It deepens the more you play, as more attacks appear, and more complicated enemies join forces to buff each other. And it’s all rather fun! It’s not too hard, which is a pleasant relief, but it’ll get trickier if you don’t properly try to engage with the tactics of it all.

I was just so intrigued by this. I loved learning so much through playing, and it’s just shocking to remember that Holiday Destination Spain was a place of such turmoil and upheaval within my own lifetime. At £20, its four or so hours feels short, but as I mentioned, it’s immediately intriguing to go back and replay making different decisions, or deliberately failing to help certain people, to see the implications playing out.

Those who want more involvement than occasionally making a choice from two or three options won’t suddenly get over their frustrations with the nature of what’s essentially a visual novel, but for people who want to enjoy a good slightly sci-fi thriller, I’d really recommend this. I’ve really enjoyed it.

It’s a worthwhile couple of hours. It’s always spooky, sometimes scary, and as I’ve said over and again, the creatures are incredible.

This is an often fantastic adventure game, with some really surprisingly deep puzzles, incredible art, and a combat system that survives the wholly inappropriate engine in which it’s built. And its atmosphere will certainly stick with me. Congeal with me, perhaps.

I enjoy playing it though! I’m not wholly convinced I’d be as enjoying it had I spent £15 to do so. Although I’m pretty convinced that aficionados would understand the pricing a lot more. I mean, it’s certainly of note that my highest score is around 18 million, while there are scores on the leaderboards over 2 billion. That is clearly indicative of a lot more game than I’ve been able to touch.

While meddling with the linearity of reality is hardly new for first person games, what I love about how Paradox Vector delivers its impossible corridors is the speed. Normally when exploring corners to find real life is looping impossibly, that you’ve taken five right-angled right turnss and appeared somewhere else, it’s done with a pace that ensures you take it all in. Here you’re zipping about almost (but not quite) as fast an old-school FPS, and realising your shredding of the Euclid’s surviving texts as you zip on by.

It all just comes together so nicely, the lovely cartoon design looking splendid, somehow managing to operate hundreds of enemies on screen at once without any issues, and offering a really good level of challenge without ever putting me off having another try. This is a properly fun time.

All of this is presented in a really beautiful way, the levels bursts of colour, changing depending upon your actions, and soundtracked not by a score, but rather the music of your movements. Transferring to the other side of a block, picking up a shape, going past certain places, rotating, sliding, all come with musical plinks and plonks, and your actions build the soundtrack to your play. It’s something Matthew Brown nodded toward in the Hexcells games, and here Nicolás Recabarren and Tomás Batista take it a stage further.

Where you might be used to Breakout clones offering bonus drops, and that dilemma of trying to catch it before zooming across the screen to get the ball before it drops, here with so much more going on that becomes a much more interesting proposition. You might be in hand-to-hand fisticuffs with an eyeball, trying to blat it before it explodes fireballs in all directions, while seeing a fall of coins to your right, and an iron ball power-up falling to the left, all while trying to judge in which direction the ball’s going to eventually come down.

It looks lovely, it stays out of your way as you’re playing, but sensibly highlights rows and columns as you hover over them, and thank goodness there’s an option to switch off the inflatables-in-the-gutters cheating that highlights clues that can currently be addressed. So, independently of anything else, it’s a top quality delivery of a puzzle type that seems to elude so many.

What’s so special here is there’s no deep dark secret. There’s no awful reveal. This is a positive game! It’s about nice people having a good time! Goodness me, it’s extraordinary that this is such a rare thing as to feel notable, but yes! It’s not dishonestly upbeat, but it offers a reflection of a really normal part of life that most media so peculiarly ignores: when things go well. Lovely moments sometimes get to gently peter out, rather than end in Sudden Calamity.

It’s exhausting. That it’s a story means you’ll want to read to the end, but doing so requires a really concerted effort. Which is, obviously, the point. It’s an extremely effective window into the routine life of those with dyslexia, and has very quickly revealed to me how much I don’t take that seriously enough. The idea that the whole world would be encoded behind these shifting, frustrating, bemusing glyphs is utterly overwhelming, a realisation that’s a complete “well duh” for millions of people.

