The mark of any great simulator or strategy game is if it encourages emergent storytelling - if you care enough about what you're doing for it to form little stories in your head. Port Royale 4 did that for me. From my obsession with becoming a global coffee baron, through to the nightmare armada of pirates I built up that would surely have terrified every boat or town that saw it bearing down on them, Port Royale has the flexibility, complexity and visual splendour that you will want to take it, and play it on your own terms, using your own strategies. That the game allows you to do that while remaining accessible to complete beginners is all the more impressive.

Voltron VR Chronicle would have been far better if it was limited to being a “VR experience” rather than a VR game. An episode of Voltron like any other, but one that you watch from inside the cartoon’s world rather than through a TV.

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’s fast paced arcade shooter style is a ton of fun, and considering the types of leaps and bounds it brought to the FPS genre, it’s no wonder that it managed to succeed all those years ago.

Yes, White Day is an older game, but as far as the horror genre goes, and how it's evolved into something I place little value in, that’s actually a benefit. Given how few people have even known what this game is to date, the extra exposure that it will get from a re-release will mean that, hopefully, a new legion of fans will discover it, because it does deserve that. It’s a masterpiece in building tension and in the way that it plays within the classical approach to horror, without relying on jump scares and endless bloodshed.

Technical issues and a lack of training to ease in newer players conspire to hold the title back from being as good of a game as it should be.

It's a clever mix of sentimentality and satire, structured in a way that's quite unusual for JRPGs. With most games in the genre, the end boss is the goal and triumph. The Longest Five Minutes is a love letter to the genre that wants you to remember that you're meant to enjoy the journey in a JRPG, too, and I certainly walked away from this game with a renewed appreciation for the spirit of adventure in these games itself.

I ended up having a lot of fun with Dex, though playing it through at the same time that I was reviewing The Technomancer was a bit unfortunate for it. In belonging to the same narrative genre as a game that will be right up there with my favourites this year, Dex’s pulpy and limited narrative was disappointing. Thankfully, as an RPG/platformer, it still largely works, and will certainly help you kill off a rainy weekend or two.

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

Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is both an amazing nostalgic trip to an older generation of gaming as well as a breath of fresh air with its fast paced and solid combat mechanics. It's rare for a developer to take martial arts and really try and do the philosophy and flow of them justice in a game, and for that Shiness is a most welcome addition to the RPG library.

Shining Resonance Refrain might not be a classic example of the genre, but it gets the most important components of the genre right – the characters and the storytelling – and backs it up with some gorgeous art and a perfectly competent combat system.

This "reward" that Romance of the Three Kingdoms offers is subtle and nuanced. This is a niche game and I would very much expect its sales to be much lower than what its rival achieved. It's the better experience, though, from a particular perspective. If you love your historical strategy for the history that they depict, then Romance of the Three Kingdoms delivers. Everything about it is a perfect reflection on what that book was on about.

Nevaeh is easy-playing stuff. It takes familiar, comfortable genre conventions and splices them together in a way that is imminently playable. With such a strong, compelling art style it would have been nice to see the developers push the artistry a little further, either to subvert or confirm the fairytale themes in a compelling way, but you're not going to regret your time playing this one. Not by a long shot.

The biggest pity is that the developers were so modest in their scope. Perhaps this little experiment is just to test the waters and get some money together for a more ambitious second project. I hope so, because Toree 3D has a lot of potential to be a more full-featured homage to B-tier platformers. As it stands here, though, it's a moment or two of fun. Nothing more, nothing less.

That Conan Chop Chop is supposedly a Conan title is a reminder that Conan is the only rival to Dungeons & Dragons as the most poorly used license in video games. It's time to give someone else a go, Funcom. It also fails completely as a single-player adventure, so if you were considering it for yourself, look to any of the other roguelikes out there instead. However, I still think there is a role here that the developers have delivered on. There aren't many multiplayer-orientated roguelikes, and you can certainly have a lot of fun with this over a weekend of beers and button-mashing. It's not going to last long beyond the hangover and will be rotated out of the library quickly enough, but it's still a moreish good time while it lasts.

