Across its short runtime, Mixtape makes a deep impact. As much as it’s about the story of three friends trying to savour their last moments together, it also speaks to the great promise of growing up and how wide-open, beautiful and terrifying the world once seemed then. It’s about growing as a person and what that can mean for the people left behind. Mixtape is also about the power of music and how it can help with these fears – how it can be a companion, express inner doubts, excitement and ambition, speak to the soul, or just provide an artful escape. In this exploration, Mixtape is simply magical.

Saros understands exactly what motivates players, and presents all the tools you need to experience the joy of triumph against the odds. Even when it presents a frustrating road block, there is always the opportunity to move through it, with persistence key to enjoying the game’s many, ever-twisting challenges.

It’s a tremendous piece of narrative game design.

With its lovely cast of characters, all with their own tiny personalities and intentions, and the freedom to forge friendships, romance and make enemies, it’s a delight to vibe within Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. While this game isn’t as meaty as anticipated, and you’ll need to find your own sense of play, it’s entirely loveable, and easy to invest in.

Despite being in development for several years, Pragmata arrives as a tight, prescient and timely adventure with plenty of thoughts to share about what our tech-infused future might bring.

In a world of swift movement, KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is an opportunity to take a well-earned cosy gameplay break, but one that allows for consistent achievement and a real sense of satisfying progression.

Simplicity can be beautiful. Hidden around the World understands this intensely, delivering an experience that is quiet, cosy and entirely wonderful. For a break from the real world, or just an opportunity to pet some cutesy critters, this is one small journey that’ll take you far away.

Even in our own little fishbowls – whether physical, as in Covid lockdowns, or metaphorical – we must all make the same effort to climb past grief and hopelessness, and work through our own feelings and memories. It’s the only way to be there for our friends and family, and to keep proving our worth – if only to ourselves and nobody else. Raw and realistic, this game is a beautiful tale of overcoming and becoming.

On Nintendo Switch 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder's stages pop with vivid colours, and the action looks fantastic. There's a layer of crispness here that really elevates the colour palette of the original game and its sense of charm. The upgrades make it well worth replaying the adventure, or challenging yourself to collect each and every hidden item.

Longevity is a touchy subject in this day and age, as many live-service titles have struggled to keep up with the gaming landscape. Marathon, for a while, looked to be one of those one-and-done that would be lost to time...Fortunately, Bungie has crafted something that proves that wrong, but looks to get better with each update. While not a single-player haven or easy-to-enter title, what you get is a great multiplayer extraction shooter that many should get in on as soon as possible.

Esoteric Ebb is a delight and a joy. It’s yet more proof that taking yourself less seriously is when the real magic happens.

With a grand scope to this storytelling, and visuals to match, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection is a dazzling experience that surrounds you with its beauty.

While this game isn’t as much of an upgrade as its predecessor was, it still offers plenty for players looking to live out their wrestling dreams.

Pokémon Pokopia is entirely brilliant. You'll have expectations. You'll want a cosy, wholesome adventure, with Pokémon given a chance to shine. Pokopia brushes all of those expectations aside with a confident wave, arriving as an expansive, ambitious life-adventure simulator that's absolutely packed with bright ideas, and the execution to match.

The Reigns system feels perfect for the adaptation, providing clever choices in the quests presented, a housing narrative and the encouragement to forge on. You will fail over and over in your path to success, but with endlessly rewarding progression and always-surprising encounters, the blows are softened...In this game, Geralt embarks on yet another very worthy adventure, with his signature dry humour contributing to funny, ridiculous and heartfelt encounters along the way. Take caution as you travel and you’ll have a warm, lovely time here.

As a requiem for the franchise, this adventure is a layered, thoughtful sequel. It manages to neatly thread two vastly different gameplay tones together, with each of its elements well-designed to create a cohesive, balanced adventure that serves a variety of needs ... With a steady back-and-forth between moments of sheer terror and outright glee, Requiem hauls you along a story that forces you to reckon with its core message: that even against the encroachment of nightmares, the world is worth fighting for.

