Flush with flash new tricks, simpler action and a bulging roster of hostile creatures, the latest instalment of the enduring series is an absurd delight.

Without the drive of something new and promising on the horizon, the daily grind just doesn’t have that one-more-go appeal that is key to the farming-sim experience. There have been big improvements to the game’s presentation and accessibility, and it remains warm, cheerful and inviting, but between the technical issues and the aimless design it’s difficult to recommend highly – even if it’s better than the newer Harvest Moon games.

This new iteration of the escape-to-the-country fantasy replaces all that was charming about earlier versions with an average adventure game.

In its juxtaposition of abstract puzzles with domestic-scale storytelling, Maquette is more familiar, following the tradition of indie games that link high-concept puzzle-solving with romantic introspection. Like the relationship it maps, the game is at its most elegant and pleasing in the early stages, when its challenges are clearly stated and simply solved. Even so, the creative possibilities of this Russian doll world seem to extend beyond this brief, delightful exploration.

Its mix of planetary scavenging, alien-hunting and funky artwork ought to be a smash, but sluggish mechanics and onerous mission demands diminish the fun.

On iPhone, there are some frustrating control issues, and often, the text in your journal and the icons on your GPS are too small to make out. On top of this, the game provides scant information on your objectives, which can be trying. Nuts is, however, a warm, stylish and contemplative little game, which makes clever use of photography and nature watching in order to craft a modest, meaningful ecological fable.

Despite its non-verbal nature (brilliant environmental details, sound design and music tell the story in place of words), Little Nightmares 2 is thought-provoking, tackling the potentially corrupting nature of what is beamed into our homes. If you were to nitpick, you could say that there’s little motivation to revisit the game once it’s run its course – but this gothic nightmare is a delight to inhabit.

3D World is one of the brightest and cutest Mario games, a real riot of fun and colour to brighten up a particularly depressing February. Bowser’s Fury, meanwhile, is itself a super little Mario experiment, a novel adventure that might have felt thin as an individual release but which works perfectly as a side dish. It’s impossible not to recommend.

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.

The Medium is hugely ambitious and could have been a site for incredible, innovative storytelling. Instead, it fumbles sensitive topics, plot points evaporate into thin air, and characters who are studied closely are left behind and never mentioned again. Even while taking notes, the story became difficult to follow. It took me 12 hours over three nights to play, and towards the finale I was astounded by how a game so short could feel so long. This certainly is a game of two worlds: one very beautiful and one very empty, unfortunately leaving us with a game that is all skin and no spirit.

The final part of the modern Hitman trilogy is a minor masterpiece, a treasure trove of unforgettable player-generated moments. It doesn’t add any new ideas to the series, but perhaps it didn’t need to – because this is a game that lets you come up with the ideas, whether good, bad, deadly or ridiculous.

Despite the rudimentary presentation and simplistic goal, this satirical game quickly draws you into its web of intrigue as you see how these seemingly unrelated events connect to reveal – if you’re a willing believer – a tangled plot to defraud democracy. Conspiracy! shows, with keen effectiveness, how the natural human urge to spot patterns and turn events into coherent stories fuels internet sleuths, and how a well-intentioned search for truth can topple a person into a pit of destructive paranoia.

The pain and the pleasure of platformers such as this is their precision: the controls must be so tight, the jumping and running so perfectly predictable, that your failures are always your own. In Super Meat Boy Forever, though, enemies can turn up in especially unfair places, and the architecture of the levels sometimes feels thrown together as opposed to carefully placed by human hand. Its difficulty feels vindictive rather than playful, and oddly soulless, like trying to beat a computer at chess. For all its challenges, it felt as if I could feel the creators cheering me through the original Super Meat Boy’s death chambers, willing me onwards. Here, the algorithm is coldly indifferent to your efforts, and, despite the offbeat art and quirky vibe, the game is a punishing gauntlet that’s not worth running.

The game is also too faithful to Orwell’s plot, for all the alternative endings. At its best, it encourages you to rethink and even challenge some of the novella’s concepts, including its rather dated classist metaphors. What if the rats were more of an opposition than an infestation? What if the sheep were more than mindless propaganda machines? But these divergences are frustratingly limited by the need to pack in familiar scenes and conversations from the book. In the end, Orwell’s Animal Farm can’t work out whether it’s a retelling or a revolution – but with the nation’s schoolkids in lockdown, it’s nonetheless a valuable adaptation.

Does Cyberpunk 2077 live up to the hype? Is it significantly deeper than Watch Dogs: Legion or Yakuza: Like a Dragon? Is it as good as Grand Theft Auto V? The answer to all of these questions is no. The sheer size of the world, its astonishing architecture, its set-piece battles, its stylistic bravado – all are testament to the efforts of a talented workforce. But you have to play by its rules, accepting Night City’s xenophobia and misogyny as unavoidable fictive components. Unlike Los Santos, this is not a multifaceted sandbox where you’re free to create whole new activities unforeseen by the designers. You’re there to do missions and side-missions, and the world only yields thus far. You’re always a tourist, never a citizen...In this way, Cyberpunk 2077 resembles a vast, futuristic Las Vegas. You come here and have a hell of a week, but then you wake up one morning feeling jaded and complicit, and you realise that the glitzy signs lead nowhere, the noise is meaningless, and when you look beyond the strip, there is only desert.

Like any good puzzle game, there is special satisfaction in working out a solution to a conundrum that has stumped you, and that’s the best reward in the game. Call of the Sea ramps up the story towards the end, but I cared far more about the clues than Norah and Harry’s tale. It frustrates as the best puzzles often do, but no solutions feel unearned or gimmicky. This is definitely one for the pencil-chewers to check out.

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.

The gameplay is occasionally wonky, some of the more elaborate storytelling devices don’t land, and Sam is (deliberately) unlikable. However, Twin Mirror has a powerful story and it puts you in direct control of where it leads. If you play your narrative adventures for the narrative, Twin Mirror has the plotline for you.

It’s unfortunate that Empire of Sin has arrived in town with holes in its waistcoat, but I don’t believe its problems are beyond fixing, and it’s got moxie that ultimately shines through the flaws.

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.

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.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does everything it needs to with polish and zeal, and those who plan to spend the next year levelling up through its multiplayer ranks won’t be disappointed if they get this for Christmas (although they might have liked a few more maps than the currently available eight). But given how disruptive March’s battle-royale Call of Duty game Warzone has been, both as a competitor to Fortnite and Apex Legends and as a new meeting place for CoD fans, Cold War could definitely have used some more innovation. The campaign hints at it, and the 1981 setting offered so much promise, but, sadly, this is not the subversive goth-punk krautrock shooter I was waiting for.

It’s a satisfying experience as you glide gracefully over the ocean, but too often the dogfighting and bombing runs play out as erratic scrambles.

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.

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.

Offering a unique brand of tongue-in-cheek escapism that should induce a laugh roughly every five minutes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a perfect lockdown game. The one unintentionally amusing element is the voice acting, which you can thankfully eliminate by opting to keep the original Japanese dialogue with subtitles. Sega’s Yakuza games have always seemed like a well-kept secret, but they’ve recently been enjoying much more appreciation abroad. If you like the idea of a very Japanese, gangster-themed, interactive comedy soap opera, you’ll absolutely adore it.

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.

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.