You're likely to have similar dust-ups and shakedowns, of course, given the component parts of any procedural machine. But vitally, Unexplored 2 makes the player feel adventurous and special. Even when you've got no money, no XP, and no shoes. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The biggest miss, for me, is the Ages system, which feels like a solid concept that desperately needed more time in the pre-production concepting stage to make work the way it was intended. Pivoting to fantastical alternative eras of history could have made for a wildly exciting story with each campaign. Instead, it far more often ends up feeling like a compulsory family road trip to somewhere you don't want to be, while you pass the hours half-listening to another podcast about the Roman empire.

Chaosbane defines itself in these tiny instances of friction that break up the flow of holding down a button to smoothly mulch through an ocean of solid obstacles. Most of these obstacles are more aggressive than sandy chickpeas, although only some of them are smarter.

The ending is a good payoff to a sweet story, with plenty of chuckles and surprises along the way.

Under its surface there’s a complexity to Cobalt’s systems and a surprising depth that will keep you playing.

More than anything, Lost Sphear serves as a reminder that there’s a lot more to capturing the spirit of your idols than just miming them in your bathroom mirror, and I hope that Tokyo RPG Factory learns that lesson before they release yet another love letter to the exact same game.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 is a fantastic football game, quite possibly one of the best ever. On the pitch, it plays spectacularly well, with both individual players and teams expressing themselves as recognisable entities, and Master League is a superb singleplayer mode, making player development entertaining and simple to grasp...Take it online, though, and things start to fall apart. And the PC port is an ugly downgrade in comparison to the current-gen console versions.

Okhlos feels like an elevator pitch – ‘go smash up a comedy ancient Greece’ – made flesh, without too much worry about expanding upon the concept. I do admire that, there’s a purity and a glee to it, and it’s refreshing to not butt up against a skill ceiling as in something like Isaac, but I guess once you’ve smote one god, you’ve smote ’em all.

I should also emphasise that for every memorable interaction you’ll have with another player, there’ll be many where you’re just killed. Rust is a strange, harsh game that’s worth exploring – but only certain parts of it, and only for so long. I’ll never commit to constructing my own fortress, but I’ll happily knock on the door of one belonging to another player.

Yet in all its clockwork detail, I admire it all the same. Buying into its world, bugs and all, has yielded the satisfaction of cases closed and the comedy of killings that completely stumped me. It took me 9 hours just to find the killer of the tutorial mission. For in-game days all I had to go on was an initial - A. Then for more hours, only a first name. After endless dud leads, dopey mishaps, and one bullet in the back by a security guard who found me snooping in her office, I finally found a surname and address for my suspect. I gasped a zealous "gotcha!" at my screen, and understood that something about Shadows Of Doubt felt special. It might not match the prints of the grail-esque single city block. But I think the immersive detective sim has found its first true killer. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Scores are obviously anathema to what we do at RPS, although I'm not so strong a person that I can avoid pointing out that if someone were to show me a picture of original series protagonist Six right now, I'd nod sagely and say "indeed". Again, there's a couple of really inspired scenes and more than a couple of arresting sights here, good enough to drag me from 'meh' to 'oh damn!' a few times. It plays like what it is, really: a cover act. A tribute. A flatpack knock-off of a trendy piece. Good quality. Well built. You could hit it with a wrench and it'd barely shake. Then again, I do have to ask whether it's a good thing that I find myself assessing a game like a piece of furniture.

This is an often boring and sometimes brilliant game, where the brilliance depends on the boredom. If that’s too risky a pitch for a full-priced ticket on Suzuki’s time machine, maybe try the originals first (both are on Xbox Game Pass for PC). For better and for worse, Shenmue III is a perfect continuation.

It’s a tricky balance to master, relaxing but complex, yet Megaquarium manages to do it while making it look effortless. It’s a breezy, upbeat management game that nonetheless gives you lots to play with and plenty of room for experimentation. Plus, the fish are all cuties.

Ask yourself this: Do you really need more empty irony in your life? Do any of us? We of course do because it’s a wonderfully effective way of numbing ourselves against the self-created horror that is the reality of living on borrowed time due to various catastrophic extinction scenarios of our own making. But hey, maybe a nice bit of sincerity might ease that along, too.

