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 might be made of papercraft, but Origami King has a lot of structural integrity, and unexpected depth. If you don’t fold at the tricky battle mechanics, the reward is an elevated, postmodern delight.

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

If you're uninitiated in the ways of Agent 47, this may be a little bit of a wobbly entry into the series, but it's certainly worth it of you're a huge fan of the franchise.

While wildly ornate, Autonauts is in equal parts playful, welcoming and charming. It is comparable to the cute farming sim Stardew Valley, yet it is very much its own game. And in the taste it gives you of thinking like a creative coder, it is in its own quiet way empowering and exciting.

Keeper speaks clearest through its tremendous images, while billing itself as a “story told without words”. But the latter isn’t quite right. At various points, button prompts flash up on screen: for example, press X to “peck”. In spelling out exactly what the player should be doing, the world’s ambiguity is diminished.

With a couple of hundred cars and just 14 circuits, each with their own variations, Forza 5 is a notable cutback in terms of content. Newcomers such as the legendary Spa Francorchamps and Bathurst, Australia are both thrilling, but the appearance of familiar stalwarts like Sebring, Indianapolis and Laguna Seca means that it won't be long before you've seen all the tracks that Forza 5 has to offer.

The best thing one can say about Absolution is that it's impossible to feel ambivalent about it; players will love and loathe aspects of this game in equal measure. In Absolution, terrible ideas rub up against great ones almost on a moment-to-moment basis, and the end result is a title which is impossible to consider with the same clinical detachment that it's protagonist is known for.

It’s a joyous, preposterous romp which sucks you in and takes you on a thoroughly enjoyable, surprisingly well-paced journey. Along the way, it even manages to hammer home the big advantage games have over films: that they can take “What if?” scenarios and explore them over a considerably longer period of time than two piffling hours.

In relaunching a much-loved and much-missed Star Wars genre, Fallen Order does exactly what it set out to. It reaches the bar, but then stops, with a set of characters and adventures that are not particularly intriguing or fresh, but certainly feel like they come from that very particularly galaxy, far, far away.

This feels like a far more honest take on what Far Cry is to most people: a joyful, chaotic toybox. There’s room for improvement – the questionable Latin American representation, for a start – but there’s no doubt this is something of an awakening for the series, exploring ideas I’m excited to see refined in iterations to come. In particular, doing away with the cumbersome pretence of political salvation leaves you free to pick and choose your own adventure, whether that’s toppling Castillo or just being crowned Gran Primo champion. Like Yara, Far Cry 6 is brimming with potential – you just have to step up and shape it.

It crosses demographic and gaming boundaries as easily as Guy Dangerous hops over dangling footbridges. An excellent sequel.

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.

Lego Batman 2: DC Heroes isn't groundbreaking but it is consistently fun, and while it might not take top honours for best Batman game of all time (that belt is still held by Batman: Arkham City), it's easily the best Lego game we've seen in years.

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.

It looks fabulous, the control system is exemplary in terms of both the control it gives and its flexibility, and the addition of both the Masters and the caddie system should make it more or less irresistible to golf nuts. While the player whose name it bears may still be making his comeback from a disastrous period, his video game at least still towers above all its peers.

Right off the bat, the world contained in Fall Of Cybertron is far more impressive visually than that of its predecessor.

That feeling’s at the heart of everything, in fact. Beneath the smoke and spent cartridges, I Am Your Beast is playground warfare retooled as a sport. In this forest, on this battlefield, you get to perform acts of gruesome excellence. And if you can’t get it right first time, you’re always just a restart away from perfection.

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

Nearly everything good about Prey is pulled from a game released in the decade before it. Well, four other games to be exact...The new Prey takes the highlights of these games, but merely allows them to coexist in a single habitat, never doing anything new with the foundational building blocks it has borrowed.

It is still enjoyable, because the Pokémon themselves are so interesting to look at; it’s just not wildly exciting. It’s a laid-back game and one that offers many hours of gentle photographic research to anyone drawn to Pokémon’s weird world – whether you’re a veteran of 90s Pokémania, or a nine-year-old.

Sweet and occasionally salty, Bugsnax is certainly one of the PS5’s most interesting launch titles. If you look at it as a checklist game where you need to catch creatures in order to win, it wobbles: it gets repetitive, some parts are harder than they need to be and it won’t help much if you get stuck. But the sheer range of creatures on offer, and the villagers’ hidden depth, filled my time in Snaxburg with joy. It’s funny, thoughtful, inventive and warm.

Discounty is a valuable addition to the sorority of cozy, slice of life with a dream-job games. It goes a little against the grain, while still managing to hold your focus. While there is not a lot of romance in running away from your life to work in a supermarket, there is certainly a lot of good clean work to do, which still manages to feel like play.

