Unlocked’s Best Xbox Game of 2023

18.12.2023 - 12:29 / ign.com / Saga Anderson / Best Xbox / Best / Xbox Game

As we eagerly anticipate IGN’s Best Game of 2023 announcement, we as the Podcast Unlocked panel thought we’d tell you what we think is the best Xbox game of this year. After all, we talk about Xbox every single week, we use our Xbox’s constantly, and we’re fully immersed in the Xbox ecosystem. And so our group gathered, discussed, and debated. We’ll get to the winner in a bit, but first, here are the five games we settled on as nominees, listed in alphabetical order.

The Finnish wizards at Remedy Entertainment have been making outstanding video games for over 20 years now, but somehow they’ve just made their best one ever. Alan Wake 2 is a triumph of unique and compelling narrative storytelling, survival horror gameplay, and a beautiful visual aesthetic – all delivered by a cast of talented live-action and motion-captured performers. It’s delightfully weird, and it’s built so smartly that playing Alan Wake 1 was not required homework. In fact, Remedy knew that the overwhelming majority of players will have not played the original, and so FBI agent Saga Anderson effectively becomes the player’s avatar as the strangeness of Bright Falls envelops everyone in the town. Alan Wake 2 looks gorgeous, it sounds amazing, its story is full of surprises, and mechanically it’s a damn good survival horror game – itself an unexpected change of genre pace from the original action-adventure romp. It is truly special.

Look, we know that Baldur’s Gate 3 just dropped on Xbox last week after developer Larian Studios did its best to wrestle split-screen multiplayer onto the Xbox Series S before Phil Spencer and the Xbox leadership team wisely bent their parity policy and allowed the Series S version to ship without said same-screen co-op while the Series X version included it. But from our experience playing it on other platforms, it’s patently obvious that it should be included on this short list of the best Xbox games of the year. Baldur’s Gate 3 levels up the traditional CRPG in the same way that Xbox legends Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect did in their day. It is truly the roleplaying game where solutions are limited only by your own imagination, and for that it deserves every accolade it gets.

It was a long wait between last-gen's Forza Motorsport 7 and the new-gen Forza Motorsport, but oh was the wait worth it. The new Motorsport promises to be a platform that will evolve and grow over time, and it's already off to a tremendous start. A focus on tuning – with an in-game economy built to reflect that – encourages you to tweak builds of existing cars, really getting under the hood with them, rather than simply lusting for the next shiny new car. Though there's still plenty of that, too. To top it