It’s into this rich version of Sea of Thieves that the PlayStation 5 embarks – the latest in a series of Microsoft first-party titles coming to Sony’s machine. And what newcomers will find is an absolutely perfect translation of the current Xbox version, retaining the mannered visual splendour, with its stunningly authentic water physics, luminous sunsets and enticingly tropical islands. Experienced players will be able to quickly and seamlessly link to their Xbox accounts, while cross-play between the consoles and the PC is similarly painless. At the start of the game, you chose a boat (sloop, brigantine or galleon), invite friends from the list or select an open crew to play with strangers (Rare runs its own message boards to help players meet up and organise a voyage together), and you’re off.

Like your knowledge of the game’s beautiful and rich ecosystem, this knowledge accumulates naturally over time, and a game that seems intimidating at first quickly becomes one of the more rewarding gaming experiences of recent years. There is no feeling quite like taking down a dragon with nothing but a sword, your wits and sheer nerve.

It is rare to play a game so accomplished in everything it sets out to do. God of War is a standard-setter both technologically and narratively. It is a game that, until recently, would have been impossible.

This is an unlikely comparison, but now that I’ve had some time to absorb The Last of Us Part II, it reminds me thematically of Shadow of the Colossus, another game about how consuming grief and anger can be. I was similarly poleaxed by that game’s clever manipulation of the player’s power, the way it also used the language of video games to make you think twice about your actions. The Last of Us Part II is another story that could only work as a game, the kind of challenging, groundbreaking work that comes along two or three times a decade.

An enthralling, at times near-classic adventure.

Here is an exquisite gem, the brightest in Ueda’s enviable clutch.

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.

Everything takes this strange comfort of the procedurally generated personal to a universal scale, and it is good. It’s really good. Everything is a game that knows what its core strengths are, and it does not shy away from them: everything persists, and everything is connected.

The things is, you don’t have to think about anything if you don’t want to; you can just enjoy the adrenaline rush, blasting symbolic victims of player violence (enemies even disappear in a whirl of multicoloured light when shot, a self-reflexive reference to the sheer disposability of non-player characters). But a darker subtext is always there, if you want to look beneath the gleaming surface...In this way, Deathloop gets to have its cake and eat it – over and over again. And it is, to be fair, absolutely delicious.

It comes packed with visceral gun-battles, ear-splitting explosions, bucketloads of blood and you use a good old-fashioned control-pad to play it. Oh, and it's also one of the best games released all year.

Civilization VII is very much the Civilization for now – deep and complex, but with an emphasis on human drama and achievement rather than the sweep of faceless units across a mathematical matrix. There are still few moments in video games as pleasing as building the Hanging Gardens, or discovering a bountiful new location for a town, or marching a phalanx of troops into a battered enemy capital. This game, which once almost cost me my job, will gracefully sneak away with hours, days and possibly months of your life. But then, nobody ever conquered the world in an afternoon.

What Nintendo's designers do with this new spatial freedom ranges from amazing to even more amazing.

Here is a keen reminder of gaming's ability to provide we who live in a world charted by satellites and Google Maps with new frontiers, with the unfettered joy of discovery, with the sense of our own psychical and mental horizons being expanded.

Metal Gear Solid V is a game-changing triumph. It is comfortably the best stealth game yet made. But that accolade sells the game short. This is the final evolution of a video game director’s singular vision, one first painted in the crude pixels of the 1980s and now fully realised, fully resplendent.

Journey's visual and sound design sets new standards for interactive entertainment. This alone makes it an extraordinary work, but it's the way that these aesthetic elements come together with beautifully subtle direction and storytelling to create a lasting emotional effect that elevates this to one of the very best games of our time.

Neon White’s chaotic presentation and somewhat puerile script conceals a game of taut design and striking imagination – a delicious test of skills that generously rewards commitment with exhilaration.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a game that succeeds in recreating the childhood joy of reading a book and being utterly transported into its pages, only to reach the end and realise it’s not real. It will touch the heart of all but the most soulless of gamers.

This is fascinating, formally daring stuff that, in its two-hour playtime, asks more questions about the nature of memory, simulation and identity than a dozen 100-hour epics.

The Case of the Golden Idol is a game of reasoning, elegantly modest in execution – the artwork is rudimentary, but strikingly so – but one that often requires extravagant feats of deduction. Genuinely new and inventive forms of play are relatively rare in video games, a medium that more often trades in refinement than revolution. Which makes this even more thrilling. Its puzzles are inventive, but so too is the way they must be solved, allowing both a trial-and-error approach and pure deductive reasoning. A game of wondrous, Sherlockian texture that plays out in our own imagination as much as on screen.

