It’s a game with two key strands that feel forced together when they don’t really work in tandem. I like both ingredients in theory, but they don’t coalesce successfully, like how a vinaigrette salad dressing will separate into oil and vinegar until you shake it up again. Except balsamic dressing is obviously delicious. Night Call isn’t quite that. It’s not bad, though. A honey-mustard, maybe?

I am going to give it a “Holy gherkins: It’s got couch co-op!” award, because couch co-op is a beautiful feature that deserves nothing but praise, in a thoroughly confident and largely successful game that seems solely designed for you and some mates to laugh with it, at it, and at yourselves until the frogs come home. It’s camp, sure, but as Susan Sontag put it, “Oh no! The bugs, they’re everywhere! The frogs! They’re too big!”

Eagle Island promises a lot, but whether it ever truly delivers I cannot say, because after two days with it I am plain done. I was never quite enjoying it as much as I wanted to, and it never quite came together even during the brief window when the plot took a turn and it looked like it was about to really open up. Even the promise of more ways to brutalise my dutiful owl isn’t enough to drag me through another afternoon of increasingly grating near misses.

It’s fun. It’s tremendous fun, and while I was hoping for more room to experiment or completely mess a child up (sorry Dave, it was nothing personal), I still wanted – indeed, still want – to have another go. It’s funny, it’s accessible despite all its numbers and moving parts, and there aren’t many games that get me so animated about a 9-year-old’s school test results. The design is solid too.

I can’t say Dunderlords excites me anymore. It’s too dynamic to feel dry, but I do find myself in the same situations, and aiming for the same compilations. Playing now is about tweaking well-trodden paths rather than forging new ones, but that’s OK. We’re in a good place, Dunderlords and I. We’re comfortable, though you’d never have caught me using that word when I started.

I really liked Kiki’s face in the top-right corner of the screen, pulling an adorably smug expression as she pew pews her little pistol. But this isn’t a novelty animal Instagram account. Adorable only gets her so far, I’m afraid.

At the heart of Sea Of Solitude is the idea that all emotions can have a positive or negative form — love can be twisted to be something unhealthy or saddening, for example, just as being alone can be quiet solitude or debilitating loneliness. I’ve no doubt that Sea Of Solitude might seem facile to some people, but that just means it isn’t for you. I think it’ll probably be for a lot of other people.

For me, I think it was easier to be forgiving of flaws when I was so excited by the newness of what it was trying to do. If you’re keen to try a Quantic Dream game, I’d say Heavy Rain is still the one most worthy of playing, if you can excuse some of the over-the-top elements of the story. And if nothing else, it will be a nice reminder of how far story-driven games have come.

It is a fine game, but it has already served its purpose: it entertained me for roughly as many minutes as it cost in pennies, and it left me refreshed and ready to play some longer games.

Katana Zero is built from almost nothing but influences from other mediums, and each of those influences is something I’ve seen used in games before. It doesn’t matter. For all its hurried stabbing and spilled blood, Katana Zero is a beautiful game, from the juicy text boxes onwards. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Without the weird Lovecraftian bits, this is a slightly janky, slightly grindy detective game that does some interesting things in a very atmospheric depiction of a profoundly depressed town. Taking them into account, I don’t know! I was confused and uncharmed by the whole thing, but I still haven’t untangled my brainnoodles. At least I’ve told you how they got tangled. Goodness, I was very interested in The Sinking City. I really wanted to love it. But I’m afraid rain may have stopped play this time.

The music is fantastic. The art is striking and its got that timeless comic book thing going on that means it’s probably still going to look as good in five years as it does now. The campaign is a letdown, but that’s partly because the survival built such a high perch to be let down from. If you’re into strategy, I still think it’s essential, and I can’t really think of any better use than the sticky approval circle than that. [RPS Bestest Bests]

My Friend Pedro does let you realise the fantasy of conducting a bullet symphony while hanging upside down from a zipline, but like most fantasies, it doesn’t survive past the initial rush of blood to the head.

Ask yourself this: Do you really need more empty irony in your life? Do any of us? We of course do because it’s a wonderfully effective way of numbing ourselves against the self-created horror that is the reality of living on borrowed time due to various catastrophic extinction scenarios of our own making. But hey, maybe a nice bit of sincerity might ease that along, too.

I just wish it was better structured to deliver that a conclusion without collapsing on itself at the last hurdle. Because there are hints of something wider at play here. It just does a terrible job of pulling it all together, which can leave Octopath Traveler feeling like a big old anticlimax. I both love it and hate it in equal measure, although I must say the PC version’s gorgeous 60fps is absolutely to die for after chugging through it on the Switch. It makes me all the more inclined to give it a sort of sneaky thumbs up, but in the end I think even JRPG die hards will find this a bit of a slog.

As it is, this is a perfectly reasonable portion of carefully planned fantasy stabbing, which was enough fun (once I started playing properly, at least) to make me reevaluate my whole position on puzzle elements in tactical games. Hell, it might even be time to postpone my next marathon slog with XCOM, and revisit Into the Breach.

Teddy and Lissie are still very inviting characters, who obviously have a backstory that is distinct and known to their writers, and are the best reason to play this game.

Chaosbane defines itself in these tiny instances of friction that break up the flow of holding down a button to smoothly mulch through an ocean of solid obstacles. Most of these obstacles are more aggressive than sandy chickpeas, although only some of them are smarter.

SteamWorld Quest isn’t going to be the next Slay the Spire, and to be honest, die hard Spire-ites will probably find its one-and-done story a bit, well, restricting. But for card novices (which I count myself one of), it’s still a real charmer, no matter how sluggish it might get in those early hours. There’s so much heart in Image & Form’s games, and SteamWorld Quest is no exception.

Void Bastards is ultimately not more than the sum of the parts I outlined 1400 words ago, but it’s worth rummaging through all the same. Just like yer da said about the bins, when he finally found those Euros.

It’s clean and painstakingly handcrafted, with superbly chosen colour palettes, striking linework, and cracking use of lighting effects to bring life to grisly, glowing ghosts.

Outer Wilds has more character in its handful of planetoids than No Man’s Sky had in 70 squinjillion. [RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s too fixated on traditional jump scares to embrace the twisted, palpitating gut of its story about a flawed protagonist and his struggles with inner demons.

At its heart, Pathologic 2 is a frustrating game. Ten times more interesting than your average immersive sim (probably the genre it belongs), yet hundreds of times less inviting. It has perhaps successfully replicated its predecessor in being an artful mess. But whether you’re up for the art depends on how much of the mess you can stomach. For me, the answer is: no more.

Observation is clever, but it’s also astoundingly dumb. You’re placed in a unique perspective, where onscreen inhumanity accentuates your oh-so-human instincts. Then it subverts that! But then it makes you control a sphere that can’t move directly up or down, furthering the nightmare of navigating already labyrinthine spaces. It asks you to do something, without telling you how...It’s worth persevering with. When you get stuck though, don’t hesitate to use a walkthrough.

Thea 2 is interesting in a ‘may you live in interesting times’ sense. An imperfect thing that I can’t help but feel affectionate towards.

Surviving Mars, it turned out, was little more than a plucky little rover, diligently raking the regolith to make a place for the main rocket to touch down. Now, however, the eagle has landed, and it’s a bloody lovely bird.

Three Kingdoms is an absolutely massive game, but it has a very clear thematic focus on the Three Kingdoms period – specifically the Romance of the Three Kingdoms – and a very clear mechanical focus on individual heroes. [RPS Bestest Bests]