Even on the hardest of the three difficulty settings, Terra Nil is more forgiving than expected. Everything from its simple interface to an easily understood tutorial and a fantastically beautiful in-game guidebook makes environmental restoration go smoothly. The music and sound effects are very relaxing, and after every successfully restored map, there is a moment where you can just appreciate your handiwork. While a bit more friction wouldn’t have hurt, and the variation from map to map is modest, by keeping it simple, developer Free Lives spreads a clear message: saving the planet could be so easy if we wanted it to be. All that’s missing is a toxin scrubber.

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

It’s creepy, but never explicitly grotesque – and it can be beautiful and calming, too. It’s mostly up to you whether you tempt fate out in the dark or stick to the daytimes and keep to the shores. The way that its mood can turn so quickly and the intrigue of its sparingly told story kept me hooked.

This is a wonderful game: a beautiful, tense, camp, gory summation of everything that is so good about Resident Evil. Wherever you find yourself, whether rose garden or torture dungeon, it is alive with intimate detail, from the sounds of distant screams and chants to the sight of a grizzly murder scene or a beautiful vase. It is resplendent, delicious and decadent, like an incredibly rich banquet served amid the detritus of some horrible battle. Believe me, you will feast on it.

Revealed to little fanfare at last year’s The Game Awards, Bayonetta Origins was the game that no one expected, and even fewer wanted. For some then, its mere existence is akin to Bayo blasphemy, yet in truth, this spin-off is far from the disaster many expected. While it never comes close to the highs of last year’s Bayonetta 3, it’s still a charming curio for fans and more importantly – a fantastic introduction to the genre for younger players.

If you’re looking for a nostalgic J-horror experience, and you’re prepared to put in the effort and work with the control scheme, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is an enjoyable, highly atmospheric adventure, with many brilliant moments of fear and dread. The spirits are wonderfully designed, and spotting a black-eyed ghost child lurking behind you, or in the corner of a room, never fails to send a shiver down the spine. For those of us who believe the Project Zero series should be as revered as Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it has been a pleasure to step, once again, into its chamber of horrors, with just a camera to protect you and the remnants of an ancient ghost story ready to be exhumed.

Before he had a face, Kirby’s unassuming spherical design was intended to be a graphical placeholder – but then its creators fell in love with his squishy simplicity. Return to Dream Land feels like a playable placeholder, ticking the right boxes without ever being truly exciting. In multiplayer it’s much more fun, but after the charmingly inventive Super Mario odyssey-inspired escapades of Forgotten Land, revisiting the safe, side-scrolling Kirby era holds little appeal.

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.

EA and Omega Force’s unlikely venture succeeds by being the perfect entry point to the hunter genre. This is the accessible radio single to Monster Hunter’s prog album odyssey: it’s silly, flawed and probably not destined to be an all-timer, but if you’re in the right mood, my god is it fun. Whether it’ll continue to dig its talons into me remains to be seen, but after years of frustration, I finally feel ready to dive further into this once-impenetrable genre.

Hogwarts Legacy starts to feel like countless open-world games of the past decade once you’ve been playing it for more than 15 hours. However, you get to ride a Hippogriff. It’s those magical moments and the setting that rescue it from mediocrity, but only if the Wizarding World still has you under its spell.

This is a world that, robot assassins aside, is pleasurable to exist within and to explore, made all the sweeter by virtue of its unexpected arrival.

Where modern blockbusters are often weighed down by bloated worlds or predatory business models, Dead Space cuts right to the quick.

The cult 3DS game has been refreshed for smartphones and the combination of card game and horse racing is as weird and addictive as ever.

Season’s unwillingness to paint the world in anything but the broadest strokes (“The country’s expansion caused a war. Internationalism was breaking down”) and penchant for flowery but meaningless language may have been influenced by a troubled development history. Part of Season’s development cycle was marked by allegations of workplace harassment and disorganised leadership, which became public in 2021. The game is enamoured with ideas of community and culture, but in appropriating real culture and removing it from context, it robs itself of its own message.

This is a distinctive, appealing example of the JRPG genre that also nails the essence of the One Piece universe. Fans from both worlds will adore it, and I found it to be a perfect appetiser as I await The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom later this year.

