The Final Station is a simple game, which is always just compelling enough for its duration. I’ve come to think of it as an efficient, low budget horror movie: it has a high concept it can’t afford to show directly and so it wrings as much as it can from the mystery and the satisfaction of piecing the plot together from snippets. It’s only a shame that its action suffers more from never having a particularly interesting concept of its own.

The issue is, it’s just so unremarkable. There’s no great depth, no interesting meta-narrative, no unique pull. It’s just a bit more Pillars – a section you’d not have minded in the main game, but never remembered a while after. Which makes it hard to get particularly excited about – especially at £11.

Neo Cab is certainly strongly anti-corporate. I already agree with that, so I don’t know if Neo Cab has the power to change minds. But it does excel at capturing how messy things are becoming. How it can be difficult to know what the right thing to do even is. How some people have more breathing room to be ‘good’ than others.

If you’ve silently stormed, kicked doors, frozen synapses, or formed jagged alliances in the past and enjoyed it, expect to break lines with a spring in your step and a smile on your face.

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.

The measure of an open world is ultimately not the story it tells but whether you’re happy to kill time within it, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance offers plenty of ways to do that, even if a lot of them will, in fact, get you slaughtered. It isn’t the departure I was hoping for, thanks to a shortage of character to set against the nuance of its historical sandbox, but the grubby realism is a pleasant shock next to the tales of elves and dragons that are its nearest competition.

When it’s doing what it does best, The Curious Expedition 2 really shines. If I could strip at least some of the roguelike out of it, along with some of the enthusiastic colonialism, I’d be enchanted. But I can’t. Instead, I’ll say there’s a fun game here, if you're prepared to knuckle down and learn from past mistakes. And, I suppose, if you pretend that all the treasure you plunder gets flown back off-camera, after each successful run.

Twelve Minutes' time loop puzzle is layered and weird, but its short time limit doesn't find the sweet spot between tense and frustrating.

Though I sometimes grew weary of the donkey-work of cables and repairs, I definitely relish the new state of sustained fear Surviving Mars brings to city sims. It means that even small accomplishments feel so much bigger.

Figment 2 is an overall solid game, but it’s just a shame that it feels like second violin to Figment 1. Even so, getting to peer inside the minds of the folk over at Bedtime again is always a treat. Playing Figment 2 solo is fun enough, but if you're after a fun co-op game with a young player 2 in mind, then it's a great shout.

As I mentioned at the start, Dordogne is not a taxing game, and it won't challenge you or make you think differently about the world around you. But it is a very sweet and tender coming of age tale that's the perfect little mini-break for such a busy time of year, and I enjoyed the three hours I spent gawping at its truly gorgeous watercolour scenery. It's well worth a pop on Game Pass if you have it, but even if you don't, you'll feel much better about yourself at the end of it than spending the same amount of money on the latest Marvel dross at the cinema - and it will no doubt stick longer in the memory, too.

Beyond: Two Souls feels like a Frankenstein creature; a television show with interactivity jammed in for the sake of it. It’s an interminable cutscene that demands your input at every moment, constantly disrupting the flow of the story to do so, but doesn’t reward your actions with any kind of meaning. And being held hostage to every second only means you have a whole lot of time to think about how Ellen Page deserved better.

Bulletstorm is lots of silly fun, and deserved to do better in 2011. It’s still lots of silly fun, but it’s hard to quite get as behind the desire for it to do well when it’s being released at full price with very little new put in.

Home Safety Hotline is definitely in the Daniel Mullins vein of game ideas, where a game starts as something and becomes something else, and while Home Safety Hotline is very thoughtful and has a brilliant framing, it never fully transformed. Which is perhaps ironic, given the ending.

I think the best I can offer is that if you like the kinds of games I like (and you can get a sense of that through my author tag) I think you will like and value this.

Aside from some glaringly wooden dialogue in the early chapters, As Dusk Falls is a thrilling story that had me hanging on every word. It immediately establishes an incredibly tense situation and I couldn't stop playing until I'd seen it through. While some might stop after one playthrough, the narrative flowchart for each chapter shows that there's much more to experience, and the ability to jump back in at any point of the story is a welcome alternative to doing an entirely new run. As it became apparent that the story was drawing to a close, I found myself desperately hoping for just one more scene so that I didn't have to leave the characters behind so soon. Whether As Dusk Falls gets a direct sequel remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: I can't wait to see what Interior/Night do next.

It probably isn't going to set the world on fire. A dull first hour certainly isn't going to help. As fun as it is, the story is pretty well trodden stuff. Yet combine an over-the-top world and tone with slick dogfighting and you've a potent package. Chorus will sing for you, even if it takes a moment to find the right notes.

It’s a good way to relax for a few hours.

Crucially though, just as I would one hundred percent go to a real-world Jurassic Park despite the near-certainty of getting hypermaimed in a portaloo, I will one hundred percent keep mooning over this game’s wonderful dinosaurs, right up to the point where my attention span is chewed to bits by micromanagement raptors.

Atomic Heart’s lack of satirical bite might just be one of the most consistent things about it. For every miserable onslaught of respawning bots, there’s an intoxicatingly tense run-and-gun battle. For every work of artistry in the sound design and environments, there’s a scene of utterly sub-par scripting. It’s glorious and tedious, polished and patchwork all the same time, and while there’s an anarchic part of my brain that wants more ambitious-yet-wonky games like it, stronger is my hope that Mundfish’s second game has a tighter grasp on its own strengths and weaknesses.

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]

Unfortunately, good vibes simply aren’t enough to save Bandle Tale from its overwhelming busywork. It too often gatekeeps the fun behind skill tiers and layers of crafting that never felt totally satisfying to me, but at least the constant repetition etched the beautiful pixels onto my eyeballs. That’s good. I think?

The good news is that even at its worst, Furi is something rather special. Even the trudging between fights has some fairly nonsensical but engaging chatter and the scenery is gorgeous. Better still, pressing ‘x’ (or whatever equivalent your gamepad has – it’s playable without but not very effectively), automates all of the walking so that you can sit back and watch, or go and make a brew.

The story felt like work to experience. The best way I can think to sum up this feeling is to say I enjoyed Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture far more on PS4 and that was because after the first chapter I lay on the sofa watching and listening and luxuriating while my companion dealt with the controls.

I can’t shake the frustration that the Savage Planet could have been something more, but that might be because I’ve been spoiled through reading reams of outlandish sci-fi. It’s populated by the pulpy bug-eyed monsters of the fifties, rather than the oddities dreamt up by the likes of Iain Banks or Greg Egan. Or Liu Cixin. Or China Miéville. Or Ted Chiang. Or Peter Watts.

There’s a special appeal, too, for Dota players. It’s remarkable how effectively Artifact captures the structure of a Dota game, where semi-isolated struggles build to climactic battles that see every hero converge on the same lane. Though not always: Artifact’s well of possible situations runs deep, offering variety where other CCGs dry up.

The Necromancer has turned out to be a fantastically gruesome expression of all Diablo III best qualities. With nice skills and good looks, it’s an enormous pleasure to tour all Sanctuary’s old haunts with a new special someone. [RPS Recommended]

A few gripes aside, then, the 'roleplaying musical' concept has proven itself a winner here, and if Summerfall ever want to give us an encore – once more, with even more feeling? – a sequel would be wholly welcome. Plus, isn't it nice to hear those Last Of Us actors harmonising for a change, instead of pretending to kill each other?