With this time-spanning opus, Remedy Entertainment hoped to unite narrative gaming and linear television for its Xbox One title. But neither comes out of the experiment well.

Arms is a good starter fighting game, both for players and for Nintendo. Hopefully future updates will give the inevitable franchise a bit more bounce.

Like its predecessor, it does an excellent job of staying faithful to the Star Wars universe, right down to the sound effects. Even the way the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks feels like a wry nod to fellow fans.

For those who think they don’t know enough about the war, 11-11: Memories Retold paints a picture of the time. Aardman Animations, development partner DigixArt and publisher Bandai Namco have harnessed the power of video games to create a fitting accompaniment to the centenary of Armistice Day.

In introducing cooperative multiplayer, it has opened up an entirely new way to experience the adorable conceit of yarn characters making their way through a gigantic human world – but in freeing up movement and removing some of the friction, it has lost a little of the original’s focus and heart.

With real travel compromised right now, tagging along with Signs of the Sojourner’s caravan is one way to experience the sights and smells of new streets.

This game made me feel like a swashbuckling stranger in a foreign land for a couple of evenings, and left me wanting more. What’s there is lean and sometimes exquisite, but there wasn’t time to fully explore the different weapons (or try on all those dapper hats) before Faraday’s adventure came to an end after around six hours. I could have spent twice as long exploring this beautiful and mysterious creation, but I’m grateful nonetheless for the journey I’ve had.

Quantum Conundrum feels like the PC's answer to a smartphone app – a simple idea, well executed but never quite reaching the level of a "real" game. You'll play it for a few hours, enjoying the experience and then suddenly think: "Well, that's enough of that," and never go back. It is what it is; a small slice of casual gaming at a slightly inflated price.

The doors of Sherlock’s decrepit, abandoned family manor unlock for him as he remembers more, slowly piecing together what happened to his mother. You can populate this place with paintings, furniture and possessions, filling out its character and history, a decent metaphor for your progress through the story and the game. This is a lively world, with wonderful smaller mysteries and an overarching story that brings you closer to its famous main character and his personal history. While there are some technical issues, and the game understandably lacks the glossy polish of bigger-budget titles, this is nonetheless something that I’ve been wanting for a long time: a properly open-world interactive detective story.

All told, there's weeks of fun in this package. As you'd expect. It's fun and funny. As you'd expect. I'm utterly hooked. As you'd expect. Can we have Lego Matrix next? Please?

XCOM: Chimera Squad is essentially the Agents of Shield to XCOM 2’s Avengers. It gently plays with the formula, and tells the peripheral stories of a much wider world on a much tighter budget and with much smaller stakes. In other words, it’s XCOM but chilled – and, in these desperate times, that’s just fine.

It’s a game to be picked at with a sense of leisurely satisfaction, as if working loose a complicated knot. The effect is gently soothing, in the way of a jigsaw, but, when it comes to arranging your artworks, a little more scope for creative flair.

What you’re left with is a game whose best ideas are all optics. The fairytale southern style plays out like a modern, YA take on Toni Morrison’s fiction while summoning some of the whimsical, damaged beauty of 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The soundtrack is a rambunctious collage of howling blues, twanging folk and lilting jazz. Compulsion Games bottled much southern magic during the making of this seemingly risky gambit for Microsoft, yet failed to take risks where it really mattered: this unique setting deserved more.

There has never been a better way to confront, or indulge, your inner assassin.

If you buy a WiiU, you'll simply need to get a copy of ZombiU. It's a true survival-horror game, channelling the heart-in-mouth claustrophobia of early Resident Evils and Alone In The Dark, and adding Dark Souls' refusal to compromise as the icing on top. Play it in a darkened room, and you'll remember what gaming is all about.

If you see PewDiePie as an annoying bell-end who deserves a sceptic toe, you’re unlikely to shell out £3.99 on his game – even if its quality means you’d probably enjoy it much more than you do his videos...Equally, if you’re one of his fans, this is £3.99 well spent, with plenty of potential for replayability using the different characters and power-ups, as well as taking on the higher difficulty levels.

Zenless Zone Zero is stylish, silly and exciting, and promises years of fresh stories and an endless conveyor belt of shiny toys to seduce you. You pay for it somehow, either with your time or your money, but for me at least, it feels like a fair exchange.

This unquestionably beautiful game about saving a planet from an encroaching black hole boldly goes where few have remained awake.

Quite a few of the later puzzles rely on reaction times alongside forward planning, and since they’re often bigger than those earlier in the game, it’s far more frustrating to have to restart because of a mistimed jump-and-switch or accidental misfire. For the first few hours, however, Hue’s puzzles are concise, inventive, and surprising. For that, at this price, Hue is an experiment worth experiencing.

The result is a game about mythology that somehow lacks a sense of mystery. It’s fun to play and I dare say I will keep chipping away at it for weeks to come, but say what you want about Norwich in the dark ages – at least there was real depth beneath all that mud.

Running at a breathless 60-frames-per-second and with tiny loading times, Hotshot Racing is a slick callback to a much-loved era of racing games made by people who are clearly passionate and knowledgeable about the genre. Older players will get all the references, and newcomers will enjoy a bright, exhilarating game that forgoes modern frills for pure, seamless racing entertainment.

There just isn’t very much to do in The Pathless: you run across empty fields for a while, before solving a small variety of puzzles. Boss battles, with their blend of dashing, fighting and light brainwork, drive home that the Giant Squid formula works best in small doses. The score is reduced to sparse percussion in the open field, and the world itself doesn’t offer much in terms of visual variety or secrets to uncover. The problem isn’t the rudimentary gameplay itself, but how The Pathless tries to stretch its few puzzles across several hours. I was bored after the first hour, and no new ideas or clever twists arrived to rescue me from torpor.

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.

Filled with lovely details, perfectly constructed and often genuinely funny, Game Builder Garage is another excellent Nintendo creative tool, which quietly teaches you why its games are so good. It’s a totally closed experience, so you only have access to the materials it provides, but that makes it safe for families, and forces you to be imaginative in how you employ (and break) the rules. You won’t learn how to code in C from playing this game, but you will begin to understand how games are designed and how the logic of a game program works. If these are things you want to know about, there is no better teacher than Nintendo.

Fifa Street's new cooler, slicker presentation sits better with the game than I first imagined. Yes, it's a far cry from the arcade-like iterations of yesteryear, but in truth it's all the better for it.

A solid enough title – but it's certainly not a game for the casual console golfer.

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.

Destiny, isn’t just set in space, it an allegory of space. It is beautiful and fascinating, but oh so cold and immense, and the past engulfs everything.