While Ikai’s a missed opportunity, it’s not one that necessarily should be missed. It’s not overlong, has some vivid imagery, and while the puzzles are almost laughable at times for how out of place they are, the actual design of them remains interesting right throughout. I’m glad I played Ikai, but I doubt I’ll play it again.

Biomutant's concept of a colourful post-apocalyptic kung-fu adventure is an intriguing one, and when all the pieces come together, it can be a riveting ride. The world is rich and exciting to explore, with plenty of hidden secrets to find and an important, convincing environmental message tied into it and a lot of freedom in how you build your character. But poor pacing holds back the narrative potential, and for all its open-endedness, a lack of finesse in the combat system leaves Biomutant feeling messy and awkward instead of hitting those stylish action high notes it's shooting for.

There’s room for improvement, and it’ll be interesting to see how that takes shape, given that they’ve said the plan is not for annual sports game style releases, but instead iterative development over many years. Maybe adding in a cage match, smoothing out some of the games’ slightly rougher animations, even if they are hand-drawn, and adding commentary would be good for a start. Yes, I know, I’m asking for them to add in even more DLC, but it seems like that’s what they actively want to do here, and it might just be the right approach for the challenger brand.

Fated: The Silent Oath is exactly the kind of game that VR was made for, and it’s nice to finally see the technology put to work on small, intimate, emotive character drama. The good news is that this is the first part of what’s planned to be a multi-episode game, and I’m really looking forward to spending more time in this world, with these people.

I highly recommend playing Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair with a friend or three. And then, only if you're all fans of incredibly cheesy science fiction films. If you can get the right group together, the fact there are over 100 levels to play through means this will be a lot of long-lasting fun.

There is a lot of thought that has been put into this game's survival modes, and people will enjoy that side of things. It's just a shame that thought couldn't be put into the rest of the game.

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.

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.

Between a battle system unlike anything I’ve seen before and a story that pushes the boundaries of comedy, Akiba’s Trip has plenty of personality going for it. Expanding on the world of Akihabara itself would have elevated the experience into a truly classic one, but as is, fans of niche experiences still ought to take this trip.

Although the satire doesn’t localise as well as I might have liked, the game’s not as straightforward in its perversions that a surface level analysis makes it seem, and I’ll be disappointed if there aren’t at least some people that recognise this.

It has a style of play that allows it to be incredibly challenging if you are going for as many stars as quickly as possible, but it also allows you to feed Om Nom and move on to the next level - handy for younger players.

8BitBoy is a great throwback to the NES era of platform gaming where skill and mastery were required if you were to make it through to the end of the game. It’s games like these that remind us that button mashing does not always win the day and sometimes, just sometimes, perseverance can be a reward into itself.

The game lacks originality and suffers from a lack of narrative, and those two factors aren't enough to make up for the decent puzzles.

Ultimately The Sun and Moon just isn’t unique enough that it justifies sitting through the poor presentation. Puzzle games are dime a dozen on every platform out there.

Despite its lack of content, SpiritSphere is still a blast for the first few rounds of play. If you’ve got friends who don’t have much time for a long haul multiplayer game, but still want some fast paced action, SpiritSphere has you covered. It’s an interesting look at how nostalgic and culturally significant footnotes in gaming can be remixed and re-appropriated into completely new experiences.

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.

I really wanted to love SwapQuest but it's neither memorable nor essential in any sense of the word. That's not to say it's a bad game, because it's not. It's still fun to play, but as an experiment in mixing a puzzle genre with the RPG, it's proof that this particular genre isn't necessarily easy to smash together.

Despite the dull combat system and the infuriating card collecting mechanic, it manages to tell a fascinating and surprisingly relatable story that should be experienced at least once.

It’s an unrelentingly bitter game, one which has the power to incite a strong reaction in anyone who plays it. Just as much as I liked it, I’m sure there are others out there who will come to hate it with a passion. But then again, what’s worse - playing Arrest of a Stone Buddha for five hours and leaving with a negative (but powerful and thought-provoking) reaction, or playing a blockbuster for forty bland hours and not feeling a sliver of genuine emotion the entire time?

