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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I might have been disappointed by Metroid Prime 4 if it had come out in 2010. But now, after such a long break, I’m happy to return to this anachronistic way of playing: slow, laborious, sometimes annoying. It’s a reunion tour rather than a revival for the Metroid Prime series: some of the new material doesn’t hit but the classic stuff is still just as great as ever.

Whatever you think about the series and its problematic role in how the mainstream games industry works, how it is perceived and the types of communities it engenders, this is slick, thrilling entertainment. Nowhere else will you be blasting a giant robot in a corporate science lab one minute, and then playing a modern take on Atari’s Super Sprint the next. Value matters right now, and in this as in almost everything else, Call of Duty does not hold back. It is a maximalist paean to the ultimate, troubling truth of video game design – shooting stuff on a TV screen is a hell of a lot of fun.

And despite these issues, this is still Football Manager, with all of its delicious tactical minutiae to get lost in. Thanks to the modernised tactics and match engine, making the perfect tactical tweaks to kickstart a stoppage time comeback and silence those oh-so-confident home fans has never felt better. Football Manager 26 provides tangible feedback to your split-second decisions and lets you conceive fictional rivalries that can last for seasons. And when you beat Sunderland with three goals in the final five minutes, the thrill remains unsurpassed.

Sure, The Séance of Blake Manor is an autumnal treat filled with spooky scenes but it is also that most joyous of discoveries: a game that challenges, delights, thrills and educates in equal measure.

Most of all, this is that rarest of things: a horror game that actually has something to say. Rather than simply throwing jumpscares and black-haired ghost maidens at you until you submit, it uses rural mythology and superstition as a lens through which to examine the harms of patriarchy and the rigidly gendered expectations it thrusts on to teenagers. It also proves that the survival horror genre still has so much to give, 30 years after its inception. You must come to Ebisugaoka as soon as you can, and stay at least a week, maybe longer.

For the most part, Battlefield 6 is a brilliant return to form, a thrilling, almost operatic shooter experience, which manages to combine deafening combat with tactical subtlety. How it will fit into the modern landscape of hero shooters and battle royale blast-em-ups is anyone’s guess – it deserves a shot, that’s for sure.

This spiky, funny, and bracingly original game consumed a few laughter- and tear-filled evenings, and left memories that will stay with me a good deal longer.

This might be a straightforward tale at heart, but it has absorbed me more than any other historical action game. Even hours and hours in, I still feel a flicker of excitement whenever Atsu purposefully draws her sword at the beginning of a battle. I will be sad to see the end of it.