I can’t start a list of my favorite things to come out in 2023 without just addressing the elephant in the room. Baldur’s Gate 3 was the best piece of culture I interacted with, full stop. It’s a triumph. Most people would agree that last year was one of the best years in gaming history and all I want to talk about is playing Baldur’s Gate 3.
I have to admit that I had never played a game by Larian Studios in the past. I had always heard great things about the Divinity: Original Sin games but up until a couple of years ago I never had a PC that was up to the task of playing either of those games well.
When I heard that Larian was going to be bringing back the Baldur’s Gate series that was originally developed by Bioware, it piqued my interest. Not so much that Larian was developing a game based on Dungeons and Dragons IP, but because Bioware has made some of my favorite games. If a developer could replicate the magic of old Bioware games like Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, games that have great dialogue, interesting characters and meaningful player choice, I had to play it.
When BG 3 dropped the reviews felt like a coronation. This was indeed the game that would take RPGs into a new era. When I booted up the character creator and spent multiple hours creating my rogue/ranger character with stats that would define my playthrough I was already hooked. Within a few hours of roaming around the starting area I had already met a slew of memorable characters, and was almost overwhelmed by how much choice I had both in how I was playing the game and how the story unfolded by choices I was making in dialogue. For me an RPG lives or dies by how interesting and meaningful dialogue choices are. In Baldur’s Gate you are just as likely to lose a beloved character by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time as you are in a difficult combat encounter.
All of the characters that you bring into your party in BG are complicated and dynamic companions who have their own political interests. Throughout the game you go on quests, exploring these characters’ upbringings and helping them face down their own demons. Just like in Mass Effect 2, these quests are often some of the best content in the game. There was a moment in my playthrough where I had to choose between having one of my favorite character leave, or bringing on what I thought was the apocalypse, and it was honestly one of the more heart wrenching decisions I’ve ever had to make in a game.
The combat in BG 3 is also top-notch. The game is just a giant sandbox that allows you to bend and twist its rules to your bidding. I played the game as a ninja-like rogue who could at any moment backstab an enemy and escape into the shadows before anyone noticed. As I leveled up I was able to use my bow to take out enemies at range, then hide so well I could take down difficult bosses on my own. But it’s in the moments where you synchronize your abilities with your party that the game truly sings. Say I find myself up against a mob of enemies surrounded by oil barrels. I would shoot the barrels with my bow, have my wizard throw a giant fireball to set everyone ablaze, have my cleric bring any dead bodies into zombies, and so on…
The developers at Larian set out to create the most open-ended RPG ever made and I feel like they hit the mark. The game has thousands of endings that depend on both how you play the game and what decisions you make in dialog trees. I’ve never felt more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibilities a game could throw at me at a given time. By the time I got to the city of Baldur’s Gate I couldn’t move more than 50 feet without getting myself into a seemingly benign sidequest that would turn out to be a multiple hour long adventure with meaningful payoff in both gameplay and story. I’ve never played anything like Baldur’s Gate 3, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Here’s a list of my top 10 games from last year.
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Alan Wake 2
- SF 6
- Hi-Fi Rush
- Armored Core 6
- Super Mario Bros Wonder
- Dave The Diver
- Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
- Resident Evil 4: Remake
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Moonlight
Moonlight is a service that uses Nvidea GPUs to stream games over the internet to whatever device you want. I used Moonlight a ton this year to play games from the PC in my basement office on my TV in the living room. There are plenty of cloud streaming services out there right now that do a shockingly good job, but since Moonlight is running games off of your own hardware and sending the video out to any device on your personal network, there is almost zero lag when playing games at home. We’ve used Moonlight to play everything from Mario Kart (via Yuzu) to Baldur’s Gate this year and the experience has been pretty flawless. My kiddo spent a couple weeks home from school this year sick and being to chill with her on the couch and still play something like Slay the Spire on my iPad via Moonlight was awesome.
Killers of the Flower Moon/Oppenheimer
The first movie I saw at the cinema since the pandemic was Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and for the next four months I was sure that Killers was going to be my favorite movie of the year. Scorsese’s unflinching epic about the massacre of the Osage Nation left me speechless. I was not a huge fan of The Irishman, and honestly I did think an 80 year old man would be capable of making one of the most daring, horrifying and deeply moving films of my lifetime, but I was so happy to be wrong. The performances by Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are all extraordinary, and Gladstone almost certainly deserves an Oscar for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart.