MazM: The Phantom of the Opera is what I would like to see more of in video games; it's a genuine effort to engage with a more meaningful side of art. It's less pop culture, easy content as it is an adaptation of a masterpiece of the gothic literature genre. The developer succeeded in capturing the aesthetics and generally representing the story, but there have been some big compromises made to hammer this nail into place, and the gamey elements and technical proficiency are just not there. Not for the Switch version, at any rate. As a Phantom of the Opera fan, I do highly recommend like-minded fans check this out, as it is a curiosity, but if you're going into this looking for a game... you'd be better off picking up a copy of the film adaptation of the musical.

In theory, a roguelike FPS could work, however, there needs to be a very specific reason to even try. Nightmare Reaper never gives us that reason. It comes across like a game that’s a roguelike purely because that was how an indie developer should shove 100 levels of grind into it. There’s no narrative nor thematic value to it being a roguelike, and in all that randomness, it loses the soul of what makes those games it pays homage to so special.

My Time at Sandrock’s issues are due to its ambition and sheer density of what you can do. I would expect a Yakuza title to have similar issues on Switch. But then the developers aren’t putting Yakuza games on the console. I am quite sure that this game is a fine experience on other platforms. However, the developer decided to release it on Switch, and therefore this version needs to be assessed in isolation. In short, it is just not a good game on this specific platform, and the developers should have made a judgment call to pull this version when it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. That way we wouldn’t have been subjected to it.

teamcoil’s PUSS! is memorable for its visual style and bizarre aesthetics, but the gameplay sadly doesn’t match the creativity of its graphics. For any player excited by the surreal dialogue and fearsome bosses, there will be another player who won’t be engaged in navigating simple mazes. I anticipate the difficulty will also be prohibitive for some players, and it does feel like the challenge and repetition are the only things stopping the game from being overly short (and there’s only so much that can be done to spice up this style of gameplay, too.) I love that the Switch’s eShop is a home for strange games like this one, and I appreciate the nod to Newgrounds culture, but this one left me wanting a lot more.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is an incredible game that is just so much fun to play whether you are diving head first into someone’s Castle or if you are working on your own Castle’s defences and trying to get things just right.

Jet Car Stunts is the kind of game that appears simple on the outside, but smacks you in the face with its sheer difficulty.

Battle Grounds isn’t going to convert anyone who sees beat ‘em ups as mindless entertainment. Yet even when its ideas are half-baked in execution, the overwhelming style and ambition here make for one of the genre’s more memorable entries in recent years.

I can’t imagine the niche for this game will be too big, but even as someone who doesn’t know the anime, I found myself enjoying the unique take on hell that Made in Abyss throws at players. Once you learn to play it within its rhythms, rather than expect it to be something more conventional, it has a charm all of its own.

Frankly, being competently made isn’t enough. Not for a genre as loaded as this boomer shooter one. The original Painkiller had an identity and personality. It wasn’t meaningfully different in how it played compared to its peers at the time, but it had something about it that allowed it to stand out for itself. This Painkiller is a generic multiplayer shooter with a generic Christian horror-themed setting and aesthetics, and none of it is memorable.

For fans who've desired to take Trials on the go, there's a lot to enjoy here, but there's no denying that the F2P mechanics and digital controls sink the ruts a bit too deep at times.

Zombie Vikings is basic brawler, but it's a basic brawler done right, and is quite funny in the process. And, really, that's all most people are looking for from this genre. There are far better examples out there of it, but as a Sunday afternoon killer, this one is nonetheless almost as worthy as Thor himself.

Urban Trials Tricky ends far earlier than I thought it would – there’s only a handful of levels and I breezed through them all in a matter of hours, but perhaps it was because of the exploit I’d discovered for all of the Trick stages. I would have wanted further spaces to play around in, since the real strength of this game was just letting players ride and bounce around the creative and incredibly vertical zones. The physics and level design stand out here, considering that Tate Multimedia has had a few games in the series under its belt already. I would hope that future games in the series have better events and scoring systems which effectively test the player’s understanding of the mechanics. What is available here is a fun game, and I certainly didn’t hate the time I spent with it. But it could also have been so much more.

These games are important because, as the dominant entertainment industry, games are a way to inspire audiences to learn more about something, and the more people learn about cultures other than their own, the better. Mulaka might not be your favourite game in 2018, but what you take away from it will be far more valuable than the couple of hours of entertainment you'll get from it.

