Where Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy proves most winsome, however, is in its twining of the intergalactic and the terrestrial.

If only House of Ashes were possessed with something malevolent enough to actually scare us; sadly, it commits a litany of sins, none of them original.

We have been given a finely tooled zombie shooter, but it lacks the power of the original. This has less to do with its diminished darkness—Left 4 Dead was a far gloomier ride, lit by the panicked sway of torches—and more to do with us. And with the years. There is plenty to enjoy here, and I heartily recommend it to any who relish killing the dead. But Turtle Rock Studios wants to take us back to another time, and it’s 2 Late 4 That.

Where the studio succeeds—and where Metroid Dread elevates from noble and flawed effort to inspired riff—is in its embrace of the unreachable.

As it happens, though I played for much longer, I had had more than my fill after the first four hours, with no desire to venture back in. Strange to tell, I mourn the very things—the scalable vantages, the unlockable skills—that Ubisoft has left behind for the sake of freshness.

Whether you demand more than comfort from your games will inform the way you see Kena: Bridge of Spirits; is it merely a graphically sumptuous example of design that you wish we would leave behind, or is it a vivifying tribute to a rich precursor legacy?

It offers an otherworldly break from the busyness of life, and, when you do return to Earth, you will do so with a smooth landing, and without stress.

In an odd way, then, Glass Bottom Games has captured the truth of the situation; contrary to its mission of cuteness, it has made a game that feels hollow-boned, caged by unflattering mechanics.

If there is something lacking in Deathloop, it has to do with emotional staying power. As one egghead, in a scratchy projector film, began to unreel the mythology (“Long ago, the isle of Blackreef experienced a cataclysmic event which tore the fabric of”—and so forth), I realised that I couldn’t care less. Blackreef can go hang. I suspect that the only things that will stick with me—the only things coated with enough Residuum to survive a hard reset—are Colt and Julianna. And maybe that isn’t all bad news. I may replay it at some point, and when I do I’ll be even more like Colt, waking on a beach with the vague prickle of familiarity, and the need to break free.

True Colors is the best game in the series since Before the Storm, and it will satisfy your narrative craving for a time.

The lack of challenge in The Artful Escape, not just in its play but in its emotional texture, somewhat shreds the odyssey.

Grasshopper jumbles together the conventions of the hack and slash with a slew of other ideas, and, if it all hangs together, it’s precisely because of the Hang: the relaxed air of logorrhea and pop cultural reference that wafts through it.

There are, of course, multiple endings, and the minutes leading up to each resolution can be flavoured with violence and revelation, or laced with deceit. The question is: Do we care?

The sequel, by definition, cannot pack the same shock, but it arrives bearing new gifts.

If you squint, you could be playing Outriders—with less satisfying shooting, granted, but with a superior world grafted onto the action.

Art of Rally is that rarest of things: the video game as essay. Now and then, the medium throws up chewy cogitations on the nature of choice and of play—usually so inward-gazing as to cause neck ache—and you feel like saying, “Would you kindly shut up, and let me get back to it.” But the developers have instead filed a report on something they love, taking the delicious murk of their favoured sport, scouring it clean, and schooling us lightly in its history. The danger of doing that, of course, is in boring us, but Art of Rally, while a glittering reflection, is anything but dull. To do something dangerous with style may be art, but Funselektor has done something dangerous with art, and arrived at pure style.

Last Stop is most enjoyable when it isn’t going anywhere. The end of each episode may hook you with a cliffhanger, but, when you look back on the game, the story fails to hang around. Instead, the scenes that stick in the memory don’t mean much at all.

In The Ascent, which offers a menu of main and side missions and runs to over twenty hours, there is only one strategy: shoot those in front of you until they are in front of you no longer. True, we get the standard stream of skill points, to feed into our preferred areas: aim, balance, movement speed, etc. And you can upgrade your cyberdeck, the better to melt the circuits of enemies and locked doors. But it all comes back to open-plan gunning, and it takes more than ballistics to persuade us of real freedom.

It’s not quite that I had forgotten how good it was—more that I needed the intervening years to realise it.

The humour is thankfully intact, but the mysteries grow as ornate and heavily threaded as Sholmes’s overcoat.

Wings of Ruin may not make a hardened hunter of you, but nor does it want to. It would rather bring you along for its own wondrous ride.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is bound to the template set forth by The Legend of Zelda, but, rather than offering reflexive glibness, or inking the affair with irony, its critique wraps warmly around its subject, like a scarf.

It’s to Flight School Studio’s credit that, though the clashes at the game’s core left me underwhelmed, the whole thing didn’t feel hollowed-out. This is down to Annika, who sits at its heart and drives it on.

If I didn’t feel the sugary twinge of sentiment in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, it is down to its pastel starkness.

Even if you have your doubts, it’s difficult not to smile at the graphical and cinematic fireworks on display; Sony ordered a parade for the PS5, and Insomniac has served it to us. The arsenal has been upped, and size, it turns out, does matter.

The fun of playing these games, especially these days, lies in the director, Ryuchi Nishizawa, whose approach to genre was one of precise and genial disregard.

If the DNA of Biomutant sparks a re-evolution of some of the genre’s dull spots, perhaps we can forgive the dull spots present here.

Though it comes with a crop of upgrades, and its graphics have been brushed to a smooth shine, what it offers, despite its title, is the joy of the old.