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.

Unfortunately for Foreclosed, the glitches, confusing systems, and undercooked game mechanics overwhelmed my experience with the game. On the surface, Antab Studio present an exciting and engaging future-noir thriller, but look much further and you will see a cyberpunk-by-the-numbers experience that falls flat. Even taking into consideration the well-realised cyberpunk world, and the clever use of comic book aesthetics to present the game’s narrative, Foreclosed fails to impress on most fronts. Gameplay is key, and unfortunately Foreclosed presents and feels like a middling shooter from decades past.

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.

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.

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.

Martha is Dead isn’t for the faint-hearted, though sadly that’s not for the right reasons. There are too many moving parts in this game that weigh the already poorly-paced story down. If this was a spooky investigative adventure that required you to take photos to unlock the brooding mystery hidden within, I’d be all for it, because that’s one part that actually works. But alas it’s instead left as an over-exerted mess that is more focused on a couple of key shock-value moments than anything substantial. This game needs a swift autopsy to dissect out the crimes before a merciful cremation.

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is a sad tale for the much-needed resurgence of equestrian-focused video games. Littered with poor design choices and endless amounts of bugs, every attempt to seep some joy out of the game was hindered. This comes as a shame. The bones of a good game are in there from the exploration of an interconnected world to a good start in both horse gameplay and town management and restoration. Boiling down to more than just a game released too early, Horse Tales also is a game too ambitious for its own good and not what was expected or needed. Take this one out to the pasture, they’re done.

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.

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.

The House of the Dead: Remake could have been such an easy recommendation if it controlled properly. It hits all the right notes EXCEPT for the most important ones, and I seriously cannot wrap my head around how it got released in its current state beyond a deadline that absolutely should have been pushed back. Either way, I think the Switch got the short end of the stick here… with FPS lag and bad controls to boot. At this point, you’re better off waiting for a version on another platform or at the very least waiting for a patch for this one, because this is one game that should’ve stayed dead a while longer.

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.

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.

From a dismal effort on the front of graphics, user interface, player onboarding, sound design, and essentially every other aspect of game design, Babylon’s Fall is a failure. Games have bounced back from disastrous launches in the past, but in this case, I feel like it may be best to let sleeping dogs lie. The game’s one and only saving grace is that Platinum Games truly are the kings of combat, and while Babylon’s Fall is nowhere near the top of their collection of works, hacking and slashing your way through the Tower of Babel is at least, occasionally, kind of fun. It is just a crying shame that there is very little else to enjoy from the game; there isn’t anything pretty to look at, nice to listen to, or easy to engage with.

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.

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.

As a game, it is not up to scratch. While the characters and the story might be good enough for a music video, it’s not good enough for a video game. It is clear these are music video characters, sometimes in great emotional scenes, but often feeling two dimensional. The gameplay is sometimes nice, but often lacking in a discernable thread of logic, and is undercut when you see how little influence you have on what is clearly a prescribed set of events.

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.

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.

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.

The voxel creations and freedom that Dual Universe offers are pretty impressive. It’s a concept with a lot of potential. However, the failed execution and many bugs leave this game dead on arrival with honestly no reason to play unless it ever receives a resurgence in players and a massive gameplay overhaul.

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.

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.

Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is a game that should not have been made. It provides a core gameplay experience that is neither realistic enough to be a simulation nor interesting enough to be an actual game. At the same time, it unironically tries to cater to a fantasy that positions everyday people as enemies to be dealt with. Shamelessly borrowing the trappings of the Grand Theft Auto series without any of the satirical overtones leads to an unsettlingly pro-violence experience. It is even difficult to enjoy the game’s impressive environmental design thanks to a litany of visual glitches. Police Simulator: Patrol Officers misses the mark in almost every regard.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes is an utter disappointment and not the redeeming game developer Supermassive so desperately needed it to be. Where its accessibility options offer to draw more players in, just as many will be repelled by its poor and offensive political themes, shoddy camera handling, uninspiring cast and buggy nature. Hoping to be a thrilling ride with some political intrigue, it's instead a sloppy affair that'll leave players feeling like they're going through the motions. Supermassive fans deserve better. The horror genre as a whole deserves better. No recommendation can be provided for this dark plunge.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a buggy mess, even disregarding the constant crashes. Not only that, but it is a game void of any personality, originality, or bravery. It attempts nothing new and falls back on tropes that started falling out of style years ago, while somehow still managing to replicate them poorly. It disappoints me not just as a fan of the Lord of the Rings, but also as a fan of video games in general.