Double Fine’s adventure is confident and charming, the studio feeling its way to a comfortable mid-point between the desires of adventure-game fans and its own motivation to move the genre forward – even if only by a small increment.

At a base level, this is simply too forgettable to give players a good enough reason to return. Perhaps it would be different if Zombie had been more lenient with its economy, allowing you to try more before committing to buy.

Strip out the poor parkour and clunky melee and all you’re left with is a shooter, and a workmanlike one at that.

Quibbles aside, the good news is that the frantic swiping and tapping to negotiate track obstacles while squeezing in showboating tricks for extra points remains as ebullient as ever. Sitting down to play five minutes of Infinity and losing an entire evening: that’s the real danger.

Cliffhanger endings are fine when the next episode of a TV show is days away, but less so when the wait is likely to last a couple of months. Yet Telltale has already achieved something remarkable, proving – to both Clem and to you – that there’s life after Lee.

What began as a celebration ends with nostalgia’s bubble being cruelly pricked.

It’s no accident that your role can often feel more captive than intrepid explorer; Fireproof skilfully demonstrates that escapism through escapology can be a potent conceit indeed.

Multiplayer’s not much better, and is a rare area in which Shadow Fall suffers technically, the action slowing to a crawl when things get busy thanks to an unlocked framerate.

For the time being, Exordium represents a kind of success, even if it’s tempered by the evident struggle to achieve an objective that may, in the end, prove to be a fool’s errand.

It’s sweet stuff, but repetition quickly sets in.

It’s a masterclass of design purity: every one of these elements exists for a reason, and its potential is exploited to the fullest. But Samurai Gunn’s genius lies in its dizzying speed. It condenses organic, balletic setpieces worthy of an action flick finale into mere seconds, the ground filling up with the bloodied pixel remains of the fallen.

Board game fans might be able to overlook these sins to find the deep game within, but developers Full Control has done too little to evangelise the cult of Space Hulk.

The Novelist, then, is a game of endless compromise, and in that sense it is a quite remarkable simulation of family life.

Peggle’s secret is the way it makes you feel about these successes – and it’s here that this most feels like a true sequel. Clear out a level and the resulting Ultra Extreme Fever is a bigger festival of light and colour than ever, and Xbox One’s Game DVR popup serves as an extra pat on the back. The accompanying crescendo is no longer limited to Ode To Joy either – each Master has their own piece of classical music.

Naturally, it isn’t as attractive as its console cousin, though zoom down to eye level during its majestic sunsets and the shanties belted out by your crew make for a reasonable facsimile of the console game.

Polyphony has produced a handling and physics model that is unmatched by any other racer, but failed to provide AI competition capable of showcasing it to its fullest.

As a reminder of the old days of the series, The Serpent’s Curse just about serves its purpose; it sounds the same, works the same and, mostly, looks the same. But as a contender on the modern point-and-click landscape it offers little to drag players away from the new age of superior soirees.

Playing Blek is pure intuition, not a puzzler so much as an act of freeform creation. That’s quite a feat within a genre which can feel so stiff and prescribed.

This is a game that skilfully blends the safe with the courageous in an alchemical fusion of old and new, somehow brave and default all at once.

For all Zoo Tycoon’s charms, it’s ultimately too shallow; there’s only so much cooing at identikit baby animals you can do before the inevitable fatigue sets in.

Fighter Within’s storyline is a misery of clichés, reaching for kung-fu movie kitsch but delivering nothing of the sort. But even the ugly presentation and forgettable cast of characters could have been forgiven if the developer had managed to make good on its ambitions for a nuanced fighting game controlled with arms and legs rather than fingers and thumbs.

The game also fails as a high-profile PS4 launch title in terms of what it’s putting onscreen. The particle effects serve their purpose, but everything from the vapid story sequences to the hackneyed goblin foes feels blandly feeble. A chapter setting entitled The Barren Wastes? Yes, you think, no need to ram it home.

It’s a game of light and shade, sure, but there’s a little too much of the former seeping through the cracks.

It’s gorgeous; Resogun draws on its host hardware’s graphical capabilities to make you feel like the most powerful entity in the room.

Rivals’ systems show potential, but it is considerably less than the game it might have been.

Like the first Gears, Ryse is a simple game loaded with small-scale encounters and rudimentary set-pieces with the intention of hustling you towards something beautiful. Both have their own ‘horror’ stage, both have sieges, both have stationary guns of sorts, and Ryse, like Gears, has room to grow if given the chance.

There’s no way to sell unused cars back to the AI or to other players, no bespoke onscreen speedometers, no test driving a car before purchase, no kid-friendly Kinect steering or Kinect support in Forzavista, no opportunity to load a circuit-specific tuning setup before a career race, no exiting from a race series without loading up the next track, no unicorn cars, no ‘reasonably priced car’, no auction house, no storefront, and no surprise, really.

At six to seven hours, Tearaway isn’t the longest game in Vita’s library, but it packs in more joyfully realised ideas than many games manage in three or four times the runtime. It’s a beautiful, brilliant game, but it’s more than that: it’s the first great Vita game.