It may be obsessive and uncompromising, but it’s also the best to ever do it.

Oddly, The Invincible is at its best when you are like its simple automatons, following instructions to complete a clear objective. However, as soon as your instructions become unclear, you can find yourself walking in loops or frozen part-way through an action, unsure of what to do. The game is a great example of how engaging first-person narratives can be, but also how any missteps or unearned moments can eject you from the head of the narrator, leaving you cold and confused.

Ultimately though, the game is quick and breezy enough that none of these shortcomings have the chance to become truly grating, and the writing and visuals are strong enough on their own to carry you through Jala’s little reconciliation saga. In a genre that is frequently achingly white and straight, it’s a balm just to have something that is so resolutely neither. And it’s downright exciting to play something that, in place of overblown fantasy worldbuilding, is more interested in reflecting cultures, demographics, and relatable struggles that rarely get a spotlight in mainstream games.

It's so full of love and pretty reveals, and empty dwarf pubs that feel hand crafted, and overheard orc conversations where they bitch about goblins. If you have a group of friends that you already play games like this with, then I'd say it's well worth bringing campfires and cosy stew to as many corners of Moria as you can.

Jusant is a very lovely game that asks you to meet it half way. It's worth the leap.

So yes, Song Of Nunu won't win any prizes for ingenuity or platforming prowess, but it is very handsomely made, and I had a lovely, heartwarming time with it. It certainly feels like a step up from Rime, the game that helped put Tequila Works on the map for these kinds of soulful adventures, even if it doesn't wrench quite so violently at your heartstrings. If nothing else, it will remind you of simpler, perhaps happier days when every third-person adventure game wasn't just another grim Soulslike you had to endure, and that there's still plenty of joy and warmth to be found in a story about a boy looking for his mum with his big yeti dog friend. Whether you like League Of Legends or not, it's another notch we can add to the recent 'good character platformer' list.

Even if Remedy's spellbinding undertaking does eventually come undone at the final hurdle, it remains a horror game unlike any other. Here's hoping Remedy don't suffer their own bout of writer's block as they continue their journey into their burgeoning Connected Universe.

Technically, you can just go ahead and unlock everything in the settings menu if you'd rather avoid these kinds of frustrations, but for me at least, that rather deflates any impetus to keep playing Subpar Pool in the first place. Any sense of structure and challenge is instantly lost when you don't have anything to work towards anymore, so I'd recommend playing it as intended if you're keen on giving it a shot. There is certainly a lot to like here, but as time's gone on, I find myself less and less keen to come back to it. The pool tables are all a little too similar to feel truly different in longer game sessions, and the challenges themselves come just a little too slowly to make it feel fresh and exciting. The allure of the googly-eyed cue ball is strong, but for me, it pales in comparison to the soul-hooking stare of Holedown's hypnotic worm lad.

Despite my misgivings, I think plenty of people with the right mindset and fast-twitch muscle fibers will enjoy Ghostrunner 2 and its demands. There's a lot of variety on offer here, whether that lies in options to slice foes or just veering between bikes and cyber realms and large areas. But for the rest of us who aren't as enamoured by relentless trial and error challenges, I'd find it a difficult one to recommend.

I did have one minor gripe when Urbo first launched, in that it was sometimes hard to discern the exact level of particular buildings, but a recent update has fixed this so you can always see exactly what's in play. So really, I have no complaints about this whatsoever. Neat! If I was being nitpicky, I'd still say that Dorf is probably the more nourishing puzzle game for me, what with its quests and discoveries and near-endless map sizes to play about in, but if you're more of a cerebral Threes-type, then Urbo will fit right into your regular puzzle regimen. It really is a lovely little thing, and a very chill way to while away a dark and rainy afternoon.

I haven't had the performance issues everyone's been fretting about, for what that's worth. It ran absolutely fine on “medium” with my usual anti-blur options, until I put everything up to "high" again for screenshots and it became both uglier and much slower. Colossal Order have been quick to issue acknowledgements and a second review build of graphical fixes, and “intend for these performance improvements to be delivered at or very shortly after launch”. But glitches that only happen in fancy mode matter little to me, and will probably come out in the wash.

