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.

Few other games have done such a good job with this setting, as you run through lush bamboo forests before scaling ancient castle walls and sneaking inside to steal treasures. These moments of brilliance more than compensate for its weaker points.

Splatoon is a breath of fresh air – or more accurately “splodge of fresh ink” – for those who like to shoot stuff, but have grown tired of the endless bloody churn of gritty, realistic shooters. It is the coolest game on the market.

Once these tools are mastered, however, not only is it tremendous fun role-playing as a stadium-filling DJ, it’s also technically possible to stage a crowd-pleasing performance at an actual party – an opportunity that will, for now, have to wait for more communal times.

Indeed, one of the best things about Sunless Sea, apart from its beautifully crafted elder-horror stories, fantastically drawn artwork and generally creepy atmosphere, is the feeling that the decisions you make within the game are shaping the narrative, and that by playing, you are writing yourself into that story.

Few game franchises have ever gripped like this one, and its symbiosis with the real sport remains rather staggering. For those who recall the heady days of Championship Manager, but who became alienated by the increasing complexity of its Football Manager replacement, FM 2016 represents an opportunity to come back. Your loved ones and work mates, however, may regret it.

If you have a Switch, Tokyo Mirage Sessions is an essential purchase – and if you harbour a fondness for anime and its aesthetic, it is worth buying a Switch for. This is, simply, the first cult-classic game of 2020.

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.

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.

There’s nothing so gauche or straightforward as a Miss Marple denouement reveal, where you discover whether or not your conclusions were correct. In Paradise Killer the truth is more complicated and, counterintuitively, all the more satisfying for it.

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

Borderlands 4 is a big game – the main storyline takes 20 to 30 hours to complete, and there’s plenty to do afterwards. It is not entirely frictionless: sometimes you need to traverse huge distances in its missions, and the directional indicator that helps you along the way is annoyingly erratic. And it has been buggy at launch: playing on PC, it has occasionally crashed on me, even after a huge patch, and early players have reported problems with stuttering and other performance issues. But Borderlands needed to grow up a bit, and that’s exactly what it has done, without losing its essential charm. Its top-quality shooter action might be comfortably familiar, but it’s also an awful lot less annoying than it used to be.

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.

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.

The most fully featured Skylanders offering to date. The combination of new modes, online play and backwards compatibility is unparalleled in this sector. It seems competition really is a good thing.

Serious puzzlers will plough through the levels in a matter of hours (although there's some family-pleasing, inter-generational mileage in the two player option) but, for the price, it's hard to grumble. It's also hard to grumble about any game that can leave such a big, goofy smile on your face.

This comfortable but clunky reboot of the part farming simulator, part dungeon crawler, part life sim is very much a product of its time.

It may lack the precision of, say Witcher 2's combat, but it makes for a style that can be picked up in seconds, customised to your own particular style of play and crowned with impressive arcade-style finishes... Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a triumph that makes the prospect of a future MMO based on the same world and engine all the more enticing.

Despite these creative flourishes, Sunset Overdrive never quite surpasses the chaotic physics of Just Cause, the coherent style of Blood Dragon or the assured sense of place of GTAV – nor does it manage to draw its story and systems toward a coherent, impactful point. In the end its hero escapes the purgatory of a boring job and successfully wreaks revenge on the judgmental consumers he once served. But the game itself does little to undermine the increasingly over-familiar, open-world establishment, instead quietly celebrating the status quo.

Interactive possibilities make this dorky tale about a small-town psychic musician strangely absorbing.

A decidedly mixed affair. It isn't perfect, some of it feels quite antiquated, and it is by no means the high-water moment in the FPS genre that Doom and Quake were in their day. But it is still a very eye-catching and incredibly fun shooter, and in its best moments, it can't be matched for pure entertainment value.

It tells a simple, effective story using its keenly developed sense of location and by binding us to Henry through smart writing and dialogue choices. The question of whether these choices can substantially impact the outcome of Henry’s story does niggle: were we just witnesses or active participants?

