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.

There is an OK vamp story hiding in here; careful, dicey conversations with dangerous fellow vampires are by far the most interesting thing that Bloodlines 2 has going for it. And I enjoyed some parts of Seattle, particularly the dive bars packed with people gyrating to (of course) goth music. The Chinese Room has managed to make something playable and vaguely interesting out of a game development disaster. But after the first few hours, I kept going more out of morbid curiosity than enjoyment.

The most frustrating thing is that there is the kernel of something great here. Despite the time-travel conceit, Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t remotely original – you’ll swear you’ve skulked the darkened corridors of these very hospitals, factories and apartment blocks before – but it looks stunning in places, plays well once you’ve upgraded your weapons, and there are spooksome moments and satisfying puzzles peppered throughout. When everything clicks, it is the engrossing, icky body-horror creepshow you want it to be. But then it will throw you into another exhausting death room full of bullet-sponge ghouls, and you’ll soon be filled with irritation instead of dread.

Despite some efforts in meta-progression, it’s difficult to look past Drag x Drive’s most significant hurdle – that it’s uncomfortable to play for extended periods. The mouse controls are ingenious in theory, and when applied in small bouts, it feels like a novel prototype. But, in the context of such overtly active gameplay, the concept starts to fall apart. What remains is a surprisingly inaccessible sports game that lacks modal variety and a long-term hook. If you were hoping for a spiritual successor to the Nintendo Switch’s Rock ’Em Sock ’Em brawler Arms, you will be disappointed.

MindsEye is an oddity. For all its failings, I rarely disliked playing it, and yet it’s also difficult to sincerely recommend. Its ideas, its moment-to-moment action and narrative are so thinly conceived that it barely exists. And yet: I’m kind of happy that it does.

It’s all so frustrating. Deliver at All Costs offers up a beautiful destructible playground, then barely utilises it, instead focusing on a bizarre, half-baked story that somehow ends in a courtroom drama. It feels like being invited to a glittering champagne reception, then getting collared by a conspiracy theorist who insists on describing the plot of his hokey sci-fi novel for the next eight hours. What a criminal waste.

When I imagined a video game adaptation of Squid Game, I did not imagine running around an arena in a golden pig outfit trying to hit a player called skibidi69 with a baseball bat. Perhaps I set my expectations too high, but the only shock value here is in the lack of imagination.

For players of the original, this should get a steady nostalgia drip going. But coming to this series fresh makes for an overlong, dated and tedious experience.

The problem is, very little of what you’re asked to do turns out to be any fun. Fetch-quests that offer next to no payoff are compounded by annoying travel: you have to make an unappealing choice between the vein-popping frustration of trying to drive across the craggy, impassable, boulder-strewn landscape, or giving up and shlepping there on foot. And this landscape isn’t Skyrim, or The Capital Wasteland, with discoveries to be made around every corner. It’s a Starfield planet map like any other, with only the odd cave or cookie-cutter facility to explore, and it rarely rewards inquisitiveness with anything other than wasted time and the urge to swear.

Would Kafka approve? Obviously not – he didn’t want this work published in the first place. But a Kafka adaptation that cannot satisfy its author might as well trap him in a hell of his own making. Kafka playing Playing Kafka would have been Kafka’s ultimate nightmare: lost in a maze arranged from his own words, confounded by obscure if not non-existent objectives, dialogue options that offer no choice at all, and ultimately unable to progress after a bug sends his character’s lawyer clipping through the floor. In the thought of it there is, at least, something a little Kafkaesque.

Despite the enjoyable premise and high production values, Peach’s long-awaited star turn feels disappointingly patronising, one-dimensional and forgettable – the polar opposite of the Super Mario Bros film’s capable heroine. As the Nintendo Switch enters its twilight years, this was the perfect moment to give the Mushroom Kingdom monarch the celebration she so thoroughly deserved. Yet where Kirby received a Mario-worthy, Iliad-esque epic in Forgotten Land, this is more akin to a flimsy pop-up book.

