Cutting out the parts that became tedious would quicken the narrative enough to undermine it, but those parts became so laborious that they dragged it down instead. Perhaps I missed the point entirely by playing it alone – it is eminently obvious where a second player would fit in to its design – but if I had a lover here right now, I don’t think this is the game I’d choose to play with them. I’ve been in my own haven for far too long.

It’s a shame, because it’s a wonderfully ambitious mashup of systems wrapped around a lovely, if extremely cliched, caricature of the golden age of gangster fiction. When negotiations break down and you end up in a shoot-out with enemies that look like they’re dressed for a wedding, Empire Of Sin feels like a farce worthy of a Coen brothers movie.

Does every game “for” grown-ups need to have blood and rude swears? No. And by the same token, games for tweens don’t need to be patronising, and it’s not like if I had a 12-year-old kid I’d buy them Cyberpunk 2077 for their new console, because that’s not at all appropriate. Thank goodness there’s this, then: an imaginative, fun action game that has a nice story about family and personal growth at the heart of its epic adventure, and a good sense of humour, where you turn Aphrodite from a gracious tree back into a bitchy hot girl.

So I’m in danger of overrating Across The Grooves. It’s fairly short, and at only a couple of hours long, you could dig up all its alternative scenes and endings in a long afternoon. It’s more linear and structurally simple than I’d expected, and I was definitely expecting more from the main music. But while it hasn’t truly touched me as deeply as Eliza or Watch Me Jump, it’s given me an unusual angle on time travel and a lot of feelings and thoughts to process. It’s even helped me a little, I think. There are some things that were probably always going to happen, and the only real choice you have isn’t how to fix them, but to either make yourself miserable wondering what you could have done better, or try to salvage a future from the consequences you were left with. I’m glad I got to play it.

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

Don’t get me wrong, I think the guns feel great and the maps are equally well designed, but I need more, Treyarch. I can’t even customise my Operator, and there’s like, hardly any to choose from really. It didn’t take me long to unlock practically every weapon and see every map, and I can’t envision myself sticking around for too much longer if the game doesn’t get updated pronto. And I think this is the heart of the issue. It’s like Cold War has stalled on the way to a patch it scheduled in advance to save time, and we’re now just awkward passengers growing more impatient as we wait for it to lurch forwards. [Multiplayer review]

For the five or six hours it takes to reach the game’s ending, Bugsnax is a delightful and intriguing world to inhabit, just one whose robotic wildlife won’t inspire you to jump back in and finish off your collection. Bugsnax is a faintly naughty, but never crass adventure that feels simultaneously like a love letter to, and a sharply observed satire of, the games that inspired it.

For fans of the series it’s really entertaining. It might not set the world on fire, but you can set some virtual bits on fire yourself if you want. I think running towards an abbey with terrible purpose, yelling “KILL CHRIST! AND BURN HIS HOUSE DOWN!”, is the energy a lot of people want right now. I dunno how well that would play in Texas, though.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has set Yakuza on a grand new course, and Like A Dragon’s RPG switch up is sure to delight long term fans, while remaining a perfect entry point for newcomers. If it slipped under your radar, take this as me pushing Ichiban Kasuga into your room and suggesting you install he and his friends as house guests for a while. This really isn’t a game you should miss out on. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The only reason I’m not giving Teardown a Bestest Best is because it’s still in Early Access, and I want to wait to see more of what it becomes. At this stage, it is a towering achievement in tearing down towers, and well worth your time. [Early Access review]

Look, it’s certainly very possible to spend an enjoyable evening playing Little Hope. But you have to calibrate your expectations towards B-movie, janky schlock-fest. If you go in wanting to have a spooky time that actually freaks your nut, I fear you’ll be disappointed.

While I may not identify with any of my guerrillas and their grab-bag backstories, nor feel any sense of real investment in the fate of DedSec as a whole, I’m still attached to this strange band of possessed berserkers. We’ve had a good time together, in this nonsense dystopian playground. When construction goblin finally angers one boat too many, or when Diane discovers the limits to God’s tolerance of Three Lions and is rightly obliterated, I will miss them.

