Revealed to little fanfare at last year’s The Game Awards, Bayonetta Origins was the game that no one expected, and even fewer wanted. For some then, its mere existence is akin to Bayo blasphemy, yet in truth, this spin-off is far from the disaster many expected. While it never comes close to the highs of last year’s Bayonetta 3, it’s still a charming curio for fans and more importantly – a fantastic introduction to the genre for younger players.

If you’re looking for a nostalgic J-horror experience, and you’re prepared to put in the effort and work with the control scheme, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is an enjoyable, highly atmospheric adventure, with many brilliant moments of fear and dread. The spirits are wonderfully designed, and spotting a black-eyed ghost child lurking behind you, or in the corner of a room, never fails to send a shiver down the spine. For those of us who believe the Project Zero series should be as revered as Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it has been a pleasure to step, once again, into its chamber of horrors, with just a camera to protect you and the remnants of an ancient ghost story ready to be exhumed.

Before he had a face, Kirby’s unassuming spherical design was intended to be a graphical placeholder – but then its creators fell in love with his squishy simplicity. Return to Dream Land feels like a playable placeholder, ticking the right boxes without ever being truly exciting. In multiplayer it’s much more fun, but after the charmingly inventive Super Mario odyssey-inspired escapades of Forgotten Land, revisiting the safe, side-scrolling Kirby era holds little appeal.

What a shame that Luminous Productions didn’t capitalise on its best assets. Frey’s taken some heat for being overly chatty in Forspoken, but without Ella Balinska’s fantastic performance, the game would be totally forgettable.

EA and Omega Force’s unlikely venture succeeds by being the perfect entry point to the hunter genre. This is the accessible radio single to Monster Hunter’s prog album odyssey: it’s silly, flawed and probably not destined to be an all-timer, but if you’re in the right mood, my god is it fun. Whether it’ll continue to dig its talons into me remains to be seen, but after years of frustration, I finally feel ready to dive further into this once-impenetrable genre.

Hogwarts Legacy starts to feel like countless open-world games of the past decade once you’ve been playing it for more than 15 hours. However, you get to ride a Hippogriff. It’s those magical moments and the setting that rescue it from mediocrity, but only if the Wizarding World still has you under its spell.

This is a world that, robot assassins aside, is pleasurable to exist within and to explore, made all the sweeter by virtue of its unexpected arrival.

Where modern blockbusters are often weighed down by bloated worlds or predatory business models, Dead Space cuts right to the quick.

The cult 3DS game has been refreshed for smartphones and the combination of card game and horse racing is as weird and addictive as ever.

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.

This is a distinctive, appealing example of the JRPG genre that also nails the essence of the One Piece universe. Fans from both worlds will adore it, and I found it to be a perfect appetiser as I await The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom later this year.

Characters are memorable and well drawn, literally and figuratively, and the game ably tackles thorny issues such as the consequences of school bullying, and the terrible toll taken by anxiety, depression and domestic abuse. For the most part, the 12-hour runtime flies by as you get to know every delightful nook and cranny of the cosy neighbourhood; only the final third drags a little. It feels worthwhile after the superb ending, though, which ensures that this game will live on in your memory for a long, long time after the credits roll.

Technical wobbliness doesn’t always denote a bad game. The sheer charm of the writing, delightful golfing and the warmth of the world compensate for the rough edges. It’s a generously big game, too – imperfect, but special nonetheless.

Babbdi has a retro ambience that goes beyond its low-resolution textures. Its brevity and open-endedness makes me think of the magazine demo disc levels I’d hoard and replay as a teen. But it also feels like targeted relief from 2023’s anxieties, blending a strange restfulness with a sense of possibility. And yes, it lets you play La Cucaracha.

Of course, all of that chaos leaves the game vulnerable to some seismic bugs. It is no shock that the first option on the pause menu is an automatic respawn, because it is quite easy to banjax yourself. (Once, I fell through the bottom of the world and into a strange, psychedelic nether-realm.) Perhaps this is part of the deal, in a game this manic. Goat Simulator 3 has no aspirations beyond what it is: a dishevelled yet appealing bender of self-destructive looniness.

