My Favorite Games of 2023

Last year feels rather strange to me in that I didn't complete any RPGs and I'm not entirely sure how that happened, since I usually manage at least one of them. That said, it felt like such a good year for enjoyable gaming. I only list games I liked enough to finish, which usually means I felt they were good or very good, but great games are fewer and further between.

I usually designate these great games as my Top 3 picks each year by marking them with an asterisk (*) and I was pretty sure that I knew what my Top 3 were going to be as we went into November as I'd played what I thought was a shoe-in for my third stellar game in October, but even if Tempest slid in at the end of the year and blew me away, so I'm going to call out Ghost Trick as an honorable mention. In another year it probably would have made Top 3 and it is still a solid game I highly recommend.

With that said, these are the 12 games I liked the most out of the ones I finished in 2023, in the order I played them. If the game is available on multiple platforms, the one I played on is listed first.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong (Switch, Windows, Mac, iOS) *

More often than not, I find one of my favorite games of the year at the start of the year, and that was definitely the case with OPUS: Echo of Starsong, making it one of the few linear games where I dove back in immediately after I finished. Told from the perspective of an elderly Jun Lee, he reflects on the short period of time he knew Eda and what being with her meant to him. If you want an intimate piece of space opera with deep lore and some far future Chinese flavoring, all wrapped up in 12-15 hours of gameplay, this is a must-have, but bring tissues. That's not a spoiler. The frame story makes it clear that Jun and Eda are deprived of any happy ending.

Ambition: A Minuet in Power (Switch, Windows)

When Yvette arrives in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, her fiance mysteriously does not pick her up, nobody seems to want to associate with him, and he's left her paying for the rent and the maid at what would have been their home. Refusing to return to her village, Yvette forges a new life in Parisian high society, and the player can decide whether she reunites with her fiance or discovers a new love entirely. With a tight calendar system and selling gossip for money, Yvette can nudge the tensions in Paris one way or another. Probably more fun if you like French Revolution stuff, but also good if you just like being a schemer. You can make Yvette somewhat upstanding if you want, but there are a lot of options to play as an awful person.

Buried Stars (Switch, PS4, Windows)

Mystery/suspense visual novel in which a group of aspiring k-pop stars and their floor director are trapped inside a collapsed building. Despite the unusual choice in cast (I never thought I'd be putting on my detective hat with a pop star as my protagonist), the mystery is effective and had me on the edge of my seat through much of the main game. The game's UI is a little misleading in regards to how the story will actually play out, and there are some obvious translation errors, but despite the bumpiness I think this will end up one of the more memorable mystery VNs I've played. Saying why would be a spoiler, but I talk about it here.

My Sweet Bodyguard (iOS, Android)

Part of the Love 365 library app. A college student discovers she's the long lost daughter of the Japanese prime minister and is threatened by unknown forces who want to influence her father. Fortunately she has a crack team of bodyguards looking out for her in what is a surprisingly upbeat and light-hearted romance adventure. It also gets really silly on some routes, so don't come here for any realism. Each route may as well take place in a different reality since plot points and villains generally don't cross over.

Frostpunk (Windows, Mac, PS4, XB1) *

Brutal survival-based city building game. After a deep and potentially neverending frost settles over Victorian England, you play as the captain in charge of a new settlement that strives to survive heading in an unknown future. Though it is possible to make a relatively comfortable life for your people once you know how the game works, I think most first time playthroughs will either end in failure or with barely anyone alive (and you might end up a despot on top of that too). I like how the game makes you consider which lines you'd be willing to cross in order to allow your city to survive, and if you fail, was it because of poor planning or because you valued your morals?

Piofiore: Fated Memories (Switch)

Liliana has grown up as a ward of the church, but for reasons unbeknownst to her, she is extremely important to varying factions fighting for control of a city in 1920s Italy, thus sparking a journey with various men from one of the city's three mafia families or an agent of the church. It's otome, but darker than usual because none of the guys can really say they've walked away without killing someone, though they're generally presented in a nicer light if they're Liliana's current love interest. While I bought this as a fan of anime takes on mafia, it's worth mentioning that Liliana is a civilian, so even if she's present during the action bits, she's usually a non-participant, and some of the heavy decision making by the men happens in scenes when she is not around.

Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders (Windows, Switch, PS4, XB1)

Series of murder mysteries in the style of the old point-and-click pixel adventure games, starring a fictionalized version of Di Renjie, more popularly known in English as the protagonist of the Judge Dee books/movies/TV series, but was a real historical person. This Di is portrayed as relatively young and new to his work, though historically he would have been pushing fifty by the time of the game, which mostly involves solving a series of murders on behalf of Empress Wu Zetian. It's a fairly short game, with some of the usual point-and-click genre problems of not being able to figure out what you missed, but otherwise a fun bit of intrigue. Good if you don't have a lot of time or want a quick palate cleanser before diving into something else.

Radiant Tale (Switch)

It took me a few games to realize that found family is one of my favorite tropes in otome. I love when the entire cast is a group of friends who support each other through thick and thin, so when I realized Radiant Tale shared staff with Code:Realize and Cafe Enchante I knew I had to get this. Tifalia joins a performance troupe called CIRCUS and gains a wacky surrogate family that includes personalities as varied as a fun-loving dragon, a flashy noble, and possibly the world's most unfriendly clown. They're on a JRPG-eque quest to free the kingdom's prince from the spell that has frozen his body and heart in time, and only by literally bringing joy to the world can they heal him. Despite the overly bright and optimistic theming, some of the routes can get unexpectedly dark.

Ghost Trick (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows, DS, iOS)

HD remaster of the underappreciated mystery solving puzzle game for Nintendo DS. You control an amnesiac ghost who has a number of "tricks" he can perform in order to manipulate the environment and the living around him in order to figure out who he is and why he died. Without spoiling too much, I think pet lovers will enjoy this game. It's not too long, but not too short either, being the rare game that is just the length it needs to be and no more. Fans of Ace Attorney will recognize writer/director Shu Takumi's brand of character writing, though Ghost Trick is less episodic since there is only one central mystery that covers the entire game.

Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze (Windows, Mac)

Indie puzzle adventure game where humans and various fantastical races are unwillingly placed in a survival game where the winner can ensure the continued existence of their race. English translation is usually pretty good, which makes it more obvious when it's not. Puzzles will give you a pretty good workout if that's your thing. Best played with a pad of paper next to you in order to make notes. Though it's probably possible to reach the best ending without romancing anyone, Xixy needs a certain level of friendship with her main three party members to open the way to the true ending.

even if Tempest (Switch) *

I was truly blown away by the narrative in this game, which is marketed as otome, but aside from affection-related dialogue options, plays out more like Raging Loop since it also features one love interest per timeline and a protagonist who tries to abuse timeloops in order to solve a problem. The worldbuilding is fantastic and Anastasia is one of the most engaging female protagonists I've ever had a chance to play, getting to be both strong and vulnerable, vengeful and kind, and rising from a childhood of abuse to being the person she wants to be. She is willing to do whatever it takes to save the ones she loves, and some of what she does is truly heartrending both for her and the player. There are witch trials which will likely appeal to Ace Attorney and Danganronpa fans, with the unique twist that they are playing out in the court of public opinion in which judgment is less a matter of truth than what the jury comes to believe.

The Last Matches (Windows, Mac)

Indie visual novel based on The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. It's very short (about an hour to play through), but felt like a fitting title to close out the year given that it takes place around Christmas. Both the original tragic ending of the story and a happier one are available for our protagonist. I liked the sad ending better, perhaps because it pulls from the original and works better thematically, but also because the happy ending feels surreal, like I can't tell if it really happened. Still, it's a nice little package if you want something quick that will pluck at the heartstrings.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 7: Finale

As you finish every best ending in the game, an old timey film plays with a countdown starting at 5 and counting down as each ending is achieved, with 0 heralding the finale. I was expecting a brand new route, but instead it branches off of Gilbert's with a few new scenes being added to the parts in common between them, which feels a bit weird, but I suppose makes sense given that the finale serves as an explanation for what was going on in Gilbert's route as well as a deeper dive into the backstory between the Key Maidens and the Falzone family.

If the player makes the right choices in the prologue and Gilbert's route (which are generally easy to spot because they are new), fake editions of a national newspaper show up announcing sordid crimes by the various mafia families that causes them to fall out of favor with the common people, and this comes to a head shortly after Gilbert and Liliana find out about the casino being in on the counterfeiting. Liliana's safety is Gilbert's priority, and since staying with any of the mafia now is decidedly not safe, she goes back to the church. Since this happens before she falls in love with Gilbert, the Finale branch proceeds with Liliana unattached to anyone.

