As the studio name suggests, this is a game design team that's in love with books, and so it's amongst books that its first offering reveals its true potential.

The levels here are every bit as inventive as they were in Origins and, by the time your moveset has expanded to include a hover, wall-run and punch, every bit as punishing.

Sadly, the developer's good work is all but undone by its publisher's demanding IAP structure.

Unaided solo players at the moment will either have to grind through normal to upgrade specials and stances to overcome the higher difficulties, or just take their chances alone. That aside, this is a smart, funny and faithful update to a game that hasn't aged well, and another feather in WayForward's retro cap.

Like Spelunky before it, survival often depends on what you're carrying, and when you happen across life-prolonging shops and lucky weapon drops. But FTL is a less masterful game than Derek Yu's cave diver, throwing more chance into the mix.

Smilebit, led by Masayoshi Kikuchi – who has since moved on to work on the Yakuza series, another franchise that pivots around vivid city-building – swam upstream with JSR, defying the rush to photorealism, celebrating rebellion and individuality in one of the most memorable genre mash-ups you're ever likely to come across. Its HD revival is every inch that game, serving as a reminder that originality and passion retain their lustre when all else fades, and that such treasures are worth buffing up to display again.

Guild Wars 2 is a few brushstrokes short of a masterpiece, then, but ArenaNet has succeeded in trying to paint over the worst of the genre's cracks. Thanks to a rigorous programme of restoration, only sometimes do its underlying imperfections show through the glossy veneer.

Borderlands 2 might not develop extensively on its forebear, but it has even greater power to hold you for hours on end, deftly weaving RPG stat development with skill-based play. It's enough to make every decision you make meaningful and fun, and lend the realisation that Gearbox knows more about the fundamentals of the shooter than almost any other developer.

Whether you're serious about climbing the leaderboards or just looking to race a teetering cupcake monster around on a pushbike, Hello Games' victory lap has you covered. May the instant restarts never falter. May the boosting never cease.

Ugly, punishing, and extremely satisfying, Gets To The Exit is a raw kind of fun. [Oct 2012, p.110]

In spite of its balance wobbles, Orcs Must Die 2 is a frenetic blast of co-op joy - the ideal 30-minute post-pint pick-me-up, be it a step-change sequel or not. [Oct 2012, p.106]

The true measure of this journey isn't where you end up, it's how fast your pulse is racing when each luminous tube finally spits you out into the darkness again. [Oct 2012, p.92]

And if this animalistic chaos all sounds a little too weird, consider this: strip away the surface strangeness, and you're left with a surprisingly identifiable tale of a mammal negotiating the pits and pitfalls of the concrete jungle, constantly worrying about sex and death as they try to make their way in a hyena-eat-elephant world. Well, at least until the velociraptors arrive.

A puzzle game that's more puzzle than game, Huebrix is a quiet pleasure – a soothing rainy Sunday afternoon to Super Hexagon's hedonistic Saturday night.

If you've been writing the series' Vita appearance off as a compromise or a contractual obligation, you're in for something of a treat. That 5 inch OLED screen is a chance to see Media Molecule's staggering achievement afresh, and to witness one of this generation's most intriguing engines of creativity at its most energetic and effective.

Beyond the sharper picture quality, there's little here that couldn't have been done on DS, though it matters little in the face of such ageless design. Picross E may not do much more than the basics, then, but sometimes that's all that is needed.

Super Hexagon weds zen-like design purity with the highest order of twitch-reflex athleticism. It revels in the ineffable dance of muscle memory, the act of shutting off your brain and trusting your thumbs to guide you improbably to safety.

Klei's Saturday morning cartoon style visuals intersect smoothly with your ninja's slinky animation and flowing moves, and the range of visual effects (position-betraying lightning strikes, a blurred fog of war-style filter on activity beyond your sight line) folds neatly back into the game's light-and-shadow based stealth systems. The result is a slick and striking game, one with presentation worthy of the potent and flexible set of powers at its core.

This is a rich, interesting design, then, but one whose capacity for long-term competitive play is questionable.

Throw in a typically generous range of levels and a surprisingly engrossing hidden object game, and Snapshot becomes a recipe for a candy-coloured afternoon of elegant brainteasers.

Part auto-runner, part RTS, and part puzzle game, there are enough strange ideas here to make up for a grindy campaign and awkward aiming controls. Shellrazer's an odd kind of game, perhaps, but it ultimately benefits from its own eccentricities.

It's good to see Inman opting for something other than a straight sequel, but this is one space odyssey that won't last you much longer than a pleasant hour or so.

Toybox deserves a wider audience. Chunky, colourful and challenging, this is a game that makes the most of its strange conceits. Occasionally those Nobel laureates are onto something, then.

Like the very best narratives, Thirty Flights Of Loving relies on economy more than excess, and it races you breathlessly to its conclusion rather than herding you through an awkward gauntlet of false choices and bottlenecks.

Even at its best, when using the AV8R stick, Damage Inc feels clumsy, badly implemented and lacking in imagination. Mad Catz is unlikely to drive sales of its peripherals with a game in which every flight feels like work and every kill is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory in a tedious war.

It remains disarmingly single-minded throughout, yet any repetition is offset by intuitive, precise controls, and satisfying audiovisual feedback.

There's a sizable adventure here but the repetition of basic tasks makes it seem padded rather than epic – too many dungeons send you on fetch quests for plot devices wherein the rule of three is doggedly applied.

Messy but oddly mesmeric, Bad Hotel is perhaps more successful as a curious plaything than a game, but it's no less essential for that.