Capcom's turned back the clock with Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, bringing to us an action RPG tower defence hybrid that's very 2000s and very welcome in this age of open world, live service-ness. And for some, it'll deliver what's needed: a fairly good time. A time marked by a loop that does hack 'n slash, management, and a dash of base repairs to an average degree. For me, though, and possibly many others, I simply don't think this mix ever truly captures what makes even the simplest of tower defence games so captivating.

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In the heyday of Sierra's adventure game years, there was a series called Space Quest that featured an intergalactic janitor named Roger Wilco. The series was more satirical than King's Quest, less preachy than Police Quest, and not quite as adult as Leisure Suit Larry. Spearheaded by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe - a pair of devs who called themselves "Two Guys from Andromeda" - Space Quest was renowned for its humour, and there was a nice sense of progression throughout most of the series, with Roger Wilco leveling up from working class spaceman to the head of his own Star Trek ship.

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Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.

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Take me back to the soft blue light, Conscript. It’s safe there, in the save room. No body-armoured heavies with trench raiding clubs. No tunnels choked with sickly, mushy-pea green gas. No rats feasting on my ankles, occasionally inflicting a disease that halves my health bar. “Christ, they’re sending runners now?” the rifleman asks as I hoof south from Fort Souville after a gruelling trench defence whittles down my resources to a busted fightin’ spade and a handful of pistol bullets.

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Usually when a game makes me want to stop playing and go outside it’s a bad sign, but with Dungeons of Hinterberg it’s different. It’s an action RPG that made me pine for the outdoors and want to be whisked away from all my responsibilities and just exist for a bit. Each time I would finish playing I’d be thinking about my next getaway, and although dungeon delving wouldn’t be on my holiday itinerary Dungeons of Hinterberg is making me think twice.

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I increasingly judge Souls-adjacent games not by the height of their bosses or the depth of their dungeons, but the cleverness of their shortcuts, and Flintlock: Siege Of Dawn has my favourite shortcuts in an age. Rather than just being routes around to the other side of a barred door - though there are plenty such Lordrannish loops to find in this game - they consist of aerial chains of magic, purple triangles that suck you toward them when you hold a button. They lend vigour to a branching, faux-Napoleonic world that might otherwise be a collection of atmospheric strolls between bonfire-equivalents and fights defined by taut resourcing systems. They're idiot-proof grappling points from which you can launch yourself at another triangle, a ledgeful of upgrade materials, or a loitering musketeer who is in urgent need of a ground-pound.

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My favourite ever mode of travel in games is flying, so I was already poised (in mid-air) to really enjoy swooping around the world of Flock. It's a gentle exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot's Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, RPS in peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding around the strange forests and rippling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful trailing tail. Big Journey vibes, but more whimsical and colourful.

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So I’ve just hopped on my motorbike, enjoying one of several pleasingly incongruent classical musical tracks that plays from the radio, on my way to tick tasks off a list in the top right corner of my screen by scavenging an abandoned hospital. It’s a great hospital, by the way. Spotlight-headed phantasma shamble about corridors reminiscent of The Division 2 or The Last Of Us’s naturalia.

Striking, but also within easy reach of comparisons. And if Once Human was purely the collection of x from ys it very much appears to be, I’m not sure I’d have much positive to say about it. On the surface, what you're getting here is a 6/10 third-person shooter from ten years ago that gleefully spills thumbtacks along any simple paths to progress with live service obfuscation, propped up by a detached crafting and building economy that has you popping mined rocks and chopped wood in the oven then taking out freshly baked shotguns a few minutes later. Its systems run the gamut from numbly enjoyable to being a source of major psychic damage, and even the simple act of replacing your initial tier I rustic baseball cap means navigating several menus, currencies, and resources.

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Lots of games use frogs as a means to appeal to those who believe they are cute, me being one of those people. The humble croaker dominates the wholesome category, where they take centre stage in farming sims or as detectives or as green lads who hop over platforms and hurt enemies by lashing them with their tongues.

Schim is different: you play as a frog of the shadows, not some green attention-seeker. And in a mundane world of vibrant colour, you're to bounce between patches of shade in search of a human pal whose shadow you've been unwittingly severed from. What ensues is a charming puzzler of both freedom and flow, which genuinely has you view everyday environments through the googly eyes of a phantom amphibian. It's a lovely thing, if perhaps not as emotionally charged as it implies early on.

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You ever do that thing on a fairground ride or rollercoaster where you sort of pull your neck and face back in preparation for extreme motion? Welcome to kick-exalting FPS Anger Foot. Violence is brutal and cartoonish. Slight mistakes kill you instantly. The soundtrack slaps. There’s an easy Devolver labelmate orientation point here, but if Hotline Miami was a cocktail of chemical euphoria and gut guilt, like realising you’ve accidentally pocketed someone’s lighter at a festival, Anger Foot is doing whippits out of balloon animals then having a great time rhythmically headbutting a portaloo for a few hours. Similarly, it’s also a bit of a masochistic ordeal to put yourself through. But, man. What a buzz.

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Many years ago game designers advised their peers to make their prototypes "juicy". They were talking about the nebulous collection of sensations a player is exposed to when heads explode, coins jangle, and balls bounce. Zenless Zone Zero is a game deeply informed by the philosophy of juice. Like the lootbox hawkers of yesteryear, gacha designers understand the appeal and power of a pleasingly animated gizmo, ker-chunking open and fizzing with potential. This poppy visual and sonic language stretches across Hoyo's latest game, from its cinematic moments, to each character's attacks, to the cute bunny mascots that erupt into gatling guns, to the barista's coffee-making ritual and the recipes of the robo-limbed noodle server. The menu screens, the maps, the free-to-play storefront, everything. It is all very juicy. It is pumped with juice, but only in the same way supermarket chicken is pumped with water.

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What to compare Nine Sols’ flowing Sekiro-like 2D combat and layered metroidvania exploration to? The eternally sequel-less Hollow Knight? The punishing roguelite trappings of Dead Cells? 2D Souls-nuzzling Salt and Sacrifice? I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always had such trouble with slashing, blocking, and jumping in two dimensions that not only have I barely played any of the above, I’ve missed out a swathe of important platformers in the belief I just didn’t have it in me to manage them. But Nine Sols is so generous, so creative, so lucid and upfront in its ruleset, even as it crushes you with sometimes absurd difficulty, that playing it has opened up an entire library of classics I might have otherwise missed out on. I don’t have the experience to tell you what this game does better than others of its ilk, but I can tell how it made me feel. And for a game that murdered me with such relentless frequency, Nine Sols made me feel invincible.

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If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

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I'd been in Paris to see open world action-RPG Shadow Of The Erdtree early and when I got back, Edwin messaged me. He asked whether I thought it was big enough to consider the DLC a pseudo-sequel, and at the time I said something along the lines of, "It's hefty, but I think that's probably pushing it".

I was wrong. The Land Of Shadow may not be as expansive as the base game's Lands Between, but it's knottier, denser, more of a twisting mass that burrows into the earth and soars into the skies. For this reason I think it produces some of Elden Ring's finest moments, as exploration leads to a truer sense of discovery reminiscent of old Souls. But I also think its sheer density exposes more chinks in its open world format, where its interconnected sprawl leads to even greater recollection paralysis.

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Scottish petrochemical horror is not exactly a genre, but maybe it ought to be. From the opening moments of Still Wakes The Deep you know life on its 1970s North Sea oil rig is precarious. Leaky ceilings, busted panelling, faulty drill machinery - the omens pile up as you spend your first thirty minutes wandering through the colleague-packed canteen and over the platform into the boss' office for a severe dressing-down. It's a classic pre-disaster setup for a mostly traditional monster story, yet the game sticks expertly to the first-person horror form, and its voice actors' performances are so spot-on, that it'd feel churlish to judge this foaming fear simulator for sticking to type. It also has some markedly unsettling use of the shipping forecast, a famously dull feature of British radio I definitely did not expect to freak me out in a video game.