It’s in the steps of this journey that In the Dark shines, as it delivers a warm, cosy parable about making space for others, even – and perhaps especially – when they find it difficult to accept love.

While there are many layers here – it’s a Paper Mario homage, it’s an original fantasy adventure and it adapts beloved IP – each idea is given time to evolve. There’s a delicate balance required, and developers Sleepy Castle Studio and Wing-It! Creative have managed it very well indeed.

Even advancing at a wicked clip, the DLC’s plot is well-balanced, and it consistently provides new reasons to return as new features unlock and the dark, gothic story unfolds.

The Séance of Blake Manor is a wonder-filled puzzle adventure that wields its horror aesthetic well, telling a dark and consistently enthralling tale while leaving room for player choice and exploration in every outcome. This home may be haunted, but the ghosts make for incredibly good company.

It understands that humans are at the heart of superheroics, and that a magical suit is less important than a desire to uplift everyone around you, and to help them realise their potential. To see past their flaws, to see what they can become. To save the world, one person at a time.

We could all do with the injection of charm that Dogpile offers, delivered so well in a beautiful cartoon art style, and with those all-important, synergistic game mechanics. This is pure, encapsulated delight that’ll leave you buzzing with a happy glow.

In its best moments, Skate Story is just an unbelievably cool game – and that totally makes up for the slightly more tedious sections.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is not complicated. It’s an old 90s arcade game but designed with a one-time payment in mind rather than needing a constant stream of coins. It’s relatively easy to finish but the moment-to-moment experience of playing it is hugely satisfying. More than anything, it makes me want to pick up a huge anthology of fun old Marvel comics and enjoy some convoluted plotting.

This is a game that understands its purpose so clearly. The narrative may borrow occasionally from common tropes, but as each chapter dawns, Goodnight Universe feels more and more like its own thing, with clarity in its intentionality, and how it invites players into its narrative.

Overall, the mix of these five new mini-games makes The Jackbox Party Pack 11 an incredibly strong Jackbox experience. There’s a wonderfully cohesive style in this particular pack, and each mini-game feels well-designed for fun, party-based antics. It also hits all the activities that make a Jackbox game fun – there’s a drawing game, a trivia game, a funny writing game and more. It’s all in service of a multiplayer party experience that absolutely brims with a bright joy.

Metaphors aside, Death by Scrolling is undiluted fun. It’s simple enough that anyone can play – but not so simple that everyone can survive.

If you’re somebody with a knack for code-cracking, whether solo or in a team, Escape Simulator 2 is a wonderful translation of real-world escape rooms, with strong themes pairing with tightly-designed puzzles for an experience that’s well worth tackling. Keep your head on straight, and your brain waves humming, and electrifying mysteries await.

In this mix – a subtle, clever humour, a loose but engaging story, and an ample variety of choice in every step – The Outer Worlds 2 is an impressive achievement. It’s a game that frog-leaps its predecessor easily and simply, with a variety of systems all working together to serve a brilliant choose-your-own-adventure experience that allows players to feel like an intrinsic, influential part of its world.

Whether you’re keen on the game to improve your fitness (and it certainly helps there), or you’re just looking for an excuse to groove along to a thumping beat, Just Dance 2026 Edition will serve you very well. After all, we can always do with more excuses to groove.

In a sea of other modern games beholden to the formula, Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a bright, creative new franchise entry that is bold, confident and charts its own wonderful course.

There’s even a seemingly Persona-inspired Velvet Room-type setting in this game – a go-between dimension where you can spend time raising Digimon on a farm, or spelunking into new virtual dungeons...It all adds up to a game that feels incredibly ambitious, wild, and free. Media.Vision has created an adaptation of Digimon that grasps the core of the franchise, and stretches it in every direction. Any idea the team had, it was absorbed into Time Stranger – and the game is all the better for it. It’s constantly surprising, and incredibly creative.

It’s not entirely revolutionary, but with a sleekness in its racing, and plenty of ways to shake up the status quo, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds arrives as a bright, creative new kart racing game, with plenty of charm to make an impact.

