There’s no doubt that The Red Exile – Survival Horror is well put together and it does deliver an interesting concept and thrill ride, but there are plenty of other games in this genre that provide a more diverse experience.

The Bridge Curse: Road to Salvation delivers a chilling and superb bit of horror storytelling, complete with some fun jump scares.

Cats and the Other Lives is clever and inventive. The whole concept of having a cat as the protagonist and finder of the narrative is excellent. But you always get the feeling that this cat isn't worried about how things play out, acting as a bystander to the events which fold.

It may not be for everyone with the mix of death and a cartoony world possibly proving to be a hard mix. Maybe the price is a bit high too, but you’ll mostly find an amazing adventure to be had should you take in The Oregon Trail.

When all the aspects of Call of the Wild: The Angler come together, the resulting mix is actually a pleasant place to spend a few hours. Driving to a new lake, having a few casts and seeing what you can find is remarkably zen; a very calming experience.

We’re still riding that feeling - the feeling of having zero expectations, only for Ashina: The Red Witch to grab hold of our attention for hours. Ah, if only more games surprised us like this.

The mission to bring Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition from PC to Xbox is a successful one. Age of Empires IV may not make history buffs out of the uninitiated, but it is a compelling enough entry for those who are interested in the genre or the subject matter.

Adore is simple by design but this means enjoyment is spread more thinly the longer you play. Its depth of customisation options and range of items to acquire will keep your interest for a while, but before long Adore can feel like a little bit of a grind.

Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy is a co-op puzzling masterclass encapsulated by a wonderfully charming world. If you’ve ever played Trine before, it’s more of the same brilliance in regards to creative platforming puzzles and gorgeous environments.

The Let’s Build a Zoo: Aquarium Odyssey campaign is an excellent extension of an already brilliant game. It’s fantastic how much freshness the aquatic theme brings to the table in terms of tasks, buildings, and decorative pieces.

The intro promises some future dramatic, potentially even salacious turns, but not one of the four different stories delivers. It’s all too tentative. In the end, Embraced by Autumn could have done with just a little more confidence and sass.

The excellent on-field action in Madden NFL 24 is badly let down by the performance elsewhere. The menus are in desperate need of an update, and the shallow modes like Madden Ultimate Team and Superstar mode offer little in the way of variation.

The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is a free-wheeling, surrealist graphic adventure that’s so beautiful that sometimes we just want to sit back and admire.

Colour-matching aside, Overdriven Evolution is a beast. It’s one of the most over-the-top shooters we’ve played, lighting up like a pinball table as you play. But it’s also stacked, absolutely full to the brim with game modes and challenges

Beautiful Sakura: Surfing Club is perhaps the most cynical, half-hearted attempt at weedling £10 out of someone’s pockets, and no amount of baby-oil and AI-generated creepy-fingers can justify its existence. If this is the future of gaming then stop the bus, because we’re getting off.

There’s a high chance that you’ll find the controls of Ultimate General: Gettysburg to be a big issue; one that will affect your enjoyment of the game over its campaign running time. If you can see through that though, then this is a tightly focused game with some brilliant AI and battle tactics to be enjoyed.

Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition for the Xbox Series X|S is a bit of a strange beast. The narrative is engaging as it meanders to an end goal, but the journey from A to B is pretty abstract.

I could have done without the stealth sections but if you are truly after a new experience that takes you to a far away land, Chants of Sennaar will be right up your street.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is well worth a look. I mean, what have you got to lose? Except possibly your life?

Moving Out 2 is a cracking game. Single player is tougher, no doubt about it, but the game really comes alive in multiplayer. With a host of levels, and a lot of objectives within those levels, Moving Out 2 is a game that you'll have a lot of fun playing.

We can’t wave the red flag fast and hard enough: DPS Idle is not ready to play - not by a long shot. Its progression is broken, and - more heinously - the purchases aren’t working either. It might be worth trying as a demo for ‘what might be’, once fixes have been applied, but it’s otherwise a waste of time. Some people would say that about idle games as a whole but, in this instance, they’d be right.

Cheap and cheerful, Running Fable isn’t one that will appeal to single players or those looking for narrative. It's all about hitting the mean online streets, having quick fun with others to see who comes out with bragging rights.

EVERSPACE 2 will hold your interest well. It’s likely to be a game that you go back to, time and time again, working with new loot and trying a variety of different approaches.

There’s no doubting the importance of what Acceptance is trying to get across, but it lacks tact. The concept is a clever one, with a well-constructed atmosphere surrounding it and a selection of intriguing characters to boot. But focusing on the gameplays aspects and it’s incredibly boring.

