by Adi Stein

Guys! It’s scary out there! Don’t ya kinda miss the good ol’ days of global pandemics? When the clear enemy was a virus that didn’t have any political ideology or inherent bigotry associated with it? I know I sure do! There’s a lot to be afraid of these days, but there’s also a lot to enjoy out in the world. This year I played so many fantastic games, read some of my favorite books of all time, and watched maybe more movies than I have ever watched in a single year. Storytelling got me through some rough moments in human history and enhanced beautiful moments in my own life (I got married again!). Writing this list brings me so much joy and I hope reading it brightens your day. So if you’re looking for something new to enjoy, be it a new game to play, book to read, or movie/TV show to watch, look no further cuz I’ve got you covered.

A quick note: Previously I’ve written about my top ten video games and top five to ten books. This year I’m adding movies and only giving my top five in all three categories. Not all of them came out this year, but I engaged with them for the first time this year which is why they're on these lists. These lists are all much longer (which is why I’ll shout out some honorable mentions in each category), so if you want more, just lemme know! Happy to share and recommend things to anyone that wants. So, cozy up next to the fireplace and get comfy cuz it’s listing time!

Vidya Games!

Honorable Mentions: Resident Evil Village, Tails of Iron, Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV, Dorfromantik

This past year, my gaming life changed when my wife and siblings got together and bought me a Steam Deck for my birthday. All of a sudden my gaming was not limited to our living room and there was a new world of PC games that I could play anywhere. And the first game I’d play on this magical new machine? Dave the Diver! This quirky game was probably my most exclusively joyful gaming experience this year. On the surface, you play as Dave who dives deeper and deeper into the ocean to get rarer and rarer fish for the sushi restaurant he’s running on land. But as the game progresses, shit goes cheerfully off the rails. Whether fighting mecha-PETA activists or making very specific vegetable sushi for a rap superstar or saving an underwater community of alien merpeople from a zombie outbreak, this game constantly kept me guessing. Most importantly, this game doesn’t take itself seriously for a minute. Dave is constantly with you, the player, in expressing how bizarre and outlandish these scenarios are. But he carries on and does his best to help everyone out, no matter how outrageous the request. Dave gets it and he’s a great guy to go scuba diving with in this completely insane world.

This is a game that came out years ago but I was never able to play because it was only on Xbox and PC and I’m a Playstation and Mac guy, so this was another perfect fit for my new Steam Deck and I’m so glad I was finally able to enjoy it. The music and visuals are exceptional, but the gameplay is what had me hooked, playing hour after hour until I finished the game in one week. Every button press in this game just feels great, and locking into the rhythm of jumping, dashing, bursting through the environment made even the most difficult platforming challenges rewarding. Ori is a delightful game that had me locked in all the way through.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the video game equivalent of a page turner. The story and its pace just kept going and constantly made me want to see what was going to happen next. This is a sizable open-world game and I flew through it in a matter of weeks (which is a very short amount of time for me these days). Kraven alone was a fascinating antagonist for this game, but the moment when Venom becomes the main bad guy is an all-time great moment in Insomniac's gaming history. I don’t really have much more to say about this game beyond the fact that it is a blast to play and I can’t wait to see where Insomniac continues to go with this franchise.

Every “Game of the Year” list that has this game on it will start with some permutation of the same sentence: “The original Resident Evil 4 is largely viewed as one of the best video games of all time.” That’s important context for why this is so high on my list. I remember begging my parents to let me get the original RE4 when it came out. Thanks to an “M” rating, it took a lot of convincing. But they eventually caved and boy was it worth the work. I was rewarded with a fun, scary game filled with action and badassery. The original RE4 truly was one of the best games of all time. The remake is even better. It still hits everything that was great about the original (tight gameplay, fun/absurd characters and story, pitch perfect pacing), but it adds in new mechanics and course-corrects some of the narrative moments/themes from the original that haven’t aged as well. And that’s not even discussing how beautiful this game looks. The remake perfectly updated the visuals so that the game looks like I remember it looking, as opposed to keeping it exactly in line with how it looked back in the day. Overall this is about as flawless a remake as anyone could ask for, making Resident Evil 4 relevant to a whole new generation of gamers. Now if you’ll excuse, I’ve got another round of New Game+ to dive into.

PS: No music in gaming makes me feel quite as calm and safe as the Save Theme from this game. Pour yourself a cup of tea, click here, sit back, relax, and enjoy.

2023 is the year I finally reached peak nerd (I’m so sorry, Zo, that it just happened to line up with the year we got married). I mean, I’ve always been a nerd. I’m a self proclaimed indoor kid who has always enjoyed video games and never cared for sports. But I never went full Dungeons & Dragons. Until this year. Thanks to a random YouTube stumble into an amazing show called Dimension 20 (more about that later), I came to understand and value the world of tabletop role playing games. The more I watched the more I got it and the more I got it the more I wanted to play. But getting a group together for a game of D&D is no easy task.