If Gilbert's route felt like a golden route with everybody being at their action-packed best, the Finale is more like a fan disk, with lots of lower stakes and moments of warmth. Once Gilbert is no longer the primary male character in Liliana's life, Orlok takes up being her bodyguard (since he's unaffiliated with the mafia) and she gets scenes with all of the guys to varying degrees to reflect her lack of attachment. If not for the fact they are in a race against time to foil the casino direttore's plans and discover his identity, I would say that the route is quite fluffy, with most of the guys being kind to her.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 6: Gilbert

Throughout the game I was wondering why Gilbert was the final love interest, especially since Dante's route felt like it explains so much of the church storyline and Gilbert doesn't seem involved in that at all.

That said, starting his route was a lot of fun because the game knows the player has a certain baseline of information to work with, including the back stories of all the love interests aside from Gilbert, so even if Liliana is bewildered about a three way battle erupting in the church when Yang comes to kidnap her, it's laughingly business as usual to the player. The only thing that was a little weird is that after fighting breaks out between the Lao-Shu and Falzone, Orlok is the one to rescue Liliana from Yang and send her running out into the night clad in nothing but her nightgown while he tries to hold everyone else back.

So while everybody who is aware that she's a valuable person is fighting, who does she bump into but Gilbert Redford, who is out for a late night walk. And I was (probably unintentionally) amused that after offering her shelter and security, Gilbert declared that the safest place in Burlone is next to him. Considering that he is the one love interest who has been killed by every other love interest on at least one other route through the game, I probably would have felt safer with anyone else (barring Yang).

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 5: Orlok

Orlok's route is unlocked at the same time as Yang's, by the completion of Nicola or Dante's route, which at first felt like an unusual step, but once I discovered he and Liliana spend almost half the route with the Lao-Shu I could see some kind of logic behind it.

Nicola and Dante are both part of the Falzone, and their routes serve as an introduction to the status quo of the city and how the various characters and factions fit together. Yang and Orlok are a showcase of the Lao-Shu side of the story and why the tension in Burlone has come to a boiling point at this particular moment in time.

But just as the opening routes and the first set of unlocked routes can be grouped together by mafia family, you can group Nicola and Yang's routes as being completely secular and unrelated to the greater story, while Dante and Orlok's can't help but be tangled up by all the church intrigue. Thus, while I don't think it makes much of a difference whether Yang's route is played second, third, or fourth (with Gilbert being a mandatory fifth due to route-lock order), playing Orlok before Dante would be an incredibly different experience.

I don't think it would necessarily be a bad one, but the player would be working with a different set of assumptions for most of the route and I'd be curious how that changes the experience.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 4: Dante

It felt a bit odd playing Dante's route in the middle, because he's the poster boy (usually sharing the spot with Gilbert), but given that I got Nicola first and wasn't sure about doing back to back Falzone routes, this is how things played out. He was a conscious choice rather than a roleplaying one though, since the prologue doesn't introduce new choices with a second route completion and because I knew some spoilers I had a preference to play his route before Orlok's.

Dante is the dedicated boss of the Falzone family, and as such is intrinsically tied to Liliana's own story, and it's in Dante's route that we find out why. In fact his story is so tied to why everyone's fighting over her that some players are surprised he's one of the two routes available at the story of the game, as playing Nicola's route is a fairly straightforward mob story and Dante's shoots off into Da Vinci Code territory.

Though it starts in a similar fashion to other routes, with Liliana falling under Dante's protection and being hustled away to the Falzone manor, and then there's some sitting around at home while lots of mafia dealings are happening, there's a distinct change when the term "Key Maiden" comes up.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 3: Yang

After Nicola, I was a little ambivalent about which route to play next. I didn't outright dislike any of the characters, but neither were any of them jumping out at me as a person whose story I just had to see. I still had a bit of an inclination towards Dante, but I had just played through Nicola who was a Falzone so I wasn't sure I wanted to play a second route back to back from the perspective of the same crime family. Since I had completed a route though, Yang and Orlok had unlocked, so I decided to spin the wheel and role-play through the prologue again to see who I'd end up with.

With the newer, more expanded prologue, I kept all the same answers as last time, and winged it on the newer choices. As you can guess from the title and header of this post, I got Yang. Which meant that it was time to gird my loins and see if this mess was going to be as bad as I feared, because it was Yang's route that made me question whether I wanted to play this game.

