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?

I am going to give it a “Holy gherkins: It’s got couch co-op!” award, because couch co-op is a beautiful feature that deserves nothing but praise, in a thoroughly confident and largely successful game that seems solely designed for you and some mates to laugh with it, at it, and at yourselves until the frogs come home. It’s camp, sure, but as Susan Sontag put it, “Oh no! The bugs, they’re everywhere! The frogs! They’re too big!”

Eagle Island promises a lot, but whether it ever truly delivers I cannot say, because after two days with it I am plain done. I was never quite enjoying it as much as I wanted to, and it never quite came together even during the brief window when the plot took a turn and it looked like it was about to really open up. Even the promise of more ways to brutalise my dutiful owl isn’t enough to drag me through another afternoon of increasingly grating near misses.

It’s fun. It’s tremendous fun, and while I was hoping for more room to experiment or completely mess a child up (sorry Dave, it was nothing personal), I still wanted – indeed, still want – to have another go. It’s funny, it’s accessible despite all its numbers and moving parts, and there aren’t many games that get me so animated about a 9-year-old’s school test results. The design is solid too.

I can’t say Dunderlords excites me anymore. It’s too dynamic to feel dry, but I do find myself in the same situations, and aiming for the same compilations. Playing now is about tweaking well-trodden paths rather than forging new ones, but that’s OK. We’re in a good place, Dunderlords and I. We’re comfortable, though you’d never have caught me using that word when I started.

I really liked Kiki’s face in the top-right corner of the screen, pulling an adorably smug expression as she pew pews her little pistol. But this isn’t a novelty animal Instagram account. Adorable only gets her so far, I’m afraid.

At the heart of Sea Of Solitude is the idea that all emotions can have a positive or negative form — love can be twisted to be something unhealthy or saddening, for example, just as being alone can be quiet solitude or debilitating loneliness. I’ve no doubt that Sea Of Solitude might seem facile to some people, but that just means it isn’t for you. I think it’ll probably be for a lot of other people.

For me, I think it was easier to be forgiving of flaws when I was so excited by the newness of what it was trying to do. If you’re keen to try a Quantic Dream game, I’d say Heavy Rain is still the one most worthy of playing, if you can excuse some of the over-the-top elements of the story. And if nothing else, it will be a nice reminder of how far story-driven games have come.

It is a fine game, but it has already served its purpose: it entertained me for roughly as many minutes as it cost in pennies, and it left me refreshed and ready to play some longer games.

Katana Zero is built from almost nothing but influences from other mediums, and each of those influences is something I’ve seen used in games before. It doesn’t matter. For all its hurried stabbing and spilled blood, Katana Zero is a beautiful game, from the juicy text boxes onwards. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Without the weird Lovecraftian bits, this is a slightly janky, slightly grindy detective game that does some interesting things in a very atmospheric depiction of a profoundly depressed town. Taking them into account, I don’t know! I was confused and uncharmed by the whole thing, but I still haven’t untangled my brainnoodles. At least I’ve told you how they got tangled. Goodness, I was very interested in The Sinking City. I really wanted to love it. But I’m afraid rain may have stopped play this time.

The music is fantastic. The art is striking and its got that timeless comic book thing going on that means it’s probably still going to look as good in five years as it does now. The campaign is a letdown, but that’s partly because the survival built such a high perch to be let down from. If you’re into strategy, I still think it’s essential, and I can’t really think of any better use than the sticky approval circle than that. [RPS Bestest Bests]

My Friend Pedro does let you realise the fantasy of conducting a bullet symphony while hanging upside down from a zipline, but like most fantasies, it doesn’t survive past the initial rush of blood to the head.

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.

I just wish it was better structured to deliver that a conclusion without collapsing on itself at the last hurdle. Because there are hints of something wider at play here. It just does a terrible job of pulling it all together, which can leave Octopath Traveler feeling like a big old anticlimax. I both love it and hate it in equal measure, although I must say the PC version’s gorgeous 60fps is absolutely to die for after chugging through it on the Switch. It makes me all the more inclined to give it a sort of sneaky thumbs up, but in the end I think even JRPG die hards will find this a bit of a slog.