It’s difficult to weigh up episode three of The Expanse: A Telltale Series, because the positives are almost totally cancelled out by the negatives.

Strike Force Kitty on Xbox swallowed up our attention for hours on end, and those hours were great.

Shootvaders The Beginning takes one too many leafs out of Space Invaders’ book. It makes each level near identical to the last, just with more incessant bullets coming your way.

For some, Family Man will feel like a delicious challenge. For us, it made for a dark, relentless struggle that impressed with its scale, but was a few postcodes away from fun. Often, that was because bugs and glitches were waiting for us with baseball bats.

By slapping on a time limit and throwing crows at us every ten seconds, Agriculture started losing the simple joys that make farming games great. Nothing we were growing had any real purpose. We weren’t building up to something better. And worst of all, we were feeling on edge rather than relaxed.

Hexapoda brings the retro shooter to the insect world, and the result is creepy, polished and a whole lot of fun. It finds the sweetest of sweet spots between difficult and possible, and hands you some ridiculous weapons to blow those sweet spots up. It’s well worth a flutter.

For Nova Strike to succeed, it needs to be a little less demanding. It needs to reward just a tad more. It needs to ease off every once in a while, letting the player feel like they are in control. Perhaps it's the random nature of how the levels and chapters have been put together, but there's little room for manoeuvre with this one.

Two Point Campus: Medical School continues its excellent run, this time taking us back to where it all began which despite potential risks, pays off handsomely.

Figuratively and literally, Starfield is the next evolution for a Bethesda game; taking that framework and that sandbox before applying it 1000 times over. There are memorable characters, quests and locations, but these help you tell your own journey too as you forge your own path and create your own plots within this unfathomably large sandbox.

Anyone who cares about the rich history of games as an art form needs to play The Making of Karateka. This is a five-hour journey with decades' worth of impactful stories baked into it.

Catan - Console Edition: The Helpers ends up being a safe but welcome first expansion to the base board game. It’s a touch on the expensive side, and it would benefit from usability improvements to turn-length and Quick Games, but Catan fans (Cafans?) will find they get a lot of enjoyment from trading for this one.

The tracks are cleverly made and it runs well, but Smurfs Kart needed far more than that to register a scoring position.

What we’re left with is half a game. Gnomes Garden 8: Return of the Queen stops abruptly halfway, thanks to a critical save bug, and it’s a flip of a coin whether you will emerge with your save game in one piece afterwards. At the moment it’s a no-brainer - don’t dare play this. Wait and see if 8floor address the issue.

Puzzle by Nikoli W Kakuro is inelegant, and far from the quality we expect from the masters at Nikoli. We’re going to leave it for only the rainiest of rainy days.

Quake II is a great value package, well priced and showered with love and care. It may not go on playlist rotation, but it’ll be hard to turn down a game of Quake II when asked.

While there are some interesting RPG frills around the edges of Envasion, this is a Space Invaders-like shooter that lacks speed, bombast and variety. Envasion, sadly, is one to evoid.

Cube Airport is not very innovative, so even though it won’t take much longer than an hour to finish, it feels tedious.

If you fancy yourself as a tank commander, fill your boots with Chrome Wolf. But the controls are a big stumbling block. Finding yourself getting stuck on a corner, before being thrust into yet another fight, soon takes the shine off.

What a strange experience playing Cat Souls was. Our interest curve would look a little like a ski slope. We loved the pitch of using the titular ‘souls’ as platforms, yet Cat Souls does next to nothing with it, leaving us deflated. But over the levels, we realised what had happened. The designers had been distracted by other ideas, as if a sudden laser pointer dot had appeared.

If you feel like you’ve seen most of what puzzles in games have to offer, you might want to try Teslagrad Remastered.

If you want to brainlessly toss away an hour or two of your evening, then Hidden Shapes: Cat Realm + Trick or Cats is where it’s at. You’ll emerge from the session afterwards feeling like all of the mental knots and tensions have been massaged into nothingness.

Sure, The Rabbit Crazy Adventure is functional, and we managed to cross the finish line, but that’s no measure of a good game. It’s about as crazy as those people who say ‘you have to be crazy to work here’.

I’ve loved the twist on the standard chess mechanics that comes with Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. It feels like a different game each and every time you play, challenging but not impossible to grasp.

There's some cheap and easy Xbox Gamerscore on offer if you must boost your numbers, but otherwise Zombie Derby is a game that'll be over in an evening, swiftly removed from the hard-drive thereafter.