It’s a game in near-perfect balance, a lean and distinctly not mean ode to turn-based tactics that embraces the genre’s creative puzzling while repudiating its worst excesses. Tactical Breach Wizards lets you see the future, raise the dead, and burst through windows on a witch’s broom. Yet amid all that, its most powerful spell is empathy.

Right now, it’s my main contender for game of the year, simply because, in its lack of pretension, its attention to detail and its understanding that video games first and foremost should be fun, it puts everything else I’ve played recently in its long shadow.

XCOM 2 is a perfect example of how iteration should work for games: it takes a great original, fixes and streamlines the problems, and doubles-down in unexpected areas. Among its greatest achievements is adding a sense of pace to the overall campaign and the moment-to-moment combat. This is an about-turn from the principles of the original that could have gone wrong but instead is the making of the experience.

Skyrim is one of the most gargantuan undertakings gamers will experience all year. The sheer size of the adventure, both in terms of its environment and in the amount of activities available to the player, is mind-blowing.

Robo Recall is an almost perfect VR arcade experience. The only downside is that the cost of entry for Oculus Rift and Touch – even with a new lower price of £598 – is still too high for many, when you include the cost of the PC needed to run it. But that’s not the game’s fault.

Telling Lies requires a deliberateness from its players that turns us from viewers to active plot participants. It’s a game that doesn’t hold your hand, and ultimately it’s down to you to decide the truth – another secret of a good mystery done well.

Where many western games yearn to be seen as the height of sophistication, craving the critical kudos of an HBO drama, Bayonetta 3 stands defiant in its absurdity. Like its predecessors, this is destined to go down as a cult classic – a dizzying dance of demon-dicing delight. Its crude, whiplash-inducing narrative means it certainly won’t be for everyone, but the best things in life rarely are.

Inside is constantly surprising, introducing new elements without ever overwhelming, maintaining an excellent pace over the course of about four hours.

New Leaf is a world on a cartridge slightly bigger than a stamp, one full of beautiful, wise and hopelessly optimistic observation of humans as social animals. It is a magical creation.

Crypt of the Necrodancer may not be for everyone, but if the idea of a steamy love-in between two seemingly incompatible genres turns you on, you’re gonna love it.

Only two or three hours long, Goose Game doesn’t overstay its welcome, though there is an expanded list of small mischiefs to accomplish post-credits, if you still wish to continue terrorising the innocent. Certainly not fowl, most definitely worth a gander, it’s a whimsical little game full of charm and joy and a wonderful experience for just about anyone.

Arkham Knight triumphs as a richly empowering comic book fantasy that sees its hero fail almost as much as he succeeds, making him the most believable, the most occasionally unlikeable, and ultimately the most heroic he’s ever been.

And then there’s the fact that Blue Prince has the best titular homophone in video games (sorry Fortnite). It’s a game about the blueprints of the Mount Holly Estate, and naturally a magical mansion like this has a story; it’s this, the family behind it, and the fantastical wider world in which they live, that will draw you to the 46th room and far, far beyond.

You could look over videogame history and pick out antecedents for some of what Her Story does but, even so, I’ve never played anything quite like it.

While some players will spend hours perfecting time trials and improving their standing online, that’s not really what these games are for. Mario Kart is a vehicle for fun with all your friends and family, no matter their individual skill, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the best, most versatile version of that yet.

A game that marries the best bits of the franchise’s long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts.

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.

I have never seen – or played – anything like it. It’s not a game that everyone will love, but I do think it’s one that everyone should play.

Hot Pursuit, like the high-end vehicles it fetishises, has been crafted with genuine care, with great insight, with technical brilliance. Gran Turismo 5 will grab the headlines and the purist vote, but it surely won't live like this game does; it will be an austere cathedral to Criterion's joyous modernist structure.

Those subtle changes and little overhauls make all the difference, and they’re wrapped up in perhaps the most beautiful first-person shooter ever made – one that captures the sludge of the trenches, the cacophony of destruction of a battlefield, and the intensity of desert standoffs and mountainside raids. Dice has taken a risk visiting a time period not seen in major multiplayer shooters before, and Battlefield aces it. This is a lavish package that capitalises on a stagnancy in the genre, offering something new, exciting and, most importantly, solid.

