Beyond its success as a mood piece, it's tempting to recommend Exo One solely for its scenery. As a machine for generating desktop wallpapers or screensavers, it's first rate. Some of you, I feel, will love it for this alone. But as I said up top, maybe I just don't like sci-fi vistas as much as I thought I did. Long before Exo One's short three hours reached their conclusion, I just wanted it to be Exo Done.

I really wanted to like it, but right now I see Battlefield 2042's little logo and I simply don't trust it. This game needs time. Time to untangle those performance issues and perhaps tweak Hazard Zone’s economy. Portal needs time to save it from the maw of XP farming servers. Whether I’ve got the patience is another matter, entirely. Simply put: this is a game that doesn't seem ready yet.

Less would have been so much more here, and sadly Undungeon’s deep-running problems with the basics get in the way of its bizarre and beautiful world, its lovingly drawn characters and its wild sci-fi storyline.

And that’s the thing that most frustrates me about Growbot. It squanders much of its potential. When things click, Growbot can be magical, but for all those wondersome moments, there are more that come to a jarring, juddering halt. If you’re good at puzzles and have a good ear, then you may well have a better time with Growbot than I did, but I suspect its hint system will leave you equally irked. I wish the game was as beautiful to play as it is to look at.

If like me you've been away for a while, or have never played FM before because your brain calcifies whenever someone says the word "football", then FM22 is definitely the version to try. As someone who came in relatively unversed in the series' recent history, I was surprised by how quickly I found myself poring over my rival's tackling statistics and trying to find a cheap yet quality replacement for my injured starting full-back. If the game can do that for old Barry Hattrick, then it can do the same for you.

It might not be quite up there with The Room as an all-time puzzle classic, but it's probably the closest we've come to a spiritual successor in quite some time.

Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is somehow both the best game that I have ever played while also being as smart as a bag of rocks. What happened to Mrs Holmes is, on many levels, best left unsaid, but it is almost exactly a literal view of that Charlie Day conspiracy board image: a complex web of clues and plotting that is impressive in its execution, yet embedded with idiocy. It is the silliest thing I have ever loved and enjoyed; the best thing I have ever ridiculed. I wish it every success while also hoping that it is screencapped in a million joke tweets. I cannot wait to finish all the side cases I have left over, and I will laugh at every two out of three of them. I cannot explain it more than this, reader. Which is why I am not a real detective. And also why Sherlock Holmes isn't, either.

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.

Nevertheless, it’s unfair to evaluate a game solely through the lens of a masterpiece. The mountainous peaks you can reach with Severed Steel don’t make BMI’s hills not worth climbing, and this is still an impressive creation to spring largely from one person’s work. A short blast of high fidelity bombast might be just what you’re after, and this reaches levels of spectacle you’d typically expect from a much bigger team with a much bigger budget.

There is care in every line of Unpacking, in the ancient mug that you come to know as The Mug You Always Keep Your Toothbrush In, the way this person's fashion changes a little bit over time, the sound design that sees cutlery jangle when you put it away, or the paper rustle whenever you pick out something new. Each new box, each new item you pull out, is a little surprise, a little exquisite treasure. Every room you complete in Unpacking is like tearing open a Kinder Egg and carefully constructing the toy inside. [RPS Bestest Bests]

While Burnout Paradise Remastered still offers more involved gameplay on a second-to-second basis while still offering a similarly gleeful atmosphere there isn’t another open world racing game so exquisitely polished as this. If you’ve played a Forza Horizon game before then you might feel a slight sense of deja vu, but you won’t care as the formula has been perfected at last. The best sound and visuals, the most variety of gameplay, the best editors, superb car handling… it’s sheer class. And so, so big. Yes, it really is the best modern open world driving game, so get it. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Quotation forthcoming.

Flaws aside, Demon Turf pulled me in as a long-time platforming fan. Thanks to that competitive gameplay, great sense of humour and appealing art style, Fabraz’s latest stands apart from the rest of its 3D platformer competition. If you’re after a new jumping fix, I’d recommend it.

It’s reliably brilliant fun, and the best multiplayer experience a Ubisoft studio has ever worked into one their many open worlds. Whether played alone or alongside 63 other warm bodies, Riders Republic is unalloyed gratification in a stunning natural utopia, a streamlined series of rewarding activities so open-ended and forgiving it can sometimes veer into a directionless fuzz. Things are certain to change shape as more stuff is added and the player-base settles in for the long games-as-a-service haul, but there’s enough arcade fun here at launch to delight your inner extreme sportsperson, the one who looks at Tony Hawk at 53 and thinks, yes, there is still time for me.

Aside from those interface annoyances and the somewhat confusing compromises made to simplify roster management, I have been having a hell of a time with Darkest Dungeon 2. It might not scratch all of the same itches for me that its predecessor did, and some of the changes seem born of an overzealous devotion to streamlining everything, but it's also one of the most enjoyable roguelites I've thrown myself into on its own merits. The pacing is great, each decision along the road feels meaningful, most runs that aren't killed early on by horrible luck feel aptly rewarding, and the music, art, story, and narration create a singular and sorrowful set of vibes that are hard to top. Deck it out with some very interesting and often unconventional RPG classes and thematically-grounded party dynamics from the refined stress system, and I don't think I'll be letting the flame of this carriage burn low for a long time.

The game's story keeps unravelling towards a genuinely tearjerking ending, digging into its themes of community, resilience, and rebuilding in surprising and consistently interesting ways. It keeps a steady, compelling rhythm, switching between the normal fishing and cooking to something more dramatic and then back again. And watching the town slowly come back to life, not despite setbacks but building on what they leave behind, is beautiful.

