The story does a great job of pulling you along for the first few hours as you go from rivals to friends and back to rivals again. It gets you invested in the action and raises the stakes, but the narrative climaxes near the beginning of your UFC career and then fizzles out. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to keep you engaged when you reach the top and have to defend your belts. Nonetheless, between the fluid fighting and the story-mode razzmatazz, this is the best version yet of EA’s fight-sim series.

It’s easy to see why The 7th Guest was so beloved in the first place. Vertigo Games has given this classic a well-deserved facelift, ratcheting up the impact of its theatrical story and unique historical atmosphere. Frustrating mechanical woes aside, it still feels like essential reading for puzzle-lovers who wish to experience one of the classics that shaped the adventure game genre.

Mina the Hollower doesn’t only trade in nostalgia; it’s a game that could only have been made today. But if you’re looking for vintage Sega or Nintendo-alike magic, here it is. A simple, perfectly satisfying move, spun out into 20 hours’ worth of fun, squeezing out every possible surprise and delight along the way. As links to the past go, this is hard to beat.

Very few fans get to play in the sandbox of their obsession like IO has here. As far as Bond video games go, nobody has done it better.

But mostly, it’s business as usual at the Forza Horizon festival: an expansive map filled with scenic and seasonal variety (plus hidden cars!), an intuitive yet still challenging handling model and hundreds of challenges to take part in. Forza Horizon 6 adds to the size and visual splendour of the environment, brings in better progression and provides an impressive array of accessibility options for players with different abilities, including full auto drive, limitless fast travel and high contrast mode. It does not revolutionise what this series has always done, there is nothing radical here to attract a whole new base of players. But that’s fine. There is no other way most of us will ever get to sit in a Porsche 911 GT3 and cruise into the Daikoku parking area with Yellow Magic Orchestra playing on the radio. For that experience, and so many others, the designers of this beautiful game should be thanked and applauded.

This mixtape, then, plays it safe, curating a crowd-pleasing compilation of teenage tropes and homages to coming-of-age cinema. It’s a beautiful and inventively silly series of musical vignettes – but without any real conflict at its core, the adventure fails to match the memorable heights of Life Is Strange. Much like an evening spent scrolling through classic music videos on YouTube, there’s a simple, nostalgic joy to be found. But once this four-hour spectacle is over, you might be left wishing that you’d spent your time more wisely.

It is wonderful to see such a difficult and unwieldy idea executed so brilliantly. It has been a pleasure to go on this weird trip back to the crucible of PC gaming culture. You don’t have to be nostalgic for the period of fuzzy FMV and splatterhouse gore to appreciate Forbidden Solitaire – it works as a brain-teasing card-battler in its own right. But if you were playing games 30 years ago, when interactive horror meant bad acting, looming purple skies, pixelated images of decapitated heads and stories inspired by pulp fantasy fiction, Forbidden Solitaire is a wildly self-aware, multi-textured treat. Enter if you dare.

There’s so much happening during the action that you learn to focus on the centre of the screen, relying on reflexes and peripheral vision to take it all in simultaneously as the scene explodes. Saros asks a lot of you – you’ll strafe until your thumbs hurt – but it taps into something primal, pulling you into a flow state where even a screen full of flaming orbs spat by towering hostile aliens no longer seems that big a deal.

Replaced’s most memorable stretch sees Warren sneaking back into the heavily guarded facility where the adventure began. You crouch amid tall, swaying grass and boggy marsh while being stalked by futuristic choppers that can end your life with a single, booming bullet. A gigantic wall looms in the background, rendered as an imposing black silhouette. For much of its 10-hour run time, Replaced seems content with replicating cyberpunk leitmotifs in pretty pixel-art fashion without adding much of its own. But this supersized, militarised fortification sees the game extend its purview, powerfully evoking the Mexico-US border wall and the West Bank barrier.

Despite its sparkling near-future setting, Pragmata succeeds because it feels like a throwback to gaming’s recent past. It’s a beautifully made, heartfelt single player adventure with a novel combat idea, and it prioritises storytelling and atmosphere. Where attempts at heartwarming games often come across as off-puttingly saccharine, Pragmata pulls off its father-daughter relationship with surprising deftness.

If Life Is Strange were a Netflix series, I would probably have stopped watching it a few episodes in. Instead, it’s a game I’ve been playing for more than a decade, and I care about these characters. (I also appreciate that more than a smidge of the original’s millennial cringe remains: a Foals song plays over the credits.) Life Is Strange has always been corny but it has also always been earnest, grounded in friendship and feelings. Max and Chloe deserved this chance to end their story – and so did we.

I started playing one afternoon and didn’t stop for nine hours. The interlocking systems, the pleasing pace, the ebb and flow between Olympus and the mortal realm are almost hypnotic. Every time you reach the end of a day cycle you think “just one day more”, and then it’s two in the morning and you’re still trying to grow a pumpkin for the upcoming festival of Demeter, or setting a trap for a monster in the forest. Expertly and lovingly crafted, Mythmatch is a lyrical poem about beautiful and rewarding game design.

