This remains the magical, bizarre, joyful and utterly peculiar game that earned its place in gaming history. It also remains very short (about four hours at a slow pace?), but also extremely replayable, with so many targets to meet. And it’s very funny, in a super-dark way.

The greedy part of me would appreciate a few more modes or units – the few faces do make it feel slightly small after a while – and, sure, I’d love to see what a four-player contest looks like. But by staying small it stays elegant, and that’s what makes Antihero such a pleasure.

Thing is, I can't pass judgment on Lost Ark until I've reached the endgame myself. Otherwise, it's a jarring party of blinged out pauldrons and alien map markers. The trouble with that is whether I've got it in me to cross the finish line. The grind and the game's aged MMORPG template refuse to budge, and I'm not sure it's something even its excellent combat can varnish over. Some may adore the EXP churn and relish the comfort of an MMO with familiar trappings, but if you're after an MMO that does something truly different, I remain uncertain. The endgame certainly seems filled with menial and moreish pastimes, but whether you've got the patience to get there is another matter entirely. I'm not sure I've got it in me, honestly. [Review in Progress]

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.

Black Myth: Wukong is a triumph. A surprising triumph in the sense that I can't quite believe it's as good as its drip feed of screens and trailers looked over the last few years. It's a generous Soulsy adventure hybrid that works within its limitations and delivers a beautiful challenge to be unpicked with a magical toolbox. Arguably, I'd say Black Myth's world sucked me in more than Elden Ring and Lies Of P, probably more so than anything I've played in ages! This is Game Science bursting onto the scene and saying: "You've got competition". And hey, I'm listening. You should be, too.

Northgard is simple in all the right ways, challenging not because of complexity but complacency – it’s harsh, but rarely unfair.

Heaving with all that content, and impressing on the pitch where it counts, this is the best FIFA has been in years. I won’t deny I’m more than a little in love with it. The highest praise I can give is that I wasn’t expecting to say that this year. Well played.

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]

Perhaps my biggest gripe with Warzone and DMZ are the many launch woes, which feel like the game's servers are teetering on an active tectonic plate. Some matches are stuttery, elastic messes. Small grievances only serve to back up my theory that the game's backend also slides over a molten layer of rock, like when I'm queuing up for a DMZ match but seeing the "Battle Royale Quads" matchmaking whirr away, or finishing a match of Warzone and not even seeing how much EXP I earned and what levelled up. I've had important AI enemies fall through the floor in DMZ and Strongholds not even work as intended. One time I queued up for Warzone duos but it placed us in a borked quads, so I went to revive my teammate and it wouldn't let me. Sigh.

Cursed To Golf has plenty of visual charm, and elements taken from its Flash game origins feel like a fun throwback. Unfortunately, though, it’s a bit of a swing and a miss for its roguelike elements.

So yes, Like A Dragon Ishin isn't going to convert those who dislike Yakuza. It still carries some of the series' historic frustrations and feels like a bit of a step backward when you compare it to Yakuza: Like A Dragon's turn-based shake-ups and modernisations. Although, a step backward isn't a bad thing at all! Ishin feels most like Yakuza 0 (my fave) that's sure to please longtime fans, and its standalone nature means that it is, without a doubt, one of the strongest starting points for newcomers. Now excuse me, I best get back to harvest my radishes.

Art nice. Game not nice. Maybe you’ll make a beautiful origami swan out of it, but all I ended up with was a pile of origami boulders.

My Time At Sandrock is Stardew Valley with a gun. It’s a compelling and lusciously detailed life simulator with an endlessly rewarding mine-and-build loop, and a set of diverse career paths so richly designed that it’s difficult to pursue them all. When I am 120 years old, suckling grey nutrient paste from a tube in my hovering retirement home, and they’ve finally invented the virtual reality world from that one episode of Black Mirror, I want you to put me into this eight out of ten game from 2022. Just duct tape a Steam Deck to my head if you have to, and watch as a nostalgic grin spreads across my withered, paste-dappled face. Oh yes, that’s the life for me. Take me there now. [Early Access Review]

In short, I'm still very much in love with Dorfromantik, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Its forever status is assured. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Even with these grumps about plot and characters, even with the sad lack of co-op or Forge mode at launch, this Halo ring is still a luscious national park devoted to rampage, Tarzan swings, hammer blows and big drums of plasma (my GOD these are fun to chuck). An open world Halo is something I didn't even realise I wanted. I'm glad I got it. It has taken the series a while to look outside its corridor shooting monoculture for inspiration. But now that developers 343 Industries have broadened that corridor to the width of plains and stretched it to the height of mountains, it'll be hard to go back. You can't drive a jeep full of snipers down a corridor.