Cassette Beasts might not be as immediate as a certain pocket-monster game on another platform, but its depths are more cavernous. If you’ve been aching for a beast-battler that treats you as an adult, well, what’s stopping you? Go collect ‘em all.

Spectrolite is fun in short sprints, but there isn’t yet enough content to give the game the legs it requires for marathon sessions. The parkour mechanics are tight and precise while the difficulty is staunch yet rewarding; just don’t expect too much in the way of accessibility options.

RIDE 5 is perhaps the most welcoming motorbike racing game to date, while retaining the exciting and challenging gameplay the series is famed for.

Death Becomes You is a great visual novel that improves and becomes extra twisted with every playthrough. And that’s crucial for a game offering so many possible endings for you to reach.

The finished quality of Aery - Flow of Time is a shame, because you can see the game underneath. It’s clearly better than what came before, but you’ll need a swatter for all the bugs that obscure the view.

You can slice, shoot and smash your way through enemies to your heart’s content in Broforce Forever, in an over the top romp that does just about enough to avoid weariness setting in.

If you like cats, enjoy hidden object games, and want to hand some cash to charity, then consider A Castle Full of Cats to be a hearty recommendation.

We can’t help comparing the £4.19 Fruit Adventure with the 79p shovelware we often get on the Xbox Store. There really is nothing in it: in the equivalent of a blindfolded taste test, we would have told you that they’re one and the same.

The key takeaway with F1 Manager 2023 is that your enjoyment of the game will differ immensely depending on your knowledge of F1. What is here, as long as you are a real F1 nerd, is capable of captivating for hours on end. However, with niggling issues within Race Moments, a lack of sense of progression, and the engineering side difficult to get to grips with, F1 Manager 2023 is the nichest of niche titles.

If you enjoyed the first Blasphemous, then getting hold of Blasphemous 2 is a given. Everything that was great about the first game has been built on in the second, with nearly all issues addressed.

Dust & Neon is a twin-stick shooter that has something about it. Pretty unique with how it goes about things, the tease of a new upgrade, another notch on a skill tree, or a weapon to best all others, will see you tempted back to this one over and over again.

Quantum: Recharged feels like a disappointing callback to some of the earlier Recharged games. It is a one-trick pony in terms of its basic premise, leaving little room to modify in a modern remake

As an experiment - something that scratches the itch of whether games can work with one button - One Button Games 5-in-1 might be worth £4.19 to find out for yourself. As an exercise in accessibility, it’s noble and that price tag will have appeal.

You’ll certainly enjoy your time with the crew of The Red Marley in Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. The challenge is real, make no mistake, but using the different crew members and finding the sweet spot in terms of powers does keep you retrying.

Episode two of The Expanse: A Telltale Series is a remarkable improvement on the opener. The zero-g section is exciting and tests your stealthy skills, while the storytelling is slightly better thanks to the voiceover quality and a worthwhile conversation.

WrestleQuest is a great RPG adventure that’s oozing with personality. Full of exciting grappling, it’s absolutely a love letter to a bygone era, but it also works for those unfamiliar with the wrestling business, thanks to a cavalcade of quirky characters and eccentric drama.

Stray is a masterclass in escapism gaming. Taking a rather unusual perspective doesn’t stop this being a joyous experience from start to finish, irrespective of whether you are a cat person or not.

This is it. World of Solitaire is the Solitaire game on Xbox that so many of us have been waiting for. It comes with intuitive controls that suit the pad, no unnecessary frills, and five of the best Solitaire variants that you can play. Layer on a neat battle pass-like system (don’t worry, there’s no whiff of MTX here), and you have pure Solitaire goodness.

If you like your games to come with a slower, more relaxing pace, then Scarf will happily tick boxes. The world is a pleasant one and the gameplay is simple, but it all comes together to deliver enough of a challenge.

Whilst A Song of Ice and Dust may be the most fun DLC for Saints Row 2022, there are still question marks over it in terms of length. The five missions can be completed in under two hours and the new location offers little you haven’t seen hundreds of times already.

Yeah yeah, it should have been baked into the main game, but as an EP of extra songs go, LOUD: My Trip to Japan is a rather welcome improvement on the LP.

There is a charm to Strange Horticulture, even with the occult themes and downtempo music, but only if you can stick it out long enough.

Reverie: Sweet As Edition is not going to set the world alight, but apart from Shalnor Legends: Sacred Lands this is the closest you’ll find to an old skool Zelda game on the Xbox. It deserves some recognition for that alone.