Characters are memorable and well drawn, literally and figuratively, and the game ably tackles thorny issues such as the consequences of school bullying, and the terrible toll taken by anxiety, depression and domestic abuse. For the most part, the 12-hour runtime flies by as you get to know every delightful nook and cranny of the cosy neighbourhood; only the final third drags a little. It feels worthwhile after the superb ending, though, which ensures that this game will live on in your memory for a long, long time after the credits roll.

Technical wobbliness doesn’t always denote a bad game. The sheer charm of the writing, delightful golfing and the warmth of the world compensate for the rough edges. It’s a generously big game, too – imperfect, but special nonetheless.

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.

Of course, all of that chaos leaves the game vulnerable to some seismic bugs. It is no shock that the first option on the pause menu is an automatic respawn, because it is quite easy to banjax yourself. (Once, I fell through the bottom of the world and into a strange, psychedelic nether-realm.) Perhaps this is part of the deal, in a game this manic. Goat Simulator 3 has no aspirations beyond what it is: a dishevelled yet appealing bender of self-destructive looniness.

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.

The Forest Quartet left me feeling hopeful about the future. It’s a story about the resilience of the human spirit, the healing power of music and the profound, unshakeable impact that art can have on the world.

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.

By the end, there wasn’t a lot that felt new – but I had phantom hand cramps from swinging that electrified baton, and a powerful need to sit down and have a cup of tea. I felt as if I’d survived – which is just what this game is going for.

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.

It’s kind of brave of Firaxis not to just give us XCOM with an asset swap. Midnight Suns is its own thing, combining strategy and soap opera in a nod toward Japanese battle tactics games and the underlying frivolity of the Marvel universe. One thing Firaxis certainly hasn’t done is dumb down turn-based strategy for incoming comic book fans. This is a hugely challenging game, with dozens of hours of play and a narrative that wants to say interesting things about family, identity and sacrifice. Sometimes, it even manages it.

Somerville is the only game that has ever had me hiding from aliens in a grimy festival Portaloo. Yet its last-ditch attempt at a galaxy-brain sci-fi ending lands with a disappointing thud. While its head-scratcher finale leaves you wishing its nonverbal narrative was a little more verbal, Somerville remains a masterclass in minimal storytelling; a series of memorable, haunting vignettes.

Here, Game Freak draws up an exciting new open-world blueprint for the Pokémon franchise, but appears to have lacked the time and knowhow to deliver it to spec. Compare this with June’s gorgeous Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which runs on the same console, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re beta testing an open-world Pokémon. With more time in the oven, this could have been genuinely exciting. As it stands, this fun-filled adventure asks you to put up with an awful lot more of the rough than the smooth.

Here, Game Freak draws up an exciting new open-world blueprint for the Pokémon franchise, but appears to have lacked the time and knowhow to deliver it to spec. Compare this with June’s gorgeous Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which runs on the same console, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re beta testing an open-world Pokémon. With more time in the oven, this could have been genuinely exciting. As it stands, this fun-filled adventure asks you to put up with an awful lot more of the rough than the smooth.

When a Sega marketing executive came up with the nonsense phrase “blast processing” to “explain” the technical capabilities of the Mega Drive, it’s now clear they experienced some sort of messianic premonition. Sonic Frontiers is blast processing in video game form: anarchic, careless, silly, exciting, meaningless, wonderful. What a daft and incredible ride.

Above all, what stands out is the developer’s deep knowledge of and love for the period. The dialogue drips with fascinating historical detail, supported by an extensive glossary of terms. That, combined with a focus on the minutiae of everyday people’s lives, results in a game that provides a wonderfully evocative window into the past. The glacial speed of progress and preponderance of text might be a barrier, but Pentiment is a gift to any player who longs for a historical setting that’s more than a surface texture.

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.

Marvel Snap is the perfect smartphone game: easy to get into, visually attractive, and simple to play in bite-size chunks, but it also offers masses of strategic depth.

If last year’s Unpacking has left you craving more mess to mess with, then A Little to the Left is an obvious next port of call. We’re witnessing the birth of a new genre, the tidy ’em up. Judging by how expertly these games tap into the innate human desire for order, expect many more examples to follow.

There haven’t been many interpretations of ancient mythology as gripping, detailed and imaginative as this, in video games or any other medium. It brings the stories and characters of an ancient era to life in a way that only modern technology could realise.