More than ever, the Mass effect universe pulls off the masterful trick of feeling huge and yet believable – the game's production values are through the roof, and its third-person shooter controls incredibly precise, responsive and accurate given Mass Effect's immense scope. It really does feel like a TV sci-fi series in which you play the central character.

The results of this suffusion are nothing short of spectacular, delivering an expertly crafted Half-Life tale inside a knockout VR experience.

That, really, is the fundamental value in Forza Horizon 3. It wants you to have fun. It will challenge you, it will ask you to improve as a driver and it will reward you for doing so. But first and foremost, it wants you to spend time in this ridiculous playground, with some of the best (and strangest) cars in the world, having an absolute blast.

It's a game that's been meticulously crafted to keep you moving. Every jump leads precisely onto the next water-drenched slope which slides down to zip-line before the checkpoint. At times it moves with the agility of a slickly produced Sunday morning cartoon, when in actuality it's a video game. A video game that leaves others looking like dead sharks.

A masterclass: breezily new, yet quintessentially in character with its illustrious forbearers.

Every so often, a game comes along which is so irresistible that it leaves you wondering whether sequelitis might actually be a good thing. Far Cry 3 being a classic example.

Its elegance, precision, humour, and challenge make Bloodborne irresistible. Ultimately, the horror is secondary; wonder is the true transfusion on offer here.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, at least for anyone who played its brilliant but cruel predecessor FTL: Faster Than Light, is how overwhelmingly fair Into the Breach is. There are no random events that unexpectedly handicap you. Instead, every situation is winnable from the outset (though poor first-turn decisions will change that), and you are shown the consequences of any action before you commit to it.

This is demanding work, but the game’s distinct but complementary loops of playful labour are highly compelling. The satisfaction of completing a challenging dive without needing to be rescued, then watching the rave reviews on “Cooksta” pour in, is profound. Stylish, witty and exquisitely designed, Dave the Diver uses several hooks to achieve its goal, while establishing the relationship between the food we eat and the world from which its harvested with useful urgency.

Left Behind does nothing new with The Last of Us' tense and exhilarating gameplay rhythm; you're always either in intense danger, or fearfully anticipating the next moment of intense danger. But it tells a different story, one that's more compact and more affecting for it, and it shows that Naughty Dog has serious emotional range. Rarely have I played anything as powerful.

Its concept may seem silly at first, but the latest title from prodigious indie developer Stephen Lavelle is one of the most difficult puzzle games ever made.

More than just Fallout in space, this action-RPG is a delightful sci-fi romp with razor-sharp writing, lashings of humour and enough content to entertain you for months.

The continual design evolution of one project split over three full games and dozens of expansions makes me hesitant to call Warhammer III a landmark strategy game in its own right. But looking back now at that very first trailer, it does feel like a promise kept.

It might not quite match the narrative prowess of BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, but Jedi: Survivor has so much else going for it. Whether you’re tracking down optional bounty hunters, solving the puzzles in those Jedi temples, or searching Koboh’s many obscure thoroughfares for character upgrades, the game’s tactile controls and precisely balanced challenge make it consistently rewarding. Meanwhile, its biggest moments rival anything games like God of War or Elden Ring can throw at you. Be assured, this is the Star Wars game you’re looking for.

Visual and haptical enhancements along with bonus content including new modes, cut stages and audio commentary from designers make this a required experience.

If you want to visit Lordran and enjoy a straight-up bash-the-baddies quest, then you’ll find no better collection of bosses than this. If a new kind of adventure appeals, however, one in which quick fingers matter less than brains and human cunning, there’s still nothing like Dark Souls. After seven years its mystery has diminished, but it’s still among the best of the best.

There can be no doubt that this is a landmark game. It is a new high water-mark for lifelike video game worlds, certainly, but that world is also home to a narrative portrait of the wild west that is unexpectedly sombre and not afraid to take its time.

In truth, Dark Souls is un-replicable precisely because of its individuality. Yes, many of its best moments have been felt in other games through the years: the joyful surprise of opening an unlikely shortcut, the rush of dopamine at defeating a long-standing boss, the thrill of upgrading a character and evening the odds, the sense of aesthetic wonder at a piece of grand architecture. But no game has combined them in such an alluring and memorable way, or with such adherence to cohesive vision.

Blizzard’s take on the team-based shooter is as polished as you’d expect, marrying tactical breadth with an emphasis on variety and inclusivity.

For those players who can exercise a little patience and restraint, it's quite simply one of the best games you'll play all year.