I do think it is too “hurt me plenty” for me, only just. The sensation of being slapped right back to the start every time and having to repeat the opening level is as likely to produce a frustrated sigh as it is to inspire a “one more go” mentality. In this case, new minibosses have started to appear to offer some variety. But I’m probably bowing out, at least for the time being. That’s okay. I can appreciate the knuckle-cracking attitude of improvement-by-death while also being ready to lay down my demon razor and die no more. You win this one, ScourgeBringer.

As a simple one-and-done campaign run Ghostrunner isn’t at its best: the handiest tricks coming too late in the day and the towering death spikes overshadowing the good times around them. I couldn’t, for example, tell you anything of the story, as it’s delivered over comms during moments of intense concentration. I think it involves someone called Mara, but only because that’s the name on one of the boss fight health bars. But take that initial pass as a warm up lap, inuring yourself to some frustrations to come, and what follows finally delivers on the fun of the cyber ninja fantasy. Death number 1424 beckons.

Disc Room might be readily slept on, but if you are the kind of tough game obsessive, a connoisseur of arcade death, or a bullet hellion who cannot resist the call to mastery, these rooms should be approached wakeful and willing and ready to die.

I trust Frictional implicitly to do very interesting things, but though Rebirth takes a run at a bunch of cool and alarming concepts, it feels like it’s juggling too many to do any one of them full justice. Rebirth hasn’t haunted me since closing it in a way that Soma did, for example. I kept waiting for the take on pregnancy anxiety to become something more than what it always is. I could feel it straining to against the ropes of previously established bullshit lore about orbs. Amnesia: Rebirth isn’t bad at all. You just get the sense that if it was called Rebirth it would have been better.

It’s rare that a developer is able to wrestle this kind of ambitious technical witchery into the shape of an actual game, but Noita pulls it off. Fast and loose, or tight and controlled? It doesn’t matter, I’m having fun either way.

That story, of a vast civilian population forced into a total war footing, Partisans tells very well indeed. If you’ve got even a passing interest in the war on the Eastern front, or you enjoyed the various Commandos, Desperados and Shadow Tacticses of this world, I’d recommend it without hesitation. This machine kills fascists, one quicksave at a time.

All of these issues are fixable (some quite easily, I’d hope), and just a little extra content could do so much to hide the edges of the game.

Shelmerston is an honestly charming place to visit, while also being a bit strange. The art is bright, round and cosy, but its plants and foods still make it look strange and exotic – a bit like the excellent (and also very chill) Mutazione. Some of the inhabitants are big bipedal fishfolk with curiously blank, smiley faces, for example, and there are tourists who are just really big birds. Some animals have either both eyes on one side of their head, or one big one on the front, and this is apparently unremarkable. Which is, itself, charming.

If you like XCOM-ish things, The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk should be in your library – just so long as you don’t mind a bit of hamfisted zaniness. I don’t think it’s one you’ll want to replay again and again, but it’s a substantial, well-crafted effort that’s definitely worth your time. Admittedly it’s no Garfield Kart, but it’s unreasonable to expect a developer to produce two once-in-a-generation masterpieces on the trot, after all.

Spelunky 2 has fully replaced Spelunky 1 for me. In playing it, I have been tense, I have been excited, I have been elated. I have also rediscovered the joys of being lost, uncertain, and surprised. Spelunky 2 makes Spelunky new again: a fancier strap, more cogs, a cuckoo popping out from a hidden compartment on the hour. The correct time, as delightful as the first time I learned to tell it. [RPS Bestest Bests]

If you can get it for £4 – and as noted above, you can during most Steam sales – Crysis is worth returning to for at least its first few hours. If you’ve never played it before, I reckon it’d be worth playing all the way to its end. But Crysis Remastered’s spit-polished nanosuit can’t redeem the game’s aging design, or justify the Maximum Price.