Ghost of Yotei is a game of great beauty and great violence, its disparate parts weaved together in a sweeping, lush narrative about the transformative power of revenge. This is a journey that treads in the footsteps of Ghost of Tsushima, while charting its own course, telling a winding tale about a warrior-ghost who wanders a harsh, unforgiving world in search of solace.

Baby Steps has given me some of the best – and worst – moments I’ve had in a game in quite some time, and I felt richer for both the good and the bad experiences I had with it.

LEGO Voyagers is a great, small, relatively straightforward co-op experience. It’s something you could play with someone who has never finished a game before or your gamer buddy who finished Elden Ring five times, and both of them would likely enjoy the experience equally.

Borderlands 4 is a wildly enjoyable romp, with a raft of systems that work smoothly together. It's not without friction, in terms of its high challenge level, but it all serves a greater purpose, feeding into a cohesive and mature narrative about escaping tyranny.

It makes the puzzles in Little Problems a real challenge to solve, but they tickle your mind as you progress. While some solutions are simple, others are head-scratching, and in the mix of clues you’ll eventually find your answers resolving. It’s a wonderful, satisfying process, and one that gives Little Problems a real spark. This game doesn’t do much different from others in the puzzle-mystery genre, but with its warmth, and the depth of its many challenges, it’s a wonderful adaptation that’s well worth playing for puzzle enthusiasts.

For organisers, and anyone looking to bask in the glow of Unpacking, Whisper of the House is a wonderful, cosy organisation sim that shines, especially when it’s cute, strange, and unsettling.

Whether approaching the game for the first time with this release, or returning for its add-on Star-Crossed Worlds DLC, there’s so much to this adventure. It’s bright, bouncy, and brilliant, and now even more so with its new features. Modern platformers don’t get much better than this.

It’s so satisfying to move through this world, and to lay waste to Ruse’s army with your incredible moveset, that I can’t help but hope this is just the beginning of Joe Musashi’s comeback.

Is This Seat Taken? is a game that succeeds on this simplicity, with a strong core idea well-realised in a minimalist art style, and siloed puzzles you can tackle at your own pace. It’s never too complex or meanly challenging, but provides a smorgasbord of light-hearted and moreish challenges with little sparks of humour that keep you charmed by the experience...It does a lot with very little, arriving as a wonderfully well-formed, confident puzzle game with a sense of freshness, style, and pizzazz that marks it out as exceptional.

Whether you’re going pedal to the metal, or just popping in for a casual race or two, Mario Kart World delivers in spades.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Cyberpunk 2077 on Nintendo Switch. Having played the original, pre-patched version of the game, I was anticipating some elements of trouble, or at the very least, severe graphical downgrades that would impact my personal enjoyment. To my delight, I got nothing of the sort. This really is an excellent port, and one that reveals just how much better and more robust the Nintendo Switch 2 is, compared to its predecessor. It’s a great sign for the future, too. Third-party developers should be encouraged by this port, knowing the Switch 2 really is capable of handling massive AAA adventures, with only some caveats needed to deliver a good-looking, good feeling experience for players.

Plaza is a game of tight little systems all working together, to create a joyous mini-game collection that brims with good vibes. For those who played the Corner Shop games, it’s a nostalgic return to a simpler time. For anyone who hasn’t, it’s an ultra-cosy experience with enough cuteness and novelty to be entirely endearing.

While it doesn’t feel entirely essential – really, it’s for those who enjoy the supernatural side of the game, or just want a pretty new town to roam in – Innisgreen and everything that comes with it gives Enchanted by Nature such a lovely sense of charm. If you’ve ever dreamed of fairies and meadows, it’s a simple, wonderful delight.

While a loose structure and light story elements means there’s a lack of push for progress, Donkey Kong Bananza allows that feeling, and provides ample reasons to take your time, to smash everything in sight, and to see what you might uncover. It’s best played without a sense of time limit, to open your eyes to the possibilities of your journey.