An ornate and clever if slightly under-cooked System Shock successor, which makes the most of a truly magnificent space station setting.
A trashy, overwrought psychodrama with the odd inspired touch that alternates between simple forensic puzzles and gimmicky gunplay.
A short, sweet, slightly dissatisfying translation of Gone Home's cosy environmental storytelling into the realm of speculative fiction.
A winningly nasty turn-based cult sim with beautiful monochrome art and surgical orchestral audio.
A sublime blend of Metroidvania and Lovecraft with beautiful hand-drawn art, tarnished a little by the element of repetition.
1992 is alive and well. Christian Whitehead and team turn in a beautiful rewrite of the 16-bit Sonic games with all-new stages.
A splendid hybrid of CSI, cyberpunk and Silent Hill woven around a potent central performance, spoiled a bit by unconvincing scare tactics.
A one-of-a-kind blend of blood-thumping martial arts, combo curation and grindy multiplayer set in a ravishing wasteland.
A morbid, potent epilogue for Dishonored 2 equipped with new powers, some great locations and some overdue tweaks.
A scrappy, open-ended, infiltrator's delight for the player who enjoys breaking levels more than beating them.
A powerfully grim, fleet-footed cyberpunk action odyssey that is caught in the spell of its own nihilism.
Resident Evil 4 meets the Truman Show in an entertaining but unremarkable follow-up, held back by tepid stealth and warmed-over scares.
Vicious, affecting, witty, spaced-out, crude, inventive, morbid and for the most part, a success.
Origins handles its creative inheritance more elegantly than some open worlders, not least because unlike, say, the first game's Altair, its protagonist actually feels like he is of this realm rather than merely in it. And if the levelling and to-do list grate, the series has never offered a society and a landscape so worthy of close attention.
Though not without its moments, Forces is a depressing return to form for Sonic the Hedgehog after the joys of Mania.
An oppressively beautiful portrayal of an undersea environment, and a well-wrought survival game with a vaguely eco-friendly message.
The measure of an open world is ultimately not the story it tells but whether you're happy to kill time within it, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance offers plenty of ways to do that, even if a lot of them will, in fact, get you slaughtered.
An earnest eco-platformer that is at once under and overcooked.
A continent-sized anthology of American campfire tales that will keep pulling you in deeper, once you acclimatise to its slow pace.
Weather its bugs and lacklustre stealth, and Ghost of a Tale is a quietly ravishing potted epic with a serious subtext.