If you like XCOM-ish things, The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk should be in your library – just so long as you don’t mind a bit of hamfisted zaniness. I don’t think it’s one you’ll want to replay again and again, but it’s a substantial, well-crafted effort that’s definitely worth your time. Admittedly it’s no Garfield Kart, but it’s unreasonable to expect a developer to produce two once-in-a-generation masterpieces on the trot, after all.

Spelunky 2 has fully replaced Spelunky 1 for me. In playing it, I have been tense, I have been excited, I have been elated. I have also rediscovered the joys of being lost, uncertain, and surprised. Spelunky 2 makes Spelunky new again: a fancier strap, more cogs, a cuckoo popping out from a hidden compartment on the hour. The correct time, as delightful as the first time I learned to tell it. [RPS Bestest Bests]

If you can get it for £4 – and as noted above, you can during most Steam sales – Crysis is worth returning to for at least its first few hours. If you’ve never played it before, I reckon it’d be worth playing all the way to its end. But Crysis Remastered’s spit-polished nanosuit can’t redeem the game’s aging design, or justify the Maximum Price.

I think the rules are still a bit too opaque for my liking. But they are, typically for Inkle, very elegant, and trust them to be the developers to weave them in with stories of knights and chivalry in such a neat way. Inkle are still better at story than strategy, though. I’ll beat Mordred one day. I just suspect it will take me a long while, is the only thing.

It easily carried itself on the strength of its emotional impact. Which is great, for me. But I’m curious as to whether newer players will have the time to build up the investment necessary for it to lean on that before they’re thrown into the end game. It seems difficult to pace a story that will unfold radically differently for so many. Not only are players jumping in now getting a very different approach to Hades’ plot, so too does it depend on how good players are and therefore how quickly they progress through the various layers of hell.

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]

Iron Harvest is a throwback to one of the last golden ages of the genre, often feeling as old fashioned and crusty as that association entails, but frequently reminding us of the essential appeal of extremely large robots chilling out in timelines where they shouldn’t be.

As much as I can appreciate and credit its beautiful design and atmosphere for that, when I suddenly get the solution to a particular island, I get the mental round of applause all to myself, made all the sweeter by previously thinking this genre was impossible for my brain.

So yeah, it has more than a bit of roughness to it. But hoo boy, do I admire its spirit, its extra-ness, its enthusiasm for small-scale RPG design. It feels like somebody put a lasso around the neck of a snorting Disgaea game and corralled it into a pen with Slay The Spire, the resulting gamefoal erupting onto Steam in slime and wires, a cybernetic child of chaos, pixel art, and giant JRPG word flashes. BREAK. BLEEDING. ANTIMATTER. ENRAGED.

But Paradise Killer also backs the style with substance. The Syndicate’s lifestyle is supported by the mass abduction and eventual murder of normal people from our reality, who become a kind of cattle class. They’re banned from doing basically anything, placated by soft drink mascots, and give their literal blood to a cause they never benefit from.

It’s less dramatic than some of Dontnod’s other outings (and probably not for those with short attention spans given the pacing), but Tell Me Why remains a good entry in their the library of stories about families and sad magic – and it’s probably the most hopeful one yet.

I think I’ll need another year of playing it to work out exactly what I think of it, but that’s another way of saying I want to play it for a year, so it must be pretty good.

I do understand the appeal of getting a chonky “choices matter” game like this to put it in Steam tag parlance. If you have that vacancy to fill, go ahead. Let’s face it, there aren’t many other options at the moment. I myself have made many bad calls in my time as a Ranger, and even I wouldn’t mind seeing the repercussions of my major decisions play out. But if I have to fight through listless combat, buggy UI, and an onslaught of juvenile gags to see one of the many endings, I’d rather leave the snowfields of Colorado behind. To hell with the consequences.

No Straight Roads feels like a less good version of Sayonara Wild Hearts, and if you want a rhythm action game I can’t really recommend the former over the latter. I would have much preferred that NSR didn’t have the platforming sections and put in another wacky boss fight instead, because they’re funny, weird and pretty, and have better music.

