I feel like Rime will be a game celebrated by those who already love the third-person genre, those au fait with Tomb Raider-style climbing and jumping, and environmental puzzles. It’s certainly celebrated by me. But I wonder if it might have a harder time winning the affections of those who aren’t already sold on the concept, simply because of the swathes of assumptions it makes about a player’s fluency. Or maybe I’m being patronising? I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is I’ve had such a splendid time with Rime, so deeply enjoyed its expansive and sumptuous world, and found myself not missing the attack button at all. Not when there’s a sing/shout button that does so many more interesting things. [RPS Recommended]

Caveblazers is superb and I’m looking forward to discovering all of its secrets, and to the local multiplayer add-on that’s apparently coming soon. I can see myself playing for years to come.

Tokyo 42 is an inventive and strikingly attractive game, with a very natural blend of stealth, combat and figuring out a path, unfortunately hamstrung somewhat by absolute fealty to its isometric perspective. I alternated between the beautiful tension of sneaking through busy places (personally, I incline towards the silent kills of a katana rather than the Syndicate-esque mass destruction of miniguns and rocket launchers) and the jaw-clenched annoyance of death-by-camera. An impressive accomplishment, but sometimes a grating one too.

There’s not quite enough here to win me over completely, but there’s more than enough to make the numerous trips I’ve made worthwhile, and part of the charm is in never knowing if there’s anything left to discover. The stars are strange and home to many mysteries and it’s tempting to stick around until I’ve seen them all. But keep in mind that there’s lots of work to do along the way.

What I really need is a group to play with and I’ll be recruiting across the upcoming long weekend.

Is Vanquish the legendary success that you may have heard others describe it as? Nah, but it is a distinctive and solid good time with excellent movement and controls, and some delightfully tricksy setpiece battles. It feels damn good if you can break apart your shooter muscle memory and give yourself to its new ways, and I only wish that element of it could somehow be transplanted into a game with a less turgid personality. In the absence of that impossible possibility though – yep, play Vanquish.

Too much of the game is spent being annoyed by having to slowly trudge between levers – a crime as old as gaming itself – only to allow it its little follies. The acting is splendid, the writing decent, and as I’ve said, the graphics a fabulous showing off within the Unreal Engine. But in its short time, it frustrates too often, and tries to do too much.

Not creepy or scary enough to quite work as a horror game, and without the sense of investigation that would make it work as a mystery, Perception falls between two posts. It’s premise is strong and the echolocation works well, but there simply isn’t enough to do in that old house, other than knock on the walls and listen to tales of times gone by. It’s a game that I wanted to like so much more than I do, partly because it’s so visually appealing and partly because Cassie is such a likeable character. She deserves a better story for herself rather than to be an observer of other peoples’ lives.

For the sake of fairness, I have to admit that I only made it as far as the fourth boss, 18 hours deep. At which point I was murdered enough times to gently accept my fate as a Surge drop-out.

Sharp as a spike bayonet in the AI department, surprisingly realistic in areas like morale modelling, LoS and armour penetration, SD’s crowning achievement is arguably its interface. It’s hard to think of a wargame that makes control feel so effortless or one that communicates unit details so effectively. [RPS Recommended]

Old Man’s Journey is a game with all of these prickles of delight but where the interstitial matter often feels humdrum. It’s short enough that you can still pick those delights out even if you’re not satisfied with the rest of the interactions, but you can’t help but wonder, what if it had found a way to make the whole thing shine?

It’s grisly and cruel in ways that are both obvious and difficult to identify. There’s a bleakness that worms its way through every aspect, insidious and very effective. And then something else will go wrong and it’s so ghastly to start a chapter over because everything is so damned slow.

From the interface to economics, it sports some of the best systems I’ve seen in a 4X game, and like Endless Legend, it’s simultaneously confident and experimental, finding new ways to spice up a genre that can too often be bland. [RPS Recommended]

Brute is N with a ship in place of a ninja. That change aside, there’s the same challenge of grappling with the particulars of the game’s physics, the same love of alternating bright colours, and a similar menagerie of deadly pursuing enemies ready to destroy you with a single touch. Luckily, there’s also the same sense of satisfaction to be found in trying, failing and eventually overcoming each of its tricky levels.