Enter Baldur’s Gate III. As the reviews began to come out about this game and my Dimension 20 consumption reached a crescendo, I knew I was a goner. But I didn’t realize quite how much. If Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a page-turner, Baldur’s Gate III is a dense, rewarding biography (and if you’ve read previous lists of mine and stick around for the books this year, you know how much I love those). This is a game that begs you to sink into it, so much so that I have not even finished its second of three acts after 70+ hours. I’m really taking my time with this game and I’m loving it.

For the less D&D-knowlegable player (a category that I would definitely put myself in), there’s a lot in this game that you’ve just gotta let wash over you. So many locations, historical figures, belief systems, and so on that all sound like gibberish to me. But that’s all surface level. Beneath that is a rich world packed with exciting landscapes, compelling and beautifully-realized characters, and meaningful choices.

And those meaningful choices are exactly why this is my game of the year. For context, a major area of myself that I am working on is my profound discomfort with when I upset people. I am a people pleaser through and through, so making others experience negative emotions fills me with anxiety. It’s something I work on in therapy on a regular basis, but it’s also something that, funnily enough, Baldur’s Gate III is helping me out with. There are so many options for what you can do in this game. You can almost never predict the exact results of the choices you make. Sometimes you’ll say something to a character you love that really makes them turn on you. Sometimes you’ll do something that makes a character you hate thrilled! But no matter what you do or what happens as a result, the game is ready and goes on. Which, honestly, is how life goes!

One of my best friends often says the following about me: “You go into things anxious and afraid of what will happen and walk out of them with a new best friend.” Applying this in my real life is hard and scary, but applying it to my character in Baldur’s Gate III provides me with the safety net to step outside of my comfort zone with no consequences. This, admittedly, makes me sound like I have some radical emotional disorder or that I’m agoraphobic in some way. To be clear, I am not. But using video games as a way to push your own emotional development is a great thing. For years I have said that video games are a safe place to explore seemingly unsafe emotions. Baldur’s Gate III showed me how true that is in as fun a way as possible.

But wait! There’s more! I played a lot of video games this year, watched a lot of TV, watched a bunch of great movies, but also read many great books. I’d like to share those great books with you. So here we are: My favorite books that I read in 2022 (in order of when I read them)!

Readin’ Books!

Honorable Mentions: The Truth About Leaving by Natalie Blitt and Video Game of the Year: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977 by Jordan Minor

Eleanor by David Michaelis

I love me a thick non-fiction book and Eleanor hits the spot. Here is a hugely important figure in American history who I knew next to nothing about and for whom I now have a great appreciation. Michaelis’s writing is moving without being overly sentimental, beautifully examining not just Eleanor Roosevelt’s life but her very attitude towards the world. Here is a woman who saw the world for what it was and did her best to make it better than she found it. Eleanor is a truly worthwhile read and gives this impactful first-lady the time, attention, and recognition she deserves.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This past year I read two of my favorite books I’ve read (both introduced to me by my painfully well read mother-in-law, thank you very much). The first is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and the second is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (we’ll get to that one in just a moment). Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a blast to read and a genuinely moving story of friendship, love, loss, and creativity. In many ways, it feels like a book custom built for me. It follows three friends and their journeys as video game developers, grappling with success, what it means, what to do with it, and how to be there for one another. It asks beautiful questions about the nature of collaborative creativity and self advocacy. But, most impactfully for me, it explores friendship and love over the course of decades. It reminds me of my own friends; our moments of celebration, our fights, and our own journeys together. If there is one book that you read this year, make it this one. You don’t need to know anything about video games. All you need to know is what it is like to be human.

The Hidden Saint by Mark Levenson

Another very fun read that feels like it was placed directly in the center of my Venn diagram. The Hidden Saint is a Jewish fantasy book (who has even ever heard of such a thing) that tells the story of a rebbe and his quest to save his family from a sinister demon. It has all the great trappings of a fun fantasy journey, with the added layer of Jewish history, theology, and mythology. But all of that would feel gimmicky if not for the moving story being told. There are real moments of pain and loss in this book that made me reflect on how I have treated those around me over the course of my life. This book forced me to do some profound introspection and was fun at the same time. Cool!