Simply put, Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy is a really good time. Not only that, but its linear story-telling and fast, nippy pacing feels intensely refreshing after the bloat of, say, Far Cry 6 and the sometimes frustrating openness of Deathloop. As it funnels you down a story filled with japes and jabs, I'm transported back to a happier, simpler time. If you're a Marvel fan, this feels unmissable. And even if you haven't got a clue what a Marvel is, it still delivers a very enjoyable romp through the stars.

I don't feel very strongly about Age Of Empires. That might sound damning, but I'm someone with no particular stake in the series, perhaps even slightly biased against it. Yet I've never wanted to stop playing AoE 4 all week. It might not be a huge step forward, but it's a sure step in a genre whose comeback is long overdue, and it doesn’t appear to have ambitions beyond that. I'd like to see more clear innovation, I'd love an active pause and speed controls in single player at least, and a pull towards macromanagement, and a heap of smaller tweaks that may well come in time anyway. Fundamentally, the best I can say is that I enjoyed it more the better I got, I got steadily better the more I played, and I don't see myself stopping any time soon.

The tissue-thin layer of political commentary in House Of Ashes mostly serves to get in the way of what is almost a decent horror romp. It has real monsters! A big length of iron thrown at head height! Flashbacks to the past with a creaky old English voice! A cool combined knife and flare fight! Mushrooms! For God's sake, stop trying to say something meaningful beyond, "the member of your group who has been bitten cannot be trusted." By going back to being a silly 00s survival horror, House Of Ashes has taken a step firmly in the right direction compared to other Dark Pictures Anthology games. But what it really needed was the cast to be two cheer squads from different schools, who were on their way to regionals when they fell into a vampire nest. I'm sure you could come up with another way for them all to have massive guns. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Whatever the reason, Evertried forgoes a lot of modern conveniences common to the roguelike. If you are in search of an austere tile-hopper, you might find strength in its arrow-key puritanism. But as one indoctrinated by Into The Breach and the recently released Pawnbarian (a similar tile-by-tile roguelike with both clarity and capybaras), the uniformity of Evertried comes across as a lack of polish, a jigsaw that could be pleasing to the eye if only it didn't have so many missing pieces.

Gripes aside, I love Digihaven for everything it does, and I love it even more because of how accessible and simple it makes such a magical tabletop experience. It’s not just a great tactics game in its own right, but a gateway to introduce the Monopoly-scarred to how nifty, gratifying, and ambitious the best digital board games have become over the last several years. Gloomhaven? Massive bloody grin-haven, more like. [RPS Bestest Bests]

After several months of stalling and dogged perseverance, I finally finished a 350-page book about the art and struggle of being a Japanese literary translator the other week, and not once did it get me thinking about words and language in the same way Grotto did over the course of five hours. When a game provokes these kinds of feelings in me, I don't mind so much if the choices I'm making are actually a little bit fake. Grotto stands on its own as an engaging story about the way we communicate with others and how their meaning can be polluted and morphed over time, and I reckon fans of such things will likely enjoy it even if the game-y aspects of it feel a little undercooked. If it's a meaningful, branching narrative you're after, though, then you'll be better off finding a different rabbit hole to hunker down in than Brainwash Gang's Grotto.

When Quintet disbanded, many of its developers unfortunately faded from the industry. ActRaiser Renaissance is therefore the work of a whole new staff (barring legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro, who returned to revise his epic soundtrack while adding a slew of new tunes). It's always worrying to see a beloved property fall into the hands of a new team, but Sonic Powered have done right by ActRaiser. And that's important, because Quintet's catalogue deserves to be remembered and revisited. With any luck, ActRaiser Renaissance might herald yet another renaissance for the likes of Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma.

It’s a shame to end on such a sour note, because those earlier moments where the Pit shines are positively radiant. Battles in Into The Pit never get as intricate as a meaty fight in Doom Eternal, nor as suspenseful as the single, exquisitely choreographed encounter you’ll find in Devil Daggers, but I’d say they came close enough to make me giddy if only they came more consistently. Instead, Into The Pit descends into comfortable familiarity, and all the scuttling in the world can’t save the back half from feeling like a slog.

A finely crafted card game sealed in a meta-narrative wrapper that you sometimes have to tear off when it snags, but when that wrapping falls away, Inscryption reveals itself as a rare shiny. A clever game without taking itself too seriously. Metafiction always runs the risk of being pompous and showy. By contrast, this is an impish game, trollish even, repeatedly reinventing its own rules. A beautifully cursed creation. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Ultimately, ElecHead is just an absolute treat from start to finish. It's clever, beautifully designed and it's all accompanied by a toe-tapping soundtrack by composer Tsuyomi. It's an essential purchase for puzzle platforming connoisseurs, and an excellent way to spend an evening for less than a tenner. It's not often I say this, but chucking your head against a brick wall has never been so much fun. [RPS Bestest Bests]

This is a shambolic RPG barely held together by an underutilised photography aspect and an entirely inconsequential shapeshifting ability, wrapped in the familiar trappings of a rural life simulator. The Good Life is tonally stupid, structurally broken, surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware. It is a confusing and strange and mostly horrible experience, which I feel personally worse off having been through, but am somehow glad that I did.

Ultimately Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles doesn’t really offer a lot outside of watching characters beat the shit out of each other with various flashy moves, but I guess that was always the point. Although the playable roster is feeling the distinct lack of demons right now, there’s a lot to enjoy from the characters who are there, delivering on the promise of a power fantasy of Gotouge’s manga epic. For those steeped in knowledge of that manga (or Ufotable’s anime adaptation), The Hinokami Chronicles offers a great little opportunity to spend some more time with the heroes and stories we’ve loved for years.