After the excellent surrealist horror of Alan Wake 2, which revelled in its own strangeness while also delivering a clear, compelling story, Alone in the Dark is too staid, too clumsy, and too haphazard to invoke anything other than a shrug. The mystery surrounding Jeremy’s madness isn’t worth putting up with the ponderous unravelling, while the combat and puzzling are mere shadows of Resident Evil 2’s superior design. The curse, it seems, lives on.

Ultimately, Warner Brothers live-service ambitions rob players of a remarkable comic-book caper. The result is a game that’s as confused as its titular characters. Just as these reluctant heroes find themselves battling against their villainous natures, Rocksteady’s storytelling ambition struggles to break free of its live-service trappings. Since its reveal as a looter shooter, the internet has declared Suicide Squad an abomination – the antithesis of the classics that Rocksteady once made. The reality is somewhere in between, a game that straddles both the brilliant and the banal. As Rocksteady is surely learning from Suicide Squad’s hostile fan reception, you either die a licensed game hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

There are moments when The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria hints at what it could have been, such as when you’re mining a rich vein of ore in some dark tunnel, and your dwarf becomes inspired to sing. They’ll clear their throat and give voice to a story of trolls and orcs and the beating that will rain down on them if they cross your path. The game briefly feels alive, the story making the cold mines warm. But then the song stops, and you’re still mining, and all you have to look forward to is a long walk back to the forge.

With the sweetness and delight associated with Disney absent, this new platform game is a strangely cynical waste of potential.

There is both too much and too little going on in Harmony: The Fall of Reverie at any given time. It is a game of many parts that don’t come together – an interesting design study packaged in a mildly boring game.

A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien’s fiction.

Redfall is a poor execution of ideas ill-at-ease with Arkane’s historic design ethos, a sad misuse of Arkane’s a unique developer’s particular talents.

Tron Identity has merits in its atmosphere and flexible story, but strip away the licence and what remains is a fleeting and unremarkable visual novel that lives in the shadow of better detective games.

The storytelling suffers from a lack of conviction.

What a shame that Luminous Productions didn’t capitalise on its best assets. Frey’s taken some heat for being overly chatty in Forspoken, but without Ella Balinska’s fantastic performance, the game would be totally forgettable.

I’m a huge fan of the Oddworld-ian creature design and the factory-farming satire of its plot. But Oddworld made that stuff work because it had a big, weird heart. High on Life just has dilated pupils and a shit-eating grin.

This version of Vertigo portrays women in a way that is seriously difficult to stomach in a post-#MeToo era. Here, women prey on an unsuspecting man using, for instance, sex and hypnosis to lure him in and do him harm. Male trauma is of course absolutely real, but this game doesn’t have the tools to examine it with the required care, and ends up essentially saying #MenToo – and doing a significant disservice to the body of cinematic work that inspires it.

With a little more time in the oven, Food Truck Simulator could have been something really tasty. Unfortunately, in its current form, it will surely leave players feeling a little sick instead.

If you’ve played a zombie game in the past decade, this mishmash of tattered post-apocalyptic stereotypes will feel all too familiar.

The museum itself is pretty rudimentary: a dark hall, with signposted identical locks pointing the way towards Nordhagen’s recreations of lock-picking mini-games. It looks and sounds basic, but the amount of effort, knowledge and understanding of the topic (and of game design and history more generally) that has gone into this mini museum is abundantly evident, from both the exhibits and the text that accompanies them. Like listening to someone talk about the PhD research they’re doing on a niche topic, it might sound boring at the outset, but by the end of an hour, you’ll come away with something you definitely didn’t know before.

This unquestionably beautiful game about saving a planet from an encroaching black hole boldly goes where few have remained awake.

My hope is that we’ll look back at this launch and laugh, remembering that a great game began on such a shoogly peg. For now, the best fun is found in the sideshows. On the main stage of its chaotic 128-player showdowns, it stumbles.

These versions of Grand Theft Auto III (2001), Vice City (2002) and San Andreas (2004) are in no way definitive. Seeing them like this is more than a disappointment. It is infuriating.