Most importantly from my perspective, Aveline is the most worthwhile female lead character since Ubisoft's own Jade from Beyond Good & Evil.

The Sinking City is a thoughtful take on the source material, but is nearly destroyed by the poorly-executed open world and actions sequences. The investigations themselves are well-structured and easy to maneuver, but the long treks between, and the downtime that comes with them, is unnecessary. Still, if you're a Lovecraft fan or a fan of Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes titles, it's well worth a play for being an intriguing, and more authentic take on Lovecraft than most manage.

Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong is nonetheless a good attempt to capture the mechanical essence and purpose of the pen-and-paper game. The developers could have made a stat-heavy action thing, or followed a bunch of other games and thrown players into a generic open-world that barely resembles or is relevant to the base material. They didn’t, and the game is better for it. Swansong comes across as a timid vampire story – the kind of thing a first-time game master might right for a first-time tabletop group, but timid as it might be, you are left under no illusions that you’re playing a game of Vampire: The Masquerade.

It's probably not a game that you're going to spend too long playing online, and the AI is generally too soft for its own good, but Grand Ages: Medieval is the kind of game that, every time I sat down to play it, I'd lose time and end up playing for a half dozen hours or longer.

Moero Chronicle is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be, and it shows remarkable commitment in wholeheartedly sticking to the Compile Heart brand without sacrificing the quality of its delivery.

For such a cheap little game I had plenty of fun with it, and blew through it well before I got bored with it.

There's nothing else quite like Rock of Ages out there. It's a mesh of things that shouldn't work together, and that's why I suspect no one else has tried to replicate the mad genius of ACE Team's work. Yes, Rock of Ages 3 has some mild issues with pacing and the loading times could be better to suit the experimentation that is at the core of the experience, but this is also the definitive version of something that is very funny, ideal for both single-player and multiplayer parties, and, thanks to that most excellent course designer, Rock of Ages 3 is functionally endless.

I’m obviously the target market for this game. I like trashy fanservicey things, and Seven Pirates H, by virtue of being one of the trashiest and most fanserviey things I’ve ever played, just happens to be a really good example of that. Everything within the game is well-crafted in service of this one particular goal, and the result is outrageous, ridiculous and fun. This is the finest example of raunch humour on the Switch.

Kholat is an atmospheric adventure game that is creepy but really should not be labeled as a horror game. With a wonderful art style and amazing sound effects, Kholat should still please horror fans and adventure game fans alike.

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.

Obviously I’m not the target audience, and sure there might be some kids that get a kick out of collecting figurines that resemble wizards and hot dog men, but I like to think the developer should have given a bit more credit to the target audience. The other LEGO games all manage to be child-friendly without being insulting to everyone else in the process.

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.

Over and over again some truly baffling decisions let it down, and while the scenarios justify the asking price in themselves, for any of us that prefer the sandbox mode of the simulations that we play, Townsmen is a complete misfire.

When you're in the mood for a tactics JRPG, but not necessarily concerned with narrative, then this no-frills approach to the genre will scratch the itch. Really, though, this game's biggest problem is that it doesn't do enough to push the series forward from the predecessor, which is available as a three pack collection, and that comes across as far better value for the kind of experience that Mercenaries provides.

The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa is one of the best examples of subversion within the brawler genre since the mighty Lollipop Chainsaw.

Nero is a beautiful contrast between light and dark, love and pain. It's not a fast-paced game, but rather a reflective, insightful, and emotional experience that is a very different kind of game that what we're used to.

Though there’s less direct threat when compared to more mainstream horror titles, there’s an intensity to that environment that helps to create a wonderfully sinister atmosphere. It’s not an essential horror game, but it’s a genuinely ripping yarn.

The end product is a game that's a load of fun, but only for people with fond memories of running around in circles fighting wave after wave of random encounters. As equal parts homage and parody, Dragon Fantasy works.

For the very small niche of people who care that much about Snooker, however, Snooker 19 does deliver. There are more accessible Pool titles out there - including on the Nintendo Switch itself, but as an attempt to go the full distance with a deeply authentic simulation, Snooker 19 is a good and genuine effort.

