The game presents a formidable challenge, and most players should begin at the easiest difficulty level, where the laser bullets fall like a shower rather than hail, and you have a modest stock of lives that replenish between each of the game’s seven lingering stages. It is, at times, repetitious, and Cygni’s novel systems will no doubt prove divisive among the genre’s dedicated and often conservative followers. But for those who approach with an open mind and dextrous fingers, it remains a thrilling vision.

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.

To look at Black Myth: Wukong purely through the lens of market sizes and tastes is a disservice that obscures the most critical fact of all: it’s a fantastic game.

A genuinely likable new lead and intense attention to the mythology of the Star Wars films made this a nostalgic thrill.

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.

The underlying issue with Dustborn is the balancing act between serious topics and the supernatural, as well as its clear desire to alternate between fun moments, activism and drama – a balance it ultimately can’t hit. For example, a tragedy for an entire community is followed by a birthday party for a raccoon. I had a better time once I stopped taking it seriously, because the standout moments happen when Dustborn leans into the silliness of its supernatural storyline. With Dustborn, you may expect a tense trek across the US, but what you really end up with is the equivalent of an interactive Marvel movie, and that is OK.

If The Crush House had simply been a smart and funny photography and cinematography game, I would have been satisfied and pleased – but it offers the player far more than that. Underneath the snappy text and playful design, it has a weird heart, too. It’s worth noting that the review build still had moments of glitchiness – however the strength of the idea and execution far outweighs any of the technical struggles. This in itself is remarkable: The Crush House is so much fun that even the slightly broken parts didn’t make me want to turn it off. It’s a fantastic way to spend the last few chill nights of summer – and the seasons coming up, too.

Video games, at their best, allow us to inhabit the lives of people who are different from us, or to assume the roles of protagonists in stories we have the power to shape, or fiddle with recreations of the systems that underpin civilisations. But they can also be a very silly little joke, shared among friends, which for 15 minutes or so make everyone love each other a tiny bit more.

In the future, when the subject of the funniest comedy games of all time crops up, the usual names will be there – Monkey Island, The Stanley Parable, Death Stranding (I’m kidding) – but now surely a new one will join them. Coal Supper has produced perhaps the first great abstract Yorkshire-based cartoon puzzler of the 21st century. Thank goodness.

It definitely exhausted my brain from time to time – now and then I was just shifting stuff around in circles because I couldn’t figure out how to make three blocks land on three separate switches at the same time, as the conveyor belt logic of the puzzles temporarily eluded me. But more often I felt locked in, darting around the levels and arranging them almost on instinct, feeling as if I was playing Tetris. Having reached the end of Jenna’s adventure, I am definitely done with block puzzles for a while – but rarely do you play a game that explores one good idea as thoroughly as this.

I enjoyed the couple of afternoons I spent with Flock – I only wish there were more of it. A couple of really interesting little environmental puzzles made me wish to find others hidden around the uplands. Most of the creatures can be found quite easily, but just a few required some enjoyable deduction from a single sentence in the field guide. Once or twice, a creature in my entourage pointed me towards another, or helped me search something out, but most of them do nothing except follow you around. I couldn’t help but imagine a just slightly more ambitious version of this game, in which key beasties bestowed interesting abilities, with races or challenges to give you something to do with your friends once you’d filled out the field guide. But after less than five hours I’d done everything there was to do.

The ponderous, obscure pacing will not be to everyone’s taste, and you’ll need a powerful machine to reproduce the world as its creators intended, but – surprisingly, perhaps – Riven’s mystical power has only intensified with age. There is nothing else quite like it. And as many of us count the days until the summer holidays, here is a destination free of tourists, with plentiful vistas and a clockwork conundrum that, when solved, provides a revitalising blast of satisfaction.

Zenless Zone Zero is stylish, silly and exciting, and promises years of fresh stories and an endless conveyor belt of shiny toys to seduce you. You pay for it somehow, either with your time or your money, but for me at least, it feels like a fair exchange.

As ever, Mario’s brother is a scream, but this remaster is haunted by the spectre of its much better sequel – and the price might spook you.

