eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards Day 5: Highest Honors

We’re finally down to it. What follows is the best of the best, the absolute cream of the crop of what 2023 had to offer.

Note: You can listen to a podcast where Jenn and I discuss these awards! Check it out here!

Game of the Year: Bronze Award (Third Place)

Alekon – There’s a reason I chose this game to review to launch eShopperReviews.com. Many reasons, in fact. It’s a wonderful game with heart, humor, and a lot of polish. It’s a creative game that takes Nintendo’s formula for Pokemon Snap and expands on it in some outstanding ways, making each of the critters on your little safari not only targets for your photography, but characters in their own right with quests for you to take on. It’s my biggest surprise of 2023. It’s a game that has been sadly overlooked by most major videogame outlets, and it’s a game that kept bringing a smile to my face the more I played it.

How can a game that gets so much so right go so completely overlooked? Well, I for one will absolutely make it my mission to sing this game’s praises. In a year full of truly incredible games, this unassuming title was one of my absolute favorites, and I’d wager there’s a good chance it could become one of your favorites too.

Game of the Year: Silver Award (Second Place)

Pikmin 4 – Pikmin fans have had a very good year in 2023. Not only did this year bring ports of the first two Pikmin games to Nintendo Switch, but we also got what may well be the best game yet in the series, a game that brings us all the beauty the series is known for, all the wonderful exploration, and the great challenge of trying to most efficiently manage your pikmin to claim victory in “Dandori challenges”.

This was also a highly-accessible Pikmin game, letting players take the game at their own pace to fully explore the game’s levels, build up their troops, and take on the challenges how they wanted to. If ever there was a time for newcomers to try out the Pikmin series, it is now, with this game. And for those who aren’t newcomers to Pikmin, all those years of waiting for the series to resurface have finally paid off.

Game of the Year: Runners-Up

Backpack Hero – When I first saw this game announced and shadow dropped in Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase this year, I could tell it was something special. The unique take on inventory management is absolutely inspired. However, what really took me by surprise was just how compelling it was to keep playing, with every completed run leading to one more “just another run”. The thought of packing my backpack juuuuuust right so I can do massive damage to all of my enemies is still one that gets me craving this game, and now that I’ve said that, I may just head back for another run right now…

Fae Farm – I’ll be honest here… I love Fae Farm way more than I ever liked Stardew Valley. Yes, I know that game is still to this day seen as the epitome of the “Farming RPG” genre, and I understand what makes it so appealing to others, but in my opinion, Fae Farm manages to top it in multiple ways. However, more than that, I found this to be a wonderfully relaxing game, and a great game to play in co-op, complete with cross-platform play! This is a game I could easily see myself playing for hours on end and enjoying every minute of it.

Sanabi – This game presents players with a combination of smooth, thrilling platforming and combat and a truly engrossing story that had me eager to find out more about the mysteries the game presents. And while the two halves of this game don’t always mesh well together, they’re both so very good that I was always excited to see what was next, whether it was a suspenseful new bit of story, or a new combination of traps and enemies for me to skillfully slice my way through. Either way, I was in for an amazing time.

Vampire Survivors – The creator of the “Bullet Heaven” genre saw many copycats this year, but none came close to the original game, which is not only a wonderful Action game that makes you feel like a true powerhouse among hordes of enemies, but it’s only $5 as well, making it so easy to pick up and enjoy for hours on end, always ready for “just one more run”.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood – This is one of the best examples I’ve seen of the power of videogames as a storytelling medium. The story this game tells is expertly-written, massive in scope yet personal in its emotions. But more than this, it is a story the player feels they have true influence over. Funny that in a game about a supremely powerful seer, I still kept wanting to know what was going to happen next. When it comes to profound experiences playing videogames, few games topped The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood in 2023.

Game of the Year

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – This is surely the biggest no-brainer I’ve ever had in selecting a Game of the Year for these awards. What The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom manages to accomplish here is nothing short of brilliant.

