New Allies isn't for me, I'm afraid, and I couldn't speculate who it might be for either. But I don't want to end this review on a downer. Every creative biffs it once in a while. It's an unfortunate part of the process. So if you haven't already, I'd urge you to ignore this little stumble into the mud, and check out Blue Byte at their best by grabbing hold of the excellent Anno 1800.

Metal Gear Survive is the game I want it to be about…10% of the time. When there’s a rare section where stealth is the best approach. When I just manage to defeat the final wave on a protection mission, thanks to strategic placement of defences. When I’m thinking my way out of a tense situation, moments away from being overwhelmed – by zombies, rather than starvation or suffocation...Most of the time though, it’s a game that goes out of its way to be repetitive, frustrating and dull.

It made me so paranoid that I second guessed everything I thought about the game. It’s a shame that the ending, when it happens, is a bit abrupt, but even after it ended I couldn’t decide what had happened. It’s only a couple of hours long, but Old Gods Rising stewed me in my own juices so thoroughly that I woke up, confused, at about 2am, looked at my aforementioned boyfriend as he slept, and thought “he was definitely in on it with Maz… he looks too smug”. That’s got to be a well crafted story, hasn’t it? As long as you don’t mind not having all the answers at the end.

It reeks of development hell, as demoralising to play as I imagine it was to make. Yes, clearing a map of its icons can be readily distracting, and it fulfils this role at least. But that’s no longer nearly enough. Although I’ll say one thing for it, that shouldn’t be underappreciated. It’s fast travel is fast – it loads anywhere on the map incredibly quickly. Which would be a nice thought to end on, if I didn’t add: it’s just it’s not much fun when you get there.

Breached is just too small in every aspect to feel satisfying. I’d love to see this fleshed out into something with more ambition and more purpose.

This is a disaster, and the biggest surprise about it is that Ubisoft thought it worth releasing.

Perhaps its lack of ambition that’s the most frustrating aspect of Bedlam.

The satisfaction of The Last Worker, then, comes from roleplaying the sabotage of an exploitative major corporation, and if you crave the sense of catharsis that comes from sticking a finger up to the man, it may well fill a hole. But that’s not quite the same as marshalling the human capacity to serve up real food for thought, or prompt us to imagine a better future.

I should add that Foreclosed, from a performance perspective, is technically flawless. No stutters or hiccups. This is clearly a team that knows how to put a game together, even if the one they have didn’t hook me on any level. Then it ended after around five hours, just as it was threatening to get interesting. For those after a more engaging cyber-shooty game, I recommend reading Ed’s review of The Ascent. For cyber-story-puzzly fans, meanwhile, I recommend Mind Scanners. Foreclosed, for all its graphic novel aspirations, is paper-thin.

I know the above's been pretty bleak and it genuinely saddens me that Redfall is a disappointment. I simply can't believe it's by Arkane Austin, the same folks behind Prey, and by the same minds who helped bring Dishonored's Dunwall to life (Dishonored 2 remains one of my favourite games of all time). It's not that Redfall's absolutely diabolical, by any means. There are moments of wonder buried away in Redfall, where Arkane's penmanship and architectural mastery surface. I just know that Arkane are far, far better than what they've put out here, and there's a sense that what's arrived is a game that was pulled in so many directions it couldn't cope.

There’s still a certain compulsion to whacking out cards in an optimal order, figuring out the most impressive combos during performances and the most efficient routes through the meta-game camp upgrades. There are endearingly playful touches, too, like the way my strongman quivers when he’s nervous, or how Henry Ford rocked up to that show in a motorised carriage with a plush leather seat. Those joys fade fast, though, and you’re left with a slog to a finale you’ll just have to hope is no longer broken. I hate to say it, but there are better shows in town.

I'm not going to begrudge the Dannys, both Glover and Trejo, a pension. I just cannot fathom the decisions that went into making Crime Boss: Rockay City.

Mighty No. 9 is the best Mega Man game I’ve played in years, but all of the problems it has come from that too. Whether the gaming scene of 2016 needs a modern Mega Man is a more ambiguous question, perhaps answered by the old adage: be careful what you wish for. Or in this case, what you back.