This horror game creates great atmosphere with its acting and visual design, but is regularly brought to its knees by uninspiring gameplay.

Hunters is not quite as much fun as playing Overwatch … or watching Star Wars. It could have done with some truly original features, or more movie content tied in with the gameplay. Instead, it is a decent team shooter that you can play on Switch or mobile, and swap your progress between the two, so you never have to go more than a few moments without levelling up a wookiee. Yes, it tries to bamboozle you with many quests, challenges and blinking icons on the menu screen so that you inevitably fold and buy a £10 season pass, but you can definitely defeat the game’s Jedi mind tricks and have a blast without paying. The force is strong in this one, but not THAT strong.

At a time when the big video game companies are focused on building video games designed to function like sport, with seasons and passes and never-ending fixtures designed to dominate your leisure time, what a joy to be presented with a game that is so intricate and contained. This is a perfectly made contraption, with a start, a middle and an end, intended to inspire joy and build culture, and not, mercifully, shareholder value.

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.

F1 24 is really all about how its clever incorporation of real drivers into the career mode throws up an endless number of possibilities – just like the real sport hopefully will for the rest of this season and beyond.

Moonloop Games pulls off its artful attempt to elevate the humble twin-stick shooter.

Those tiring of Overwatch 2, Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, who want a fresh take on the format and have a penchant for Ubi franchises, have many happy hours of shooting, hiding and grinding for XP ahead.

There is a layer of kindness interwoven within the cruelty, implying that even the world’s greatest monsters were once human. In an increasingly divided age, this simple message of choosing empathy over hatred feels especially poignant. As monolithic megacorps shutter Bafta-winning studios, a game like Hellblade II deserves to be cherished. Who knows how many more such cerebral epics this risk-averse industry will produce.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a riveting puzzle game, which uses its eerie visuals and elusive story as an intrinsic element of the experience rather than a mere design affectation. It is a game that asks subtle questions about the nature of creativity and play, and later it takes a breathtakingly meta turn that will thrill those who remember Kojima’s tricks in the Metal Gear Solid series. It is also a meditation on the troubled relationship between art and commerce, and quite frankly, there could not be a more timely concern for a video game to explore.

Eiyuden Chronicle stands as a monument to his singular design sensibilities, and a testament to the power of a determined community, both within the game’s fiction, and by its very existence.

The mystery of Crow Country was far richer than I had anticipated: the story is very completely drawn, and isn’t without a little levity and playfulness in the face of the darkness. I found the final sequences really bold – committed to the strange and unsettling all the way through, it certainly sticks the landing. Crow Country is far more than a pastiche of the giants of the PS1 era – it is a real triumph in and of itself.

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.

Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a new tennis sim, but TopSpin 2K25 is worth it. If there’s one thing that this game teaches you, it’s the value of determined patience. Well, that and the fact that you can match pink Lycra with yellow sunglasses and look amazing.

Reigns Beyond works as a madcap space caper that you can dip into for 10 minutes at a time, and the wit and pace of the dialogue are impressive. But I did wonder why I was part of a band. Sometimes when you land on a planet you’ll play a gig, but these musical interludes are repetitive, unchallenging and inconsequential. It’s funny and surprisingly wide-ranging as a space-team comedy, but as a band buddy comedy it’s comparatively shallow. I also wonder whether the name isn’t holding it back at this point: Reigns made sense when it was a game about being a variably competent monarch, but it doesn’t scream comedy sci-fi, and I think it will end up passing a lot of people by as a result – a minor tragedy, as you won’t find anything else like these few hours of spacefaring silliness for under a fiver.

Botany Manor isn’t a long game, but it is immersive and relaxing. There are fantastic, upfront accessibility options for players who struggle with the motion sickness that can often come with first-person gameplay. There’s a classic feel to it: it has touches of Myst, and The Witness, but none of their heaviness. The challenges are never too frustrating. It is a perfect two-night experience, a trip into a surprisingly sunny past, a story sprinkled with secrets that gently connect us to Arabella, but never weigh the player down. Though the story never lets us get too close to her, helping her to complete these measured, sophisticated puzzles is truly satisfying and peaceful.

