Hidden Folks is good as a mild diversion, but doesn't offer much beyond that. The development team seems to have missed what made Where's Wally books truly special - it wasn't simply in packing the books full of stuff, and then challenging people to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. It was in filling the books with vibrant, exciting, and imagination-stirring scenes. Hidden Folks doesn't do that.

Overall Super Mega Baseball 4 is immensely disappointing and an unworthy successor to its predecessor. SMB 3 was a genuinely fun and clean playing arcade baseball game, and never needed to be more than that. Now, though, it seems like the series is being positioned as a viable alternative to the MLB license. The new game modes, efforts to bring real-world names into the fold, and aesthetic shifts all seem to be designed to pivot Super Mega Baseball to become something to take more seriously and commit more time to. You know, like MLB The Show. Unfortunately, these new additions are directly at odds with arcade good times and now, thanks to the influence of EA in all likelihood, we’ve been dumped with a series experiencing an identity crisis.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is an objectively well-made product that is perfectly playable and it’s both empowering and entertaining. But it’s also nothing more than a product, finely tuned for passive consumption, right off the content mill.

Dragon Sinker's strength is that, in being such a slavish homage to one of the greatest JRPGs ever made, it too manages to be more playable than many of the original story JRPGs that Kemco produces. It is an endlessly replayable formula that the developers are copying wholesale, after all. But then, in being a slavish homage, the Dragon Sinker also opens itself up to comparisons with the game it's derivative of. And, sadly, it doesn't come out well in those comparisons at all.

There is a solid core game here in Trials of the Blood Dragon, the problem is when the team extends away from that core to do other things. Not all of the motorbike tracks are great, but that is true of the Trials games as well. The platforming segments are terrible, however, some of the more bombastic and colourful stages are an absolute joy to play, and the neon visuals and pounding soundtrack do an excellent job of selling the action.

There's plenty of merit to Demon's Rise as the developers have delivered a game that is nicely balanced and blends a rich tapestry of gameplay elements together in a surprisingly nuanced manner. Purely on the basis of how this game is presented you just would not expect that going in. The total lack of effort in the writing kills it, though. How am I meant to enjoy a fantasy game if there is nothing to draw me into the fantasy?

If the developers bring a lot more focus Pantsu Hunter, and more carefully consider how to make the various gameplay and narrative elements fit together, this could yet become something special.

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.

The game is decent at times but it lacks some features that would have made this a better experience. Things like mutiplayer and a leader board would have really helped to give Dogos legs. There's also some irritations in the art style, frame rate and general presentation, and the lack of a narrative to give context to what's going on hurts as well.

Sailing Life has depth, and if you can deal with its rough edges, you may appreciate the grand vision and intent behind it all. I would buy Sailing Life 2 in a heartbeat if the team polished the foundation up and got a better translation team, worked on the consistency of the aesthetics, and made the breadcumb trail less obtuse. Unfortunately, as unrefined as this is, it’s very difficult to imagine this finding much of an audience.

On one level I am sure that there will be people that appreciate that, after all this time, they finally have a Stargate SG1 game. I just can’t help but see it as a missed opportunity on every level. Stargate was, at its core, a narrative-driven (not action) show about exploring the stars, meeting alien species and embracing science over religion. A more grounded take on Star Trek, basically. An isometric RPG in the vein of Disco Elysium would have certainly been harder to produce, but much more appropriate to the ideology and intent of Stargate than this stealth tactics title. It’s well-crafted and were it not carrying the license it would have been much easier to enjoy. Painted as it is, however, it’s far too dissonant and incoherent to be the celebration of the property that it needed to be.

Variety in stories and settings could have gone a long way to making Siege Survival Gloria Victis a more compelling game. As it stands, while those who enjoy a mix of strategy and deliberately melancholy narrative threads may find it engaging for a while, it’s all a bit too uneven to really recommend.

The problem with Kairosoft games is that they’re inevitably good fun and even compulsive for a while. Once you sit down to one fresh you’re inevitably going to get hooked for a while, be that a few days or a few weeks. But soon after you’ll put it down and completely forget about it. You’ll come across it at random a few years later and then get very briefly hooked again, but again you’ll soon get tired of it. Kairosoft games are pure consumption, no meat, and while they’re fun – and this game is fun too (I hate coming across as overly critical of Kairosoft!) they are junk, and Doraemon deserved better.

