Has there ever been a better year for video game narratives than 2023? As the 7th console generation hit its stride, we saw more money invested into confident storytelling than we have in years. Is this the start of a game story renaissance, or just a blip in the never-ending content sludge?
You’re probably sick of “Best of” lists by now, but as The Escapist’s resident story enthusiast, I can’t properly start 2024 without acknowledging what a truly ridiculous year it was for interactive fiction, especially expensive blockbuster games by big studios.
At the top of the heap is Baldur’s Gate 3, which carried extremely high expectations due to its studio’s pedigree, the series’ legacy, and four years of early access. Still, I don’t think anyone was prepared for just how good Baldur’s Gate 3 turned out. Sure, the main game’s plot isn’t all that original, but sometimes plot is just a structure to hang great stories on, and BG3 has that in spades. Every companion is interesting, loveable, and fun to use in combat, with writing and performances that bring out a ton of personality without being annoying or undercutting the story’s drama – a common pitfall of a lot of modern genre fiction.
I said in my write-up of Best PS5 Games that I wasn’t ready to write about Alan Wake 2 and that I may never be. The ambition, the audacity, the sheer joy at work in all of Remedy’s titles is unleashed in Alan Wake 2, delivering one of the most creative stories ever told in a video game. That it’s genuinely scary on top of that is like a gift addressed to me personally. Someday, someone is going to write a book about this era of gaming, and Alan Wake 2 deserves its own chapter. It probably deserves its own book – fitting for a game about the horror of the creative process. I don’t know if I’ll be the one to write it, but this is one story I’m comfortable leaving un-analyzed for now, letting it sit in its weirdo tower on top of a pile of weirdo money.
2023 was a year of great sequels, and Spider-Man 2 is the platonic ideal of a great sequel. Insomniac went bigger in scale and storytelling ambition but never lost sight of the original’s tight controls and charming characters. It’s not easy to tell a compelling Spider-Man story in 2023, especially not one featuring Venom, but Insomniac uses the sheer volume of a videogame to transport us into the everyday struggles of Peter Parker, Miles Morales, and the loved ones caught in their orbit. I advocate for quality over quantity, but Spider-Man 2 is the rare game that excels at both. This is a tight, emotional story and a sprawling open-world collect-a-thon, but the balance is so perfect neither one overstays its welcome. I’m not crazy about some of the changes made to the combat, but, moment-to-moment, this might be the best-designed game of 2023.
Despite my love of Spider-Man 2, for my money, nothing touched Jedi: Survivor last year. While still rough around the edges – aren’t the best Star Wars often a little shaggy? – Jedi: Survivor takes the Dark Souls-inspired bones of Jedi: Fallen Order and goes full Elden Ring, with a big open world broken up into discrete zones that you revisit and unpack multiple times in your journey. Smart updates to the combat system, the welcome addition of fast travel, and truly generous customization options make this game a ton of fun to play, but the story is dynamite. Jedi: Fallen Order told a pretty standard story about resilience in the face of trauma, but Survivor goes deeper with an honest and mature examination of what it means to really live with deep scars in a hostile world. It’s way more complex than most game stories allow – it’s way more complex than most Star Wars stories allow – all told by great actors and great writing. The High Republic stuff falls a little flat and is a worrying sign of the larger Star Wars IP starting to creep into the Jedi series, but there’s so much good stuff in the foundation that I’ll forgive a shaky attic. Survivor proves there’s still plenty of life, energy, and creativity in Star Wars, even as we descend into the post-Ahsoka Filoni era.
Big studios had a lot of success in 2023, but I have to give some recognition to a few smaller titles that also carved out space for themselves. Thirsty Suitors and Venba are two games that take radically different approaches to the same objective: breaking through the white male focus of most games to tell stories about the immigrant experience from the perspective of a young woman. Thirsty Suitors attacks traditional Indian values about relationships through a wildly entertaining, constantly shifting gameplay loop that is sort of a dating sim, a skateboarding game, and a fighting game all at once. It’s wild and as close to the vibe of Scott Pilgrim as I’ve seen a game get.
Where Thirsty Suitors has this loud, Bollywood punk rock energy, Venba is a sweet, gentle journey through the immigrant experience by way of a cooking game. It uses the cooking of Tamil cuisine as a skeleton to tackle the difficulty of instilling your culture into your child even as they’re immersed in Western influences. It’s also set in Toronto; more games should take place in Canada.
The first big narrative game of 2024 is Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the follow-up to the reboot of the Yakuza series. Speaking of quantity over quality, this series has both, with dozens of hours of written dialogue covering everything from minor, everyday inconveniences to operatic crime stories. Somehow, the wild swings in tone always work out, and these are some of the best story-driven games you can get. Ryu No Gotoku Studios has pretty much never made a bad game, so I expect Infinite Wealth will continue the trend, even though I probably won’t finish it – I usually burn out on the Yakuza games long before the credits roll.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is like when a small indie movie is given the budget of a Marvel movie for the sequel. An intimate action-adventure game that encouraged users to wear headphones to simulate living with schizophrenia has ballooned into a full-on AAA blockbuster and one of the biggest releases for Xbox in 2024. The trailers are breathtaking and terrifying. If they can maintain the first game’s storytelling quality, this could be one of the year’s best titles, but I’m concerned that Microsoft is chasing God of War a bit too hard with this one.
Star Wars: Outlaws is coming from Massive Entertainment, who released Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora at the end of 2023. It’s weird that this is the first time Star Wars has tried to do an Assassin’s Creed, with a massive open world full of things to do, but Massive has plenty of experience in the genre, having made the two Division games. Outlaws lets you play out your space rogue fantasies with a focus on the seedy side of the Star Wars universe. While I love a Jedi-free Star Wars story, telling a cohesive narrative in a massive open-world game is almost impossible, and Massive’s storytelling is usually pretty bad – I started skipping Avatar‘s dialogue before the end of the prologue.
Probably the biggest game of the year is the second installment of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, Rebirth, out in February. I was blown away by Remake, both in its transformation into an action-adventure game and in the super smart way it played with the very nature of a remake. I’m looking forward to seeing more of the world outside the city of Midgar, including that cute seaside beach town and the giant casino. Even if they pull back on the more esoteric stuff in the sequel, I’m all in on these characters, and I’m excited to see how they spin things the second time around.
Just like the movies, 2023 was a great year for stories in gaming. But also like the movies, 2024 isn’t looking like as much of a slamdunk. Maybe the lack of big-budget games will make more space for smaller stories like Venba to shine. Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to the stories we get to experience this year.
