Misc. A Tiny Tale is not a game I enjoyed. The narrative tone is awkwardly patronising to play through as an adult, and while the level design has its occasional moments, the relatively bland gameplay does not make up for this. While the game mostly handles sensitive topics around mental health in a way that is appropriate for young children, some of the supplementary material is at odds with this otherwise child-friendly tone, and it’s hard to recommend to any age group.

Ratcheteer DX taps into nostalgia for simpler times, but it largely fails to translate to a modern console experience. Beyond the low-res pixel graphics that come with a free helping of eye strain, the experience is weighed down by a shallow narrative, humdrum combat, and excessive backtracking.

Gotham Knights sets itself apart from the Arkham series in all the wrong ways, leaving players with a disappointing action-RPG that’s in desperate need of refinement.

The main issue with short games is that they need to be a tight experience; try and cram too much in and they often feel rushed. Unfortunately, this is The Fabled Woods undoing, with the game trying to tell a poignant story with multiple links inside a movie-length runtime. There’s a good story here, it just needs a little longer to have more of an impact.

A disappointing take on open-world first-person shooters, Redfall has none of the flavour or mechanical finesse that we’ve come to expect from Arkane Studios.

Soulless yet almost serviceable as a light hack ‘n slash Valkyrie Profile spinoff, Elysium is a 15-hour chore of ugly visuals, repetitive combat, and a mundane plot.

An excess of disparate systems and RNG do little to hold one’s attention, Home Behind 2 is more interested in playing itself than rewarding your time.

An impressively intuitive control scheme and accurate ball physics hint at an enjoyable tennis experience, but a lack of meaningful content and a busted online mode end up costing Tennis On-Court the game, set and match.

The reward for my perseverance with Goblin Stone would be a well-narrated bit of storybook exposition and perhaps a new combat class or weapon tier, before heading back to base to find missing inventory items, goblins, and stats being reset to the impossibly low 0/0/0. It’s just boggling stuff, making for an arguably unplayable late game that kills any curiosity and goodwill that the first impressions made. A disappointment, as there is genuinely a heap of interesting ideas here repurposed from turn-based indie greats, but Goblin Stone forces its implementation onto rails with no fanfare and no incentive or reward for player experimentation or even investment.

Necromunda: Hired Gun features a stunning art direction, but with a garbled story and more technical and design blemishes than you can poke a space stick at, this one's bound to be buried in the under-hive.

An initially wonderful return to Max Caufield comes entirely undone with competing narrative priorities and nonsensical attempts to build Life is Strange into a cinematic franchise. Despite the game’s stunning animation work and sincere queer writing, Double Exposure is an overexposed mess.

Layers of Fear is an admirable remaster that uses the fresh coat of paint to bring the series’ art direction up to modern standards but the bones of the experience remain fractured. Tedious and exhausting gameplay loops and tasteless writing make even this package a nice frame on an ugly painting.

A clumsy and mechanically inert effort to capture the majesty and thrills of mob cinema, Mafia: The Old Country finds no promised land in either its routine tale of crime or its linear, hyper-focused gameplay. Impressive facial capture and a unique setting can’t sustain this poor, if well-intentioned, emulation of far greater works.

Morsels is an ambitious indie roguelite that just doesn’t deliver. The game shines with a distinctive aesthetic identity, but between shockingly unclear mechanics, poor game balance, and unsatisfying moment-by-moment gameplay, it otherwise has little to offer.

I do have a soft spot for small development teams and I find it hard to be critical while acknowledging the time and effort it takes to put together a game like this. Playing Animal Rescuer felt more like I was playtesting an end of year project for a game development student, albeit one that would get an A+. There is definitely potential here and it could be a decent game if there was just a little more focus on the narrative and the core gameplay loop. There is also a free demo on Steam that you can check it, if it sounds like something you’d be interested in.

An artistically striking interpretation of Arthurian canon that isn't quite able to draw its sword of convoluted card-driven systems from the slow and cruel stone that is the turn-based combat.

Rustler brings classic Grand Theft Auto to a twisted version of the European Middle Ages, but its reliance on other media for laughs and a finicky release build makes it a title worth trying only for those nostalgic for the vintage entries of a now-juggernaut series.

Hotel Barcelona is an underwhelming roguelike with lopsided design that simply doesn’t nail the fundamentals that make the genre popular. Head-scratching design choices regarding stingy mechanics that are almost tailor-made to extract joy from your life, mixed with a lack of fluidity and unity of vision make this a hard sell. Even in you love Suda51 and Swery 65, this is not what you hope it will be.

A repetitive and dull gameplay loop that’s thematically allergic to the game’s cast of misfits only begins to describe how heartbreakingly disappointing Kill the Justice League truly is. Rocksteady should’ve died a hero, instead, it’s lived long enough to see itself become the villain.

Arkham board game fans will find little in this adaption that harkens back to the fantastic tabletop challenges. This could almost be a ‘my first turn-based tactics’ game, hampered by embarrassingly arbitrary puzzles, bad technical and vocal performances, and progress that provides meaningless penalties rather than rewards.

With a little more polish and player-driven feedback, The Cleaner could well emulate a proper first-person John Wick experience. However currently, it feels a little more like a frustration emulator designed to inspire rage quits.

This hellish remaster is stretched to raw, fibrous sinews. There is far too little variety in the weapons and enemies to make the many hour stretches of blind backtracking and incomprehensible connected-world layout anything more than a slightly dressed up chimera’s corpse. Place this in video game museums with its cult mantle and a sign above its polished noggin that reads ‘look, don’t touch’.

Funko Fusion’s biggest success is how well it matches the vibe of Funko’s uber-popular line of vinyl figures as a whole – joyless, soulless representations of beloved franchises that capture almost none of the charm of the source material. The most culturally-relevant thing here might be the collectible KFC buckets.

Harvest Moon: One World feels like an unfinished release that could have been so much more but is as uninspiring as its flat, empty landscape.

Riko and Reg's descent to the netherworld is a classic in existential dread and worldbuilding. Playing in this broken world imparts an even worse sense of dread.

Enchanted Portals copies almost everything about Cuphead, except for the precision of its mechanics, the tightness of its design and the enjoyment gleaned by mastering it. All the good bits really…

After giving The Bee Hive a chance, it unfortunately proved to be a dull experience full of bugs and glitches. Despite its potential, there are too many ideas that simply do not stick the landing.

Martha Is Dead fails to deliver any meaningful semblance of the story it wants to tell and ends up being nothing more than a colossal and tedious disappointment.