With time and patches, this could be a must play, but as it is I can only cautiously recommend RymdResa as a game with fascinating ideas and inconsistent execution.

what Darksiders III gets right - the combat system and that beautiful, intricate labyrinth design - it gets so right that it can hold its head high against the many peers that it has at this at this time of year.

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

The purity and simplicity of what drives this game is appealing, and even refreshing, and the perfect thing for a lazy Sunday afternoon, when you just need to clear your head.

Normally when I review a game, I play, I write, and I’m done. Cat Café Manager is different: I fully intend to continue playing it for many more hours. A terrible saying is that variety is the spice of life, and this game provides a lot of variety via the choices players can make with regards to progression. The cats are great, of course, but the real fun here is running the café and learning the town’s story. Aside from some fairly minor issues, such as my qualms with building, I always came away from Cat Café Manager with a smile on my face.

I find that the complexity of its systems add a nice layer of strategy that most “Diablo clones” could benefit from. More than that, though, I find the narrative to be delightful in the way it revels in the Grimm Brothers’ sense of villainy, and then sticks you right in the middle of it and left to figure out for yourself if you’re comfortable helping a monster that completely evil.

Neon Chrome certainly has its charms, and it can be a lot of fun, especially if you bring some friends along. At the same time, I feel like there’s a lot of missed opportunity here.

"Incredibly successful" is actually a wonderful phrase to go out on. I struggle to find an aspect of This Is The Police that I didn't find enjoyable and appropriate for the style of game as well as what was promised in trailers prior to the game's release. Taking over the role of police chief to run Freeburg would have been a great simulation/management game on its own, but then add layer upon layer of villainous folk and reasons to go over to the dark side, and the game becomes a fully immersive experience that requires great difficulty to put down.

It's priced just right as an impulse purchase, and offers so much content that anyone who's ever enjoyed a tower defence game should get a kick out of it.

It's a good start to the franchise, with opportunities to expand upon the world there, add some story context and hopefully flesh out the experience further.

It's not that Moons of Madness is without merit, but it does come across as a game where the development team never quite reached creative cohesion and weren't able to quite work out what they wanted to achieve with this game. From the butchering of Lovecraft's vision, to a scenic structure that feels too disjointed for its own good, to the over-reliance on cheap horror tricks like jump scares in the absence of true narrative and thematic depth, Moons of Madness is just a little too confused for its own good. It's an inoffensive way for sci-fi and horror fans to while away a few hours, but by no means a masterpiece.

Despite moments of brilliance and an overall lovely aesthetic, there are mechanics which seem to be at odds with each other and thus the game seems conflicted. One moment you’re slowly following an enormous, glowing beast through an oceanic tunnel, and the next you’re chaining drifts together to zip through tight caverns while breaking through cracked glass panes.

While the core mechanics remain functionally the same, that (even more) exotic setting and (lesser known) time period, brilliant environment design and brief, but effective, narrative all combine to make something that offers just that little bit more.

The World Next Door isn't perfect, but is shows that Viz is - for now, at least - willing to take on a project that's a little different and oddball. Colourful, creative, and generally well designed, it's worth forgiving this particular title its teen B-tier narrative tropes.

It's hard to make a game that successfully melds genuine strategy and fast action together. There's always the risk that the strategy could be too simple, or the action would either overpower the strategy, rendering it redundant, or become irrelevant itself because the strategy side of things determines success or failure. Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires strikes that balance where both on-field performance and strategy equally determine success, and while it's a different flavour to the typical Warriors formula, it's wonderfully entertaining, and anyone who says the Warriors games "never change" should be sat in front of this until they learn otherwise.

I soured quickly on Penny-Punching Princess. I love the art. I love the combat. I found the sharp challenge and simple, clean mechanics to all be very enjoyable. But I just couldn’t get past how shallow it really was in the end, and how the game failed to live up to the tantalising promises made in its lede. It could have easily been a 5/5 game, but instead it’s one of the real disappointments in 2018.

While it doesn’t offer a whole lot to do and risks getting overshadowed by bigger party racers like Nintendo’s own Mario Kart, Chiki Chiki Boxy Racers is good for an afternoon of fun with up to eight players. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and it’s simple enough that players of all ages can immediately understand the controls and goals.