Repetitive combat in World Of Horror can't entirely mar a unique, stylish and layered horror adventure that makes you want to play more the more that you play.

So aye. Like any stew, there's a lot piled in. But the principle ingredients are filling and simple. Endless Dungeon's core design, if we want to break it right down, is made of the following stuffs: turret, door, nest, money. There is nothing in these elements, or even in the "verbs" of the game, to make it unique. Hundreds of games use the same ingredients, even aim for the same taste (lighthearted Aliens). But Amplitude's recipe here, their choice of spices, results in a uniquely pleasing dish. They sprinkle the turrets, they keep the nests chunky, they bake the money into the doors. (God, I'm hungry.) The result is an absolutely stacked dish that roguelike-likers will be very happy to gorge on. [RPS Bestest Bests]

And yet... I recorded all these complaints with a detached sort of "hmm" rather than major frustration. It's one of the most low-stress strategy games I've played this year, and its detail comprehensible once you've picked up the stone it's hiding under. It's a combination of engaging and undemanding that grand strategy seldom manages, and has enough Trek stuff to work for someone who's seen most of the serieseses but only once, and can only sometimes tell if something's a reference to an episode or wholly new. How the boon of such a familiar setting will stand against the weight of that setting's expectations I do not know, but if you go in wanting an enjoyable game that you kind of already know, Infinite will be a pleasant little surprise.

I really want to like Lords Of The Fallen more than I do. Sure, its bosses might not be spectacular or its maps brimming with character, but thrills abound when you defeat a tough enemy or finally poke your head into a crumbled house and see the cosy light of a Vestige. Moreso when you shine your magic lantern on a wall and it fizzles away to reveal a secret passage or a levitating platform that looks like the Adams Family's kitchen island. The lantern almost elevates it into special territory! And at times, there are flashes of a grand adventure to cleanse a kingdom of rot. But there are just too many little annoyances that prevent the journey and its umbral counterpart from ascending into Soulslike royalty.

There is so much I adore about Saltsea Chronicles. The characters, the setting, the look of the damn thing. It's all absolutely wonderful, and I would gladly make several more roundtrips with the De Kelpie crew without batting an eyelid (although I will make a stop at cat island Los Gatos every. Damn. Time. Mark my words). It's just… that ending. It's a sticking point I can't quite resolve, causing that dreaded FOMO net to creep back in and loom eerily around my shoulders. Perhaps that's the point. Perhaps my desire for a heroic and triumphant final flourish simply doesn't fit within the confines of what this ragtag bunch of ordinary folk can realistically achieve. Perhaps, it's a story for another time.

Sofia have made the absolute best of a bad situation here, and I’ve had a good, freeing time taking part in what basically feels like an interactive design conversation. You’ll probably want to, you know, play something fun though.

But the structure is repetitive and frustratingly random. Strategy devolves into grinding through the same side missions to perk everyone up so they can endure main missions, which quickly repeat a grind of scouring the map for resources, hoping enemy placement and movement won't screw you over, and then slogging through too many enemies with very irritating attacks in a system where just one or two lost actions can doom a whole mission. It's far from a write-off, and some players will love the exact elements I hated, but I've mostly been left with mounting disappointment and frustration at a design that lets down a very likeable game.

I think my CS days are behind me. It's an FPS that requires a lot from you, and those after a shooter you can sort of switch your mind off to should look elsewhere. But if you're a newcomer, lapsed player, or veteran, I think CS2 offers up thrilling matches that can twist and turn after a smart play or a remarkable shot. Many will find it's rather close to CS:GO with neat upgrades to grenades and extra pop to maps, while another portion of the community might just want CS:GO back. Right now CS2 is a great iterative update to a tried and true formula... that's missing an awful lot of fan favourite stuff. Give it time, though, and I think it's onto something pretty special.

Mirage takes the good bits from what the series has become in decades of not being a stealth RPG, polishes them up a bit, and puts them together with some of the best bits from the early games in the series, in a neat little package. It's smaller, sure, but you don't miss out on anything, and when you've finished you don't feel like you wasted any time. This is how big companies should make better games.