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

As mentioned in the Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow blurb, Pachinko is another book that I read this year that I would place on my list of top five favorite books of all time. That being said, it could not be more different. Pachinko is an exceptionally written story about generations of a Korean family between 1910 and 1989. Lee weaves a beautiful story about family, what we give up for those we love, and how our choices impact those around us. This is one of those rare books that I just did not want to end. The rich and complex cast of characters are so compelling and moving that you can’t help but feel for them, even as some of them make genuinely questionable and painful decisions. The best word I can use to describe this book is bountiful, despite the fact that most of the characters in this book are simply trying to make ends meet. Lee has given us a masterfully told, truly impactful story and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

32 Yolks: From My Mothers’s Table to Working the Line by Eric Ripert

This past year, my wife and I had the pleasure of dining at Le Bernadin, Eric Ripert’s world-class restaurant. It was an exceptional experience that I will always cherish, despite the fact that I 100% did it totally wrong (pro-tip, don’t waste valuable stomach space on a second helping of the bread - there’s more magical things to come). It was such an inspiring experience that I immediately looked up Ripert’s work because I needed to know more. Lo and behold, he wrote a memoir and it is fantastic. 32 Yolks is Ripert telling his own story, from his tumultuous childhood to his brutal time in some of the best kitchens around the world. It is at times a painful story, but it is always told with love, joy, admiration, and appreciation. I had so much fun following Ripert on his journey and cannot wait to go back to Le Bernadin with my newfound knowledge (both of Ripert himself and how to actually do it right).

Cinemaaaaaaa

Honorable Mentions: A Haunting in Venice, Theater Camp, John Wick: Chapter 4, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (I loved it, come at me)

#5 All Quiet on the Western Front

Zoe and I watched this movie just before this past year’s Academy Awards simply because it was nominated for so many things and boy am I glad we did, if only because it ended up winning so many dang awards and I would have been so confused/angry if I didn’t understand why. Everything it won was well earned. It’s a visually stunning, haunting, brutal, and unflinching look at the horrors we ask young people to endure in the name of war. It’s devastating in its portrayal of the divide between those actually fighting and the older generation throwing away lives due to their own sense of pride. It asks such important questions about sacrifice, honor, nationalism, and more. As I’m writing this, I can’t help but connect the message of this film that I watched almost a full year ago to this exact moment in human history. This movie uses brutal violence to beautifully show the urgent need for peace and empathy, a message we need now more than any other moment in my life.

#4 Barbie

HARD PIVOT TO THE LAND OF COTTON CANDY PINK AND SMASHED PATRIARCHIES. Barbie is the most fun I had at the movies this year, full stop. Greta Gerwig's take on the Mattel toy’s unbridled optimism and devastating misogyny has so much to say and does it all with a smile, open arms, and some kickass dance moves. This movie made me laugh out loud and think seriously about the societal power structures that force everyone into unnecessary limitations and expectations. AND IT’S A FUCKING MOVIE ABOUT BARBIE. My hat is truly off to the world-class balancing act that Gerwig pulls off with this joyful triumph of a film.

#3 Women Talking

This movie spent 99% of the year at my number one slot and got swapped out with Past Lives at the last minute (more on that in a bit), but Women Talking is my go to recommendation for anyone looking for a profound, thoughtful, and impactful movie. Women Talking tells the story of a group of Mennonite women who, after a brutal attack by the men in their community, must decide what to do when the men who attacked them return. Do they forgive their attackers, fight them, or leave the community? This movie is an ode to resolve, communal resilience, and, honestly, democracy. It asks powerful and challenging questions about forgiveness and what it means to fight back. All of this is done through poetic dialogue that painfully encapsulates the power and perspectives that each of these women bring to their community. I watched this movie nearly a year ago and it has stuck with me ever since. Please go watch this movie now.

#2 Oppenheimer

I’m a big fan of Christopher Nolan, writer and director of Oppenheimer. Just ask my college roommates who remember me watching and rewatching Inception, taking vigorous notes on each subsequent re-watch (yeah, I was VERY cool in college). But his last few films just haven’t hit for me. I wasn’t a big fan of Interstellar, I found Dunkirk’s nonlinear storytelling to be needlessly obfuscating, and I could not understand what the heck was going on in Tenet largely because of how dang impossible it was to actually hear anything the characters were saying. But Oppenheimer- Oppenheimer is a new beast entirely and one that will go down in history as one of Nolan’s best films (if not his best film outright). This movie also turned me into the worst kind of movie snob. I needed to see it in 70MM IMAX. I needed to see it in the format Nolan intended, on the biggest screen possible, and with the loudest and best sound system available. There’s one movie theater in New York that can do that. Tickets were sold out for months. So I purchased tickets months in advance. And I waited. And I’m so glad I did. This movie needed to be seen on the biggest, loudest screen possible. Where I found Dunkirk’s nonlinear storytelling momentum-halting, I found Oppenheimer’s to be vital. The entire movie is an attempt at getting into the head of one of the most important people in human history and it does so expertly. By jumping through time and space, we are able to follow Oppenheimer’s emotional journey and struggle with the weight of what he is doing right alongside him. All of this is only possible because of some of the best performances in movies this year. Needless to say, Cillian Murphy is incredible in the titular role, conveying so much with the smallest possible facial expressions- expressions greatly enhanced by the video format in which I was able to watch this movie. When a man’s eye is as big as my whole body, you can examine every tiny movement of his face. It’s immersive in the most important ways. But the show stealing performance comes from Robert Downey Jr., who brings righteous anger and frustration to the Salieri/Burr archetype. His performance is nuanced, infuriating, moving, and pathetic in all the right ways. His was the performance I kept wanting to watch, but they both deserve Academy Awards and, at least, your time.

