We begin a week of Siliconera’s Game of the Year selections with the PlayStation 5! The system hit a level of maturity in 2023, with fewer cross-generation launches and more titles using the hardware’s full capabilities. It even got a VR headset this year! (Though without any software support worthy of contending in this particular category.) Read on for our PlayStation Game of the Year 2023 honorees!
These awards represent the consensus of the Siliconera staff. For more of the year’s award selections, check out our Game of the Year 2023 archive.
Resident Evil 4 Remake
While it stays closer to the action-focused approach of other Resident Evil remakes than the more suspenseful one of the original release, Resident Evil 4 Remake does a solid job of recreating the characters and world of the beloved series entry. There are lots of ways to play RE4 these days, and many of them are still worth playing! So in offering a fundamentally different take, Remake justifies its existence without stepping on any toes.
Like a Dragon: Ishin!
The earlier of the franchise’s two 2023 releases, Like a Dragon: Ishin! remakes a Japan-only spinoff title that shifted the setting back in Japanese history. It tells an existing tale but puts its own spin on it — and would you believe that spin includes a lot of street fights? — and the result was one the Siliconera staff really loved. Though maybe we spent a little too much time farming?
Siliconera PlayStation Game of the Year Winner: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Insomniac’s second Spider-Man outing builds on the foundations of the first, delivering an open-world game with satisfying traversal and combat. It’s easy these days to find a game with tons to do, but harder to find one in which those tasks never feel like chores. Its story definitely tries to do a lot, and it strains to hold plot threads together a little along the way, but the fun never suffers. That earns it our PlayStation Game of the Year 2023 honors.
