My disappointment with Egglia is its capitulation to free-to-play mobile game conventions, that simply weren't necessary. Priced at the relatively premium price that it's set at, I expected Egglia to be something bolder; something willing to do away with the timers and endless grind. I expected something to take advantage of the gorgeous art style to tell a compelling story. I expected a game that was closer to what I might expect to play on my PlayStation 4 than something I download to my iPad, noodle around with for a while, but ultimately forget. Sadly, Egglia is not that game.

Assuming concentration is a problem worth solving (an assumption lacking the solidest of foundations), I will argue there are better, significantly more efficient, ways to address it than through another game from a device that's otherwise a regular dopamine provider by its own rights.

With the variety in levels, the large number of missions, and the historical depth, I really enjoyed what Sudden Strike 4 had to offer. I think it’s going to appeal to only the smallest of communities on PlayStation 4, and the PC version is clearly going to be the superior choice for people that can manage it, but still, it’s a good little game.

The narrative is on the light-side, but that makes it perfect for short bursts at a time. By the time I came to the end of Miitopia, I found it slightly emotional to say goodbye to my companions of more than a decade, but it was truly worth the ride.

My expectations have never been so thoroughly exceeded. As I said, I have a great deal of difficulty putting in words just how much I love Hellblade. It’s just that powerful.

Patapon is simple, elegant, and utterly delightful.

Tacoma gives the player space to get to know its characters, and really know them deeply, which is why its moments of melodrama become so much more compelling than anything else we’ve seen in the gaming medium. It is indeed short, I will concede that, and it is not open even by walking simulator standards, but what Fullbright has delivered is rich, affecting storytelling that’s truly worth experiencing.

It is the small, seemingly insignificant details of The Lion's Song that will make you smile the most as you explore the four episodic chapters of the game. It's purely story-driven stuff, but with wonderful characters, all dealing with very real (and easily relateable) creative challenges, this is a game that provides players with a real look into the human psyche, and where the world's great ideas and art come from.

I feel audiences will be alienated by the overwhelming focus on dying and starting over, but take out the death and what remains is a simple, lifeless game about cubes.

Familiar and fun proves to be just as great.

It’s true that Bullet Soul Infinite Burst doesn’t offer the obvious new stages, characters, or difficulty options that would have guaranteed a double dip for fans of the original. Despite this, Infinite Burst warrants existing because of a single new mode that is so endlessly captivating. If nothing else, Bullet Soul is a game worth owning for fans of 2D shooters and this is the definitive way to do so.

Masquerada is a rare gem of a game in which everything about it comes together just perfectly to give plays a consistent and cohesive experience. Sure it’s possible to rue its relatively short running time (at 20 hours, this is a short RPG), particularly when the lore is so deep that you’ll want to dig deeper into it all. And, yes, it’s a hyper-linear game at a time where “good game design” apparently means “arbitrary open world.” But these “faults” drive home the point and purpose of the game, and as a narrative experience, Masquerada is truly wonderful.

The important thing about this game is that despite what anyone has to say about the various stages of nudity, it’s perfectly playable and delivers exactly what it sets out to – boobs, butt, and brawling.

There’s a lot to love about Cat Quest, most of all perhaps its familiarity. That trait feels more like a blessing than the death knell that it is for a lot of other games, and it’s evident that this is a game with a lot of heart. It’s a bit like eating comfort food – there’s no pretentiousness in the execution, and each bite has an expected outcome but most importantly, you know it’s going to be delicious.

The ease of which you can get into Hey! Pikmin is both a blessing and a curse - it doesn’t do a lot to distinguish itself as a title, which is fine, but that also doesn’t make it particularly memorable.

I really like CastleStorm, and I’m so pleased with what Zen Studios has done to make the VR version of it a meaningful upgrade.

By providing a serviceable story as a driving force and then honing in on meaningful character interactions, Millennium Twilight becomes essential for Reki Kawahara fans. Those unfamiliar with both properties may occasionally find themselves occasionally mystified by plot points and fanservice alike, but hopefully this game will serve as a gateway drug.

