Sonar Shock is a reminder that some of the best game concepts or settings seem so obvious as soon as you play them.

System Shock on an unreasonably huge submarine on an equally ludicrous trip around the Northeast Passage via Cape Agulhas? With a satirical Soviet setting that isn't just "lol russia" or "I think Stalker was about machismo and gun attachments"? And a third thing that I'll get to in a minute because this intro is getting out of control? God yes.

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We have been cursed with a terrible devouring monster. Each harvest, one villager must don the ceremonial, mildly magical mask, and enter the fields alone, to gather the precious life-giving ambrosia before the beast can befoul it. For five nights you must do battle, or evade its ravenous clutches.

Those of you who have known your own Devourer are surely thinking: Only five nights per year? Luxury. Harvest Hunt is good, though.

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I love building games, but it's not that often that put one down and feel particularly tempted to get straight back into it again. Of Life And Land is one of those, but thankfully not so much so that it threatens to consume my every waking moment.

It quietly does several things in a modest little way, that are all the more impressive for its lack of fanfare. The core one though, is that it takes the kind of simulationist foundation normally reserved for the punishing Dwarf Fortress derivatives or gnarly logistics games, and builds on them an approachable, gentle, even philosophical game instead. In a word: it's lovely.

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There are exactly one million metroidy rogueishy action platform games and that is okay. There's no such thing as too many of an entertaining thing in a world with, god I dunno, at least thousand humans in? Maybe more? Who knows.

They are rarely my thing, though. I try more than I really want to, for you, and games like Biomorph give me the energy to keep going through the many that leave me indifferent. This isn't one of my grudging admissions that a subgenre isn't all bad; it's a game that I can't even think of a way to complain about.

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It's not, strictly speaking, a goo. From Glory To Goo's enemy isn't a sinister gunge, but that minor disappointment didn't last long.

Its monsters are individual, blobby little (mostly) purple nasties, but they act as a flood anyway, taking great exception to your base and the resources it pipes back and forth (much like in Creeper World), but coming mostly in waves like They Are Billions. But the thing with FGTG is that there's always a little bit more to deal with than you think.

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Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don't really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I'm not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

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It's been a while since I snuck my diary into a column, huh?

Long-term readers might have discerned that I haven't been well for a very long time. I have various ailments, of which we all suffer, and it turns out that a mere five years of clinging on by your fingernails sometimes leads to some actual treatment for... all of them. Wild.

So while there've been a lot of interesting looking games in the shortlist lately, these last few weeks have been entirely too interesting for me personally. Piecing It Together is nothing more or less than 3D jigsaw puzzles. I've never even liked jigsaws, but it turns out that was exactly the kind of game I needed.

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"Very little Bela Lugosi" is not a criticism I ever expected to level at a game. It's not entirely unexpected considering he's dead, but I'm still grumbling at you, Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi.

It is, as it appears, an unabashed homage to Castlevania, but with none of the -vania, making it much more like the original (or the game boy ones, and possibly a few others in the series I don't know about): a straightforward, linear platform game about whipping monsters and not stepping on spikes. Ten a penny, right? But CNSBL captures it so well that it had me looking up old game boy tunes it vaguely reminded me of.

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I like a good management game, but my definition of "good" often includes words like "detailed", "complex", or "dangerously all-consuming". That doesn't mean, though, that I don't appreciate something light and simple now and then. In fact, Minami Lane might barely qualify as a management game by some standards.

There's no real pressure, no chance of failure, and its limit of a handful of levels lasting perhaps three or four hours just about taps it out. But sometimes such limitations are intentional, and exactly what you want from a game.

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I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from Graven, but it still feels like it wasn't quite what I expected. That's both good and bad. It has the look of a 90s throwback FPS, the cool atmosphere and action RPG (barely RPG, really, restricted to which weapons you upgrade) combat of something from the 2000s like Rune or Dark Messiah, with a hint of a modern immersive sim. There is, I think, a better game to be made with those parts in a different arrangement. This one is only kinda good.

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I have never enjoyed those grid-based dungeon-crawling games. I dislike the very notion of dungeon-crawling in general, frankly, but the awkward juddery squareskipping rat-toucher games have always left me absolutely cold.

You will be shocked and aroused to learn that I preface with all this just so I can make an exception of Islands Of The Caliph. Does this mean she's becoming more open minded, or just that she's found a way to gripe and complain even within a recommendation? Who can say, readers.

What I can say is that I don't merely hate it less than its genremates. I think it's a bloody great little RPG, full of charm and detail that never drags it down.

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