Accomplished as GT6 is, the team will need to revisit some fundamentals if future iterations are able to stand wheel arch to wheel arch with the Forzas of the world. Indeed, the prospect of how the developer may be willing to evolve the franchise for PS4 is a riveting one. But knowing Polyphony Digital, that's a few years down the road yet.

When the hype settles, the new GoldenEye will probably not be as epoch-defining as the original. However, its pick-up-and-party multiplayer, and audacious and satisfying single-player mean that Goldeneye 007 on the Wii may wear the name with pride.

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.

Those new to Borderlands will find some aspects confusing at first – Borderlands 3 is minimal when it comes to tutorials – but if they persist, they will end up luxuriating in the joyous, tongue-in-cheek, comic book-influenced fun it provides. Sure, it fails to turn the franchise into something new and futuristic in gameplay terms. But why would it, when its original conception was already immaculate?

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.

Cindy’s design is laughable, but she draws attention to a broader problem with the game: its overwhelming maleness.

Brilliant; cute as a button, ingenious in its design and as addictive as any core title you could mention, this is one of the best investments you will make all year.

First time out, it scored four out of five, mostly for originality. This time round it scores the same purely for gameplay. That's definitely a (pin-striped ostrich) step forward.

Nintendo has done an unconvincing job of trying to position this remaster as a kind of prototype Breath of the Wild, and it sets newcomers up for disappointment – and undersells Skyward Sword’s unique charms. It’s hard to think of two Zelda games less alike: one a celebration of unbridled freedom and emergent thrills, the other an on-rails rollercoaster built by Nintendo’s brainiest puzzle architects. Somewhere in the middle there is a potent compromise – and the skydiving in the forthcoming sequel to Breath of the Wild suggests it may have been found. But until then, Skyward Sword is doomed to feel less ambitious. After Breath of the Wild, though, what game isn’t? A backward step it may be, but Link still holds that sword arm high.

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.

There are great individual moments in Far Cry 5. The gunplay is excellent, its unpredictable world generates daring stories of accidental heroism, and when it leans into the whole red-blooded American patriotism schtick, it’s genuinely funny. It doesn’t always fit together as well as it should, sometimes forcing the player to work around the game rather than with it – but the wildly vacillating tone is the bigger issue. It’s at once disorienting and noncommittal. Paradoxically, this is an extreme satire of modern America that says pretty much nothing about it.

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.

Both longtime RTS fans and Age of Empires vets will find things to love here, a comfy if well-worn tactician’s armchair to slip into, spiffed up, and with a few shining surprises stuffed down the sides. But it all comes at such a premium, and with campaigns geared so heavily as tutorials for the multiplayer, it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone not already invested.

My Friend Pedro offers the syrupy concentrate of Hollywood’s most epic fighting movies, with you as the star stunt performer.

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.

It’s a triumphant study in how to explore and exhaust the creative possibilities within a set of tightly defined creative parameters.

Black Ops III is the classic fan game: if you still love the series, you’ll love this one. But if the relationship is fading into routine, if the spark has gone, those old habits and nervous tics are really going to nag at you. You will go through the motions, but quietly – guiltily – you will already be looking elsewhere.

This game is an idiosyncratic joy – a brash, clever, juvenile head-trip, messy at the edges but all the more likable for it. It is loaded with brilliant pop-culture references, channeling not just Adams, 2000AD and Tank Girl, but also anime and 90s industrial dance music. Void Bastards is Cowboy Bebop meets Trainspotting, on a night out, in a galaxy of death.

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.

I played using the touchscreen on my Steam Deck, which I found deeply pleasing and responsive compared to using the buttons, which were a little tricky. Decorating my tiny bookshop was great: discovering I could acquire a shop dog was a real joy. The local characters are quite a serious bunch and hold some old dramas and pathos – there is a sense of a lush, lived-in community unravelling secrets and context as the seasons pass by. It is the first new game I’ve found myself truly relaxing into in quite some time: the gameplay is rhythmic and mellow, and, dare I say it, genuinely cosy. Tiny Bookshop provides players with a job that doesn’t feel like a job but a lovely escape into words and stories.

