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.

If last year’s Unpacking has left you craving more mess to mess with, then A Little to the Left is an obvious next port of call. We’re witnessing the birth of a new genre, the tidy ’em up. Judging by how expertly these games tap into the innate human desire for order, expect many more examples to follow.

There haven’t been many interpretations of ancient mythology as gripping, detailed and imaginative as this, in video games or any other medium. It brings the stories and characters of an ancient era to life in a way that only modern technology could realise.

In our era of coldly distanced technological combat, of armoured police vehicles on city streets, of protests bloodily subdued, we might ask why such violent delights as Modern Warfare still have a place on the entertainment calendar. It’s something I’ve pondered over the many hours I’ve spent thoroughly enjoying this ludicrous game. It is something I will perhaps go on to think through in the many, many hours to come.

Where many western games yearn to be seen as the height of sophistication, craving the critical kudos of an HBO drama, Bayonetta 3 stands defiant in its absurdity. Like its predecessors, this is destined to go down as a cult classic – a dizzying dance of demon-dicing delight. Its crude, whiplash-inducing narrative means it certainly won’t be for everyone, but the best things in life rarely are.

Stealth, however, is the biggest disappointment in Gotham Knights. Where Batman infested the city’s crevices, his underlings merely invade them: you can work together to set up terrain traps or create distractions, but it’s a world away from the older series’ puzzlebox intricacy and it’s always more fun to barge in swinging.

Throughout its running-time, Requiem treads a fine line between poignant and absurd, balancing heartbreaking scenes in which Hugo wrestles with burdens no child should ever bear, with action sequences where you must flee from literal tsunamis of rats. But even at its most ridiculous, Requiem is always earnest in its ideas. Ultimately, it’s a game about living with incurable illness, the constant daily struggle, the threat of outside circumstances making it worse, the importance of hope, and the sad truth that, sometimes, there is none to be had.