I think the rules are still a bit too opaque for my liking. But they are, typically for Inkle, very elegant, and trust them to be the developers to weave them in with stories of knights and chivalry in such a neat way. Inkle are still better at story than strategy, though. I’ll beat Mordred one day. I just suspect it will take me a long while, is the only thing.

It easily carried itself on the strength of its emotional impact. Which is great, for me. But I’m curious as to whether newer players will have the time to build up the investment necessary for it to lean on that before they’re thrown into the end game. It seems difficult to pace a story that will unfold radically differently for so many. Not only are players jumping in now getting a very different approach to Hades’ plot, so too does it depend on how good players are and therefore how quickly they progress through the various layers of hell.

Post Void is a masterpiece of compulsive motion and hypnotic, irresistible sounds. It does something to my brain that I’ve never experienced before. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Iron Harvest is a throwback to one of the last golden ages of the genre, often feeling as old fashioned and crusty as that association entails, but frequently reminding us of the essential appeal of extremely large robots chilling out in timelines where they shouldn’t be.

As much as I can appreciate and credit its beautiful design and atmosphere for that, when I suddenly get the solution to a particular island, I get the mental round of applause all to myself, made all the sweeter by previously thinking this genre was impossible for my brain.

So yeah, it has more than a bit of roughness to it. But hoo boy, do I admire its spirit, its extra-ness, its enthusiasm for small-scale RPG design. It feels like somebody put a lasso around the neck of a snorting Disgaea game and corralled it into a pen with Slay The Spire, the resulting gamefoal erupting onto Steam in slime and wires, a cybernetic child of chaos, pixel art, and giant JRPG word flashes. BREAK. BLEEDING. ANTIMATTER. ENRAGED.

But Paradise Killer also backs the style with substance. The Syndicate’s lifestyle is supported by the mass abduction and eventual murder of normal people from our reality, who become a kind of cattle class. They’re banned from doing basically anything, placated by soft drink mascots, and give their literal blood to a cause they never benefit from.

It’s less dramatic than some of Dontnod’s other outings (and probably not for those with short attention spans given the pacing), but Tell Me Why remains a good entry in their the library of stories about families and sad magic – and it’s probably the most hopeful one yet.

I think I’ll need another year of playing it to work out exactly what I think of it, but that’s another way of saying I want to play it for a year, so it must be pretty good.

I do understand the appeal of getting a chonky “choices matter” game like this to put it in Steam tag parlance. If you have that vacancy to fill, go ahead. Let’s face it, there aren’t many other options at the moment. I myself have made many bad calls in my time as a Ranger, and even I wouldn’t mind seeing the repercussions of my major decisions play out. But if I have to fight through listless combat, buggy UI, and an onslaught of juvenile gags to see one of the many endings, I’d rather leave the snowfields of Colorado behind. To hell with the consequences.

No Straight Roads feels like a less good version of Sayonara Wild Hearts, and if you want a rhythm action game I can’t really recommend the former over the latter. I would have much preferred that NSR didn’t have the platforming sections and put in another wacky boss fight instead, because they’re funny, weird and pretty, and have better music.

Measured, thought out, detailed, kind. It has intent, from top to bottom. Even the weather feels like it has intent, the cycle of the day and night, the routines you get into. They way your friends leave you, sometimes in ways that will surprise you. Spiritfarer will probably make you very very sad, but it even does that in a kind way. In a way that makes you think about who you have lost, but also what they left behind with you, and the ways you are still close to them. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Ultimately, Mortal Shell will make you want to headbutt your monitor out of sheer frustration. The puzzling nature of the map, the repetitive placement of enemies, the lack of options all coalesce into a big arm that holds the game back from being really good, to just good. No matter times I try and swat it away with thoughts of the meaty combat, that arm simply won’t budge.

It’s such a shame. Risk Of Rain 2 is delightfully weird, with an enviably eclectic menagerie of beasties. Runs that go well can branch off in wildly different directions, where items twist character abilities into novel new uses. But the sad truth is that I can’t click with any of the early characters, and the path to unlocking the good ones is long and paved with too-quick deaths. Stick your neck out if you want to – I’m headed indoors.