This game’s predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, is still to this day one of the greatest videogames of all time. How do you follow an act like that? What’s more, this game reuses the gameplay, characters, assets, much of the music, and pretty much the entire world from the first game. How the heck could a game do that and not just be seen as derivative?

And yet, Tears of the Kingdom responds to each of these concerns by flying higher than anyone could have imagined, in some cases literally. Tears of the Kingdom makes what we already experienced in Breath of the Wild feel new again by recontextualizing everything with a new set of abilities. It expands on the massive world by not only bringing us new sky islands to explore, but also a whole new massive Depths area equal in size to the land above. And with its Ultrahand ability, it provides players with a toolkit for creating their own unique machines to not only travel around the land of Hyrule, but absolutely dominate it.

By now, I can only conclude you’ve been hiding under a rock if you haven’t seen YouTube videos of player-crafted mechs, helicopters, dune buggies, semi trucks, hoverbikes, deathtraps, and… crucified koroks? Yikes. Yeah, many a korok has been subjected to absurdly over-the-top cruelty in this game, and it has made for a great amount of hilarity this year.

This sort of customizability and the spirit of creativity that comes with it just further help to underline that while Breath of the Wild was about surviving in a hostile world and exploring it, Tears of the Kingdom is about mastering it.

Furthermore, with its retooled dungeons and fused weapons and shields, Tears of the Kingdom aims to address some of the biggest complaints about Breath of the Wild… to largely mixed results, to be sure, but this is nevertheless a game that doesn’t simply build on the success of its predecessor, but tries to improve it and use it as a springboard to greater heights (again, sometimes literally).

What’s more, where story was something of an afterthought in Breath of the Wild, told more through the environment than through the game’s characters, here the actual story is a major part of the experience, with the mystery of what actually happened to Zelda… well, not being much of a mystery, truth be told, but still absolutely compelling.

There are some moments in this game that are as epic as any Zelda game has ever had. When you first dive out of the sky, when you first plunge into The Depths, when you journey to the Wind Temple and then fight its boss, when you learn Zelda’s fate, when you finally get the Master Sword back, when you confront the final boss…

Yet, as powerful as these moments are, there are also plenty of other wonderful smaller moments sprinkled throughout the game. When you help a dedicated employee put his sign into place, when you work for a newspaper tracking down stories, when you play a pivotal role in a contentious election, when you help a little girl prepare for a long journey, when you free a town from pirates and help them rebuild.

And then there’s all the moments you create. When you realize that a puzzle you’ve been struggling with can be easily completed with a power you’ve been neglecting, when you create havoc in an enemy camp by tossing a muddle bud amongst the group and watch them fight each other, when you find a way to get past a shrine puzzle your own way, when you finally succeed in putting together a machine that does exactly what you want it to, when you first manage to create a machine that absolutely demolishes every enemy in your path.

I spent 223 hours playing this game in 2023. And this is a year in which I have reviewed over 900 games. So when I say I don’t usually spend a huge amount of time playing any one game, you know exactly what I mean. Yet, for months I was absolutely obsessed with this game, seeing every corner of its world, discovering all of its secrets, and toying around with Ultrahand creations for hours upon hours. This isn’t just my favorite game of 2023, it is one of my favorite games of all-time.

At this point, I think I’ve probably gushed enough about this game. Not that I really needed to – I’m hardly the only one declaring this to be the best game 2023 had to offer. However, just to add my voice to the crowd of people celebrating this game, I say it again – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the greatest games of all time. It is not just one of the best games on Nintendo Switch, it is a reason to own a Nintendo Switch. And there is absolutely no doubt or hesitation when I say that this was the best game on Nintendo Switch in 2023.

Additional Commentary!

Okay, I know what many of you want to hear about here, so let’s get to it: games that weren’t named Game of the Year (or even a runner-up) and why.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder – This is the big one, a game many declared to be Game of the Year material. And… sorry, I just wasn’t feelin’ it. Look, I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and I absolutely agree that it’s the best 2D Mario game in years, but I just wasn’t feeling the same kind of magic in this game that I got in games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World.

