The real issue that Othercide isn't technical, it's thematic: this is a game that is at odds with itself. Nothing about it suggests that it needed to be difficult like a Darkest Dungeon or Bloodborne... indeed its narrative and themes would have better lent themselves to a much more condensed, intense, and high-impact experience. But that would have also made the game shorter, and so once again we have a casualty of developer obsession to preference content over cohesion. Othercide had all the elements it needed to become something truly powerful. Sadly, it tries to stretch that material too far and forces players into too much repetition, eventually diluting the game's impact and leaving it as something which, as vivid and entertaining as it is, is also just a game.

I really wanted to like Skully because it falls neatly into a genre I have fond memories for – I’ve played more Marble Blast on old iMacs than I’d like to admit – but Skully very rarely succeeds at being the frenetic action platformer that it wants to be. Lacklustre level design and an inconsistent difficulty curve, matched with a meandering and confusing story, make this a hard sell for just about anyone. It’ll take a lot of patience to enjoy this one, even if you are a seasoned fan of 3D platformers.

Dodo Peak plays really nicely. I know the knee-jerk response to any mobile game-like “cute and charming arcade experience” is to assume it’s some kind of cheap shovelware, but Dodo Peak is precise, clean action, with well-designed levels that straddle the line between encouraging creativity among players and giving them a specific range of different puzzles and logical traps to overcome. It’s bright, cheery fun that people of all ages can enjoy, and is something well suited to the Nintendo Switch platform. You could go much, much worse than giving this a spin.

I do say my criticisms with a grain of salt; I have definitely under-appreciated many roguelikes in the past, only for them to "click" much further down the track on a repeat play. At this point, I feel like I get the gist of where Nowhere Prophet is going, and I think for genre fans who grow weary of the old mainstays of Into the Breach, Slay the Spire and FTL, there is a familiar compulsion to the way Nowhere Prophet’s systems are constructed, even if they often pale in comparison to games which came before. If there’s anything to be learned from Nowhere Prophet, it’s that a successful rogue-lite is like intricately designed lightning in a bottle, and no amount of mechanics which look good on paper can recreate a truly well-planned experience.

I can appreciate why a developer would want to try its hand at a Souls-like. It's a hugely popular genre that doesn't have that many entries at this point in time, and there's a veritable goldmine of unique settings and concepts to explore. A horror-themed Souls on an abandoned space station, circling a black hole, is appealing on every level. Unfortunately, this genre is also incredibly demanding, technically and creatively, and while I admire the ambition of Cradle Games, with Hellpoint they've shot for the stars but well missed the mark.

The game has an intriguing premise and I want to believe the developers had some intelligent ideas behind what they're doing, but between the painfully shallow strategy, the laboured (via translation) writing, the mundane, uninspired presentation and the shonky interface and UX, there was nowhere left for me to go to find something I admired about this game. For story-driven roguelike strategy, I highly recommend Thea: The Awakening (also available on Switch). Mittelborg is a different game to it, but the energy and intent does cross over between the two. It's just that Thea is also made exceptionally well, and this is not.

Tiny Racer is a bad game. Its premise is a fairly uninspired circuit racer, its physics system is constantly failing and its design choices seem to suggest the developers knew the physics system doesn’t properly work, and yet leaned into it. It does have multiplayer, so if your friend group goes out of their way to play janky games, this could be worth a laugh over a beer or keg. But it’s not memorably bad, rarely does your car glitch so spectacularly that it creates a response. Most of the time, you’ll be placated, maybe interested in the bold course design, but also hoping to play some better racing game instead.

Fairy Tail is pure comfort food for people who, like me, count the JRPG as the favourite genre. It lacks the subversive intelligence of a NieR: Automata or Final Fantasy VII Remake. It also lacks the rich refinement of a Persona 5 or the epic scope of a Trails of Cold Steel. Even in comparison to Gust's own titles, it lacks the rich character development of Atelier or the sheer beauty of Blue Reflection. But Fairy Tail has one thing in spades; it's joyous, and it's the right kind of frivolous. It's a celebration of an anime that I can only assume is both silly and fun in its own right and that works as the perfect promotion for Fairy Tail: I really want to watch the anime now. Fairy Tail isn't going to be on any of my game of the year lists, but not every release needs to be pitched at those lists to be well and truly worthwhile. Fairy Tail being the game that reminded me why I loved JRPGs in the first place is more than enough.