In our era of coldly distanced technological combat, of armoured police vehicles on city streets, of protests bloodily subdued, we might ask why such violent delights as Modern Warfare still have a place on the entertainment calendar. It’s something I’ve pondered over the many hours I’ve spent thoroughly enjoying this ludicrous game. It is something I will perhaps go on to think through in the many, many hours to come.

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.

Stealth, however, is the biggest disappointment in Gotham Knights. Where Batman infested the city’s crevices, his underlings merely invade them: you can work together to set up terrain traps or create distractions, but it’s a world away from the older series’ puzzlebox intricacy and it’s always more fun to barge in swinging.

Throughout its running-time, Requiem treads a fine line between poignant and absurd, balancing heartbreaking scenes in which Hugo wrestles with burdens no child should ever bear, with action sequences where you must flee from literal tsunamis of rats. But even at its most ridiculous, Requiem is always earnest in its ideas. Ultimately, it’s a game about living with incurable illness, the constant daily struggle, the threat of outside circumstances making it worse, the importance of hope, and the sad truth that, sometimes, there is none to be had.

There is a genuinely brilliant strategy game lurking under all this flimsy Nintendo wrapping. For younger audiences, these complaints probably won’t matter, but for the fully-grown Nintendo faithful, Sparks of Hope’s paper-thin narrative, juvenile jokes and disappointing hub worlds are hard to ignore, despite the fantastic fights.

Running a struggling potion shop, sourcing ingredients, haggling with customers and fending off the bank is all charming and stressful work in equal measure.

It’s not just the sense that everything is aeons old, it’s that aeons seem to pass before your eyes, chapter to chapter. Brief combat encounters are tense but sparse, and neither a highlight nor detriment, although creature design is enjoyably gruesome. Not an acquired taste, then, but an unequivocally bitter one, engineered with such bold artistry you’ll wince as you go back in for seconds.

Like Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium, the writing here occasionally sacrifices clarity for floridity, although its ornate descriptions do add detail and texture to the rudimentary pixel art.

Despite the shift to a season battle pass, Overwatch 2 retains is character, its charm and its individuality. It is the pop-culture, day-glo, neon-scorched riposte to dingy military shooters, and its concentration on empowering team-minded players and tactics makes every match feel like an unexpectedly violent buddy comedy. It is what it has always been: the shooter for the rest of us, but now there’s more of it and it’s kinda sorta free. Happy hunting.

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.

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.

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.

The result of the old team getting together again is a tale that retreads old paths but also clearly wants to be more than just an ode to a bygone era of video games. When Threepwood goes to an oracle, Voodoo Lady, for advice, she summarises the paradox this game faces: “You must walk the path, yet you have already walked the path.” Return to Monkey Island pulls off the trick of looking backwards and forwards at the same time, reminding us that the point-and-click adventure will never really die: it’s a zombie pirate that won’t stay in the ground for long.

Somewhere out there is a bigger, more vivid version of Metal: Hellsinger that could truly rock it with the FPS greats. Yet while Hellsinger’s art isn’t good enough to grace the black cotton T-shirts of an avid metal fan, its music certainly wouldn’t feel out of place in their record collection – and the way Hellsinger weaves this soundtrack into an infernal action experience makes it a thoroughly enjoyable twist on shooter convention.

I’ve been playing versions of this game on and off for seven years now, but the fun doesn’t wear off. Splatoon 3 doesn’t offer something different, it offers more: more fashions, more modes, more ways to spend time in its messy, chaotic universe, alone or together. It is delightful to be back.

Cowabunga Collection is a nunchuck-twirling, shuriken-hurling jaunt through a glorious five-year stretch of Konami’s rich history, a perfect complement to the recent indie brawler Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge.

Two Point Campus isn’t entirely toothless: it pokes gentle fun at university life through a range of lightly cynical announcements about paying tuition fees and assignment extensions. Mainly, though, it is content to focus on the journey of learning and discovery that university is intended to provide, which it achieves in inventive, knockabout style. For all the game’s wry declarations, the one truest to its spirit is also the simplest: “Students are reminded to have the time of their lives.”

Despite its 90s origins, Live a Live feels novel, revitalising a genre that often feels too conservative. It’s a constantly shifting, time-travelling bonanza that foreshadows what Takita would perfect in 1995’s Chrono Trigger; 90s role-playing fans are now praying that it receives the same lavish remake treatment, alongside other classics of the time such as Final Fantasy VI. Live a Live is not without its faults, but in an age of fast-food entertainment that satiates without leaving a taste, this compendium is a curio that’s certainly worth your time.