Partly this is due to the power-ups. Honestly, I felt like this was one of the weakest selections of power-ups we’ve seen in a Mario game in a very long while. The soundtrack was also one of the more forgettable Mario soundtracks. And despite multiple stylistic changes, to me this game still seemed to be far too similar to the New Supe Mario Bros. games that everyone is sick and tired of at this point.

I still think this is a very good game, absolutely worth playing for any fan of Platformers (I did award it Platformer of the Year, after all). But Game of the Year? No. Just no.

Sea of Stars – Yet another game that some people floated as a potential Game of the Year contender. And… yet another one I just wasn’t feeling. Look, I awarded this game Best RPG, and I stand by that, but I would also point to multiple problems this game had too.

The story just wasn’t that interesting. The two main characters were bland and uninteresting. The soundtrack had a few absolutely incredible songs and a whole lot of forgettable ones. The Super Mario RPG-style combat mechanics were fun at first but just got tedious and annoying before long. The graphics… no, the graphics in this game were actually really good, no complaints there.

I really liked Sea of Stars, but honestly it was hard for me to get “too “Game of the Year”-level enthusiastic about it when I was just coming off of Chained Echoes, a game that I feel is far better.

Wargroove 2 and Octopath Traveler II – Anyone who wants to nitpick to grades might point to these two games, both of which I gave an A grade to, higher than the A- I gave to many of the runners-up listed above. And I stand by those grades, these are two incredible must-play games. However, all of the reasons these are must-play games were the reasons the first games in their respective series were must-play games. So while I will absolutely stand behind these games being exceptional, I can’t stand behind awarding them for simply repeating what worked well in the past.

Metroid Prime Remastered, Tents and Trees, Persona 4 Golden, We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie – All disqualified from winning this award due to the age of the original release. For the record, Tents and Trees would have easily made the list if this wasn’t the case, and Metroid Prime Remastered surely would have gotten the silver award.

Okay, so what other games were under consideration for runners-up? The ones that aaaaaalmost made it into the list of runners-up, but didn’t quite make the cut, included Cocoon, Sea of Stars (yes, even after my above complaints), A Space for the Unbound, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, Patrick’s Parabox, Shadows Over Loathing, and Blasphemous 2.

Also, notes regarding one game that did make the list: Backpack Hero. As I have bemoaned throughout the week in my additional notes, Backpack Hero seems to be suffering a lot of stability issues on Nintendo Switch that I did not experience in my initial playthrough, and I suspect these problems were exacerbated by a patch that was meant to improve the game’s stability and fix bugs. When I wrote these lists, this was before seeing what a mess this game became. I can only hope that another future patch will correct these issues, because I still believe this game to be one of the best games to release on Nintendo Switch this year… it’s just that its current state does not reflect this, unfortunately.

So… final thoughts…

It’s been a crazy run this month, trying to play through as many games to review as possible while also launching the website. I am really going to look forward to slowing down a bit in the next few months so I can get a chance to rest some. oh, I’ll still be posting reviews, to be sure, but not at the crazy pace I have been over the last month or so.

I admit, playing so many great games in December, a part of me really worries how strong a role recency bias plays in these selections. Sadly, I feel like I don’t have any good options there, especially because I buy most of my games and I need to wait for good sales, most notably the yearly Black Friday sale.

I could do what other review outlets do and make a November or December cutoff for game releases to be included, but this just seems unfair to November and December releases. I could wait to do this Game of the Year event until February or March, but then I feel like it would be far too late and most people will have already moved their attention to the next year (even holding it in January feels like I’m running behind everyone else).

In the end, I expect I’ll just keep on doing things the same way and just continue to feel frustrated about this, but at the very least I felt I should voice my concern all the same.

In any case, I hope that this week has got you excited about at least a few games you might not have tried yet, and I hope you agreed with at least some of my choices. If not, please feel free to talk about your personal choices in the comments!

That’s all for the eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards! If you missed the other awards this week, be sure to check back at the Awards’ Start Page to see the other awards that have been handed out!

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