The Best Games from GMTK Game Jam 2023

6,800 games were made to fit the theme "Roles Reversed"

Earlier this month, I challenged 23 thousand game designers to create a brand new game - in just 48 hours. And, what's more - the game had to fit a very difficult theme... roles reversed.

I wanted to see games that let us become a character that we don't normally get to play. Like, instead of controlling the buff knight in a suit of armour - what happens if we get to play as the army of enemy skeletons, instead?

As always, the community rose to the challenge. They submitted over 6,800 games. Making it, once again, the biggest jam in Itch.io's history.

Sorry about the servers.

I played through the top 100 rated games, and picked out my 20 absolute favourites. These games are clever, creative, inventive, and annoyingly good for games made in a single weekend. As always, the results are in no particular order or ranking - and this year, I've bundled them into groups that show off different takes on the theme.

Help or hinder

Okay. So, a very popular take on the theme was to make a game with a hero character, who moves through the level by themselves. And you've got to help or hinder them, by taking on a completely different role.

Take, for instance, Princess Paladin. Here, the titular princess is very much the main character as she takes on waves of demonic bats and slime-spitting snakes. You, on the other hand, play as her measly minion sidekick.

So you dash around the level to pick up weapons and health potions, which you can then yeet towards to the princess to help her out. Which means you're basically playing as Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite.

But it's surprisingly fun to play in the support role. For one, while it can be tricky to work alongside an autonomous AI, these cute thought bubbles help make the princess's decision-making more transparent.

And there's some clever design here as you juggle your own needs with those of the so-called hero. When you pick up a health potion, for instance - you have to ask yourself: who needs this more? You or me?

Another take on this idea can be seen in LedgePainter. You're a game dev making a fancy 3D shooter but - alas - your playtesters can't seem to navigate the level without some assistance. So, it's time to do what all triple A games do and paint the way forward with bright yellow splotches.

The game's split into two halves: you've got the editor where you lay down your paint, from a limited supply. And then you can hit play to see how the AI-controlled character handles your stage. You can also look at The Tutorial, which is also about painting a level layout to give commands to an autonomous hero.

So those are games where you help the AI-driven character reach their goal. But plenty of games went the other way, and instead pitted you against the protagonist.

Bready or Not is clearly inspired by the breakout hit Vampire Survivors. But instead of playing as the whip-wielding hero, you're now commanding the army of enemies. Each one is on a different cooldown timer, so you need to bounce between the different birds to create a varied team. When you do enough damage, you can pick from a random selection of upgrades - from faster cooldowns, to twice-as-many spawns.

Now I have to admit, the similar entry, Vampire: No Survivors, is probably a little bit smarter as you must carefully spend a limited pool of resources to build the most effective army of enemies. But I slightly preferred playing Bready or Not - probably because there's something wickedly fun about spawning such a massive pool of pigeons that it literally breaks the game's audio system.

Flip it on its head

Another popular approach for this theme was to take a well-known game, and completely flip it on its head.

So, Inside Job is an upside-down tower defence game where you place down the minions, rather than the towers.

You've got a bunch of different baddies to pick from - each on different cooldowns - and you have to carefully deploy them to overwhelm the opponent's defences. Sometimes that means making sure many enemies arrive at the towers simultaneously, so some slip by unharmed. Or using a costly power-up to temporarily shut down the defences.

Bonus points to Tower Attack, which also toyed with the "tower offence" concept.

Another genre that's ripe for reversal is the stealth game. In Sneakerdoodle, we actually want to be spotted by patrolling guards.

You play as an attention-hungry pooch who wants to be chased by humans. But not caught and cuddled. So you need to intentionally trip these wandering view-cones... and then make a dash for it before you're actually caught.

This leads to some surprisingly clever levels as you dart under tables, squeeze through tight gaps, and carefully choose the order in which you get spotted, so you don't find yourself trapped.

Retro games also provided a good opportunity for role reversal.

In Bricker Breaks Free, the game starts with a very familiar set-up: a paddle firing a ball towards a bundle of blocks. But then things change: the camera swaps into an isometric view and you're now controlling the entire field of blocks as a single, amorphous character.

Now you're moving through corridors of enemy paddles and wandering balls.

