I dearly hope this receives a huge patch. Perhaps fistfuls of bandages and a full body cast. This could be a three-hour wonder, a really truly beautiful work to be lauded. Gosh I wish I could have written the review its unmangled form deserves. As it is, it’s very hard to recommend spending £12 on – already a tough call for such a short game.

It has quite a few moving parts, but each part is very simple. It really is oddly similar to one of those keep-clicking-the-numbers games, but pinned with a more meaningful structure and shallow but engagingly frantic combat.

These enhancements are great, sometimes even game-changing, but Paradox are offering so much for free that it makes the actual premium DLC less vital.

Bulletstorm is lots of silly fun, and deserved to do better in 2011. It’s still lots of silly fun, but it’s hard to quite get as behind the desire for it to do well when it’s being released at full price with very little new put in.

Yooka-Laylee is bright, it’s positive, it’s daft and it wants to play with you. And that’s lovely.

Most of all, I marvel at how well it’s done snakes (snakes, like snakes). This could, as I say, have been all comic pratfalls and Goat Simulator destruction, but instead it’s an extremely careful study in how snakes navigate their bizarre bodies around, then transplanted into broadly well-done puzzle-places. I feel in awe of how well-realised this is, almost more than I actually enjoy it. I really do enjoy it though, so much so that I ended up picking it up for my Switch too (making it only the second game I own for Nintendo’s latest toy). Snake Pass gets an easy pass from me.

Academy is entirely focused on tricking you into learning some basic electronics. And that’s enough. I heartily encourage you to grab this if you’ve got a kid trying to learn it at school. Heck, if you’re a physics teacher you really should buy a bunch of copies, as this’ll be a surefire way to gain the attention of some of your students. Or if you just fancy reminding yourself about logic gates, pulse generators and capacitors, this is a neat little thing. I’d love to pretend I viewed it all as a smug expert pondering its usefulness for younger players, but that’s just flat-out not true – it taught me a whole bunch, as hard as I tried not to learn anything.

It’s a smart game though and a thoughtful one, even if it sometimes hides those qualities behind its clown makeup and a beaglepuss.

At first glance Beat Cop looks like something akin to the Sierra Police Quest games of the late 80s/early 90s, a combination of point-and-click adventure and fiddly paperwork procedural. Ooh, intriguing. But just a few minutes in it becomes apparent this is far closer to a Diner Dash-like frantic management games, with swearing. Just, not a particular good version of the format.

At 20 hours, having discovered just 8 of the regions, I threw the gamepad aside with a mixture of exasperation and disappointment. There are those who will relish the challenge but I never found the slugcat’s family, and not just because there were no clues or direction as to their whereabouts. There was a big part of me that didn’t want to stop playing and maybe I’ll pick it up again some day, because there is so much to love about discovering the laws of nature behind this huge, ruined ecosystem. But with each random death, each accidental roll off a cliffside, each checkpoint drought, that love turned to ash. There is so much beauty and intrigue and diversity of life in Rain World. It’s a pity the game doesn’t want you to see any of it.

I think the best I can offer is that if you like the kinds of games I like (and you can get a sense of that through my author tag) I think you will like and value this.

It’s tremendous at creating its distinct atmosphere and then drawing you deeper in. It’s witty, spooky, and achieves an ideal sense of urgency. Weird, clamant and intriguing, this is well worth a look.

Whatever happens to Afghanistan 11 in the future, it’s sure to be one of my most played w******* (history-steeped military strategy games with influential terrain and plausible, reality-derived unit relationships) this year. I love how it forces me to spin plates. I like the way it uses IEDs and RPGs to transform every vehicle move into an adventure. In a genre dominated by demolition and death, the emphasis it places on construction, and improving the lives of the local populace, is cheeringly discordant. The theme isn’t one I’m naturally drawn to, but the design is so strong, the history so ingeniously utilized, an ‘RPS Recommended’ rosette is inevitable.

Compact, delightful, slightly wonky in terms of difficulty curves for me and I think overall I preferred A Good Snowman simply because I find the track placement sometimes has a bit too much wiggle room for it to feel entirely neat, whereas rolling the snowballs for A Good Snowman stayed as a very tight experience. But! Cosmic Express is just as delightful to look at, and has a really solid core of puzzling to get your brain around!

