The Best Video Games I Played In 2023

In 2022 I wrote the below post to accumulate all the knowledge I learned playing some awesome video games. Hilariously, I often look back at it to remember those tips when it’s been a while since I last picked up one of those games.

• The Best Video Games I Played In 2022

2023 was supposed to be “The Year Of Video Games” where I played more than I ever had before and explored new types of games that were previously outside of my comfort zone. Well 2023 accidentally became “The Year Of Reading” instead when I fell into bookshelf blackholes and ended up reading 250 books in that year – a number my brain can barely fathom in that context.

So video games took more of a backseat in 2023 than I intended, but I did still play some awesome new games and learn a lot that I wanted to share with you. Here are the best games I played in 2023.

Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

Before I played Zelda, I had really only played open world games like The Sims 4 or city builders like Cities Skylines or Jurassic World Evolution. Zelda: Breath Of The Wild was my first adventure/fighting/story based game. However, people suggested I play it because it also has a large open world element, which I admit was my favorite part 🙂 .

The world they’ve created for Breath Of The Wild (BOTW) is massive and you can wander around endlessly and just see what happens 🙂 . The first time I tried to play it though, that massive open world worked against me because I quickly died of hypothermia. Oops.

I hadn’t done any research before starting the game and didn’t realize that I needed to gather certain plants, find a cooking pot, and make meals that would help me survive the elements. So I set the game down for a little bit and then once I had read up on how this works, I dove back in and didn’t die immediately. Win!

Tips

Here are some tips I wish I had known my first go-round:

• Gather everything! If it sparkles, grab it!
• Food gives you hearts and protects you from different climates. The food you need is along your path on the way to the more hardcore temperature areas, such as spicy peppers for warmth
• Unfortunately you need to find a cooking pot to make these foods, but they can be found around horse stables and houses
• You can light a fire under a cooking pot with wood + flint + a hit from a sword
• There are monsters about and a change in music can indicate that they’re nearby so keep your sound on!
• Some enemies are better to shoot with an arrow from afar, such as electric enemies that will make you drop your weapon if you try to hit them with it
• Reanimated enemies are skeletons and you have to destroy their heads – even if they’re not attached to their bodies anymore – for them to die
• If you press X during a cut scene it skips it. Yes I’m impatient 🙂
• Do a practice run for boss fights. I kept going in telling myself I would just try it out and then come back after I die on my first attempt because these fights were intimidating to me, but every time I just succeeded the first time

So I absolutely loved playing Breath Of The Wild. It is an absolutely gorgeous game that provided enough open ended adventure while also getting me interested in the overarching story enough to complete the game the way it was intended. After finishing this game I was more curious what other story based games exist that I might enjoy.

Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

Yeah this is basically the Zelda show. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TOTK) was released in May 2023 and I was lucky enough to have finished Breath Of The Wild shortly after its release so I could just keep the Zelda train going.

I really enjoyed the reveals in this game. I also loved how TOTK expanded the world and brought in the sky and the depths to almost triple the existing map. I also loved how the stories of characters evolved between the two games.

My Partner disliked the lack of difficult puzzles in this one and I…loved it 🙂 . In Breath Of The Wild, the only part of the game I didn’t love were the puzzles. Shrines, mazes etc are not a fun thing for me. I don’t love puzzles in real life (word puzzles, literal jigsaw puzzles, sudoku etc) so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t enjoy them in the game. Even knowing that most shrines were teaching me useful game mechanics or strategies couldn’t make me see it as a fun exploration.

They were just frustrating for me unfortunately. However, by the end of Breath Of The Wild, I did find that I started learning and thinking about the puzzles differently so that’s a win, but it was a painful win to get 🙂 . So the fact that the puzzles in Tears Of The Kingdom were less difficult was a win for me and a loss for apparently most of the internet. Sorry not sorry 🙂 .

Tips

Here are some tips I wish I had known from the beginning:

• You can run away from most opponents instead of engaging #CowardiceFTW
• You can take a picture of a monster and add it to Compendium and then use your radar to find them. You can also do this to find anything 🙂
• Something that I really couldn’t figure out and something not intuitive about the game is what time of day a specific dragon is flying around, so I got ‘permission’ from my story-based video game coach (it’s just my Partner 😉 …) to look it up. And in doing that found that Polygon had the most straightforward answers and guides to Zelda questions. I’d just search for any question on Google and add “Polygon” and there were all the answers I was looking for. An end to hours of frustration 🙂 . The internet and hobby communities are truly a wonderful place
• It was confused about what Upgrades were actually important after unlocking the Fairies and the below video helped a lot. In general I found the Froggy Armor upgrades and getting all climbing gear and Zora armor to Level 2, to be most helpful for my gameplay

BOTW Or TOTK?