It is populated with characters reminiscent of Jhonen Vasquez’s illustrations, combined with a gothic and botanical bestiary that calls Hollow Knight to mind. The writing, though, is sparse and unsettling, not quite void of humour but nor silly in the way one might expect. The overall effect is darkly, fascinatingly cute: mall-goth meets folk horror, and the perfect set dressing for elegant, sharp gameplay. Cult of the Lamb has already amassed over a million sales in the first week of its crusade, for good reason. There’s little doubt that the flock will only continue to grow.

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.

While Saints Row is messy, buggy, silly and often derivative, it also recalls a time in the early 2000s when the open world genre was a haphazard, joyful space with none of the codified, dopamine-fracking precision of modern titles. There are, in this frisky reboot, the ghosts of titles such as True Crime: Streets of LA, State of Emergency, The Getaway and Runabout – patchy, imperfect but gripping experiments in player agency that didn’t quite understand the conventions, but had a bash anyway. To me that is a far more interesting set of stablemates than the last couple of Saints Row titles. To me, this is a preposterously fun video game, despite its many faults, or more accurately, because of them.

Rollerdrome is about getting lost in a giddy gameplay trance. As the hypnotic electro pulsed with each turn of the half-pipe and slow-mo bullets tapered out of a well-timed flip, I was grinning like a goon. Yet where OlliOlli World offered a bountiful buffet of levels to grind across, Rollerdrome’s stingy stage selection left me hungry. Much like a lockdown fad, Rollerdrome offers a thrilling way to pass an afternoon or few, but once you’ve got your kicks, only the dedicated will still be donning their skates.

Arcade Paradise comes across as a little confused, sometimes: if the premise of the game is that you’re running an arcade in your father’s laundromat in secret, for instance, then why is your dad the one paying you bonuses for those daily gaming challenges? It has the feel of a game that changed shape a few times over the course of its development. Nonetheless, it is more than a collection of average arcade game tributes. Intentionally or not, it captures something of the ennui of young adulthood and 90s Gen X disillusionment with menial work – and how video games have always been a colourful escape from the boredom of everyday life.

Whether your guests’ stay is pleasant or not rarely makes a difference, so the management elements feel like stepping stones to the story Bear and Breakfast actually wants to tell. Hank is a sweet Bear and his friends are memorable enough, but in its storytelling the game seems to introduce and abandon characters for long periods of time. It is a simulation that requires patience in a genre that usually gives players loads to do – it’s a management game that’s obsessed with managing its players, rather than letting them exercise control.

As Dusk Falls comfortably exceeds the standard of its genre when it comes to plotting, characterisation, performance and the impressive malleability of the story. It’s a story about trauma and what it takes to overcome it, really; reluctant teen criminal Jay Holt stayed with me, particularly, touchingly innocent despite what he’s been exposed to in his life. Narrative games exist outside of gaming’s old technological arms race, now, and because we’re not focusing so much on how realistic they look, they’re free to tell much better stories.

This is a stunning-looking game, whether witnessed from the ground or the rooftops – I won’t spoil the cat’s journey, but the developer wrings copious novelty and some impressively creepy moments from this shut-off city in the seven-ish hours it takes to play through. It’s certainly far from twee, with the possible exception of the bucket-lifts that you can ride down from rooftops, paws and ears all poking out over the top – and those are so cute that they’re instantly forgivable.

From the stop-motion, claymation backgrounds that dress some tucked-away areas, to mind-bending stage transitions, and the commanding full orchestral score from composer Kristofer Maddigan, there’s not one aspect of The Delicious Last Course that feels undercooked.

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.

F1 22 is technically stunning, and that, combined with the chance to drive this year’s cars on this year’s tracks, should make it irresistible to Formula One fans. As long as they manage to ignore the egregious F1 Life.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes gives the series the whirlwind combat that its fantastical story deserves, while still allowing you to lovingly gaze at your favourite anime boy or girl at a picnic. It’s really the best of both worlds.

Stylish and minimalistic, this gentle, quietly demanding game offering escape and satisfaction will entertain for hours.

The Quarry’s charming writing and cinematic presentation make it an engrossing horror caper – even if this is, paradoxically, a game that’s often at its best when you’re not actively playing it.

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.