This is a good Total War game. I love Total War games. I could spend forever comparing every element of it against its corresponding point in previous Total War games, and we’d none of us feel any the wiser for doing so. I suppose the frustration for me is the thought of what sort of a mind-blower Troy could have been if it hadn’t needed to be a Total War game in its entirety, but could still have gotten away with copying the two-layer strategy format.

Problem is, all this wears thin fast. After a couple of hours, I’d already got to the point where seeing certain maps crop up made my poor jellified heart sink. Within a few more hours, my heart looked more like stone. Saying that feels monstrous but it’s true...I’d still heartily recommend Fall Guys in its current form though, because those first few hours were such a treat.

Not the most innovative game in the world by any means, but one of the best adventures you can go on inside a telly, and one of the most beautiful, too – especially now that telly is a PC. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Much like crabs themselves, I am tremendously glad this game exists, but it’s something I’d rather appreciate at a distance.

This is a pleasant clicker game neatly disguised as something a little more fun and adventurous, and while there are some wonderful artistic flourishes (you can play music to a giant carrot in a top hat for bonus items, and there’s a fish god you can feed apples to) they don’t add anything to the game’s basic systems of moving things around for money. For five pounds and change though, Merchant Of The Skies is an entertaining enough obsession of a lazy afternoon.

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.

The result, for me, was anxiety. A low background hum of “did I miss something”, combined with the high notes of being unable to find the next new area. It was enough to shade my entire experience with Carrion, turning a pleasant enough Metroidvania with a one-of-a-kind protagonist into something I felt like I was struggling to escape from. Your mileage may vary. But for me, I was happier with the GIFs.

It is a game of surprising depth, and while Röki’s point and click backbone may prevent it from delivering the constant, one-two gut punches we saw in the likes of Edith Finch, this is certainly one of the closest attempts at capturing its mechanics-led story structure I’ve seen since. I thought Röki was going to be a cute and throwaway little puzzle game with a light adventure wrapping, but Polygon Treehouse have gone so much further, and so much deeper than I was expecting. Like all great folklore stories, there is a quiet devastation lurking beneath Röki’s picturebook world, elevating this mythic tale of gods and monsters into the pantheon of all-time adventure game greats. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The most perfect example of everything I’m trying to say here is this: Necrobarista ends on a pun. And that pun made me cry. [RPS Bestest Bests]

My living situation in Among Trees is better than my real life. I cannot fully describe how delightful and relaxing it is to wake up in my cabin and look at the morning light streaming into my new greenhouse.

Persona 4 is a twisting tale of dreams gone rogue in a town sapped of purpose. It brings personal demons to life in gaudy but plausible ways, and uses this to rejuvenate the dog-eared framework of a town-and-dungeon fantasy RPG. Unceremonious as it is, the PC port leaves all of that peculiar magic intact. It’s just a shame that the insight and empathy on show here doesn’t extend to everybody.

I like the world and the writing, and I especially like how it can click its heels and conjure up a story – as long as you don’t get bogged down in overlong battles. It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, and if any of this sounds interesting then an early access visit might well be worth your while. Just do your best to forget about how you could be playing Slay The Spire or Monster Train instead. [Early Access Review]

Disintegration has a lot of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time with it, and it succeeds in finding a balance between its shooting and strategic elements. It’s the kind of game I hope gets a sequel, one which is bolder in pursuing its ideas, and not just in its character names.

This won’t necessarily be true for other players, of course. But you could well see those tweets as a sort of diagnostic for whether it’s worth you buying this game. If you read them and think “ah, yes… that’s the sort of emotionally laden sea stuff I like to think about,” then the odds are Beyond Blue’ll be worth it for you, despite all its drawbacks. And if that is the case, just be prepared to relax and click on a lot of sealife while it gets to its point.

