but it hardly conveys just how astonishing this vicious, emotionally pulverising, and unabashedly queer visual novel of friendship and post-COVID trauma in the Italian sun really is. At its heart, it’s a morality play – a tale of three violent, inevitable unravelings in the face of emotional, cultural, and political inertia – but one shot through with a devastatingly relatable thread of emotional authenticity, even as it tilts into all-out horror. Mediterranea Inferno is a sledgehammer of a game, a dense, disturbing, provocative, playful, poetic, occasionally profound, and often deeply funny rumination on the sometimes paralysing search for a place in the disenfranchising shadow of modern-day life – and it’s easily the most relentlessly, suffocatingly stylish game of 2023.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

I’ve a confession to make; I’ve regretted not giving Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew the full five stars treatment since the day my review went live. This tragically final outing from developer Mimimi Games – a studio that’s built its impressive reputation on its catalogue of remarkable Commandos-style stealth-tactics games – doesn’t, admittedly, shake up the team’s winning formula a whole lot, but it pushes it just about as far as it can go and does so with incredible style. It’s a wonderfully refined, deeply rewarding, and irresistibly characterful pirate adventure (where else can you hide an ally by dragging them off the corporeal plane, or stuff a foe into a portable cannon to launch them out of the way?) that’s just a joy to play. It’s a stellar achievement – as approachable as it is rich in tactical opportunity – from a studio at the top of its game, and it’s just devastating that Mimimi’s journey ends here, albeit on such an enormous high.

Chants of Sennaar

Developer Rundisc’s Chants of Sennaar certainly isn’t the first game to turn linguistic archeology into play, but there’s something wonderful about the purity of its approach here. Shorn of complicated story arcs and character beats, Chants of Sennaar makes language – or rather languages – the absolute star, words folding inward, outward, informing each other, informing the last, in a dazzling, deftly orchestrated series of semantic conundrums requiring players to infer meaning on unfamiliar symbols. That Chants of Sennaar manages to juggle the complexities of its five interlinking languages – each often working within startlingly different parameters – with such casual elegance is an astonishing achievement in itself; that it does so while also wordlessly establishing five fascinatingly distinct cultures and infusing the whole thing with a joyous sense of human connection makes it even more so.

Hi-Fi Rush

Emerging like a blaze of summer sun on a bleak winter’s evening in the depths of January, Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush proved to be a wholly unexpected, but entirely fitting, herald to a wonderful year of video game releases – its breezily winning one-two combo of flawless arcade rhythm combat and primary-hued adventuring seemingly escaped from a universe in which the golden age of Sega never died. The beating heart of it all – that rhythmic, mesmerizingly chaotic brawling – is a treat, pairing dazzling, pulsating musical spectacle with timing-based tussling that hides unexpected depths. That alone would make Hi-Fi Rush a worthwhile endeavour, but the boundless charm, wit, and style with which the whole thing is presented turns a canny game into something utterly irresistible.

Cocoon

I don’t think I’m quite as taken with Cocoon as some – it’s hard to be emotionally invested in a game this dispassionately aloof – but there’s no denying its often breathtaking ingenuity. Developer Geometric’s puzzler is an obscenely clever thing, the conceptual complexity of its worlds within worlds perpetually threatening to overwhelm players with just too much brain stuff – but one of Cocoon’s most impressive tricks, in a whole bag of impressive tricks, is the way it elegantly, effortlessly guides players to the very brink of bewilderment without ever slipping. The result is that relative rarity – a game that doesn’t just feel clever but makes you feel extremely clever along with it – and, as an added bonus, it’s also perhaps the squelchiest, most disturbingly alien game of the year. Those one-hit boss kills can do one though.

Liv

Smushi Come Home

This is a short platform-adventure game which only takes a few hours to complete and really only needed a few minutes to make an impression on me. Although developer SomeHumbleOnion has said A Short Hike and Zelda were among the biggest inspirations for Smushi Come Home, when I first played it I was reminded of the 3D platformers I would play endlessly as a young kid. Spyro: Year of the Dragon and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos were the ones I immediately thought of, mashed up with a really wholesome version of the opening parts of Ocarina of Time. It gave me a feeling of exploration and wonder which I’ve honestly struggled to find in the post-lockdown world.

Terra Nil

A recent post from Hard Drive sums this one up for me – Fantastical Video Game Lets You Imagine World Where People Come Together to Fight Climate Change. Sadly it’s sort of true. When most of the contributors to climate change are huge corporations who don’t want to address it, it’s easy to feel powerless and it’s nice to think about a world where you can live out your wildest dreams (like tackling climate change). Terra Nil is a great strategy game all round, and I never get sick of seeing colour flooding back into the wastelands.

Super Mario RPG

I never played the original, but I have to give props to the remake. When I started playing it, I got nostalgic for my late teens when I was really into Kingdom Hearts. The soundtracks to both were written by Yoko Shimomura and they’ve both obviously different, but somehow the music in Super Mario RPG manages to make me feel the same magical way I feel when I listen to the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack. This game makes me nostalgic for an era of games I never even played, which is an impressive feat, and now I really want to delve into the archive of turn-based RPGs made by Japanese developers in the 90s.

Die in the Dungeon: Origins

This is quite a recent release, but no other deck-builder roguelike from this year has managed to capture me like this has. Here, your deck is made up of dice which can be used to block, attack, and give yourself buffs. Similarly to Backpack Hero (one of my other favourites in the genre), where you place dice on your combat grid is important and if you build your deck smartly you can get massive bonuses. My brain has quickly gotten to grips with how different types of dice work together, which is why it’s become one of my most-played games in December. (Plus it’s free, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the main game releases!)

Baldur’s Gate 3

I’d love to try D&D one day in-person with a group of people, but frankly I’d be too scared about having to roleplay consistently and I don’t have enough friends who’d also want to give it a shot. Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the closest I’ll get to the experience and I’m okay with that. A whole game full of complex and well-written characters, a combat system just asking to be experimented with, and the freedom to save-scum shamelessly is the perfect mix of features I could hope for. I’m hoping over the holiday I’ll be able to get through the campaign finally, and then I can start convincing my friends to play co-op with me… And maybe think about trying Honour mode. If I can survive on the Nautiloid.

Vikki

Sons of the Forest

Sons of the Forest is a game I didn’t expect to like, let alone list as one of my favourites of 2023. Even though it’s full of the things I like least in games – crafting and scavenging and surviving and getting lost for the eleventy gazillionth time because I have the directional sense of an empty yoghurt pot – beneath Sons of the Forest’s core survival gameplay lies a deeply compelling mystery, and it’s this that keeps me coming back to hang out with Kelvin again and again.

That said, it deserves a place on this list just for the sublime in-game inventory systems alone.

Dredge