It’s rare to see such ambitious storytelling and open world roleplaying tied to such a stylish combat system, not to mention the (optional) Souls-like multiplayer elements, shooter tangents, mini-games that punctuate rather than interrupting, and that big ol’ world to explore. You don’t need to have played any of Yoko Taro’s previous games to appreciate Automata, even though it has links to both Drakengard and (of course) the original Nier, but it’ll probably make you keen to seek them out. Me? I’m hoping Platinum get a chance to work with these worlds and words again. A thousand ideas, delivered in rapid succession, backed by action that is the thread that stitches everything together rather than an interruption between one story beat and the next.

As a follow-up to the previous trilogy, it’s a timid and tepid tale too heavily reliant on what came before, too unambitious for what could have been, trapped in a gargantuan playground of bits and pieces to do.

Pixel Privateers knows exactly what it’s doing, and though it’s about as deep as a microwave lasagne, it’s almost impossible not to lose yourself to it for a few evenings.

Despite those reservations, and the sometimes plodding nature of the matches, there’s a lot of brains to Faeria. It’s certainly more interesting to me than vanilla Hearthstone, even if many of its cards lift directly from the big book of CCG mechanics. It’s a game of risk, reward and really bad decisions. It’s many times more thoughtful than Duelyst, which is always my yardstick for card games. But at the same time it is much less climactic, less explosive, and less creative with its minions and their abilities.

Robo Recall makes me a frantic cyclone of destruction, the force of my mechanical slaughter matched only by my sheer ineptitude whenever I try to teleport. It’s a party, basically, mixing the accuracy of lightgun shooting with the physicality of Wii gaming.

Too often, I plunged to my death purely because Styx did not leap to the handhold he either either appeared to be reaching for or was the only logical place to go. It’s not quite so unreliable as to make the game consistently frustrating, but something there is seriously in need of a fix. I learned to speculatively quicksave my way around it, which isn’t ideal but was enough to let me keep thinking that this is a solid pure-breed stealth game.

The occasional strange conflict and the missing alchemy feature aside, Monks & Mystics is undoubtedly one of Crusader Kings 2’s strongest pieces of DLC. It leans heavily towards the game’s roleplaying aspect, its best feature, and produces some of the game’s most bizarre stories. Essentially, you’re playing two characters. You have your public face and your secret one, so there are very few moments where you’re waiting around for something to happen. Indeed, you can almost ignore the traditional intrigue and realm management, if you want, in favour of playing a member of one of these secret sects or hunting them down to save your kingdom.

After years of seeing the same thing, it has become clear that Ubi games cannot function on the strength of their formula alone. And they certainly can’t rely on the strength of your mate Greg. They need some hook and less bait. At the very least they need decent story-telling or likeable characters. However, the principal problem that will forever plague this developer is that the transparency and rigidity of their formula will always hinder them. You can always see it skulking over the surface of the game, like a man in stars and stripes facepaint trying to sneak into a cocaine warehouse. It has been detected: insta-fail.

Loot Rascals is a smart piece of game design executed with delightful style. Even so, it feels as though the mechanics overwhelm all else – I do think it would benefit from offering more structure and goals in order to then earn the daily-play status it clearly desires.

It’s a couple of evening’s worth of exploring a concept and buying a few upgrades for under a tenner. I don’t not recommend it on that basis – the single greatest thing about PC gaming is that it’s a medium which will explore every niche, and I was glad for a brief nose at this one. It is a bit crashy in its current form through, and that paired with the feeling that it needs a little more meat on its bones makes me more inclined to suggest waiting a month or two.

It all works really rather well, and is accompanied by a very pleasing ambient soundtrack, along with nature noises chirping and squawking over the Eno-esque keyboardy tones. And it gets rewardingly difficult, without feeling unfair, or relying on ninja reflexes. (Clearly I have them, but they’re left in their box here.) This is well worth a look, and a good scratch of the head.

Stories Untold is bleak and disturbing, novel and experimental, and most importantly when doing all that, very clever. It’s smarter than you’ll realise, in fact. And why it’s smart is all in the experience of playing, not to be given away in the process of reviewing. A pain in the arse for me, but worth it for you.

There is, throughout, a slight air of artificiality to Torment: Tides of Numenera. It has been made to please a specific crowd, and sometimes that shows; sometimes that comes at the expense of what matters most. This is outweighed entirely by the scale of this accomplishment. Torment is the weird, wordy, wise and wicked roleplaying game we’ve so desired during these long years of heightened spectacle. Not a total triumph, no, but close enough.

I started off really not liking it, I grew to completely love it, and I walk away from it with so much love but a wobble of doubt. It’s by far the most elaborately graphical piece of interactive fiction, but in being so it suggests it’s going to be other things too, and it’s hard (certainly at first) to let go of all that, just let it be what it is. Get there, forget about what else it might be, and for me at least, it got me good.