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.

In some ways, Destroy All Humans! shows its age, being a remake of a game that's now 15 years old, in a genre that's grown a lot in those years. But it's also got a sense of humour and parody of American life that feels more relevant today than when the original game first came out. That's a depressing reflection on the state of the world today, but it also means that the satire that underpins everything else in the game hits harder than the original creators ever could have imagined.

As a horror aficionado, and someone who also likes the extreme ends of horror, I find Carrion to be fascinating. It's not the kind of game I generally like playing, but it's pitched at the easy edge of the Metroidvania "genre". The exploration and puzzles are fluid and in service of the game's main purpose, which is the most unapologetically visceral thing I've played in some time. Not everyone will be able to stomach Carrion's atmosphere and gleeful violence. But those that can will find an experience that is beautiful in being so grotesque.

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 went into Void Terrarium a little apprehensive. With every indie out there scrambling to call their game a "roguelike", and with so many Mystery Dungeon roguelikes on the Nintendo Switch already, it can be difficult to muster up enthusiasm for yet another one. NISA and Furuya Masayuki surprised me, though. From the gentle subversion of the nature of progress in roguelikes, to the razor-focus on a sweet, paternal-style relationship between a robot and his ward, told with minimalistic elegance, Void Terrarium is a mature, different, and interesting take on the genre.

TroubleDays is fine, all said. It’s a fairly brief romance visual novel with a really gorgeous character model and pinup-worthy key art. Narrative and characterisation is all over the place in the attempted service of humour, and the cheap localisation is distracting at times, but let’s face it, if you’re going to play TroubleDays it’s for one particular reason and, lack of nudity aside, you’re not going to be disappointed in what you get back out of it.

Paper Mario is such an eclectic and generally experimental series that it's difficult to define what makes a good entry in it. Some people like the specific combat systems that the series plays with. Others enjoy Mario in the JRPG context. For me it's the sense of humour that's important. On that basis I couldn't be happier with The Origami King. I feel that there will be discussion about that ring-based combat system and some of the world design elements, but through it all I do think that most people will be too busy enjoying the deadpan, dry, droll and refreshing humour that they won't care about much else. This is a fine return to form for Paper Mario at what it does best.

People who come to it looking for a quality SHMUP are going to be disappointed. It's functional, but that's really not the point. The point is the fan service and pin-up aesthetic, and while Waifu Uncovered is limited there, as a cut-price hour or two of fun, as someone who enjoys anime and fan service, I had more fun with this than I should probably admit in public. Also, I really am genuinely impressed that eastasiasoft has paved the way for anime nudity on the Switch. There's hope for the Dee Dee visual novels to debut on console yet.

And so, at the end of nearly 5,500 words of review, everything that I’ve written leaves me in a conundrum. On the one hand, just with The Last Of Us 2, I found the moment-to-moment gameplay of Ghost of Tsushima to be excellent and massively entertaining, if a little derivative at this point in time – the open world genre as a whole does need some new ideas. Tsushima doesn’t do anything that will surprise you if you’ve played any of Sony’s other first party games in recent years, but it does it all in a way that’s as refined and sharp as a samurai’s blade, and that is fundamentally enjoyable. I can’t stress that enough – this game is fundamentally enjoyable. However, as much as I had issues with The Last Of Us 2’s narrative, it was an American story told by Americans, and it had a thematic and tonal resonance as such. It was consistent and uncompromised. Ghost of Tsushima by contrast is a wild misfire with every narrative element it attempts, and it boils down to this: Sucker Punch decided to do a historical epic inspired by Kurosawa… and produced something that fails as both history and as a pastiche of Kurosawa. There are going to be a lot of people that love this game, but I don’t think that should be overlooked, nor dismissed as irrelevant to the quality of this both as artwork and entertainment product.

I am extremely biased towards this game. How could I not be? I had a 15-year-long lingering emptiness from weeks of grindcore MMOs and this game comes along to hit the spot perfectly. I’ve overlooked the technical problems on the Switch port because I think having this style of game on the go is so valuable. It’s a crowd-pleaser, a game which welcomes you to have it your own way, focus on the things you enjoy, and leave a play session feeling good. It is a heavenly JRPG – one which has the love and insight to make the necessary changes and improvements to the formula, while keeping the strange idiosyncrasies which make the genre what it is. And just in case I haven’t hyperbolised this game enough, I’ll end with this. It’s better than Secret of Mana. Go play it.