So effective was the musical and visual direction that I gasped in genuine awe at a key moment in the finale. It may not be a long game, for a faster-witted player than I would get through it in an afternoon, and pretty games may not be all that scarce… but this is more than just pretty. It’s a carefully directed, genuinely beautiful game well worth your time.

Repetition stings more here than it did in the main campaign as traditionally Assassin’s Creed DLC has been a place for designers to test out weirder ideas. Think of Syndicate’s hunt for Jack the Ripper, or getting a suite of magic powers to fight a godlike George Washington in AC3, or taking a visually spectacular tour of the afterlife in Odyssey. If anything, The Siege of Paris’ run of strong missions and knottier story feels like what Valhalla probably should have been in the first place; a tantalizing glimpse of a better game penned into an eight hour DLC. It only dips its toe into the giant, plastic skull full of red wine; time for a bolder developer to take the plunge.

Overland isn’t that one friend on a road trip who has packed emergency supplies, and has the itinerary worked out to the hour. It’s the scarred, weather-chafed drifter you picked up along the way, and who’s seen things, man. The guy you’ll end up asking for just one more story, even though the last one they told stung so hard you swore you’d never ask again.

And after all this, there are the bugs. Bugs bugs bugs. Characters vanishing, cameras swiveling, cars becoming lodged in barriers, shotguns becoming lodged in spines, doors that look wide open but are really closed, ambulances flickering in and out of existence like a dying filament. The majority of the bugs are visual hiccups, but a couple are complete blinders, such as the time my onscreen health, stamina, ammo and minimap all vanished in the middle of a fight with a tank-like juggernaut zombie. Or the time I threw a pipe bomb and it simply froze in the air centimetres in front of me, then exploded.

It’s a real shame. If State of Mind was more minimalist in its plot, and focused on exploring and completing character arcs rather than absurd thought experiments, if it dealt with one or two of the themes of posthumanism, instead of six or seven all at once… we might have had something really special on our hands.

At the core of Miasma Chronicles, then, is a nugget of precious metal. It demonstrates a strong understanding of what makes turn-based tactics games tick, and when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it’s full of the knife-edge decisions and risk-reward gambits the genre is renowned for. But around that core there’s too much that doesn’t quite fit, or isn’t quite up to snuff. If The Bearded Ladies are going to stick to type in the future, their balance of stealth, tactics and post-apocalyptic fiction could do with a new strategy.

Shadowhand, by contrast, is not for me. I’ll put Pip and Adam’s love of the previous game, which looks to be the same mix of cogs and odds, down to a monumental clash of tastes. Where they found that blend of petticoats and card-plucking soothing and thoughtful, I found this one boring in the extreme and stylistically overblown, floating through a brief few hours with it in a somnambulic state (I couldn’t bear to finish it) occasionally roused enough to tut at an uncooperative deck or the hackneyed dialogue.

Maid Of Sker is more frightening when it’s not trying to scare you. The story, the atmosphere and the music are well-crafted enough that they would almost be enough on their own, but its obsession with chucking monsters at you ends up destroying a lot of that good will. Perhaps, in looking sideways at Capcom’s desk, Maid Of Sker copied even the answers it didn’t need.

Look, I know making almost any game is a labour of love, but I spent like a week being sad and not knowing why, until I finished this game and realised I was happy because I didn't have to play it every day after work anymore. All this does is prove that Gearbox cannot be trusted with their own IP anymore. The very existence of New Tales From The Borderlands is a more effective critique of corporate structure and the pitfalls of capitalism than any of the content of any Borderlands game. Apart from the best one. Just play Tales From The Borderlands.

Spacebase Startopia isn't here to rock your world. It's here to gently wrap a friendly arm around you. It's a game that does exactly what it needs to do, and does it well. I can take off my rose tinted glasses and offer it an assured Han Solo-style salute.

It’s by no means a terrible game, but it whiffs on too many elements for the admittedly cool aesthetics to carry the day. There were moments of pure fun, like escaping from the docks as a robot-controlled ship ripped up everything behind me with a massive anchor chain. But there were just as many infuriating, controller-tossing moments that managed to destroy any goodwill the fun times had built up.