PowerWash Simulator is currently in early access (you pay a reduced premium to play a game not yet finished), but even now this is an irresistible example of so-called “playbour”, and further evidence that a shit job often makes for a sublime game. [Early Access review]

Part town-planning exercise, part board game, this thoughtful debut gives plenty of scope for strategy and idealism. [Early Access Score = 80]

This new iteration of the escape-to-the-country fantasy replaces all that was charming about earlier versions with an average adventure game.

Its mix of planetary scavenging, alien-hunting and funky artwork ought to be a smash, but sluggish mechanics and onerous mission demands diminish the fun.

The Medium is hugely ambitious and could have been a site for incredible, innovative storytelling. Instead, it fumbles sensitive topics, plot points evaporate into thin air, and characters who are studied closely are left behind and never mentioned again. Even while taking notes, the story became difficult to follow. It took me 12 hours over three nights to play, and towards the finale I was astounded by how a game so short could feel so long. This certainly is a game of two worlds: one very beautiful and one very empty, unfortunately leaving us with a game that is all skin and no spirit.

The pain and the pleasure of platformers such as this is their precision: the controls must be so tight, the jumping and running so perfectly predictable, that your failures are always your own. In Super Meat Boy Forever, though, enemies can turn up in especially unfair places, and the architecture of the levels sometimes feels thrown together as opposed to carefully placed by human hand. Its difficulty feels vindictive rather than playful, and oddly soulless, like trying to beat a computer at chess. For all its challenges, it felt as if I could feel the creators cheering me through the original Super Meat Boy’s death chambers, willing me onwards. Here, the algorithm is coldly indifferent to your efforts, and, despite the offbeat art and quirky vibe, the game is a punishing gauntlet that’s not worth running.

There just isn’t very much to do in The Pathless: you run across empty fields for a while, before solving a small variety of puzzles. Boss battles, with their blend of dashing, fighting and light brainwork, drive home that the Giant Squid formula works best in small doses. The score is reduced to sparse percussion in the open field, and the world itself doesn’t offer much in terms of visual variety or secrets to uncover. The problem isn’t the rudimentary gameplay itself, but how The Pathless tries to stretch its few puzzles across several hours. I was bored after the first hour, and no new ideas or clever twists arrived to rescue me from torpor.

The idea of a literal battle of the bands is a good one, and I was always keen to see what the next encounter would look like. But the lack of substance to the actual fights was invariably disappointing. Despite some impressive sights and sounds, in the end No Straight Roads has too many potholes to make its musical journey worth recommending.

Peaky Blinders: Mastermind is stuck between abstraction and fan fiction, ambition and restraint. At its best, it’s streamlined; at worst, stifling and predetermined. Give me an Alfie Solomons rum-empire management game, and you’d have my attention.

For the most part, the acting is pretty dismal, as if the cast were exhausted by the number of takes they had to make for each branch path of action. Nevertheless, the always welcome Kate Dickie pops up as the tech company’s CEO and gets to sport a particularly amusing pair of tartan pants – the kind of clothes you dig out of the closet when you have been in isolation for too long.

Animal Crossing is everything I have been craving: it is gentle, soothing, social and creative, and my group chats are already buzzing with hype about beetles and villager fashions. If there was ever a perfect time for a game such as this, that time is now.

There’s a fine line between playfully obtuse instructions and infuriatingly vague game design. Being unable to complete a task because it’s challenging is one thing, but not knowing exactly what the task is (and being blocked from doing it by bugs) is another. Table Manners has a brilliant premise and provides incisively funny commentary on modern romance but, just like when a Tinder date doesn’t match their profile and then proceeds to behave inexplicably, sometimes you just want to make your excuses and leave.

There’s nothing wrong with a game making you work hard before it yields rewards, but Ghost Recon Breakpoint takes that principle so far that, in its early stages at least, playing it is a chore. The latest iteration of Ubisoft’s future-soldier open-world shooter has plenty of good points, but those are marred by basic elements that so broken that the game feels like a backward step from Ghost Recon: Wildlands (2017).

