It’s utterly beautiful, and it sounds so wonderful, but in the end it feels too hollow. As a piece of visual art it deserves extensive celebration. As a game, it needed to be slightly more: slightly more purposeful, slightly more involved, slightly more communicative.

Attack On Titan is reminiscent of the EDF series, but where that game aims for bombastic frivolity, its run-and-gun ant slaughter ends up feeling insubstantial thanks to a lack of feedback. Wings Of Freedom is similarly straightforward, but the satisfaction of moving and fighting is enough to sustain me for hours. I hope it becomes a series as long-running as EDF.

There’s joy to be found in this zany horrorshow, but it’ll take a seasoned janker to grit their teeth through its issues and fully appreciate it.

So few games are capable of putting humans together like this in a den of villainy and letting them become slowly corrupted or instantaneously redeemed. Hackmud does this and does it very well. It is like the early internet it so perfectly mimics: a world of confusion, paranoia and possibility.

If you crank the difficulty right up, missions are not something to just casually slaughter your way through. You’ll have to think smart, take longer and most of all sneak, something that is not realistically required on normal hardness.

It didn’t entertain me, it didn’t distract my son, and it’s very broken. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic by Giant Machines 2023, but not yet.

Better responding controls would do a lot of good, but for £6.40 you’ve got a lovely idea, often delivered very well.

I’m probably guilty of hoping that, now that the nu-Lara groundwork is established, Tomb Raider might now feel more free to re-embrace the tonal qualities that we loved the original games for. ‘Celebtration’ or no, I shouldn’t realistically expect add-on content for a game which very deliberately employs a dour vibe to somehow depart from that. Happy 20th birthday, Lara. I hope you find your way home one day.

This isn’t the expansion or the patch to convince those who weren’t already convinced by what Stellaris has to offer, but it brings plenty of alterations and additions for those already on board. More than that, it’s an indication that the studio have ideas as to how the universe can become more lively, without making it more cluttered at the same time, and that makes the future of Stellaris very exciting indeed.

The most annoying flaw I’ve encountered in a week of play is an immovable combat window pop-up that make attacks in corner areas like Voronezh fiddly. Very occasionally, movement limitations rub me up the wrong way (arguably there should be a simple way of swapping units in adjacent areas, and reinforcing a contested area without triggering a battle) but minor blemishes like these won’t stop me playing one of 2016’s most absorbing and affordable battle sims.

After a few campaigns, it’s left me a little cold.

If you enjoy low-key wind-down sims like Train Simulator and American Truck Simulator I’d be surprised if you didn’t also enjoy City Car Driving.

There’s a lot wrong with The Martian VR Experience [official site], and it’s almost scandalous that they’re charging for it at all, let alone asking sixteen quid, but the bit where you get to drive a rover across an Unreal 4-rendered Mars with I Will Survive blaring is very hard to argue with. The bit where you cack-handedly chuck some potatoes in a bin, less so.

Slick, beautiful, gently challenging and supremely well designed, it’s a stunning piece of work.

These aren’t the worst of the Pinball FX2 tables by any means, and prolonged time with DOOM might even show it to be one of the best, but as a bundle of three, they’re…frustrating is the word I’m looking for. Frustrating because the idea of taking a big RPG and making a pinball table that carries over some of its qualities in mechanics as well as art and sound is brilliant. I suspect they’d need to escape the confines of a single table and such a basic ruleset to succeed though – an entire pinball game based around Fallout, with separate tables for factions and areas? Now, that might work.

Don’t play for the graphics. Don’t play for the story. Play for what this game is about: putting your brain through a thresher and loving it.

It’s a frustrating expansion, though there’s every chance patches will address some of these complaints. McMillen has already said that portal percentages and other issues mentioned are on the list for patching. Pick through the shit and you’ll find the nuggets of gold, but if I hadn’t sucked every last drop out of Afterbirth, I’d rather be playing that than Afterbirth †. As it is, I’m just about won over by the promise of new things, many of which are solid additions, but there’s a lot of dreariness to tolerate.

I’ve had a mostly splendid (and occasionally aggravating) time with it, and for its minimal price really strongly recommend you give it a look.

Glittermitten Grove is nothing but misery. Build, wait for meters to refill, endure, repeat, self-loathe.

I’m very glad it exists. If it is simply interactive fiction, it’s a wonderfully inventive take on it.

This is all the work of one man, Thomas Lerdy, and he’s absolutely nailed it. If like me you’ve been craving a good implementation of the puzzle for PC, then you’ve found it in Pictopix. If you’re looking for a fun, brain-using puzzle presented splendidly, then now is the time to discover why Picross/Nonograms are quite so great.

It’s definitely got a place in my games library, and it’s a really good way to play a version of the board game my friends and I enjoy even though we’re rarely in the same city at the moment. It’s not hellishly expensive so I don’t feel bad suggesting someone pick it up for a couple of afternoons of play. I will say, though, that I didn’t form any attachment to the single player stuff, nor was playing with the AI appealing. I’m going to be sticking to my human (or post-human in the case of the ghosts) buddies from now on.

There’s greatness here, and damn, it’s so funny and cutesy-sarcastic. The puzzles are top notch, and the dungeons, when properly equipped, often a pleasure to plough through. But there’s just so much annoyance layered on top for absolutely no discernible reason, beyond presumably a fear that their sequel didn’t feel sufficiently different. The silly thing is, it was.

If you’re after a smart implementation of Threes-like input and tile-based battling, Tiles & Tales does that, and is free!

That’s where I’m at with the game personally – invested and interested but also frustrated and bored at times. More broadly, the thing I’m struggling with is why I would recommend this to someone when Sunless Sea exists, has a similar sensibility and is more polished. It feels more like something you’d suggest after a player of Sunless Sea has exhausted their interest in that particular game but is still excited about the style of story.

Again, so much of this criticism really wouldn’t feel relevant if the game’s own storefront (if it has its own website, I cannot find it) didn’t describe something totally other than what’s being sold. This is not an open world game, there’s absolutely no exploring, and you don’t gather twigs to build a nest.

I’m glad that Barksdale is making these twisted little stories. The Static Speaks My Name impressed me because I never quite knew which way it was going to twist, whereas Bucket Detective is soaking in its own horrible juices right from the start. It starts ugly and ends ugly, without enough humour or horror in between to shock or surprise. I’m not convinced its mingling of arcane silliness and actual suffering quite works either; it’s a bit like Martyrs with gross sex jokes.

Unexplored is almost certainly going to be one of my favourite games of the year.