As it is, this is a perfectly reasonable portion of carefully planned fantasy stabbing, which was enough fun (once I started playing properly, at least) to make me reevaluate my whole position on puzzle elements in tactical games. Hell, it might even be time to postpone my next marathon slog with XCOM, and revisit Into the Breach.

Teddy and Lissie are still very inviting characters, who obviously have a backstory that is distinct and known to their writers, and are the best reason to play this game.

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.

SteamWorld Quest isn’t going to be the next Slay the Spire, and to be honest, die hard Spire-ites will probably find its one-and-done story a bit, well, restricting. But for card novices (which I count myself one of), it’s still a real charmer, no matter how sluggish it might get in those early hours. There’s so much heart in Image & Form’s games, and SteamWorld Quest is no exception.

Void Bastards is ultimately not more than the sum of the parts I outlined 1400 words ago, but it’s worth rummaging through all the same. Just like yer da said about the bins, when he finally found those Euros.

It’s clean and painstakingly handcrafted, with superbly chosen colour palettes, striking linework, and cracking use of lighting effects to bring life to grisly, glowing ghosts.

Outer Wilds has more character in its handful of planetoids than No Man’s Sky had in 70 squinjillion. [RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s too fixated on traditional jump scares to embrace the twisted, palpitating gut of its story about a flawed protagonist and his struggles with inner demons.

At its heart, Pathologic 2 is a frustrating game. Ten times more interesting than your average immersive sim (probably the genre it belongs), yet hundreds of times less inviting. It has perhaps successfully replicated its predecessor in being an artful mess. But whether you’re up for the art depends on how much of the mess you can stomach. For me, the answer is: no more.

Observation is clever, but it’s also astoundingly dumb. You’re placed in a unique perspective, where onscreen inhumanity accentuates your oh-so-human instincts. Then it subverts that! But then it makes you control a sphere that can’t move directly up or down, furthering the nightmare of navigating already labyrinthine spaces. It asks you to do something, without telling you how...It’s worth persevering with. When you get stuck though, don’t hesitate to use a walkthrough.

Thea 2 is interesting in a ‘may you live in interesting times’ sense. An imperfect thing that I can’t help but feel affectionate towards.

Surviving Mars, it turned out, was little more than a plucky little rover, diligently raking the regolith to make a place for the main rocket to touch down. Now, however, the eagle has landed, and it’s a bloody lovely bird.

Three Kingdoms is an absolutely massive game, but it has a very clear thematic focus on the Three Kingdoms period – specifically the Romance of the Three Kingdoms – and a very clear mechanical focus on individual heroes. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The parts I like far outweigh the parts I don’t. I’ve got my weirdo NPCs, my Ark hunting, my Whoopinkoffs and Dimbledicks. I’ve found every Ark, now, but I still plan on gambolling between side activities. I still want to explore, even though I wish I was exploring a world that had been less generically destroyed. Most of all, I want to do more super-powered fighting. I might not even bother swapping from that rifle.

It’s a good sign that such a short game has me thirsting to know more about an obscure occultist who lived 400 years ago. In one scene, Doctor Forman admits to a patient that he merely has “the gift of logical surmise”. With that in mind (among other crimes) it would be easy to see him as the charlatan he is said to be by his enemies. But there are also moments that reveal a more complicated and conflicted man. In a short game full of haughty songs and jokes about willies, that’s an impressive achievement.

A Plague Tale has a story that’s way more detailed than the escape-to-safety romp I was expecting, involving bloodlines and ancient power, and one extremely evil leader of the Inquisition doing an extremely evil voice.

But if you don’t mind button bashing through some brawls, just to see more of these good fellas solving bad problems with their strong fists and stern words, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is ready, once again, to get ridiculous.