Hexologic is an excellently presented puzzle game, offering some lighter fair than your Hexcells-like challenges, and it’s incredibly cheap.

I’ve had such a good time! I haven’t giggled like that in a long while. I’m not proud of it, except that I am, but I snickered and smirked and properly laughed my way through building the silliest pots the ever-expanding collection of tools allowed me to. And then felt enormous pride as my pottery drew in the crowds to my exhibitions in their hundreds, raking in cash, with people writing me letters begging to buy my work. My Work. Capital W. [Early Access Score = 78]

This is a treat. It’s about a quarter of the length of the games it emulates, but at a squillionth of the price. The animation and pixel art is a nostalgic delight, cutting no corners at all, and the writing is brisk, fun, and always cheerful. That this withstands the comparisons it invites is no small feat, and I dearly hope there’s more to come.

This is such a visually interesting game, using so many different and captivating methods to tell its stories. It’s very sad, and that’s absolutely OK. It offers truth, catharsis, or best of all, gratitude for what you still have. I think this is really splendid.

Tametsi is one of the best logic puzzle games you can buy on PC. It’s up there with Hexcells in my mind, albeit without the latter’s exquisite presentation. Its increasing complexity and perfect difficulty curve makes it one of the most compelling puzzles I’ve had the pleasure to play.

It’s a short-ish game, perhaps two or three hours. For the first half of that, I was pretty convinced we had a gem here, a completely bonkers gem. By the second half, as the threads began to unravel to a subatomic level, I began to suspect we had a sparkly stone someone had coloured in with a felt tip pen. It was hard to mind.

I really never thought I would ever be someone who played deckbuilding games. I never managed to get into Slay The Spire or Darkest Dungeon, and figured it wasn’t a genre I’d ever get to grips with. And then I stumbled on Meteorfall. It was love at first sight. It clicked. I got it. I got really good at it! I played it until I was on game+++ modes for every character, in a way I never play games! I’m having very similar feelings about Iris And The Giant.

There are some nifty puzzles in here, wrapped in its completely excellent presentation, across its two-to-three hours. That this is all the work of one person is completely crazy-bonkers. And for less than a fiver. Goodness gracious, it’s worth waking up for.

And really, that one element of moving around the mine by where you match is so smart, and adds so much. The deeper you go, the more involved it gets, the more tile types there are to bust through, and upgrades to add to your town. And it has me completely hooked.

It’s funny when it’s not being annoying, and fun when it’s not being fiddly. And with 50 of these stupid levels for just £4, it’s hard to make a big fuss. Because, and I just want to be sure that I’ve conveyed this information, it’s the metaphysical dilemmas of pasta.

At such a low price, I really do recommend this for those looking for a janky horror kick, especially with how successfully it delivers on those spooky PS1 vibes. I'm very interested to see what this team does next.

It’s £4! This is such an obvious buy. If you’re super-great at this sort of game, you can make it harder for yourself with the tougher hats. If you’re terrible at them like I am, you’ll have a great time laughing at your own ineptitude. It’s a huge bundle of fun, and just extraordinary for something made so quickly by so few.

Fortunately the rest of the game is a cute little puzzler, that has its difficulty ramp up slowly and calmly. And there are over 100 of them, so you’re getting a good deal.

Most fun of all is when you find a pan. You can repeatedly lob it at enemies for one-hit kills, until, tragically, it breaks. It’s also splendidly gory, blood spattering messily across the screen as bullets fly in all directions. Just like grandma used to love.

I’m so pleased this is still so much fun to play. It has all the same irritations, like the slightly dodgy tiny-thin platforms in some rooms being a little flaky, and the way you have to re-press a direction key after jumping or the dude stands stock still. Oh, and the sound is awful. But for £3-4, this is a lot of fun and a decent challenge, that feels really remarkably contemporary. I’d really recommend giving it a go!