It will deliver a fun weekend of fart-infused chaos for anyone who misses the days when snowfall meant freedom.

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.

If this review feels chaotic, then that’s a fair reflection of the game. It is mad, fun, fantastical chaos and I honestly love it. Before I started writing this, I had left my Arisen and her endearingly incompetent pawn in an ancient battleground patrolled by a dragon. We blasted it with a couple of ballista bolts, and then it flew over and crushed the ballista with a claw, at which point I realised we were somewhat outgunned here and ran for some castle ruins to hide from the creature. This seemed like a good idea until skeletal warriors rose from the ground, and I realised the castle is extremely haunted. I don’t know how we’ll get out of this situation. But I do know it will be an adventure.

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.

You leave this stylish, compact and clever game feeling relieved to be free, but then an hour later as you sit at your computer answering endless work emails or grinding in some identikit live-service fantasy game, you have to ask yourself – am I really?

There’s a parable for sports franchises to follow here: taking a year off (as WWE did in 2020) can be a good thing. From the hilariously detailed character creator to the sensation of administering a German suplex, 2K24 hits its marks.

Melody of Moominvalley is simple and unchallenging, and also disappointingly short – you can see almost everything within a day’s play. And yet it’s all put together with such care that it’s difficult to begrudge these shortcomings. The licence is everything: spending a short time in a faithfully evoked version of Tove Jansson’s strange and memorable world is worth the entrance fee.

It’s a delightfully silly journey, and a rare example of a truly iconoclastic video game emerging from a sea of derivatives.

Longtime fans will hungrily slurp up every morsel of sugary fan service here, savouring every extra moment spent with this hugely beloved cast. For Avalanche-loving diehards, this is a miracle of nostalgia-stirring dream fulfilment. Newcomers hoping to experience one of the medium’s most beloved stories in its new, modern form, however, should be prepared for some yawn-inducing lows alongside many Buster-sword swinging highs.

If its publisher Ubisoft continues to support it, Skull and Bones will attract a committed player base of sea-combat enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with their ships’ builds and facing off against each other, or teaming up to take on the intimidating fleets, cargo heists and sea monsters that lurk tens of hours in. If you are after a game that feels like a pirate adventure, though, you’re still better off with Black Flag.

The archeologist’s earliest adventures show their age in more ways than one, but this revival preserves enough of the games’ treasured elements to keep purists happy.

This is perhaps the most fun I’ve had from a pure co-op shooter since Left 4 Dead or the original horde mode in Gears of War – it is so precise, its gunplay so invigorating, its feedback and effects so generous. Everything about this game is ridiculous, including how good it is at what it sets out to do.

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.

As someone who has played Tekken since 1995, who once smashed a PlayStation controller to pieces trying to beat Kazuya Mishima in Tekken 2 and who, as a young games journalist, often found himself in the Official PlayStation Magazine games room taking countless screenshots of Yoshimitsu’s Helicopter Stomp, Tekken 8 is an orgiastic pleasure. It is both familiar and new, eccentric and intuitive, and it does what all great fighting games do: it makes you feel incredible when you pull off an elusive series of moves to almost balletic effect. Tekken used to be dismissed as a showy poser by Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter veterans, its combos seen as over-automated and inexpressive. But later Tekken titles have added subtle layers of complexity, and now Tekken 8 wants everyone to see how that works...The King of Iron Fist tournament is calling. It is time, once again, to answer

Infinite Wealth takes a few curious steps backward, but it gets so much right and once again dedicates itself to goofiness with such aplomb that it’s impossible not to get swept up in it – a true vacation from the darkness and drama of yakuza life.

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

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.

Is this a realistic insight into property ownership and management? Probably not. But it yields a good time nonetheless, and one that obeying the property ladder advice of cutting out avocado toast might actually help you to afford.

This is a well-made Avatar game. If you’re fond of the James Cameron films, then you’re in for a real treat, while even Avatar apostates will probably find something to enjoy amid Pandora’s dense undergrowth. But there are better examples of this form, and if you’re not all-in on the Na’vi way of life, you’ll be gritting your teeth through their tedious stories.