White Day: A Labyrinth Named School is, simply, an excellent game. If you haven’t played it yet, you should. The new wave of re-releases of it, for the modern consoles, but especially the Nintendo Switch, give you the chance to do that. So, if you missed it last year, here are your Halloween chills for 2022 served up to you.

This appears to be a theme with the Mega Man franchise. Each series starts off well, and then after a half dozen or so numbered titles, the quality falls off a cliff. Much like with the original Legacy Collections, I would recommend the first collection over the second in a heartbeat if you were to only choose one.

It’s clumsy and filled with flaws, but it’s precisely these imperfections that make it so interesting.

A new NBA arcade game will always be something to get excited about. Many of us have fond memories of dropping coins into those arcade cabinets back in the day. A game that can capture that raw sense of fun, while modernising the more archaic elements would instantly become one of the most entertaining games of the year. I’m sure the developers went into NBA Playgrounds with the most noble of intentions, but this game is not the NBA I remembered. This game is one that young me would never have considered to be worth my allowance.

As a game, Beholder is really well made. It has an interesting aesthetic, clever, challenging mechanics, and plenty of paths through the game. Its real struggle is in getting you to genuinely care about what’s going on, and it’s hard to get there; the gameplay too often makes it too clear that you need to make decisions that have little to do with your moral core.

The buggy nature of route markers, the lack of a serious crafting system, and the the underdeveloped protagonist are all issues with the game. But when I step back and examine the game as a whole, what stands out is the gameplay.

The levels are hard and they offer a good challenge for those who are willing to stick it out through the long loading times.

Table Top Racing's small issues are not enough to ruin what is essentially an easy, casual party racing game, but they're enough to ensure that it's never going to be remembered as a classic. Then again, it's being sold for a couple of dollars, so you can't really lose either.

King’s Bounty II is excellent, and much like The Witcher 3, having this thing on the Switch, portable, and playable wherever is very much worth dealing with the drop in visual fidelity. Hugely expansive in scope, and deeply traditional as a fantasy RPG, for fans of fantasy RPGs, King’s Bounty II is a rough gem in so many ways, and the lack of budget compared to what the big guns can achieve is evident at every step. Ultimately, however, that tactical combat system is impossible to put down.

Dokapon Kingdom Connect is a very niche thing indeed. But it’s silly, wacky, colourful and charming. Everyone in the household can have a laugh with it, and putting aside the old school “cheating” AI, it’s mechanically sound. It’s no replacement for Boom Street/Fortune Street/Itadaki Street, but it’s not a bad substitute, and might be on high rotation on your Switch longer than you think.

For now this game is little more than a noble, albeit misguided attempt to make a MOBA ideally suited to mobile platforms.

Poncho is that kind of indie game you have saved as an .exe file somewhere in the depths of your computer. It's something you stumble upon and unravel at your leisure, but you keep finding out that it gets deeper as you go. It manages to be a puzzle platformer which transcends figuring out patterns and jumping on things, and while the basics need polish it's definitely a title which deserves your attention.

While Shadow Blade: Reload may not re-invent the platformer genre, it is both pretty to look at and fun to play. With multiple stages, collectables, difficulties, and challenges there’s more than enough ninja action to keep Kuro busy for a while.

It's hard to stay mad at Chocobo GP, though, even when you're hit with what feels like an endless barrage of magic. The game's just too bright and cheerful. Obviously, your mileage is going to depend on whether you're a fan of Chocobo. Not just Final Fantasy, but also this specific series of cute mascot characters. If you are, though, you couldn't ask for a more loving treatment. The expansive roster, the adorable presentation, and the quality kart racing mechanics will combine to give you something that you just might prefer over Mario Kart. The latter might be a bigger and tighter racing experience, but Chocobo GP has a killer weapon up its sleeve that makes all the difference: Chocobo.

I’m disappointed because of how good Radiohammer could have been. If it actually had a music library that didn’t sound like a set of royalty-free midi tracks off a dodgy website, I’d be much more willing to recommend it.

The concept was there, and I so badly wanted to enjoy it. Unfortunately, caring about the contrived cancer plotline would have only been possible if so much of my time wasn’t taken up by wondering how DigixArt has taken a great mobile game and made it somehow less accessible on a more powerful device.