But this just wasn’t for me. Ultimately, there’s only so excited I can get by the prospect of being (let’s all say it in Chod’s awed whisper) an entrepreneur. Maybe I’m just becoming more prone to escapism as I age, but there’s just not much of a thrill for me in getting really, really efficient at flogging grape juice and tables to people.

I’m in love with Mordhau. [RPS Bestest Bests]

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.

The studio has promised adjustments to this mode (some may have already been patched in by the time you read this). But I’ve yet to feel the benefit. That sense of dissatisfaction leaves a reviewer in that old laundry drum of morality. I should probably be out on the cyber-streets demanding improvements. What do we want? More costume unlocks! When do we want them? After you nerf the Towers! But that means yet more work for the developers, and then I’d have to face the other problem of Mortal Kombat 11: the recent reports that its studio is a harsh place to work, a place of unhealthy working practices and months of unhealthy overtime. Crunch, in other words. But they’d probably spell it “Krunch”.

If you prefer your pleasures somewhere on the periphery of your attention, you’ll find there are plenty to pluck off the branch here.

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.

Conquest, it turned out, was the easiest bit of the game. Maintaining civilisation afterwards was where the real skill came in. [RPS Bestest Bests]

I really enjoyed it, I really appreciated having a methodical, forthright adventure game to play, with excellent art and animations, good music, great acting, and a story worth hearing. I just wish I’d been more of a detective as I did it.

It’s an undisputed heavyweight, and an experience I’d recommend to anyone.

I don’t know if I can recommend this to someone who isn’t a word nerd. But at the same time, what Inkle have achieved in Heaven’s Vault is tremendous. I don’t know what to compare it to, because there isn’t anything. I can’t remember what the Ancient for love is, but I know it contains the word for heart, which contains the word for life.

It’s going to take a heck of a lot for anything to beat this game to be my favourite of 2019. What a splendid treat.

Photographs is a very novel experience (well, a very short story experience, fnarr), lovingly crafted, if not fully composed. I don’t love it as a puzzle game, but it’s a vignette of vignettes, and I like it for that.

It’s Winter is very specifically about nothingness – by which I mean, though its blood is rich with walking simulator platelets, it is not about dreamy escapism, but rather about feeling purposeless, even trapped, by one’s situation. We all know the feeling: that certain kind of boredom, where it’s not that there’s nothing to do, but rather that everything feels futile.

It is, very much, A Tropico Game, but it knows how to go big, how to feel like it’s playing with the citybuilder big boys, instead of remaining in its safe soft play corner. There’s plenty of stuff I’d change, especially tonally and in terms of international relationships, but I played it happily until I couldn’t see straight. I’m left thinking it should have called itself Ultimate Tropico rather than the implied exhaustion of sticking at 6 at the end. [RPS Bestest Bests]

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.

Shadows Die Twice is a beautiful, masochistic misadventure. Some of its boss fights are so stupendous, I dare not speak about them. It is a test of mettle and nerve that proves From Software are still winning the arms race against us cheesey rats. A brutal master who snaps the shield and broadsword out of your hands, and looks you up-and-down for what you are capable of. No more blocking, chump. You’re going to learn ballet. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Suffice to say, I’m enjoying it more than its predecessor. It is chunky, it is moreish, and every time I come back to it in the evening it is like taking a big bite out of one of those mega Snickers you can only find in the cinema. All this praise might seem out of place moments after critiquing the game’s toothless practice of political commentary by obfuscation. But honestly, don’t worry about that. We humans are idiot creatures of contradiction, and we can thoroughly enjoy a rock solid shooter even as we recognise it as being vapid hogwash.

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.

Baba Is You is immediately completely superb, a puzzle game where you literally rewrite the rules as you play.

I’ve had such a time with this. I’ve been bemused, entranced, confused and delighted. I’ve laughed a lot, been slightly creeped out, and constantly astonished at the level of detail in every element of this. There is just SO much to do, to explore, so many secrets I know I’ve missed, and bits I want to return to. This is completely splendid. [RPS Bestest Bests]

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.

