Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a bad game. I should know, I actually paid $40 to see how bad it is. And it is bad. It is a 2003 PS2 game released 20 years later. It is functional, but both hilarious and painfully dull at the same time. You are supposed to be a few hundred foot tall gorilla, but you are stymied by jumping puzzles. But is it the worst game of 2023, as YongYea says? No. No it is not. Not even close. No the worst game of 2023 is nothing you’ve ever heard of. Chances are the game is shovelware buried in the Nintendo E-Shop waiting to be found by unsuspecting players. The game is Anime Beauty Girl Puzzle. It is Wolf Simulator. It is Green Soldiers Heroes.
If you have heard of even one of them, congratulations, you continually read this site. If not, be glad you haven’t. And read on.
Somebody on Discord brought up an interesting idea when I said Rise of Kong isn’t the worst game of the year: “I mean i think there’s a difference between real games and shovelware tho,” the user said. Shovelware I consider to be cheap, poorly-made cash-grabs. However, even AAA studios are often known for cheap, poorly-made, cash-grabs, like most sports game franchises(Madden anyone?). And the line between real games and shovelware is often so blurry the distinction is meaningless. So when considering the worst game of 2023, I consider everything, That is where Anime Beauty Girl Puzzle comes in, and is what the title refers too.
The Contenders
Is Anime Girl Beauty Puzzle the worst game of 2023? It’s certainly in the running. It cheaply made jigsaw puzzle game using creepy AI imagery that looks like underage girls. There is utterly no point in buying it. You can make AI generated anime babes yourself. In fact, I’ll go on Midjourney right now and create an anime babe that doesn’t make you dirty for looking at it:
Or what about Wolf Simulator as worst game of 2023? It is barely functional game where you, as a wolf, run around killing snakes. Then there Green Soldiers Heroes, an outright scam shooter retailing for twenty bucks? I could go on. What about the abysmal platformer Flannel Amethyst, which despite being Hilariously Awful, is still a really, really bad game? I could pick any number of the garbage games I’ve played this year and hold them up as worse than Rise of Kong.
What really is the worst game of 2023?
In the end, what constitutes the worst game of 2023 is entirely subjective. For most people, the worst game will be the worst out of what they’ve played. And usually, even the worst of the worst never get played. I mean the internet mocked Rise of Kong, but how many people actually played Rise of Kong? Metacritic user scores are almost entirely memes and from people who have not played the game at all. It is like the Razzies, where the worst movie of the year is the worst mainstream movie of the year. They totally ignores the z-grade indies clogging up Amazon Prime. The true sewage sinks to the bottom, never to be seen, unless it is famously awful like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room or Birdemic. Gaming is much the same.
In some ways, most people are lucky, they’ve never experienced true gaming horrors like I have. They have never peered into the gaming abyss like I have. Normal people live in bliss, while I do not. Whatever you think is the worst game of 2023, just know there’s always something worse out there, buried. If you encounter it, woe to those who play it. Therefore, they should be happy Rise of Kong is their worst game of 2023, unaware of what lies beneath. It takes a real masochist to find and play them. Somebody like me. Let me play them, so you don’t have to.
