I hope Stray Gods kicks off a whole new genre, and more from Summerfall Studios in the future.

This is a simple game, artfully told.

Baldur’s Gate 3, like its titular city, is a towering landmark of an RPG. Bustling with life, brimming with scope, and bursting with imagination.

This new visual novel from the creator of One Night Stand is an engrossing, emotional study of digital relationships that will hit a raw nerve with gamers.

Venba is a great example of stories we need to see more of. It would just have been nice to see more of this particular story, too.

With the sweetness and delight associated with Disney absent, this new platform game is a strangely cynical waste of potential.

The emotional core of the game remains the interdependency between you and the Pikmin, and the sense of responsibility and gratitude that you feel towards them. Walking through my local park after playing it for a day, I felt that if I crouched down under a tree and remained still, I’d see little lines of them ferrying things around among the ants and beetles. The most memorable games are always the ones that inject a little magic into your every day life.

Viewfinder is magical, then, but also short-lived. Even with the optional puzzles, you can easily finish the whole thing over two or three evenings, and it never quite capitalises on the promise of the camera, the promise of getting lost inside picture after picture after picture. Each level is bespoke, tiny; although the very final sequence, a timed dash through puzzle after puzzle, hints at a grander potential. I’m left dazzled by the possibilities, but ultimately wanting more.

This, then, is the playable equivalent of curling up under a duvet and binge-watching a Netflix series. Fitting, really, considering that the monolithic streaming platform coughed up to publish this sequel. It certainly won’t be a game for everyone, but its punchily paced paranormal parable respects its players’ time, and by the existentialism of the end credits, it will certainly have you reflecting on how you want to spend yours.

It all adds up to a feeling of becoming enmeshed, slowly but surely, in a little community – one that you become familiar with and part of, even if the moment-to-moment interactions can feel a little shallow. Marvelous also seem to have finally nailed the technical performance for their remakes, too, especially on the Switch, with fast load times and little to no slowdown even with loads of animals on screen. It’s not going to be a game for everyone, but if you can meet A Wonderful Life on its terms, you’ll find a lot to love in its slow-paced, small-town gait.

Final Fantasy XVI is the series at its most spectacular, for good and bad. However, Square Enix has taken a lot of the criticism aimed at previous games into account, and the battles offer more freedom, the characters are fleshed out, and thanks to detailed world-building, you finally get the sense again that there is a world out there that needs saving.

There is plenty of novelty here to attract seasoned F1 game pros and newcomers, who may start off with F1 World. It’s technically magnificent: it looks and feels incredible, and its off-track production values are sky-high. Sure, the continued presence of loot boxes – seemingly de rigueur in any EA Sports game these days – cheapens it slightly, but at least it doesn’t force them upon you too brashly.

There is both too much and too little going on in Harmony: The Fall of Reverie at any given time. It is a game of many parts that don’t come together – an interesting design study packaged in a mildly boring game.

But despite the rewarding interplay between various stats and buffs, and the laudable sensation that, even very early on, you have access to the sort of freedom in character and combat customisation that’s typically locked away for hours in similar games, Diablo 4 feels … toylike. Strip away the hellish screams and scarily convincing Halloween costumes, and what’s left is the video game equivalent of hyper-palatable junk food, albeit with myriad colourful warnings on the packaging.

Essentially, Citadel Station is one gigantic puzzle that you solve from the inside, and figuring out that puzzle as you fight for your life is always engrossing. The lessons System Shock can teach may be different now than 30 years ago, but thanks to Nightdive’s restoration, there’s still plenty to be learned from Looking Glass’ cerebral sci-fi horror.

It takes a lot to reinvent a 30-plus-year-old franchise while keeping step with tradition, and Capcom has succeeded admirably. Hopefully the still-to-come monetisation schemes are reasonable (details hadn’t been fully announced at the time of writing) and the netcode remains smooth, because the king of fighting games, Street Fighter II Turbo, is on notice: here comes a new challenger.

A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien’s fiction.

If you have young children and want to share with them the thrill of driving across a wild, fantastical landscape, crashing into stuff and getting constant positive feedback, this would be a smart investment. It is a game with a lot of heart, made by developers who clearly understand how to make kids smile while they play.

I feel as if I will never finish this game. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on it, it reveals a new expanse. I haven’t even mentioned the depths, the particularly dangerous pitch-black underground world that exists below Hyrule. (Man, I do not like it down there.) I am walking around looking at all the clutter in my house and imagining ways that I could fuse it together. I invite my kids on to the sofa with me to watch Link’s adventures, and we all scream as I’m pursued by a terrifyingly fast gloop-monster made of grasping hands. In an airport recently, surrounded by bored people staring at their phones, I was so absorbed in a labyrinth I’d found at the edge of the map that I nearly missed my boarding call.

Redfall is a poor execution of ideas ill-at-ease with Arkane’s historic design ethos, a sad misuse of Arkane’s a unique developer’s particular talents.

It might not quite match the narrative prowess of BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, but Jedi: Survivor has so much else going for it. Whether you’re tracking down optional bounty hunters, solving the puzzles in those Jedi temples, or searching Koboh’s many obscure thoroughfares for character upgrades, the game’s tactile controls and precisely balanced challenge make it consistently rewarding. Meanwhile, its biggest moments rival anything games like God of War or Elden Ring can throw at you. Be assured, this is the Star Wars game you’re looking for.

Tron Identity has merits in its atmosphere and flexible story, but strip away the licence and what remains is a fleeting and unremarkable visual novel that lives in the shadow of better detective games.

Dead Island 2 will amuse you for days with its stylish vision of a zombified LA, but it’s also limited in scope, and with skill systems that feel shallow and impersonal it won’t hang around long enough to achieve superstardom. The fact is, Dead Island 2 is one of 2014’s best zombie beat-’em-ups – it’s just a pity we’re in 2023.

This is a promising return to golf for EA Sports. It’s slow of pace, it’s tough to get into, and it’s a little staid and fuddy-duddy at times (most of the background music makes you feel like you’re on hold to a financial service call centre), but the accuracy of the ball physics, the huge range of shots and the highly tactical nature of the play gives serious players the challenge and realism they want. I wish there was a smoother on-ramp for beginners, or a much more basic arcade mode for those who want to thrash through a few holes with pals, but this is a sim after all and when it comes to sport, EA does not mess around.

The storytelling suffers from a lack of conviction.

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.

Even on the hardest of the three difficulty settings, Terra Nil is more forgiving than expected. Everything from its simple interface to an easily understood tutorial and a fantastically beautiful in-game guidebook makes environmental restoration go smoothly. The music and sound effects are very relaxing, and after every successfully restored map, there is a moment where you can just appreciate your handiwork. While a bit more friction wouldn’t have hurt, and the variation from map to map is modest, by keeping it simple, developer Free Lives spreads a clear message: saving the planet could be so easy if we wanted it to be. All that’s missing is a toxin scrubber.

This brief, raw and unsettling reimagining of a celebrated environmentalist’s campaign against pesticides presents a sickly vision of nature contaminated by humans.