Serial Cleaner is one hell of a game. It captures the style and appeal of the seventies greatly, layering it with a surreal 'job' to do, and a solid sense of humour.

Enemies and locations are varied enough to keep things from getting stale, a selection of upgrades add a sense of progression and customisation, and though this isn’t a game that could work just as well without VR, it’s implemented well. Really, the gameplay is there to service the story, which is where Archangel shines brightest, and I’m just fine with that.

There are two endings to Theseus, though either way the game itself isn’t that long. It does tell the story it wanted to, though, and does so in a comprehensive enough way that I wasn’t left wondering. It’s a crafty little proof-of-concept and experiment in making VR work in the context of a third person adventure experience. It’s a little limited for what I ultimately want VR to deliver, but it’s worthwhile nonetheless.

Fate/Extella is a near perfect port of an excellent PlayStation 4 game, and the best Warriors game that hasn’t been developed by Koei Tecmo. It’s likely to be the only game of its kind on the Switch until Fire Emblem Warriors lands, and it’s the perfect kind of game to have on a portable console to unwind with on the commute home after a long day of work.

It’s a pointless time waster, but it’s a fun way to relax the mind with something mindless in short burst.

Match-3 games are dime a dozen, so it’s hard for any of them to really stand out. Boost Beast is another example of that. It’s adorable and cute, but with well over 200 levels, the grind becomes real and tiring with three quarters of the game still to go.

The game looks gorgeous and has plenty of personality, and on the Switch you also get all the DLC, which adds even more value to the overall package. More than anything, though, the ability to detach the joy cons from the Switch unit and get a two player game going anywhere is a brilliant use of the technology, and makes Overcooked feel like it was designed for the console from the very start.

This is still an excellent little game, and it’s a good fit for the Switch’s portable functions.

And the inclusion of Pac-Man Vs. is an absolute masterstroke of brilliance. That is a rare retro game, and finally having it readily available on a modern console is something that anyone who enjoys local multiplayer should get excited about.

Overall Cryptark is a great, albeit limited, fast paced experience. While it could have benefited from having a greater narrative scope and dialog between the characters, the action and replayability will be more than enough to keep you going for a long time.

99Vidas is a perfectly competent brawler game that does nothing to reinvent the genre, but is a solid enough example of it. Short without a lot of variety, I wish the story and main characters were more interesting, but at least the visual style suits it and the music is fantastic.

The end reality is that The Girl and the Robot is like what would happen if I tried to write a Shakespeare play. People would pick it immediately as a (deeply) inferior pastiche, because it might emulate the style of its inspiration, but it would be a faint imitation in every way that actually counted.

The only redeeming factor of Toby: The Secret Mine is that it’s not one of the many, so many, “roguelikes” or pseudo 8-bit platformers that are the norm these days from indie developers. It felt kind of refreshing to go back to 2014, even for a fleeting moment. The ideas in Toby are sound, the execution however is a lot to be desired.

Ghost Blade HD lovingly embraces the history of bullet hell shooters, providing classic substance with modern polish. Though these modern aesthetics proved vexing at times, it’s an experience worth seeing through.

Without involving the micromanagement of something like Transport Giant, it’s also a game that offers just enough complexity to offer players a management challenge, and a sense of rewarding satisfaction when they’ve built up a sustainable, large, city. The story mode itself is quite poor, but as with any good city builder, all the fun’s in the sandbox mode anyway, and unleashing both your inner creative and inner city planner at once.

The new game plays like a dream and is the same excellent, balanced, and replayable game and the horde mode shows that at least Nintendo is thinking, but calling the rest of the game a “sequel,” might be a bit of a push.

Cinderella Girls is a downright strange release and I worry that it will do more harm to whatever commercial potential Idolm@ster has in the English-speaking world than it will do good.