Desperados III may dismay profanophobes and Commandos 4 devs short of confidence, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else not warming to it swiftly. I can’t wait to see where Mimimi take the engine next. With WW2 spoken for, I’ve got my blistered quicksave/quickload fingers crossed for Medieval Nottinghamshire. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Eco Lifestyle adds some of the most interesting stuff to The Sims 4 I’ve ever seen. I just wish they had taken it a bit further towards its natural conclusion.

It’s as close to a perfect restoration as you’ll get, and the treatment these genre-defining games deserve.

I love the thrill of threading a conveyor through my domain and hunting down an errant input port, in a weird shark-like sort of way. I love cleaning up a kink that’s been unknowingly bottlenecking me for hours, then watching a dormant part of my factory spring back into life (and I love that I can now place signs as reminders that make those happen slightly less). Most of all I love passing by old projects, grinning at hodge-podge engineering that’s still thrumming away, playing its part in the overall colossus I have somehow crafted. Nothing devours a weekend like Satisfactory, whose demands are so often in that sweet spot where the work is complicated enough to yield capital S Satisfaction without tipping into choredom. No management game has made me feel as powerful, letting me relish in how my labours have sculpted the world on such a scale. And nowhere else, or rarely, have I appreciated such loving attention to detail, be that in the bloops of an unfolding miner or the toot of a departing train.[RPS Bestest Bests]

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but it’s at least as good as Slay The Spire. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Quantum League is a delightfully inventive, smart, and surprising gem. I’d love to see a future where not just competitive FPS fans, but anyone with an interest in game design has at least given it a go. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a future where they nerf the grenade launcher. [Early Access Review]

To me it feels far more like an expansion pack than a whole new game, slightly improving the cutesy graphics and adding in a couple of extra construction materials, but even then it all overlaps a little too closely with the original. A sequel to a game that already looked awfully similar to another series seems like something that should have iterated a great deal further by now. I certainly recommend checking out people’s most elaborate and daft bridges on YouTube – as for creating them yourself, it’s harder to get excited about.

Valorant’s gunplay feels just as weighty and precise as CS:GO’s, with a structure that hits all the same highs and lows. Abilities sometimes let you outsmart people rather than simply outshoot them, and I’m excited about playing in a squad of friendly and coordinated pals. If and when they fall away, though, I expect I will too. Riot say they’re taking toxicity seriously, and this is good to see. But they acknowledge they’re fighting an uphill battle, and I’m not at all convinced they’ll be able to foster a competitive environment that doesn’t routinely make me miserable. This launch week, though? When my friends are playing, and the game isn’t dominated by people with far more experience than me? I’m going to have a blast.

Here’s the real masterstroke behind Nimbatus’ design. There are several sets of skins, all of which can be mixed and match to make even cooler looking flybots. But they’re all unlockables except the default set, meaning you need to play the campaign to gain access to them. And for once, the cosmetics genuinely are worth grinding for. So I guess I’m just going to have to head back to the hangar, and get better.

Some games only become fun once you work out what they expect from you, and I spent most of my time with Wildfire wondering if I was playing it wrong. Maybe I was, but if there was a fun way to play it, I never found it.

My only real major disappointment with Atmomicrops is that the advertised simulation bits turn out only to be a few light nods to the genre. It’s got some simulation-shaped aspects, sure, but they’re flimsy plastic ferns in comparison to the very much alive and dynamic creeper vines of its shooty-dodgy core. This said, the farming does make fighting more interesting simply by providing a worthwhile distraction, leading to almost unbearably chaotic instances of frantic multitasking. As long as you know what you’re getting into, and are up for sewing a few hours of practise in before you reap the rewards, I think it’s well worth your cashews. Which I’ve only just realised are a play on ‘cash’. Ooh.

On paper, Crucible was built for me. It’s a MOBA-infused hero shooter with an emphasis on mobility, with a diverse line-up and some interesting new ideas. In reality, I’d rather play any of the many games that grapple with just one of Crucible’s heads, and pulls it off far better. This hydra might be sprawling, but none of it looks healthy.

