Darkest Dungeon 2 is so different from its predecessor. A true roguelike with only one significant problem: The creators should learn how to explain things better. It’s also rather long for the content it provides. But the combat is great, the graphics beautiful, the narrator splendid.

A complex, rich game full of secrets and the joy of their discovery. It offers freedom, replayability, difficult yet engaging combat. The passive skills aren’t great and enemies appearing behind your back can get annoying, but there’s only one true drawback: poor optimization.

Pretty colours, smell of spice, they couldn’t dull my senses enough to not notice all of Venba’s imperfections. The characters aren’t very nice, the conversations tend to say nothing of substance, the story never reaches the required depths. But it’s short enough for it to be a cute visit of Indian culture and cuisine.

Dave the Diver is a surprisingly excellent game. Its beautiful pixel art is joined by plenty of activities, not very deep, but fun all the same. The weird underwater world is charming and invites discovery. The characters are interesting, with memorable quests. The tempo is a bit unequal sometimes, but the game offers plenty of content nonetheless.

A school building simulator made with love and care. Its state at launch isn’t the best, however, and several aspects could’ve been deeper. Also, people looking for a challenge will leave disappointed. But the combination of fun building, charming atmosphere and adequately complex management is nice enough.

This interactive musical might seem to be just another visual novel, but that’s simply not true. It will amaze you not only through its brilliantly written characters with whom you’ll share both laugher and tears, but also through great voice acting and singing thanks to its stellar cast. The main draw is its system of interactive songs with many different variations including various genres and moods.

Blasphemous 2 has everything a proper metroidvania should have and plenty more besides. It’s properly difficult, it boasts wondrous exploration, epic bossfights and an imaginative world. So it doesn’t really matter that it’s not very different from the previous instalment.

The perfect specimen of its genre and its current undisputed king. Confident, expertly designed, beautiful and without weak points - and it implements elements of other genres in order to advance its own.

Atlas Fallen is a game from another era, and it lacks a more expressive face and more ideas to succeed. Nevertheless, it at least offers fun fights and pleasant movement around the world. But it's a bit low from experienced developers.

Bum Simulator advertised itself as something akin to a homeless person GTA, but it’s just an unoriginal, stupid game with an identity crisis, incapable of utilizing its own systems, lacking in fun and quality. There are zero reasons to spend money on this.

Dordogne is a warm, colorful game, able to send you back to your childhood years. It tells of two contrasting worlds, looking for similarities between them. The ending of the story doesn’t connect quite in the way it should, but the experience as a whole is deeply emotional and truly worth your time.

There are certainly things to enjoy in this redone version of Layers of Fear, especially its visuals and carefully constructed psychological horror elements, perfect for players willing to look for hidden connections. Its attempts to scare you fall a bit flat, however. But while the overall story of the writer is deeply disappointing, the new depressing episode, The Final Notice, is capable of true emotional destruction.

Masterplan Tycoon takes the complex automation processes from other games and minimalizes them which makes the whole experience more streamlined, accessible and dependent on your own imagination. It’s an engaging puzzle, trying to connect everything to everything else without it getting in the way. And to see the seemingly incomprehensible chains pop up beneath your hands produces a feeling of true satisfaction.

Park Beyond will certainly provide you with a few fun evenings full of crazy construction shenanigans. It’s a relaxing game and lets you be creative, more so than some of its competitors, games which concern themselves with such silly concepts as physics and its laws. But apart from that, Park Beyond doesn’t really offer anything extra. There’s not much content and the game doesn’t really feel completely finished.

Make no mistake, these bikes look great and it’s quite fun to ride them, if you can get used to the strange physics. But then you’re going to start noticing things, unfinished and unpolished, such as the environment around the track. This shouldn’t happen to a yearly franchise.

It might not look that way at first glance but this is the best Alien game in many years. It’s a strange mixture of ideas which perhaps shouldn’t work together as well as they do. We’d certainly welcome a sequel.

Farming Simulator 23 doesn’t build at all on last year’s predecessor. On the contrary, it lost many features and fans of the series should steer well clear of this. Yes, you can farm while you’re travelling, but why would you do that when the downsides are so many? It could perhaps work as a good entry point, but in that case it probably shouldn’t be so ugly.

A very pleasant surprise. It’s simple, it could even be called primitive, but it’s also perfectly crafted, a journey through blood, screams and explosions. Legends of the industry could learn a thing or two from these four Canadians.

This game fails at basically everything it’s trying to do. It’s a shallow, bare-bones experience, artificially prolonged, and you’d be best advised to ignore a lot of what it’s trying to show you. But it doesn’t really matter because you’re probably going to give up long before the disappointing end.

The Bookwalker doesn’t really manage to refresh the venerable old point-and-click genre with new systems because the new systems simply don’t work all that well. The worldbuilding and story are immensely compelling, however, and guided forward by great dialogue. The gameplay itself doesn’t have to be awesome if you tell a story such as this.

Final Fantasy XVI leaves its RPG roots behind and focuses on action gameplay… And it’s a gamble that works out very well. This is a spectacular, breathtaking game, even if it sometimes buries the good under the average.

Midnight Fight Express is a great fighting game, simple, yet varied and inventive. There’s also loads of pop culture references and a crazy story, even if the narrative loses its way a bit near the end.

Are you a business simulator aficionado and love video games? Then you’re hardly going to find better fun than Mad Games Tycoon 2. It’s full of so many possibilities that there’s hardly anything you’ll miss. The depth of the simulation is impressive and the resulting game surprisingly addictive.

Jagged Alliance 3 is an explosive return among the giants of strategy. Its turn-based firefights are unbelievably fun and addictive, the beautiful, varied maps are mall strategic puzzles. The story is strong, emphasizing your own decisions, and the whole package is basically what I always wanted as a fan.

Wildfrost feels fresh among the many roguelike card games with its focus on timing, tactics and captivating graphics.

After Us wants to comment on the dark side of consumerism, but it fails to convey its message through mediocre gameplay. Neither the story or the mechanics are satisfying enough, there are technical issues and the action feels superfluous.

The wonders of building your own railway are back. Railway Empire 2 is beautiful and addictive, and while a full sequel should perhaps offer more, it’s great fun anyway.

Miasma Chronicles tries to tell an epic story but fails. It does some things better than its predecessors, and some worse. There are slight technical issues. The combat system is fun, thankfully, as is the exploration which will be your two main activities anyway. The world is well crafted, but the protagonists are extremely annoying.