This is stunning. It’s just so utterly beautiful, its bucolic scenes hiding extraordinarily lavish and enticing buildings. It’s smart but so modest about that, bulging with brilliant ideas. Movement is amazing and refreshing. And despite the guff, the place itself is fascinating to wander. What a treat. Just a slightly expensive treat. [RPS Recommended]

I adore this. I am so frustrated that it’s very hard to convince people to pick up an RPGMaker game, so I’m also very relieved it has the To The Moon alumni tag that will hopefully convince people to grab it. Grab it you absolutely should. Yes, it’s maudlin in places, and yes, it’s undeniably a bit twee, but it earns the right to be by being just so good.

Scanner Sombre is at its best when you’re left to your own devices, lonely yet in awe of the sights you see and make, but suffers when the game itself is pulling the strings, whether that be to evoke empathy or terror. I absolutely recommend it, for its four or so hours of dot-matrix world-generation have pleased me greatly, but you should go in knowing that it stumbles over its storytelling hurdles and should instead be treated as, like the titular scanner, a remarkable technological toy.

Prey is a game that’s smart about almost every aspect of itself, and yet with that, so crucially modest. It doesn’t yank the camera from you, doesn’t force you to sit through cutscenes, doesn’t demand you sit still and listen to its backstory. It’s content to be itself and let you find it, which is a damned rare treat in this hobby. Even more amazingly, for all its array of abilities and powers, you can finish the game without touching them, perhaps even find a narrative rationale for doing so. It lets you improvise, explore, make big decisions without needing to tell you they’re big. And yes, it absolutely does let you turn into a cup. [RPS Recommended]

It comes so close to being something I love and then it has a hollow core. The best way I can think to explain it is how at some point as you grow up your toys stop being these magical things with their own lives and start being toys. From watching the trailers and following the development I was hoping for a window into a little lively toy universe but I’ve opened up the packaging and I can’t seem to find the spark.

Flinthook’s world is weird, with its space ghost pirates, animal ruffians and giant robots, but as colourful and crowded as some of these screenshots look, I’ve always found the rooms easy to read. That’s important because underneath all of the silliness and the roguelite elements, there’s a tight and challenging game that would be a delight even without its superb structure and flow. With that carefully crafted layer around it, Tribute have made one of the year’s best action games.

Horrible to control, horrible to listen to, really surprisingly ugly to look at, and and all-round mess, I’ve no desire to put myself through this.

Under Leaves either needed a lot more to do in a level, or a lot more levels, to feel substantial.

For me, at times, Everything feels like the game Spore should have been. When I watched the early presentations of that game’s silly creature creator and its invocation of Powers of Ten, I wasn’t imagining a fiddly, shallow strategy game, but an experience that hoped to approximate the awe I sometimes feel when stargazing or can tap into by listening to Carl Sagan talk. By throwing out most of Spore’s traditional mechanics in favour of a cross between Katamari Damacy and Nested, Everything gets closer to sublimity. And though I don’t think it gets all the way there – not for me, not right now – the silliness is constant and delightful.

It’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as remade by Eli Roth, starting with the worst possible thing that can happen and then daring itself to go further. Shock tactics so persistently silly that they become the equivalent of a flaming bag of poo on a doorstep. I will always defend the right of horror fiction to be horrible, but never excuse it for being so dull in its depravity. One of the game’s six chapters is named after the Biblical Job and by the end of the game that’s who I felt like. I’d suffered through great and terrible hardships but was no closer to understanding why.

What elevates it from a fascinating and gorgeous experiment in presentation to an immediate contender for my game of the year is the way that the broader narrative informs the stories it contains, just as the house is home to its many rooms. Without casting judgement or becoming didactic, Edith Finch explores both the good and the harm that stories can do, and how folktale, imagination and superstition can lift us up and dash us down.

If it’s your first time back since 1999, however, rest assured that it treats your memories well.

I love it. There were times when I didn’t, mostly when I had to replay a section where I kept failing to line up what looked like a simple jump over and over, but by the end I was smitten. It’s a grotesque, horrid and eventually hopeful in its own morbid fashion, and despite many moments that feel like reimaginings or echoes from elsewhere, it has enough extraordinary images and sequences to stand alone. It’s precisely the kind of horror game I love – grotesque but not gross, and interested in thoughtful pacing and escalation rather than jumpscares and shocks. Also, linear though it is, there are some collectibles I’d like to hunt for and the whole game is short enough that I’ll happily play it again, or watch someone else playing.

There are moments, many of them, during multiplayer and AI skirmishes, where I’m absolutely certain that Dawn of War 3 is the best game in the series, even with its missteps when it comes to cover and fortifications.