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.

This is a small game, but its meaning and intent are large. Like any domestic drama, it tells us as much about our own lives, tastes and experiences as it does about the characters we are bonding with. One thing is certain: learning about the relationships this protagonist has with her possessions, her lovers and her family, and how they affect her, is one of the most profound and touching experiences I’ve ever had playing a video game.

The visuals are great – as vibrant and colourful as you'd want from a game featuring comic characters – and overall it's tremendous fun to play. Perhaps not an essential upgrade if you already own Fate of Two Worlds, but nevertheless highly recommended.

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.

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.

Part town-planning exercise, part board game, this thoughtful debut gives plenty of scope for strategy and idealism. [Early Access Score = 80]

It could’ve achieved true greatness if it had followed through on its most ambitious promises.

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.

Writer Alan Wake searches for his missing wife while tackling a malevolent force disguised as darkness in this clunky but atmospheric reboot.

The completist will have to spend hundreds of pounds to experience Dimensions in its entirety.

Whatever legacy players leave on the world of Terratus, Tyranny will leave a lasting legacy on RPGs. This is a game that truly takes on the whole concept of evil and does it justice.

For those who love the series and have dedicated hundreds of hours to it, purchasing the game is an unavoidable ritual. It’s more of what you want, with a lick of paint and up-to-date player stats...But for everyone else, it may be better to sit this one out, or wait for some sort of mid-season overhaul.

The Artful Escape is, Galvatron has said, a 17-year-old’s conception of what it is to play in a rock band: musical transcendence meets universal adoration beneath the hot lights. But behind the shimmer, this is a touching tale of how to break free of the creative expectations of others. There is little traditional challenge here, but as a left-field power fantasy, few video games are so immediately stylish or so gratifying.

Ezio Auditore is, simply put, the only reason one needs to pick up a copy of Assassin's Creed: Revelations. While it doesn't feel like the step forward for the franchise that its two predecessors did in their day, Revelations can confidently stand shoulder to shoulder with the better titles of 2011.

With a real-life rule-change next year due to change the cars radically, Formula One currently feels like it’s at a generational peak, and F1 25 is so brilliantly crafted and full of elements that generate an irresistible mix of nailed-on realism and fantasy that it, too, feels like the culmination of a generation of officially licensed Formula One games. F1 25? Peak F1.

This is a gorgeous, exciting game.

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.

The real fun of Snipperclips is in those first 45 puzzles, played with a friend over many short sessions or – as we did – in one afternoon. Once you’ve solved them, of course, there’s little reason to go back and play them again, but at £18 on a console with a currently limited catalogue, for anyone who owns a Switch this highly sociable game is a must-buy.

The designer Sid Meier famously said that a game is a series of interesting choices. It's a maxim fully embraced by The Banner Saga, which stitches those choices into its very fabric to form a tapestry that is wholly your own.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla takes a while to get going, but don’t be disheartened by its mirthless opening, because the smart, inventive and witty open-world game you’re hoping for is lurking somewhere over those gloomy hills and dales.

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.

The really unfortunate thing with this Premium nonsense is that the greater body of players are made to feel like they're travelling in economy class, so that the core fans can be milked. I'm not anti-DLC, but the way Battlefield Premium constantly thrusts at you just feels grubby. It's not a nice way to treat paying customers, and it's a pity to see it besmirch such a great game.

It’s not cheap, and will undoubtedly result in ongoing spending as more content is released, but there is a lot of play value here for fans of the films as well as the younger audience.

It's a solidly entertaining romp.

In Blood Dragon the risk-taking, while welcome, is arguably in the wrong place. After 60 minutes' play, the joke wears away to near invisibility, and all that's left are the familiar systems that underpin the game. These remain enjoyable and, after the slow start, most players will be compelled to push through to the end. But there's an undeniable thinness here, the sense of a mild joke that's been eked out for too long, that can't fully wrap around the heft of the underlying game onto which it's been grafted.