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“When I was young,” the villager washing garments in the river says, “I thought it was enough to clean the dirty laundry once and be calm. Not that it will get dirty forever.” I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the crushing weight of universal entropic decay so keenly as in that RPG maker textbox, nested upon Felvidek’s nicotine-stain hues. I’ll need to clean my keyboard soon. I keep taking screenshots of Felvidek. I can’t take enough. I want to make a scrapbook of every character and every line. Neither my laundry nor keyboard will ever be clean forever either, but if I hate Felvidek for emphasising that, I love it for reminding me that all the best art is buttressed by an irremovable layer of deep, thick grime.

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You like F.E.A.R.? You like DOOM? Yeah, I bet you like FPSing where you're outsmarting soldiers in offices with a nailgun and gibbing demons like you're ploughing a Hummer through a sequence of pheasants in an alternate universe Evil Somerset. No, it doesn't boast a title in all-caps, but Selaco's early access release more than deserves it's spot as a must-play for those who desire some sophistication with their ultra-violence.

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I regret not covering Skald Colon Against The Black Priory when its developer told us about it 2019. I'd get to be so smug now.

Skald is terrific. I've tried to come up with a clever angle on its journey, but they all wind up saying the same thing: For all its retro stylings (right down to party portraits taking up an unnecessary quarter of the screen at all times), it's an accessible, charming treat, and the best modernisation of 80s RPGs that I've ever played.

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I cannot compare my experience of writing a review for The Splintered Sea, the first paid expansion for dastardly clever physics puzzle builder Besiege, to that of a journaling sailor facing lethal storms on the horizon. Still, if we take for granted the idea that a review is only really valuable as an insight into the experience of the player: I haven’t been feeling especially great this week. That in mind: Splintered Sea is more Besiege, thoughtfully applied to its already expansive toolkit. More importantly, it's currently bringing me deep and deeply needed moments of untainted, childlike, vaguely-Orkish joy.

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Hauntii sets the scene with a rather magical opening sequence. A beam of light shoots out of a mysterious planet and a zoom in reveals the beam to be an asteroid, but not just any asteroid: a crystal shaped like a teardrop, with a little ghost nestled inside. You awaken as this little ghost, who it turns out, has crash landed in Eternity (and who, it turns out, is called Hauntii). Soon you bump into a ghostly girl, who guides you to a tower that thrusts you both up to a higher plane - but though she ascends, you're dragged back to the bottom at the last moment by some netherworldly chains. And so, as Hauntii you travel through Eternity to discover who that girl was and, ultimately, how to ascend to those heavenly skies yourself.

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Three questions before we start:

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Two years of early access have been kind Songs of Conquest. Its strategy fundamentals were already strong enough to impress me in 2022 that it's been quite tricky to even remember what's changed. But there's more of it, and although after much reflection I think it's not quite, quite for me, more of a good and unusual thing is definitely enough to push me into a very nearly wholehearted endorsement.

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Wacky space station management sim Startopia and wacky hosptial sim Theme Hospital are two of my favourite older games, so I was very pleased with the concept of Galacticare, which is a wacky space station hospital management sim. And you know what? It's great! From early reveals and previews I thought it might veer into being too wacky, but it nails its tone, has some really striking levels, and bugs in earlier builds have been squashed (much as you can manually splat small parasites that make their way into your hospital). I can see this becoming a go-to comfort game for me.

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The characters in Read Only Memories: Neurodiver are deeply into anime. They love manga and figurines and trashy movies and horror novels. The interests of the game's creators have not so much leaked into this fictional world as they have been generously pumped in with an industrial hose. Even the visual novel's loading screens take the form of those two-second intermission panels that flash up to signal an anime's commercial break, complete with random characters announcing the game's name ("Neurodiver!"). In moments like that, the passion is endearing. But in other places, it is overwhelming. Neurodiver is obsessed with media in a way that often distracted me from the bright-eyed cyberpunk story it wants to tell.

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I’d like to start this review with a question: What’s the difference between overcoming a challenge and thinking “I did it!” and one that leaves you sighing “It’s over!”? I may leave little insights scattered throughout. A Paper Trail, if you will. A puzzle game named Paper Trail that has you solve discrete head-scratchers by folding the screen like a piece of paper in different ways to create new paths, I might even say, if I were trying to cram a bunch of information right at the top without breaking theme. Let’s talk about it.

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Mullets aren't just coming back into fashion, they're everywhere at the moment, adopted largely by lads who love draft beer and The Football. And seemingly by Mullet Mad Jack, the protagonist of a single-player roguelike FPS who would shove draft beers into the skull of a billionaire robot, then shoot him in the gonads. What I'm trying to say is, Mullet Mad Jack is fashionable and no-nonsense, which makes for a great hang if you'd like to burn some aggression once in a while.

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Spacefaring RTS Homeworld 3 is good sci-fi. Monolithic structures scorched with plasma burns. Sleek spacecraft. Alien sunrises. It’s also good sci-fi because its characters converse through reams of inscrutable but cool-sounding space science, and at no point does a grinning quipster tell a scientist: “Whoa there, professor. Why don’t you try saying that again... but in English!” Basically, if your wishlist for Homeworld 3 has tone and atmosphere at the top, rest easy. At no point did I get the sense that Blackbird ever took making the first proper Homeworld in eight years lightly.

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Computers have always been animal wells, in a sense. They're havens for creatures of many shapes and degrees of literalness, all the way down to the metal. As in ecologies at large, the most abundant and widespread are probably the bugs, beginning with the moth that flew into that Harvard Mark II in 1947 and ending with the teeming contents of the average free-to-play changelog. A little further up the food chain we find "worms", like the Creeper that once invaded the ARPANET, and "gophers", a directory/client system written in 1991 for the University of Minnesota. There are computer animals spawned by branding - foxes of fire and twittering birds and the anonymous beasts that haunt the margins of Google documents. There are computer animals that are implied by the verbs we use in computing - take "browser", derived from the old French word for nibbling at buds and sprouts, which suggests that all modern internet searches are innately herbivorous.

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Tangle Tower was a weird and cute point and click murder mystery set in a big weird tower full of colourful characters, so what better way for the devs to fill time before the sequel comes out than by making a creepy retro survival horror set in a regional theme park? Crow Country is like if Resident Evil was made out of Duplo: more chunky, less threatening, and easier than playing with a fully motorised K'Nex ferris wheel, but darn it, it's still a good time.

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You won't be surprised to know that after two years in early access, V Rising's 1.0 launch hasn't seen Stunlock Studios drastically change the V for "Vampire" to V for "Venetian Blinds" or "Vienna Sausage". From a top-down view, you still play as a newly awakened vampire on PVE, PVP, or private servers, and you're still tasked with becoming the most powerful bloodsucker around. It has, however, streamlined some things and added in an endgame zone. All of this combines to form a survival game that was great back then and is even better now, with thrilling MOBA-esque fights and little in the way of faff.

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Scylla and the Sirens are a rock band of mythical boat wreckers who insist they have tons of fans. (They do not.) As a boss battle in Hades 2 they are a deadly trio that has bested me more times in the last few hours than I care to admit. But as a sign of things to come for this early access roguelike sequel, they are an encouraging bunch of characterful malcontents. The harbingers of a confident, slash-happy action game, and another poppy adaptation of classic Greek japes.

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Harold Halibut has the vibes of a game that should be 4-6 hours long and is, inexplicably, 10-12. It's inexplicable not only because it's a slow game low on interaction - the game is really just a plot delivery mechanism; a TV show you can walk around where you advance the story by pressing A - but also because it's a game created using handmade miniatures. It's a sci-fi animated dolls house under the sea, self described as "a cross between a game and a stop motion film", and if my game required that amount of labour I'd edit that script down. Then again, there aren't that many locations, so maybe you'd really want to show them off.

I love miniatures, and Harold Halibut is beautiful. It's also a lovely story about finding yourself and your place in the world, even if that place is unexpected, and having the courage to take that step. There are unexpected silly bits and strange bits and bits where people break into song, and bits where you read undelivered letters. But, at the same time, I totally understand why some people would find it boring.

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Hurtling along on top of a train full of goons in Phantom Fury you will see another rushing train pulling up at matching speed, inviting you to hop from one to the other. A helicopter will soon join the fray. Many things will soon explode, and you will take a short break from the minigunning to calmly physics some boxes into a set of steps with a crane. This FPS is not so much writing a love letter to a bygone era of noughties shooters, as it is standing underneath the window of its respected elders earnestly serenading them with a busted old keytar from the attic. There are bum notes and the singing voice is not exactly boy-band beautiful, but the love is unmistakably there. And, hey, singing is hard.