The cinematography is beautiful, and Scorsese uses his camera to stunning effect. This is a long movie. The camera will linger on the grief displayed by the Osage members of the tribe being systematically murdered by sycophantic white men trying to extract every dollar the tribe has come into due them finding oil on their lands. It’s a difficult movie. We come to Scorsese to live vicariously through his characters doing bad things. Whether it’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas or Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. You can’t help but be enthralled by the sins of those protagonists. In Flower Moon you are brought face-to-face with the consequences of the actions of evil men. Scorsese has always been interested in what can happen when corruption allows for bad people to prosper. Killers of the Flower Moon feels like an exclamation mark at the end of his life’s work. It’s a masterpiece.
My biggest regret of 2023 was not seeing Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus in theaters. I didn’t watch the movie until Christmas night when my beloved 49ers were getting worked over by the Ravens, and I needed to flip to something else. I’m a fair weather Nolan fan. The first two Batman movies and Inception are great films, and I liked Dunkirk quite a bit as well, but I wasn’t really into Interstellar or Tenet. When the Barbenheimer weekend happened our kid was sick and I couldn’t make it out for the double feature, but I was excited to hear people I trust have good things to say about both films.
When I did get around to watching Oppenheimer for the first time (I’ve watched it four times since Christmas) I couldn’t help but think about another film I love – The Social network. Much like my favorite Fincher film, what I love most about Oppenheimer is how propulsive and smart the dialog is throughout. I’m a sucker for movies that put a bunch of great actors in a room, give them something interesting to say, and don’t take their foot off of the gas.
We all know Christopher Nolan is the best in the business at spectacle, and the detonation of the atomic bomb is breathtaking in this film. I can only imagine what it was like to see it in IMAX. Nolan and his effects team using every trick in the book to create all of those images without resorting to computer generated special effects is an achievement.
What makes Oppenheimer Nolan’s best work to date is how he was able to navigate multiple, parallel timelines within the life of one the worlds most important people. Nolan has been playing around with time in his movies since Memento, and has relied on this mechanic more and more in movies like Inception and Tenant to varying degrees of success. In Oppenheimer this effect works incredibly well. It helps us understand how the defining moment of a man’s life can haunt him forever.
The performances in Oppenheimer are great, and there are just so many great moments from a murderers row of great actors. Cillian Murphy just kills in the lead role. His face is just so damn emotive and Nolan’s Imax cameras are right there to capture every single detail in those expressions. You often hear how so-and-so was born to play a role, and as much as that’s a cliché, this certainly feels like a career defining role for Murphy.
It was so damn exciting getting to watch Robert Downey Jr. dive headfirst into a challenging character that is very much the antithesis of the roles he’s been playing the last decade plus. He’s a revelation in this movie. Then there’s Matt Damon, who brings the film levity, and Jason Clarke who is just an all-time great prosecuting asshole. For a movie that is about a huge explosion, Nolan is celebrating what can happen when you put a bunch of brilliant people together for a cause bigger than any single person.
While I think that Killers of the Flower Moon is probably the better movie, and certainly feels like it’s more important, I know that Oppenheimer will be the movie that I come back to most in the years to come.
MJ Lenderman – And The Wind (Live and Loose)
I didn’t listen to a ton of new music in 2023. My Spotify Wrapped was not all that interesting, and most of what I did listen to was music suited to the gym. However when people started talking about their year-end favorites I couldn’t help but notice that MJ Lenderman kept popping up, as a member of Wednesday and their exceptional album Rat Saw God, as well as his live album And The Wind (Live and Loose).
Lenderman is a singer/songwriter who plays a mean guitar and reminds me a lot of a young Kurt Vile. His last LP, Boatsongs, made him a big name on the indie scene, but for some reason left me a little cold. It was only when I gave the live album a listen that a lot of the songs on his last album started to really click for me. From the first couple riffs on “Hangover Game” I just knew that I was going to be into this record. Lenderman’s songs range from a number of topics from Michael Jordan’s infamous flu game, to Tables, Ladders, and Chairs wrestling matches, to joining the priesthood. His lyrics are sharp and playful, and a great match for the ramshackle guitar solos that run rampant throughout Live and Loose.
Indie music has been ruled by the singer/songwriter type for almost half a decade now. Most of the year-end awards have gone to the Phoebe Bridgers, Angel Olsens, and Waxahatchees of the world. We even had what I felt was a culmination of that movement in Boy Genius’s superb album, The Record, earlier this year. That said, I’ve welcomed the return of more guitar-heavy, garage rock in 2023.
Those were some of the things I really enjoyed last year! If you noticed that I didn’t mention any books, just know that I feel bad about that and I’m hopefully going to read a bunch more this year! In a lot of ways 2023 was the year of playing a lot of games, watching some movies and trying to keep myself sane in what’s a pretty crazy world. Hope you all found some things that kept you whole last year. I’m excited to see what defines my year in 2024!
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