Timing is all as you wake from the dead and race towards a heavenly finish line, slaying demons en route, in this chaotic yet ingenious anime-inspired game
This award-winning single-person adventure, set in a run-down refinery town, is full of compelling mysteries
A treasure inspires murder, and your job as detective is to piece together the crime in this addictive 18th-century whodunnit
]A sushi waiter is on a mission to bring exotic fish to the table in this stylish, satisfying game that delivers a vital message on sustainability
An awful childhood gets a surprisingly arcadey revisit in this blistering action roguelike.
The combined effect of this maze of vivid, diverse, shifting scenes is memorable. You are Alice, touring wonderland, seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes. In Hohokum, it goes an awfully long way: it's deep, it's wide and, perhaps most importantly, it's temporally long. This is a game that sticks with you long after you switch it off.
Shinji Mikami has yet to make a poor game, and The Evil Within does not blemish his record. But neither does the game enchant and disrupt in the way that Vanquish and the others managed. This is Mikami revisiting his past glories and, as such, it's both a delight and a disappointment.
Despite the game's dipped-nose poise, its obsession with speed and clocks, it rewards those who take their time, who perfect their technique on each stage, and who savour an arcade game that's been lovingly embellished and expanded to its full and likely final potential.
With its delicious score system taken into account, Astebreed is well-constructed, well-presented and well-balanced. A certain amount of delight comes from the novelty of a 32-bit-esque indie game, as it offers a welcome change from the army of sprite-based titles of the previous few years.
Hyrule Warriors rewards thoughtful play and demands a strategic approach that transcends the brute force combo-strings of its moment-to-moment gameplay. The marriage of Zelda and Musou is an unexpected success, then - a game that recounts the Zelda myth not just in a new way, but in a whole new language.
Scram Kitty and His Buddy On Rails is a wonderfully idiosyncratic creation that, despite its smorgasbord of influences, feels like nothing else. It's also a game that ignores current design fashions: there is no overarching list of achievements, there are no sideshow systems or alternative stages to upset its rhythms, no adornments to distract from the core task. For some, the lack of variety combined with the stiff challenge will be too much. (Even for competent players, this is a game that requires such a degree of concentration that it's best played in short bursts.) For others, the steepness of the initial learning curve will throw them from the rails before they get anywhere. But for those who master its controls, there is glorious opportunity for showboating play; it's a game built with admirable craft and singular focus, and it richly rewards your investment.
Activision would have us believe that the latest title in the series is a bold re-imagining. It's not, but it's still blistering entertainment
The designer Sid Meier famously said that a game is a series of interesting choices. It's a maxim fully embraced by The Banner Saga, which stitches those choices into its very fabric to form a tapestry that is wholly your own.
The game struggles a little over the mid-to-long term: the difficulty doesn't fluctuate much and, soon enough, you're merely turning the cogs rather than responding to thrilling challenges, but Zoo Tycoon is pleasant and engaging, even in its absence of spectacle.
This sprawling sci-fi series once set the agenda for console shooters, but now far behind and playing catch up, it has much to prove
Temper your expectations, accept that you're essentially blasting cans off a fence, and Doom is, unexpectedly, the best shooter of 2016 so far.
Deliciously dark stealth adventure returns to tempt players into a trap-like city of wary guards and architectural puzzles
It may look like a game for children but this primary coloured, Kickstarter-funded platformer is catnip for 30-somethings who came of age with Banjo-Kazooie
Fire is your friend as you leap through this exhilarating game rescuing prisoners tied to stakes
Mystery and melancholy combine in this affecting exploration game in which you navigate through a life unravelling