Jamie's Top 5 PS5, PS4 Games of 2023 | Push Square

pushsquare.com:

Our individual Game of the Year articles allow our lovely team of writers to share their own personal PS5 and PS4 picks for 2023. Today, it's the turn of reviewer Jamie O'Neill.

I've waxed lyrical many times about how Capcom's 1989 Strider is one of my personal favourite games ever, so the long awaited console release of Mitchell's previously unconverted 1996 coin-op title, Cannon Dancer, was genuinely one of my most anticipated games of 2023. Strider led me to be fascinated by Kouichi Yotsui as a Japanese game designer, so I also spent many more hours than most gamers playing PS3 Moon Diver. Cannon Dancer's acrobatically animated sprites and detailed, ethereal 2D backgrounds have aged magnificently, so hats off to artists like Kiyoshi Utata, and Mitchell's arcade team for creating a worthy spiritual successor to Strider.

Of course, it's the tense, tread carefully gameplay, and the swanky, spit-shined PS5 remake's graphics, but with Motive Studios' 2023 Dead Space I especially enjoyed the way its story, setting and lore sucked me into a blissful black hole of sci-fi media, and interstellar horror appreciation. I sandwiched returning to the USG Ishimura in-between repeated views of both the animated Dead Space: Downfall prequel, and the Dead Space: Aftermath films. My outer spooky space nostalgia for the 2008 PS3 game was expanded, so even though it's a tenuous link, revisiting Dead Space brought back fond memories of an interview I carried out with Firesprite about The Persistence back in 2018. Dead Space's sci-fi horror vibe also convinced me to re-watch Event Horizon, too.

Take into account that Blazing Chrome featured in my top five PS4 games of 2019, and combine this with how editor Sammy Barker had me sold in the