This trek across forbidding crags and through crumbling caves demands resilience and determination, but rewards it with a wonderfully rich and atmospheric sense of place.

With rewards for completing each stage within a set number of moves, there are incentives for perfecting your approach too. But the game’s tutorials linger well into the game’s 40-hour runtime, and combined with a bland storyline, basic environments and a persistently low challenge, it’s a game that will only appeal to the series’ most committed followers.

But it’s all just so damn charming. The animations are superb, and zooming right down into the city to watch your robot citizens go about their business never seems to grow old. The move tool means that the perfect city is always within your grasp, inviting endless adjustments in the quest for maximum efficiency. It’s easy to lose hours in reverie, tending to your steambots’ needs. Who else is going to keep them supplied with roboburgers?

The same old arguments apply to this release as to all retro compilations: you can find these games online then run them on an open source emulator for free, though you won’t get the modern save features. You could buy an original console and a copy of the games on eBay, but then that will work out much more expensive and unreliable. For Jurassic Park lovers and retro enthusiasts, this is a really nice way to relive a lost world of gaming.

Reviewing a Call of Duty game today is a bit like reviewing a military theme park: it’s impossible to give a holistic appraisal. You might find the rollercoasters thrilling, the ferris wheel tiresome, and the hotdogs tasty, but consider its murky ties to the US military-industrial complex deeply problematic. Certainly, however, the game has expanded in such diverse and deliberate directions that most players will find at least one diversion to suit their tastes and play styles, and for this the developers are to be commended. Wrangling an annual series into a persistent online framework is obviously an unwieldy challenge for artists, designers and programmers alike, as they seek to marry the past and future of video game delivery. Within those difficult, arguably misguided constraints, MWIII is, campaign aside, a minor triumph of engineering and design.

It’s a brisk, enjoyable package, ideal for a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon when you want to put your feet up and, every now and again, raise a smile.

Jusant is an eco-fable, and like other such titles you play the role of a restorer. What the game deftly tells us through its world-building, narrative, and exquisite climbing is that the role requires both ambition and imagination. This is no better summed up than by the jump your character must make from one handhold to another, an act that suspends them in midair for a perilous, heart-in-mouth moment. Lodged in this little leap of faith is the entire spirit of adventure, the quality that ultimately makes the rehabilitation of Jusant’s stricken mountain possible.

Thirsty Suitors may be a very different take on a south Asian immigrant story, but it’s made with so much style and fun you can’t help but love it.

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.

If Alan Wake 2 matched its narrative charms with greater depth in play, you’d be looking at a very special game indeed. As it stands, it’s a thrillingly spooky ride that can, at times, feel too much like you’re just pressing forward while weird things happen around you. That said, I very much enjoyed those weird things, and while Alan Wake 2’s combat lacks the developer’s usual pizzaz, it is Remedy’s best narrative adventure yet.

There’s no story to discover, no complex rules to learn; just instant, appealing fun. It’s fun you’ll have already experienced if you’re a Mario fan, but with enough novelty and unexpected twists to prevent it from feeling over-familiar. And for those new to Mario – kids just ageing into video games, friends or family members tempted into a multiplayer session – this is a wonderful introduction to the fizzy creativity and attention to detail that has made Mario a family staple for nearly 30 years.

It is a genuine pleasure to play something that has been so lovingly envisaged, and which is so true to its source material. It’s a game everyone with a PS5 should experience, augmented by an admirable range of accessibility options to ensure as wide a group of potential players as possible can be Spider-Man. This is what mainstream action adventure video games should be: a big, wholehearted fantasy, invested with rewarding details and loaded with conflict and emotion. In all the ways that count, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the embodiment of that famous Stan Lee motto: Excelsior!

A good puzzle game shares qualities with a good poem: precision, elegance, a growing feeling of resonance that climaxes, finally, in the quiet euphoria of a revelation. Originality, too, of course, as neither poem nor puzzle game can blossom in the shadows of imitation. Finity, a taut and cascadingly inventive puzzle game by Sebastian Gosztyla, has all of this and more.