I can go on infinitely about how much I am enjoying Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy. The game present little truly new to the series' gameplay, but since it already shone in past titles that's a great thing. The characters are lovable, often with dry wit and secret pasts (or presents). Whimsy combines with reality, creating a fantastic believable world. The game promises at least dozens of hours of gameplay with limitless expansion potential, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Transport Giant takes itself seriously. It’s enjoyable and rewarding, but as a serious simulation, rather than something fun to unwind with on the weekend after a long week’s work. It’s not a game for everyone by any means because of that, but it is the kind of game that will continue to reward you the more you put into it.

Fallen Legion shows all the potential in the world to become a great IP. The core ideas are strong, and the attempt to tell an interesting, deep story is admirable. Unfortunately this one doesn’t execute on its ideas as well as it should, and, critically, this lets down the game's themes, but it is on the cusp of being something special.

Levels+ is a completely forgettable game. It's got some gorgeous aesthetics, and functionally it's a refined, balanced, and perfectly competent Threes clone, but there is no longevity to the game whatsoever, and the lack of an online leaderboard for a game like this is downright amateur.

What this all amounts to is an expansion that doesn’t push Final Fantasy XIV in bold new directions because, quite frankly, it doesn’t need to. Stormblood takes everything that makes the game good and doubles down on it, expanding the world of Hydaelyn and filling it with more to see, do, and experience. Minor issues with its story and storytelling notwithstanding, this is everything I could want from a Final Fantasy XIV expansion.

Do this game again, but shift the focus so that everyone can enjoy it without relying on others being online, and then we'll talk.

Yonder is the nicest, and yet most deeply transgressive game we’ve seen in our little section of the art world, for quite some time, if not forever.

Like most movies of the thriller genre when you go and replay the game you will likely find things you missed and understand things a lot more but even if you play it only once it does a good job of explaining everything and has a very satisfying ending (regardless of which one you end up getting).

Flip Wars' problem is that it has no depth whatsoever. That silly, simple, chaotic, and utterly pointless button masher that you had a quick laugh at when you play it for the first time really is all that’s on offer.

Finnish studio Housemarque have produced in Nex Machina another game to sit alongside its well-received titles of Alienation and Resogun, and that showcases the serious pedigree it has built since their start in the early nineties with Stardust. It is a rush of colour that delivers a satisfying experience that’ll steal your calm and let you imagine a future where the robots don’t wipe us all out.

While it’s not to the standard of its rhythm games, Rayark did well with its first RPG. Implosion looks gorgeous and is a very slick production. You can tell that it’s a game that comes from a studio that has had minimal need to develop narratives previously, and on the Nintendo Switch, the game’s mobile roots hurt it, but then the Nintendo Switch is also a portable console, and as a game that’s best played in short bursts, it’s a good one to have sitting on the hard drive or memory card.

Shephy is mechanically sound and intrinsically fun, but it’s also a harrowing experience if you think about it hard enough. I can’t tell if Pawn intended the game to be darkly humorous or outright desolate, but either way the grim story both tempered my enjoyment and drove me to play more. It’s an emotion that I’ve rarely experienced from a game, and that itself lends Shephy merit beyond the extent that the randomisation within the game actually hurts it.

I like what The Golf Club 2 has to offer. It is a really solid representation of the sport both in terms of mechanics and the overall aesthetics. Because of the course editor, you have a plethora of options you can use to create the course of your dreams, or just play those made by other people. The possibilities are limitless. However, some technical issues still linger and the career mode could use some additional depth as The Golf Club takes some small steps in the right direction.

For a game that looked like another cute little timewaster, Koichi Ishii has outdone himself.

Final Fantasy XII’s willingness to be different and innovative has left it feeling every bit as modern and poignant now as any new JRPG on the market, and it remains my favourite game within a series that I hold very precious to me.

Damascus Gear is fun. It’s clean, well-playing fun. It could have been an awful lot more, and it’s a little frustrating that the game didn’t make better use of the opportunities that the setting provided it. It’s also not a game that you’ll remember a year down the track, let alone feel nostalgic for in a decade. But it’s, again, good clean fun, and if you’ve got a weekend to kill, this one will do it.