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Lots of Soulslikes have about as much joy, and the same colour palette, as a burning cowpat. They are grim and dark and often have gimmicks that are a bit middling: mechanical arms that spew gunk, or turning to stone. Or they stand out with incredibly deep combat, with dense menus and rainbow loot. So, Another Crab's Treasure comes as a refreshing surprise, what with it's crustacean theme, platforming, and shell gimmick that actually complements fights in clever ways. Not only that, but it's colourful and funny, with plenty of challenge for veterans and plenty of difficulty tweaks for those who just want a good time. Trade cowpat for coral, I'd say.

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Sand Land is like a sanitised manga-ish Mad Max Fury Road, where there are fewer explosions and nobody huffs paint and screams "Witness me!". So, arguably, a less cool Mad Max. In this incarnation it's an open world action game with light RPG elements; in previous incarnations it is a manga and anime by the creator of Dragon Ball. My takeaway from playing Sand Land the game is that it is a tremendous advert for the manga and anime, in the sense that everything good about Sand Land the game is from those, and I would rather be reading or watching them instead.

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When, in town building simulation Manor Lords, you erect your first manor, it feels natural to place it in the center of your humble 14th century European settlement. It presents as a locus of power, where your character avatar resides. Also, it’s right there in the title. I built mine down a side road, between oxen posts and granaries, for no real reason but free space. The more I play, the more it feels a fitting place. Not sidelined, exactly, just not especially loud. I need the taxes it brings to pay mercenaries to see off bandits, but lords - their whims and ambitions - don’t set the tone here. Parchment and seals aren’t as important as tilled earth; as winter snow, spring thaws and autumn harvests. So, despite the title, this sedate, curious, and intricate sim isn’t really about lords, nor manors. Not half as much, anyway, as it is about manure.

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Until I played Tales Of Kenzera: Zau I figured people had run out of ways to make original platformers, but an Afrofuturist story-in-a-story framing for a mythological platformer about healthy ways to deal with grief sure did teach me to not underestimate human creativity. I really liked a lot about Tales Of Kenzera, and got annoyed by a bunch of stuff too - and the division seems to be that a lot of the former falls on the story and design side, and the latter on the mechanical side, which I guess isn't ideal for a platformer. But still, I think it's worth persevering.

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Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is the spiritual successor to a classic JRPG called Suikoden, and it came to be thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign. As someone with little knowledge of Suikoden, I went into Hundred Heroes thinking it was going to be a dense, old-fashioned, and slightly impenetrable time. And yes, some of it is annoying and obtuse and will almost certainly suit veterans who enjoy those quirks, but it has a surprisingly easy going nature. Hundred Heroes accomodates new players like me with combat that's simple to grasp and a story that's emotional and sprawling and absolutely worth your time.

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In the world of strategy and management game Goblin Stone, the goblins are nearly extinct. Getting murdered in large numbers by adventurers hungry for a quick experience point and a slack handful of coin will do that. I cannot tell you that you will want to bestow protection and prosperity on these gribbly green niblets. They exhibit a tweeness that you’ll either find charming or despicably manipulative, even when they’re showering in the blood of their enemies. Should you want to, though, Goblin Stone offers you the chance to rescue these maligned misfits from the brink of extinction, rebuilding their kingdom and leading them on outings to take the fight to all those heroes that have spotlight-hogged the left side of your screens for far too long.

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I tried to look up the plot of Bore Blasters, because my focus when playing the game is entirely on exploding dirt, but it turns out the Steam store page doesn't bother to explain any kind of plot either. Thus, the purity of Bore Blasters. Some facts can be divined from the earth, though: you play a dwarf, piloting a small ship akin to Robotnik's flying hedghog killer, and are dropped off on a small, discrete, gem-bearing chunk of dirt. This you pulverise, in a downward direction, with the aim of finding a huge chest of gems at the bottom somewhere. Your drill is the machine gun on your ship, your efforts governed by about two minutes worth of depleting fuel and a hull that can take three hits total. It's cyberpunk by Gimli.

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Drop Bear Bytes, the studio behind post-apocalyptic RPG Broken Roads, are named after Australia’s deadliest creature. The Drop Bear might look like a normal koala, but they’re actually dangerous predators, fond of jumping from trees to maul unsuspecting chumps who forget to take adequate precautions, like urinating on themselves. Really, the story is a wind-up the aussies like to blag tourists with. If it looks like a koala, it’s just a koala. But it’s this sort of character, inspired by love for Australia’s unique landscape, culture and good-natured mick-taking, that forms the heart of the best bits in Broken Roads. I say ‘best bits’, but I should probably say ‘the only bits that I actually enjoyed’, unfortunately.

Bombs wiped out 80% of Australia’s population, and left the remaining nail-hard Nancys and tough Tobiases to fend for themselves in a world short of resources, but shockingly plentiful in both guns and pre-made Vegemite sarnies. You’ll pick one of four character classes - I went with ‘Jackaroo’ (cattle hand), because it was called ‘Jackaroo’ - before tackling a short tutorial section. You'll then be thrust into some events, where you’ll meet the rest of your starting party and kick off the game proper.

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In many ways Children Of The Sun is a highly relatable game. I do not have telekinetic powers that allow me to control the path of a bullet from a sniper rifle, and I was not part of a murderous cult that killed my father-figure. But if I did and I were, you can bet that I'd go on a rip-roaring rampage of revenge! Stepping into the be-grimed trainers and unwashed jacket of the protagonist - a misused girl whose vibe is that of a member of Gorillaz - you shoot a single bullet from your gun and control it in first-person as you zip it through the heads, hearts and hands of cultists placed around a level. It's a satisfying Sniper Elite meets Superhot puzzle of ultraviolence, and it's neat.

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Botany Manor is a game that seems calculated to make me sit up on alert like a meerkat, or crash through a wall yelling like that sentient jug mascot (I am not from America, I just know he exists). It's a puzzle game about growing plants. Holy Strange Horticulture, Batman! But Botany Manor is much less eldritch, and much more gentle historical feel-good movie starring Emma Thompson in the lead role. That role - which in this case is played by you in first person rather than La Thompson - is of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who, thank God, is the childless inheritor of a huge manor and ancestral wealth, and so is able to spend the sunny days of 1890 pottering around the house and grounds researching weird, slightly fantastical plants almost wholly untroubled. So in this respect it is also a fantasy game. It's quite delightful, which is the sort of phrase I am confident Arabella would use.

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Like an aggressively competitive thane at a reindeer-piss guzzling contest, 2D tac-and-slash roguelite Sons Of Valhalla never lets up the pace for even a moment. Whether you’re charging across its pixel-art battlefields slashing and burning increasingly tough-to-crack strongholds, or making quick decisions to get the upper hand in its tug-of-war tactics, the only times Thorald is not doing cool violence, commanding others to do cool violence, or upgrading his camps so that he may act in cooler and more violent ways, is when he’s restoring stamina with a cool slug of mead or violently gnawing at health-boosting meat.

Viking Thorald Olavson is a man possessed. A rival Jarl burnt his village and nicked his wife Raya. In his quest to find her, he’s prepared to do anything - even visit England. As Thorald, you’ll butcher your way up a chain of command in your search for Raya across six stages, each of which sits somewhere between the side-scrolling tactics of Kingdom Two Crowns, the lane strategy of a Warpips, and the slashy/blocky/shooty/dodgy of any 2D ARPG you care to name.

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Pepper Grinder is one of those games that has so many great moments in it that recounting them would almost feel unfair to anyone hoping to play it. There are feats of platforming prowess on show here that should really be experienced fresh and unsullied by rudimentary descriptions of them, because to say anymore would be to spoil the surprise. This feels doubly important when the game itself is so fleeting in length, its brief and dizzying journey through the dirt, magma, ice and marshy bogs of this strange, treasure-stuffed island coming to a swift conclusion in just over three and a half hours. It left me wanting more the moment the credits rolled, but deep down I know it's also perfectly formed just the way it is. Rather than outstay its welcome, Pepper Grinder shows up, performs its party trick, then gets the hell out of the way, leaving you to bask in the warm glow of a good game well done.