The quality of the writing itself was fine, and genuinely made me smile in places. I just think it’s a tricky subject to wade into without a coherent plan for what should be said. And I know “it’s just a game,” etc., but when sharks are as perilously threatened as they are, and one of the big reasons is that people think of them as a threat to be annihilated, it’s just a bit depressing to see the idea celebrated. And whatever might be claimed about the game’s writing undermining that, I’m sorry, but that’s what it does. Maybe I’d care less if Maneater was fun enough overall to earn a pass. But as you’ve hopefully gathered by now, it’s not.

It’s a robust piece of design that you could well consider a triumph, given just how many ways in which the concept of an ARPG based on a construction game phenomenon could have ended in disaster. And I’m confident in recommending it as worth its price to even the most jaded click-stabber, especially one with even a passing familiarity with Minecraft. But the fact it’s been executed so competently leaves me wishing the developers had been a bit more reckless, frankly. A bit more experimental, in adapting its parent property to an alien genre. Because while the results might have been profoundly weird, it’s weird things – like Minecraft itself was, when it first appeared – that change the landscape of gaming.

It’s just the content, I suppose, that doesn’t charm me any more. It was like playing the FPS version of a top down ARPG like Diablo or Wolcen. Yeah, I’ll shoot the waves of oncoming enemies. No, I don’t particularly need to know why. I’ll do it again in another mission in a minute. Blah blah blah, strip club, blah blah blah, chop shop. Oh Saints Row. It is not you that have changed, but I.

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.

This is far from the most polished remaster I’ve played, and the original was a hit-and-miss affair to begin with. Judged in terms of Platinum’s own end-of-level trophies, this earns a silver award at best. But then that preposterous theme tune kicks in, sweeping your misgivings away for a precious handful of minutes. When you hear that music, you feel like you can do anything – even draw a circle correctly on your very first try.

But the thing is, and maybe this is me just not being good enough at card games, that eventually all the conversations get too hard. On the one hand this is fine, because Signs Of The Sojourner is sort of about life, and you can’t win at life, nor should you think of it that way. But on the other hand, the bittersweet story – meeting people, making new friends, losing old ones – is a lot of this game’s appeal, and I got the sense I was missing out on loads of it because I wasn’t getting through conversations successfully.

Overall, Horizon’s Gate is a joy to play. Its simple art style, combined with its excellent soundtrack and sense of exploration make it a naval sim that captures the inherent charm of discovery.[RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s a winner. Sixteen tons of detail, sixteen tons of character, sixteen tons of riotous bug blasting, spelunking co-operative goodness. Deep Rock Galactic is a company I’ve got no qualms about selling my soul to for hours more to come. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Runeterra might not be packed with interesting decisions, but it is loaded with charm. It’s nice. It’s soothing. That’s enough.

For anyone hoping it would bring a little modern fluidity to a long-stagnant genre, you might have to moonwalk upwards from this one. But for Ragers, it’s a sturdy score-attacking blowout to while away some hours, perfecting your flying knees and enflamed uppercuts, arguing over who deserves the trash salad.

With just three maps to choose from, all of them set in the same jungle and pretty much indistinguishable from one another, it will only take a dozen matches before you’ve seen every which way that things can shake out. It’s at this point that Predator: Hunting Grounds really does feel like the interesting-but-limited multiplayer component of a much larger game, and no amount of loot crates with customisable cosmetic skins, unlockable sniper rifles and fancy new dresses for the Predator can hope to liven things back up again...It’s a shame too, because I could spend ages running around the jungle as everyone’s favourite Schwarzeneggar-botherer, leaping over temples and howling at the sky in unbridled agony each time this supposedly rock-hard alien has to give himself his little injection of health medicine. There’s a really excellent Predator in here, waiting to be set free.

Particularly nifty is the ability to port your trucks back and forth between maps. If you lose one in a snow drift and can’t yet afford a bigger vehicle to dredge it out, it’s feasible to head back to Michigan and raise the funds in safer environs. That’s the other children’s story SnowRunner resembles: The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly. No matter the size of your stuck truck, you can nearly always send in something heavier. It’s the simplicity of principles like these that makes the ‘Runner games remarkably accessible, even as they grow in complexity and ambition.