I’m still glad that we’ve got Castle of Shikigami on Steam; flawed as it is, it’s a fun, creative shoot ‘em up and an important part of the genre’s history. Here’s hoping that its two sequels are also in the pipeline, because by most accounts, they’re a huge improvement on the good groundwork set down by this game.

Ripstone took something great that it already had going with Pure Chess, and further enhanced everything that the game was already doing well. In terms of aesthetics, atmosphere, and play features, Chess Ultra is as good as I can conceive Chess actually getting. Bring on a better range of chess sets through DLC, and preferably a Hatsune Miku set among them, and I don’t think I’d ever actually put this down.

While I say that RPG Maker FES is more limited than its PC brethren, it still enables plenty of creativity.

I imagine the target audience is less the philosophical and the obsessive, but rather the more casual JRPG fan looking for a light way to spend their spare time. As with most Falcom games, the game feel is straightforward and kinetic, paired with a vanilla aesthetic that’s more inoffensive than groundbreaking. I can’t fault a game for not being ambitious enough when it’s following a tried and true formula and does it without any perceivable blemishes at all.

The real joy to be had with Poly Bridge is to do with getting away with the cheapest bridge one can get away with. Inevitably, this approach will lead to many a car spectacularly plunging to the depths (not to mention collapsed bridges). The contrast between the horrific events and the happy colourful graphics, mixed as they are with an easy going cheerful soundtrack, is the source of magic that is Poly Bridge. Truly one of the best gaming experiences on mobile.

What beggared my belief is the question of why this “buy once play forever” game utilises all the cheap and nasty tricks from the freemium books. I can only conclude there is a core design problem with Subdivision Infinity, perhaps to do with it originally being conceived as freemium but then turned into premium due to rival releases. Regardless, the end result is a very mechanical affair of short dog fighting followed by lots of tediousness for the sole sake of getting a slightly better ship with which to fight slightly superior enemies in the next round. In the year of our Goddess 2017, this - Subdivision Infinity - is simply not good enough.

Like its predecessor and its DLC, Monument Valley 2 is a short game (say, two hours?). Personally, I do not consider this a disadvantage; on the contrary, I like games that do not pull their punches. I do not need time fillers, thank you very much; I plan on only living once but making the most of that opportunity. Monument Valley 2 certainly deserves a spot in my short but rich life.

Pixel Heroes is some good old classic dungeon crawling action. The lack of narrative context makes it a tough, but not necessarily rewarding game, but putting that aside, the endless gameplay loop is simple and clean, and there's a fun combat system to make it all worth at least a little of your time.

DiRT 4 does a remarkable job of creating a sense of speed.

As with the main Danganronpa games, there’s a number of serious subtexts to Ultra Despair Girls, and actually digging into these themes makes it clear that the game’s a lot smarter than it might appear at first.

If your big point of difference is that you’re playing a blind girl, but the way you’ve structured the gameplay means that she doesn’t behave blind at all, then you’ve shot your game’s credibility in the foot before it even starts.

An intense, special, and downright important game, with a powerful message to share not just about war itself, but also how we also talk about, and share stories about, war.

I hope it’s a game that others embrace as a stepping stone towards understanding a history and culture that too many are too eager to dismiss as “weird” or different.

Those little gripes aside, Neko Navy is a delightful little indie shmup, full of cute characters and oddball humour. It may lack the depth of some of its more established peers, but it’s got plenty of challenge to offer nonetheless, while a smooth difficulty curve means newcomers aren’t entirely left out in the dark. It’s probably not going to go down as one of the shmup greats, but its quirky charm alone is enough to warrant a look.

This is a console that does not need lesser local multiplayer experiences to bolster it up.

The whole effort is leaps and bounds ahead of Mighty No. 9, perhaps owing to the lack of fanbase threatening to withdraw their support if the game wasn’t at least 90 per cent similar to Mega Man. Mighty Gunvolt Burst suffers some early shakiness trying to find its own voice, but it’s not long before the game will win you over.