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I went into Open Roads pretty cold, knowing only that it was a story-driven road trip game with some element of mystery to it. The mystery is really just a backdrop, though - a device to better bring forth the themes of family and secrets. Most specifically it's about mother-daughter relationships, as we join single mum Opal and her sixteen-year-old daughter Tess on a short (from our point of view) but bittersweet road trip when, going through Opal's mother's home post-funeral, they discover she may have had an affair decades before. Can you ever really know the people you love? Does it matter? If you left your daughter's early-00s flip phone back at the motel, would you turn around and lose four hours, or hope it's still there on the way back?

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Like the good works of Calvin Klein, these genes come pre-distressed. Geneforge 2 - Infestation is fresh from the rack, yet looks and functions like the CRPGs of the late 1990s. Where most isometric throwbacks these days offer a forced perspective over 3D scenes, Geneforge 2 is the real deal - its flat character sprites gliding across tiled backgrounds, with the elegant shuffle of Shōgun-era ladies-in-waiting.

This look is less a nostalgic affectation than it is simply practical. Geneforge 2, like all of Jeff Vogel’s games, was made in the spare bedroom of his Seattle home with the help of his wife, Mariann Krizsan - plus a handful of artists spread more broadly. It’s the latest in a long line of low-budget Spiderweb Software RPGs to achieve sprawling scale and reactivity by leaning on cost-effective and old-fashioned production values. Here there is no voice acting, nor any ambient noise that cannot be sourced from royalty-free soundbanks. In pastoral areas of the map, the impression of grazing livestock is conveyed entirely through a free sound effect called ‘Eating a rusk.wav’.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the post-apocalyptic wilderness, the giant dinosaur robots return. In fact, they never left! Go-gettin', arrow-shootin' warrior Aloy managed to delay the end of the world in Horizon Zero Dawn, but the death train is still chugging along to all life on Earth station via a (currently resonant) eco-disaster. In Horizon Forbidden West it's because the AI created to heal the planet from the prior extinction event caused by humans isn't working properly. Gaia, said AI, has been turned off and split into different parts, so yours and Aloy's job sequel is to, firstly, reboot Gaia, and secondly collect all these subordinate functions. But nobody turned off the making robots button, which means this action RPG in a massive open-world still involves fighting rocket-launcher T-rexes. It'll shock no one that this makes for a very good video game.

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Maintaining the thrum of a finely-tuned citybuilder has to be one of the most satisfying acts of video game plate-spinning around. Nursing that constant flow of foot traffic, produce and profits, all of them teetering on a carefully honed knife-edge, that's the good stuff right there. Of course, it's not always the threat of imminent and total collapse that fuels these mighty engines of urban planning. Sometimes it's the simple pleasure of building itself, watching a scrub of dirt track rise up into an advanced superhighway of architectural wonder. The best of these more relaxed kinds of citybuilders - your Dorfromantiks and your SteamWorld Builds et al - still involve plenty of plate-spinning; it's just that they won't ever fall over if you take your eye off the ball for a moment.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles sits at the citybuilding crossroads of 'relaxed' and 'something more'. It wants to be an easy-going kind of builder, as nothing fundamentally bad happens when the wheels stop turning for a moment. For the most part, you're free to build where and however you please, constructing imposing fortresses jutting out into the ocean from mere scraps of rock. But it also gets more bogged down in the minutiae of resource flow, worker management and conquest and expansion via muddy, ill-defined combat procedures than it probably should. It always feels on the precipice of becoming something bigger, bolder and more boisterous than it ever really achieves, dipping its toes into the murky waters of its lonely Ursee without truly ever getting its feet wet.

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It's been nearly eight years since the launch of Civilization VI, which is the longest gap between mainline Civ entries the series has seen since the first game appeared way back in 1991. It's the perfect time for a new contender to rise and claim the historical 4X throne, and indeed, many have tried, and some have even come close. Soren Johnson and the gang at Mohawk Games struck gold in Old World by zeroing in on the ancient era and opening up the personal lives of rulers and generals as fields of play. Humankind let you fuse and blend cultures over the arc of time like a world-historic Doctor Moreau.

Millennia is perhaps the Civ-like that's clung most tightly to the genre's apron strings. It has a few new ideas that sound interesting on paper, but even as back-of-the-box features, they're clearly not meant to significantly disrupt the established order. This is a strategy game that very much wants to be like Civilization, and has a lot of enthusiasm for the subject matter. Unfortunately, it isn't a particularly good student.

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At first glance, this shadow-hopping top-downer looks like a nostalgic stealth game designed to evoke the boxy subterranean environments of the first Metal Gear Solid. But really it is a tough single-player fighting game with stealth bits attached. It is closer in design to kung-fu brawler Sifu than it is to any of Solid Snake's various mischiefs. And while this mash-up of influences intrigues me, it can also feel like a layer cake of awkwardly clashing flavours. Like that very pretty but questionable cake, Raw Metal feels a little underbaked.

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You know when you remember a game really fondly and instead of ageing alongside you, it becomes more modern in memory? The Dragon's Dogma 2 experience is, essentially, how I remember its predecessor Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. To me, DD2 feels like a remaster of the first, except it looks nicer, is more expansive, and features some rejigs to things like your AI pals.

Not that any of this is a bad thing! In fact, DD2's closeness to the original makes it just as much of a joy as the first, where your grand adventure isn't only grander, it's still at the whims of a world governed by chaotic physics and the passage of time. Quirks remain, for good and bad, but ultimately this is an RPG where you make travel plans and the game does it best to dash them. It never gets old.

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Detective Edward Carnby looks very different these days, and not only because he’s made of a lot more polygons. Gone are the professorial waistcoat and bow tie of his angular 1992 incarnation, replaced instead by the grubby suit of a life-bruised 1930s noir PI, complete with hipflask of brandy for when the stress of being unaccompanied with the lights out gets too much.

Carnby isn’t the only one who’s transformed in this reboot of Alone in the Dark, the classic survival horror avant la lettre, either. Veterans will find plenty of callbacks and familiar names as they poke around its Louisiana manor house – talk of the Pregzt Shipping Company might raise an eyebrow, for instance, as may the gnarled tree filling much of the conservatory. But like these, everything here is remixed, rewritten, relocated. Indeed, Decerto house is no longer empty but a ‘home for the mentally fatigued’, while player characters Carnby and Emily Hartwood now arrive together, since she’s hired him to help check on her uncle, a long-term resident who may be in danger.

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Combat is such a routine activity in video games that it often doesn't feel much like conflict at all. It's just something done to move the simulation along - a propulsive chore stripped of drama or significance or lasting emotion beyond a vague desire to see what lies beyond whatever it is you're trying to kill. In Death Of A Wish, combat has substance: it's a form of redemptive self-expression. The game's fights are a means of asserting and cherishing yourself in the face of a world that regards you as a deviant, a world whose poison you carry on the inside.

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My day in Lightyear Frontier starts out with a bit of farming. On a good day, it’s raining, so I don’t need to water the crops. On a bad day, there are weeds spontaneously spawning from the sky and I need to catch them before they land right on top of my precious plants. Either way, when I’m done, I’ll put the day’s harvest into the processing machines to work while I’m away, and then go exploring for minerals.

My goals are clear. I need to build a new machine, or upgrade my mech so that I can clean up a new area of the map and get new resources in return. Those will – you guessed it – let me build new machines or upgrade my mech again. There might be a few steps to juggle on the way, but nothing that needs me to hold long recipe flowcharts in my head. When I get back I’ll have everything I need to take the next step. It always feels like I’m making forward progress.

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Cast your eye over the original Outcast from 1999 today, and you'll find a world that's more abstract than alien. Hazy, almost block colour textures are stretched to breaking point over terrain that looks like it's been pulled and poked by a child sculpting in putty slime, while its cast of beige, three-fingered Talans are so rigid that they'd all be reigning champions at the local robot dance-off. Understandable, given the era in which is was made, but even so - what a difference 25 years make. Even after 2017's remake glow-up with Outcast: Second Contact, A New Beginning's version of Adelpha is a lush and verdant paradise, with treetops soaring over your head, and mountains requiring several triple or quadruple jetpack jumps to traverse. It's no Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, admittedly, but it leans in very much the same direction, punching your eyeballs with such bright, primary colours that you'll feel enticed to explore every inch of it.