Measured, thought out, detailed, kind. It has intent, from top to bottom. Even the weather feels like it has intent, the cycle of the day and night, the routines you get into. They way your friends leave you, sometimes in ways that will surprise you. Spiritfarer will probably make you very very sad, but it even does that in a kind way. In a way that makes you think about who you have lost, but also what they left behind with you, and the ways you are still close to them. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Ultimately, Mortal Shell will make you want to headbutt your monitor out of sheer frustration. The puzzling nature of the map, the repetitive placement of enemies, the lack of options all coalesce into a big arm that holds the game back from being really good, to just good. No matter times I try and swat it away with thoughts of the meaty combat, that arm simply won’t budge.

It’s such a shame. Risk Of Rain 2 is delightfully weird, with an enviably eclectic menagerie of beasties. Runs that go well can branch off in wildly different directions, where items twist character abilities into novel new uses. But the sad truth is that I can’t click with any of the early characters, and the path to unlocking the good ones is long and paved with too-quick deaths. Stick your neck out if you want to – I’m headed indoors.

This is a good Total War game. I love Total War games. I could spend forever comparing every element of it against its corresponding point in previous Total War games, and we’d none of us feel any the wiser for doing so. I suppose the frustration for me is the thought of what sort of a mind-blower Troy could have been if it hadn’t needed to be a Total War game in its entirety, but could still have gotten away with copying the two-layer strategy format.

Problem is, all this wears thin fast. After a couple of hours, I’d already got to the point where seeing certain maps crop up made my poor jellified heart sink. Within a few more hours, my heart looked more like stone. Saying that feels monstrous but it’s true...I’d still heartily recommend Fall Guys in its current form though, because those first few hours were such a treat.

Not the most innovative game in the world by any means, but one of the best adventures you can go on inside a telly, and one of the most beautiful, too – especially now that telly is a PC. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Much like crabs themselves, I am tremendously glad this game exists, but it’s something I’d rather appreciate at a distance.

This is a pleasant clicker game neatly disguised as something a little more fun and adventurous, and while there are some wonderful artistic flourishes (you can play music to a giant carrot in a top hat for bonus items, and there’s a fish god you can feed apples to) they don’t add anything to the game’s basic systems of moving things around for money. For five pounds and change though, Merchant Of The Skies is an entertaining enough obsession of a lazy afternoon.

Maid Of Sker is more frightening when it’s not trying to scare you. The story, the atmosphere and the music are well-crafted enough that they would almost be enough on their own, but its obsession with chucking monsters at you ends up destroying a lot of that good will. Perhaps, in looking sideways at Capcom’s desk, Maid Of Sker copied even the answers it didn’t need.

The result, for me, was anxiety. A low background hum of “did I miss something”, combined with the high notes of being unable to find the next new area. It was enough to shade my entire experience with Carrion, turning a pleasant enough Metroidvania with a one-of-a-kind protagonist into something I felt like I was struggling to escape from. Your mileage may vary. But for me, I was happier with the GIFs.

It is a game of surprising depth, and while Röki’s point and click backbone may prevent it from delivering the constant, one-two gut punches we saw in the likes of Edith Finch, this is certainly one of the closest attempts at capturing its mechanics-led story structure I’ve seen since. I thought Röki was going to be a cute and throwaway little puzzle game with a light adventure wrapping, but Polygon Treehouse have gone so much further, and so much deeper than I was expecting. Like all great folklore stories, there is a quiet devastation lurking beneath Röki’s picturebook world, elevating this mythic tale of gods and monsters into the pantheon of all-time adventure game greats. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The most perfect example of everything I’m trying to say here is this: Necrobarista ends on a pun. And that pun made me cry. [RPS Bestest Bests]

My living situation in Among Trees is better than my real life. I cannot fully describe how delightful and relaxing it is to wake up in my cabin and look at the morning light streaming into my new greenhouse.

Persona 4 is a twisting tale of dreams gone rogue in a town sapped of purpose. It brings personal demons to life in gaudy but plausible ways, and uses this to rejuvenate the dog-eared framework of a town-and-dungeon fantasy RPG. Unceremonious as it is, the PC port leaves all of that peculiar magic intact. It’s just a shame that the insight and empathy on show here doesn’t extend to everybody.