You’ll feel deflated – if not outright miserable – after playing it, but it’s also a truly masterful example of writing and storytelling, and it’s the kind of game that people should play, because it will prove to be genuinely challenging and, hopefully, encourage them to think a little more critically of the world around them.

This is one of the nastiest video games ever made.

Stikbold lacks any kind of narrative or gameplay substance to be a compelling single player game. Sadly, it’s all too simple to be an effective multiplayer title, either. It’s passingly fun.

The Coma doesn’t outstay its welcome, and tells its story over five or so hours. Sadly it’s just not frightening enough. The implications of the story it’s telling are terrifying, and certainly this will discourage anyone who thought they wanted to do a couple of years education in South Korea, so the themes that form the basis of game are potent. But where Creeping Terror had me gripped with its aesthetics and tension and never let go, The Coma is simply too inconsistent and clean to really work as a piece of horror.

For a game made by such a small team, Plague Road drips with genuine quality. Mechanically, it’s a tight, efficient roguelike that gets the core gameplay loop down perfectly, which means that it can be very hard to put down. Some misfires in how the game is themed and presentation let it down, however. It’s not quite as cohesive as I wanted it to be, and while the art style is tantalising, the game ultimately fails to build the lore and fiction that it needed to give it the depth it needed to be something truly special.

The fact that this is a terrible port on the Nintendo Switch only makes things worse. All I can hope for at this point is to have a developer show up with a vision, a way to turn the WWE series around and begin from scratch. Perhaps next year. The Nintendo Switch would be a perfect platform to start from scratch and create something truly magical that does the art of pro-wrestling the justice it deserves.

Sadly the limitations that it has leaves Tactical Mind as a game that only holds long term value as a local multiplayer experience.

Gorogoa is quaint, expressive and beautiful, delivering a lush narrative full of different potential interpretations carried by game mechanics which challenge players to think in unfamiliar and creative ways.

For what it is, Feral Fury is a lot of fun, building upon established arena shooter conventions with high production values and vibrant, kinetic gameplay. While I admit more could have been done with the game’s interesting story and setting, I found every other facet to be immediately enjoyable. If you don’t mind some things feeling like a retread of prior games, Feral Fury is a competent entry in a universally enjoyable genre.

It has all the presentational and gameplay elements it needs to be really great. But this developer's track record isn't there, so what we’ve got here is a game with a translation bad enough that it effectively breaks the game.

If you’re a fan of shooters and relish the challenge, Enter the Gungeon is absolutely at the top of its genre. This is a game with meaningful, complementary mechanics and a tight gameplay loop which will have you playing for days.

Overall, Omega Quintet is a game that good-naturedly tries to punch above its weight.

Hiragana Pixel Party is a game with an identity crisis – it’s too shallow to be a serious learning tool but it’s too serious about learning to be just fun. It’s on a console with more than a few proper rhythm games which feel more intuitive to play, and honestly you’ll pick up about as much Japanese from this game as you would while playing Project Diva with dual language subtitles on. I would have loved it to be more ambitious, and to find more ways to be a useful language acquisition tool, but as of now it’s only useful to players who want to learn just hiragana and katakana.

Road to the Olympics is a solid addition to Steep. Even if the story mode is lacking, the Olympic events and new Japan-based massif are more than enough to make this worth your time, especially with the PyeongChang games on the horizon. It might look like one of those weary licensed games of the PS1 and PS2 days, but fret not, because Road to the Olympics is the real deal.

This is one of the more unheralded Super Nintendo JRPGs, but the update is of a high quality, and while I don’t think it’s a classic example of the genre by any means, it is still a very enjoyable game. A clean, enjoyable combat system, plenty of enemies to fight, and a bit of exploration and puzzle solving on the side; this is the kind of classic JRPG experience that I’ll never get tired of.

It's Worms, and Team 17 has done a good job in restraining itself this time around so that the only gimmicks within the game genuinely add to it. What's important to note here is that the Nintendo Switch is absolutely perfect for Worms, and that fact alone makes this the best entry in the series in years.

SeaBed is a beautiful game. Some pacing issues aside, it's a poignant exploration of love and heartbreak that manages to feel both grounded and ethereal. One thing's for sure: this isn't a game I'll forget in a hurry.

There's nothing of value in Wonder Boy Returns. It's the weakest platformer I've played for years, and were it a free Flash game, as it so closely resembles, I still wouldn't recommend it.

I found Dead Rising 4: Frank’s Big Package better put together than the original release. This time around you don't need to worry about the real conclusion being behind a paywall, and there are two new modes to enjoy. Especially for those who didn't previously own an Xbox One and thus missed out of the original, the result of this package is that you've got something genuinely good fun to play this holiday season.

It’s the most enjoyable Kemco game I’ve played to date. More of this and fewer generic RPG Maker-like “retro” JRPGs and I will become a real fan for this company.

Despite my irritations with the combat system, Ōkami remains very playable throughout, and given the beauty and power of the rest of the game, I wouldn’t let a trifle like a slightly cumbersome and chaotic combat system get me down over the whole game. This is a real, bona fide masterpiece and is, if anything, getting better with age. Ōkami is not a “Zelda-like”, and deserves far more respect to be compared to a series that, arguably, it’s superior to.

As someone who has every intention on buying his own pinball table at some point (or, hopefully, more than one), the appeal of having real pinball experiences is such that I’ll buy all of the tables in Stern Pinball Arcade, but it’s lacking the features and robustness to allow it to properly compete with Pinball FX 3, and the lack of leaderboard features just kills its long term appeal.

Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock serves a particular niche; it’s for people who are both strategy game fans and Battlestar Galactica fans. I don’t know how many of us are out there, but I hope there’s enough that the entire development team gets rewarded for the excellent work that they’ve done. Yes it’s a budget game and a really authentic Battlestar Galactic experience really should also have solo flight and ground missions, but as a complement to the overall franchise, I couldn’t ask for more. This game is brilliant.

It's addictive stuff, all up. I've been playing Zen Studio's various releases for years now - in fact, aside from Hatsune Miku games I can't think of anything I've played more than these, and with the Nintendo Switch I imagine I'll continue playing long into the future.

Although short in duration (my meticulous approach lasted two hours plus), and it really needed more to the game for the kind of story that it was telling, Attentat 1942’s poignancy managed to stir me on several occasions, and its ending in particular was touching.

Tokyo Xanadu is good. It’s a lot of fun and Nihon Falcom has a real touch with combat systems that its developers deserve real respect for. The biggest challenge I found with the game was finding the motivation to actually finish it; it might not get anything wrong, but it’s such a lengthy quest that it really needed a greater thematic depth to maintain my interest, and unfortunately it wasn’t quite able to replicate Nihon Falcom’s own, brilliant, Trails of Cold Steel in offering that.

Caveman Warriors is a competent platformer weighed down by the problems of a game which wants to be Metal Slug, and Trine, and Joe & Mac, but hasn’t synthesised a unique mechanic or gameplay loop to set itself apart.

Games like Hidden Agenda are what we need to see more of. The game itself isn’t perfect, but it is a perfect example of games that try new ways to tell a story. Full credit to Sony for trying something new with the mobile phone linking system.