Calvary and Four Last Things both wear their Monty Python influences very much on their sleeve, though, and this is appropriate. Because while Monty Python is funny, people tend to forget that the TV show in particular had about as many misses as it did hits, and only the hits made it into the clip compilations. Yes, yes, I will whip myself in penance later for saying so, please hold your comments. But by that metric, The Procession To Calvary is better than Monty Python, because it’s probably more consistent and, perhaps surprisingly for the content, less surreal. But your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Without having been in one myself I can’t say with any authority that Disaster Report 4 isn’t an accurate representation of the kinds of things that happen after a real earthquake, but I’m willing to guess that it falls short of a true simulation. It’s certainly about as ridiculous as the unfolding apocalypse happening outside our own windows – where society has seemingly ejected its collective mind to stockpile eggs and demand that the army open fire on joggers – but it’s about as passive as our lockdown too. Disaster Report 4 depicts a strange and consequence-averse crisis, in which you’re usually little more than a hapless observer.

Both games boast shortish campaigns, modest price tags, and occasionally shoot themselves in the feet with lines of B movie dialogue. Both bring down The Helicopter Fallacy with a flurry of tracer-laced MG fire, and deserve our admiration, gratitude and patronage for doing so.

I still enjoy Bannerlord because there's nothing else doing those open world battles. But almost everything else is a robotic, shallow grind offering no surprises, with a plethora of complaints that early access is supposed to iron out. You can ignore a lot of it, which only highlights how irrelevant it is, and though there are a lot more things going on, you have to provide your own motivation, because everyone's behaviour is basically the same, and everything feels like a missed opportunity.

The trial-and-error approach to deaths and puzzles mentioned above didn’t help, as it made me feel I was having to really work for what I was increasingly convinced would be a slim narrative reward. In the end, I wandered off for metaphorical celery, and it took me the best part of a month to come back to Stela in order to finish this review. I’m glad I did, as it still had some astonishing sights left to show me. But it was a close call.

The basic act of hitting something doesn’t feel quite right, even when you’re whacking someone with your massive motorcycle hands. There’s this feeling of disconnection, some of it coming from the way your enemy can blink away at speed, and some of it, probably, from lag. A recent patch claimed to address that, but it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Hopefully that will be ironed out further down the line. But even if it is, I’d steer clear of Bleeding Edge. The characters may be inventive, but everything else is bleeding out on the floor.

You get to be methodical. Curious. Work through all the different species you need to research. Log all the specimens you need. Update all the taxonomies until you know everything you can about this world. You can order it all, and order your mind. You can imagine Ellery’s careful steps. You listen to the deep, slow breath of the ocean rolling overhead and around you. Ah. Lovely. [RPS Bestest Bests]

I liked it! More than I expected to like it. But at the same time, after six hours of it, I’ve had enough. The spider labyrinth was astonishing, but it’s not really a mess I’d get myself in twice, when the real joy was in escaping it. I could have spent more time finding secrets and backtracking for loot. And there’s certainly a huge replay potential to RE3 for completionists, and folks who are fond of difficulty challenges. But that ain’t me. I was precisely in the mood for a fairly linear, day-long series of setpieces, and that’s exactly what I got. If that’s what you want too, then the question is whether it’s worth £50 to you. Unless of course you also have pervasive fantasies about being smacked around by a wardrobe-sized bastard wrapped in bin liners, in which case this is a must-buy.

But mainly I just yearn for more Half-Life, in whatever form Valve wants to deliver it. It was about three hours after reaching the game’s thrilling, won’t-spoil-it, can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it conclusion that a thought occurred to me: for a brief moment I had a new Half-Life game to play, and now, again, I do not. I hope I don’t have to wait for brain-computer interfaces to exist before the series returns again, because despite a handful of complaints, I still think Valve make the best first-person shooters around. [RPS Bestest Bests]

These are minor transgressions. They don’t come close to souring a delightfully bloody pudding, a tour de force of grizzly decapitation. The highs in Doom Eternal come thick and fast and towering, in the midst of battles that demand total attention. New-new Doom nails that marriage of twitching and planning, the calculated deployment of rampant aggression. It makes you feel godly. I haven’t been able to try the multiplayer mode, but it promises asymmetric, player-orchestrated arenas that sound much more intriguing than the underwhelming marine-on-marine action of the last game. And if winds up as another disappointing side-show, so what? [RPS Bestest Bests]

As it is, it’s the best way to play Valve’s original design if you haven’t done so before, and it’s a brilliant way to retread those old ventilation shafts, if you have.