I’m a huge fan of the Oddworld-ian creature design and the factory-farming satire of its plot. But Oddworld made that stuff work because it had a big, weird heart. High on Life just has dilated pupils and a shit-eating grin.

The Forest Quartet left me feeling hopeful about the future. It’s a story about the resilience of the human spirit, the healing power of music and the profound, unshakeable impact that art can have on the world.

You could summarise Dwarf Fortress as a game about the meticulous cultivation of downfall. There’s no victory condition beyond the satisfaction of bolting together another grand chronicle of inevitable disaster. It’s this joyful fatalism as much as the simulation’s richness that makes it timeless.

By the end, there wasn’t a lot that felt new – but I had phantom hand cramps from swinging that electrified baton, and a powerful need to sit down and have a cup of tea. I felt as if I’d survived – which is just what this game is going for.

Much of the game’s thickly melancholic atmosphere comes from the shadier, quasi-mystical side of the business. A unique proposition, with its own rhythm and character, that may just inspire a keen interest in botany.

It’s kind of brave of Firaxis not to just give us XCOM with an asset swap. Midnight Suns is its own thing, combining strategy and soap opera in a nod toward Japanese battle tactics games and the underlying frivolity of the Marvel universe. One thing Firaxis certainly hasn’t done is dumb down turn-based strategy for incoming comic book fans. This is a hugely challenging game, with dozens of hours of play and a narrative that wants to say interesting things about family, identity and sacrifice. Sometimes, it even manages it.

Somerville is the only game that has ever had me hiding from aliens in a grimy festival Portaloo. Yet its last-ditch attempt at a galaxy-brain sci-fi ending lands with a disappointing thud. While its head-scratcher finale leaves you wishing its nonverbal narrative was a little more verbal, Somerville remains a masterclass in minimal storytelling; a series of memorable, haunting vignettes.

Here, Game Freak draws up an exciting new open-world blueprint for the Pokémon franchise, but appears to have lacked the time and knowhow to deliver it to spec. Compare this with June’s gorgeous Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which runs on the same console, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re beta testing an open-world Pokémon. With more time in the oven, this could have been genuinely exciting. As it stands, this fun-filled adventure asks you to put up with an awful lot more of the rough than the smooth.

Here, Game Freak draws up an exciting new open-world blueprint for the Pokémon franchise, but appears to have lacked the time and knowhow to deliver it to spec. Compare this with June’s gorgeous Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which runs on the same console, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re beta testing an open-world Pokémon. With more time in the oven, this could have been genuinely exciting. As it stands, this fun-filled adventure asks you to put up with an awful lot more of the rough than the smooth.

When a Sega marketing executive came up with the nonsense phrase “blast processing” to “explain” the technical capabilities of the Mega Drive, it’s now clear they experienced some sort of messianic premonition. Sonic Frontiers is blast processing in video game form: anarchic, careless, silly, exciting, meaningless, wonderful. What a daft and incredible ride.

Above all, what stands out is the developer’s deep knowledge of and love for the period. The dialogue drips with fascinating historical detail, supported by an extensive glossary of terms. That, combined with a focus on the minutiae of everyday people’s lives, results in a game that provides a wonderfully evocative window into the past. The glacial speed of progress and preponderance of text might be a barrier, but Pentiment is a gift to any player who longs for a historical setting that’s more than a surface texture.

The Case of the Golden Idol is a game of reasoning, elegantly modest in execution – the artwork is rudimentary, but strikingly so – but one that often requires extravagant feats of deduction. Genuinely new and inventive forms of play are relatively rare in video games, a medium that more often trades in refinement than revolution. Which makes this even more thrilling. Its puzzles are inventive, but so too is the way they must be solved, allowing both a trial-and-error approach and pure deductive reasoning. A game of wondrous, Sherlockian texture that plays out in our own imagination as much as on screen.

Marvel Snap is the perfect smartphone game: easy to get into, visually attractive, and simple to play in bite-size chunks, but it also offers masses of strategic depth.