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.

This spiky, funny, and bracingly original game consumed a few laughter- and tear-filled evenings, and left memories that will stay with me a good deal longer.

Of more importance is how this world will evolve once enough players have completed all the current missions and find themselves in an end-game that is effectively a treasure hunt in an anarchic moral wasteland. Even at this early stage though, The Division is an experience that’s worth having if you’re at all interested in mainstream action games, or role-playing adventures, or co-operative online play. You will not be bored as you blast your way through.

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.