Gods Will Be Watching bleeds into your thoughts, even if the toll feels steep and caustic. The cost can feel too high, the enjoyment too strange and poisoned at times. But ... it's brilliant and different, you know? I just hate it, that's all.

The cutest catalyst for an existential crisis I've ever encountered. Its puzzles are complex and brutal, at times unforgiving and in other ways surprisingly merciful. The townspeople are lovable and unique, even in their bite-sized interactions. The game is packed with surprises – it's deep in narrative, world and interaction. Overall, though, it's a roguelike...Kind of.

Divinity: Original Sin could be more straightforward and more modern in other aspects and perhaps maintain its allure. After 60 hours of deep, challenging and often confounding role-playing action, I'm willing to forgive its sins, original or otherwise.

Whether you have or haven't played Abe's Oddysee, you haven't played New N Tasty. This HD remake is more than a simple reskin of nostalgia, and offers a compelling adventure with contemporary design that will satisfy most anyone's puzzle-platformer appetite.

Wayward Manor has charm for the adorable-goth market, but not so much for puzzle game enthusiasts. It's simple, slightly janky and kind of cute, with an OK story and sub-par game design.

Amid the Ruins forces us to swing that axe again and again and again in unsavory situations; it forces us to feel each step through a mass of hungry zombies, and it makes the steps leading up to an uncomfortable conversation just as tense.

Light reaches for greatness, but ends up merely serviceable; nothing breaks or falls apart within its mechanically sound design, but nothing inspires the game to step out from the shadows of better games.

In some respects – particularly in its graphics and slightly more refined shooting – Sniper Elite 3 is a better game than its predecessor. That said, it's grandfathered in a lot of Sniper Elite V2's AI issues, while also forcing players to micromanage too much when it comes to sniping.

If you want to work your brain for a few minutes, MouseCraft is a good choice (especially on Vita).

The Wolf Among Us has been consistently excellent from start to finish, and its final chapter, Cry Wolf, is the well-told end of this well-told story.

Shovel Knight isn't just inspired by 8-bit classics, it is inspired in and of itself.

Like any athlete with a thirst for victory, EA Sports has a great opportunity to create something special with this brand. It's just not quite ready for its title fight yet.

It sends you digging into the trenches of World War 1, but knows that leaving you to wallow in the mud and blood forever does not grant it emotional maturity. For every dour moment in Valiant Hearts, for every uphill struggle, there is a moment of warmth, of return, and reunion between old friends.

Entwined has clear objectives and an overall goal, but the reward for "beating" it isn't points or a trophy, it's a sense of serenity and peace. It's certainly not for everyone, but to those who find the idea appealing, it utterly succeeds.

Even without the creation and sharing tools here, Intelligent Systems' little series continues to tickle the brain just right. Mallo may trick you into thinking a relaxing, smooth time awaits therein, but even when the game gets rough, Pushmo World is well worth visiting.

Tomodachi Life wore out its welcome for me quicker than any Animal Crossing game ever did, due to its comparative lack of structure and progression, and its brilliant spark of creativity fades much more quickly than you'd like.

Without the well-established relationships in Always Sometimes Monsters, the game would be a disaster. It would be an exercise in tedium and starving artists – but the writing makes it all worthwhile. Yes, even the act of making tofu burgers. In the end, love – even just the chance of it – is worth it.

With some truly great ideas and some unfortunate choices, Murdered: Soul Suspect and its ghostly hero is neither heaven nor hell, but something in between.

Even as a one-off experience, though, Leo's Fortune is an excellent platformer. The thumb-sliding controls fit tablet play perfectly, and the clever, gorgeous design is evident throughout. It's neither lengthy nor terribly challenging, but these complaints are outweighed by the joy of sliding through each beautiful level.

If you allow yourself to exist in the moment, Among the Sleep will take you back to a time when a teddy bear was your shield, and you'd think twice about going to sleep without checking under the bed.

What Sheep does so elegantly is remind us that life is rarely as tidy as Snow's rules would allow, and that "right" is an ever-shifting concept. It gives us absurd characters like talking pigs and childhood boogeymen and makes them as real as we are, so that we ourselves feel like citizens of Fabletown, scraping to get by.

Even when it skews toward bigger actions and questionable bouts of busywork, though, Watch Dogs is a more fluid and modern power fantasy than we're used to. Somewhere, in its vague, fantastical version of hacking, there's a lesson about the power and the naughty temptations that lie in our networked, selfie-infested world.

It's passable and functional, but doesn't elevate the franchise or add the magic that'll bring El Presidente to a wider audience. It is what it is: Another evolution in a franchise that needs a revolution.

Like the combat, the story starts off strongly, intertwining threads about Red's past, the history of the Camerata and the true purpose of the Transistor, but it doesn't come together in a satisfying way.

The greatest problem in Wolfenstein: The New Order, then, is a jarring inconsistency of tone and cohesion... It's almost as if there's a tug of war going between the big dumb shooter and the attempt to be subversive, with the result being a game that's not really slick enough to be an action classic, and not dramatic enough to draw you in.

If you're a fan of the noir genre or '90s adventure games, you're gonna like the cut of its jib.

The gravity-shifting sections spliced into existing and new tracks feel like a natural extension of the series rather than a gameplay-changing revelation, but it's a strong compliment to an already enjoyable experience. The social features are surprisingly solid and may even outlive the total course selection, but it helps that the new tracks feel as worthy of a revisit as the series' standouts.

It's hard not to feel that the game would have been better served by slightly slowing down the pace of its basic shooting elements. At times, it feels as much like a spatial puzzle as it does a test of your reflexes. The best spatial puzzles, though, allow for a measure of patience and consideration. As a twitchy shooter, Super Time Force never lets you catch your breath and stand firm in time, leaving you under ceaseless pressure.