Hamstrung by clumsy mechanics, this game was unfortunately destined to disappoint; which is a pity when the conceptual framework was so promising.

Knights and Bikes captures the nostalgia of British childhood holidays in worn-down caravan parks and small-scale adventures in seaside towns. Designed to be played with a friend, with both of you tapping a button to careen around on extremely 80s bikes, it is energetic and charming enough to make you laugh all the way through.

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.

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.

It's not perfect – the storyline is a bit perfunctory, its free-form style can be illusory when it forces you to perform certain missions and it gets a bit repetitious in the latter stages. But it's a joyous sandbox in which you can drive like a lunatic, in exotic machinery that you might never even clap your eyes on in real life, without hurting anyone.

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.

If you're a newcomer, answer this question as honestly as possible; are you likely to be put off a game by the idea that one of the protagonist's most powerful weapons transforms into an adorably cute imp that says "Kupo!" at the end of every second sentence? If the answer is no, then FF XIII-2 is well worth exploring. If the answer is yes, then move on – there's nothing for you here.

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.

The most important aspects - how it looks and the feel of play - are top-drawer, but this only makes the surrounding drabness even more disappointing, and ensures that PES will remain the preferred choice of contrarians only.

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

Even if The Outer Worlds 2 rarely blows my mind, and suffers from direct comparisons to Avowed, the smaller scope of which resulted in a tighter experience overall, there is inherent value in a role-playing game that so effectively sucks you in for hours upon hours. It’s not breaking the mould, but improving its structure: offering you something satisfying and solid that rarely surprises, but still manages to regularly delight.

This attempt to cosy-fi an immersive sim game is full of ‘zany’ gags as you rescue cats from a spaceship, but it gets a bit too saccharine.

Resident Evil 3 doesn’t quite hit the heights achieved by last year’s reworking of Resident Evil 2 – it fails to gloss over the shortcomings of its forebear. But it is still a well thought-out and nicely executed modern refresh of a survival horror classic – and welcome slab of (almost) escapism to enliven our current house-bound lives.

What Air Riders lacks in modes, it makes up for in charm. There are a heap of customisation options, allowing you to pimp your ride with unlockable stickers and alternative colour schemes – you can even hang a plushie from your machine like a Kirby-branded Labubu...This is a tightly focused game that reminds me of Nintendo’s fun-first NES-era game design – for better and for worse. It has a sprinkling of Sakurai magic and oodles of visual panache, but at full price it is – like Kirby – a little puffed-up.

I’ve been waiting 23 years for a game to come along and take the crown for the best Star Wars flight sim from X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, and have had to endure guff like 2001’s Starfighter in the meantime. Well, it’s finally here. This is now the high watermark for interactive Star Wars experiences.

This is a game that can sit proudly in the Halo canon and also call itself a true, albeit hybrid, RTS. It’s instinctive to play, exciting to watch and packs in some genuinely new ideas that deserve exploring. And if you still can’t get past the inevitable compromises and unfamiliar UI, there’s always the PC version.

The new additions to Fifa 20 elevate it above “standard annual update” fare.

More generally there is much better access to tactics and strategy, with players able to manipulate their team's position and lineups to an almost Football Manager-style degree.

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.

Wasteland 3 is treading creatively irradiated ground. The nuclear post-apocalypse has been explored to exhaustion, in video games and elsewhere, and no amount of weird factions or sex jokes can prevent it from feeling like an aged rock band on a comeback tour: the tunes are still decent, but there’s no youthful vigour.

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.

Despite retailing as a full-price game, Siege contains microtransactions which can speed up the levelling process and unlock cosmetic items, which on top of the ‘season pass’ (for future DLC) feels more than a little mean. Counter-Strike GO looms large in the background of much of what Siege does, and that game supports a miniature economy of skins and other items – but also built a following for a dozen years over several entries before this. Ubisoft has actively harmed this game’s chances of success by pushing such stuff when what it should be focusing on is building a player base.

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.

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

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.

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

GR:FS is so nearly a landmark game. It's busting with great gadgets, challenging and unusual to play and committed to a true co-op spirit that most rivals have long since abandoned. If only it looked a little better, had a few more maps and U-Play made it easier to find a quick online match-up with your mates. Even so, it's a worthy alternative to any FPS and puts the Ghost Recon franchise right back at the cutting edge.

Such rough edges, and there are many more, suggest that while CoD: WWII may look the part, this is actually a game rushed to hit release – there are at least two areas in HQ with placeholder vendors saying ‘coming soon’.

This Definitive Edition might have been wiser to double down on the original, slightly hokey script and performances, rather than strive for something more sophisticated in the rewrite.

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.