Oninaki’s sin, then, is to be so achingly close to quality and yet so far; to have almost everything needed for a top-tier role-playing game – an interesting premise, hauntingly evocative aesthetics, a deep and complex approach to combat – only to be betrayed by fundamental issues that keep it tied to this earthly realm.

There’s plenty of intrigue here, and in better circumstances you’d want to spend more time with the characters in order to understand their perspectives. But by the fifth time you’ve opened a lock that could have so easily have opened automatically, all you really want to do is find the quickest possible route to the exit.

This is a game from another time, best enjoyed with your brain switched off, some friends to laugh with, and perhaps a bottle of extremely cheap spirits.

An accomplished but rather tedious and macabre game.

Even where it is strongest, Anthem rarely stretches beyond the derivative. The combat, while well-designed, is little more than Gears of War with jetpacks, and narratively it veers between inconsequential and downright irritating. This anthem is, sadly, a tedious and conservative dirge that we’ve all heard before

Previous Fallout games always had something to say about the post-apocalypse and the human factors that led to it; here, it’s reduced to shooting mutants and picking up rubbish. Even if, in the future, it mutates into something more stable, it will still feel eerily soulless.

Phantom Doctrine may find an enthusiastic audience with strategy-game masochists. It is complex and open-ended; there are multiple ways to finish missions, and they’re are not always about taking out targets. But it’s also punishing and opaque, poorly explained and hampered by a flummoxing plot. For most of us, it’s a confused and very niche experience.

The ability to explore space with a party of up to three friends makes it feel much less lonely than before. And where it once was difficult to return to a previously visited planet, establishing bases allows you to make some small corner of the universe feel like home.

The Crew 2 has the whiff of a game that might become something wonderful in a year’s time, after numerous patches and additions. But right here, at the beginning, it doesn’t do enough.

After the touching emotional drama of Dontnod’s previous game – the coming-of-age adventure Life Is Strange – Vampyr’s ambitious but awkward chin-stroking is disappointingly inert, while its failure to reconcile its ethical hand-wringing with its gratuitous combat leaves it as conflicted as its undead protagonist.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is a dull game with a great concept, made borderline unplayable by its hyper-aggressive monetisation.

It’s plausibly a commentary on the nature of an ecosystem, but the emotional reward doesn’t compensate a player for the amount of busywork.

When set against the non-VR first-person shooters, a genre in which only those games that have benefitted persistent, focused iteration and a king’s ransom of investment can now compete, Farpoint seems embryonic and amateurish. Its thrills are short-lived, but the lessons that can be drawn from its struggles in trying to transpose the genre into VR will surely echo for a long time to come.

It tells its story well, with smart writing and some superb characterisation that elevate its simple revenge plot. Ultimately, however, it never capitalises on its open world potential, instead succumbing to an almost constant lull of tediously unimaginative repetition that makes for a boring and dated open-world shooter.

To put it bluntly, Pokémon Go is not good as a game. Until it gets updates which iron out kinks and offer content promised in early trailers, such as trading Pokémon, group battles, or even just more interesting combat, this isn’t likely to change.

With its open-world environment and emphasis on crafting, this is an interesting sequel, marred by glitches and frame rate issues.

With this time-spanning opus, Remedy Entertainment hoped to unite narrative gaming and linear television for its Xbox One title. But neither comes out of the experiment well.

If you’re old enough, if you love Nintendo enough and if you have enough friends who fall into both categories, Miitomo is an inventive and fun, first mobile app for the company. Everyone else? The wait will continue for Nintendo to make some more ambitious mobile games based on its most-loved brands.

Of more importance is how this world will evolve once enough players have completed all the current missions and find themselves in an end-game that is effectively a treasure hunt in an anarchic moral wasteland. Even at this early stage though, The Division is an experience that’s worth having if you’re at all interested in mainstream action games, or role-playing adventures, or co-operative online play. You will not be bored as you blast your way through.

There has never been a better way to confront, or indulge, your inner assassin.

Like throwing a punch in the dark, buying Street Fighter V today is a speculative gamble.

