MAGES. Inc. delivered and then some with Iwakura Aria. What’s within is an electric and rich visual novel story, a page-turner that is filled to the brim with memorable and beautiful prose as it expertly weaves its themes. Better yet, it sands off all the rough edges of the genre with quality-of-life improvements. Where there’s sacrifice and power found within the halls of the Iwakura mansion, there’s also love, adoration and devotion. Whether it’s in protagonist Ichiko’s investment in the illustrious Aria or the player following along at every beat, you’re both in for an artful and magnificent ride.

Echoes of the End has strong puzzle foundations and a good grasp on difficulty, making it the type of challenge that is just right. That said, these puzzles dominate gameplay with action getting less of the spotlight, making for a lack of balance. This is a fantastic pick if you prefer brain-teasers over fisticuffs. But if you were looking for a thrilling escapade, you may be disappointed, as the action in this adventure mostly takes a backseat.

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.

Overall, Tiny Bookshop is a fun, cozy game for book lovers where you live that dream of running a bookstore, while also forming friendships with the locals. The use of real books makes it feel personal, especially if you’re someone who reads often, plus it makes recommending titles to others a breeze. While the story isn’t perfect due to its lack of execution, it’s not too big of a deal unless you’re someone who’s invested in the narrative. Regardless, it’s still enjoyable and could introduce you to your next book.

Demon Slayer – The Hinokami Chronicles 2 gives you a strong fighting game that draws you into the story just like the original manga/anime. Prioritising teamwork and combos makes you utilise every moveset for maximum effectiveness. It’s not an easy game to master, and the story can be finished in a few hours. Fans will love what this game has to offer, but you may not enjoy the game if you’ve never heard of the Demon Slayer series.

1000 Deaths feels like it’s a crazy fever dream I had in the early 2000s after falling asleep in front of the TV. I mean this in the best way possible. Filled with fun levels, genuine heart and a killer, crazy aesthetic, if you’re looking for a colourful experience reminiscent of classic 3D platformers, this is for you.

In moments where you can dive into the mechanics on offer, Ritual of Raven really shines. Tinkering with the automations is fun and rewarding, providing a fresh spin on a well-worn genre. But the game doesn’t encourage these moments, instead pulling you through a narrative in a world that doesn’t feel fully realised. There are some excellent ideas here, but they don’t form a compelling whole.

Touting a unique brand of offbeat humour and some absolutely beautiful pixel art, Artis Impact is a labour of love that mostly hits the mark. While its combat system lacks depth and it could use a stronger core narrative, it presents a gorgeous world filled with charming character moments that surprise and delight. Despite a few rough edges, this is a bite-sized RPG full of heart.

At first, Mafia: The Old Country swept me up straight away. Its stunning world, compelling story, and rich sense of place felt like an Italian holiday. As I played on, the simplicity of its combat and stealth stood out more, but that’s not what I valued most. Not the most inventive action game, but one of the most immersive you’ll play this year. This is a leaner and more focused Mafia game that trades scale for storytelling and worldbuilding, and in doing so, delivers something quietly special.

The Wandering Village has a grasp of the building blocks of its genre, but never truly capitalises on its core mechanics or its premise. Rather, it presents an enjoyable but somewhat shallow city-builder that just happens to also be on top of a wandering behemoth, rather than truly embracing and exploring what that could mean in gameplay terms. While its visuals and audio are both lovely, there is little here to really sink your teeth into, particularly for a veteran of the genre. The Wandering Village is worth a visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Killing Floor 3 delivers the punch and the thrill that you’d expect from this well-renowned franchise. Upgraded with modern audiences in mind, the title could have easily been the next big release from a talented development studio. However, with too little focus on content and polish and too much focus on replicating games-as-a-service design philosophies, Killing Floor 3 falls short of its potential.

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.

The King is Watching is a satisfying, if slightly homogeneous, tetris-like roguelite base builder. While it struggles a bit with variety and uneven meta-progression, its gaze mechanic is a simple and clean hook that, alongside a creative setting and range of kings, makes for an almost comforting building manager run after run. The only problem is, that may not be enough to steal player’s gaze away from the wealth of other roguelikes it’s competing with this year.

Dead Take is a solid adventure for the FMV genre that provides an eerie and moody atmosphere set in the Hollywood hills. What’s there is an intriguing exploration of the powers that be and the dog-eat-dog nature of the film industry, and how it can consume people. It may not contain the deepest or most complex puzzle, nor does it make replayability easy for optional objectives, but you don’t stay for that. What you’re there for is the stellar performances; the likes of Ben Starr, Neil Newbon, Laura Bailey and more giving it their utmost all to deliver you a sufficiently chilling horror experience. There are horrors in that mansion, and though not all in there may delight, it’s a worthwhile and memorable jaunt behind Hollywood’s closed doors.

While there are certainly some areas where Tales of the Shire shines, like its highly engaging cooking mechanics, the package as a whole is lacking the polish to be a real winner. There was clearly a lot of love put into the game, and hopefully, with future patches, the performance issues will be resolved. For now, though, I am still longing for the rolling green hills of the Shire, because this game didn’t quite scratch that itch.

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.

