Thankfully, the lynchpin for this game is a pretty decent lynchpin, so if you love ghosts and Instagram and don’t mind redundancy, then Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is the sixth scariest thing you can do with a camera.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate lets you science the shit out of murder in a city where people are sciencing the shit out of everything. There's an undeniable appeal to that. But it’s an appeal worth looking in the face.

It is fun and addictive, but moreover it’s adrenaline-pumping and shocking in its barbarity.

Jotun turns the elements of an ancient poetic tradition into a digital myth.

Its limited combat options and often obtuse puzzle solving, alongside the sheer endurance required to survive boss fights long enough to end them, add up to a system that doesn't point to any elaborate moral insight. It simply points to itself.

By the time it’s done, Armikrog feels more like The Neverhood’s mulligan.

Shadowrun Hong Kong’s success boils down to a smart early decision to stay true to Hong Kong, and exaggerate the flaws of the city’s bizarre governing philosophy to find a new, urgent relevance in the cyberpunk genre.

Yes, The Beginner’s Guide occasionally fumbles its narrative, Wreden sometimes overacts, and the writing can be a little ham-fisted—but the game also provokes incisive, critical thought about the way we read and evaluate games, and does so not by laying out a definitive “message” to be delivered to players, but by prompting us, through play, with open-ended questions.

Simulations can distort for good, and so help us resist, or ill, and obscure the forces that corral hearts and minds. Every system locks us up. But sims like Prison Architect throw away the keys.

What Mario Maker is at heart: a mash-up machine.

Without any friction to the player’s actions, the game’s title becomes a suggestion rather than a command.

It’s true that Dream can be beautiful and fun at times, but its structure too often holds it back from being something great.

All of which leaves Dancing All Night as a rare mix: at once a good dancing game, a bad Persona game, and a Vita game.

The Taken King shows Destiny is willing to reach for everything it might be, and it's hard not to look forward to what comes next.

It delivers a vast, meticulously rendered desert with nothing special to see.

PES 2016 stumbles under the weight of all its divergent modes and duties

As the title suggests, SOMA wears its sci-fi influences proudly on its sleeve.

By placing your adventure in the context of all the other tragedies aboard the Groomlake, a kind of familial intimacy develops.

Panoramical is Ramallo and Kanaga’s vision of what music can look like. It’s an interactive music visualizer and generator that’s content with illustrating the magic of musical arrangement, and on that front, it plays beautifully.

“Complicated” is not the same as “complex,” and nowhere does Rememoried fail to parse this distinction than in its unconventional ruleset.

As the game becomes more “normal,” Dropsy’s original challenge of endearing himself to those he repulses fades, and the puzzles start seeming a little tedious. So many are based around a difficult to manage day/night cycle, and many others around the talents of collectible animals. But before things escalate, when it’s just the story of a clown without a circus, the sentiment warms you like a hug.

You are not truly alone in Corpse of Discovery, but the videogame shows how loneliness is a question of degrees and shades, and not a simple binary. It is through this three-dimensional exploration of the pilgrim on a foreign world that the game shows its worth.

Volume’s strengths are primal but simple, at times feeling like a Crossy Road-style time-passer with a cyberpunk sheen. It tries but ultimately doesn’t say much of modern society or governments beyond the elementary. Indeed, it is the modern videogame incarnate, warts and all.

The Phantom Pain is different. It, like its predecessors, wants to remind the player that war is, indeed, hell. But, in giving over to structural bloat it obscures the tremendous promise established in its opening hours, trading the narrative power of violent anguish for a routine, Sisyphean take on torment.

It’s more of the same, just colder and thinner.

The game is best experienced as an occasional therapeutic exercise.

Submerged is skeletal and unoiled. It is damned by competence: a short story that checks the boxes, but in doing so leaves no mark.

Until Dawn is a game constructed by people who understand how to manipulate its players’ sense of control. It’s informed by a deep study of horror films and smart in its consideration of how to employ this understanding in an interactive medium. It only fails in its uncharacteristic acceptance of a few outmoded tropes.