All this is beautifully brought to life with scribbly, expressive character portraits, wine-coloured backdrops and a cosy, mock-serious score that suggests a chamber-music troupe lurking just across the salon. Card Shark isn’t always this charming, however. Building the story around perfecting tricks makes for plenty of repetition, whether practising in the coach or restarting a scenario with little more than the shirt on your back. Nerial does its best to avoid a traditional game-over – you can actually cheat death – but it’s easy to imagine a better-resourced version of the game in which every loss sends you along a wholly different story branch. Still, mastering a new con is always worth the trial and error – as is the thrill of taking a duke to the cleaners.

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.

Like Ash’s “improvised surgery” with a chainsaw, the multiplayer is surprisingly deep. Unlocking new powers and abilities for Survivors and the three varieties of Demon continually opens up fresh horror possibilities, and the player community is already making the most of the nefariousness on offer. It’s fittingly rough around the edges, but Evil Dead: The Game is a surprisingly worthwhile cabin retreat.

Moral murkiness helps preserve the tension across Swansong’s duration. There’s always something at stake – your life, the masquerade, your integrity – and that does a lot to infuse some meaning into all the talking and scouring rooms for notes. I doubt that Swansong is set to become a vampire RPG of legend, like 2004’s Bloodlines, but it nonetheless makes vampires scary again.

Habitat destruction is something we’re surely all aware of – we’ve all seen the heartbreaking footage of animals left stranded in tiny patches of forest, surrounded by roads and industry. Beyond the Trees reinforces its ecological message through its visuals and through play, and though this might not be many players’ introduction to this pressing real-world issue, it is a new way to look at it, and a new way to engender sympathy. Developer Broken Rules has done its research here, both on the creatures themselves and the places they call home. No matter how many people feel moved to donate to conservation charities after playing, this game will have made a difference through its advocacy.

Despite its repetition and frustrations, I warmed to this grainy, gore-soaked journey after the tedious early hours. Thanks to a smattering of player choices, the game offers just enough of a hint at player agency to make you feel involved in the narrative, too, giving Trek to Yomi’s surrealist slaughter a sense of purpose. There’s a strong argument that a Japanese-made attempt at this genre would come closer to doing the samurai fantasy justice, but as with the many Japanese takes on virtual America, there’s a schlocky charm to Yomi’s tropey inauthenticity nonetheless.

By presenting unsolvable yet feasible questions in rapid succession, under a time limit, it reveals the flaws and inconsistencies in every person’s moral scaffolding. Unless you cleave to an inflexible rule to, say, never intervene in a way that will threaten life, or to always minimise fatalities, you are likely to find yourself assuming contradictory positions. In this way, Trolley Problem, Inc succeeds in being both absurd and provocative.

It helps, too, that the music is superb, vaguely reminiscent of Blade Runner’s Vangelis soundtrack at times, and it changes subtly with the decisions that you make. It’s just a shame that Citizen Sleeper fizzles out at the point where it’s set to explode. There are far more stories to tell in this fascinating universe, and this is some of the finest video-game sci-fi writing out there.

None of these sports would be enough to sustain a game alone, but together, and paired with Nintendo’s charming and slick aesthetic and brain-infesting music, they are the makings of a good time.

If you’re looking for a sliver of joy in bleak times, Nintendo always delivers.

There is hope and reconciliation here, but A Memoir Blue is primarily a tragic depiction of a person who has convinced themselves – or who has been convinced – that attainment is necessary for love. The story is fragile and a little simple but, like publisher Annapurna Interactive’s 2018 game Florence, it succeeds in creating a mood of compelling melancholy, heightened by Joel Corelitz’s exquisite soundtrack. And while A Memoir Blue feels deeply personal, it achieves that miraculous narrative trick of making the specific universally approachable.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is a well-made and highly entertaining addition to this long, long series. It’s not doing anything radically new with the recipe, but it doesn’t really need to – this is a game about nostalgia, not just for Star Wars but for the Lego games themselves. These games have always sought to conjure our favourite family movie franchises as we choose to remember them, shorn of all the boring, indulgent and problematic bits. My god, even The Phantom Menace is bearable here. For this feat alone, the game deserves the attention of fans and families throughout the galaxy.