You can shoot at the paddles to destroy them, but this actually uses your blocks as ammo - making you a tiny bit smaller with every shot you take. And the smaller you get, the more vulnerable your core becomes. However, it's not all bad being small - you can use your slimmed-down structure to sneak through tight gaps.

This is a fun, frantic, and very clever twist on an arcade favourite. I just love games that use the character's shifting size and shape to organically change the way you play the game.

Kinda like... Snake, which actually inspired two games in the top 100.

My favourite, though, was VERSUS SNAKE, which turns the sedate Nokia phone favourite into a legitimately scary first-person horror game.

So you need to find all the apples in the room and feed them to the snake. Or you can throw them far away from you to distract the giant cobra and give yourself a chance to get away. It plays on the familiar AI patterns of the original game, but turns it into something completely fresh.

Real-world games were also at the mercy of our clever game jammers.

Descriptionary is a really imaginative rethink of Pictionary. Basically, the character tells you what to draw - just squares, lines, arches, and circles, with vague directions for where they should go. You can then doodle that in the box below.

Your job is to guess what you've just drawn. It's a bit like translating the same message through 4 languages on Google Translate - you know, things start getting a bit wonky, but you can still figure out the original intent. This game is super polished and well worth a play.

I also want to give props to The Last Piece Standing, for being a rare chess-based game that I actually enjoy. You play as the king, and have to destroy a bunch of enemy pieces that are slowly marching towards your army.

However, you can borrow the powers of the other pieces to make massive jumps and diagonal leaps across the board. This turns each bout into a careful positioning puzzle. Good stuff.

Unexpected roles

Another way to interpret the theme was to look at the different roles in games and relationships, and let us take the side that we don't usually get to play.

Take, for instance, Get Packing where we become the shopkeeper NPC from your typical RPG. In each round you have a limited amount of money to spend on the weapons, shields, food, and potions, brought in by the brave and copyright-dodging adventurer.

You then flip to the store room where you embrace your inner Leon S. Kennedy and try to squish all this stuff into the cramped confines of a crate. What's more, certain items can affect their surroundings - so don't put a magic flame sword next to your bananas, or the fruit will go bad. Sure, we have seen games about being a shopkeeper, but this was still a cute game, and is worth checking out.

Another game to do this was Crabjuice. It's clearly inspired by the horrible headcrabs from the Half-Life games - those mutant chicken nuggets who pounce on your face. But here, it's used to make a excellent puzzle game. Playing as the headcrab, you have to get around these cramped levels by leaping from one human's face to another.

Soon you'll be flinging yourself into switches to open doors, narrowly avoiding enemies with guns, and ricocheting yourself off walls for a better vantage point.

Pets and Pokemon were also common targets for role reversal. We're so used to playing as the human that we don't stop to think what it's like to be the animal.

Not so in Walkies - a game where you play as a bone-hungry dog, who is cruelly constrained by a tight leash and a strong owner.

So the owner wanders around the town automatically, giving you a small radius to explore for bones. And also ways to gain power - you can get pets from passing humans, say, or use fire hydrants as a handy toilet. Once you're powered up completely, the screen zooms out and now the dog is totally in charge. You can zoom around at double speed and the human is powerless to stop you. It's a fun back and forth of power and powerlessness.

Meanwhile, in One Day Better, you play as a cat who tries to help its depressed human. The dude wakes up in a funk - a fuzzy fog of thoughts clouding their mind. Left to their own devices they'd happily sleep in all day. But their faithful moggy can use a few tools to get them going.

So you can meow to get the human's attention. Scratch at stuff to make them move towards objects. And even headbutt the human's legs to get them to move between rooms. Using these three commands you can make your owner tidy their room, have a shower, and eat breakfast. It's a heartfelt and touching little game about the restorative power of animals, and I really liked it.

Surprise!

Another take on the theme was to give you a pretty standard game. and then pull the rug from beneath your feet by reversing the roles.

Take UVSU. It's a platformer where you have to get the angel to the goal before time runs out. Seems simple enough? But then you replay the level, but now as an imp who has to kill the angel before they reach the door.

And then you play it AGAIN, but as another angel who now has to reach the door while dodging the imp and its bullets. Hopefully that made some sense. Basically, you're simultaneously killing and dodging yourself and must think several steps ahead so you don't screw yourself over in future runs.