It feels unappreciative to wish that there could be even more of it, but it’s like that perfect cup of tea. You’ll always want another one.

This is 100% a Gears Of War game, that also happens to be a top flight strategy effort. Arguably the best of its kind on the market, in fact, despite a bit of trouser trouble. It’s a spectacular thing to play through, and it’d be more than enough to merit the fifty quid price tag if it deleted itself on completion. Thankfully, however, the replay value is much greater than you’d expect. [RPS Bestest Bests]

I don’t know if droves follow it to Appalachia. But for hardy and forgiving treasure seekers, while there might not be much gold in them thar hills, there’s at least company now.

Overall, Chimera Squad is solid. It’s still a shadow of its progenitor, with its new ideas not quite making up for the loss of old ones. But if you try to treat it as its own thing, play at a higher difficulty, and do your best to ignore the snake’s voice, I’d say it’s worth a punt.

There is still suspense in every moment, because I know how easily each moment could go wrong. I can still revel in the discipline required to shoot a turret, recognise that I’ve disabled its firing mechanism, and stand still as it turns around. I can still freak out at inspired surprises I won’t spoil, and delight in paying attention to every little detail. They’ll kill me if I don’t. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Calvary and Four Last Things both wear their Monty Python influences very much on their sleeve, though, and this is appropriate. Because while Monty Python is funny, people tend to forget that the TV show in particular had about as many misses as it did hits, and only the hits made it into the clip compilations. Yes, yes, I will whip myself in penance later for saying so, please hold your comments. But by that metric, The Procession To Calvary is better than Monty Python, because it’s probably more consistent and, perhaps surprisingly for the content, less surreal. But your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Without having been in one myself I can’t say with any authority that Disaster Report 4 isn’t an accurate representation of the kinds of things that happen after a real earthquake, but I’m willing to guess that it falls short of a true simulation. It’s certainly about as ridiculous as the unfolding apocalypse happening outside our own windows – where society has seemingly ejected its collective mind to stockpile eggs and demand that the army open fire on joggers – but it’s about as passive as our lockdown too. Disaster Report 4 depicts a strange and consequence-averse crisis, in which you’re usually little more than a hapless observer.

Both games boast shortish campaigns, modest price tags, and occasionally shoot themselves in the feet with lines of B movie dialogue. Both bring down The Helicopter Fallacy with a flurry of tracer-laced MG fire, and deserve our admiration, gratitude and patronage for doing so.

I still enjoy Bannerlord because there's nothing else doing those open world battles. But almost everything else is a robotic, shallow grind offering no surprises, with a plethora of complaints that early access is supposed to iron out. You can ignore a lot of it, which only highlights how irrelevant it is, and though there are a lot more things going on, you have to provide your own motivation, because everyone's behaviour is basically the same, and everything feels like a missed opportunity.

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.

The basic act of hitting something doesn’t feel quite right, even when you’re whacking someone with your massive motorcycle hands. There’s this feeling of disconnection, some of it coming from the way your enemy can blink away at speed, and some of it, probably, from lag. A recent patch claimed to address that, but it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Hopefully that will be ironed out further down the line. But even if it is, I’d steer clear of Bleeding Edge. The characters may be inventive, but everything else is bleeding out on the floor.

You get to be methodical. Curious. Work through all the different species you need to research. Log all the specimens you need. Update all the taxonomies until you know everything you can about this world. You can order it all, and order your mind. You can imagine Ellery’s careful steps. You listen to the deep, slow breath of the ocean rolling overhead and around you. Ah. Lovely. [RPS Bestest Bests]

I liked it! More than I expected to like it. But at the same time, after six hours of it, I’ve had enough. The spider labyrinth was astonishing, but it’s not really a mess I’d get myself in twice, when the real joy was in escaping it. I could have spent more time finding secrets and backtracking for loot. And there’s certainly a huge replay potential to RE3 for completionists, and folks who are fond of difficulty challenges. But that ain’t me. I was precisely in the mood for a fairly linear, day-long series of setpieces, and that’s exactly what I got. If that’s what you want too, then the question is whether it’s worth £50 to you. Unless of course you also have pervasive fantasies about being smacked around by a wardrobe-sized bastard wrapped in bin liners, in which case this is a must-buy.

