An Animal Crossing inspired life-sim populated by the world's most fiercely defended intellectual property
My Time At Sandrock takes every life sim feature under the sun and rolls them into a winning package.
A love letter to the world of snowboarding, Shredders is a passion project that mostly sticks the landing.
A beautiful but barebones combat flight simulator, Tiny Combat Arena is only just taking off.
A strategy game about tens of thousands of tiny idiots trying to break your stuff, Diplomacy Is Not An Option is as gratifying as it is light
A strange, funny, and ambitious fully-acted propaganda simulator, Not For Broadcast puts you at the control desk of the mainstream media
A delirious action RPG set at the end of a dying universe in which time, space and combat mechanics are collapsing in on themselves.
A chaotically structured open world racer, Riders Republic feels like the free roaming SSX sequel we never had.
The Good Life is a shambolic RPG that barely hold together, wrapped in the trappings of a rural life simulator. It's tonally stupid and structurally broken, but also surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware.
Bugsnax is a faintly naughty, but never crass adventure that feels simultaneously like a love letter to, and a sharply observed satire of, the games that inspired it.
Iron Harvest is a throwback to one of the last golden ages of the genre, often feeling as old fashioned and crusty as that association entails, but frequently reminding us of the essential appeal of extremely large robots chilling out in timelines where they shouldn’t be.
It’s as close to a perfect restoration as you’ll get, and the treatment these genre-defining games deserve.
There’s a really excellent Predator in here, waiting to be set free.
Disaster Report 4 depicts a strange and consequence-averse crisis, in which you’re usually little more than a hapless observer.
Wolfenstein is a masterpiece of its genre. It does good shooting men. But it’s more than that, it’s an effortlessly melancholy adventure that doesn’t drown in its own bombast. It’s like finding out that a superstar footballer is a poet, or finding your dog pressing flowers. It’s a game with hidden depths that you’re invited to explore, but ones that never overshadow the thing it’s best at.
In contrast, Session feels back-to-front: so unblinkingly focused on the technical side of riding a skateboard that it's overlooked everything that makes rolling around on a board actually fun. There’s plenty of room for skateboarding games less arcadey than anything with a Tony Hawk face on it, but this early version of Session is a bleak, sterile thing, and one that only serves as a painful reminder of my own lack of talent in most physical activities.
Daily Challenges and split-screen multiplayer and pro-versions of tracks and a really cool soundtrack are all other things that OlliOlli 2 has going for it. It's an improvement on the scrappier feeling original, introducing that one tiny combo-blending manual trick that transforms the game into a profoundly new-feeling and lovely thing.
I love space and Kerbal Space Program.
Elite: Dangerous is a beautiful arcade experience, plugged into an empty galaxy, one so big and bold that it might trick you into thinking there's more to see and do than there really is. You'll probably love it anyway.
And with the game's unwavering deference to the film's cinematic world building and detail, and its skillful adherence to Ridley Scott's original vision, Alien: Isolation is quite easily the best Alien game ever made too.