I’m glad this game exists, but I wish there were more to it. There wasn’t enough variety in the virtual landscapes or in the characters’ conversations to make the long night drives or train journeys appealing beyond the second or third go-around. It is a game that wants us to think about the contradictions and complexities of being alive on this Earth, but also, it doesn’t seem to come from a place of great life experience. I would be fascinated to see what these developers would make in another 20 (or 50) years.

It’s a landscape worth visiting, nonetheless. Okomotive’s games are the antithesis of open world blockbusters – see that mountain? You can’t go there – and their geography is all the more sublime for being non-traversable. Rather than routine video game empowerment, Changing Tides offers mindful deprivation in a ravaged world where even the concept of a haven must move with the flow.

Gearbox knows by now how to keep the narrative work light, and leave room for you and your friends to create the fun. The game has a real knack for making you feel like the quarterback of the fight – even if that means a team of four quarterbacks in one coop game, each firing off abilities and spells with wanton abandon. It’ll be hard to go back to the rather more straight-faced Borderlands universe after this jamboree of unicorn queens, goblin miner revolts and lute solos.

It’ll be tempting to reach for your phone and start looking for a solution when you get stuck in Tunic, but resist the impulse if you can. Just … be stuck for a while. The resultant wandering and thinking will lead you somewhere unexpected, and before you know it you’ll have found the way forward by yourself. It feels like a luxury to play a game that isn’t constantly prodding you towards the next objective, and that instead allows you the space to daydream.

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.

An unrivalled feat of design and inventiveness.

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.

I don’t think I’ve seen half of what Forbidden West has to offer. It bored me sometimes with endless dialogue and exposition, but is equally generous with things to do and places to explore and creatures to unwisely provoke. Unlike many open-world games it is continually offering you something new, and a couple of the tools you acquire later in the game really open the whole place up. It’s got the spirit of a Metroid or Tomb Raider-style puzzle adventure on the scale of an Assassin’s Creed. And once again: by god, it is beautiful. I’ll happily endure ten minutes of being lectured about terraforming, in exchange for marvelling at these sunken caves, forbidding plains and mechanical T-rexes.

While Arceus may be a sight that leads to sore eyes, this ambitious reboot sets Pokémon on an exciting new trajectory, finally recapturing a lost sense of adventure. What made those initial Pokémon games special was the way that they embodied a childlike spirit of discovery. The problem was that its creators struck gold on the first attempt – and spent decades repeating the same trick. Now, 26 years after I caught my very first Pokémon, the franchise is new again, and that gleeful sense of excitement is back.

The Chinese term “kung fu” roughly translates as “a skill acquired through hard work and practice”. Sifu might just be the purest expression of the concept that games have ever seen. The journey is brutal. It is not for the faint of heart, nor the short of patience. But those prepared to rise to the challenge will find that something spectacular comes after the pain. Is it worth the hardship? Ask me when the wounds have healed.

If you’re feeling understandably worn down by the monotony of the daily grind, OlliOlli World is the charming virtual alternative.

As long as you don’t mind a few hours of failure while you learn how to commit yourself to the way of the disc, Windjammers 2 is this winter’s sport of the summer.

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

Given that Uncharted 4 is already available on PlayStation 5 as part of a wee free collection of PlayStation classics for all PlayStation Plus subscribers, it’s hard to argue that this is an essential purchase for anyone who’s played these games before. If they passed you by at the time, though, this is the best way to experience two different spins on the same bombastic action game – adventures that remind us why characters such as Nathan Drake (and his spiritual predecessor Lara Croft) suit video games so well.

There are plenty of co-op shooters on the market, and some intriguing titles on the way (Sons of the Forest, Gotham Knights, Redfall), but Extraction has military gadgets, dank horror and heart-stopping stealth, and those are qualities that, although not original, make for a heck of a game.

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

The soundtrack is one of the best of the year, and it’s incredibly stylish. But the sheer gory, numerical compulsion at its core gets more terrifying the more you consider how much sway this manic impulse toward numb, exploitative accumulation holds in our own world. Dystopias like this used to feel creepily prescient. Now, they just feel terrifyingly honest.

There are none of the dials and tickers that usually clutter the screen in sci-fi games and films: your HUD is empty save for the occasional text prompt to inform you of your distance to the monolith, or the raindrops that smear across the screen. The uninterrupted views and undulating rhythms invite a near meditative state, the thrill of which deepens as your skill at manoeuvring the craft increases. A joyous, otherworldly ride.