The whole play experience seems set up to make you feel as if you’ve arrived just after the fun is over. Indeed, the game’s opening, where you wake up having missed the start of Reclamation Day, and must trudge to the vault’s exit alone through drifts of spent confetti, couldn’t set the tone more succinctly. The party’s over before it’s even started.

The Waylanders is an RPG that's endearing as it is janky. It has fun characters and looks stunning, so here's hoping that more patches can get rid of the (potentially game-breaking) bugs.

Horrible to control, horrible to listen to, really surprisingly ugly to look at, and and all-round mess, I’ve no desire to put myself through this.

I feel rotten, panning a game that’s delightful in some ways but frustrating where it matters.

Yume Nikki thrives on its own obtuseness and obscurity, even now it has been dragged into the light somewhat. Dream Diary really does feel like a second-hand retelling of half-remembered and ill-understood nightmares, and I found my mind wandering on imaginings of its own to get as far as possible from these dreary dreams.

While this suite of options is probably something those playing on console will find interesting, I can’t see it appealing to all too many PC players – simply because there are already a multitude of Fallout 4 mods out there that do a similar, if not better, job for free.

The climbing is unquestionably repetitive, but that’s not something that puts me off at all. It’ll be the deal-breaker for many, I’m sure, but for those not put off, this is a delightful little thing.

Paranoia is geared towards this kind of playful arguments and collaborative storytelling more than it is simulation. You can’t easily replicate scenarios like the above in a video game, so to port the setting into a standard computer RPG requires… more. I do wish Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory had been a bit more daring in the attempt.

Even more upsetting are the momentary flashes of Platinum brilliance that shine through. The game hits you with the occasional stunning oil-painting backdrop, draws you in with the story for a split second. Sometimes the bosses are super cool, or you'll do an awesome last minute dodge and you'll feel unstoppable. Somewhere, deep down, there's a sliver of the fantastic Platinum. But it's mired in what it thinks makes a live service game tick and loses itself as a result.

This is a steaming pile of shit.

I could go on with describing Mechajammer's flaws and failures for far, far longer than I could stand playing it any more. The sheer relief at exorcising my complaints are the closest I've come to enjoying it since my brief excitement at the promise of its character creation screen. Between its awful, threadbare design and a shocking number of bugs and major glitches, this has been an absolutely miserable experience and not even close to fit for release.

The real heartbreaker is that I want to like the city of Abermore. It has so much potential. There’s real love in those streets, and so many toys to play with on a job. They have a secret bug cult! I gotta know what’s going on there. But right now, it's too rough and ready to recommend playing. It wants to riff on the same 'go with the flow' style of heist and sneaking as Arkane's Deathloop, but feels about as rickety as one of McDuckitt's ghost-knight automatons. I've been told the devs are currently working on a patch to fix up some of these game-breaking bugs, but at time of writing it's not going to be ready for launch. As it is, Abermore is a dame that I want to love, but she’s got nothing but contempt in her heart for me.

But even these moments of spectacle can't hide what is ultimately a very dull game. It's also quite janky, and I spotted plenty of canned animation loops, characters getting stuck in scenery, and Gollum clipping or jittering through the environment on several occasions to name just a few. But even if it were technically sound, Gollum is simply a game that fails to expand the world of Middle-earth in any meaningful way. There are glimmers of something here, but like the ring itself, this is best chucked into the bowels of Mount Doom and forgotten about forever.

With Flashback 2 there’s really only one thing to say: don’t buy it.

SquareCells fascinates me. It falls short of the elegant simplicity I found in Hexcells Infinite, but not by much. It scratches that exact same itch and, promisingly, it reminds me of how I felt about the first Hexcells game.

‘Farce’ really is the key word though – any time I suspected it was about to become acidic, it hammered the silliness button as hard as it could. I know I keep mentioning it in the context of The Stanley Parable, so here’s the summary without it: it’s funny, inventive short game about games and getting flustered.