Accompanied by pleasant ambient music, and some deeper depths of complexity I wasn’t expecting, I’ve had a very pleasant time mucking about with Vignettes. Which is its absolute purpose. It’s a toy, but a detailed one, and one that belies interesting complexity.

It doesn’t hurt that it’s also weird, full of surprises, stupendously daft and often laugh out-loud funny – though not always for the intended reasons.

Dawn Of Man’s great triumph is that, a dozen hours after I’d picked my first berry, forging my first iron sword felt like an immortal accomplishment. [RPS Bests Bests]

More than just dread, Devotion’s use of paraphernalia also helps to convey the emotional weight of Fengyu’s family tragedy.

As someone who loves a bit of space-trucking, it is indescribably refreshing to have some handcrafted characters sprinkled into the mix.

Astroneer’s been in early access for over two years, and there is a sense that this release version contracted a mild case of That’ll-do-itis, rather than going to the new places it might have done. Sure, a ballpit offers more long-term play value if there’s hatch on its bottom that opens up into a world of dinosaurs, spacefighters and alien civil wars. Sometimes, though, all you wanna do is jump into a ballpit.

If nothing else, this is a game where you, a gorilla, can punch a man so hard that he crumbles into his constituent parts, and then pick up his arse and hoof it at one of his mates. I don’t know what else to tell you.

There’s definitely a nice idea in playing as a tech support trapped behind deploying stock phrases, as some larger story unfolds about you, but Tech Support: Error Unknown just doesn’t deliver it.

It needs changes to how it actually works, which is a lot to ask. But the biggest fight I’ve had with Anthem so far is against Anthem.

As it is, it’s a calm, gentle game, with intermittent moments of brilliance. Apart from that bloody descending number thing.

My other thought is that it really needs a system for fainting out a number when it has the correct number of bombs marked – that would make the puzzles a lot cleaner to solve.

This is the best battle royale game we’re going to see for a long, long time. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The setting is too tame, and the fighting much too familiar to soar – but if another dollop of Far Cry sounds appetising, tuck right in.

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.

Gathering Storm is a chunky collection of small remixes that amount to a big difference. All the same, I’m left feeling that the next Civ game, whatever it is, really needs a root and branch rethink rather than attempts to retroactively justify its existence through expensive expansion packs.

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.

For less than a couple of quid, this is well worth it. Randomly generated puzzles, so you won’t run out, plenty of options, and that bonkers triangle mode for a real head-scratcher.

Regardless of its limitations, Exodus still deserves its place among its underground comrades. In many ways it’s better, and I’m very glad they didn’t just repeat the same subterranean journey again. And yet, for the studio, this installment might also turn out to be a fabulous curse. Because if there are any further shooters set in the Metroverse, they’ll won’t be able to return to a life of tunnel vision. Not when we’ve seen Metro is capable of so much more.

It is simply a good time. And there is an unmistakable, open-hearted joy to fixing problems for people as an intimidating agony uncle. Even if it usually involves hitting them with a bike first.

It’s definitely a shame that painting isn’t more of a thing. But this really comes together. A slow, gentle, personal RPG, with neat little stories, characters I remember, and a real sense of having spent time in a special place. Oh, and last of all, in Eastshade if you want to get around a bit faster, you buy a bicycle. Yeah, it’s exactly that sort of place.

Nowhere near as odd or quirky as its trailers suggested it could be, and offering no surprises, it’s fun is over in the first few minutes. Bums.

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

The only reason I’m not giving it a Bestest Best badge is because it doesn’t do anything particularly new. It just does everything very well.