Of the many things Death Stranding 2 is trying to say, the message that comes to the fore is: you are never truly alone. Global disasters, big tech, even death itself – these things might abstract the way we connect to one another, but they can’t sever the connection altogether. Not bad for a game about delivering boxes.

You could summarise Dwarf Fortress as a game about the meticulous cultivation of downfall. There’s no victory condition beyond the satisfaction of bolting together another grand chronicle of inevitable disaster. It’s this joyful fatalism as much as the simulation’s richness that makes it timeless.

Whether or not it's the best ever Zelda game is open to debate, but it's certainly up there. However, nobody could argue that it's anything less than a masterclass in the art of crafting video games.

DMC5 is a lot like Dante himself: older, grizzled, more experienced, yet still unapologetically juvenile in the best possible way. It’s bloody, spectacular and irresistible, all cheesy one-liners, guns, swords and explosions while guitars scream in the background, and it plays like a dream. Director Hideaki Itsuno and his team have delivered: Devil May Cry is back.

I feel as if I will never finish this game. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on it, it reveals a new expanse. I haven’t even mentioned the depths, the particularly dangerous pitch-black underground world that exists below Hyrule. (Man, I do not like it down there.) I am walking around looking at all the clutter in my house and imagining ways that I could fuse it together. I invite my kids on to the sofa with me to watch Link’s adventures, and we all scream as I’m pursued by a terrifyingly fast gloop-monster made of grasping hands. In an airport recently, surrounded by bored people staring at their phones, I was so absorbed in a labyrinth I’d found at the edge of the map that I nearly missed my boarding call.

Its gorgeously lush visuals are quite simply among the best ever seen in a game, offering an object lesson in how stylisation has the power to trump photorealism even in the 4K age. Some players will lack the time or patience to put in the effort that any heavyweight role-playing game demands – this is a 50-hour adventure at least – but it puts forward an irresistible case for your attention. As video games are once again weathering ignorance-fuelled attacks that paint them as universally gun-centric, violent and nihilistic, Ni no Kuni is a timely counterpoint.

The game sizzles with invention, and its hyperactive flits from the cosmic to the prosaic combine to produce an astonishing, memorable and novel piece of work. The game’s ambitions lie not in producing a pixel-perfect representation of the world, but in something deeper and truer.

Dark Souls II is an extraordinary game. If it stops short of fulfilling something precious within the soul, it certainly has the heart, mind and fingers covered.

It takes a lot to reinvent a 30-plus-year-old franchise while keeping step with tradition, and Capcom has succeeded admirably. Hopefully the still-to-come monetisation schemes are reasonable (details hadn’t been fully announced at the time of writing) and the netcode remains smooth, because the king of fighting games, Street Fighter II Turbo, is on notice: here comes a new challenger.

I Am Alive uses its post-apocalyptic environment far more effectively than many other games that share its nightmare vision of the future. I Am Alive joins games such as Fallout, RAGE and Left 4 Dead in its setting where a some horrendous event put paid to civilisation as we know it, but in truth, it's far closer in its atmosphere and aesthetic values to Cormac MacCarthy's grim post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.

At its core this is a spectacular work of contemporary young adult fiction, one with a strong moral core, angled yet never didactic, expansive yet always focused.

The map, though similar-sized to Fallout 3's, seems more jam-packed than ever – New Vegas is less a sandbox game than whole beach to play around in.

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.

An unrivalled feat of design and inventiveness.

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.

F1 2013 oozes quality, fully living up to the illustrious nature of its official licence, and the presence of the 1980s and 1990s cars, drivers and tracks gives motorsport nuts a real reason to buy it – which is much-needed for such an annual franchise.

This short collection of small moments manages to cover a wide range of powerfully relatable emotional highs and lows, beautifully capturing what it’s like to fall in love for the first time.

Whether or not you choose Fifa 11 over Pro Evolution Soccer is more likely to be a matter of taste and tribal loyalty, but Fifa fans will be even more delighted with this year's offering than they were with Fifa 10.

A zombie scenario which is entirely plausible and believable and that, in itself, takes Dying Light to a higher plane, reaching toward the role-playing depth of State of Decay and the sheer nastiness of DayZ. Factor in the giant sandbox of a huge city, and the end result is a scarily immersive experience.

