That I love the game even with a Virtual Boy palette is testament to how lovely it is. Very lovely. And very smart.

Fallen Order wants you to feel like a fighty, telepathic space priest, and for about 20 hours or so, it does that. Stick with it, and you might also find a cool, yellow lightsaber.

It’s not the most polished shooter but it does shine in all the right places, and it builds on the huge potential of Red Orchestra, which I loved. There are very few games that can match the feeling you get when you watch an artillery strike destroy a treeline and push up with your squad mates under the cover of smoke and deafening explosions.

Frog Detective 2 is a game you can hold in your head all at once, and cherish. I think it’s great.

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

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.

Despite those reservations, and the sometimes plodding nature of the matches, there’s a lot of brains to Faeria. It’s certainly more interesting to me than vanilla Hearthstone, even if many of its cards lift directly from the big book of CCG mechanics. It’s a game of risk, reward and really bad decisions. It’s many times more thoughtful than Duelyst, which is always my yardstick for card games. But at the same time it is much less climactic, less explosive, and less creative with its minions and their abilities.

The villains are better, the combat feels weightier, it looks better. To top it off, it's cheaper. I don't regret spending time with Majima again but, 'free' NG+ or no, if I'd paid full price for this thing I'd feel well and truly hornswoggled.

Borderlands 4 takes everything that worked about the previous games, removes the majority of the hindrances (cough Claptrap cough), and refines its RPG aspects, all of which make this easily the best Borderlands I’ve ever played. It has its share of issues: not just the tech stuff, but also what sometimes feels like endless travelling and the overabundance of terrible weapons. But what is Borderlands, even a much-improved one, without its billions of garbage guns?

Coldwood did put their hearts into Unravel and I can definitely feel that when I play. But despite his woollen charm, Yarny stayed well away from my own heart strings.

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.

Approach Everspace 2 like a single-player arcade space shooter with a 30 hour shelf life, rather than a Loot-Spewing Space Diablo you will play forever, and it’s enormously entertaining stuff. It’s like playing Freelancer for the first time again, or Colony Wars: Red Sun on a chipped PlayStation with the lid propped open.

The Pedestrian is surprising and astonishing and delighting, it’s true. But for about the first hour and the last. Still, in complete fairness, that does add up to about half of the total play time – and 50% surprising and delighting is pretty good going.

I’m not in for the long-haul, but I’m pleased to have a game where escape isn’t just a booby prize. And one with yet another terrifying spider.

Despite my misgivings, I think plenty of people with the right mindset and fast-twitch muscle fibers will enjoy Ghostrunner 2 and its demands. There's a lot of variety on offer here, whether that lies in options to slice foes or just veering between bikes and cyber realms and large areas. But for the rest of us who aren't as enamoured by relentless trial and error challenges, I'd find it a difficult one to recommend.

I thoroughly recommend it, for those looking for something erring much more toward the more casual end of the strategy world, the only region of the genre with which I’m comfortable. It’s bright, breezy, light and fun, and perhaps, after all, that’s enough.

It, itself, is a lovely story well told, with great humour, moments of genuine pathos, and plenty of intrigue. It hasn’t made an impact on me like its predecessor did, it doesn’t have the same weight, but it remains a superb time. You absolutely should play it if you’ve played To The Moon. If you haven’t, you should blooming well go and play that, and then this.

It’s pure agony at this point that they’re re-running the exact same bloody plots yet again for a third five-part series, as if they weren’t miserably worn out before even Telltale scooped them up off the floor and blew off the crust and fluff. That they’re not even trying to take the slightest new angle belies a barren and bereft production not worth dragging your own mutilated corpse through.

Children Of The Sun is not, we can agree, an especially subtle game (the girl has NO PEACE written on the back of her jacket), but I'm afraid I found these moments a bit silly, most especially the one where the girl has to walk through calf-high water in a dream void and kneel before successive cultists.

Firewatch is a rare and beautiful creation, that expands the possibilities for how a narrative game can be presented, without bombast or gimmick. It’s delicate, lovely, melancholy and wistful. And very, very funny. A masterful and entrancing experience.

I love it. There were times when I didn’t, mostly when I had to replay a section where I kept failing to line up what looked like a simple jump over and over, but by the end I was smitten. It’s a grotesque, horrid and eventually hopeful in its own morbid fashion, and despite many moments that feel like reimaginings or echoes from elsewhere, it has enough extraordinary images and sequences to stand alone. It’s precisely the kind of horror game I love – grotesque but not gross, and interested in thoughtful pacing and escalation rather than jumpscares and shocks. Also, linear though it is, there are some collectibles I’d like to hunt for and the whole game is short enough that I’ll happily play it again, or watch someone else playing.

It’s very funny, so busy with good ideas, and really damned strange.

At its best this is reminiscent of 80 Days, though it doesn't have quite the sense of wonder. But it is intricate and clever, very suited to the release on handheld and mobile that it's also getting (possibly more suited, if it comes to it), and an instant win if you know what you like and what you like is Inkle games. Overboard has a lovely frivolity, a sort of happy wink of a game to uplift a bit of lockdown gloom now we're back into summer - and that frivolity also belies the complexity underneath. Much like Veronica herself, who even now is, at my behest, stuffing her husband's clothes out of her porthole so she can steal a dolphin paperweight just because she damn well can.

It's disappointing that there are only three maps (no random maps at present), and the new themed buildings are usable only when map editing. I imagine its thriving mod scene will fill in those gaps. Biomes is a nice bonus. A bit underwhelming if you want to go all in, but completely skippable if you're fine with the default setting. Thus: it's fine, with potential to become more appealing over time. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Aside from those interface annoyances and the somewhat confusing compromises made to simplify roster management, I have been having a hell of a time with Darkest Dungeon 2. It might not scratch all of the same itches for me that its predecessor did, and some of the changes seem born of an overzealous devotion to streamlining everything, but it's also one of the most enjoyable roguelites I've thrown myself into on its own merits. The pacing is great, each decision along the road feels meaningful, most runs that aren't killed early on by horrible luck feel aptly rewarding, and the music, art, story, and narration create a singular and sorrowful set of vibes that are hard to top. Deck it out with some very interesting and often unconventional RPG classes and thematically-grounded party dynamics from the refined stress system, and I don't think I'll be letting the flame of this carriage burn low for a long time.

Chuchel is a creation of pure joy, an absolute masterclass in silliness, with pleasingly involved puzzles to boot. It’s a giant cuddle of a game, interesting to all ages, and with a manic edge that never slows down.

Burgerlords 3 is a game about clicking on things until they stop. It’s blessed with exquisite audiovisual design, it’s extremely annoying on several levels, and it’s compelling despite its boneheadedness. It takes a while to get up to speed compared with previous iterations, and it suffers from having missions stretched to the point of tedium for the sake of boasting a 30+ hour play time. But when it’s firing on all cylinders, it’s the most fun the series has been. At times, I even laughed out loud at the game’s script – which only made the rest of it, with all its dated meme references, poo lols and roaring bros, more frustrating.

Stranded: AD may not contain an entire galaxy’s worth of possibilities, but it knows how to keep you curious about your little patch of land, and it's a pleasure to watch your survivors feast on the fruits of their labour–whether they be beefberries, graincob, or buttermelons.