On the multiplayer servers, players can jump into lighthearted casual races or far more intense open events, where the global community of players bring their own cars – and their own tuning – to the track. But personally, most of my time with Forza Motorsport has been spent all by myself, taking the same left turn over and over again, until I’ve memorised every nuance of the angle. Turn 10 has brought out the obsessive in me. I mean that as a compliment.

Saltsea Chronicles will doubtlessly win over players of cozy indie games and tabletop RPGs this autumn. The story is involving, challenging and builds out the tale of a missing leader – and partner, and friend – with elegance. The sunken, oceanic world runs on radios and astral plane sailing for technology and prayer - the characters simply do not always get on, despite their shared quest. This is a sophisticated adventure, taking the medium of the narrative game to new horizons.

In returning to its roots, Ubisoft has made a more focused Assassin’s Creed, one that those with limited time have a hope of completing. And in setting all the action in a single city and its surrounding countryside, the team has packed its sidestreets with fascinating snapshots of life – such as heated hagglers bickering in the bazaar, musicians drawing a crowd beside a mosque and pigeon fanciers feeding their birds on a rooftop aviary. Ubisoft lets down the liveliness of its world with a well-trodden story, but after a string of formless open-world games, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a stab in the right direction.

EA Sports FC 24 may be wearing a new strip but it remains the superlative football sim of our time.

Mortal Kombat 1 is also home to an esoteric, slightly underbaked “Invasions” mode, which injects a dash of RPG-ish grinding – complete with random encounters and variating elemental damage types – to its bread-and-butter brawling mechanics. I found this to be less compelling than either the campaign or the standard multiplayer ladder, but it’s good to see that NetherRealm is, at the very least, considering how they might reinvent the wheel in the future. After all, this is supposed to be a total reimagining of Mortal Kombat oeuvre; a new beginning for all of our twisted, bloodsoaked combatants. I’m happy to have them back in my life, but it’s a shame they didn’t learn a few more tricks during their time away.

This hack-and-slasher clings to its Soulsborne heritage too tightly, but does creative things that no other Soulslike until now has managed to pull off.

Experiences such as this don’t come along very often: Mr Coo pulls from disparate influences that other games haven’t already done to death, and bobs along on a dream logic that makes sense while you play and then evaporates immediately after. Why did stealing a coin from that one-eyed lady end up giving you a sword to slay a many-eyed crocodile? And how did you end up inside that egg with an unborn chick? It matters not. They are vivid memories now, the kind your brain will randomly turn over, decades down the line when you are trying to get to sleep.

Starfield, as with Bethesda’s previous work, requires its player to submit to the spell that is being cast. The rewards for those who can overlook the often awkward delivery of dialogue, bodies that glitch through scenery, the confusion of menus and the flimsy feel of combat are considerable. Because that feeling of electric possibility – when the horn section swells as you touch down on a new planet, stride into the nearest settlement, then pick up whatever threads of story interest you – never wanes.

It is imperfect but affecting, and hopefully after a few patches and updates, players will be able to enjoy it with fewer caveats. It’s peaceful under the waves. I can see why Stan, desperate to escape a measureless grief, would be drawn to it. But in the end, this turns out to be a game about what it takes to avoid being dragged under.

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.

Many good RPGs of late have eschewed melodic soundtracks for a more ambient route, but Sea of Stars is full of great tunes. The battle music in particular is both enlivening and nostalgic, and changes ever so slightly from area to area. This attention to detail is what makes the game such a fabulous way to while away end-of-summer evenings. There are pirates and curses, necromancers and spies; there are moonbeam boomerangs, and stealthy stabbings through green portals in the air. Sea of Stars is no shallow mirror of RPGs past. Its depth and sparkle make it a modern classic in its own right.

This spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio has the same stylish look and feel, though with better gameplay for the outlaw street gang.

This is Tobe Hooper’s putrid amoral universe in film perfectly replicated as an interactive terror ride.

I hope Stray Gods kicks off a whole new genre, and more from Summerfall Studios in the future.

This is a simple game, artfully told.

Baldur’s Gate 3, like its titular city, is a towering landmark of an RPG. Bustling with life, brimming with scope, and bursting with imagination.