The more ambitious surrounding artifice may alienate much younger players, while the lack of quest lists with which to track your progress will frustrate older, more seasoned virtual adventurers. This is a less focused game than the most recent Lego Harry Potter game, then, thoughtfully assembled but ultimately failing to rule them all.

From Dust is sublime – it's arguably close to being a piece of art. But prospective players should be warned you will only succeed here if you are a calm, benevolent and (above all else) patient god. Wrathful Old Testament types needn't bother; you'll only end up staring at the Game Over screen.

Simplistic, repetitive interactions drag on an otherwise engaging story based on the Marvel franchise.

It's not an easy or forgiving game. Disappearing platforms require excellent timing, and not thinking ahead can often mean leaping on to a platform already occupied by one of the many alien invaders, sapping one heart from your meter.

Wanderstop’s cosy and cute exterior belies something much richer and much cleverer than I have seen in quite some time. It is a masterpiece in a cute disguise – offering the player a place worth visiting, staying and paying attention to.

There are a lot of players who'll miss the structure, the atmosphere and unique quirks of the original. But Digital Extremes deserves credit for delivering an action-packed shooter that balances its mixture of gunplay and superpowers far better than its predecessor ever did – even if those powers will inevitably conspire to turn the game's protagonist into a monster and wreck his entire life.

The further you delve into New Super Mario Bros U, the more rewarding it becomes. Its final worlds hold some of its best levels, and there are plenty of fun secrets to enliven the second or third attempt at a level. But it’s hard to summon the motivation to devote that much time to it. It’s typically well-made and enjoyable, but next to the best of the Mario series, it’s unmemorable.

A slickly produced, well constructed military shooter filled with thrilling set-pieces and moments of fraught tension. It’s also a good run-and-gun online shooter, which wants to bring something fresh to the way online team-based competition works in this genre but isn’t quite there yet – new maps will inevitably follow.

It seems likely that the depth and scale of the experience is only going in one direction: to the stars.

The diversity and creative ingenuity of these little four-dimensional riddles is truly impressive. I was sad to finish the game after four or so hours, but enriched by the journey.

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

The result is a skateboarding game of rare poetry. There is the poetry of the skating itself, the miraculous interplay of body and board rendered with aplomb. There is the actual poetry that accompanies the end of each level. Finally, there are the tender emotions that refract through, and seem amplified by every bailed kickflip in this surreal, shimmering take on hell.

Avowed started out as Obsidian’s answer to Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, and it did remind me a lot of Oblivion and Skyrim in the exciting moments where I stumbled across something unexpected in the wilds. But it also shares those games’ tendency towards repetition, and the weightless feel of their fighting. My first 15 or so hours in The Lands Between felt rich with potential, but I got fed up with it long before the end.

While Sleeping Dogs works from an established palette, it's an absolute blast to play. Like the Uncharted series, the focus here isn't to break new ground for the medium through innovation. Instead, the aim here is to make the player feel like an action hero in a piece of blockbuster entertainment, while remaining fun to play throughout. Sleeping Dogs is not the most original game you'll play all year, but it's easily one of the most enjoyable and it's arguably one of the best.

It's fun for exactly the same reasons Company of Heroes: Tales of Valour was fun. Many hours of rewarding historical conflict await. Play the original first: it's considerably cheaper.

Clap Hanz Golf is the culmination of many years’ refinement: from the well-explained tutorials to the finely tuned rate of progression, playing it is like watching a master carpenter hammering out their 50th dining table. Unless you truly have had your fill of these games, this really is everybody’s golf.

Part chic toy, part interactive museum exhibit, part broadsheet mind-teaser, Rytmos is a sophisticated proposition (the puzzles soon scale in complexity, sometimes lacing around more than one side of the cube at a time), at once tactile and mystical.

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.

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.

