As in Journey, surely now an ordained saint of artistically ambitious and emotionally resonant video games, that cleaved mountain always looms in the distance, beckoning you towards it. You do eventually reach it, in the dead of winter, beaten down, the world dying around you. I’m still thinking about what happened there. Rarely has a game made me feel so much in a few short hours. It will be some time before I feel ready to play it again, but until I do, I will be recommending it to anyone who’ll listen.

For Yu and Perry, it’s been a preposterously ambitious undertaking, multiplying the challenges and timings involved in crafting a single video game by a factor of 50. For us, the result is a gift of wild generosity, a demonstration of how much untapped creative terrain remains in even the crudest-looking video games.

For players of the original, this should get a steady nostalgia drip going. But coming to this series fresh makes for an overlong, dated and tedious experience.

The problem is, very little of what you’re asked to do turns out to be any fun. Fetch-quests that offer next to no payoff are compounded by annoying travel: you have to make an unappealing choice between the vein-popping frustration of trying to drive across the craggy, impassable, boulder-strewn landscape, or giving up and shlepping there on foot. And this landscape isn’t Skyrim, or The Capital Wasteland, with discoveries to be made around every corner. It’s a Starfield planet map like any other, with only the odd cave or cookie-cutter facility to explore, and it rarely rewards inquisitiveness with anything other than wasted time and the urge to swear.

Apartment Story is a film-length mediation on loneliness, repetition and adult life that is unlike anything else I’ve played. With a little more time and scope, a little more access to Arthur’s wider life, this could have been a cult classic rather than a cult curio. Yet when an indie debut manages to so effortlessly capture such a miserable mood – and for less than the price of a London pint – Apartment Story still feels like an easy recommendation.

EA Sports FC 25 is perhaps not the major structural leap forward that its predecessor was – it is, to use the classic phrase, an evolution not a revolution. To get the most out of its major new technical features, you’ll need to really dig down into the depths of the pre-match menu systems – and that’s not for everybody. Meanwhile, Ultimate Teams is as problematic as ever with its carefully greased compulsion loop of in-game purchases and micro-improvements to your fantasy squad.

It’s great to finally get to play as Zelda, but working out how to take an active without being able to fight is rather hard work.

The Plucky Squire is a moon-shot of a concept, and as the hours go by, it becomes clear that it’s trying to say something truly interesting about the importance of storytelling and the power of narrative. I would recommend seasoned players approach the first few hours with patience, as it takes a hot minute to find its pace. As the game evolves it becomes highly rewarding, even if the controls are a little finicky at times. The Plucky Squire is heartening, funny and impressive to behold: not flawless, but still a treasure of a title.

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.

Astro Bot is still the wonderful tribute to PlayStation history and hardware design that Astro’s Playroom was, but it has been given room to grow beyond a characterful tech demo and into the best platform game I have played in many years. Actually, it’s one of the best platformers I’ve ever played, – and, as a child of the 90s, I truly have played a tonne of them. PlayStation has been lacking a great homegrown family-friendly game since LittleBigPlanet, and Astro Bot is a worthy inheritor of that series’ playfully humorous legacy.

The game presents a formidable challenge, and most players should begin at the easiest difficulty level, where the laser bullets fall like a shower rather than hail, and you have a modest stock of lives that replenish between each of the game’s seven lingering stages. It is, at times, repetitious, and Cygni’s novel systems will no doubt prove divisive among the genre’s dedicated and often conservative followers. But for those who approach with an open mind and dextrous fingers, it remains a thrilling vision.

We are admittedly right at the beginning of The War Within’s two-year life cycle, but this is the best that WoW has been performing in years. While Blizzard will surely continue to grapple with Warcraft’s place in the modern gaming landscape, especially ahead of WoW’s 20th anniversary, the game feels more relevant than it has in a long time.

To look at Black Myth: Wukong purely through the lens of market sizes and tastes is a disservice that obscures the most critical fact of all: it’s a fantastic game.

A genuinely likable new lead and intense attention to the mythology of the Star Wars films made this a nostalgic thrill.

It’s a game in near-perfect balance, a lean and distinctly not mean ode to turn-based tactics that embraces the genre’s creative puzzling while repudiating its worst excesses. Tactical Breach Wizards lets you see the future, raise the dead, and burst through windows on a witch’s broom. Yet amid all that, its most powerful spell is empathy.