This is not an indie that has looked to a quick cash-in for minimal effort. It's just unfortunate that the racing genre is such a competitive one and, even on the Nintendo Switch, there is everything from Mario Kart, to rally racers, bike racers, and a half dozen existing top-down speedsters. It's just not enough to provide such a stock-standard racing game, however good the intentions.

I do appreciate the effort that went into Remorse: The List. The developers had a strong vision and did their best to execute on it. On a technical level, I also found it to be quite impressive for the Switch. There are much bigger games that struggle to lift to this visual and mechanical quality on that hardware. But, unfortunately, at the end of the day, this is a horror game where its enemies – which it relies on far too much to carry the experience – are more likely to make you giggle than sweat. That’s a death knell for any horror experience.

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.

A very expensive way to play bad pinball.

Abyss of the Sacrifice is close to being something special, but its little irritants around presentation, puzzle consistency and design, and localisation mean that you'll need to be pretty far down the visual novel rabbit hole to want to play this. It wasn't long ago that Root Double was debuted on the Nintendo Switch, for example, and that game too takes place in an underground facility that the characters are trapped in. It might lack the puzzles, but it is incredibly well written, and as we see with Abyss of the Sacrifice, sometimes a VN is better off without the puzzles anyway.

I just wish the level design better lived up to its potential. Skater Cat is a charming, enthralling game inhibited by a bloated amount of lesser content that regrettably comprises most of the experience.

SingStar used to be a tremendously fun party game way back on the PlayStation 2, and I still have some fond memories of the PlayStation 3 incarnations. SingStar was a beast, but the lack of backwards functionality, latency issues and a rather generic song list is no way to “celebrate” what made SingStar so great back in the day.

On a whole, Digimon World: Next Order isn’t a bad experience. It does take some time in order to get used to the flow of the game, and to deal with its irritations, but once you're there, you're in for what might potentially be a very addictive grind indeed.

I'm sadly torn on Gomoku. I love that we have a serious take on a great game on Nintendo Switch, but the lack of online play defies all logic. If you've been dying to learn Gomoku, then this will get you going (aside from the missing application of a critical rule). Otherwise, though, anyone interested enough in Gomoku to consider a video game adaptation surely has a board of their own for local play, and the game's utility as a training tool is hindered by how few opportunities most of us will ever have to want to play the game seriously enough to train. The application itself is presented lovingly, but I just don't see the audience here.

There's a basis here to grow into something truly spectacular, but the first entry of open world One Piece hasn't delivered on its promise.

The boss battles remain a highlight and almost enough of a reason to play the game in itself, but the rest of the game structured around them is so pedestrian and bland that keeping motivation in this one is perhaps the greatest challenge of them all.

One might be quick to dismiss CounterSpy as nothing more than a half-broken stealth game, but you’d be remiss for doing so. I for one prefer to look at it as a half-working stealth game, one that has passion and enthusiasm where it counts. Dynamighty may not have hit a home run the first time around, but based on the love of the medium of the team there, I wouldn’t count them out just yet.

Goblin Slayer is a perfectly adequate tactics JRPG that people who have nostalgia for the genre back on the PlayStation will have a particular fondness for. Mileage may be slightly better for the fans of the anime, but even then I think the big problem this game has is that it’s very superficial and shows very little interest in making any kind of statement or point. In other words, it plays exactly like an ‘anime tie-in’ game, and nothing more or less than that.

Although the game is fun to look at, and to think about, it rarely lives up to its lofty ambitions once it’s in motion. Combat is thankfully sparse enough that players get pushed towards their next objective briskly. Although enemies aren’t always fun to fight, they do look cool, and their bullet patterns are always an impressive spectacle. And while I came in expecting a 3D bullet-hell action RPG, what I got instead was an interesting sci-fi world to explore. It’s a pleasant surprise to see that a world this rich and complex came from a studio this small. Origamihero Games is a developer with huge ambition and a lot of promise, so I’d be keen to see the team iterating on ideas from this game and continuing to polish their craft.

It’s clean and works, but it’s a game that is difficult to see people getting long-term value out of it.