Taro’s approach is of a restless rarity; he swaps genres as though trying to scratch an itch.

In that image lies the appeal—and for some the off-putting twinge—of Oddworld: a bleak and black-hearted concoction, laced with snickering humour and shot through with hope.

The best time I had with the game was a ten-minute stretch that contained (a) no crashes or bugs, (b) the right level and world tier—essentially, a measure of enemy toughness—and (c) a harmony of tactics, sorcery, and gunfire.

If only Naka, staying true to form, had given the whole thing a dose of high speed; his work only holds together when it hurtles past our eyes, growing vivid with velocity.

There is enough fun available for those who are happy to muddle through, and the winning combination of Wirebug and Palamute adds enough zip to each fight that you can swing over much of its more intricate baggage. Whether that counts for or against the game, I still haven’t decided; fortunately, no small measure of its power lies outside the combat, patrolling the glittering plains, and down in Kamura, amid the cats. It’s more than steel and hunters.

The puzzles compel, while the narrative stalls, and there is something worthy in that mismatch. I only wish that breakup at its core yielded something worth holding on to.

It’s worth pointing out that few other studios have the confidence to take this approach to horror: not to jolt you with sudden frights or to ration your ammunition, but to probe and puncture your emotional ease by putting foulness in such close proximity to the childish.

We get a story whose late twists are telegraphed within the first hour or so, and an ending drenched with homage to the Shape of Water. The journey, however, is worth taking. I relished the spectacle of a stranded ship, its hull gashed with Godzilla-sized claw marks. And, in the wavering depths of a dream sequence, Norah swimming down towards a pair of glowing eyes. Still, that sort of thing is par for the course, when you’re in Lovecraftland. What rescues the game from the descent into cliché isn’t a rise to sanity. Nor is it the call of the sea. It’s Harry. You believe in Norah because she believes in him, and even when the plot goes bats you want to see them back together. Who would have thought that the solution to madness might be marriage? Thanks, Old Pal.

Bloober Team has summoned a rich atmosphere, under all that writing, and one or two sequences offer glimpses of a purer game.

As much as Hitman III was a pleasure to play, it left me longing for the mood of the old games—for that European concoction of sirens and splashing rain, drenched in Jesper Kyd’s cold scores. I’m as excited as anyone for Project 007, but I wonder how long we will be left looking for 47—a wraith in a red tie, who has proven elusive enough to slip IO’s grasp.

The troubled launch and the shoddy state of the last-gen versions will hurt nobody more intensely than the artists and developers, who may well have come to resemble the characters of their own creation—frazzled, fused to their computers, and wired into the limbo of non-stop work.

What I didn’t expect from the new Call of Duty was downtime, and the suggestion, at least in the first half, that guns, while great for going in blazing, can provide just as potent a thrill when holstered.

I would prescribe The Pathless to anyone feeling numbed and locked by our days of inanition; it’s perfect if you feel your home becoming an isle on the edge of the world.

Where Sackboy: A big Adventure proves most winsome isn’t in its play but in the surfeit of its surrounding glitter.

If you wish to see what your new console can do, this is the game to get; it provides the most whimper for your buck.

The developer, SIE Japan Studio, has forged a platformer from the same blend of delirium and precision that blows through Super Mario, and then filled it with fossils.

Far more than the combat—whose charm ebbs away on a tide of repetition after the first few hours—the draw of The Falconeer is its suggestion that, while we may be shaped by our stories, they don’t pin us down, that the mere act of living is to take flight from the past.

Sadly, that string of hours, spent clambering up towers and defogging the map, bounding across the fields in a hopeful, happy loop, was the last of the fun on offer.

The developer, Insomniac Games, has a similar storytelling confidence to that of Naughty Dog—a natural cinematic ease, bolstered by money and technology, which gives equal weight to ground-level struggles as to those beyond the rooftops.

This is the crux of Yakuza: Like a Dragon. It is fascinated by the way that games lurk at the soft verges of life, vesting our days with dreams.

Where the action comes alive is in the leaving behind of bodies altogether. Most missions involve breaking and entering, and the thrill lies in the absence of any breaking.

In the earlier, sandy hours, that restlessness is a boon—the work of a developer surveying the drier sweeps of a genre and divining a bright pool of ideas.

It was clearly forged from a love of Solitaire, and even its failures feel like restless, riffled expressions of that love.

Whatever the antic designs of Dr. Tropy, there is a deeper story here, and it’s one that centres on a far sadder subject: it’s about time.

You could argue that Squadrons breaks no fresh ground, that it is merely the latest in a prized patch of genre; but the ground, fresh or otherwise, was left behind long ago, and being the latest is no bad thing.

It’s in the art direction of the Definitive Edition, led by Petr Motejzik, that you catch the developers’ obsessions: their love of long-coated ne’er do wells; of chrome shining through the wet; and of crime fiction, free of the emotional collateral and ruin of real crime.

The new studios pay both respect and homage to the original releases by valuing their clarity above all else.

There may well be the feeling of a missed opportunity here, but no matter. Almost worthy is still pretty good.