While the music and gameplay have evolved with the times, in terms of narrative, Scott Pilgrim EX plays it way too safe. Though written by series creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, there’s none of the edge that secured Scott Pilgrim its original cult following. Our cast have, for the most part, worked out their differences. There’s no David v Goliath here, no antagonist that forces Scott and his pals to grow amid the messiness of bad relationships. Scott’s other friends appear in fun cameos and cat-meos, but the story is a silly, shallow adventure that feels like a side quest, the kind of game Scott would stay up all night playing before missing his shift at work.

Pokopia turns out to be huge, and unexpectedly complex. As new zones opened up beyond that first wasteland, I realised that this game was probably going to occupy me for as long as I wanted. (With 300 Pokémon to catalogue, the conclusion of the story need not be the conclusion of the game.) This is not a child-friendly Poké-painted simplification of the life-simulation genre, but instead an accomplished celebration of it, borrowing the best of all its many influences.

Requiem has had so many clever set-pieces, tense chases, and joyfully gruesome encounters by that point that it’s easy to forgive it simply running out of ideas. Capcom has been on a hot streak for a while now, so it’s no shock that Requiem delivers. But it’s a very pleasant surprise that Resident Evil still feels this vital.

From Life Is Strange to Undertale to Knights and Bikes, independent games have proved a rich and evocative medium through which to explore the theme of friendship. Pieced Together is another example, a careful, beautiful little game that, in more ways than one, turns nostalgia into art. After finishing it, I was inspired to contact an old pal I haven’t spoken to in ages and wasn’t sure I ever would again. Good games can be like good friendships: they encourage us to see things anew.

The most fun you’ll have is playing with a bunch of friends in the same room, but there’s also an online mode which offers ranked or friendly games. However you choose to play, the game exudes childlike charm while hiding layers of depth beneath its chaotic exterior. You can spend hours practising perfectly timed drop shots, mastering spin and getting your positioning just right, and figuring out which fever rackets best suit your style of play is an involving process. It is, in short, exactly what you want and expect from a Nintendo sports title – something for everyone, and then something more for those who decide to go pro.

And, yes, the handful of marquee moments spent running from or tussling with gargantuan creatures are spectacular. I will never turn my back on a pelican again as long as I live. Throughout, Reanimal drip-feeds clues to compelling mysteries surrounding the nature of its world and the children’s place within it. A shame, then, that it whiffs its apparent swing at recapturing the gut-punch of Little Nightmares II’s ending.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is certainly not predictable. It’s capable of getting a baffled smile out of you, and its anti-gaming-establishment attitude will have diehard fans searching for an irony-drenched reason to celebrate it. But where No More Heroes’ simplistic yarn kept the fights flowing and the jokes rolling, Romeo Is a Dead Man’s sprawl feels disappointingly directionless. Instead of coming together as a kitschy universe-spanning epic, this sci-fi story is sadly told with all the mastery of a rambling drunk in Wetherspoons.

Mewgenics is built to fill every moment you’re willing to give it.

There were many moments of beauty and terror during my ascent that left me quietly awestruck. That awe, in the end, was proportional to the hardship.

Just as the fictional maker of the archive fell under the spell of these records and materials, I too was seduced.

The Ivalice Chronicles is not interested in narrative flexibility; its plot does not bend to the whims of the player like other RPGs. The story’s framing – recounted as a historical account in the distant future – makes this abundantly clear. As such, the game is less about fantasy and fairytales than history itself. Forget easy resolutions: here, events simply produce yet more events; trauma begets trauma. It is one battle after another for Ramza and his comrades.

Arc Raiders isn’t just fun to play. It’s a straight-up shot of serotonin.

While No Fate doesn’t move the needle for Terminator games as much as I’d like, it succeeds in resetting the clock for the series’ interactive arm. It’s a pointed reminder that Terminator has gaming greatness within it.

Times have changed, and Simogo has expanded beyond Flesser and Gardebäck as their ambition has grown and brought them back to the realm of console games – such as the playable pop album Sayonara Wild Hearts, and their puzzle-mystery magnum opus Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The brief, heady days of App Store brilliance are over; the world that allowed Simogo to flourish is now extinct. How fortunate it was that Simogo got the chance they did; that they’re still with us, and able to assemble this inspiring little collection we can play in perpetuity. These games, in all their varied playfulness, are full of longing: for a lover, for meaning, for a chance to write your own ending. Play them and dream about a world where it all went differently.

The result is a skateboarding game of rare poetry. There is the poetry of the skating itself, the miraculous interplay of body and board rendered with aplomb. There is the actual poetry that accompanies the end of each level. Finally, there are the tender emotions that refract through, and seem amplified by every bailed kickflip in this surreal, shimmering take on hell.

The death screen is a rare moment when Sleep Awake summons something between dream logic and the strange hazy moments between sleep states that can feel like dreaming. The rest of the time, this narcoleptic nightmare merely wears its psychedelic aesthetics – floating Numan included – without interrogating them interactively. It’s too straightforward, too legible, and not actually illogical enough where it matters. You may want to sleep on this one.