It’s a game with two key strands that feel forced together when they don’t really work in tandem. I like both ingredients in theory, but they don’t coalesce successfully, like how a vinaigrette salad dressing will separate into oil and vinegar until you shake it up again. Except balsamic dressing is obviously delicious. Night Call isn’t quite that. It’s not bad, though. A honey-mustard, maybe?

Quotation forthcoming.

Agents Of Mayhem is huge, and so incredibly ambitious, but more often than not, it misses the mark. The lack of combat feedback is a tragedy, and one that is ruinous, but for me it’s the disappointment of the writing that feels like the biggest letdown.

The Spectrum Retreat may be the perfect holiday resort, but I can’t really say I’ve enjoyed my stay.

Serial Cleaners has a relatively quick runtime, made up of a few chapters that conclude things before it outstays its welcome. While an array of cleaners and strong level design can't quite turn the game into a devour-in-one-sitting affair, it's still a burst of stressful fun and an anecdote generator if you're either a chaotic cleaner or more methodical with the hoover.

The trial-and-error approach to deaths and puzzles mentioned above didn’t help, as it made me feel I was having to really work for what I was increasingly convinced would be a slim narrative reward. In the end, I wandered off for metaphorical celery, and it took me the best part of a month to come back to Stela in order to finish this review. I’m glad I did, as it still had some astonishing sights left to show me. But it was a close call.

Flaws aside, Demon Turf pulled me in as a long-time platforming fan. Thanks to that competitive gameplay, great sense of humour and appealing art style, Fabraz’s latest stands apart from the rest of its 3D platformer competition. If you’re after a new jumping fix, I’d recommend it.

The Gunk is good rather than great, then, but given it's on Game Pass you'd be silly to pass it up. Maybe it's just the time of year, but watching each region unfurl in a bubble of light and colour, not knowing what it's going to look like until the last minute, feels very much like pulling back the windows of an Advent Calendar, with each de-gunking revealing yet another jaw-dropping treat for the senses. It's Christmas comfort food for lazy afternoons on the sofa, and at just under five hours, it can be done and dusted in just a couple of sessions, too. Very good vibes indeed.

In some sense judging Mecha Break for these free-to-play foibles is a pity. Because buried beneath the weedlike mass of microtransactions, the noise of lootboxes opening, the lecherous lingering over chests and butts, and the legion of screens popping up to flummox you with unintelligible currencies, there is a slight but glowing core: a decent multiplayer action game with a lot of admittedly cool robots. It is a shame this core is housed in the greebly shell of a desperate salesbot, hawking at you every step of the way. Mecha Break upsells to you even as you leave - quit the game, and there is an advert to follow it on social media. Mate, I can barely follow what you said in the briefing room.

Despite the story and side missions being interesting enough to make you want to finish Steelrising (and they are), despite the world being pretty-ugly (and it is), despite the combat having the ingredients to be interesting and cool (and it does), you still might end up annoyed and a bit bored by it all. And it's worse because it's so almost better than that.

I think it’s a generally inoffensive game with extremely charming presentation that’s badly suited for the ritualistic plonking down of oneself in front of a chunky desktop PC, but would probably be a welcome distraction on the Switch.

Altogether, the combat is just cumbersome enough to make every fight feel like a drag, and a poor imitation of more sophisticated systems you've seen elsewhere. It's something I'd probably be willing to put up with were it buoyed by an exceptional story and lovable cast of characters, but Astria Ascending fails on all counts. By all means give it a go on Game Pass if you're desperate to see what it's like, but be warned: this is not a game that respects your time. There are far better avenues to pursue if you're after an engaging JRPG. The only thing you'll achieve by taking this particular detour is a one-way street to disappointment.

It’s a couple of evening’s worth of exploring a concept and buying a few upgrades for under a tenner. I don’t not recommend it on that basis – the single greatest thing about PC gaming is that it’s a medium which will explore every niche, and I was glad for a brief nose at this one. It is a bit crashy in its current form through, and that paired with the feeling that it needs a little more meat on its bones makes me more inclined to suggest waiting a month or two.

Despite it's so-so action, Recompile is a brilliant adventure and unlocking its mysteries is a blast. It could be a bit clearer when steering you to the next step, but the strength of its platforming and puzzling more than makes up for it. Love me some hacking and code now.

