We Met in May is done in an hour, but like Freeman’s other explorations of self-conscious longing and ardour, it lingers in the mind.

It doesn’t have the exhilarating freedom of movement, memorable score and eye-catching artistic direction of Abzû, 2016’s excellent tribute to ocean life and mythology, but Beyond Blue hews closer to reality, encouraging learning and reflection on the planet’s last unexplored frontier.

There is a lot of soul in The Collage Atlas, and a lot of beauty. Aesthetically, it is extraordinary, and worth playing just to gawp at. It lacks direction, and might have been more affecting without words – but a few hours’ wander through its dreamscapes filled me with admiration for its creator’s artistic talent.

On iPhone, there are some frustrating control issues, and often, the text in your journal and the icons on your GPS are too small to make out. On top of this, the game provides scant information on your objectives, which can be trying. Nuts is, however, a warm, stylish and contemplative little game, which makes clever use of photography and nature watching in order to craft a modest, meaningful ecological fable.

This can be a fiddly game, and certainly isn’t one for people who dislike mining or organising elaborate storage systems, but after a couple of years in Early Access this is now a refined and elegant experience, gently paced, where there is always something interesting to pursue through beautiful spaces. Voluntary isolation in the deep cold might not sound like solace after a winter of lockdowns, but Subnautica: Below Zero is cosy and moreish. Dive in, and you may be surprised how deep you end up going.

There are a few technical hiccups that are to be expected (and forgiven) of a game produced primarily by three people. Textures have a habit of popping in, or in some instances not loading at all, and it’s easy to get stuck behind an innocuous piece of scenery, though I reached the end credits without a proper crash or hard reset. Despite that, The Forgotten City is a tremendous achievement, a labyrinthine little sandbox packed with interpersonal mysteries – some ghoulish, others dorkishly domestic – that unravel further and further with each pass. For me, the moment that it got its hooks into me was when I used my foreknowledge of an impending accident to ensure that an assassin met an unfortunate end without my having to raise a finger. After that I was sunk, and the credits arrived too soon. Tempus fugit, indeed.

This endearing adventure feels like a fever-dream Flash game you discovered in the 00s and could never find again.

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 is a short game, one that can easily be finished over a couple of evenings, but the haunting underwater caverns and enduring strangeness of it all will linger long in the memory – and possibly your nightmares.

Designed by Amanda Warner, who has collaborated on interactive projects for the WHO and the Gates Foundation, Influence, Inc feels like fiction, but it’s based on hard research and includes a bibliography of works such as Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani. Your work soon becomes overwhelming (the interface struggles to communicate the minutiae of your projects as they grow in complexity), but this is a mesmerising window into the murky world made famous by Cambridge Analytica, and inhabited by countless others all working for clandestine clients, towards clandestine ends.

Much of the game’s thickly melancholic atmosphere comes from the shadier, quasi-mystical side of the business. A unique proposition, with its own rhythm and character, that may just inspire a keen interest in botany.

Babbdi has a retro ambience that goes beyond its low-resolution textures. Its brevity and open-endedness makes me think of the magazine demo disc levels I’d hoard and replay as a teen. But it also feels like targeted relief from 2023’s anxieties, blending a strange restfulness with a sense of possibility. And yes, it lets you play La Cucaracha.

This brief, raw and unsettling reimagining of a celebrated environmentalist’s campaign against pesticides presents a sickly vision of nature contaminated by humans.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.