Pixel Privateers knows exactly what it’s doing, and though it’s about as deep as a microwave lasagne, it’s almost impossible not to lose yourself to it for a few evenings.

Compact, delightful, slightly wonky in terms of difficulty curves for me and I think overall I preferred A Good Snowman simply because I find the track placement sometimes has a bit too much wiggle room for it to feel entirely neat, whereas rolling the snowballs for A Good Snowman stayed as a very tight experience. But! Cosmic Express is just as delightful to look at, and has a really solid core of puzzling to get your brain around!

Whatever happens to Afghanistan 11 in the future, it’s sure to be one of my most played w******* (history-steeped military strategy games with influential terrain and plausible, reality-derived unit relationships) this year. I love how it forces me to spin plates. I like the way it uses IEDs and RPGs to transform every vehicle move into an adventure. In a genre dominated by demolition and death, the emphasis it places on construction, and improving the lives of the local populace, is cheeringly discordant. The theme isn’t one I’m naturally drawn to, but the design is so strong, the history so ingeniously utilized, an ‘RPS Recommended’ rosette is inevitable.

Academy is entirely focused on tricking you into learning some basic electronics. And that’s enough. I heartily encourage you to grab this if you’ve got a kid trying to learn it at school. Heck, if you’re a physics teacher you really should buy a bunch of copies, as this’ll be a surefire way to gain the attention of some of your students. Or if you just fancy reminding yourself about logic gates, pulse generators and capacitors, this is a neat little thing. I’d love to pretend I viewed it all as a smug expert pondering its usefulness for younger players, but that’s just flat-out not true – it taught me a whole bunch, as hard as I tried not to learn anything.

Under Leaves either needed a lot more to do in a level, or a lot more levels, to feel substantial.

It comes so close to being something I love and then it has a hollow core. The best way I can think to explain it is how at some point as you grow up your toys stop being these magical things with their own lives and start being toys. From watching the trailers and following the development I was hoping for a window into a little lively toy universe but I’ve opened up the packaging and I can’t seem to find the spark.

Brute is N with a ship in place of a ninja. That change aside, there’s the same challenge of grappling with the particulars of the game’s physics, the same love of alternating bright colours, and a similar menagerie of deadly pursuing enemies ready to destroy you with a single touch. Luckily, there’s also the same sense of satisfaction to be found in trying, failing and eventually overcoming each of its tricky levels.

It’s grisly and cruel in ways that are both obvious and difficult to identify. There’s a bleakness that worms its way through every aspect, insidious and very effective. And then something else will go wrong and it’s so ghastly to start a chapter over because everything is so damned slow.

Caveblazers is superb and I’m looking forward to discovering all of its secrets, and to the local multiplayer add-on that’s apparently coming soon. I can see myself playing for years to come.

After a dozen hours, it’s all just variants of the same dungeons over and over again. By the time I grew a bit bored of the dungeons, however, I was already invested. So that I didn’t need to keep checking the corp information menu, I even scribbled down my grudges or the names of groups I needed to butter up in my Little Book of Debts. Even more than Syndicate or Shadowrun Returns, StarCrawlers manages to capture the essence of cyberpunk and turn it into compelling systems. Despite the concessions made in the name of ambition, it’s an impressive dungeon romp.

For a first commercial game by a developer who was 16 when he launched it into Early Access, and has constantly honed it ever since, Unturned is an extraordinary achievement. I guess what I’m wondering now is what, armed with all this experience and skill, Nelson Sexton will do next.

It’s this framework for what feels like should have been a much better, more entertaining game, and yet the ghost of that potential game leaks through in the charming way it presents the Whodos, and the always welcome environment of a creepy old mansion for setting puzzles. It’s too brief, ridiculously easy, and woefully insincere, which certainly renders any recommendable features moot. But I really did like the Whodos.

This was crying out for a new version, an evolution of Alphabear better suited for bigger screens. Something that might make sense of the newly added “Hardcover Edition” mantle. Instead we’ve got a slightly less good version of the two year old phone game. Which is still a top game, but, you know, not really something to write home about.

