It comes within touching distance of true greats such as Super Mario Odyssey thanks to nuanced controls and visual creativity, though perhaps Nintendo’s work retains the edge.

Arco’s creators are a small but disparate bunch encompassing Poland, Australia, Mexico and Spain. This compact team is reflected in its concise design, with most missions and side-quests lasting just a few minutes or less. But they have designed a game with a big heart and a lingering place in the player’s memory.

Star Wars buffs will find much to relish here as Outlaws shines a bright light on fresh parts of the galaxies untouched by the relentless flow of TV spin-offs. But this attention to detail may be lost on players seeking a power fantasy akin to 2023’s Star Wars Jedi Survivor, or a more inventive take on Ubisoft’s overworked open-world blueprint.

Arranger entertains the player because of its restrictions, not in spite of them. The resolution to Jemma’s every conundrum rarely lies more than a few sliding moves away, as unimaginable as that sometimes seems. But it insists you think not just outside the box, but around the corner and into the spaces beyond the edge of the screen.

It comes as little surprise that Thank Goodness You’re Here emanates from the same publisher as Australia’s epically silly Untitled Goose Game. If you surrender to Coal Supper’s similarly surreal whimsy, you will also have a honking good time.

Austrian-based developer Microbird Games has created something distinctive and compelling with its debut effort – a depiction of their native Alps where the inside of the mountains are more interesting that the peaks outside we regularly admire.

It resembles nothing else out there right now and we should be grateful Capcom was prepared to give a small team its head in creating such an esoteric concept. It echoes the look of classic Japanese titles of the PS2 era such as Onimusha and Okami – but feels like totally its own thing, for good and for ill.

This 20th-anniversary edition of Beyond Good & Evil dodges that trap by being genuinely entertaining, playable and polished over its relatively short running time. Maybe it’s the banter between Jade and Pey’j, perhaps it’s the restless diversity of its levels, or could it be just that Ancel packed his designs with myriad lovely touches.

For my money, it’s the joyful purity of Adventure mode that will win you round – pitting you and your reflexes against craftily designed game worlds with just two thumbsticks for control.

The puzzles remain as pleasantly headwrecking as ever, sometimes relying on noticing tiny details, other times requiring meticulous deductions based on trial and error. Few could blame you for sneaking the odd look at a walkthrough that at least points you in the direction of a solution. The developers acknowledge they’ve applied several tweaks to modernise the game. “This is not the same old Riven, but we hope you’re as surprised and intrigued by the new one as we were,” they say. On the evidence of my playthrough, you won’t mind getting stuck in this captivating prison with no hope of release.

The confined nature of the levels can sometimes be problematic when grappling with the wildly bucking ghosts, not least because aiming the vacuum feels a tad awkward. Younger or less experienced players drawn in by the colourful setting and gentle humour may find the battles with bigger baddies rather challenging. But at their heart, Luigi’s escapades serve up a helping of supernatural whimsy that stands up well after more than a decade.

Still Wakes The Deep reminds me of John Carpenter’s equally implausible The Thing, an enjoyable schlock-horror set in the Antarctic. But if you can suspend your disbelief about this rigged rollercoaster, you’ll find layers of depth beneath the surface.

F1 24 takes the most appreciable leaps for the franchise in years but for all that it remains just an incremental upgrade for owners of the 2023 version. If you haven’t kept up to speed lately with Codemasters’ revisions, however, then F1 24 is the new model to get the pulse racing.

It’s the sheer force of the lead actors’ performances that will lead you through a somewhat laboured tale of a hero whose mental strife overshadows the challenge of her adversaries.

The by-the-numbers gameplay is not what you will remember most about Indika – even though the frustration of some insta-fail platforming sections does take a while to fade from the memory. Instead, what lingers is the communion of uncomfortable conversations, harrowing figments and darkly comic asides as a nun wrestles with the big questions of life and doesn’t like the answers.

Wizardry lacks the historical extras that made the Atari and Minter exhumations so fascinating, its bare-bones presentation exposing a game very much of its time that has long been surpassed.

Thousand-Year Door folds in more depth than Super Mario RPG, that is certain. The gameplay deals with additional layers – bits of Pikmin, bits of Metroidvania, for instance – and there’s an attempt to add value with extras such as concept art. Its offbeat comedy also carries an edgy vibe that strains at the Nintendo leash. This Paper Mario may be thinly spread but hidden dimensions give it space to become its own thing.

As rough around the edges as it is – the lack of impact from the weapons, the endless hunt for keycards and the right locked door – System Shock still adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It’s a game that sows confusion and fear in a way we rarely experience now, while reminding us the AI apocalypse might be closer than we suspect.

Simogo showcases its characteristic ability to wrap compellingly novel gameplay in a distinctive visual aesthetic, all the while telling a captivating story.

Luminous doesn’t lend itself to long sessions of scuba adventures – it just doesn’t have the depth for that. But as an antidote to the pressurised atmosphere of modern life, it acts like a cleansing bath.

You will want to keep playing just for the sheer pleasure of the sharp dialogue – by turns sarcastic and poignant but at its heart drolly funny. Less successful is the musical aspect that notionally underpins the whole expedition – the tunes at your gigs are pleasant enough but the mini-games that accompany them quickly become tedious. Reigns: Beyond shows the formula might be running out of legs. But priced at under a fiver it offers plenty of laughs even though it’s more of a game that plays you than you play.

The less said about its unconvincing voice-acting the better and the plot holds few surprises. But even those foibles can be overlooked when Stellar Blade gets its hooks in and you glance at the clock only to realise it’s 3am. Damn you, you adorable mongrel.

My initial impression was that this periodic monotony was intended to function as a meta-commentary on your job as a dogsbody. But my overriding feeling might just be classed as boredom. You get the sense that a more tightly wound plot with expanded gameplay to hook the player could have turned the Halibut’s tale into a story that could really reel you in.

That’s not to say this 2024 do-over is unworthy of one playthrough, especially now a month after release that many bugs have been ironed out. It has entertaining moments of visual splendour jostling against creeping dread but ultimately is a glimpse of unfulfilled potential.

You won’t enjoy the sometimes risible dialogue, nor the punishing and at times unfair randomness that can punctuate your trekking, leaving you a long way from safety without companions. In the end, though, it is that tension between chaos and cruelty that makes the game frequently compelling.

Peach’s adventure may not possess the sheer wit and flair on show in Nintendo’s most recent tour de force, Super Mario Bros Wonder, but it acts as a long-overdue promotion for a promising heroine.

Anyone who spends a few hours digitally in Minter’s company couldn’t fail to warm to this talented eccentric and his prodigious body of work. You might not play most of the 43 games here more than once but a handful will pull you back in time after time, if only to marvel at the mad mind of Minter.

Probably the harshest judgment you could hurl at Operation Galuga is its lack of true reinvention. Maybe it was never on the agenda – and Rogue Corps showed deviation from the template could be disastrous. But despite a graphical makeover and some light tinkering, squint and you might well be playing one of the many Contra versions from the 80s and 90s.