I'd probably enjoy it more on PC than console. But the thing is, it's not just that the game runs badly. There are a bunch of smaller annoyances I noted on both platforms. Enemies might grow tentacles as a prelude to mutating into something worse, and you're supposed to shoot or smash them to stop it - except I could never tell when I actually managed it. The different varieties of enemies don't make substantially different noises, so you can't quickly read a situation as you can in, e.g., Left 4 Dead. If you start inputting your dodge too early, the game defaults back to movement controls and you start to strafe, which is annoying. The quick-kill prompt just flat out doesn't appear if you have your gun out, but your gun is also your torch so you have it out almost all the time. I was looking forward to The Callisto Protocol, and I want this dog to hunt. I don't think it can right now.

The Vive floodgates opened up today: I’m hoping that, somewhere in the sprawl of new titles, I’ll find something that answers the lingering question: what kind of games am I going to play in VR in the longer term? The witty and inventive Job Simulator is an excellent shopfront display for Valve and HTC’s technology, but it is not by any means an answer to that question.

As for Exoprimal's dreaded live service elements, they are exactly what you'd expect: a battle pass filled with coins and dangly bits for your guns and zebra skins and dance emotes. A cash shop. All aggressively vanilla, but at least it's not pay-to-win, I suppose. Otherwise, there isn't all that much to chase aside from a couple of new mech suits or some fairly dull upgrades. If you're after a team based shooter where you zone out for a bit and don't care for much else, then you'll have a lot of fun here. Anyone else who's after a serious new hero shooter? Eh, it's not going to inspire anything other than mostly frustration. Here's hoping the devs at least remove the early story grind, then maybe, just maybe, it might be a path to something better... if it hasn't gone extinct by then.

I really wanted to like it, but right now I see Battlefield 2042's little logo and I simply don't trust it. This game needs time. Time to untangle those performance issues and perhaps tweak Hazard Zone’s economy. Portal needs time to save it from the maw of XP farming servers. Whether I’ve got the patience is another matter, entirely. Simply put: this is a game that doesn't seem ready yet.

There’s not quite enough here to win me over completely, but there’s more than enough to make the numerous trips I’ve made worthwhile, and part of the charm is in never knowing if there’s anything left to discover. The stars are strange and home to many mysteries and it’s tempting to stick around until I’ve seen them all. But keep in mind that there’s lots of work to do along the way.

There are some potholes, sure. That story is borderline insufferable, tutorials don't do a great job of explaining things, and there's some bugginess. I only got a fraction of the cash I was supposed to earn from some missions, for example, which made it difficult to progress up that ladder of nice vehicles. But even so, I'm left with the impression of a racing game punching far above its weight and landing an impressive number of blows. If I knew more about drifting as a motorhobby, I might say something big and powerful like "this is the definitive game of a racing subculture!" But I'll let some other bumpernerd put that label on it. I wouldn't want to upset all the fans of Night-Runners or Togue Shakai. Regardless of where it fits in its racing niche, JDM may not yet be fully tuned, but it has rolled out of the garage in fine form.

The nicest layer of the flawed lasagne: being a sneakf.ck and listening to voicemails that don’t belong to you. And then, presumably, getting a chat show in America and a job on morning TV.

The Falconeer’s limitations kept it from fully winning me over. But it’s bloody impressive when its stars align.

All in all, I haven't been blown away by Mythforce. I was expecting something a little funnier and self-deprecatingly daft. But it isn't a badly crafted boney boy basher. A single solo run often left me murderizing for a happily thoughtless 30-45 minutes. That's likely to be shorter if you play with the friends I don't have, and embrace the hectic "kill stuff, get buff" attitude that comes from any reliable multiplayer game that is secretly just an excuse to chat. In this sense, Mythforce is less "Saturday morning cartoon" and more "Sunday evening co-op". It might not have the staying power or variety of others in the genre, but if greedy goblins and low stakes are enough to goad you into a weekend or two of battering baddies with buds, then go for it. I believe in you!

Full Void has just enough peaks and troughs to keep your interest, well, piqued. Its eye-catching pixel art and moody soundtrack set the perfect tone for this dystopian adventure, and its keen sense of challenge gives it the bite that so many other cinematic platformers often lack. Considering the developers' previous work has been limited to mobile and arcade game compilations, this is an impressive debut in a new genre for the team at OutOfTheBit, and I hope we get to see more from them in the future (albeit one that's hopefully not overrun by Vortigaunt AI monsters).

