First things first, Reigns is made for mobile and, frankly, it shows. You’ve almost certainly got a smartphone or a tablet, so put the PC version out of your mind and go buy it from the App Store or Google Play instead. If you absolutely must play it on PC then, sure, it works, because of what it’s trying to do at heart rather than because it’s been tailor-made for our computers.

This is a huge, deeply developed, beautifully crafted RPG, novel in all the right ways, and it’s not even finished.

Distant Worlds 2 has a lot of potential, both for official improvements and expansions and for mods, which is no small thing, but it's tangential to how it stands up on its own merits. And on that basis... it needs another draft, but I'm still enjoying it. It has a few months of patching and tweaking and rebalancing in store, even if you discount those performance issues. If you were hoping for a revolution, it isn't here. But it is a considerably improved update of Distant Worlds, and frankly has no direct competition. I want it to succeed, and while I can neither condemn nor wholeheartedly recommend it, I definitely think it's worth meeting in the middle.

Loddlenaut is a cute, cosy and charming adventure in all the ways you'd expect it to be. The process of powerwashing this idyllic ocean floor is chill and zen-like, and if you're the type to coo over adorable nuggets of animal, then its little loddles will be right up your street. But it will never be anything more than that. It will not challenge you in the slightest, and it probably won't make you feel anything particularly profound, either - and for some people that will be absolutely fine. For me, GUP-14 felt like a marginally happier place once I'd worked my magic there, but I wish it had a bit more grit in its own convictions.

As a returning Frictional fan it shook up a slightly ponderous series to make something exciting and new. This is Frictional back on imaginative, exciting form, and I'd be happy seeing them do other slightly more contained projects like this. I'd also, of course, love to see something new - but it feels like Amnesia is a pocket dimension they can visit again. If it's an idea as well-rounded as The Bunker, I'm happy to go with them.

With a bit more depth to the worldbuilding, and a bit more time spent on the dialogue and storyline, this game could have been an absolute gem on the narrative side.

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.

Techland’s taken something quite distinct and sanded down the edges. Some will find it agreeably smooth, I’m sure, but you can only sand so much off of chaos before it becomes ordinary. Come the real zombie apocalypse we should all be so lucky to face a world this trudgingly well behaved.

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]

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.

In the end, if what you wanted was a traditional dating sim populated with (in Akabaka's own inspired words) Cthulhu-presenting anime girls, Sucker For Love may not be exactly what you were hoping for. But if you want a one-and-done horror visual novel that knows its lore, revels in gore, and just might surprise you with a genuine sweet moment or two along the way, then there are many worse ways to spend an afternoon and a few quid.

Indeed, and especially in the later stages of a game, Humankind can feel more like a puzzle game than a 4X, with the business of hexes and multipliers abstracting it from its central theme of humanity. Still, if the worst things I can find to say about Humankind are that it sometimes makes me think too much, and that I need to play it more, it’s hardly a bloody disaster, is it? Go make yourself some harbours, and tell the Olmecs I said hello. If they ever make it out of their Ancient Era time loop and invent writing, that is.

With Siege of Dragonspear, Beamdog has come on a long way. It’s not perfect, either at matching the style or being a great new RPG in its own right, and future games will need some heavy QA loving. But, as the company’s first big attempt to both follow in BioWare’s wake (the presence of former BioWare people notwithstanding), it’s a good start and at least a good first step to one day giving us that Baldur’s Gate 3 we’ve been waiting so long for – another nostalgia trip, but with a slightly more practiced eye on the future.

With those bugs squashed, The Pale Beyond would be a stonking survival game. I love the attention to detail in the story and characters, which makes you want to hang in there not for the sake of beating the campaign, but because you genuinely want to spend more time with the crew - and find out the bigger mystery behind the missing ship. Next time I'm going to try and save every single person, and not just barely make it through with half my crew dead and the other half frostbitten and starving. I think it's going to take me a while, though.