But what I think Refunct most importantly demonstrates is the nascent skill of developer Dominique Grieshofer. This appears to be his first public project, and what’s displayed here is a rare talent for communicating what a player needs to do in a game without ever having to actually say it. That makes me want to keep a careful eye on whatever he does next.

This is an improved version of the game but, in singleplayer and in 1v1, it retains the same rigidity as the original release.

A quiet, careful joy, spinning an impressive tapestry out of relatively few threads.

Underneath it all is a sweet little game, that takes its cues from 16bit gaming in many right ways.

Perfect Angle looks like a neat little puzzle about rotating obscure 3D shapes until they align to form objects, but somehow sports the most astonishingly dreadful narrative of all time.

How about telling people that this is a fraction of a game at the point of sale? It’s only a tiny £2.80, as you’d hope for something less than two hours long, but the principle remains: if something’s episodic, you say so. Starting with putting it in the title.

After its brief hour, with a definitive conclusion, it’s something of a shame to realise it’s not in any way procedurally generated. Start over, as it will offer, and everything’s in the same place it was last time, giving you no incentive for another wander. But while it lasts it’s an extremely pleasant time.

So yes, should the maths homework weirdoness be part of your make-up, and in your case be matched by ability, then is a snap at £1.59.

As a ‘game’, well, I guess Apollo 11 isn’t answering any questions. As an often mesmerising and thrilling way to pass an evening, I’d point you at this long before I did the Vive’s headline acts such as The Lab and Job Simulator.

So yes, goodness me yes, get hold of this. Get hold of the first two, too. But most of all, get this.

The Average Everyday Adventures Of Samantha Browne is free, a really interesting little thing.

OPUS is very cute, and while the story obviously borrows heavily from elsewhere, and while the core mechanic will feel familiar to fans of Mass Effect, it was almost a lovely idea. I’d love to play OPUS Remastered, with the ideas elaborated upon, the ship clicking given more purpose, and a greater focus on those ambient puzzles. This remains interestingly strange, but never quite interesting enough.

It is definitely visually improved, but still looks very dated. And the remastering apparently didn’t include addressing the game’s many issues. But at the same time, this is still Shadow Complex, well loved, and definitely a decent time. Just a decent time from six years ago and looking and feeling like it.

The campaign can feel like a bit of a grind because of [this], but then again I really don’t believe that it’s been designed to be played doggedly for hours at a time. It’s best enjoyed as a precious hour of bright, brash space fantasy/Lego crate come to life to scratch imaginative itches here and there.

I found it difficult to get into Crea in the same way I did for its forefathers. It would be easy for me to say that part of that is down to fatigue with the genre – I have been through it all before, after all. But that is not the main problem I have with this latecomer. The fact is, it just does everything less well. The crafting, the researching, the art style, the fantasy monsters. There is constant development, like many of these games, so there is always time for things to be stripped out, and much more to be added in future. But at the moment, Crea feels like a step back in time.

I happily add 35mm to the swollen pantheon of RPS’ highly-recommended games from the first half of 2016. It is janky at times, but it is something special.

At £4 it’s a really easy decision – get this. It’s fun, spooky, peculiar, unique, and most of all – and I use this word very carefully – interesting. That’s something games too often are not. The Room Two unquestionably is – a properly interesting experience.

Replica is a strong concept played out a bit too broadly for its own good, but it’s just smart – and certainly timely – enough to get away with it.

Progressive, witty, and touching, if chronologically troubled, Killing Time At Lightspeed a fine thing.

There you go. I wrote a review of a jigsaw puzzle game for one of the biggest gaming sites on the internet. So there.

Valley tries to do so many things. Bless it for that, really. It’s just so damned frustrating that, in its first hour, it was really onto something fresh and exhilarating and beautiful. Then, far too soon, it shrugs it off in favour of not-awful but less inspired and more familiar first-person action-adventuring.

It’s utterly beautiful, and it sounds so wonderful, but in the end it feels too hollow. As a piece of visual art it deserves extensive celebration. As a game, it needed to be slightly more: slightly more purposeful, slightly more involved, slightly more communicative.