I’m just at a loss as to how this has happened. Just Causes have been buggy, sure. But they’ve never felt at least six months from finished. I cannot fathom how this wasn’t lengthily delayed, because it’s in such a dismal state. Although that said, even if the bugs and AI were fixed, it would still leave behind a version of Just Cause that barely changes anything you actually do since the third edition, yet has made every aspect of doing it so astronomically more annoying. What went wrong? How did such an established and entertaining series end up in such a quagmire?

If you’re jonesing for a new game in the field, then this isn’t a disaster by any means. If you put up with its clumsiness, there’s a tough-as-nails isometric twin-stick action-me-do (that’s the one!) here to play. Just one that doesn’t really stand out from the crowd.

It’s not the deepest game, but it’s smart, ridiculously pretty, and has me completely hooked. [RPS Recommended]

How To Say Goodbye doesn’t try to make grand statements about life and death. You get out of it what you like. It’s a short, cozy adventure about how death sucks, and how losing people sucks, and how grief sucks. And I appreciate that simple sentiment.

I don’t feel good giving Blanc a hard time like this. It feels like the equivalent of accidentally stepping on your dog's tail and then your heart breaking as they whimper because they don’t know what they’ve done wrong. The first half is genuinely brilliant. It completely understands where the fun's to be found in a co-op game, and I will never get tired of gawking at its gorgeous hand-crafted art style. It’s just a shame that it becomes such a slog in the second half, ending as a hard snowball to the face instead of a warm, melted heart.

But alas, bugs only exacerbate the sense of freedom curtailed. One prevented essential resin from spawning that made a sequence unfinishable until I rebooted the game; another saw Isao pause in uncharacteristic, eternal silence during a mandatory conversation. It’s testament to Jett’s great strengths that, in the language of the scouts, I adapted and persevered through its severe lows. Once the story finished, I hoped an endgame would open up and allow me to play freely in its world. That I’d have more opportunities to watch great Ghoke, the red sun, rise in real time, and to ponder the Far Shore’s fascinating mysteries at length. Instead, I could only replay previous chapters. If only Jett had embraced a rhythm as organic as its inspired ecosystem.

Despite my frustrations with the puzzles, there’s an engaging story at the core of Encodya. If you’re prepared to accept those flaws, you’d do well to take a look.

The Thing stays interesting in its foibles even when it’s nowhere close to entertaining. And, on balance, I don’t regret my time with it. It’s a worthwhile bit of in-amber preservation, even if I don’t necessarily want to touch the insect inside if I can help it.

It's a very short adventure, clocking in at three or four hours. Precisely the right call for a story like this. It's smartly written as well (or maybe I just assume it is from the dozen references to Russian history and culture that went over my head…) I just wish the game's slumberous design was as enthusiastic with its verbs as Ivan is with his adjectives. For parents, or maybe anyone burnt out at the end of the day, or anyone seeking the cinematic beauty of Another World without the accompanying teeth-gnashing, this tall tale of a tiny terranaut could work as a pre-sleep chill-out game (psst, it's also out on Nintendo Switch, but you didn't hear it from me). But for someone who likes their platformers with more oomph, with trials of dexterity or twisty puzzle-thinking, then its straightforward tale might make you a little snoozy for entirely different reasons.

It's the sort of game where, from one point of view, not a lot really happens, and it's almost surprisingly short (wrapping up in the region of two or three hours). But by the end, something has shifted between Tess and Opal in a way that lets you imagine the story continuing. The real open roads was, unironically, the friend we made along the way.

Gwent: Rogue Mage is a great evolution of an already-satisfying foundation. The roguelike trappings of travelling across an ever-changing board full of shifting events and encounters meld wonderfully into the action of Gwent battles. Some redundant events and bothersome bugs aside, this is a real treat.

On the one hand, Sea of Thieves is a game so empty that recommending it feels like a dereliction of duty. On the other hand, I just chased down a man who killed me and threw a bucket of my own grog-induced vomit over him by way of revenge...It’s the small things like that that can make Sea of Thieves triumphant, which is just as well, seeing as there’s just an empty mass of very pretty water where the big things should be.