It's also just very nice to look at. You can zoom right in to watch the trains pass one another, loaded with goods, and horses galloping along by the completed tracks. It's a bit like going to a model railway, except one you built yourself. You want to build beautiful railways, you want to build a luxury passenger train that winds around a mountain path rather than smashes down it with a steep bridge. You want to make your great design part of the landscape - there's a level in a forest that rewards you for not destroying any trees (and each tree destroyed in the forest stage costs money). Station To Station is a short but lovely puzzle game, perfectly balanced, and you'll play it in pursuit of a more beautiful engine. [RPS Bestest Bests]

As someone who doesn't usually care for puzzle games, Cocoon gripped me the entire way through its seven-hour-ish runtime - thumbs up for a nice, compact game. Its world-hopping gimmick sees you inhabit orbs laid out with such precision it makes each problem clear, and has you experiment with literal worlds-within-worlds as if it's second nature. Anyone can take on the responsibility of insect lad and gain the confidence to construct a backpack swimming with marbles, all while going on a grand adventure that feels like you're liberating a sequence of CPU cores from a wriggling virus. What are you waiting for? Hop in.

As James gets closer to his destination, he accepts it as a one way trip. His morose sense of duty starts to slip away, and he finds himself liberated. He starts enjoying the catharsis and doom of it all. If you get yourself similarly attuned to its sometimes abrasive nature, you’ll find that El Paso, Elsewhere turns into a strangely sad and sweet odyssey, borrowing heavily from similar works but ultimately creating something deeply unique. A cosmic third-person shooter from a forgotten age that will make you dwell on your worst break-up.

In short, Mineko's Night Market never coheres into an enjoyable whole. There's always at least one part that grates against another - and frequently it's not just one thing, but everything rubbing you up the wrong way and pulling you in different directions. Being the local errand kid is a pretty thankless task at the end of the day, and the more time you try and invest in this game, the poorer you feel at the end of it.

Payday 3 isn't not fun. The shooting is fine, the mastery of a crime feels good, the knowing where to go when and escaping with bags of ill-gotten gains! But Payday 3's level complexity requires a bit more active co-operating than your average 'go here, shoot thing' sort of co-op. The current skill gating also makes it harder to succeed unless you've already played quite a lot, which works against welcoming new players. As such, it makes it harder to have fun with strangers, which is arguably death for an online co-op game. It's not a massive plus, anyway.

And it gets a lot right. When Phantom Liberty was first announced, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't continuing V's story onwards from the end of Cyberpunk 2077. Given all that ending entails, or can entail, I couldn't see how a mid-game expansion could add anything of narrative significance. I needn't have worried. One of Phantom Liberty's great strengths is that, despite Dogtown's secure borders, it isn't ringfenced in any way from the rest of the story. You can leave Dogtown midway to take on a few missed sidequests, or give your gal Judy a call to discuss what you got up to with the President the night before. The result is an expansion that reflects, refracts and enriches the game around it. If you've never played Cyberpunk 2077 before and buy the expansion, Phantom Liberty is an absurdly lush, thrilling, 20-hour-long side quest; if you have played it before, it's an unmissable opportunity to check in on old friends, and to make a few new ones, in Night City. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Is Lies Of P Bloodborne just Bloodborne with puppets, then? I say again, no! Lies Of P is a fitting ode and a definite must play for fans of From's dark epic, just don't expect it to match Bloodborne's supernatural cinema.

In short: good fightin', rushed writin'. The storytelling is markedly more generic than the previous game (even that was a bit too Marvel for me), and I'm less in love with the character design overall. I miss the big ringed chrome arms of Jax, for instance, the skittering sharpness of D'vorah's spikey limbs, or Kollector's blessedly messed-up arm anatomy (he's not playable so far). So for franchise-agnostic fighting game dweebs, it might not capture the imagination with the same might as its predecessor. But otherwise there's enough klassicism to Mortal Kombat 1 (and enough fan servicey callbacks) to please the diehards. A totally acceptable (akkceptable?) follow-up, provided the online kombatants follow through.