That dearth of fun is the crux here. As the series finally begins to carve out an identity for itself, shed the dead-weight of its futuristic fluff of a sub-plot, and really let fly with its caricatural depiction of human history, it’s simultaneously failing to keep up with even middling mechanical, technical and design standards. With searing irony, the series feels more historic with each profit-driven iteration.

This feels 80% of the way to a great game, but that missing 20% soon comes to dominate the rest. With a little more fine-tuning who knows how The Swindle may have turned out but, as things stand, it feels a little like being short-changed.

At its worst, it’s the gaming equivalent of a drunkard shouting abuse from a park bench. At its best … well, the drunkard has leapt up and now he’s wielding a plastic knife. Rage against political correctness if you like, but don’t support this tired game as part of your ideology – there are so many better uses of your spare time.

Hotline Miami 2 is a messy, aimless sequel and a step back from the original. Many of its levels feel like crafted set-pieces rather than playgrounds for violent expression, and your scope for creativity is stifled as a result.

In some ways, the game’s simple ambitions would not have been a problem if the recipe had been respectfully crafted. But to a modern audience spolied for choice when it comes to excellent family games, it is something of a travesty.

This is a 10-minute laugh, if that – the kind of thing that's here today, gone tomorrow, but for a brief moment in history is the talk of Shoreditch and Twitter. It's the gaming equivalent of a novelty single and even the developers, to give credit where it's due, recommend you don't buy it. Listen to them.

Rome: Total War is one of the most brilliant games I've ever played. Total War: Rome II inverts far more than the name. This does not channel the greatest military empire in history so much as the pale shadow of its ending; a bloated, technically corrupt and unfocused mess.

We loved SimCity for the first few hours, but the compulsion soon gave way to frustration...The simulation promises more than it delivers, and you feel perpetually boxed-in by the meagre city sizes. The social features are interesting, but we'd rather have the ability to save our game, play offline, and not have to worry about server downtime. The regional multiplayer really should be an optional aside to a standard single-player mode.

War games can do dumb, and I'm OK with that. But dressing dumb up in the cloak of authenticity seems a dangerous line to cross. When you pretend to be saying something about ongoing real-world wars, but present a conflict of extremes with all the substance of air, the thought that anyone might take Warfighter seriously becomes a very queasy one.

Unfortunately, any sustained period of time spent actually playing The Eternity Clock will leave you with a similarly desperate feeling. Doctor Who games have always set very specific problems.

So, what do you get for your money? Beyond standard fighting or five, 10 and (ultimately) 20 fighter survival modes, not very much at all...Clearly there are enough Tekken fans out there to justify the conversion but it all simply boils down to pixels slapping pixels and that gets very boring, very quickly.

Everything Frobisher does well, Deviants does too – just a bit worse.

For actual fun and a bit of instruction – all the things you'd get at a real life Zumba class – you want Dance Central. But for adding one more piece to the Zumba branding behemoth, it has to be this, whether it's any good or not.

A mark for nostalgia then – it's the Duke, after all – and one for the game. If this was 15 years in the making, it makes you wonder what they did for the other 14 years and 10 months.

Altogether, Yoostar is as baffling as Gwyneth Paltrow in a rom-com: smart and charming, sure, but basically uninteresting, and nobody's first choice for a fun night in.

A moderate try, but minimal fun.

Overall, this game has a nice central premise let down by execution. For die hard fans – either of skateboarding or Orwellian nightmares – only.

Despite these misgivings, the gameplay actually isn't all that bad.

But when you play it, you get the feeling that everyone involved with the franchise will be secretly relieved when the whole juggernaut finally grinds to a permanent halt.

There's more mileage in a Tamagotchi, and one of them would never ask you to shame yourself by acting out "play dead" on the living room floor.

And it's all over in about five or six hours. Worse, for all its authenticity in terms of voicework, the cut scenes and animation are all too often hilariously awful.

Hamstrung by clumsy mechanics, this game was unfortunately destined to disappoint; which is a pity when the conceptual framework was so promising.