But mainly I just yearn for more Half-Life, in whatever form Valve wants to deliver it. It was about three hours after reaching the game’s thrilling, won’t-spoil-it, can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it conclusion that a thought occurred to me: for a brief moment I had a new Half-Life game to play, and now, again, I do not. I hope I don’t have to wait for brain-computer interfaces to exist before the series returns again, because despite a handful of complaints, I still think Valve make the best first-person shooters around. [RPS Bestest Bests]

These are minor transgressions. They don’t come close to souring a delightfully bloody pudding, a tour de force of grizzly decapitation. The highs in Doom Eternal come thick and fast and towering, in the midst of battles that demand total attention. New-new Doom nails that marriage of twitching and planning, the calculated deployment of rampant aggression. It makes you feel godly. I haven’t been able to try the multiplayer mode, but it promises asymmetric, player-orchestrated arenas that sound much more intriguing than the underwhelming marine-on-marine action of the last game. And if winds up as another disappointing side-show, so what? [RPS Bestest Bests]

As it is, it’s the best way to play Valve’s original design if you haven’t done so before, and it’s a brilliant way to retread those old ventilation shafts, if you have.

The problem, really, is that while both aspects of Murder By Numbers are pretty good, neither of them are given enough space to really breathe. There are too few picross puzzles for puzzlers, and there’s not enough visual novel for VN lovers. I wouldn’t not recommend Murder by numbers, but it would perhaps have benefited from being a bit longer than it is (an easy demand to make of an indie game, I’m sure you’ll agree). Still, though, it’s worth a poke around if you’re a fan of either genre involved. And I still can’t get the theme song out of my head.

It’s difficult but fair, complex but intuitive, and gruelling but conquerable. [RPS Bestest Bests]

I’ve enjoyed Yes, Your Grace. It’s a pretty game, and the story and subplots have some nice details and solid surprises. I like how you can hear distant armies chanting in the intro, torches in your bedchamber, and the hubbub of the streets from your throne room. The cheerful “Wey!” when happiness goes up is great. I’ve also much enjoyed the thought that the king is actually doing what I tell him, when I have him stand up suddenly in his throne room, declare that he likes his chandelier, then leave. But for all the time I spent making decisions, I felt let down by the ending – and the time and effort it would take to start again.

And there we have it. Arsebark: Genesis. A bottom-burp of a DLC so pungent that, for me at least, its base game will never smell the same again. Oh and yeah, there’s a giant turtle. But apparently it’s broken at the moment.

I can’t, in short, say anything bad about Savage Vessels that isn’t heavily outweighed by everything it’s doing that’s rewarding and exciting. Uncovering new levels stressed me out enough to wail at my desk, but in a way I enjoyed a lot more than the people around me probably did. Its slower pace and clearer presentation made for a less frustrating time than its zombie-stabbing inspiration, and its difficulty is more manageable and better at inviting the sense of “okay, well, this time…” that any good roguelike needs.

While I’ve been writing this, I’ve still been playing Besiege, in a way. Ideas for new creations have been bubbling away under the surface of my mind, just waiting for me to hop back in and build them – presumably so that they can crumble immediately. At least that’ll spare some sheep.

It goes back to the game seemingly utilising cyberpunk as an aesthetic, and an excuse for computer-magic, without really exploring the human concerns involved. There’s a billboard in the intro cinematic that literally just says ‘Neon’. Another advertises ‘Hack Cola’. I don’t want to make a joke about an AI writing a cyberpunk script for fear of falling into some sort of terrifying Rococo’s Basilisk-esque logic hole, but you get the picture.