A shame, then, that all its visual splendour amounts to is little more than an empty husk filled with open world busy work that already felt tired and done ten years ago. Its non-linear approach to storytelling remains intact, letting you tackle the quests and problems of its numerous village settlements in any order you wish, but even this has been boiled down to tedious checklists of fetch quests, escort missions and shooting up the same identikit facility one after another. Topping off this fatal combo is returning protagonist Cutter Slade, whose macho army dude dial is still set firmly to cringey wise-cracking and patronising stereotypes. A new beginning this ain't.

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I didn't really know anything about Moomins going into adventure game Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley, besides that their heads always looked palatable to me - like bleached kidney beans. Plus the Moomin merch I'd seen over the years in official Moomin shops or the odd gift store was delightful, so if someone had rocked up with a pencil case adorned with Moomin heads back in school, you bet I would've been jealous.

And having finished the game, I'm unsure whether I've truly learned any more about the Moomins and their friends. But then again, I've come away thinking that it's a pleasant universe to spend a few hours in, where the wild is celebrated with rebellious song. If you're after the video game equivalent of a walk through the woods on a warm afternoon, Moominvalley is the place to wander.

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Zoria: Age Of Shattering speedruns its fantasy RPG origin story in a quick cutscene montage at the start, so we might as well get that out of the way first, too. Low fantasy world, two warring kingdoms, one uses necromancy (this is cast as bad and cheating rather than practical, for some reason) to comprehensively gain the upper hand, and everything is named like a bunch of Scrabble letters were thrown randomly on the table. You play Elion war hero Captain Witherel - gender and class TBD by the player - in a small group making a final stand at the fortress Daeg Marastir, which is being overrun by the nefarious Izirian army. We start in media bellum, as it were.

This first stage, where you escape the fortress, gives you a whistle-stop tour of the main systems in the game. You control a squad of four, the combat is turn-based, you can pitch camp at any time to rest and heal up, and there are crafting systems for potions, food and gear. Zoria isn't really remaking the wheel as much as it is taking spokes from a bunch of other fantasy RPGs you like, and the result is the terrier of RPGs. Small, clearly has a lot of different DNA knocking around in there, and punches above its weight, but it's a bit scrappy and sometimes it's knees dislocate and it falls over. This terrier was made by three people, so that is sort of to be expected.

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Not long ago, a few of us from the RPS Treehouse wandered through first-person survival 'em up Nightingale with its boss Aaryn Flynn, and then had it out about the game's crafting menus. I was one of the folks who wasn't so hot on what we'd played, and I'd hoped that the early access version would prove me wrong.

Alas, I am sad to report that I still do not like Nightingale. From what I've played so far, the game is an awkward marriage of survival game and live service loot grind, which makes you feel divorced from the very world you inhabit.

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Berserk Boy is the legally distinct lovechild of Sonic The Hedgehog and Mega Man X, on account of how it fondly emulates the Blue Blur’s speedy momentum and the Dorky Mega’s various power-altering suits. That anatomically tricky relationship is enticing by itself, but even if those retro action platformers just register as historical relics in your memory, Berserk Boy does enough that’s new and interesting that it doesn’t need to rely on aping its inspirations. My only beef is that credits rolled before I was properly given a chance to test my newfound robo-bashing muscles.

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As someone who finds games about cars wot go fast only intermittently interesting, I'd expect a game about cars wot go slow to be positively soporific. Speed is, ultimately, the modus operandi of a car. It gets you where you need to go faster than a horse, and doesn't do annoying things like pooing on your patio or dying (also, potentially, on your patio). Surely, then, playing a game about cars moving at the speed of a dead patio horse defeats the point, like playing a first-person shooter where all the guns fire backwards.

Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game demonstrates this not to be the case. This bouncy, slimy off-roading simulator is the most fun I've had with an imaginary car since 2018's Jalopy. This is partly because it is as much a physics puzzler filled with limitless conundrums as it is a game about driving, but also because, like Jalopy, it envisions the car as something more than a way to boost egos by doing a big circle.

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When we first meet The Thaumaturge's hero Wiktor Szulski, we're told he's a man cursed by the vice of pride. It's a trait that sits at the heart of his personality, and in this particular alt-history telling of Polish turmoil in Warsaw at the turn of the twentieth century, such 'Flaws' can also attract the attention of otherworldly beings called Salutors - vicious creatures of myth and folklore who follow their quarry around like dark and gloomy shadows, amplifying their worst qualities and, in many cases, driving them to emotional, and often violent, extremes. It's these outbursts that Wiktor will be investigating over the course of this curious detective RPG from the makers of Seven: The Days Long Gone and the upcoming The Witcher 1 Remake, as fortunately for him, Wiktor comes from a long line of storied Salutor tamers, his thaumaturgic know-how allowing him to see these monsters made flesh, exorcise them from their human host, and use them for his own gains.

He's a man that's ultimately made peace with his own arrogance, then, but considering everything he goes through during The Thaumaturge's 25 hour-odd run-time, I reckon his pride is pretty justified. Not only is he able to brush off multiple stab and gunshot wounds and clubs to the face when he gets in a fight, but he also achieves several feats of thaumaturgy that we're repeatedly told are thought to be nigh on impossible. Indeed, at the start of this game, his connection with his original Salutor Upyr is hanging by a thread, his worst instincts having got the best of him in a recent attempt to tame and capture a second beast from the ether. By the end, however, I had six Salutors at my beck and call, out of a total of eight. Wiktor is very much a force to be reckoned with, and he makes for a highly compelling lead as you navigate the branching storylines in Warsaw's political hotbed.

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I still don’t fully understand the rancor with which the RTX 4070 Ti is often regarded. Where some see an overpriced, memory-deprived albatross of a graphics card, I’ve only ever seen a fast and feature-rich GPU whose 12GB of VRAM is demonstrably fine for 99.95% of games at 4K. A better deal than the RTX 4080 for that resolution, in any case.

Now, though, we can all agree: nobody should buy an RTX 4070 Ti. Not when the RTX 4070 Ti Super is here, doing a better, hopefully less contentious job of smooth 4K without demanding RTX 4080 (or, indeed, RTX 4080 Super) levels of investment.

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There are moments where Sons Of The Forest matches the sublime paranoia of Subnautica. There’s that same lurching, exquisite tension as you delve deeper and deeper into darkness where you are not welcome, supplies dwindling, footfall echoing, monstrosities skittering about in the black. On my most intense plunge into one cave, I groaned aloud as the path I was praying must be the exit twisted back on itself, sending me first down a rope, and then into a long slide down, down into the earth, back into the spindly clutches of pale, bifurcated mutants. When I finally saw the sun again, I could have cried.

It’s still a bit wonky, but the full 1.0 release makes the Forest a fuller, livelier and more inviting (or else alluringly off-putting) prospect for a wander - even, as in my case, a wholly solo one. Consider this your cue to peel open some skin pouches.

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A long time ago on a desktop far, far away, my family once owned a demo disc for the original Star Wars: Dark Forces. I cannot remember for the life of me which level(s) it contained. My only surviving memory of it is having quite a good time blasting Stormtroopers and the chaps in black with the swoopy, knock-off Vader helmets, but also getting terribly lost and not really knowing what the heck I was meant to be doing. Now, playing Nightdive Studio's Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster as an adult probably close to three decades later, both these feelings have come roaring back, as this is very much a Star Wars FPS in the vein of Doom and other early 90s shooters (thumbs up). But it's one that leans so hard into its maze-like level design that it can regularly feel like a little bit of a tough hang in the cold hard light of 2024 (thumbs down).

Crucially, though, not to the point where it's best left consigned to the history books. This is still an enjoyable and worthwhile artefact in Star Wars' PC gaming history, and if your eyes (and general patience levels) can't quite stomach the 'Classic' and still available 1995 original, then this remaster is a pin-sharp glow-up for modern hardware.

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I've had to look up.... goddamn it, hang on. I've had to look up Wrath Colon Aeon Of Ruin every day to remember its utter nothing of a name. Such a weak title deserves a much worse game, but this captures the feeling of its late 90s FPS influences as they actually were, and ends up just familiar enough to work, and just original enough to refresh the formula. At times, it's a little too accurate, but even with its annoyances dialled up by the pressure of playing it too hard for the sake of review, I'm impressed with the balancing act it's struck.