Generally though, this is just Fallout at its flattest, with Ada a completely forgettable companion and another, Jezebel, nowhere near as much fun as her snarky introduction suggests she’s going to be. The final fight is particularly tedious, coming down to how fast you can kill robots, and more pressingly, whether you can kill them fast enough., in a series of waves at the end of an entirely too long dungeon with only the occasional point of creepy interest in underground labs and on monitors.

Progress feels so gradual as to be nonexistent, and can be instantly wiped out — but not in a calculated way like the difficulty of Dark Souls. In a sort of hopeless way. Each warrior is a tiny Sisyphus.

But that travel, maaaaan. It absolutely nails it. If you’ve ever sold nearly everything you own and bought a plane ticket to somewhere that sounds cool, if you’ve ever read ‘On the Road’ and ‘The Beach’ on an airport bench because you’re that much of a walking cliché, it’ll resonate with you immediately. It understands that a heavy bag can make you feel lighter, for all the cut tethers it signifies.

Once I was hooked however, I wanted to see Ezra’s story through, even if it was just to see if I could afford him a little rest after everything he’s been through.

I’m not entirely sure the mystery’s resolution tracked, but it’s telling how minor a part of the whole experience this became. I dearly wish it were less annoying to play, not requiring mouse/keyboard controls, and then taking advantage of neither. But overall the story made the annoyance worthwhile.

I tried my damnedest to like Source Of Madness... but it all comes back to The Itch. The game has its moments and the world's beautifully horrid, but when everything's churned out of a machine-learning bot it makes for a roguelite that's too random. Yes, you've got to think on your feet, but a lack of defined margins means your life's often snuffed out by mess. And mess leads to frustration. And frustration leads to excuses. When you're pinning your demise on the game itself, it's hard to summon the willpower to push on.

Listen, if you like crawling around in the dark in an asylum, play Outlast. If you like detective games with weird facial animation, play L.A. Noire. If you like the Call of Cthulhu TRPG, keep playing that.

As much as I enjoyed learning the rules and rhythms of bus driving – thanks in part to the warm words of Mira Tannhauser – once that was done, I just couldn’t find waters deep enough to swim in for long.

Nevertheless, it’s unfair to evaluate a game solely through the lens of a masterpiece. The mountainous peaks you can reach with Severed Steel don’t make BMI’s hills not worth climbing, and this is still an impressive creation to spring largely from one person’s work. A short blast of high fidelity bombast might be just what you’re after, and this reaches levels of spectacle you’d typically expect from a much bigger team with a much bigger budget.

And while I wouldn't say the tricks (or the levels themselves) develop a great deal over the course of the game, these are small gripes in the grand scheme. It's just really nice to inhabit the world of a shadowy amphibian and observe our everyday world of material objects as spots to hunker in or paths to exploit. I don't think the relative ease of the puzzling should put people off, either. Instead, it's a journey worth embracing and a comforting reminder that there's always something watching out for us: frogs.

It’s a short journey but not eventful enough for a repeat trip.

Strip those personal complaints away and Realms Of Ruin is a solid RTS with some fun units and missions. Even if I do still think you'll find the Stormcast Eternals boring.

It’s a shame to end on such a sour note, because those earlier moments where the Pit shines are positively radiant. Battles in Into The Pit never get as intricate as a meaty fight in Doom Eternal, nor as suspenseful as the single, exquisitely choreographed encounter you’ll find in Devil Daggers, but I’d say they came close enough to make me giddy if only they came more consistently. Instead, Into The Pit descends into comfortable familiarity, and all the scuttling in the world can’t save the back half from feeling like a slog.

I’m honestly confused by how much I enjoyed my time with Icarus. It relies on repetitive loops and often uneventful hiking, on tedious punishments and uninspired objectives. I am not a patient person, and yet, it does enough. The storms are terrifically atmospheric, basic crafting still feels compelling when you’re doing it for the umpteenth time, and oh, I haven’t even mentioned the way it models individual planks tumbling and getting stuck on each other when you chop down a wall. Despite the jank, Icarus’s (eseses) systems feel meticulous, on scales both big and small.

But as a PC game, Chronos: Before The Ashes feels like a cash in, with nobody bothering to ask “does this really need to be ported over?”. Without VR it loses the magic of being in your living room knocking shit on the floor, and exposes the game as a very lukewarm soulslike.