#1 Past Lives

Well, Past Lives, you did it. You slid into #1 at the last minute and, honestly, I couldn’t be happier about it. This is the movie that I kept thinking about again and again in 2023. Zoe and I saw this movie on a whim after seeing one trailer and it stole our hearts. Past Lives tells a decades-spanning love story of two people who just never got the timing right. It sounds simple, but this is one of the most emotionally complex movies I’ve ever seen, thanks to writer/director Celine Song’s beautiful script and two breathtaking performances from Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It’s a story about how falling in love doesn’t necessarily mean ending up with the person you fell in love with and how, if you miss your moment, there’s a very real chance that it won’t come again. But it’s also a story about how beautiful that pain can be and how we can endure it anyway. This emotional complexity- this devastating intersection of love and what could have been- is perfectly encapsulated towards the end of the movie in its most stirring scene. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Nora (Greta Lee), and her husband Arthur (played expertly by John Magaro) are sitting at a cozily lit bar having some late night drinks, having spent the evening hanging out as a group. At first Arthur is a part of the conversation, but as the time at the bar goes on, the conversation slowly turns to Korean only, a language Arthur is only just beginning to learn. As such, the intimacy of Nora and Hae Sung’s dialogue grows as Arthur, still sitting right next to them, gets pushed emotionally further and further away. At the most vulnerable moment, Hae Sung says to Nora (in Korean), “I did not expect liking your husband to hurt this much.” It’s a line that just absolutely broke me. Anyone who has experienced love, requited or not, knows the intense vulnerability that comes with it. At that moment, Hae Sung is laying out his vulnerability in the clearest, most devastating way. That vulnerability is heartbreaking, empowering, courageous, and everything behind why Past Lives is the best movie I saw in 2023.

Special Shout outs!

Outside of video games, books, and movies, I have to give a shoutout to two other discoveries of mine this year that really moved me. These two - I don’t know, one of them is a show, one of them isn’t not a show? - “things” for lack of a better word, could not be more different but they both made my year so much better and I think you should really watch both of them.

I am savoring this show like a fine bar of chocolate, taking my time between bites and trying to make it last as long as possible. Scavengers Reign is a visually stunning animated show about a crew that crash lands on a completely alien world. It's bursting with creativity, gorgeously animating creatures that look and behave like nothing I have ever seen. The hand drawn art style creates a sense of comforting intimacy with these characters as we follow their journeys to try and find one another while trying to survive on this awe-inspiring and oftentimes hostile planet. The story is told with minimal dialogue which gives every word real impact. The music is exceptional, leading with the most moving main titles theme I have heard for a TV show in some time. This is an incredibly special show that is well worth your time and patience.

The best money I spent this year was the $57 I spent on an annual Dropout subscription and the reason I did that was for Dimension 20. For those who don’t know, stay with me as I explain because it’s likely not gonna sound like it’s for you but it is so fun and worth your time. Dimension 20 is essentially a Dungeons & Dragons show but hosted and played by some truly brilliant improvisational actors. It’s in the style of an anthology series so each season is a new premise, world, and cast of characters (oftentimes new actors as well). Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dimension 20’s executive producer, has created a show that is just pure play while still generating expert level storytelling. These people feel like friends, creating characters, worlds, and stories that I want to be a part of. I’m grateful for this program because it was there for me when I was feeling anxious, needed to unwind, or just needed to disconnect from the terrifying goings on in the world. Dimension 20 brought me more direct joy this year than any other form of media and I’m so thankful for it. (If you’re looking for a starting point, I highly recommend their “Unsleeping City” season which takes place in New York City. It might be my favorite season of the show and you can watch that whole season for free on YouTube here.)

So there you have it! So many video games, books, movies, and more than I genuinely loved this year. I’d love to hear where you agree, where you disagree, what you think I’m missing, and what you ended up trying based on these lists! I genuinely think that, as the world grows dark and scary, sharing stories and ideas that move us is an important way to make the world a better place. Everything in these lists made my year better and I hope they make your year better, too. So thanks for reading! It’s always a lot of fun for me to put this together and it means so much that you made it this far. Thanks for reading and have a happy new year.

Pixel Theory Blog

Adi's Top Games, Books, and Movies from 2023

Vidya Games!

Readin’ Books!

Cinemaaaaaaa

Special Shout outs!