Detroit: Become Human is a spectacularly crafted game that bends and branches out around the player’s choices in an astonishing and unparalleled way. Although hampered by tired central plots and some predictable, occasionally hokey storytelling, the result is a technical feat in video game development and a meticulously detailed cinematic achievement.

Yakuza 4's production values are through the roof, its plot is gripping and quirky, it's often very funny indeed, and it would undoubtedly sell in millions if it was published by Rockstar rather than Sega.

Perhaps those overpriced but desirable toys will turn more people’s attention towards this delightful game.

Age of Calamity is a bizarre, enjoyable beast that pays homage to an incredible game, while merrily doing its own thing. Scything through thousands of identical baddies might not be the most sophisticated power fantasy, but the compelling rhythm of intense battles and constantly achievable microgoals ensures it’s certainly a fun one – to the point where only thumb pain was preventing me from playing even more.

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.

You will enjoy For Honor more if you can form a clan with friends and support each other properly, but even for casual swordsmen and swordswomen it has much to offer. Yes, the real-money system is galling, but it’s a reality of the modern industry that we’re probably going to have to live with, and everything that you can buy with cash can eventually be earned through doing what the game wants you to do; learning to control and administer the resource of violence against ever more testing enemies.

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.

Thanks to the Rumble HD in the JoyCon, you get a sense of that physical feedback you would once have got naturally from those mechanical arcade machines; you feel your seed rolling from one side of the screen to the other. And while the tension of TumbleSeed makes it a surprisingly great spectator game, this just feels right in portable mode, with that precarious, procedurally generated mountain in the palms of your hands.

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.

Advanced Warfare is the best that Call of Duty has been for years, a successful negotiation of that troublesome creative and commercial tension.

While you’ll become overly familiar with the limited number of levels, the arrangement of enemies and power-ups is always different. No two fights feel the same. Like the brilliant Tetris Effect, Superhot deftly sidesteps monotony and instead becomes hypnotic, inducing the zen-like trance state of the archetypal action hero when deep in the throes of violence. Ultimately it doesn’t matter who you’re fighting or why. What matters is the fight itself, the spectacle and the flow. Superhot’s self-directed choreography emerges triumphant; stylish, dynamic and gripping.

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.

I might have been disappointed by Metroid Prime 4 if it had come out in 2010. But now, after such a long break, I’m happy to return to this anachronistic way of playing: slow, laborious, sometimes annoying. It’s a reunion tour rather than a revival for the Metroid Prime series: some of the new material doesn’t hit but the classic stuff is still just as great as ever.

Yarny’s journey might have its ups and downs, but it’s brief and beautiful. It is a mostly wordless message of love.

It really is testament to the gruesome enjoyability of those hyper gory killcams that, even after four games, the sniping continues to be satisfying enough to warrant a look in. Sniper Elite 4 doesn’t miss its target, then, but it plays things safe enough to guarantee the kill without any undue risks.

That Dragon, Cancer shows how video games can create empathy, both through the simple method of allowing the player to experience unfamiliar situations – and by twisting what is real and not-real within them. It’s cut through with human resilience and humour but ultimately defined by a determination to leave a mark on a little boy’s behalf – something to show he was here, and real, and mattered. An unforgettable experience.

The game's tall difficulty belies its accessible aesthetic: make no mistake, this is a far more demanding proposition than its Pikmin cousin. And yet, these are the hallmarks that make Platinum's output some of the most exciting work in contemporary video games: scruffy invention in a playpen that allows for player mastery. In the midst of this riot of ideas and unrefined energy we can perceive some of the Wii U system's idiosyncratic wonder.

It remains a brilliant social game in the classic sense of the phrase.

Dragon's Dogma has everything that RPG-heads crave – you can lose yourself in tinkering around, collecting items, finding arcane quests and seeking random enemies for days. It's reassuringly complex, and astonishingly well-executed given that this is Capcom's first attempt at such a game.

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.

The frantic and occasional flawed action on the pitch harks back to older PES games. Fifa 12 is the more complete football experience but PES 2012 can still deliver in short hectic doses.

Sonic Colours never feels like a world you want to hang out in. There are smart ideas and neat challenges here, but in the end there's probably too much stuff and the untidy interface makes it hard to get at the goodies.

Skylanders Trap Team won’t be the cheapest video game for families this year, but with the Starter Pack and some old figures, this compelling action adventure offers good value.

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

New Super Mario Bros 2 may not do anything we haven't seen in a game before, but it oozes such quality from every pixel that if you don't derive pleasure from playing it, no matter what your age or gender, it's difficult to think of any game that would satisfy you.

A more forgiving proposition than its forebears, this is an enjoyable zombie romp that's lost some of its character in the lurch onto the next generation hardware.

Calling it a simulation doesn't quite feel right, but this captures the look and action of a football match better than anything else I've played.