The problem, really, is that while both aspects of Murder By Numbers are pretty good, neither of them are given enough space to really breathe. There are too few picross puzzles for puzzlers, and there’s not enough visual novel for VN lovers. I wouldn’t not recommend Murder by numbers, but it would perhaps have benefited from being a bit longer than it is (an easy demand to make of an indie game, I’m sure you’ll agree). Still, though, it’s worth a poke around if you’re a fan of either genre involved. And I still can’t get the theme song out of my head.

It’s difficult but fair, complex but intuitive, and gruelling but conquerable. [RPS Bestest Bests]

I’ve enjoyed Yes, Your Grace. It’s a pretty game, and the story and subplots have some nice details and solid surprises. I like how you can hear distant armies chanting in the intro, torches in your bedchamber, and the hubbub of the streets from your throne room. The cheerful “Wey!” when happiness goes up is great. I’ve also much enjoyed the thought that the king is actually doing what I tell him, when I have him stand up suddenly in his throne room, declare that he likes his chandelier, then leave. But for all the time I spent making decisions, I felt let down by the ending – and the time and effort it would take to start again.

And there we have it. Arsebark: Genesis. A bottom-burp of a DLC so pungent that, for me at least, its base game will never smell the same again. Oh and yeah, there’s a giant turtle. But apparently it’s broken at the moment.

I can’t, in short, say anything bad about Savage Vessels that isn’t heavily outweighed by everything it’s doing that’s rewarding and exciting. Uncovering new levels stressed me out enough to wail at my desk, but in a way I enjoyed a lot more than the people around me probably did. Its slower pace and clearer presentation made for a less frustrating time than its zombie-stabbing inspiration, and its difficulty is more manageable and better at inviting the sense of “okay, well, this time…” that any good roguelike needs.

While I’ve been writing this, I’ve still been playing Besiege, in a way. Ideas for new creations have been bubbling away under the surface of my mind, just waiting for me to hop back in and build them – presumably so that they can crumble immediately. At least that’ll spare some sheep.

It goes back to the game seemingly utilising cyberpunk as an aesthetic, and an excuse for computer-magic, without really exploring the human concerns involved. There’s a billboard in the intro cinematic that literally just says ‘Neon’. Another advertises ‘Hack Cola’. I don’t want to make a joke about an AI writing a cyberpunk script for fear of falling into some sort of terrifying Rococo’s Basilisk-esque logic hole, but you get the picture.

I’m not sure Taur has enough depth or variety to justify that £20 price tag, but it is good for picking up in half-hour bouts and knowing you can make a decent chunk of progress. Like Into the Breach, it’s easy to engage with without being mindless, although it lacks the balance and subtle ingenuity of Subset Games’ mini-masterpiece.

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.

It’s a really well made and sometimes great portion of turn-based tactics, but more often than not, it was frustration rather than strategy that drove me to go maximum boyo.

It’s Size Five’s masterpiece. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The most glaring problem is how The Suicide Of Rachel Foster fails to meaningfully engage with its central themes.

Off-Peak deserved to be something less arbitrary than a point and click. Or it deserved a player with better taste than me. But given how much I’ve had to say in praise of both this and Frog Detective 2, the only two point and click games I’ve played in the last couple of years, I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps I just don’t dislike as many things as I thought I did. It’s always good to shed your prejudices, and Tales From Off-Peak City helped me unload a good few.

The Pedestrian is surprising and astonishing and delighting, it’s true. But for about the first hour and the last. Still, in complete fairness, that does add up to about half of the total play time – and 50% surprising and delighting is pretty good going.

Reforged, like a lot of remasters today, is good for a run around if all you wanted was to give your nostalgia a long leash – long enough to punch some elves in the face, say. But if Warcraft III was a game you not only once loved, but love still; if it’s a game you’ve been playing for the better part of 20 years… Well. It’s not hard to see how Reforged could end up being a bit of a disappointment.

Some games are like chips. Even if you’ve got pals to play with, maybe wait until this one comes as cheap.

Kalypso and Yippee seem determined to banish memories of the ropey release build (As I type this, my install is being modified by a fresh 1GB patch – 1.08) as quickly as they can. If they stay the course and keep delivering fixes at the current rate, by March, Commandos 2 HD Remaster could be entirely error free. I’m reasonably confident the repairs will be completed satisfactorily. Whether Pyro’s masterpiece will ever get back the minuscule black crosses and red circles, it wore, without controversy, for nigh-on twenty years, remains to be seen.