So, yeah. Not for me. Which is a shame, because I'm certain that if I kept playing, I'd keep finding more things that made me laugh or smile or spark more curiosity about the town's mysteries, but I'm not willing to push through any more of this cold and oddly soulless churn to see them right now. As a functional open map, it's a treat-sprinkled diorama. Static and mundane. As a management sim, the busywork is simultaneously so insistent and so lacking in complexity or choice that I ended up on a sort of trudging, mildly annoyed autopilot, like an underpaid shopping centre security guard on a deflated Segway. Deflating to say the least.

The result is something that feels like the game I wish The Walking Dead could have been – a free-form, free-roaming tale of brutal survival, but with a story to experience too. The two conflict as you play, knowing that the game has deliberately supplied you with what you need to follow its threads, but then also let you wander off into the wilderness at your own discretion. And it handles this well, letting you hunt and forage to scrape by when stepping off the path. With a better, more involving path, this could have been really something. As it is, it’s the glorious The Long Dark with a reason for surviving, and that definitely proves enough.

There is no deep understanding here, you won’t have your mind changed, and it certainly doesn’t have any of the emotional impact of Papers Please. But within its own barmy universe, it works! It’s a good chunk of fun, and easily survives at least a second play to see how much you can mess with people’s lives.

These ruts in the road prevent Saber Interactive from delivering a soil-cold classic, but Expeditions: Mudrunner nonetheless succeeds in its primary objective, to build a world where the car and the ground are at irrepressible odds, and it's your job to make them work together to crack the case. That case might prove to be mundane fly tipping rather than anything juicier, but watching our dynamic duo constantly wrestle with one another for supremacy never ceases to be entertaining.

A very middling execution of an extremely lovely idea.

Genesis is so unashamedly mid-tier (and I don’t mean this pejoratively, it’s great to see this sort of budget project surfacing again), and so overflowing with proud mid-decade nostalgia, that it’s easy to overlook its annoyances.

The constant, unexpected transitions between visual schemes, the wild leaps in subject matter, and the sudden appearance of majestic stags, would all have slam-dunked me into the bin of my own subconscious like I’d stuck every Boards Of Canada album on simultaneously. Never let it be said I don’t appreciate the highbrow.

This works out as a great balance between the icon-ticking compulsion of a top tier Ubisoft game, with the puzzling chops from a team that have suddenly remembered they were the best in the business. It’s huge and detailed and stupid and probably most of all, fun. Problematic fun, without question.

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.

Of course, if you consider the talking cat and the computer girl close personal friends then any excuse to spend more time with them is a good excuse, and all of these shortfalls won’t matter in the slightest. We’re in a world of rapidly depleting and fleeting pleasures, so in the grand scheme of things, an aggressively mid turn-based strategy game is a fairly low price to pay.

For me, it feels like Neurodiver only wants to flirt with my disbelief, rather than commit to suspending it.

However you might step away from the rig, I stepped away rattled, impressed, and hungry for more horror as solid as this. It may not revolutionise the genre in any mechanical sense (even that "look behind you" button is something from the Outlast series) but it does set a bar for groundedness and naturalistic voice acting. More Scottish horror? Aye, make it first-person anaw.

The invisible orchestra is another kind of herd that mirrors the one you drive before you – sometimes devolving to individual performers when your beasts are scattered, only to gather itself furiously when the Calicorns are in full flight. It’s a lovely audible modelling of a disorderly group of beings in motion. It’s also an audible expression of your power over those beings and the limits of their simulated autonomy.

In a roundabout way, this is a mission success for hands-off Mikami - Ghostwire certainly doesn’t feel like something he’s made. It’s too baggy, too loose, lacking the powerhouse momentum I associate with his previous work. What’s here just never clicks fully into place: a beautiful setting, tactile combat, tantalising hints of the beyond, but not enough to populate a city this big, leaving stodge to fill the vacuum. Mikami’s tinkling ivories aside, Ghostwire is a tad too discordant.