It helps also that the latter stages of the game capitalise on groundwork laid in the more predictable first half. The locations you find yourself sucked into become that bit more intricate, with multi-part puzzles to wriggle through, and some combat situations that force you to move through the gears. Plus, each time you reemerge in Decerto, with everyone else none the wiser as to what you’ve been up to, the notion that the whole thing might be in your head starts to grip. True, there’s nothing especially original about a story that blurs the lines between madness and the paranormal, but it does inject doubt and paranoia into your investigation, which only makes you long to unravel the truth more. While spending time alone in the dark may not be as uncomfortable as it should be this time, then, with all the changes it may still be worth peering into the void, to see what returns your gaze.

Personally, I look at it and see a game that only barely iterates, even slipping backwards on gun design and tech fidelity, and that’s just not an appealing approach during what often seems like a golden age for more ambitious co-op shooters. Helldivers 2 deftly balances large-scale warfare with slapstick comedy. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a deceptively deep and immaculately presented horde brawler. And Deep Rock Galactic has good-natured teamplay down to a science, thanks in part to its own clever arsenal of sci-fi tools and weaponry. Killing Floor 3? That has a good headshot and a plus-2% foregrip.

Scanner Sombre is at its best when you’re left to your own devices, lonely yet in awe of the sights you see and make, but suffers when the game itself is pulling the strings, whether that be to evoke empathy or terror. I absolutely recommend it, for its four or so hours of dot-matrix world-generation have pleased me greatly, but you should go in knowing that it stumbles over its storytelling hurdles and should instead be treated as, like the titular scanner, a remarkable technological toy.

On the whole, though, I think Chinatown Detective Agency is pretty great, and one of those new modern point and click games you can show to people who think point and click just means 'use fish with screwdriver'. It's a different take on tired cyberpunk settings, it has a great cast, and it sets its puzzles in a new and interesting way. Most especially I want to praise the writing again, because it's so deft, but knowing, and I think I found something to make me laugh on every screen. God bless the durian fruit guy. Make good art, buddy.

Less would have been so much more here, and sadly Undungeon’s deep-running problems with the basics get in the way of its bizarre and beautiful world, its lovingly drawn characters and its wild sci-fi storyline.

Ambition wasn’t thwarted by technology, but just a lack of common sense. I find myself still wanting to recommend you play it, not least because the action is mostly fine, if very repetitive, and therefore there’s nothing that’s actively unpleasant about playing it – you can experience the wonders it has to offer, just for the price of grinding through the okay-ness of it all.

There's too much going on in Biomutant. Maybe if there weren't so many unnecessary things then the devs could have spent more time making the annoying bits less annoying. Making those menus clearer and easier to use, properly signposting critical QTEs in boss fights, and tightening the combat lock so fights feel less chaotic and you can be more intentional with your attacks. Who knows? In the end there isn't loads wrong with Biomutant, it's more that the bits that are wrong are pervasive, and you have to wade through extraneous fluff to enjoy the bits that are right. Really cool hats, though.

Next week, once the servers are busy, I’ll return and find out whether this is a game that desperately needs the internet it insists upon to shine. I’ll be delighted if that’s the case. Right now, this is an awful lot of not very much. [Single-player review]

Park Beyond could use some tweaking, and some tidying up of building and especially demolition controls (it's possible to accidentally delete an entire rollercoaster with one click). Judging it as a business sim would leave it wanting, but would also be unfair. Its shortcomings there aren't so much flaws as signs that it's not primarily intended to be that kind of game. It's a creative, low-stress game first and foremost. Some minor bugs aside, it's a fun time with some cute ideas that I appreciate but don't quite love. It's not aimed precisely at me, but I still got caught in the blast.

Metrico+ really needs a lot more focus. It’s throwing an awful lot at the wall, and while there’s certainly a great deal of smarts at play here, they’re not united, not well contained. Slidey controls do little to help, but in the end for me it’s the lack of a coherent aesthetic that feels the most disappointing. It feels too much like a portfolio, and not enough like a cohesive, deliberate piece of work, and certainly not one that adequately evokes the feeling of infographics.

I’ve had a very splendid time with this, and have much splendid time left with it. A proper fine achievement, and a game worthy of measuring against the mighty Metroid.