Aery - Heaven & Hell ends up in neither Heaven or Hell. It’s snugly in Limbo. Just as we thought we were going to soar up to the Pearly Gates with some high-fidelity visuals and pressure-free objectives, we come crashing back down with repeated levels, shoddy storytelling and a frustrating bug

Fluffy Milo delivers a wholesome Sokoban puzzler that’s easy enough for most to get to grips with. The difficulty curve is absolutely spot on and you’ll seldom feel any puzzle is beyond solving as long as it’s approached logically.

If you’re pining for Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and are willing to accept a tribute act that is low on peripherals and high on tunes that are inspired by rock and metal hits of the past forty years or so, then maybe you should hitch a ride on LOUD: My Road To Fame.

Maybe this is not a game of the year contender, but it’s probably a good starting point for the new direction and rejuvenation of Double Dragon.

Warlander is best in its first few games, so give this overblown MOBA a go, experience its best moments and make your choice. Just be prepared for shallowness to bite after the first few hours.

Oceanhorn 2 - Knights of the Lost Realm might be the perfect choice for those looking to get their teeth into a family friendly adventure.

Common’Hood provides you with all the tools you need to craft a beautiful world with a vibrant community, but it needs a bit more than sandpaper to smooth out the rough edges.

Marble It Up! Ultra is a game that will have you staying up late at night, chasing leaderboard times and going all out for bragging rights.

Binarystar Infinity is a demanding but rewarding little shooter that fans of the genre will lap up. It’s not particularly innovative, outside of the minimalist aesthetic, and it could definitely have added more moves and weapons to its central spaceship, but it gets the important things right.

If you are ready for an epic, third person action adventure, then look no further than Atlas Fallen.

Ultimately, Potata: fairy flower has plenty to enjoy; a solid platformer that is both challenging and fun in the same breath.

Whether you simply jump into a new Franchise, or play a quick tournament with all the modern features you would expect, Legend Bowl may not be a Madden killer, but it can stand toe-to-toe with the licensed franchise.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical is as flawed as its characters, but there wasn’t a moment we weren’t revelling in its company.

Despite not breaking new ground, Sea Horizon is a thoroughly enjoyable card based strategy game that offers both challenge and adventure.

Bright Lights of Svetlov is cheap to purchase and over fairly quickly - but occasionally that’s all you want in a game. It’s helped along by delivering an interesting and intriguing short story about a certain time in history, in a country that many won’t know much about.

Save Koch is a hard game to recommend. The random nature of the procedurally generated events in the city ensures you will want to take in multiple playthroughs, but even then, you may struggle to understand what is needed for success.

FRONT MISSION 1st: Remake proves that they don’t make them like they used to. There are a couple of issues with the UI, mainly it not being clear, and it must be said that going into battle against the world will see you taught a big old lesson. But that only proves what a hard game this is.

All in all, the Working Hard Collection is something of a success. It’s a generous bundle of two games, fifty levels in each, for less than a fiver. It’s two flavours of one game, but the flavours are distinctive enough that one of them will tickle your tastebuds more than the other.

Dead Ground has a lot of cool tower upgrades, skills and guns to show off; perhaps a lot more than you’d expect for under a fiver. Sadly, the gameplay slams on the brakes before you even get to experience them.

In the end, Mr. Brocco & Co.’s message of ‘eat your veggies’ gets undermined. Our kids will tell us that broccoli is the least flavoursome of anything we could put on their plate, and Mr. Brocco & Co. proves it by being bland, soggy platforming mush.

If you’re motivated by highscore tables and have three friends who reminisce about Motorstorm, then WildTrax Racing is just about worth it.

Come to Roads of Time 2: Odyssey having played none of the other games from 8floor, and you might be in for a small surprise. It’s a much of a muchness, as levels play out almost identically, and we’d challenge anyone to remain interested by level 50.

The Snow Fable: Mystery of the Flame has the generosity of spirit to create a waterfall of matches, when all you’ve done is matched three yellow gems in a line. And that’s its secret: it keeps rewarding you for doing very little indeed, and that was precisely what we were in the mood for.

With a good few hours of play found in the main quests, you'll not go too wrong by joining the adventures of Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara.

Venice 2098 has surprised in many ways. I initially thought it might be too depressing, pushing a tricky subject matter concerned with climate change. But the game is full of hope and humour, as well as concern surrounding the human spirit. You will have to get used to the camera though.

Don’t write off The Expanse: A Telltale Series yet, however a mediocre first episode is far from ideal.

If you like a Tactics game, Cross Tails is one of the better ones of recent times. With a little more variation in the mission types this could have been right up there.