Attack On Titan is reminiscent of the EDF series, but where that game aims for bombastic frivolity, its run-and-gun ant slaughter ends up feeling insubstantial thanks to a lack of feedback. Wings Of Freedom is similarly straightforward, but the satisfaction of moving and fighting is enough to sustain me for hours. I hope it becomes a series as long-running as EDF.

There’s joy to be found in this zany horrorshow, but it’ll take a seasoned janker to grit their teeth through its issues and fully appreciate it.

So few games are capable of putting humans together like this in a den of villainy and letting them become slowly corrupted or instantaneously redeemed. Hackmud does this and does it very well. It is like the early internet it so perfectly mimics: a world of confusion, paranoia and possibility.

If you crank the difficulty right up, missions are not something to just casually slaughter your way through. You’ll have to think smart, take longer and most of all sneak, something that is not realistically required on normal hardness.

It didn’t entertain me, it didn’t distract my son, and it’s very broken. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic by Giant Machines 2023, but not yet.

Better responding controls would do a lot of good, but for £6.40 you’ve got a lovely idea, often delivered very well.

I’m probably guilty of hoping that, now that the nu-Lara groundwork is established, Tomb Raider might now feel more free to re-embrace the tonal qualities that we loved the original games for. ‘Celebtration’ or no, I shouldn’t realistically expect add-on content for a game which very deliberately employs a dour vibe to somehow depart from that. Happy 20th birthday, Lara. I hope you find your way home one day.

This isn’t the expansion or the patch to convince those who weren’t already convinced by what Stellaris has to offer, but it brings plenty of alterations and additions for those already on board. More than that, it’s an indication that the studio have ideas as to how the universe can become more lively, without making it more cluttered at the same time, and that makes the future of Stellaris very exciting indeed.

The most annoying flaw I’ve encountered in a week of play is an immovable combat window pop-up that make attacks in corner areas like Voronezh fiddly. Very occasionally, movement limitations rub me up the wrong way (arguably there should be a simple way of swapping units in adjacent areas, and reinforcing a contested area without triggering a battle) but minor blemishes like these won’t stop me playing one of 2016’s most absorbing and affordable battle sims.

After a few campaigns, it’s left me a little cold.

If you enjoy low-key wind-down sims like Train Simulator and American Truck Simulator I’d be surprised if you didn’t also enjoy City Car Driving.

There’s a lot wrong with The Martian VR Experience [official site], and it’s almost scandalous that they’re charging for it at all, let alone asking sixteen quid, but the bit where you get to drive a rover across an Unreal 4-rendered Mars with I Will Survive blaring is very hard to argue with. The bit where you cack-handedly chuck some potatoes in a bin, less so.

Slick, beautiful, gently challenging and supremely well designed, it’s a stunning piece of work.

These aren’t the worst of the Pinball FX2 tables by any means, and prolonged time with DOOM might even show it to be one of the best, but as a bundle of three, they’re…frustrating is the word I’m looking for. Frustrating because the idea of taking a big RPG and making a pinball table that carries over some of its qualities in mechanics as well as art and sound is brilliant. I suspect they’d need to escape the confines of a single table and such a basic ruleset to succeed though – an entire pinball game based around Fallout, with separate tables for factions and areas? Now, that might work.

Don’t play for the graphics. Don’t play for the story. Play for what this game is about: putting your brain through a thresher and loving it.

It’s a frustrating expansion, though there’s every chance patches will address some of these complaints. McMillen has already said that portal percentages and other issues mentioned are on the list for patching. Pick through the shit and you’ll find the nuggets of gold, but if I hadn’t sucked every last drop out of Afterbirth, I’d rather be playing that than Afterbirth †. As it is, I’m just about won over by the promise of new things, many of which are solid additions, but there’s a lot of dreariness to tolerate.

I’ve had a mostly splendid (and occasionally aggravating) time with it, and for its minimal price really strongly recommend you give it a look.

Glittermitten Grove is nothing but misery. Build, wait for meters to refill, endure, repeat, self-loathe.

I’m very glad it exists. If it is simply interactive fiction, it’s a wonderfully inventive take on it.