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.

F1 is my preferred format for racing, and I would argue that Codemasters as given more respect to the F1 license in building it up over the last few years than anyone else. F1 2020 is on the cusp of being a top-flight annual licensed sports game like 2K's NBA, EA's FIFA and Sony's MLB The Show, and it has managed to get there without nickel-and-diming consumers to anywhere the same extent. This year's edition might be iterative on the track, but the off-track improvements show that Codemasters hasn't yet run out of ideas yet either.

The Last of Us 2 epitomises everything about overly-produced, mass market-friendly content that many of us are becoming exhausted with. SWERY, knowing full well that his game will be castigated on Metacritic and widely mocked, has satirised every mainstream expectation of a video game in Deadly Premonition 2. There’s nothing that suggests that anything within this game is not an entirely deliberate, surrealistic subversion of expectations, and while Deadly Premonition 2 is not for everyone (and potentially offensive to some), games as an art form are better off having works like this to exist in parallel to mainstream entertainment.

Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is the most charmingly twee thing on the Nintendo Switch. It is bright, colourful, wholesome, sweet, and, for people that remember the original on the Game Boy Advance, nostalgic. Story of Seasons encapsulates the desire that many have to retreat to a "simpler life" of wholesome work and earned reward. It's also a magnificent parallel - in an industry that is so drenched in extreme, unquestioned violence, sex, anger, terror, drugs and "serious themes", this game is a rare retreat and opportunity to reset. It's a reminder that it's okay for games to be warm-spirited... and that's a sadly rare thing these days.

Horror is an intensely difficult genre to get right. You need to draw players in and immerse them in the experience to the point that they have an emotional connection to the game, and then hit them with things that are not just grotesque, but also deeply unsettling. Horror needs to engage the brain as it engages the more visceral reactions, and that's very hard to do. Infliction: Extended Cut doesn't get there. It's simply too pedestrian and rote to really work.

There are plenty of titles out there with a strong moral conscience that try to communicate with players by making "difficult decisions" the core gameplay loop. This includes This War of Mine, Papers Please, Reigns, Not Tonight, Beholder, Ministry of Broadcast, and plenty of others besides. Yes, Your Grace is guilty of not adding enough to this philosophy of game design, and thus I suspect that it is destined to be one of the lesser-remembered examples of the "genre." With that being said, there's still a lot to appreciate about this one, and it's wrapped up in such a lovely package that, if nothing else, it makes for an excellent lazy Sunday afternoon experience.

All of this puts me in a difficult spot with Assetto Corsa Competizione. On the one hand, it’s my favourite racing experience, hands down. It just handles beautifully. On the other hand, from features to gameplay modes and with regards to almost everything that doesn’t specifically involve racing, Competizione is substantially behind its peers, making this a racing experience that only the most hardcore of hardcore racing fans will get much out of.

I wouldn't bet money on us getting another take on Go on Nintendo Switch, and even if we do, I wouldn't bet on it being a focused teaching tool for the game. As such, Being Stronger While Playing! SilverStar Go DX is mandatory stuff, despite its warts. You don't need to be a professional Go player, but it is one of those things where having a basic knowledge of the game is a good way of showing that you've got a level of interest and respect for other cultures, and it's a useful stepping stone for a broader understanding of Asian thought and culture.

You need to have a high tolerance for crass to enjoy Hakoniwa. This game is less "fan service" than it is an actual perversion, but if that kind of eyes-wide humour appeals to you then Hakoniwa is very, very funny. You'll probably only play it once because jokes are never as funny when repeated, but for that first run though, there's a sense of glory around the game; this thing offers a kind of joyous, unbounded creativity that it's impossible not to sit back and wonder at just what kind of process went into the making of it.

This is the kind of game that's so easy to overlook. Lacking things such as overwhelming charm of a Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, the exquisite fan service of an Omega Labyrinth, or the sheer depth of a Siralim, One Way Heroics Plus lacks an X-factor that allows it to stand out. If you are a roguelike fan and give it a chance, however, it has its merits. Those merits are buried deep under poor optimisation for the Nintendo Switch, sure, but they're there, and for the persistent and patient, this is an enjoyable, rich, challenging example of the classical roguelike.