Blisteringly fast when it needs to be, challenging without being frustrating, and packed with sharp, fatal toys, Dead Cells doesn’t keep you on your toes, it keeps you on your toenails.

If you’re a fan of old school Castlevania-esque games then this is the ticket for you. A perfect recreation of the mould, but filled with its own strange story and theme. For those of you who aren’t this is a tough recommendation. You’ll need a lot of patience to get to the oddities I found so compelling, but if you want to know what Indiana Jones would be like if he fought mecha-dinosaurs instead of Nazis… well, you absolutely do want to know don’t you?

Yakuza’s debut on PC is long overdue, but you couldn’t have asked for a stronger start.

Whether you have a satisfying ending or not is very much down to your choices, and yours alone – which, for a game like this, couldn’t be more fitting. Yes, it runs the risk of being a massive anti-climax if you make a few duff decisions, but even that has a kind of poetic justice to it – it’s just another tragic tale to be woven into your ever-eventful banner...Overall, I think you will have a good ending – and one worth the pain you’ve had to endure over the. course of these collective 40-odd hours

The glitchiness is my only hesitation in wholeheartedly recommending Semblance. But it’s vital that you know I’ve had a thoroughly good time with it. Not just because the puzzles are so smartly designed, but also the cartoon graphics are a complete joy, and the music is some of the best unobtrusive ambient pleasantness I’ve heard in a long while. This is a properly good debut from South African developer Nyamakop, and a genuinely interesting take on puzzle platforming.

The Spectrum Retreat may be the perfect holiday resort, but I can’t really say I’ve enjoyed my stay.

The game is in desperate need of a beefier crafting and construction list, certainly, but more than that it needs to find its purpose, or a hook of any kind. There’s nothing to latch onto, and no moment where everything clicks and it becomes clear where the game is heading. [Premature Evaluation]

This is such garbage. For goodness sakes don’t buy this as DLC, but don’t even bother if you were lured into getting a season pass at the start. What a pile of piss.

The between-fight map-wandering feels a bit time-wasting, despite a few feints towards ‘quests’ – really, all it involves is taking turns to move a few hexes over in search of an opponent, a pick-up or a shop where you can recharge health or buy upgrades. But it’s fine, it does the job. In fact, Insane Robots holds up remarkably well as a singleplayer game.

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]

Lovecraft’s Untold Stories lulls you into a false sense of security with its mostly banal horror, and then boom! Penguins screaming like people. I can still hear them. [Premature Evaluation]

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.

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a nearly flawless remaster of a mixed bag that I’m still incredibly fond of, even after so many deaths. These games might not be nearly as genre-defining as they seemed in the ‘90s, and we probably got carried away because 3D platforming was new and exciting, but they’re still so full of character and silliness that it’s hard not to be charmed.

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

Next week, once the servers are busy, I’ll return and find out whether this is a game that desperately needs the internet it insists upon to shine. I’ll be delighted if that’s the case. Right now, this is an awful lot of not very much. [Single-player review]

A game that offers us both a memorable journey and a place to call home. Of course, how much meaning can one have without the other? Far: Lone Sails gave me a wistful sense of both that I won’t soon forget. [RPS Recommended]

A beautifully engineered tactics title free of gimmicks and artificial grind, Football, Tactics & Glory abbreviates without over-simplifying, and absorbs without overwhelming. If, like me, you crave the drama and flavour of club football, but don’t have the patience to grapple with full-blown management simulations like Football Manager, or the manual dexterity or even-temper necessary to play games like FIFA, anticipate obsession. [RPS Recommended]

As much as I enjoyed learning the rules and rhythms of bus driving – thanks in part to the warm words of Mira Tannhauser – once that was done, I just couldn’t find waters deep enough to swim in for long.

Mooncrash is an enormous paddling pool compared to Prey’s Olympic swimming pool. There’s none of the depth, but it’s a heck of a good time to splash around in.

It’s a greater disappointment because it falls so short of Planet Coaster. Frontier has already made the game that shows Evolution where it went wrong. It’s not that Evolution couldn’t have forged its own path, but it throws away lots of proven systems, often without substituting them for anything else. I don’t want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far.

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.

I’m frustrated that Vampyr falls just short of truly combining a smart choose-your-own-adventure game with a meaty action one. It’ll never happen, but a director’s cut that thins the sombre exposition eases the medical busywork, injects more pep, and makes decisions decisions, rather than often either a roulette wheel or a railroaded path, would create a dream combination of darkness and light. Nonetheless, as a sprawling midnight world of tight fights and atmospheric exploration, this is a fat vein I keep returning to.

It completely has me in its grips now. I want to know what it means that the later dungeons are for adventurers only, not merchants, and I want to know just how big a store I can run, and will I ever get security guards to deal with these bloomin thieves? It’s very charming, very beautiful, and both its comprising halves are enjoyable in their own ways.

I’m looking forward to the first opportunity I get to play with some humans in the physical world – and sad that their online counterparts aren’t sticking around.

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]

Minor issues aside, I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed a long-form point-and-click adventure this much. It reminds me why I love the genre so much.[Recommended]

There’s much I wish it did better, but I can’t fail to be drawn in by the sheer substance of it.

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.