Borealys saw a winning formula, gave it a little glitter, and came up with something that plays well to both young and old audiences without relying on any gimmicks. My only regret is that in playing so much to its narrative strength, it left a lot of environmental world-building and magic-mastering hidden in the background when those well-designed elements deserved so much more than that.

The game itself can be fun in fleeting moments. And there aren't really any alternatives to what this offers, in this form, so that's a plus for it. However, the campaign is short and the visuals are just terrible.

The game is still very playable, and that same old loop around farming up some veggies in order to afford the adorably cute animals is as entertaining as always.

These are niche games, for sure, but they’re nicely designed and a good hit for people like me that are counting down to the next overseas trip.

It might not have the charm of Harvest Moon, but there’s a purity to the experience in Farming Simulator 18 that also means it avoids the irritants.

The game itself is balanced quite well, and aside from blurry text that is nearly impossible to actually read, it’s an attractive and charming enough game. Where Of Mice And Sand ultimately suffers is that it doesn’t tell a story of survival, like its betters, and never convinces you of the urgency and desperation that you’re facing. It’s simply too gamey for its own good.

Empathy wants to be a narrative-first game, that much is clear. But the constant distractions, menial busywork, and tedious puzzles constantly distract from the pacing that’s so critical to a story like this, and the end result is something that doesn’t really work well as either a puzzle game or a narrative experience.

I cannot thank the developer enough for The Town of Light. Not only are we beginning to acknowledge the injustices our ancestors committed, we are exploring how to prevent it from happening again by telling these important stories instead of burying them.

It might look like Civilization on the surface, but once you realise it’s actually a hybrid of card game, gamebook, RPG, and strategy game you’ll be hard pressed to think of anything that you’ve played this year that’s more fundamentally fascinating than this one.

If you come at Lethal League looking for a smart, well-designed, quirky, deep, creative fighting game that cuts right to the core of what makes the genre so exciting, you’ll find it in spades.

Conarium tackles the difficult task of capturing Lovecraft’s ephemeral psychological horrors and, for the most part, pulls it off. Sometimes clumsy, sometimes streamlined, sometimes elegant, Conarium is an effective piece of Lovecraftian fiction that does its best to respect the source material while adapting it to an effective interactive experience.

So credit to Nintendo’s development teams for thinking outside the box. Unfortunately that’s about all the good I’ve got to say about Arms. I didn’t much enjoy this fighting game at all, to be honest.

Chroma Squad is a fun little RPG that doesn't take itself too seriously and is happy to be silly nonsense. It's not the most lasting of games, and some glitches to wear the experience down, but I think Behold Studios could really turn a sequel into something special - and I hope they do.

I love this game. I really, truly love it. It’s the realisation of a genuine fantasy, and, as I said at the start of the review, this is the kind of completely immersive experience that is exclusive to VR that makes for the most compelling argument for the technology.

Impact Winter is a beautiful and thoughtful game, and at least initially, it ticks all the boxes in terms of emotional delivery, narrative execution, and sheer atmospheric mastery. However, the mechanical flaws are an unfortunate counter to the ambition and care that has gone into the title.

It’s an interactive metaphor for grief, and all those strange, complex emotions that all seem get balled into one when you’re grieving. RiME is a beautiful game in so many ways, but this is what makes it truly special.

The Fidelio Incident is a game that tries hard to tell a tale of guilt. It mostly works, but unfortunately, it tries a little too hard, with the end result lacking the genuine emotional impact that the work and material deserves. The way The Fidelio Incident approaches the traditional tale of loss and guilt – but importantly not redemption – through the largely unexplored lens of the Irish Troubles is fresh, and the fundamentals are strong enough to make the two hour experience worth the price of admission, if not a necessary investment.

A package of three of the best twitch racers out there, and given that we need to wait for Sony to find a new home for the WipeOut series, this will keep us going just fine in the meantime, you’d think.

Rive is excellently made, and I had a great time flying through space alongside Roughshot. It’s clear that the developers behind it were passionate about making the best experience possible. Rive holds its ground among the best 2D shooters available on PSN – it’s a title which I would readily recommend to anyone with a free afternoon and an affinity for twitch gameplay.

