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Hermit and Pig goes to unexpected lengths, and it’s a better and more timely game for it. The narrative is sharp, the battles immersive, and the characters rich. It’s a tightly packaged game that balances playfulness, wit, and bite across a rural community scratching out a way of life threatened by corporate greed. Hermit and Pig are unlikely but extremely likeable heroes that will endear any fans of offbeat, satirical RPGs.
The lack of any connectivity makes Anthem#9 feel more like an arcade game, which hurts, as this world is ripe for exploration. The deep and robust battle mechanics and bright visuals help to feed your attention, but even those are not enough to maintain long-form interest. Passionate roguelite players will find a game that will sing through its unconventional ways of handling the genre, but the rest of us might need to look elsewhere.
Successfully building upon the first game in every way, Planet of Lana 2 delivers a fascinating and sometimes emotional experience heightened by stunning visual and sound design. The time taken to explore Mui’s backstory and the machine's connection to the world in general is such a welcome addition and only aids in making this feel like more than just a platform game. Fans of the original and newcomers alike will have one heck of a ride, and I can’t wait to see where the series goes from here.
Kami, the mountain that Aava sets out to summit in Cairn, is a harsh, unrelenting cacophony of jagged edges, pushing the player back at every turn. But through the smallest movements, there is a building sense of triumph as you make the ascent to the peak, which The Game Bakers masterfully designed into the cliff surfaces and tense gameplay. The occasional slip, left without feedback, stings and can disjoint the game’s pacing, but ultimately in Cairn there is a new perspective on games that centre their design on difficulty and force you to reconcile how and why you’ll endure their friction.
This is an inventive and ambitious platformer built around a striking movement system that turns shooting into traversal, rewarding precision, experimentation, and patience once it clicks. Its colourful presentation, varied encounters, and flexible upgrade systems show clear confidence and creativity, but the demanding movement and uneven difficulty curve can make the experience feel more punishing than inviting at times. While Assist options help smooth some of those edges, Baseless remains a game that asks a lot of its players and will resonate most with those willing to fully commit to mastering its systems.
TR-49 is a challenge to the modern gamer’s attention span. It asks us to slow down and listen to the whispers of the past, to become readers before we become players. It is a work of restraint, a puzzle box that, once opened, cannot be easily closed. It lingers in the mind like a half-remembered melody, the kind of game that stays with you long after the screen has gone dark.
For Berangin Creative’s debut game, Keejora is good first attempt. Even with the game’s problems, there’s still just enough here to make for a worthwhile playthrough, but the game’s unutilised potential brings down what could have been something quite special.
If, like me, you are a Metroidvania geek, you’ll have a great time with MIO, just as long as you don’t come in with too high of an expectation, and for everyone else – especially people who turned away from Silksong – this might be the Metroidvania you’ve been looking for.
Big Hops exemplifies how 3D platformers ought to look and feel, with a nonstop pulse of adrenaline from start to finish. Control over movement is pinpoint precision, and momentum is easy to gather. Hop’s tale of self-confidence against a gaslighting quest-giver inspires while the player bounds their way through meticulously designed worlds where problems need solutions and gaps need to be crossed. Big Hops blows open the doors to 2026 with a stellar must-play right out of the gate.
I’m a bit of a sucker for games that tackle themes like grief and loss, and Death Howl is a prime example of how to not just use story beats to do that but include gameplay in that storytelling as well. There is beauty in the determination and grit that Ro shows, but it feels like there are things she still needs to learn about herself as well. Exploring that story and playing the wonderful grid-based and card-based combat is exquisite, if you’re up to dealing with dying over and over again.
Plenty of skateboard games nail what skating is all about, even if your opinion on what that actually is differs. From Tony Hawk to the Skate and Olli Olli series, there’s always a part of skateboarding culture that is perfectly translated. Skate Story doesn’t try to be any of those games and still nails that feeling too, even if you are playing as a glass demon trying to swallow the moon. Cruising around has rarely felt this good, and the surrounding atmosphere is just brilliant, from the setting to the music and everything in between.
For a series that has experienced highs and lows, Anno 117: Pax Romana is an astounding high that proves just how good the city simulation genre can be, with a near-flawless approach to gameplay, UI and visual design – the only thing holding the game back is a story lacking in weight, with the female protagonist having an interesting subplot, but the majority of the main story boiling down to a slight inconvenience in the overall experience.
A heartfelt, visually striking Metroidvania with meaningful storytelling and sharp platforming. While its boss encounters and accessibility suite fall short of its strongest ideas, Constance delivers an emotionally rich journey that’s well worth experiencing.
Possessor(s) is flash, stylish and fabulous in its presentation, but where the strong visuals and weighty soundtrack offer a glimpse of an incredible game under the surface, the mediocre pacing and unusual design choices hamper the experience. Even so, Metroidvania fans should definitely give the game their time to enjoy a compelling, well-written story.
Forestrike is a gorgeous-looking game with an innovative two-part combat system, which adds a striking sense of freshness to its roguelite form. However, the cerebral combat can feel rather slow and constrictive at times, and the game’s meticulous, mechanical complexity and harsh punishment for small mistakes might be too much for some – myself included. But those with the skill, reflexes and patience to master the intricate combat might well be swept off their feet, in more ways than one.
Morsels is like watching a Darwinistic ritual in real time of mould spores duking it out on a slice of margherita that even Pizza Rat ignored. It’s visually captivating, and there’s always a new body horror to look at. But like the food bits scattered around the levels, it grows stale run after run. There’s a bit too much fuzz that clouds up the systems, making them feel too shallow to invest much energy into.
Have you ever wanted to spend a semester at uni trying to avert the apocalypse with a bunch of friends? Then you can’t go wrong with Demonschool, as it pays homage to horror media from past to present, all the while bringing the turn-based RPG genre into modern times. You might get lured in by the gorgeous visuals, but it’s the stellar combat that will get you hooked and will keep you coming back to the game again and again.
There are few places that can match the modern history of a city like Berlin. The past century has seen regimes rise and fall in a massive way, due to which we often forget that the city was inhabited by regular people like ourselves. These are stories of victims, of those who refused to let these huge events stop their lives, of survivors. They are also tales of the beauty of the human spirit. The Berlin Apartment is a beautiful testimony to the perseverance of the people of Berlin and to human kindness itself.
This cosy crafting survival game has a charming storybook art style, but its gameplay and associated systems turn it into somewhat of a slog. The fiddly inventory management, the lack of a map, the painful combat, the repetition, the less than compelling characterisation, and the general grind of it all eventually wore me down over my 14-hour playtime. However, for those who love the world enough – and there’s certainly plenty to love – and who enjoy its mode of storytelling, these elements might be much easier to forgive. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case for me, and I’ll content myself with the never ending toil of my own household drudgery back in the real world.
Having not been all that good at video games for most of my life, I fell in love with games that focused on great stories, usually with interactions a bit more limited than in fully fledged RPGs and the like. It’s why I still adore series like Life is Strange and (most of) the Telltale games. AdHoc Studios takes the foundations of those games and brings them up to the next level. The polish is astounding, with perfect performances, brilliant art and music, and fantastic, thoughtful writing hidden underneath a heap of swear words. Dispatch is brilliant, and you should play it.