Firstly, I can see why Yang is a divisive character among the fanbase. He's a charismatic but amoral man who is very much like a cat who plays with its food, and in this case, this food is Liliana. He makes it quite clear that her life is forfeit if she bores him, and though she is rightly terrified, she does her best to keep her wits about her because his goodwill demands that she does. Or at least she does in the beginning and occasionally in the middle. Other times she has bouts of making nice person appeals under the assumption he knows what compassion is, only to realize for the umpteenth time that he doesn't have any.

If you want to romance an unrepentant villain who doesn't become a better person through the power of love, then Yang isn't a bad pick. He's ruthless and cunning, competent but mercurial, and his habit of doing what he wants when the mood strikes him tends to work in his favor, except that I found it a little less believable when it comes to his treatment of Liliana, since I can't believe that being relatively nice to her is something he wouldn't find boring after a while.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 2: Nicola

As previously discussed, Piofiore: Fated Memories has a short prologue with only a few seemingly noncommittal decisions (only two of which can be made on first playthrough), so I wasn't entirely sure what set me on Nicola's route. I actually was hoping for Dante since Nicola's character design suggests someone disinclined to take things seriously, and he's a flirt, which is a character type that rarely works with me. Nicola didn't disappoint though.

Both Nicola and Dante are part of the leadership of the Falzone family, with Dante being the boss and his cousin Nicola being the underboss, and when Liliana nearly gets kidnapped by the Lao-Shu, they take her into protective custody. She doesn't know why, and Nicola's route doesn't go into the real reason, but she's fairly cooperative about it, understanding that whatever the reason, the Falzone are looking out for her, and the head nun of her church is agreeable to this plan of action.

Nicola's route is a nice pop culture showcase of how a mafia man can be a vicious killer, but also be the same guy who goes to church on Sundays and sets up soup kitchens for the poor. The goons who hang out at the family's residence with Liliana are all friendly to her, and in return she often cooks for them as a way to show her appreciation for handling her safety. Nicola ends up being her primary point of contact, though he's not particularly warm about it. That's not to say he isn't friendly, he certainly flirts with her, but you get the feeling it's an arm's length sort of congeniality. Lili herself takes his kindness at face value, but Nicola never masks the kind of person he is or the line of work he does. In fact it often feels like he's trying to warn her not to get emotionally invested in him.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2020

Piofiore: Fated Memories came out the same year as Cafe Enchante, and while I pre-ordered one of them, the other I did not, despite my love for anime-tinged mafia stories. And the reason for that is largely down to one route that I had read about from an import reviewer.

If you've read enough of my otome VN Talks, you know that I really don't like controlling love interests, particularly when it comes down to dubious consent or attempted sexual assault. I knew one route in this game would contain actual assault, and I wasn't sure I was ready for that.

But as time passed and I absorbed more through osmosis from being around the general otome community, I realized that I probably knew enough that I could go in with a full suit of mental armor and if it really got uncomfortable, I would mash the autoplay button and just come back after the scene was over. So I picked up Piofiore during a sale and added it to my backlog, because I still really wanted a mafia game.

Chinese Representation in Piofiore: Fated Memories

I've been playing Piofiore: Fated Memories for the past month or so, and I just finished this past weekend. The plan was to start this Monday off with my usual overview followed by a weekly breakdown of each route until I hit the end. But due to how the finale is and is not related to the overall plot, as well as how it's a sort of sub-route of Gilbert's, I realized that I needed a little more time to figure out which posts are going to cover what material so I don't end up repeating myself.

Instead I'm going to post what was originally going to be a follow-up to my VN Talk series for Piofiore. It has mild spoilers and is a bit of a personal bugbear so I knew it wasn't something I could discuss in either the Overview or Yang posts because it would take up too much space I needed to talk about the actual story rather than venting my frustrations about how the Chinese characters are handled.

When I started the game I was predisposed to dislike Yang, partially because I knew ahead of time that his characterization mostly consisted of being a terrible person, but also because I (unfortunately) dislike a lot of Chinese characters in Japanese media, for being exoticized and a general sense of most writers not knowing what they're doing. Chinese characters are not the exclusive target of this. Anyone who's watched a decent amount of anime has likely seen some strange American and/or European characters that look like they stepped out of a clearing house for stereotypes.

When your primary representation comes in the form of women with hair buns and both genders running around in qipao and changshan (which are not actually traditional Chinese clothing as they come from the Manchu minority) it gets a little tiring after a while. Admittedly this might be less of an issue (like how the funny Americans in anime never bother me) if I had access to more Chinese media, but I haven't found enough in translation that really clicks with me. A native Chinese speaker might look at Piofiore and be completely unbothered.