Besides slitterheads, the biggest enemy was really Bokeh Studios' distrust in you, the player. You're forever told how to go about each challenge because the world isn't malleable enough to entertain your investigative spirit. That's with all the emptiness and the irritants on top, which come together to form a deeply unlikeable game. That's unfortunate, because I do think it has some genuinely impressive ideas and delivers, on occasion, some brief bursts of interesting combat and the occasional nice wander. They're just too few and far between for me to recommend it.

This makes it all the more disappointing that a bunch of these mysteries are unsolved, left suddenly dangling at the end of the game as if waiting for a sequel or chunky DLC to tie them off. I wish my adventure on the Helios hadn’t ended so abruptly and I feel a wee bit short changed, but I’d still be really pleased if they announced an add-on — like being cheated by a 20s newsie, but he did it with a bit of flair and a cheeky grin, so you let him get away with it.

Payday 3 isn't not fun. The shooting is fine, the mastery of a crime feels good, the knowing where to go when and escaping with bags of ill-gotten gains! But Payday 3's level complexity requires a bit more active co-operating than your average 'go here, shoot thing' sort of co-op. The current skill gating also makes it harder to succeed unless you've already played quite a lot, which works against welcoming new players. As such, it makes it harder to have fun with strangers, which is arguably death for an online co-op game. It's not a massive plus, anyway.

At 20 hours, having discovered just 8 of the regions, I threw the gamepad aside with a mixture of exasperation and disappointment. There are those who will relish the challenge but I never found the slugcat’s family, and not just because there were no clues or direction as to their whereabouts. There was a big part of me that didn’t want to stop playing and maybe I’ll pick it up again some day, because there is so much to love about discovering the laws of nature behind this huge, ruined ecosystem. But with each random death, each accidental roll off a cliffside, each checkpoint drought, that love turned to ash. There is so much beauty and intrigue and diversity of life in Rain World. It’s a pity the game doesn’t want you to see any of it.

A brisk run at Trüberbrook will take you around five hours or so, but it feels like, if they’d have had their ‘druthers, the team would have made it twice that. Trüberbrook isn’t bad, but it feels like a wedding cake with a couple of tiers missing. Beautiful icing, great craftsmanship on show, but somehow not all there.

I'm a little saddened that I have these reservations, because Sands of Salzaar is a colourful and likeable blending of familiar ideas, elevated by a unique vibe. While I wouldn't quite call it compulsive, it definitely tempts you to keep playing, or go back in again a few hours later. It's just a shame it takes a little too much time and guesswork to get there.

As a whole, Swansong is a bit more loose and messy than I'd expected, but with some screws tightened the annoyances would be much less irritating and the game much more fun. It's almost really good as is. I had, I think, a middling run, where I got to enjoy the silly bits and interesting details, and didn't have too many tragic failures. I do want to play it again and try different choices, or make better decisions, but... I'm in the middle of a new TV show. And there's that book I've been reading, you know? And I need to put a wash on. I got attached to my three vamps, but not that attached.

Listen, Gotham Knights has the tiniest shreds of goodness, perhaps tapping into the primal urge within all of us to make the numbers go up. I just don't want to play it again, which says it all for a game that's designed to worm into your brain and keep you coming back for more of its bazillion currencies.

After its two hour run-time ended with a little bubble burst of hope and sadness, I rather wished I could have sent Beth on her way and stayed behind with Adam - if only 'cos I didn't finish detecting half of those fields. There's gold in them there lovely hills. I can feel it.

In short, Mineko's Night Market never coheres into an enjoyable whole. There's always at least one part that grates against another - and frequently it's not just one thing, but everything rubbing you up the wrong way and pulling you in different directions. Being the local errand kid is a pretty thankless task at the end of the day, and the more time you try and invest in this game, the poorer you feel at the end of it.

I know that I’ve said the multiplayer mode is a potential loose cannon, and the single player content feels a bit slim, but I can’t let you leave this review without reinforcing the fact I really enjoyed this game. The things at the heart of it - demolishing towers with dodgy medieval rockets, seeing that each individual pig wandering your farms has a name, upgrading a warlord’s castle, placing those beautiful stone walls - are all immensely satisfying. It’s good stuff, essentially. But it’s wearing armour that’s very slightly too big for it, and that has the potential to weigh it down in the long run.