This is all the work of one man, Thomas Lerdy, and he’s absolutely nailed it. If like me you’ve been craving a good implementation of the puzzle for PC, then you’ve found it in Pictopix. If you’re looking for a fun, brain-using puzzle presented splendidly, then now is the time to discover why Picross/Nonograms are quite so great.

It’s definitely got a place in my games library, and it’s a really good way to play a version of the board game my friends and I enjoy even though we’re rarely in the same city at the moment. It’s not hellishly expensive so I don’t feel bad suggesting someone pick it up for a couple of afternoons of play. I will say, though, that I didn’t form any attachment to the single player stuff, nor was playing with the AI appealing. I’m going to be sticking to my human (or post-human in the case of the ghosts) buddies from now on.

There’s greatness here, and damn, it’s so funny and cutesy-sarcastic. The puzzles are top notch, and the dungeons, when properly equipped, often a pleasure to plough through. But there’s just so much annoyance layered on top for absolutely no discernible reason, beyond presumably a fear that their sequel didn’t feel sufficiently different. The silly thing is, it was.

If you’re after a smart implementation of Threes-like input and tile-based battling, Tiles & Tales does that, and is free!

That’s where I’m at with the game personally – invested and interested but also frustrated and bored at times. More broadly, the thing I’m struggling with is why I would recommend this to someone when Sunless Sea exists, has a similar sensibility and is more polished. It feels more like something you’d suggest after a player of Sunless Sea has exhausted their interest in that particular game but is still excited about the style of story.

Again, so much of this criticism really wouldn’t feel relevant if the game’s own storefront (if it has its own website, I cannot find it) didn’t describe something totally other than what’s being sold. This is not an open world game, there’s absolutely no exploring, and you don’t gather twigs to build a nest.

I’m glad that Barksdale is making these twisted little stories. The Static Speaks My Name impressed me because I never quite knew which way it was going to twist, whereas Bucket Detective is soaking in its own horrible juices right from the start. It starts ugly and ends ugly, without enough humour or horror in between to shock or surprise. I’m not convinced its mingling of arcane silliness and actual suffering quite works either; it’s a bit like Martyrs with gross sex jokes.

Unexplored is almost certainly going to be one of my favourite games of the year.

It all works really rather well, and is accompanied by a very pleasing ambient soundtrack, along with nature noises chirping and squawking over the Eno-esque keyboardy tones. And it gets rewardingly difficult, without feeling unfair, or relying on ninja reflexes. (Clearly I have them, but they’re left in their box here.) This is well worth a look, and a good scratch of the head.

The occasional strange conflict and the missing alchemy feature aside, Monks & Mystics is undoubtedly one of Crusader Kings 2’s strongest pieces of DLC. It leans heavily towards the game’s roleplaying aspect, its best feature, and produces some of the game’s most bizarre stories. Essentially, you’re playing two characters. You have your public face and your secret one, so there are very few moments where you’re waiting around for something to happen. Indeed, you can almost ignore the traditional intrigue and realm management, if you want, in favour of playing a member of one of these secret sects or hunting them down to save your kingdom.

Pixel Privateers knows exactly what it’s doing, and though it’s about as deep as a microwave lasagne, it’s almost impossible not to lose yourself to it for a few evenings.

Compact, delightful, slightly wonky in terms of difficulty curves for me and I think overall I preferred A Good Snowman simply because I find the track placement sometimes has a bit too much wiggle room for it to feel entirely neat, whereas rolling the snowballs for A Good Snowman stayed as a very tight experience. But! Cosmic Express is just as delightful to look at, and has a really solid core of puzzling to get your brain around!

Whatever happens to Afghanistan 11 in the future, it’s sure to be one of my most played w******* (history-steeped military strategy games with influential terrain and plausible, reality-derived unit relationships) this year. I love how it forces me to spin plates. I like the way it uses IEDs and RPGs to transform every vehicle move into an adventure. In a genre dominated by demolition and death, the emphasis it places on construction, and improving the lives of the local populace, is cheeringly discordant. The theme isn’t one I’m naturally drawn to, but the design is so strong, the history so ingeniously utilized, an ‘RPS Recommended’ rosette is inevitable.

