It’s a jokey concept, but this dating game/dungeon crawler deals with everything from stalking to polyamory with admirable frankness.

Twelve Minutes is not the first game to explore the concept of the time loop. Zelda, Ephemeral Fantasia and Returnal have all been there. However, as a stylish, twisted take on movies such as Rear Window, Eyes Wide Shut and Chinatown, it is an engrossing experience that marries noir sensibilities and puzzle gameplay into a dense Freudian nightmare.

There are a few technical hiccups that are to be expected (and forgiven) of a game produced primarily by three people. Textures have a habit of popping in, or in some instances not loading at all, and it’s easy to get stuck behind an innocuous piece of scenery, though I reached the end credits without a proper crash or hard reset. Despite that, The Forgotten City is a tremendous achievement, a labyrinthine little sandbox packed with interpersonal mysteries – some ghoulish, others dorkishly domestic – that unravel further and further with each pass. For me, the moment that it got its hooks into me was when I used my foreknowledge of an impending accident to ensure that an assassin met an unfortunate end without my having to raise a finger. After that I was sunk, and the credits arrived too soon. Tempus fugit, indeed.

The Ascent is an atmospheric power fantasy, a cinematic cyberpunk escape where you can disengage your brain and indulge in copious virtual violence. If you’re a Game Pass subscriber, it’s worth a try – at £25, it’s harder to recommend.

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

All of it comes together in a finale that ties everything neatly together and, even compared to its predecessors, simply astounds in the sheer audacity of who and what exactly you are facing. If asked, therefore, whether The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (as a complete package) is the best game in the franchise, I can really offer no objections. I rest my case.

Cris Tales isn’t without some endemic role-playing game frustrations – grinding, uneven difficulty, overly simple puzzles – and it’s not a landmark revitalisation. But it exudes so much authentic passion and character that it’s easy to forgive a few relics from the past.

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.

A game as unexpected and compelling in its message as in its moment-to-moment challenge.

It’s been a while since I’ve played a game that fostered such gentle intimacy between characters – and there’s cooperative multiplayer, too, if you fancy recruiting real-life friends as fellow adventurers.

The innovation of players running around after their shots is fun but you may find yourself longing for a leisurely stroll over the course.

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.

Overboard! allows us to imagine what would have happened had Agatha Christie seen Groundhog Day and written a whole new type of mystery novel as a result. Its mobile format also works in its favour – as a Switch or smartphone game, it feels like carrying a little detective paperback around with you, except here you are the lead character, author and reader. As an experiment in fast, story-based game development it is – unlike most of my own mariticidal plots and alibis – a quite scintillating success.

Humour has always been a defining feature of Ratchet & Clank, right back to its origins on the PlayStation 2, but it doesn’t try too hard. It’s funny in a laid-back, undemanding way, and the story is similarly easy to digest. Rift Apart did not exactly challenge me, but it entertained me immensely. It’s just such a lot of fun, and so gorgeous I still can’t quite believe it. If this is an indication of how the new generation of consoles can infuse familiar-feeling games with new wonder, we’re in for a great few 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.

PowerWash Simulator is currently in early access (you pay a reduced premium to play a game not yet finished), but even now this is an irresistible example of so-called “playbour”, and further evidence that a shit job often makes for a sublime game. [Early Access review]

Hang in there through the repetition, though, and it turns out that there’s more to this than internet dog jokes and fetch quests. The combination of wandering and postmodernism put me in a contemplative mood anyway, presumably by design, and the wistful conversations with Krista, in which the couple gently nurture a long-distance relationship, have tenderness and pathos that kept me coming back. As a joke game, this has the expected issues, but ultimately it’s a flight I’m glad I didn’t miss.

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.

It seems Ibrisagic has partly conceived the game as a satire on intergenerational angst and society’s treatment of old people. In that respect, Just Die Already is about as convincing as one of its own physics interactions. However, as a juvenile, tasteless and problematic co-op party game, it’ll provide as much guilty pleasure as Goat Simulator. And it’s going to be all over Twitch for the next few months, you can be sure of that.

To enjoy Returnal you have to abandon the idea of accomplishment, and stop looking for the breadcrumb trail of pleasing achievements that typically pulls you through a game. Forget about making progress. Forget about seeing the end. Once you do that, you can lose yourself in the near-infinite pleasure of the movement and combat, and the near-infinite mystery and creeping horror of Atropos. Every try is different, and yet also the same. But, with the right mindset, you can find meaning and pleasure in that instead of despair.

This can be a fiddly game, and certainly isn’t one for people who dislike mining or organising elaborate storage systems, but after a couple of years in Early Access this is now a refined and elegant experience, gently paced, where there is always something interesting to pursue through beautiful spaces. Voluntary isolation in the deep cold might not sound like solace after a winter of lockdowns, but Subnautica: Below Zero is cosy and moreish. Dive in, and you may be surprised how deep you end up going.

The brilliance here – as with all the best Resident Evil games – is the way it switches modes when you least expect it. You can be deep in thought, wandering familiar corridors searching for the solution to a puzzle, when suddenly a werewolf leaps out at you from a previously safe place, or a creepy doll falls from a shelf, and you jump five feet off the sofa. At the same time, it is rife with the ludicrous: weird voice acting, an unfathomable plot, hokey environmental storytelling – but none of it really matters when you’re being chased up some stairs by a gigantic slime creature that giggles like a baby.

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

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.

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.

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.

Strategy game preserves the structure and jokey vibe of the 2004 classic but adds 2021 slickness and scope.

Not everyone is looking for a game like Outriders, and if wooden dialogue and sci-fi cliches – it’s all commanders with eye patches and mad scientists – are not your thing, there’s no shame in that. But if you’re the type of player who reached a flow state in Doom Eternal, or speaks wistfully of Diablo, or perhaps remembers the rhythmic gunnery of Bizarre Creations’ The Club, Outriders will speak to you.