The underlying issue with Dustborn is the balancing act between serious topics and the supernatural, as well as its clear desire to alternate between fun moments, activism and drama – a balance it ultimately can’t hit. For example, a tragedy for an entire community is followed by a birthday party for a raccoon. I had a better time once I stopped taking it seriously, because the standout moments happen when Dustborn leans into the silliness of its supernatural storyline. With Dustborn, you may expect a tense trek across the US, but what you really end up with is the equivalent of an interactive Marvel movie, and that is OK.

If The Crush House had simply been a smart and funny photography and cinematography game, I would have been satisfied and pleased – but it offers the player far more than that. Underneath the snappy text and playful design, it has a weird heart, too. It’s worth noting that the review build still had moments of glitchiness – however the strength of the idea and execution far outweighs any of the technical struggles. This in itself is remarkable: The Crush House is so much fun that even the slightly broken parts didn’t make me want to turn it off. It’s a fantastic way to spend the last few chill nights of summer – and the seasons coming up, too.

Video games, at their best, allow us to inhabit the lives of people who are different from us, or to assume the roles of protagonists in stories we have the power to shape, or fiddle with recreations of the systems that underpin civilisations. But they can also be a very silly little joke, shared among friends, which for 15 minutes or so make everyone love each other a tiny bit more.

In the future, when the subject of the funniest comedy games of all time crops up, the usual names will be there – Monkey Island, The Stanley Parable, Death Stranding (I’m kidding) – but now surely a new one will join them. Coal Supper has produced perhaps the first great abstract Yorkshire-based cartoon puzzler of the 21st century. Thank goodness.

It definitely exhausted my brain from time to time – now and then I was just shifting stuff around in circles because I couldn’t figure out how to make three blocks land on three separate switches at the same time, as the conveyor belt logic of the puzzles temporarily eluded me. But more often I felt locked in, darting around the levels and arranging them almost on instinct, feeling as if I was playing Tetris. Having reached the end of Jenna’s adventure, I am definitely done with block puzzles for a while – but rarely do you play a game that explores one good idea as thoroughly as this.

I enjoyed the couple of afternoons I spent with Flock – I only wish there were more of it. A couple of really interesting little environmental puzzles made me wish to find others hidden around the uplands. Most of the creatures can be found quite easily, but just a few required some enjoyable deduction from a single sentence in the field guide. Once or twice, a creature in my entourage pointed me towards another, or helped me search something out, but most of them do nothing except follow you around. I couldn’t help but imagine a just slightly more ambitious version of this game, in which key beasties bestowed interesting abilities, with races or challenges to give you something to do with your friends once you’d filled out the field guide. But after less than five hours I’d done everything there was to do.

The ponderous, obscure pacing will not be to everyone’s taste, and you’ll need a powerful machine to reproduce the world as its creators intended, but – surprisingly, perhaps – Riven’s mystical power has only intensified with age. There is nothing else quite like it. And as many of us count the days until the summer holidays, here is a destination free of tourists, with plentiful vistas and a clockwork conundrum that, when solved, provides a revitalising blast of satisfaction.

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.

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.

This horror game creates great atmosphere with its acting and visual design, but is regularly brought to its knees by uninspiring gameplay.

Hunters is not quite as much fun as playing Overwatch … or watching Star Wars. It could have done with some truly original features, or more movie content tied in with the gameplay. Instead, it is a decent team shooter that you can play on Switch or mobile, and swap your progress between the two, so you never have to go more than a few moments without levelling up a wookiee. Yes, it tries to bamboozle you with many quests, challenges and blinking icons on the menu screen so that you inevitably fold and buy a £10 season pass, but you can definitely defeat the game’s Jedi mind tricks and have a blast without paying. The force is strong in this one, but not THAT strong.

At a time when the big video game companies are focused on building video games designed to function like sport, with seasons and passes and never-ending fixtures designed to dominate your leisure time, what a joy to be presented with a game that is so intricate and contained. This is a perfectly made contraption, with a start, a middle and an end, intended to inspire joy and build culture, and not, mercifully, shareholder value.

Would Kafka approve? Obviously not – he didn’t want this work published in the first place. But a Kafka adaptation that cannot satisfy its author might as well trap him in a hell of his own making. Kafka playing Playing Kafka would have been Kafka’s ultimate nightmare: lost in a maze arranged from his own words, confounded by obscure if not non-existent objectives, dialogue options that offer no choice at all, and ultimately unable to progress after a bug sends his character’s lawyer clipping through the floor. In the thought of it there is, at least, something a little Kafkaesque.