I think you just need to play this to really get it. It's a wonderfully clever game. Not surprising, when you learn that it was made by the developer behind Toodee and Topdee - which also started life as a game jam game.

Reversal Rooms also begins as a basic platformer. But then, in level two, your jump button actually controls the spikes. Then you control the spring. And then the door. It's a manic context-switching headscratcher that basically feels like Wario Ware as a platformer, and I really dig it.

And then Ragdolf looks like your average putting simulator - but hitting the ball doesn’t propel the golf ball - it propels the golfer, instead.

So you need to use the ball as a bounce pad to get you around the level. It's actually way more than a slapstick sight gag, though: it quickly turns into a tricky platformer where you must carefully time your swings for the correct power and angle. I played through this entire game with a big smile on my face. Highly recommend this one.

Going meta

And then the final twist on the theme was to go completely meta.

Let's start with Pause to Play, which makes the pause menu an active participant in the puzzles.

So pausing the game doesn't actually stop the action - but it does flash up some buttons which can be used as platforms to get around. Then, the options sliders can be used as lifts - but they change the settings as you go up and down. You can zoom the camera, for instance, to turn your character into a tiny speck.

More ideas are explored as the levels go on. It's an inventive puzzle platformer with plenty of room to grow into a full game, if the designer wishes. Hat tip to The Adventures of Radish Boy, which also uses pause as a game mechanic.

We also saw games that reversed the roles between player and designer. In Making the Game, you start with a platformer that is far too easy: just a brief stroll from start to finish. So you have to choose the next avenue for the designer, from a list of three random choices.

Each time you expand the game, it gets harder and harder, but you've got to complete the level to carry on. When the game gets so difficult that it's just incredibly tedious to play... it's time to hit release. Maybe a little dig at your humble host? I dunno - but I still liked this game a lot.

We also saw games that reversed the roles so hard, that they actually incorporated the game jam into the game itself. There was, of course, Video Editor's Toolkit which lets you play as me, editing the video at the top of this post.

But I'm giving the win to Our Dearest Player, which emulates the experience of being a game jam judge, in this exact jam.

You play through a handful of simple reversed-role games - including a surprisingly good Flappy Bird clone - before handing out stars in different categories. There's even a broken Web GL page, which makes the whole thing super authentic.

And then finally... Streamer Screamer is a wonderful fourth-wall-breaking meta comedy. This game features a jibbering Twitch streamer, who is showing off some low-rent horror game with a spooky villain.

But then... the screen pans up to reveal that you are actually playing as the villain. You're carrying an iPad showing the stream, meaning that you can triangulate the location of the streamer and sneak up behind them for a jump scare. You don't want to make the game too scary though - you want to vary your approach to build tension - and raise viewer numbers.

Plus, you'll want to hold back to hear the streamer's inane babbling about Disney World and dreams. This is a genuinely galaxy-brained game idea and needs to be explored further.

Honourable mentions

So, there we have it! By reversing roles, these clever game designers found fertile ground for brand new game ideas. We helped and hindered AI-driven heroes. We turned classic game ideas on their heads. We took on unfamiliar roles. We saw surprising twists on familiar concepts. And we went so meta that the fourth wall shattered into a thousand pieces.

As always, I want to shout out some honourable mentions.

Firehose is a manic score-chasing arcade game where you play as a firefighter... who starts fires. You can only move as far as your hose will allow - so you'll then need to hop into the firetruck and drive somewhere else.

The Contrarian Press sees you make the judicious use of censor bars to rewrite newspaper headlines, and make new stories. It's all presented with arty cut-out collage images.

And Spared is a bowling game where you play as the pins. You've got to dodge at the last minute to avoid being struck down, and different bowlers with special powers are introduced to mix things up.

To be honest, I can easily recommend a dozen more. So you can now head to itch.io and find the full list of games - and the public's rankings for all the entries. Have a look through the top 100 titles, at the very least.

Thank you so much to everyone who took part in the jam, or rated some games. Thanks to all the mods on Discord, to everyone who made our awesome Team Finder app, and to Leaf over at Itch.

An extra huge thank you to my Patrons who fund GMTK Game Jam - and mean we don't have to get corporate sponsors involved. The jam will be back in 2024. So subscribe to the GMTK YouTube channel to receive the date announcement next year.