You’ll need to love old school dungeon crawlers like Wizardry to get much out of these games, and if you do like those kinds of games you know that you’ll love these (and you would have likely played them on the PSP before anyway). There’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s pure comfort food for the genre faithful, and it’s a particularly generous and well-layered slice of cake.

It’s made me into a fan of Fate. If that’s not a sign of a quality game, then nothing is.

By enforcing a system of communication and bond development amongst its characters, Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star achieves what great novels and only the most lovingly crafted virtual experiences can: it offers the opportunity to not only interact with the characters but to, possibly, form memorable relationships with them as well.

With a comprehensive tutorial system, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the best fit game for people new to the genre to wrap their minds around it. Equally, for more experienced strategy fans, the superb balance that made the historical events the game is based on so fascinating also make for the near-perfect strategy game.

An RPG that is more about building an army and then leading it into battle is in many ways so much more interesting than an RPG where you’re in control of a one-man army and in pursuit of personal power. I only hope that the release of this game, now, means that there is more Mount & Blade coming, because there really is nothing else like it out there.

This isn’t a game which cracks easy jokes about weed culture; it doesn’t underestimate the finesse involved in the craft; but it also doesn’t shy away from criticising the shadier aspects of the industry either. It’s a truly fascinating look into a mythologised trade, and it’ll be a test for the most seasoned of tycoon fans.

Neptunia ReVerse is clearly a "first-run effort" by Idea Factory to take the tools of the PlayStation 5 and see what they can do with them. It's perhaps a less ambitious effort than what Idea Factory made as its launch on PlayStation 4 (Omega Quintet), but putting that aside, this is a genuinely good game, worth the time of any JRPG fan, and by its very nature the perfect introduction to the entire series for new players with the new console. The additions that have been made here make it even more complete and also worth a replay for the Neptunia faithful. And if nothing else having an excuse to watch Neptune and the other girls run around in swimwear costumes for a few hours is always worth the investment.

I had a lot of enjoyment with Hotel Sowls, which lasted for its entire run time and never overstayed its welcome. Its one of those games which cares about quality over quantity, and the control over tone and mood which Studio Sott exhibits is genuinely admirable. This game goes highly recommended to the inquisitive, the curious, and those for whom your standard video game characters and settings are proving just a tad predictable. You won’t have any idea what’s up ahead in this hotel.

Shenmue 3 won't disappoint fans of the first two. But that's almost secondary to the real story here. Shenmue 3's real strength is in the way that it suggests a different way of looking at the very storytelling of videogames. It challenges the idea that a game's value is in it aspiring to be "cinema", and it provides a pretty compelling argument for the alternative, too. On a personal note, as a fan of both theatre and Shenmue, this game is effortlessly my pick of what has been a very good 2019 for the creative side of videogames.

The developers really tried with an exceptionally difficult genre. AI Limit won’t be remembered alongside FromSoftware or Koei Tecmo’s work in the genre, but it’s also by no means a poor effort. It’s like the work that a student who really understands the source material produces. It might only be a shade of the master’s work, but you can’t help but hope they get another swing at it, because they’re on the cusp of breaking out and carving out something brilliant with its own identity.

Garrett is a wonderful character, and the city and plot of Thief hold all kinds of potential, the game looks gorgeous on the PlayStation 4 and is mechanically very tight, but all of that potential is dampened by the developer's somewhat overzealous desire to dictate just how the game should be played.

Travis Strikes Back: No More Heroes isn’t the Lollipop Chainsaw remaster that I’ve been begging Goichi Suda to produce each year over the last four TGS' when I've caught up with him, but it’s a stylish, energetic, amusing and surrealistic return to Suda’s most popular character and “world.” Yes, it might have been a vanity project for a guy that wanted to indulge his love for retro and indie games, but I’ve had a cracking time watching Suda show off just how much of a nerd he really is.

It pushes more boundaries and is a sharper satire than the other games in the series, as fine as they are, and that marks this one out as something special indeed.