One's enjoyment of Dead Space 3 depends on how much one is prepared to surrender to Visceral's new vision for their horror IP. If you're after a rollicking action title that provides countless opportunities to blast away at slavering monsters, Dead Space 3 could well be one of the most exciting titles you play all year. But if you're one of the Dead Space faithful who was seduced by this series' ability to deliver a survival horror experience shot through with moments of white-knuckled terror, be warned: Dead Space 3 has left that terrain and doesn't look set to return to it any time soon.

Infinite Warfare could have been much more than a passable single-player movie attached to a super fast, super confident multiplayer infrastructure. As such, and with those moments of tantalising potential in mind, it feels like a wasted opportunity.

Despite the beautiful detailed environment and the promise of entertaining soap opera-style clips, Rapture is a real test of patience – because it’s just so damn slow.

Fifa 22 is absolutely unmistakably a Fifa game – it has the sophistication and polish we’ve come to expect, with all the player likenesses, authentic stadia and recognisable commentators we see every year. But right at the core of it is a match engine that feels more surefooted than ever, at a time when the game’s more tactically complex rival Pro Evolution Soccer has been relegated to a free-to-play existence with all the compromises that will inevitably entail. If you can live with the loot-box trickery of Ultimate Team, this is a gigantic, rewarding simulation that offers a ton of variety and scope, and many, many moments of exquisite goalmouth drama.

FromSoftware’s experiment in upending its established gameplay formula is admirable, and taking down gargantuan foes alongside friends really adds to the joy you feel at finally besting what at first felt like an insurmountable task. It’s just a shame that the game’s skewed pacing and overreliance on Elden Ring’s pool of assets so greatly mars the experience.

Friends of Mineral Town remains an engaging, warm and homey experience.

While its plot may be undernourished, the campaign does contain a series of worthy action set pieces, and really, it's not a bad way to spend an afternoon. But the single-player's main purpose seems aimed at familiarising players with Starhawk's mechanics before setting them loose in the game's online battleground, which, as has been mentioned, is where its true longevity lies.

Reigns offers a pretty, innovative and charming diversion, then, but don’t let yourself care too deeply about what actually happens, or the charm will give way to frustration fast.

EA MMA is clearly a painstakingly researched, precisely realised game. Surprisingly impressive.

The ability to explore space with a party of up to three friends makes it feel much less lonely than before. And where it once was difficult to return to a previously visited planet, establishing bases allows you to make some small corner of the universe feel like home.

In a year that has given us not one but three Mario-themed RPGs, I was ready to be underwhelmed by Brothership. Yet thanks to captivating combat, varied platforming and well-judged difficulty, Brothership not only lives up to my childhood nostalgia for this series, but improves upon it. It is an inviting serving of sun-soaked delight at the beginning of a gloomy November.

Like throwing a punch in the dark, buying Street Fighter V today is a speculative gamble.

As home fitness products go, it's certainly one of the best. It's absorbing, interesting and fun in parts, and if you're the sort of person who gets a kick out of medals, points and progress reports then you'll certainly enjoy the framework it offers. But if you're looking for a fun Kinect game with a getting-fit side-effect, or a comprehensive exercise routine with serious results, Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 is not quite there.

The thing with Capcom Arcade Stadium is that this isn’t just a nostalgia exercise – many of these games hold up today. Designers including Tokuro Fujiwara and Akira Nishitani crafted beautiful 2D play spaces filled with energy, challenge and luscious choreography, and these elements are still inspiring today’s shooters, metroidvania adventures and roguelikes. Back in the day, when you put 10p in a Capcom machine, you knew that, even if you only survived for 27 seconds, you would see wonderful places, effects, enemies and surprises. That feeling is captured here once more, for all to experience.

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.

Sakuna is more than the sum of its parts. Individually each element is just a bit lacking: the exploration is limited, the pacing a little tedious, the combat doesn’t quite have the depth of a true action-brawler and even the farming proves repetitive. But just as sunlight, fertiliser, water and toil together produce a bountiful harvest, all of this game’s elements come together to make something hearty and unexpected.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead might not have invented this style of meaningful narrative adventure, but it certainly popularised it. It is tragic that its popularity led the studio’s leaders to run it into the ground, badly overstretching its staff on endless similar projects from Batman to Borderlands to Minecraft. The circumstances of this final ending are disappointing and unfair. But if The Walking Dead has taught us anything, it’s that things don’t always end well.

FC 26 remains a strong package, despite its deliberate choice to abandon authenticity in the online space. There are still numerous gamers out there who crave realism, even in competitive matches. Yet while this represents a step backwards for real football, it’s unquestionably a stride forwards in the field of fan service. This is not the sim Pro Evo purists have longed for – but as an esports collaborative between the developer and its community, Fifa’s third follow-up achieves the majority of its aims.