So which Zelda game is better? I really enjoyed them both, but I found myself playing BOTW again after I beat it because I enjoyed it so much and wanted to be in the world more. I didn’t do that with TOTK.

I started thinking about why this might be and realized that there are a lot more monsters’ spawn points everywhere in TOTK (with a backstory as to why), but that means there’s a lot less exploring with calming music and just enjoying how beautiful the world is, which was one of my fav things about BOTW. So obviously it’s all about preference, but BOTW was the winner of my heart 🙂 .

Return Of The Obra Dinn

What a ride! For lovers of the show Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and the video game Barbie Detective – here’s Return Of The Obra Dinn. It’s the best of both with some Halloween creepiness added for good measure.

Obra Dinn is a mystery game with a lovely art style, fantastic music and a unique premise. You’re an insurance adjuster that needs to figure out who were all the souls who perished on the ship the Obra Dinn. Luckily you have a time travel device that allows you to go back to when each person died to try and unravel the mystery. My Partner and I played it together and had a great time!

However, unlike other similar games that I enjoyed like Gone Home and Tacoma, you’re not following written clues or futuristic videos of interactions, you’re studying a moment in time to piece everything together. Interestingly I found that approach in Obra Dinn more engaging than the other two games’ approaches.

Tips

In case you want to check out the game, here are a few tips I wish I knew going in:

• Hold E for a few seconds and it connects the person you’re looking at with their picture in the crew drawing
• Don’t go when the sailor calls you to leave the boat at the end. If you do you get a bad ending (yes there are multiple 🙂 ), but you can press rewind to undo it. Make sure you get all fates you can and then leave for a good ending
• Write down what are guesses vs certainties in notes since they don’t have a way to indicate that in the game

I absolutely loved playing this game. My Partner and I went through it in a matter of days. I also had the urge to play it again after being told the level of detail I should have been looking at to figure out who everyone was. It’s intricate 🙂 .

The Sims 4

Shockingly, even after playing The Sims 4 for 10 years, I’m still learning new things about it. And not just because they keep coming out with new content packs.

Tips

• When you start the Sims game, there’s a main menu with game pack information. Be sure to check the “Free Stuff” section to see if there is anything available for free. Trying to get the pack directs you back to Origin where you can buy it for $0.00 and then find it under the expansions listed under the game to download it
• In case your Sim is glitching, I open the cheat panel with “Control + Shift + C” on Mac while in the game and then put “resetsim [NAME]” and replace the name with the full name of your Sim
• In case you want to move things outside of the usual bounds, I use the cheat “bb.moveobjects on” in the same cheat panel
• The NanoCan Touchless Trash Can is $1200, so I’ve literally never bought it, but I’m not regretting that greatly because you never have to empty it and it gives you $10-50 every time you throw something away – including plates, dirty diapers etc. I had no idea and learned that recently from a Sims Streamer
• I recently bought the Island Living Expansion Pack for 60% off during a Cyber Monday sale and love it. There are apparently community events almost every day and there’s a list of them here

Cities Skylines

I’m back on Cities Skylines again. I have phases where I play for hours several days in a row and then take month long breaks.

Tips

Given my recent game binges, I’ve found even more things to make life easier. Here are the tips I wish I knew from the beginning:

• The default is for the game to autosave every 10 minutes. However, it does that to an “Autosave” file so if you haven’t saved your previous city separately, it will overwrite that file. Make sure to save each city under a new name instead of accidentally losing it after 5 hours of work like I did. Oops 🙂
• The Controls to move the camera in Cities Skylines is never intuitive to me and I always forget which keyboard letter does what so here it is for all time: F/R tilt, Q/E rotate, W/S up and down, A/D left and right
• Once you reach the Little Hamlet population milestone of 420, you can dictate Taxes and put them at the ideal of 12% and when you get to the Big Town milestone of 7500 you can do the same for high-density construction
• According to an actual city planner, the ideal way to handle a main road is to change all the Traffic Lights to only Stop Signs on side roads so traffic doesn’t stop for every light

The sequel to this game, Cities: Skylines II, was released in October and consensus between my Video Game YouTubers is that it was very cool, but also a buggy mess 🙂 . So I’m waiting until they fix that before I shell out $50 to buy it.

Steam DB Prices

This year I discovered the website Steam DB, which has the latest price of any game on Steam (and often other platforms). It shows if there’s a sale on a game and how low the price has gone in the past and a chart of the price history. I found this super helpful for my Cyber Monday purchases 🙂 .

Conclusion

And those are the best games I played last year! I’m hoping to branch out even more this year and try some new things. I’ve already started playing Sable and Subnautica, but if there are any other games you would recommend, feel free to let me know!

What was the best game you played in 2023?