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Dark Scrolls is certainly fun at times, but it overall feels a bit insubstantial.
Deer & Boy is a beautifully crafted cinematic experience about two unlikely friends who find each other in their greatest time of need.
If you like adventure games with a large helping of puzzles and fourth-wall-breaking humour, Crushed In Time delivers in spades. The oddly limited control scheme unfortunately frustrates more than it aids. However, if you can look past that, Crushed In Time has a good amount to recommend for point-and-click adventure game fans.
Overall, Momento is short and sweet and a great way to pass the time. While it isn’t traditionally story-driven, it’s the type of game where narrative threads can be discovered and pieced together.
Swan Song is a charming game of interlocking narrative vision, puzzle design and presentation.
A worthy spiritual successor to Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight series, Mina the Hollower takes the studio’s love of retro aesthetics and strange fascination with digging and has crafted a fantastic world to explore, above and below ground.
007 First Light understands that Bond isn’t just gadgets and gunfights. There’s a lot of charm and chaos, and an abundance of improvisation under pressure.
Full of surprises and not afraid to throw you into the deep end, Yerba Buena is a delectably tricky linear puzzle narrative adventure masquerading as a colourful physics sandbox.
Stonemachia is a fun action-leaning souls-like to play, but it probably won’t become the next breakout indie sensation.
Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar is an impressively fun puzzle debut from Abandoned Sheep. Every puzzle was enjoyable and well thought out, with a natural and well-paced evolution of mechanics.
Coffee Talk Tokyo is a game that shouldn’t be rushed. The story is good, and the characters have their own personalities, and your role as a barista determines whether they get a happy ending.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a fantastic experience that anyone can pick up and play, regardless of their playstyle.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is a spectacular sophomore effort that takes the subgenre and grafts new and interesting mechanics onto it. Minor bugs do little to impact the consistent delight of narrative twists, beautiful prose, fully realised characters, and top-tier voice acting. Thematically deep and tonally diverse, CASCADE’s return to Portofiro and the fate of the Whole Sick Crew will be a story we’ll be dissecting for a long time.
Outbound struggles to justify its own loop. It presents a beautiful, yet empty, isolating space that exists without tension or inscribed drive.
Legacy of the Dark Knight tries to honour many legacies at once, and struggles to serve them all effectively. A familiar but fun LEGO game, a functional and simplified continuation of the Batman: Arkham series’ mechanics and an unambitious and only intermittently funny Batman story all sit alongside one another in a final build of a game that will still be enjoyed by many, but is never quite the sum of its bricks and will unlikely have much of a legacy of its own.
Forza Horizon 6 hits the road with the most densely packed open world racing game ever created, in the truly iconic setting of Japan.
Call of the Elder Gods is a really well-designed puzzle game with great characters and a story that grips you the whole way through. It’s a shame that some of the plot developments don’t continue the whole way through the narrative, but it’s still a story well worth following. I can’t wait to see what eldritch ventures this team will send us on next.
Vampire Crawlers is a fun roguelike deckbuilder that you can easily spend hours playing.
Mixtape is an adventure specifically for those of us who grew up in the angsty 90s. For those players, the top-tier soundtrack selection and unpacking themes you may have been avoiding for a few decades is going to hit very hard. For others, the rose-tinted glasses and hammy dialogue may feel distant or indulgent. Just like an actual mixtape someone makes for you, not every track lands. But it’s so clearly made with love, and the tracks that do will stay with you long after it’s over.
WILL: Follow the Light offers a few glimmers of promise amidst its fog of missed potential, but they are too few and far between to recommend. Stiff delivery, rough writing and uneven puzzles all would have been better served by being thrown overboard so WILL could focus on its atmospheric sailing strengths. Instead, WILL is better left adrift at sea with only its lost promise to keep it company.