As an overall package, Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition just doesn’t tickle me like the first game does. A less captivating band of characters and an unwillingness to lean as firmly into history as its rivals did both back in the day and at present just make for a tonally too strange entity for me to have truly vibed with. It’s a very fine game, but one that disappointed me. Maybe 20 years of anticipation was just bound to do that.

Developers Messhof have created a cycling utopia with Wheel World; they’ve created a universe that celebrates the art of cycling and includes a pumping soundtrack to go along with it. It’s a game that I’m honestly surprised hasn’t been made sooner, due to how prevalent cycling is as a mode of transport and how cyclists love their bikes and the freedom they give them. This is one that I would recommend to my non-gamer cycling mates, as it’s so easy to pick up and will provide them with an immersive world that I know they’d just love to be a reality.

Super Mario Party Jamboree Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV introduces a collection of fun new rule sets, but is brought down a bit due to the camera and microphone games that, for a title released in 2025, should work better than they do. That said, slapping your live reactions into your Mario Party games adds an undeniable layer of goofy entertainment that the series is known for.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers doesn't exactly rewrite the soulslike gameplay design, but I honestly think it brings enough to the table to justify itself. With its fantastic Impetus Repository levelling system, I was able to build and rebuild Wuchang however I liked and fully explored its complex and flexible combat system. Admittedly, some mechanics are somewhat of a mixed bag, ranging from the delightful Skyborn Might resource which rewards aggressive play, to the more annoying Inner Madness feature that makes the player character a bit more of a glass cannon than I would have liked. Overall, however, those looking for a deep new soulslike to get stuck into, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is pretty damn great.

With the release of PATAPON 1+2 Replay comes vibrant and wonderful flashbacks to a colourful, vibrant, arcade-y and, most importantly, fun, era of games that don’t really exist anymore. It was a joy for me to visit these games for the first time, and I’m finally well invested in the majesty and magic of the RTS and rhythm fusion harmony that the franchise is known for. With how grandiose and exciting the battles get with their devotion to music and busy, frantic chaos that explode across the screen, I’d be hard-pressed to find any fan, new or old, who doesn’t find joy here, smiling like a huge dork as your units chant and stomp across the world. Though there’s still the oddball of funk, including some poor tutorialisation in the first game and real brick wall moments that require grind, I’m glad PATAPON is back in a largely unaffected package. Players should jump right into this here nostalgia-infused release. The water’s fine, and you’ll be remembering the Patapons’ spirit songs for years to come.

Shadow Labyrinth is such a fascinating reinvention of PAC-MAN that completely changes the concept of what a PAC-MAN game can be. It’s a completely unapologetic, brutal reimagining that fully commits to this vision. It pays off in its best moments, whether you’re fighting a huge boss or weaving through some difficult platforming, but the punishing early game and confusing design choices really weigh it down. It’s far from the most flawless Metroidvania, but if you can stomach the difficulty, it’s a compelling new PAC-MAN experience.

Let Them Trade is a cute and cosy city builder, where you don’t have to micromanage everything. It’s easy for newcomers to understand, with helpful tutorials and a fun campaign. It also never punishes the players for making a mistake. But, there are areas where it needs to improve, such as explaining some of the upgrades, and better accessibility. Let Them Trade has a unique style to it, with wooden tiles where you can see the grain, and hilarious dialogue (even if it can be too real). There are no repeat scenarios, and each of them doesn’t overstay its welcome, either. It’s exciting to see what Spaceflower will bring to future updates, and what comes next for the cosy city builder genre.

For an independent studio’s debut game, Luto strongly delivers on Broken Bird Games’ ethos of delivering deep narrative experiences that reflect both their passion for video games but also great stories. Despite being a story about death, Luto has more on its mind than presenting melodrama. It’s incredibly unique, fantastic to look at, highly atmospheric, and poetically beautiful. Devoted to those who are no longer with us, and hoping to make a change in the world by humanising the struggles of living with mental illness, Luto stands as one of the most powerful games of the year. It’s transformative, evocative, and breaks form and conventions around how a game should be and how it should play, taking the overused trope of horror as an allegory for mental illness, and making it something truly memorable. It is a game that I cannot recommend more to those in the right headspace.

I’m so glad Kaname Date is back. No Sleep for Kaname Date is such an enjoyable romp through the familiar world that refines the formula, confidently adding escape sequences that fit so naturally into the gameplay loop you’d think that they’ve always been there. While the story and mystery don’t completely hold up throughout, the character interactions and pure personality of the cast more than make up for it. For AITSF fans, it’s an absolute must-play. For newcomers to the series, it’s a compelling reason to dive into the series from the start.

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.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 sticks the landing with a clean kickflip and a modern twist. Iron Galaxy may have sanded off some of THPS4’s open-ended charm, but what’s left is a fine-tuned tribute to skateboarding. With excellent controls, deeper creation tools, and a diverse music and character roster (shoutout to our Aussie legends), the game is accessible and ridiculously fun. Even with a few bails, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 proves the Birdman’s legacy can still shred.

A brutal, lightning-paced take on the point-and-click adventure, The Drifter stands confidently among the greats of Australian horror fiction. Building a uniquely unsettling atmosphere with its chilling prose and narration, it presents a compelling supernatural mystery that will satisfy any adventure game fan. With gorgeous pixel art, killer voice acting, a soundtrack full of bangers, and an engaging gameplay loop, The Drifter is a home-grown triumph.