The main Hunt gametype is an exceptional experience that, although featuring some familiar mechanics, feels unlike anything else in the genre. The matches have huge diversity, and all create some thrilling rhythm from the mix of hunting and chasing and fighting.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown isn’t a sequel or a prequel to any of the other games, it is a new journey for the series, and its first step is a confident leap. It’s not only that the most notable elements of the series’ different iterations – its setting, traps, time powers, and combat – all find a natural home in this new shape, it’s that it plays like one of the best games in its newly chosen genre, as good as a game as Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight, not an imitation of them. It’s been 13 years since the last wholly new Prince of Persia game; if this is its new direction, it is exciting to see where it will land.

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.

Those looking for a one-stop masterclass in elementary game design could do a lot worse than study this.

If you like games that are so big you can immerse yourselves in them for months, The Master Chief Collection offers excellent value. It’s an absolute monolith of a package, beautifully presented for the 21st century. And with the remastered next-gen GTA V due to arrive shortly, it seems that, at least as far as video games are concerned, nostalgia is the future.

Gears Tactics is a triumphant twist on an old favourite, capturing the fury and spectacle of its shooter-based brethren while also offering a more cerebral experience. Gears has always exhibited shades of American football, from the hypermasculine tone to its disconcertingly swole characters. Now it has the conspicuous brains to match its conspicuous braun.

A game of assured construction, stimulating myth, and welcome challenge, a warm celebration to the games of our childhood that, in its brightest moments, matches them.

We are admittedly right at the beginning of The War Within’s two-year life cycle, but this is the best that WoW has been performing in years. While Blizzard will surely continue to grapple with Warcraft’s place in the modern gaming landscape, especially ahead of WoW’s 20th anniversary, the game feels more relevant than it has in a long time.

It’s reassuring that despite ever-greater technical refinement, Gran Turismo’s unique, eccentric character remains intact. It’s present in the grab-bag mission mode, which handily demonstrates that a race between 17 brake horsepower Fiat 500s can be just as gripping as one between cars with 50 times that. It manifests most obviously in the utterly bemusing music rally mode, which has you hitting checkpoints to the strains of 80s pop relic Hooked on Classics. Keeping this distinctive spirit alive in the era of 4K and 60 frames a second, Gran Turismo 7 feels both fresh and comfortingly familiar.

You could argue that Master Chief is the necessary foil to Halo’s inherent silliness, the gravelly undertone that ties all the pratfalls together. All the same, he and his inability to get over Cortana have long since lost their charm. The series has tried to move away from him before – in that regard, Halo 3: ODST remains its finest hour. It needs to carry on trying.

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.

Now it feels like the physics, AI and animation have come together in a way that makes even these ridiculous moments feel naturalistic and pleasurable. The first Fifa on the Mega Drive billed itself as an authentic experience of real sport, real drama, real spectacle. It wasn’t then, but perhaps, in this final iteration … it is now.

For single players, it's an entertaining and gorgeous-looking dungeon hack but it's a bit short, extremely linear and hardly pushing any boundaries. Playing online (and Blizzard isn't really giving us a choice) makes it a better balanced and more compelling challenge, with all the potential to be the kind of lifestyle substitute that Diablo's legion of hunter-gatherer fans should relish.

There’s the spark of something genuinely special here, beyond a FarmVillian Nightmare, and well beyond the flood of base-building Clash of Clans clones and uninspired Candy Crush-apeing puzzlers cluttering up the app stores.

If MK7 is so brilliant, though, where's that fifth star? I'm withholding it because the best thing you can say about this is that while it improves on a near-perfect 64-bit game, it doesn't make any major advances. The 3D is excellently done, but totally disposable (in fact, you probably will dispose of it before you get your first cup).

This is a nicely contained couple of hours filled with fully aware daft fun. If you go into the game knowing that, you'll find dark slapstick humour that's worth persisting with.

Despite its visual consistency with the previous titles that share the family name WipeOut 2048 represents a concerted attempt to evolve the series in interesting ways, while making shrewd, restrained use of the new handheld's features. In this aim it finds mixed success, often sacrificing finesse in exchange for novelty, but in that creativity a new energy and revived sense of character can be found.

The effect is like Stranger Things directed by Kelly Reichardt – a realist fantasy in which silence and ambiguity come to the fore. Lost Records is ultimately a game about love, grief and self-recrimination, and the different intensities of those forces as we age. By the end you miss the optimism and verve of those girls in the woods, as though you were one of them – and quite possibly, in a lot of ways, you were.

It's a solidly entertaining romp.

Kinect Rush may be short on length, but it's big on playability, imagination and fun.