From the interface to economics, it sports some of the best systems I’ve seen in a 4X game, and like Endless Legend, it’s simultaneously confident and experimental, finding new ways to spice up a genre that can too often be bland. [RPS Recommended]

Detroit is a perfect game to livestream, or play with three mates and half a bottle of tequila – but if you tell me you genuinely think the story is well done, I will immediately be sus that you, yourself, are an android poorly trying to replicate human behaviour.

For me, The Sims was always supposed to be a kind of corny ideal life, rather than a simulation of reality, and a Cottagecore expansion is such a good theme to do that with. In real life, getting up every day to collect eggs and clean out your hen house is a pain in the ass, and you can't make friends with birds without serious effort. But this lifestyle is realised in sunny technicolour in Cottage Living. Apart from anything else, it's reignited my desire to flood the feed with posts about The Sims. So you're welcome and/or sorry in advance.

If it didn’t look so similar to the completely splendid (if also marred by dull combat) Pillars Of Eternity, if those expectations weren’t weighing on it, perhaps there’d be even more leniency. But as it is, this is a decent enough RPG that feels like its wearing clothes that don’t quite fit.

It’s a much better game than last year’s edition though, the time in between having been spent on significant and healthy rewrites of AI processes at both the tactical and strategic levels. That it is the most visually appealing game in the series, in terms of both clarity off the pitch and improvements on the pitch, is a bonus.

In all, I’m pleased by my scrappy fights, and my tutelage of Hooves the horse man continues. One sad thing to note is that £50 is a high price, a fandom price, and that’s a pity.

Ultimately, Season is a mercurial game that will likely hit different for everyone who plays it. [RPS Bestest Bests]

But the community itself is the important bit. The characters aren’t voiced, but they feel like they are. The text bubbles are sometimes animated, sometimes shaking with trepidation, sometimes small like a whisper, sometimes big with anger. And each character speaks accompanied by a sound. Miu, who becomes a close friend, is a lithe, cat-like creature with pointed teeth, and she sounds like the delicate plucking of violin strings. Jell-A, a sentient fungoid growth, is the town’s subterranean scientist, and his voice is squishy, but with a side of liquid dripping and bubbling in a glass flask. It’s excellent work.

There’s a clever stealth game here, without question. I’d just like it so much more if it ramped up faster and cooled it with all the chest-thumping.

I love a game that can get under my skin like this, but ultimately it's the steady hand that developers Black Salt Games apply to the rest of this ship that makes Dredge such a tantalising prospect. It casts a wide net, but in the process catches the best and most accessible bits of survival horror, management and exploration games and serves them all up on a glowing, eldritch platter that's simply too good, and too moreish, to ignore. It's a special game, old Dredge, so whatever horrible nasties you might find out there, don't let this be the one that got away. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The Evil Within 2 feels like something of a departure from the first game, but also an extremely fitting follow-up. Its structure, enemy design, immaculate audio production and constant tension make it one of my favourite survival horror experiences to date, and while it doesn’t push the envelope in terms of providing anything new, it focuses on what it is and attempts to provide a definitive, well-produced classic survival horror experience. [RPS Recommended]

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.

Over the last third, Reanimal sheds its Silent Hillian pallor and veers a bit randomly into World War parody, with areas made up of trenches, stripped trees, and Futurist gutted cityscapes. In some ways these closing chapters are the heart of the game. Reanimal's zoological body horror appears to take heavy inspiration from the agony of animals during the World Wars – beasts of burden splintered and thrashing in the mud, lashed to artillery cannons or caught on the wire, entangled and transformed into vengeful, howling machines.