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Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot recently said Skull And Bones is a "quadruple-A game", which I think is very accurate, actually. "AAAA" is the sound that escapes my lips as I embark on yet another hour-long sail to retrieve some logs, or when I'm doing my little deliveries and a brigantine starts on me. After 11 years in development, Ubisoft's pirate game isn't necessarily a disaster, I just think its live service model has transformed piracy from a roguish lark on the waves into a tremendously dull series of shipping tasks.

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Lil Guardsman is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve. In a victory for normative determinism, this is a fantasy adventure about a small girl named Lil who somehow becomes the first (and seemingly only) line of defence at a city’s border patrol as a guardsman. At various points, both Lil and those around her frequently call attention to the fact that, yes, you are merely a 12-year-old child who is massively underqualified for this task, and that if you’re going to continue filling in for your good for nothing father who’s down the pub gambling on the latest ball game, then really, what do your superiors expect? It’s very self-aware in that sense, and occasionally verges on breaking the fourth wall. This alone will probably be a fairly good indicator of whether you’ll gel with Lil Guardsman’s sense of humour or not, but for the most part, this is a sweet and jovial narrative adventure whose characterful animation and charming voice cast help bring this oddball tale of fate and consequence to life.

It's also not shy about where it’s taken its main source of inspiration from either. This is fantasy Papers, Please through and though, albeit one that’s more about interrogating and probing would-be citygoers for information than checking documents and spotting inconsistencies. During the day you’ll be working your post, dealing with the increasingly large, but fixed queues of fantasy species all trying to enter the city gate to go about their business. When you're off the clock, it's time to pick up the game's wider plotlines, with Lil able to travel around the city to set locations where she can chat with other townsfolk, sometimes partake in the odd mini-game or two, and visit the local shop before toddling off to bed. It’s admittedly quite a straightforward interpretation of Lucas Pope’s magnum opus, with star ratings denoting clear right and wrong answers for how you deal with each day’s horde, but you know what they say about first impressions. Good ones go a long way.

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Satan has vanished, the throne of hell lies empty, and eight Archfiends are all jostling to be its chief seat warmer. It's a great setup for a role-playing strategy game, and the allure of plotting, scheming, backstabbing and shmoozing your way to victory remains as enticing today as it did when Solium Infernum first came to PC in 2009. At the time, it launched to relative obscurity, and was mostly kept alive by dedicated play-by-email multiplayer groups. It was through one of these groups that Armello developers League Of Geeks first came into contact with it, and now, years later, have taken on the task of remaking Solium Infernum for a modern audience.

The original Solium was, by all accounts, an intensely knotty and dense affair, impenetrable to newcomers, or at least to those who were unprepared (or unwilling) to study and absorb all the countless variations and statistics involved in creating your own unique Archfiend. It was a bit like creating a D&D character sheet, only about ten times more complicated, and whose strategic implications may or may not have made themselves apparent until it was far too late. You could biff yourself before you began, in other words, and League Of Geeks have made admirable attempts to tame and streamline this unruly hell beast, doing away with a lot of that initial fussiness. As is perhaps fitting for the theme here, there are unfortunately still a few pesky gremlins causing mayhem behind the scenes at time of writing (I'm pointing the finger at literal bug queen Beelzebub for this), but for the most part, there's good fun to be had in this new incarnation of Solium Infernum - and particularly if you have some willing friends who you soon hope to call enemies.

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Last Epoch is, as has been observed many times, a kind of middle-ground ARPG. You hold down a button to evaporate hordes of enemies from a top down isometric perspective, but, in a step further than Diablo 4, it has more in-depth, any-time crafting for entry level percentage perverts to eke out incremental slivers of health regen vs. damage. At the same time, it's less complex than Path Of Exile, which is where advanced percentage perverts go when they die. Last Epoch has been in early access for a while now, so there's a decent chance that you already know what you think of it now it's in 1.0. If you haven't yet dipped your toe in, then I can tell you it's very decent. It makes building an extremely overpowered mega-wizard very easy, and I liked it better than Diablo IV, I think.

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Playing Pacific Drive reminds me of an army recruitment advert shown on British TV about 20 years ago. A group of soldiers are travelling along a road at night in a Land Rover, when suddenly they spot the enemy ahead. The front seat passenger starts barking orders at the driver: “Get off the road! Kill the lights! Through the trees!”. You sense the panic as the camera, inside the vehicle, jolts with the suspension on the rough ground, and the driver fights the steering wheel to stay in control. It’s a scene you reenact quite frequently in Ironwood’s survival game with roguelike trimmings. Well, except, instead of a Land Rover you’re behind the wheel of a rusty station wagon, and instead of military opposition, you’re scarpering from paranormal phenomena.

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There's a particular boss encounter in Balatro that always feels like it's cheating a bit. In this mesmerising poker roguelike, each stage is made up of three blinds - small, big and boss - with the blind essentially being a high score you have to hit by playing different kinds of poker hands - your traditional flushes, straights, pairs and so on. Each hand has its own number of chips and multiplier bonuses associated with it, and Balatro's whole deal is about shuffling closer to victory by making the most of the cards you're dealt. While some blinds are tiny, stretching to just 300 or 450 early on in a run, they quickly start ramping up into the tens of thousands as each successfully defeated boss blind ups the ante and the accompanying stakes. Reach an ante of eight, and bingo, you've won a run of Balatro.

The boss blind I keep coming a cropper with, though, is The Flint. This sucker not only halves a hand's chip score, but it also cuts its multiplier in two as well, and I've yet to figure out exactly how to defeat it. Sometimes it appears with a blind of just 600, but other times it's been an enormous 22,000. In fairness, all bosses have little tricks like this. Some will debuff certain card suites, making them useless in your overall score count. Others may only let you play one hand type the entire match, while the cheeky Tooth will deduct you $1 for every card used. But Balatro isn't simply about beating the odds with smart and intelligent card plays. It's about bending, twisting and abusing those odds to your will - also through smart and intelligent card plays. Cheating isn't just encouraged in Balatro. It's damn near mandatory, and it's all thanks to the brilliantly conceived joker cards that give the game its Latin-based name.

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Riot Forge’s last stab at publishing smaller spin-offs from indie teams has resulted in Bandle Tale: A League Of Legends Story, which at first glance has all the things I love in self-proclaimed cosy games: gorgeous pixel art, laidback objectives and characters cute enough to trigger primal cheek-squishing instincts. But despite looking like an SNES classic and playing like a mix between Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Bandle Tale unfortunately ties itself in knots with overly grindy crafting that had me rubbing my temples in an effort not to combust.

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Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a JRPG that is ticking off many of the action RPG tropes. It would be in danger of becoming workmanlike, such are the number of things you can tick off on your fingers like a plumber ordering parts: boss fights against improbably huge glowing monsters, an evil god, catboys, numbers popping off enemies, women who appreciate the combat applications of a thigh-high split skirt, anachronistic sunglasses, horned giants carrying halberds of the same approximate size as a caravan.

In practice, though, you sort of can't be mad at Granblue Fantasy: Relink. It's built around a layered combat system that seems impenetrable if you don't take some time to understand it. But really, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is just a game so committed to the rule of cool that the entire setting is physically impossible, and every battle is a disorientating Panic! At The Firework Factory that flirts with being a photosensitivity nightmare. I'm not selling it as such, but it's actually charming.

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Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is a delicious piece of mad science: what if you spliced the ale-sodden DNA of Deep Rock Galactic’s dwarven miners with tissue samples from a Vampire Survivors-like autoshooter?

It shouldn’t work, surely. It would be easy to look at this spin-off and question why it takes the co-op out of one of the best co-op games on PC, or to shovel it aside as a cynical attempt at latching onto the popularity of autoshooters/Survivors-likes/bullet heavens (delete as preferred). But you’d be a smooth-handed leaf lover, my friend, as not only does DRG’s mix of horde shooting and rock smashing translate remarkably well to the format, even this early access version is heaps of subterranean fun.