This new visual novel from the creator of One Night Stand is an engrossing, emotional study of digital relationships that will hit a raw nerve with gamers.

Venba is a great example of stories we need to see more of. It would just have been nice to see more of this particular story, too.

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

The emotional core of the game remains the interdependency between you and the Pikmin, and the sense of responsibility and gratitude that you feel towards them. Walking through my local park after playing it for a day, I felt that if I crouched down under a tree and remained still, I’d see little lines of them ferrying things around among the ants and beetles. The most memorable games are always the ones that inject a little magic into your every day life.

Viewfinder is magical, then, but also short-lived. Even with the optional puzzles, you can easily finish the whole thing over two or three evenings, and it never quite capitalises on the promise of the camera, the promise of getting lost inside picture after picture after picture. Each level is bespoke, tiny; although the very final sequence, a timed dash through puzzle after puzzle, hints at a grander potential. I’m left dazzled by the possibilities, but ultimately wanting more.

This, then, is the playable equivalent of curling up under a duvet and binge-watching a Netflix series. Fitting, really, considering that the monolithic streaming platform coughed up to publish this sequel. It certainly won’t be a game for everyone, but its punchily paced paranormal parable respects its players’ time, and by the existentialism of the end credits, it will certainly have you reflecting on how you want to spend yours.

It all adds up to a feeling of becoming enmeshed, slowly but surely, in a little community – one that you become familiar with and part of, even if the moment-to-moment interactions can feel a little shallow. Marvelous also seem to have finally nailed the technical performance for their remakes, too, especially on the Switch, with fast load times and little to no slowdown even with loads of animals on screen. It’s not going to be a game for everyone, but if you can meet A Wonderful Life on its terms, you’ll find a lot to love in its slow-paced, small-town gait.

Final Fantasy XVI is the series at its most spectacular, for good and bad. However, Square Enix has taken a lot of the criticism aimed at previous games into account, and the battles offer more freedom, the characters are fleshed out, and thanks to detailed world-building, you finally get the sense again that there is a world out there that needs saving.

There is plenty of novelty here to attract seasoned F1 game pros and newcomers, who may start off with F1 World. It’s technically magnificent: it looks and feels incredible, and its off-track production values are sky-high. Sure, the continued presence of loot boxes – seemingly de rigueur in any EA Sports game these days – cheapens it slightly, but at least it doesn’t force them upon you too brashly.

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.

But despite the rewarding interplay between various stats and buffs, and the laudable sensation that, even very early on, you have access to the sort of freedom in character and combat customisation that’s typically locked away for hours in similar games, Diablo 4 feels … toylike. Strip away the hellish screams and scarily convincing Halloween costumes, and what’s left is the video game equivalent of hyper-palatable junk food, albeit with myriad colourful warnings on the packaging.

Essentially, Citadel Station is one gigantic puzzle that you solve from the inside, and figuring out that puzzle as you fight for your life is always engrossing. The lessons System Shock can teach may be different now than 30 years ago, but thanks to Nightdive’s restoration, there’s still plenty to be learned from Looking Glass’ cerebral sci-fi horror.

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.

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

If you have young children and want to share with them the thrill of driving across a wild, fantastical landscape, crashing into stuff and getting constant positive feedback, this would be a smart investment. It is a game with a lot of heart, made by developers who clearly understand how to make kids smile while they play.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dead Island 2 will amuse you for days with its stylish vision of a zombified LA, but it’s also limited in scope, and with skill systems that feel shallow and impersonal it won’t hang around long enough to achieve superstardom. The fact is, Dead Island 2 is one of 2014’s best zombie beat-’em-ups – it’s just a pity we’re in 2023.

This is a promising return to golf for EA Sports. It’s slow of pace, it’s tough to get into, and it’s a little staid and fuddy-duddy at times (most of the background music makes you feel like you’re on hold to a financial service call centre), but the accuracy of the ball physics, the huge range of shots and the highly tactical nature of the play gives serious players the challenge and realism they want. I wish there was a smoother on-ramp for beginners, or a much more basic arcade mode for those who want to thrash through a few holes with pals, but this is a sim after all and when it comes to sport, EA does not mess around.