It's a deliberately limited game, but it works well within its self-imposed restrictions to keep the focus on the party atmosphere from start through to finish, and while it won't be remembered as a classic game by any stretch of the imagination, this is a good one to have sitting on the PlayStation 4 hard drive for when friends are over.

For those who do understand their 4X genre, however, At The Gates will come across as a breath of fresh air. It's a ground-up rethink on how the genre can work, and what the 4X might look like as applied to the many cultures and civilizations out there that didn't have the imperialist intent that most 4X titles assume. For that, it's one of the most interesting strategy games I've played in years.

So this won’t be remembered as a particularly good remake, and it’s tragic, because by itself, outside of the shadow of the game it’s a remaster of, Secret of Mana has its charms.

It is a passable Smash Bros. clone, but to be honest, if you're that much of a fan of the Smash Bros. formula, surely you already have a Wii U.

There is plenty of fun to be had here with friends, but just make sure your expectations are in line with what you will be getting here. It is fun for a while, and well made for what it is, but for a game that relies so intensely on the multiplayer action, it's just not quite up there with the best in the genre.

I wanted to be more engaged in Samurai Defender. It takes place in one of my favourite periods of history, and we've got plenty of reference examples of games handling this era well - everything from Nioh and Samurai Warriors to Muramasa, Onimusha, Nobunaga's Ambition and Tenchu. All of those games or franchises offer enjoyable gameplay, but just as importantly, a sense of history and place to give the gameplay context. Samurai Defender looks like it should be more than it is, but never gets there, and feels overwhelmingly shallow as a consequence.

I was disappointed that The Lost Child failed so completely to do something meaningful with the Lovecraftian concept. In fact, the game has so completely missed the mark on that that it’s almost insulting that the developers used names like “Hastor” and “Cthulhu” to describe your foes, rather than replace them with more original monster names. Once I settled past that disappointment, though, I discovered that The Lost Child is also a game that so cleanly represents everything good about the dungeon crawler genre that I found it hard to put down. The fact that it’s the perfect introduction to the dungeon crawler genre also makes it the perfect first example on the new hardware.

For its escape-room premise, Stay’s narrative is surprisingly large in scope, and despite all its shortfalls the eerie atmosphere does linger with you as you play.

While I appreciate that MercurySteam wanted to do something different with the Castlevania franchise, I feel like the entire team, from director through to writer, through to the level designer has failed to grasp what makes Dracula such a wonderful character. It's not because he's a incredible force of evil. Dracula isn't a random monster; he's something more primal than that, and in failing to represent that, the developers have failed to do the Dracula story justice.

Playing Exile’s End involves a lot more aimless running around than it should. It’s frustrating because these are all problems that have been solved as the Metroidvania genre’s developed over the years. When it’s allowed to shine, it’s a wonderful game that almost rivals the original Metroid, I just wish it didn't spend so much time getting in its own way out of a commitment to dated ideas about difficulty.

The story as a whole is predictable and underwhelming. It treads a lot of well-worn horror cliches without really doing anything to stand out, and it tries to take you on an emotional journey without giving you a reason to care.

Those amusing bugs aside, Greedfall: The Dying World is an earnest project by one of the most earnest game developers out there. It’s a game that is trying hard to say something important about a topic that is of great importance, while structuring it into an RPG that builds on the truly interesting world and lore conceived in the original. Spiders remains the best of the B-tier European RPG developers, and that’s a compliment. Belonging outside of the big-budget blockbuster developers affords a creative freedom that Spiders has never been hesitant to embrace.

What I have a problem with is inconsistent narratives, and "gameplay" that has been so compartmentalised from the "story" that they may as well be in different products.

This tedium would be unacceptable in an action game, but Windbound is a survival game. In survival games, death is supposed to mean something. Loss of progress represents the stakes; repetition is the barrier of entry. For players ready to take that plunge, there are some far-and-few-between moments of Windbound which are exhilarating. There’s nothing quite like stalking down the player’s first Gorehorn or Gloomharrow and seeing the game’s possibilities open right up as a reward for some intrepid hunting skills. But that being said, it’s a kind of enjoyment which needs to be really scrapped for and earned, and for most people, I suspect Windbound is going to feel a little too much like work.