Even if you love the game’s sense of humour and art style, the quality of the interactions is so wafer thin it’s impossible to draw much satisfaction from them. Randomly surviving may be marginally less irritating than dying through no fault of your own, but neither is much fun.

There are a few tricky puzzles in there, but the overall sense is one of gentle relaxation.

There are no instructions and the English translation is a bit homespun, but the game is rock solid, its real-time gameplay loop proving hugely compelling.

The result is absolutely sensational and Gladiabots has a level of depth and complexity that will keep the right kind of stubborn logician busy for months.

The goal is to complete 15 levels, but even making it as far as 10 is a huge undertaking that will require both significant practise and a lot of luck. It’s a fascinating and constantly changing challenge.

The story mode’s 100 levels offer a stern challenge, with the action quickly becoming frenzied but also a little repetitive.

Part room escape, part point ‘n’ click adventure, its subject matter, subtle puzzles, and graphic novel style line-drawn artwork make it a treat from start to finish.

Dead Cells’ hugely engaging roguelike-meets-Metroidvania gets its first paid-for DLC and becomes even more compelling than it was at launch.

Although graphically pretty, the controls are often slow to react to your input and swiping to swap out redundant power-ups is horribly temperamental, undermining a great deal of the potential fun.

There’s always someone falling off something, or getting impaled on something else, in a cacophony of tiny sound effects reminiscent of the chaos of LittleBigPlanet 3’s excellent multiplayer mode.

To keep abreast of upgrade requirements you’ll need to watch ads to double your winnings, or pay £10 per month for what amounts to a battle pass giving you automatic gold doubling and the ability to autoplay levels, obviating the need to sit there triggering special moves when their cool downs expire. That may be a fundamentally mindless process, but like most successful incremental games, the steady flow of upgrades proves shamefully compelling, although if we have to sit through one more ad for Charm King we can’t be held responsible for the consequences.

With excellent pixel art, Bomb Chicken is an engaging puzzle platformer with its own very distinct personality.

Tool around, explore, and try to reach lofty areas you spot from ground level. Taking out surveillance drones and signal boxes could be seen as using your hoverboard to dismantle the tools of oppression, but then you also have to destroy fire hydrants, so maybe things aren’t that straightforward, in this piece of interactive entertainment that’s as much toy as formalised game.

The way seemingly innocent snippets of data are collated, corroborated, and then grossly misinterpreted in the name of law and order makes for a sobering refresher course in why digital privacy is so vital. It’s also an enticing few hours of drama.

Its mellow pace requires diligent concentration, and its 30 levels will be enough to sustain a few days’ solid puzzling.

It often takes the best part of two minutes to load, but after months spent locked inside, it’s just quite nice getting a bit of unfettered fresh air, even if it is only simulated.

Its light challenge and straightforward level design are complemented by minimalist good looks, but there’s just too little going on to maintain interest beyond saving up and collecting a few perfectly drawn miniature vehicles.

Clever, taxing, and graphically elegant, the short-form ads you have to watch before and after each level are thoroughly inoffensive and can be removed for a one-off payment of £3.99, which also unlocks hats for your worm.

Its non-rotate-able isometric world makes it tricky to see around furniture and walls, and the absence of an undo button makes that problem worse, a single misplaced tap enough to end an otherwise perfect raid, which encourages continual shameful save scumming.

There’s a plot involving the town’s ineffectual mayor, gaff-prone police department, and various other resident caricatures, but underneath that shell, it’s incremental business as usual. How this got past Apple’s legendarily puritanical vetting process is anyone’s guess.

Because this is free to download everything comes with a countdown timer, which in time-honoured tradition starts off instantaneous and soon has you waiting multiple hours for processes to complete. It’s also very buggy, frequently crashing to the home screen, although rarely losing too much progress.

Even on the easiest difficulty level it’s intensely challenging from the start, with movement, managing your dwindling oxygen supply, and timing the long cooldowns on your weapons requiring patience and skill to get right. It’s also hampered by touchscreen controls that never feel as responsive as you’d like.

It’s a friendly and beautifully constructed ecosystem, and if you enjoy tinkering with, as well as simply playing, levels this is an endlessly engaging toy.

As you upgrade you’ll face tougher monsters, your backpedalling crowd control getting steadily more bloody as foes arrive thicker and faster, and you unlock more of the game’s vast arsenal of weapons and armour. You’ll need to grind its paltry selection of side missions to keep up with the rigours of story mode, but it’s a rewarding progression even if the action soon starts to feel repetitive.

There’s a new, less punishing, three-round battle system, but this is mostly business as usual with lots of deep pits, damp caverns, mysterious alcoves, and a short-lived partnership with Throm the barbarian. It’s a pleasantly relaxing game to play, your frequent deaths only ever sending you back to the previous narrative branch, with Eddie Marsan amiably suppling details of your demise.

It’s a nerdy organisational rabbit hole of depth and intricacy that, for the right personality, will create the sense of benign addiction gamers crave.

Your desire to carry on shrinks with every match, giving the game a perilously short half-life. This is only a beta, where almost everyone is as unfamiliar with the game and its legacy as each other, so perhaps the game’s virtues will become more obvious once players have had time to get more practice in and formulate appropriate strategies. But at the moment it’s an exhaustingly dull experience that quickly has you wondering why you don’t just switch it off and play one of the dozens of superior alternatives available. Admittedly, they won’t be free but as with most things in life, you get what you pay for. [Beta review]

It’s still a dialogue-heavy adventure set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future, and maintains its Broken Sword-esque sense of humour and charmingly British sensibilities. Sadly, it also suffers from the same peccadilloes as its ancient forebear. Chief amongst those is the need to figure out sometimes non-intuitive sequences of actions to solve its puzzles, and sitting through reams of chat that sometimes isn’t quite as amusing as it imagines. It’s still worth it for the sweet pang of nostalgia though.