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Helldivers 2 is a third-person co-op shooter that's centred as much around action as it is comedy. Gigantic insects and red-eyed robots threaten the sanctity of Super Earth and, frankly, this isn't on. As a Helldiver, you must team up with your compatriots and pulverise these menaces for freedom (a shoulder-mounted laser cannon) and democracy (an aerial bombardment). Seriousness is reserved for the act of extermination, which adds tactility to the familiar motions of a shooter, making for horde management that promotes efficiency and frequent lapses of judgement in equal measure. Helldivers 2 is a slapstick masterpiece.

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"Banishers took a while to kick in," I wrote in the RPS group chat last week, "but I fought a monster made of angry witch-hunting jam last night." It was a pivotal boss fight about half way through Don't Nod's ghost hunting action-adventure RPG Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden, and typical of the over-the-top, slightly ridiculous, but entirely earnest drama of the game that joyfully pulls you along. Don't Nod - who I am starting to suspect make their magic teen angsthologies to fund their real passion for "grimdark grown-up fantasy that you sort of suspect should be a book series" - have followed up 2018's third-person action effort Vampyr with this new semi-epic.

Banishers has a lot in common with the interwar bloodsucker, including methodical investigations and stacking moral choices, but is a much more accomplished effort. Banishers combines a sweeping, tragic love story with some very decent swashbuckling, shooting possessed skeletons in the face, and being disappointed at Puritans. A perfect game, some may say. I'd elevator-pitch it to you as a sort of goth Uncharted where you find-and-replace "treasure" with "ghosts".

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Ultros is one of those games that's born to stick in the memory. Not only is it one of the most visually vibrant games of the year so far with its neon colour palette that's an instant-KO-to-my-eyeballs, but the way it twists and rewires core tenets of the Metroidvania rulebook also make it one of the boldest and most daring examples of its genre. I'll say it now: it doesn't always stick the landing. But if there's one thing Ultros does constantly throughout its 15-odd hour runtime, it's that it's always, always interesting. And for that, it has my respect - even if by the time the (first) end credits rolled, I was ready to never touch it ever again.

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Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League feels like a perfectly average open world action game that plops out when a finance department locks a brilliant developer in a room and refuses to let them see sunlight for nine years. Rocksteady’s long-awaited live service shooter is aggressively unambitious and seemingly petrified of risk, marrying tight, combo-ratcheting, flow-state combat with some awfully familiar and conventional loot-chasing guff.

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If the RTX 4070 Super was all about addressing its predecessor’s so-so performance gains, the RTX 4080 Super’s course correction is more deeply rooted in issues of cold, hard coinage. For better and worse, it turns out – while this Super-fied GPU knocks hundreds off the RTX 4080’s starting price, any excitement for a potential new 4K champion is quickly muted by it barely moving the dial on straight FPS output. If, indeed, it’s not somehow running slower.

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The greatest compliment I can give to Palworld is that it lights up my brain in the same way a modern Assassin's Creed game does. It taps into the same checklist clearing compulsion that saw me spend over 100 hours in both Odyssey's Ancient Greek archipelago and the Viking open world of Valhalla - only instead of chasing map icons that take you down weird sidequest rabbit holes that riff on Fenton the (sheep)dog, or gobbling up story events just so you can make googly eyes at every warm-blooded human in a ten mile radius, Palworld hooks you in with its enormous catalogue of base building tasks. Not catching the 100+ Pal monsters roaming around its mysterious islands, but crafting the perfect sweatshop to put them to work in. It's one of those, "I'll just add this furnace so I can craft some ingots that will let me make a cooking pot to level up my base, but wait, now I need some ore to make those ingots, and oh god, I've just spent seven hours doing not very much at all, have I?"

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On the 23rd of May, I strode out of the exam hall with my head held high. Not only had we cleared out the 42nd floor of the cursed extra-dimensional horror house that was our school’s midnight alter-ego, I’d also just aced my midterms. I spent the afternoon helping my french foreign exchange friend sew a kimono for his estranged uncle, then killed some time before bed by consoling the small child I’d been hanging out with lately about her parent’s divorce.

So goes an average day in one of the very, very many days stuffed into Persona 3 Reload’s year long taste of demon-slaying high school life. A charming fantasy? Perhaps! There's plenty here for fans who don’t mind an old-school approach to grinding while exploring heartfelt, albeit cheesy, friendships. Those who don't get on with anime tropes, though, might find it exhaustingly written and repetitive.

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I realised several hours into my Enshrouded playthrough that I have an unspoken internal checklist for what makes a great open-world survival crafting game. Great building, a sense of scale, a beautiful atmosphere, and the ability to die in extremely stupid ways. In Minecraft, it's digging straight down into lava. In Valheim, it's getting crushed by the very tree you'd just chopped down. And after dying for the third time by trying to climb a slightly-too-steep hill, slipping down and building enough momentum to send me careening off the cliff to my death, I realised that Enshrouded, too, ticks all the boxes for maybe one day being listed among the titans of the genre.

One paragraph in, and I've already compared Enshrouded to Valheim. You'll see that quite a bit throughout this review, and for good reason. Enshrouded has come the closest for me to recapturing that feeling of when the world collectively discovered Valheim for the first time. But that's both an accolade and a reservation. Because it's not quite there... yet.

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Yakuza: Like A Dragon was a brilliant foray into turn-based chaos, but some of its RPG elements didn't quite lead anywhere. Well, in swaggers the frankly ginormous Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth to tie off the loose ends and give us a follow-up that links all the best bits of Yakuza into a far more satisfying reward loop. Some of the refinements make for superb silliness, while others are a bit eh - not everything is perfect. But spending time with Ichiban and his pals in the sun-soaked Hawaii and beyond is the real treat. It's a wonderful, happy JRPG and it will never fail to brighten my day. Thank goodness for Yakuza.

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When I am faced with Death, and that grim skeletal mouth asks me to choose the game we play to decide my fate, I have long believed I will pick Tekken. I'm not confident I will best the reaper in Iron Fist combat. But I cannot pass up the adrenally depraved possibility of successfully performing a ten-button airborne combo on mortality made manifest. It would be rad. It would be absurd and beautiful and I know, for a fact, that Death will play as Panda.

But will we play Tekken 8? Or roll back to Tekken 7? Hmmm. Let's find out.

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For a series that's defined by its trials and elaborate murder cases, the greatest crime in Ace Attorney history is arguably one we never get to see or take part in. Okay, maybe crime is too strong a word. Miscarriage of justice is perhaps more appropriate, and specifically that of Apollo Justice, the cover star of this latest trilogy in Capcom's beloved lawyer 'em up. Except poor old Apollo isn't really what holds this collection of Ace Attorneys 4, 5 and 6 together at all. Sure, he features in all of them, but at the end of the day, it's still the series' original bluffer supreme Phoenix Wright who heads up most of the casework here, relegating his new protegee back to bench-warming duties almost as soon as Apollo's debut game rolls its credits. What's more, he quickly has to share that space with Athena Cykes, another new hotshot lawyer that enters the firm in Dual Destinies and continues the scrappy defence trifecta in Spirit Of Justice.

The result is a set of games that feel considerably wobblier than Capcom's first and more robust Ace Attorney trilogy, and quite a bit more unfocused than the more recent Victorian-era spin-off, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. But despite a slightly unsure start, there are still plenty of career highs to be found here for Wright, Cykes and Justice, and Spirit Of Justice in particular remains one of the series' best entries to date. Those new to Ace Attorney should absolutely begin their journey elsewhere, but for series completionists, the Apollo Justice Trilogy is quite the welcome development.

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I disliked turn-based RPG Kingsvein at first. Quite a bit, in fact. An earlier version of this review would have been a very negative on, filled mostly with complaints and annoyances about opaque and frustrating systems, most of which I've since got over as the intent behind its design has become more clear.

It could definitely explain some things better, and its inscrutably tiny graphics remain a minor nuisance. But it's grown on me a lot, and though it may not be quite the kind of turn-based RPG I get on with best, it's an enjoyable one with a refreshing lack of bloat and timewasting, and with a class and combat system that will be pure catnip to a particular kind of player.

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It’s been two whole graphics card generations since Nvidia last tried the whole Super-branded refresh thing, and from what I recall of that sweaty 2019 summer, most of the updated RTX 20 series cards were meek rejigs of GPUs that didn’t really need replacing in the first place. Having tried the new RTX 4070 Super, though, it looks like Nvidia aren’t just redeeming the Super badge – they might just right the wrongs of the RTX 40 family as a whole.

