There is a general paucity of Lovecraftian thrills in this puzzle adventure, and as much as I try not to resent a game for the crime of simply being bad, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a frustratingly fragile waste of time and energy that I will never get back. There are far too many kinks for Big Bad Wolf to iron out here, be it a generational misunderstanding of H.P. Lovecraft as a whole, or the dreadful technical state in which I had the displeasure of playing it. Or possibly it is the muddled storytelling and stilted writing, unimaginative and repetitive puzzle design, and about everything this game attempts but fails to execute. At the end of the day, it is a game hinging on the hope that its audience has never played far better and more polished Lovecraftian titles.

Playing out and reading like incredibly poor fan fiction, Life is Strange: Reunion is a return to Max and Chloe’s roots that fundamentally misunderstands the series’ themes, rules and strengths. Less of a triumphant one last hurrah and more of a reanimating of a dead, soulless corpse, it’s an incredibly missable and disappointing regression in storytelling for the franchise that doesn’t trust its audience’s intelligence. The mystery fizzles with plot holes and limp writing, while the second ill-advised jaunt of Max and Chloe doesn’t offer anything substantive or better than its predecessor, instead throwing as much limp nostalgia baiting as it can at a wall, hoping something will stick. It doesn’t matter how much Square Enix and Deck Nine try to embalm the Life is Strange (and Max and Chloe) name; it’s still a dead, hollow husk that was better off left in the ground.

I wish my first experience with Gnaughty Gnomes was not an incomplete and buggy mess, and I would like to give it a try in a few months once things get better. In its current state, however, I cannot in good faith recommend getting it unless the launch patch fixes all the above problems. You might be better off playing something else cheap and fun with your friends until this game is truly ready for launch.

Omi Oh My AI has admirable intentions, but none of that makes up for how unfinished it feels. The CAPTCHA gimmick wears thin quickly, and constant technical issues make it impossible to tell when the game is being clever or simply broken. While it’s easy to respect the ambition behind the project, ambition alone isn’t enough.

Dreadway unfortunately falls to the wayside as simply ‘another friendslop game’. While it takes clear inspiration from other genre titles, it doesn’t do enough to create a unique gaming experience that will have players choosing it over other more popular titles. With a slew of bugs, a lack of unique or interesting features and a gameplay loop that gets old very quickly, Dreadway ends up feeling like a cheap knockoff that misses the point of what makes the good ‘friendslop’ titles good.

Sadly, She’s Leaving‘s trite plot, absence of compelling characters, and lacklustre gameplay elements mar it, leaving very little to actually recommend. It is a short, play-it-and-forget kind of game, so much so that by the end of my playthrough, I felt nothing towards it but the indifference of knowing I could have spent my time doing anything else. It is a completely mediocre experience, but one that Blue Hat Studio can, and should, learn from.

Behind the technical state of Of Ash and Steel, you can occasionally see glimpses of what could have been. A throwback RPG for those nostalgic for the games of the early 2000s. As it stands, the game is barely functional due to a plague of bugs, unplayable performance issues, and systems that barely hold together. Accompanied by myriad smaller issues, Of Ash and Steel feels closer to a first draft than a final launch. Some people might get lucky and manage to thread the needle of poor performance and buggy gameplay and have a serviceable time with Of Ash and Steel. I was, sadly, not one of those people.

Whether it was through lack of resources or lack of effort, Syberia – Remastered woefully falls short of the modernised experience it promises. Beyond the improved 3D environment that brings justice to Benoît Sokal’s imaginative world, there’s very little to recommend to returning Syberia fans and new players alike. Awkward controls and bare-bones UI makes it difficult to see what made the game so beloved to so many in the first place.

The journey is often more important than the destination, but Dead Static Drive fails to live up to its premise across the board. From unbearable driving and combat mechanics to a wasted chance to build a truly unique world, there isn’t anything to propel you to journey across this iteration of 1980s Americana. A disappointing end to years of promising development updates, Dead Static Drive feels like an early access release 11 years in the making. I looked forward to finally getting in the driver’s seat, but looks can be deceiving.

Little Nightmares 3 presents gameplay and location design that mimics the style of its predecessors, while maintaining none of the depth or exploration that the horror genre champions so effectively. Till now, Tarsier Studios has steered the Little Nightmares games through caricatural horror to plumb the depths of those life-sized fears. But now Supermassive Games has taken the wheel, and the proverbial ship has veered frighteningly off-course into shallow waters.

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian never once feels like it was developed beyond the boardroom meeting of its conception. It fails to venture beyond the foundations that the series has set for itself or delve into the world of innovation and experimentation that the series is known for. Superfans of the series may find something to love here, but for those who don’t care to dig that deep, they will find a mish-mash of boring dungeons, a bland story, mind-numbing levels of repetition, and a plethora of design shortcomings in a setting that requires prior knowledge of the world.

Arctic Awakening’s intriguing premise is quickly buried under a slushy heap of mediocrity. Its mystery is undercut by poorly conceived writing, the character dynamics and performances leave you colder than its wintry landscapes and whatever visual beauty that can be found in its intermittent spectacle is often dashed by raw survival mechanics and sluggish pacing. In more assured hands, this could have been a familiar yet effective 4-5 hour narrative adventure, but in its current state, you’d best leave it buried in the snow.

House of Tesla lets down a promising premise with boring execution. The narrative is uninteresting with low-quality execution. While puzzles fare slightly better, the most memorable moments of my time with House of Tesla will be the frustration and confusion while I wait for the hint button to give me guidance on where to go next.