The combination of gaming styles – action, role-playing and strategy – works wonderfully together and there are some real consequences to your decisions. It may be too accessible for hardcore RPG fans but Fable 3 is hugely enjoyable and the perfect game to play on a cold winter's evening.

This is an unmissable, sugary treat, bursting with kaleidoscopic entertainment, and is available for £15.99 on Steam and free via PlayStation Now. It’s a perfect entry point to battle royale games for those who are intrigued by their structure but put off by their violent undertones. And even though you can’t play against your family, you can all gather around the TV and enjoy the hilarity of 60 bean-shaped critters trying to simultaneously cram themselves through a narrow doorway, or across a rotating platform. It is lovely to see a game like this – so aware of its own silliness and so aware that it is exactly what we need right now.

Kat is never more fun than when she’s hurtling horizontally across the sky for no reason other than to feel the wind against her face. At its best, Gravity Rush 2 recreates the sense of reckless abandon that came when riding a bike as a child, the feeling of limitless potential combined with the intoxicating thrill of knowing that the tarmac could come up to meet you at any moment.

Mocked by the clock and the whizzing sounds in your ears, Time Flies gets under your skin not only because it’s a clever puzzle game, but because it manages to break down its profound ideas into easily digestible nuggets of gameplay. By blending its thinky thesis with such playful mechanics, Time Flies supplies a lighthearted canvas for players to engage with existentialism for an hour or two. As you seek a sense of meaning for the fly by ticking off their ambitions, there’s plenty of room left for you to muse about your own.

Much as our heroes are caught between two worlds, Fantasian has one foot in design dogma while the other paddles around cautiously in new ideas. The result is a lengthy and sumptuous genre piece, the equivalent of a good Netflix movie that you probably wouldn’t watch at the cinema. These days, that’s more of a compliment than it used to be.

The Metal Gear myth has never before appeared so agile, fresh and youthful, but more than the setting its Platinum's virtuoso coders that shine throughout, the object slicing a marvel of high-speed 3D manipulation. A technical masterpiece, Rising offers a funfair ride approximation of Konami's brooding series, but one with more than enough capacity for the Bayonetta veteran to express their dexterous expertise.

And, yes, the handful of marquee moments spent running from or tussling with gargantuan creatures are spectacular. I will never turn my back on a pelican again as long as I live. Throughout, Reanimal drip-feeds clues to compelling mysteries surrounding the nature of its world and the children’s place within it. A shame, then, that it whiffs its apparent swing at recapturing the gut-punch of Little Nightmares II’s ending.

The Japanese RPG may have suffered heavy blows at the hands of Western RPGs such as Skyrim and Fable, but The Last Story does much to demonstrate there's still life and innovation in the form. That this game should come from one of the genre's progenitors is testament to a creative spark that still fires even after all these years.

With air-dashes, balletic pirouettes and the ability to curl yourself into a ball for a teammate to hurl, this is a long throw from the official sport that hopes, one day, to enter the Olympics. Games are just as taut and competitive, however, with lots of scope for showboating. No competitive online game in 2021 can be merely a competitive online game, however, and, like Fortnite et al, Knockout City has an entire superstructure of unlockable items and progress meters, with an eye to turning the game into an enduring entertainment platform. Whether or not it hits that elusive target, beneath the capitalist carapace this is wonderful game-making.

Lego City Undercover is a joyous thing, filled with life and fun. It took me right back to my first go on the original Lego Star Wars – that pleasure of finding a favourite creative toy rendered so beautifully, faithfully and humorously into video game existence.

Second Son comes off as gorgeous, carefree fun, but a disappointing next-gen entry. The combat is as fast-paced and open to experimentation as it's ever been, but there is never the same sense of real power that the previous games delivered. Sucker Punch clearly wanted to create a big-hearted hero in Delsin, but there's a surprising lack of soul in everything else.

Proteus is beautiful, a beautiful thing. And it makes me happy – happy because it is so intrinsically interesting and emotional; happy because we live in an age in which things like this can be made and distributed to everyone with a computer.