This game manages to mix some quite serious themes in with its plentiful fanservice and Compile Heart trademark sense of the ridiculous.

Spellspire is good enough to play for a few hours, good enough to talk about a bit, good enough to praise for the developers' understanding of game progression... but also easy enough to forget about in a week or two when something new and shiny comes along.

For all the effort at making Tekken more accessible, Tekken 7 remains, ultimately, a fight club for the most serious of players only.

Cladun is limited, in the sense that it’s a game with an incredibly basic gameplay loop, and little beyond that to keep the attention of players. With that being said, it’s a game that stuck a big ol’ smile on my face, and that wasn’t just because I had Hatsune Miku shooting off hearts in all directions. Cladun is, at core, a lot of fun, and manages to take the most basic of gameplay loops that you could imagine in a video game, and make something eminently worthy out of it.

One thing’s for sure: if you're not Nintendo hardware equipped but wish to taste forbidden fruit, then at least until Zelda goes mobile World to the West is probably one of the finer ways to to experience easy going, family friendly, lightly puzzling and very cute gaming. I certainly loved it, and if I was to offer personal advice in two words I would simply tell you: Go West!

Injustice 2 is a very solid fighting game that has not changed a whole lot mechanically from the last offering. Visually it is a step forward, but the narrative is a step back. I cannot entirely share the feeling that this is going to be a title that is meant to milk out additional money via a combination of microtransactions and DLC, which is a bit of a turnoff, but the variety of modes and quality roster do help to take the sting out of that, because there is already so much content available.

If you’re going to play Farpoint, then be absolutely sure that you get the lightgun. It adds everything to the experience, making the game one of the most immersive and fundamentally enjoyable shooters that I’ve ever played.

It’s a deep, complex, stylish game that blows every other fighter out of the water, but made surprisingly accessible through things like the Stylish control scheme and a Combo/Mission modes that serve to teach useful, practical combos and strategies. It’s still got its RPG-like M.O.M mode that lets you level up and customise your character, it’s still got an eccentric but oddly moving story, and it’s still got the sort of kickass soundtrack that only Daisuke Ishiwatari can come up with.

The strongest part of Regalia was its multitude of lovable characters, and any interaction with them was where the game really shone; there just weren’t enough of those opportunities to carry the more cumbersome elements. Those new to JRPGs likely won’t have the same jaded lens to view this game through, but I maintain that for Regalia to have really made an impact, it would have had to aspire to more than being a tribute to those who have gone before.

You just need to look at something like Theatrhythm Final Fantasy to realise that when people really love a franchise, taking the music from that franchise and turning it into a rhythm game can be a magical experience. But then people pay a lot of money to go to symphonies of Final Fantasy music. As my old mates Dunning and Kruger would always say: people should know their limits. The Legend of Dark Witch franchise is far too limited and nowhere near of the standard where its music is ready stand alone, and Rudymical is just not worth playing on any level.

By the end of Spirit of Sanada you’ll have learned something, enjoyed the prettiest Warriors game to date, and seen just how far Koei Tecmo’s been able to take this series, so that it’s no longer purely an action game. With Spirit of Sanada, we see a future for the Warriors franchise where every battle and event is given context and purpose, and it’s a far deeper and more rounded experience for that.

It's quite unfortunate for the sake of the game that Utawarerumono just happens to come out in a rare period when there are a lot of tactics RPGs to choose between. Fire Emblem and Disgaea both have far higher profiles, and those respective games will get the bulk of the attention, but for something a little more beautiful than Disgaea, a little more humorous than Fire Emblem, and genuinely focused on the narrative, Utawarerumono is my pick of the bunch.

LocoRoco can be confusing, wearisome and infuriating at times, but it’s still impossible to stay mad at it for long. It’s a happy game without gratuitous conflict or drama, and its sheer optimism alone prevents its shortcomings from ruining the grand vision. It’s a game which just works, and without a doubt, the PS4 remaster is the best way to experience it.