If you have never before visited a Sunless place, take to the Skies immediately. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Wargroove, on the other hand, is faithful to not just the spirit but the body of its inspiration, keeping both the pleasures and some pains of the old toy war game, pointedly refusing to change most of the basics, and instead simply adding extra layers: online multiplayer, map editing, a “puzzle” mode. It’s not so much a spiritual successor as it is a full-bodied recreation of the franchise, with skeleton horsemen instead of tanks. The impeccable Into The Breach already established itself as the true successor to Advance Wars, but I’m perfectly happy to have the old GameBoy cartridge more or less repackaged, even if some of the old dust is trapped in there with it.

Newcomers to the genre may find it tedious despite these improvements, but if you’re all about that renovation grind, My Time At Portia is one of the most modern takes on the genre I’ve seen in a long time.

A drug I don’t want to quit. A miracle of design? Yeah, go on. [RPS Bestest Bests]

At The Gates has an impressively complicated set of interlocking systems, but the amount of time and patience it takes to actually get anywhere is ridiculous.

I love the presentation, I love the conceit, but ultimately this is just a cleverly disguised badly designed point-and-click adventure. Hell, this is a game where you get moon rock by looking at the moon through binoculars. Come on.

That’s where Resident Evil succeeds. Not in the drivel spouted from its character’s mouths, but in the bullets spewed from their guns. Or better yet – the clicking of empty chambers, or the spine-chilling scratches of scrabbling overhead. I may hate lickers, but I’m also a little bit in love.

It’s extremely funny...What a very lovely thing. [RPS Bestest Bests]

YIIK might have been able to get away with some of its issues if other areas were able to pick up the slack. I’ve sat through plenty of tiresome combat to find out what happens in a story, and a convoluted plot can be fine if it’s allowed to breathe through interesting characters. But Alex himself is this game’s millennium bug, preventing the player from even rooting for their own actions, because they are all filtered through this deeply unlikable proxy.

I’d love to have played a game that tried to explore that rocky landscape, with some nuance, some introspection, and most of all, with some humility. This is not that game.

Bury Me, My Love isn’t, first and foremost, a treaty about refugee-ism: it’s a compelling and effective game about deciding what the hell to do next.

Had I not winced and winced at the writing, I’d have enjoyed the aimless process of clicking through it all.

Largely, though, Catherine Classic is a pretty fantastic rerelease of a cult hit that people have nattered on about endlessly since its debut. Being able to finally play it on PC is wonderful, and having other game modes — Babel, where you unlock harder stages by getting gold trophies on normal or hard mode in the campaign, and Colosseum, a competitive multiplayer mode — gives it a lot of replay value.

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.

It has its moments. Stumbling on other survivors is a thrill, but in reality those encounters rarely lead anywhere interesting. DayZ is an anecdote-generator, but the odds are you’ll need to feed it more hours of your life than they’re worth.

All this for £13! Honestly, this is purist FPS as good as it gets, just a constantly stunning game. Don’t miss this. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Ultimately, I’ve only got so much patience for games where the victor is nearly always whoever doesn’t get spotted first. There’s a reason I haven’t played Plunkbat in months. If you’re into your realism though (or just good noises) Insurgency: Sandstorm is worth a shout.

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.

It’s hard to overstate how impossibly beautiful this game is! How good the animation! I couldn’t look away from it even when it was making me roll my eyes! Like whatever the opposite of a car crash is! Sorry for shouting! I’m sort of cross with it! But also want to play it again! Because it might be the most stunning game I have ever seen! Argh!

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a developer try to recapture the magic of Jagged Alliance and I hope it’s not the last, but I found Rage pretty hard work to enjoy. Much like the mercs themselves, for every positive trait it may offer, there tends to be some frustrating problem to deal with too.

A game of everything, a game of nothing. Eternal, unknowable, remarkable, infuriating, Kenshi defies easy judgement. Kenshi is. I implore you to play it. [RPS Bestest Bests]

There’s beauty to be found here, among the stars. But it’s going to take a more dedicated role-player than myself – or at least someone far more interested in systems for their own sake – to buy into this flimsy simulation for very long.