I’m an optimistic person. I try to view games as more than the sum of their parts, flaws and all. I’m struggling to maintain that train of thought as I reflect on my time with Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion. An odd release here or there from a studio is forgivable. They can be viewed as an off-game, one where they weren’t at their best. Two uneven titles down into the mech series, and it’s clear there are problems with this series down to the core. If this is an IP that is to be continued, something fundamentally needs to change. Fans who see that diamond in the rough here deserve better.

Static Dread: The Lighthouse is a disappointing attempt at combining the suspense, dread, and worldbuilding of Lovecraftian horror with the gameplay of Papers, Please. With what little this game does right, such as its incredible character designs and art, it is sadly overlooked by its tonal inconsistencies and its diabolical mediocrity, from its poorly implemented sanity and energy mechanics to its horrendously easy and repetitive gameplay loop. It’s an easily forgettable and thematically incoherent narrative, lacking any genuine horror elements, and revealing its eldritch threats too early on. Few games capture the essence of H.P. Lovecraft, and Static Dread falls flat at every turn.

Despite not completely lacking in fun, MADO MONOGATARI: Fia and the Wondrous Academy stops short of doing anything interesting with its academy life sim elements or its dungeon crawling. Try-hard ‘funny’ dialogue waffles for too long, academy activities is largely messing around in menus, and dungeons are one-note and house the same enemies and traps that don’t offer a true challenge. If this is your very first dungeon crawler and you’re under the age of twelve, you might find enough fun to get you to the end, but for everyone else, this one will likely lie unfinished on the shelf after the first five hours.

Based on the impressive visuals and soundtrack, I wish I had a better time with Atomic Owl. I love a good roguelike platformer as much as the next person, but without carefully executed roguelike random elements, Atomic Owl is just a platformer where you start from the beginning after every game over. This tested my patience as I powered through the same levels, again and again, after every failure. Atomic Owl also currently has too many issues with frequent crashes, buggy boss fights, and poor design to merit a recommendation to anyone but the most tolerant of platformer fans.

Becoming Saint is a dull way to spend your time. While the pitch is intriguing and the visual presentation is neat, there is almost nothing here worth engaging with on a mechanical level. For a roguelike, that complete lack of narrative depth quickly gives way to an uninteresting and repetitive gameplay loop.

While Captain Blood’s development is an engaging tale, the same cannot be said for any aspect of the final product. The game fails to capture what made other hack-and-slashers so fun, nor does it provide any notable innovations. Even as just nostalgia bait, Captain Blood always ends up undermining itself thanks to lacklustre combat, a lifeless world and general glitchiness that pollutes the whole experience.

The Fool’s Apprentice is a neat concept that simply needs more time to cook. It has some cool ideas in using magical abilities to augment its management sim gameplay, and its soothing soundtrack complements its tone perfectly. However, a litany of technical issues and critical design flaws make it ultimately unplayable in its current state. Fingers crossed the team at The Planar Danse will be able to support The Fool’s Apprentice with updates and fully realise their vision for the game in time.

Enjoyable enough to play for an hour or so, but Grit & Valor – 1949 quickly gave me the feeling of wishing I had the tools I needed to make responsive tactical decisions, and left me wanting to be offered choices that would lead me to different battleplans than the ones I started my runs with. In the end, providing giant robots just wasn’t enough to win the day.

Dollhouse: Behind The Broken Mirror felt like someone attempted to make a horror game who didn’t know what made them scary to begin with, and then didn’t show it to a single person for feedback before releasing it. The story is all over the place, and any lore you get throughout the game is hard to make sense of or connect to anything you have already learned. The enemies are obnoxious in number and any possible threat or fear goes out the window due to the sheer frustration that they instill. It feels like a bunch of half-baked concepts and locations thrown into a pot and left to boil for way too long. The flaws in the gameplay and overall functionality bleed so far through the experience that it felt like a slog, and the scariest part was the fact it took 8 hours to finish.

MainFrames is a delight to look at, but less enjoyable to actually play. The charming and cute aesthetics can’t save MainFrames from its simplistic gameplay which struggles to capitalise on its strong ideas.

NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD: Typing of The Net is a typing game that actually challenges you. Whilst there is a decent game here for those who love to test their typing skills and enjoy learning internet lingo, it’s a shame the experience doesn’t last very long. However, if you plan to pursue the mini secret section, you better hope that it doesn’t screw you over during a boss fight as there still seems to be a lot of instability and glitches in this build.

STAR WARS: Jedi Power Battles is a galactic disappointment. While some technical updates like faster load times are nice, the force is not strong with its outdated mechanics, frustrating platforming, and missed opportunities to fix core issues. A mediocre game from 2000 with no substantial changes simply doesn’t cut it in 2025. It’s a Womp rat of a re-release that fails to live up to the legacy of the Star Wars saga.

Overall Elrentaros Wanderings doesn’t have much to offer. There are a lot of different elements on display but none of them mesh together in a way that is satisfying and the game itself just comes across as an under-designed mess. Despite some cute character designs, the aesthetic of the game just isn’t pleasing to the eye and on the whole, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a big misstep and feels like Ubisoft's biggest missed opportunity in a while. Not even the fantastical and majestic sights of Pandora and some engaging hunts can cure the buggy, unoptimised product presented to the world. Offering a dull story while it trips and stumbles on delicate themes, it too is simply a confused formula of everything you've seen before from other titles, almost all of it ill-fitting. Two adaptations under their belt and it seems Ubisoft just can't get that voyage of Pandora right.

The Lords of the Rings: Return to Moria has some very solid ideas. A game set in the Fourth Age is incredibly interesting and exciting. This is why it’s such a shame that Return to Moria is not a success. There is a lot of heart in it, sure, but the core gameplay loop just isn’t engaging enough to make the game worth buying over other survival titles, even if you are a big LOTR fan.