The result of all this is just magnificent. A super-tricky game with a wonderfully smooth difficulty curve, and a masterclass in design when managing to offer real depth and challenge despite limiting itself to just two buttons from start to finish. You’ll feel amazing when you succeed. [RPS Recommended]

I also just really like being in the worlds. The Florid Vale is this pastoral idyll (plus killer skeletons and demon skulls), but it’s chill, it’s pretty and you get large land masses to navigate meaning less danger from the gnome-eating fish which live in the water. Later in the game you get desert worlds with sheer drops and mangroves with twisted roots that are easy to fall off and thus strafing is no longer your best friend.

Megaton Rainfall is an awe-inspiring achievement.

The deaths are surprisingly grim, made more so by the arcadey point scoring ways, creating a macabre atmosphere that just keeps to the right levels of distaste. This could have been the Hidden Folks of murdering. And it’s all there, underneath the mess, waiting for someone to rescue. Sadly that has, so far, not been realised.

Paradise is a very satisfying and deeply peculiar game.

A solid, decent picross game, that unquestionably stands in the shadow of Pictopix, the one picross game to rule them all. If you’ve exhausted all Pictopix has, as I have, the Picrastination is a very welcome inclusion, and at less than a fiver, an easy decision to make.

A pretty, weekend wonder that may never beat you but should never bore or baffle you either, March to Glory is a hard sell at £16. If you’re in the market for some quality turnbased wargaming free of hexes and headaches, and don’t already own them, I’d invest in Shenandoah’s WW2 duo instead.

There’s so much room for shenanigans thanks to the gameshow theme, but Radical Heights too frequently relies on the bare bones battle royale formula, which is a shame because being a battle royale is by far its least interesting feature. And it’s so early that it’s extremely difficult to predict what type of game it will grow into over the course of what Boss Key predict will be a year-long stint in early access. It doesn’t even have an identity yet. It does play You’re The Best during the victory celebration, though. [Premature Evaluation]

I’ve still happily lost hours mining away, blasting gun-toting demons with bouncing icicles and hanging with my skulls. It’s constantly doling out new weapons and monsters to test them on, and every dive into the subterranean world results in so much more loot than I can carry that I’ve just got to go back down one more time. Brevik, as you might expect, is still pretty good at making the grind compelling. [Premature Evaluation - Early Access]

Super-fans of the show may get some enjoyment out of the story, but only if they can stomach a lot of grind, tedium and wandering through identical corridors, and for anyone else, just stick to watching the anime.

I’m not really convinced by Worlds Adrift the MMO. The freewheeling aviation adventure? That I absolutely dig. I can lose days to it. It’s become my happy place, where I can look at pretty islands and not worry about the weird rattling noise that’s coming from my bathroom. I don’t even mind losing my life to the occasional workplace accident. I’m not bemoaning that it’s multiplayer, either. It’s perfectly suited for it, particularly co-op. [Premature Evaluation]

It’s a mess, but it’s a fun mess, like 52 pickup. It’s got the prettiest rectangles I’ve ever done seen, the back and forth of evolving makes every match exciting, and despite its faults Shadowverse can still produce the highs that keep me coming back to card games. My latest match was textbook CCG fun: I managed to barely scrape by in an unfavorable matchup, only to win at one health on the back of a few lucky top-decks on my end and two weak evolutions from my opponent. In that brief moment, I was over the moon about Shadowverse, and sometimes that’s enough.

Starman isn’t big or brash, but sometimes you just need to sit quietly for a couple of hours and focus on something nice.

I think, streamlined significantly, with the repetition removed, this could have been a really neat two-to-three hour game. Instead, with so much that feels like padding, it gives all the mistakes so much space to become a problem. It’s often a lot of fun to grapple and leap about in, but it’s always too quickly spoiled by something else.

It’s just simply a wonderful creation that you absolutely should buy and play. It’s brief – the nine levels will perhaps take you a couple of hours – but a splendid couple of hours they are. Daft, fun, exuberant and very pretty, it captures a sense of joy like little else. [RPS Recommended]