The 8 top gaming trends of 2023
Dec. 18, 2023Opinion | From fighting to frightening, here are this year’s biggest talking points in video games
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It’s been a spectacularly diverse year for major video game releases, taking us from the fantastical depths ofBaldur’s Gate 3to the euphoric heights ofHi-Fi Rush. So is it really possible to draw out some consistent themes and ideas? Yes. Yes, it is.
The revenge of the fighting game
The fighting game is never going away, but the depth and range of experiences on offer this year signalled a new era for the genre.Street Fighter 6offered intricate new combat systems, 18 excellent fighters and a range of tutorial and character customisation features that added new life and accessibility to the series.Mortal Kombat 1brought a self-consciously ridiculous story, astounding visual effects and a wealth of modes, and for the killer blow, we also got the hilarious Gang Beasts-inspired Party Animals for lightweight brawls. This was the year in which fighters reintroduced themselves to a whole new generation.
Yes, the Resident Evil remakes have been amazing, butCapcom’s series has always been mone about action, tension and over-sized monsters rather than true hide-behind-the-sofa horror. This year we got a lot more of that.Alan Wake 2mixed Lovecraft and Silence of the Lambs into a giddying, fear-drenched nightmare, while Amnesia: The Bunker provided a claustrophobic and hellish descent into war. Elsewhere, the early access release of Sons of the Forest gave us the starkest depiction of post-apocalyptic survival since Cormac’s McCarthy’s The Road, while Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear served up all the garish giallo thrills of a Dario Argento movie. Truly a chilling year.
We’ve grown used to a certain structure of epic open-world action RPG through the likes of Zelda, Elden Ring and the later Assassin’s Creed titles, but this year we saw developers move away from established conventions. Baldur’s Gate 3 took us back to the CRPG era with a tabeletop-inspired masterpiece radically open to player creativity. Both Sea of Stars and Octopath Traveller carefully interpreted the SNES-era role-playing classics for a modern audience, Lies of P merged Soulslike tropes with European folklore and a puppetry take on cybernetic enhancement, and Tchia brought in a brilliant new shapeshifting mechanic. The sci-fi RPG was also well-populated with very disparate titles from the lavish Starfield to the classic Star Ocean: The Second Story R and a thrillingly rejuvenated Cyberpunk 2077.
We’re used to developers constantly harking back to the past, but this year we saw lots of titles that used nostalgic genres and conventions – not just from games but also from wider culture - to innovate and explore. Spirittea looks like a standard old-school RPG, but it’s actually a supernatural bathhouse sim, combining Spirited Away and Stardew Valley with a really fascinating spirit detective element. Videoverse uses the internet interfaces of the early 2000s to tell a heartening story of friendship, and Killer Frequency brilliantly captures the 1980s with its use of neon colours and slasher movie conventions to create an offbeat murder mystery experience.
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Keith Stuart is an experienced journalist and editor. While Keith’s byline can often be found here at GamesRadar+, where he writes about video games and the business that surrounds them, you’ll most often find his words on how gaming intersects with technology and digital culture over at The Guardian. He’s also the author of best-selling and critically acclaimed books, such as ‘A Boy Made of Blocks’, ‘Days of Wonder’, and ‘The Frequency of Us’.
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