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Readers may remember how much I liked Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, principally because of how funny it was. It was an intelligent and somewhat loving take on a Zelda-y RPG - a small town hero gets a sword and goes on a rampage fighting some bosses - except the main character is a turnip. And also he tears up any paperwork handed to him. Turnip Boy Robs A Bank follows directly on from his Tax Evasion, and it's not quite as funny or as focused, but it's also an entirely different genre of game, and I have a huge amount respect for that.

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I worked on the phones when I was in pension admin, years ago, and I fielded some weird ones, but nothing quite as weird as the calls in Home Safety Hotline. It's, technically, I suppose, a horror game about manning a call line through a 90s CRT-screen PC, where people will be like "my kitchen is full of droppings that look like coffee grounds, what do?". You look through your list of potential household hazards and select the right one, so your caller gets sent the info on dealing with cockroaches. Except as your week at HSH goes on, your calls start to be less roaches, more "my house smells like death and my dog is acting strangely" or "I can see someone looking through my window at night and hear them breathing heavily."

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As Prince Of Persia subtitles go, The Lost Crown is certainly an evocative one. It conjures up images of forgotten pasts being rediscovered, of wrongs being righted, and power being restored to its rightful balance. They're all promises that Ubisoft Montpellier capably deliver on over the course of its neatly plotted story, and often in more ways than one. But after flinging its hero warrior Sargon around the monster-filled streets of its Mount Qaf citadel for the better part of 20 hours, I'd also like to proffer the following alternatives: Pit Of A Thousand Spikes; The Eternal Death Wheels Of Spinning Blades; or maybe just simply Traps: The Game. These are perhaps more accurate descriptions of the challenges you'll face in The Lost Crown, as Mount Qaf is not a place you're allowed to tread lightly. Death stalks every corner, but that's precisely what makes this dextrously designed Metroid-like such a thrilling platformer. Put away your prejudices, because this is easily the equal of both Moon Studios' pair of Ori games, Hollow Knight and its Metroid genre namesakes.

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In the festively grim universe of Warhammer 40,000, space is sometimes racked by Warp storms – terrible cyclones of Chaos energy that have a catastrophic effect on imperial communications. One such storm hits the Koronus Expanse during the events of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, erasing starcharts and obliging your character - a newly minted Rogue Trader, aka High Gothic Commander Shepard - to re-discover the systems and planets that make up your predecessor Theodora’s dominions, while gathering an entourage of indecently customisable warriors, and hunting down a series of badniks that include a mysterious Chaos cult.

Warp storms sometimes have relativistic consequences. Voidship crews may be stranded for decades in transit: you will meet characters in this vast, brooding RPG who arrived at their destinations to find the battles they were sent to fight already passed into legend, the people they were sent to meet long since dead or departed. Something similar has happened to this review, which was supposed to be published in early December. Did I dramatically underestimate the amount of playtime involved, despite being told months in advance by developers Owlcat that Rogue Trader is well over 100 hours long? Nonsense. It’s all because of those pesky Chaos disruptions, you see. It’s Chaos that’s to blame.

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Even with the rising power of integrated graphics, the prospects of getting high-quality, high-rez gaming capability in a laptop of ultrabook proportions is still years from becoming a feasible reality. Until then, slimmer gaming laptops like the HP Omen Transcend 16 remain the closest approximation of that dream, cramming discrete GPUs – the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060, in this case – into lighter, narrower chassis designs.

The usual catch with such devices, sadly, is an overeagerness to appear aspirational. Which is, to be clear, the nicest thing I can say about a Razer Blade 16 costing £2500 for its own RTX 4060 model. Despite the name, however, the Omen Transcend 16 is much more down to earth – it still offers enough premium trappings to feel like a step up from chunkier laptops, but at its current pricing of £1199 / $1429, it’s a fair trade as well. And it supports Nvidia DLSS 3, dash of futureproofing tech that might just soothe any worries about buying a 2023-spec PC in 2024.

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It’s been encouraging to see how post-Steam Deck handheld PCs aren’t merely copying Valve’s homework. The Asus ROG Ally made a (mostly) successful attempt at slimming down while upping performance, and now we have the Lenovo Legion Go: an even higher-concept portable with Switch-style detachable controllers. One of which transforms into a mouse. It’s a bit mad but I’ve always loved the concept’s ambition, even as I rendered working protypes a little less... working.

I’m happy to report that this, the Legion Go’s retail version, is far more resistant to such improprieties. Moreover, it’s basically the best Windows handheld out there right now – though some occasional fiddliness, and the looming issue of the Steam Deck OLED, mean it isn’t necessarily the finest palmable PC outright.

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Multiplayer shooters have become defined in recent years by the methods they use to withhold power from players, whether that’s a hero shooter's unlocks and battle pass or a survival shooter's vast map of scattered goodies. Even before these systems became du jour, however, shooters often required you to be good at them before you unlocked their real pleasures, whether by perfecting your rocket timing in Quake or memorising level layouts in Counter-Strike.

The Finals' real master stroke, I think, is that it has found a design that lets it be generous with power - even while containing an unlock system, a battle pass, and a not insignificant skill floor. Those things aren’t an obstacle between you and the childish joy of smashing the world to bits.

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Two years ago, developers Fntastic debuted their "open world survival MMO" The Day Before with a fairly lengthy trailer (which has since been scrubbed from their official YouTube channel, but it's been preserved by IGN and Gamespot). It shows a couple of players scavenging a post-pandemic American city slick with detailed lighting effects and reactive zombie hordes. There's crafting, cracked glass, and even a horror tease as a player peers around a corridor with a torch. It was an MMO that promised a mixture of The Last Of Us and The Division, and it quickly became the most wishlisted game on Steam.

Now, days after releasing into early access, developers Fntastic have shut down and you can't purchase the game anymore. Does it come as a surprise? Not really, considering the final product wasn't what they promised - not even close. Instead of an MMO, it was barely an extraction shooter. Consider my words below a record of a rancid time had across its short-lived early access release, then. A time when I would've rather handed a stinging nettle £40 to line my socks than spend another minute in this empty husk.

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After my time spent with open world action adventure Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, all I wanted was a jeep, maybe a jet to get around quicker. The jungles and the plains might be wonderful to look at, but they're too vast, filled with boring tasks, and overly reliant on level-gating to force a sense of progress. Sure, there's some spectacle in narrow escapes from the nasty humans - and their factories that make the plants droopy - but throughout the rebellion I ditched my bow for a shotgun with extended mags and a muzzle brake. For a game that's all, "the humans are bad", I was ready to defect. At least I would've been able to keep my shotgun.

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A while back, I had a feeling we'd see a lot of games about nature and plants and the wild coming out over the next few years, as developers and players alike emerged from being shut inside for basically a year like dairy cows during their annual spring turnout. We may not all be not be naturally disposed to it, but there's much to be said for the fleeting, if unbridled happiness that comes from running barefoot into the teeth of the wind or getting caught in a rainstorm without a coat.

Nine times out of ten, you might get wet and have cold fingers, but that one time that you get wet, have cold fingers and feel red-raw and alive is a doozy. A Highland Song, a lone and dangerous jaunt through the Scottish highlands, is trying to capture that feeling, most especially in segments where you sprint across rocks and heather alongside a deer. At these times you leap in time to swelling music, and whoop and yell in spontaneous joy. It's lovely. It's also easy to stumble.

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Following two years in early access, roguelite citybuilder Against The Storm has finally reached its 1.0 milestone. It’s a combination of genres that seem to pair together as naturally as sausages and strawberry jam. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of both of these things as separate entities, but together? My assumption was that they would prove too strange to stomach, but much like the cursed pork and berry snack that became a staple of my university diet, the result is a thrilling concoction that delights the palette. I’ll say it right up top: Against The Storm is one of this year’s best.

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Have you ever felt like you're at least ten years too old to be playing certain video games? Whether it's the humour falling flat, or just the general hyperactivity of its main cast being a bit too much, there are some games out there that you can't help but bounce off. Hard. Alas, in the case of In Stars And Time, I've been thrown from its time-looping RPG trampoline with such violence that I now can't even look at it without breaking out into a sweat.

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