There just isn’t enough juice in the combat, the cover shooting, or the endless hoovering of collectibles.

What saves Norco is that the visions on offer belong as much to the imagined as the troublingly real.

You can sense, in Weird West, a developer both returning to his obsessions and toiling on a fresh frontier.

Despite its obvious muses, Tunic manages to rise above mere flattery, by paying deeper homage to the medium itself.

Most potent of all, there is a strain of urban fear running through its design—not of monsters but of the city itself as an isolating entity, rendering you unreachable.

Polyphony has delivered an airtight flight from the everyday, rich in escape yet rooted in anything but fantasy.

If only Dalcò, rather than honouring his heroine by smothering her search for truth in confounding gloom, had abided by her love of illumination.

There are no other dynamics quite like it in games; they acquaint us with an array of miseries and charge us money for the privilege.

Maybe the visions in Sifu lie in the traumatised mind of the main character, who remains more elusive than any of his foes. The game’s tagline ponders, “Is one life enough to know kung fu?” But, in the fractured figure of its hero, a deeper realisation occurs. It may not be enough to know yourself.

Whether OlliOlli World charms you or chafes at your patience will depend on your appetite for such whimsy.

Indeed, if, like me, you have a weakness for the zombie-hued, and for the sway and flail of first-person platforming, then Dying Light 2 is easy to recommend.

More than any other studio, Ubisoft is willing to mutate its existing IPs until they scarcely resemble what they once were.

Where Solar Ash goes from an intriguing ambient platformer to one of the year’s most fascinating releases is in its fixation on living as an act of being stuck.

With Halo Infinite, 343 Industries seems to want to break the cycle and start afresh. The irony is that it has done so by drawing closer to the past.

There remains about Pokémon Brilliant Diamond the glint of something far gone, and there is something warmly reassuring about the place.

There remains about Pokémon Brilliant Diamond the glint of something far gone, and there is something warmly reassuring about the place.

If these games shaped or changed you, you might find the notion of their being shaped and changed, in turn, an unwelcome one.

Its narrative is fractious and slight, compared to Sledgehammer’s previous work, but the chance for a chaotic, target-rich experience with friends exerts a stronger pull than usual.

It may well be more of the same, but Mexico beckons, ravishing the eye and devouring up the miles.

Where Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy proves most winsome, however, is in its twining of the intergalactic and the terrestrial.

If only House of Ashes were possessed with something malevolent enough to actually scare us; sadly, it commits a litany of sins, none of them original.

We have been given a finely tooled zombie shooter, but it lacks the power of the original. This has less to do with its diminished darkness—Left 4 Dead was a far gloomier ride, lit by the panicked sway of torches—and more to do with us. And with the years. There is plenty to enjoy here, and I heartily recommend it to any who relish killing the dead. But Turtle Rock Studios wants to take us back to another time, and it’s 2 Late 4 That.

Where the studio succeeds—and where Metroid Dread elevates from noble and flawed effort to inspired riff—is in its embrace of the unreachable.

As it happens, though I played for much longer, I had had more than my fill after the first four hours, with no desire to venture back in. Strange to tell, I mourn the very things—the scalable vantages, the unlockable skills—that Ubisoft has left behind for the sake of freshness.

Whether you demand more than comfort from your games will inform the way you see Kena: Bridge of Spirits; is it merely a graphically sumptuous example of design that you wish we would leave behind, or is it a vivifying tribute to a rich precursor legacy?

It offers an otherworldly break from the busyness of life, and, when you do return to Earth, you will do so with a smooth landing, and without stress.

In an odd way, then, Glass Bottom Games has captured the truth of the situation; contrary to its mission of cuteness, it has made a game that feels hollow-boned, caged by unflattering mechanics.

If there is something lacking in Deathloop, it has to do with emotional staying power. As one egghead, in a scratchy projector film, began to unreel the mythology (“Long ago, the isle of Blackreef experienced a cataclysmic event which tore the fabric of”—and so forth), I realised that I couldn’t care less. Blackreef can go hang. I suspect that the only things that will stick with me—the only things coated with enough Residuum to survive a hard reset—are Colt and Julianna. And maybe that isn’t all bad news. I may replay it at some point, and when I do I’ll be even more like Colt, waking on a beach with the vague prickle of familiarity, and the need to break free.