Academy is entirely focused on tricking you into learning some basic electronics. And that’s enough. I heartily encourage you to grab this if you’ve got a kid trying to learn it at school. Heck, if you’re a physics teacher you really should buy a bunch of copies, as this’ll be a surefire way to gain the attention of some of your students. Or if you just fancy reminding yourself about logic gates, pulse generators and capacitors, this is a neat little thing. I’d love to pretend I viewed it all as a smug expert pondering its usefulness for younger players, but that’s just flat-out not true – it taught me a whole bunch, as hard as I tried not to learn anything.

Under Leaves either needed a lot more to do in a level, or a lot more levels, to feel substantial.

It comes so close to being something I love and then it has a hollow core. The best way I can think to explain it is how at some point as you grow up your toys stop being these magical things with their own lives and start being toys. From watching the trailers and following the development I was hoping for a window into a little lively toy universe but I’ve opened up the packaging and I can’t seem to find the spark.

Brute is N with a ship in place of a ninja. That change aside, there’s the same challenge of grappling with the particulars of the game’s physics, the same love of alternating bright colours, and a similar menagerie of deadly pursuing enemies ready to destroy you with a single touch. Luckily, there’s also the same sense of satisfaction to be found in trying, failing and eventually overcoming each of its tricky levels.

It’s grisly and cruel in ways that are both obvious and difficult to identify. There’s a bleakness that worms its way through every aspect, insidious and very effective. And then something else will go wrong and it’s so ghastly to start a chapter over because everything is so damned slow.

Caveblazers is superb and I’m looking forward to discovering all of its secrets, and to the local multiplayer add-on that’s apparently coming soon. I can see myself playing for years to come.

After a dozen hours, it’s all just variants of the same dungeons over and over again. By the time I grew a bit bored of the dungeons, however, I was already invested. So that I didn’t need to keep checking the corp information menu, I even scribbled down my grudges or the names of groups I needed to butter up in my Little Book of Debts. Even more than Syndicate or Shadowrun Returns, StarCrawlers manages to capture the essence of cyberpunk and turn it into compelling systems. Despite the concessions made in the name of ambition, it’s an impressive dungeon romp.

For a first commercial game by a developer who was 16 when he launched it into Early Access, and has constantly honed it ever since, Unturned is an extraordinary achievement. I guess what I’m wondering now is what, armed with all this experience and skill, Nelson Sexton will do next.

It’s this framework for what feels like should have been a much better, more entertaining game, and yet the ghost of that potential game leaks through in the charming way it presents the Whodos, and the always welcome environment of a creepy old mansion for setting puzzles. It’s too brief, ridiculously easy, and woefully insincere, which certainly renders any recommendable features moot. But I really did like the Whodos.

This was crying out for a new version, an evolution of Alphabear better suited for bigger screens. Something that might make sense of the newly added “Hardcover Edition” mantle. Instead we’ve got a slightly less good version of the two year old phone game. Which is still a top game, but, you know, not really something to write home about.

The result of all this is just magnificent. A super-tricky game with a wonderfully smooth difficulty curve, and a masterclass in design when managing to offer real depth and challenge despite limiting itself to just two buttons from start to finish. You’ll feel amazing when you succeed. [RPS Recommended]

I also just really like being in the worlds. The Florid Vale is this pastoral idyll (plus killer skeletons and demon skulls), but it’s chill, it’s pretty and you get large land masses to navigate meaning less danger from the gnome-eating fish which live in the water. Later in the game you get desert worlds with sheer drops and mangroves with twisted roots that are easy to fall off and thus strafing is no longer your best friend.

Megaton Rainfall is an awe-inspiring achievement.

The deaths are surprisingly grim, made more so by the arcadey point scoring ways, creating a macabre atmosphere that just keeps to the right levels of distaste. This could have been the Hidden Folks of murdering. And it’s all there, underneath the mess, waiting for someone to rescue. Sadly that has, so far, not been realised.

Paradise is a very satisfying and deeply peculiar game.