Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.

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Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this.

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The Crimson Diamond is a proper old-school style puzzle adventure. It's 2D pixel art, with a limited colour palette as in EGA games, and you control it with a text parser, like King's Quest or one of them other Sierra adventures old men like Graham remember. It's important to mention this up front because it's very possible that, despite The Crimson Diamond's tale of betrayal, murder, and mineral rights in 1914 Canada, the text parser element will be a Rubicon you instantly can't be arsed to cross. A not unreasonable stance - though I think the text parser in The Crimson Diamond is fantastic. Such beef that I have with this adventure game is down to the specificity required to solve some of the puzzles.

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Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.

Read more

Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this.

Read more

The Crimson Diamond is a proper old-school style puzzle adventure. It's 2D pixel art, with a limited colour palette as in EGA games, and you control it with a text parser, like King's Quest or one of them other Sierra adventures old men like Graham remember. It's important to mention this up front because it's very possible that, despite The Crimson Diamond's tale of betrayal, murder, and mineral rights in 1914 Canada, the text parser element will be a Rubicon you instantly can't be arsed to cross. A not unreasonable stance - though I think the text parser in The Crimson Diamond is fantastic. Such beef that I have with this adventure game is down to the specificity required to solve some of the puzzles.

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Hm. Hmmmm. Right. So, what have we got here? There’s my Blood Donor card, which reduces the value of the hearts I play, but also heals me. That’s fine, actually. Reduced score means I can squeeze in another card for more healing. If I can pull my Tarot card, I'll deal damage with each heal, and I’ve already pulled two scratch cards for yet more quick damage. Now, if I can just pull a Jack, I can plonk down the King Of Space And Time for a brutal finisher. That’ll transfer everything on my side over to my opponent’s, forcing a bust for a nice final chunk of hurt and…

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Hm. Hmmmm. Right. So, what have we got here? There’s my Blood Donor card, which reduces the value of the hearts I play, but also heals me. That’s fine, actually. Reduced score means I can squeeze in another card for more healing. If I can pull my Tarot card, I'll deal damage with each heal, and I’ve already pulled two scratch cards for yet more quick damage. Now, if I can just pull a Jack, I can plonk down the King Of Space And Time for a brutal finisher. That’ll transfer everything on my side over to my opponent’s, forcing a bust for a nice final chunk of hurt and…

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The first World Of Goo was a cheerful parade of goopy engineering with a sense of never-ending novelty (well, never-ending for about four hours). Every level would introduce a new goo type or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that challenged you to get a gaggle of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with just as much twitchy eagerness as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goos at the player in an effort to keep you on your sludge-coated toes. That pursuit doesn't always result in pleasing new levels, though. There is a "hit and miss" feeling to things this time around. But those hits are hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for more sticky structure-building: I hope you like comically unpredictable fluids.

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"Again, but better" has become the maxim of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, to be more specific, post-Steam Deck OLED ones. Now that Valve have shown it’s possible to quickly turn around an upgraded handheld without enraging owners of the original, Lenovo have hinted at a new Legion Go, MSI have revealed an improved Claw, and Asus have released this here ROG Ally X. A ROG Ally, again – but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed at which it’ll plunge you into financial destitution.

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British comedy is too often defined by its relationship to America: either as merely irony and sarcasm, which we're told Americans don't understand, or as a sprightly ideas factory for works such as The Office, which Americans can bless by re-making at scale.

Peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony however and you may find the true pulsing core of British comedy that lies beneath: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Goodness You're Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It's a cheeky 2-3 hour adventure through a small northern town, and it's here to educate the entire world of our nation's obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.

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At ten past nine every evening he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protege. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?

Read more

The first World Of Goo was a cheerful parade of goopy engineering with a sense of never-ending novelty (well, never-ending for about four hours). Every level would introduce a new goo type or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that challenged you to get a gaggle of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with just as much twitchy eagerness as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goos at the player in an effort to keep you on your sludge-coated toes. That pursuit doesn't always result in pleasing new levels, though. There is a "hit and miss" feeling to things this time around. But those hits are hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for more sticky structure-building: I hope you like comically unpredictable fluids.

Read more

"Again, but better" has become the maxim of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, to be more specific, post-Steam Deck OLED ones. Now that Valve have shown it’s possible to quickly turn around an upgraded handheld without enraging owners of the original, Lenovo have hinted at a new Legion Go, MSI have revealed an improved Claw, and Asus have released this here ROG Ally X. A ROG Ally, again – but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed at which it’ll plunge you into financial destitution.

Read more

Capcom's turned back the clock with Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, bringing to us an action RPG tower defence hybrid that's very 2000s and very welcome in this age of open world, live service-ness. And for some, it'll deliver what's needed: a fairly good time. A time marked by a loop that does hack 'n slash, management, and a dash of base repairs to an average degree. For me, though, and possibly many others, I simply don't think this mix ever truly captures what makes even the simplest of tower defence games so captivating.

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In the heyday of Sierra's adventure game years, there was a series called Space Quest that featured an intergalactic janitor named Roger Wilco. The series was more satirical than King's Quest, less preachy than Police Quest, and not quite as adult as Leisure Suit Larry. Spearheaded by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe - a pair of devs who called themselves "Two Guys from Andromeda" - Space Quest was renowned for its humour, and there was a nice sense of progression throughout most of the series, with Roger Wilco leveling up from working class spaceman to the head of his own Star Trek ship.

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British comedy is too often defined by its relationship to America: either as merely irony and sarcasm, which we're told Americans don't understand, or as a sprightly ideas factory for works such as The Office, which Americans can bless by re-making at scale.

Peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony however and you may find the true pulsing core of British comedy that lies beneath: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Goodness You're Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It's a cheeky 2-3 hour adventure through a small northern town, and it's here to educate the entire world of our nation's obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.

Read more

Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.

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At ten past nine every evening he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protege. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?

Read more

Capcom's turned back the clock with Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, bringing to us an action RPG tower defence hybrid that's very 2000s and very welcome in this age of open world, live service-ness. And for some, it'll deliver what's needed: a fairly good time. A time marked by a loop that does hack 'n slash, management, and a dash of base repairs to an average degree. For me, though, and possibly many others, I simply don't think this mix ever truly captures what makes even the simplest of tower defence games so captivating.

Read more

In the heyday of Sierra's adventure game years, there was a series called Space Quest that featured an intergalactic janitor named Roger Wilco. The series was more satirical than King's Quest, less preachy than Police Quest, and not quite as adult as Leisure Suit Larry. Spearheaded by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe - a pair of devs who called themselves "Two Guys from Andromeda" - Space Quest was renowned for its humour, and there was a nice sense of progression throughout most of the series, with Roger Wilco leveling up from working class spaceman to the head of his own Star Trek ship.

Read more

Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.

Read more

What to compare Nine Sols’ flowing Sekiro-like 2D combat and layered metroidvania exploration to? The eternally sequel-less Hollow Knight? The punishing roguelite trappings of Dead Cells? 2D Souls-nuzzling Salt and Sacrifice? I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always had such trouble with slashing, blocking, and jumping in two dimensions that not only have I barely played any of the above, I’ve missed out a swathe of important platformers in the belief I just didn’t have it in me to manage them. But Nine Sols is so generous, so creative, so lucid and upfront in its ruleset, even as it crushes you with sometimes absurd difficulty, that playing it has opened up an entire library of classics I might have otherwise missed out on. I don’t have the experience to tell you what this game does better than others of its ilk, but I can tell how it made me feel. And for a game that murdered me with such relentless frequency, Nine Sols made me feel invincible.

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If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

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I'd been in Paris to see open world action-RPG Shadow Of The Erdtree early and when I got back, Edwin messaged me. He asked whether I thought it was big enough to consider the DLC a pseudo-sequel, and at the time I said something along the lines of, "It's hefty, but I think that's probably pushing it".

I was wrong. The Land Of Shadow may not be as expansive as the base game's Lands Between, but it's knottier, denser, more of a twisting mass that burrows into the earth and soars into the skies. For this reason I think it produces some of Elden Ring's finest moments, as exploration leads to a truer sense of discovery reminiscent of old Souls. But I also think its sheer density exposes more chinks in its open world format, where its interconnected sprawl leads to even greater recollection paralysis.

Read more

Scottish petrochemical horror is not exactly a genre, but maybe it ought to be. From the opening moments of Still Wakes The Deep you know life on its 1970s North Sea oil rig is precarious. Leaky ceilings, busted panelling, faulty drill machinery - the omens pile up as you spend your first thirty minutes wandering through the colleague-packed canteen and over the platform into the boss' office for a severe dressing-down. It's a classic pre-disaster setup for a mostly traditional monster story, yet the game sticks expertly to the first-person horror form, and its voice actors' performances are so spot-on, that it'd feel churlish to judge this foaming fear simulator for sticking to type. It also has some markedly unsettling use of the shipping forecast, a famously dull feature of British radio I definitely did not expect to freak me out in a video game.

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“When I was young,” the villager washing garments in the river says, “I thought it was enough to clean the dirty laundry once and be calm. Not that it will get dirty forever.” I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the crushing weight of universal entropic decay so keenly as in that RPG maker textbox, nested upon Felvidek’s nicotine-stain hues. I’ll need to clean my keyboard soon. I keep taking screenshots of Felvidek. I can’t take enough. I want to make a scrapbook of every character and every line. Neither my laundry nor keyboard will ever be clean forever either, but if I hate Felvidek for emphasising that, I love it for reminding me that all the best art is buttressed by an irremovable layer of deep, thick grime.

Read more

What to compare Nine Sols’ flowing Sekiro-like 2D combat and layered metroidvania exploration to? The eternally sequel-less Hollow Knight? The punishing roguelite trappings of Dead Cells? 2D Souls-nuzzling Salt and Sacrifice? I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always had such trouble with slashing, blocking, and jumping in two dimensions that not only have I barely played any of the above, I’ve missed out a swathe of important platformers in the belief I just didn’t have it in me to manage them. But Nine Sols is so generous, so creative, so lucid and upfront in its ruleset, even as it crushes you with sometimes absurd difficulty, that playing it has opened up an entire library of classics I might have otherwise missed out on. I don’t have the experience to tell you what this game does better than others of its ilk, but I can tell how it made me feel. And for a game that murdered me with such relentless frequency, Nine Sols made me feel invincible.

Read more

If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.

Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.

Read more

I'd been in Paris to see open world action-RPG Shadow Of The Erdtree early and when I got back, Edwin messaged me. He asked whether I thought it was big enough to consider the DLC a pseudo-sequel, and at the time I said something along the lines of, "It's hefty, but I think that's probably pushing it".

I was wrong. The Land Of Shadow may not be as expansive as the base game's Lands Between, but it's knottier, denser, more of a twisting mass that burrows into the earth and soars into the skies. For this reason I think it produces some of Elden Ring's finest moments, as exploration leads to a truer sense of discovery reminiscent of old Souls. But I also think its sheer density exposes more chinks in its open world format, where its interconnected sprawl leads to even greater recollection paralysis.

Read more

Scottish petrochemical horror is not exactly a genre, but maybe it ought to be. From the opening moments of Still Wakes The Deep you know life on its 1970s North Sea oil rig is precarious. Leaky ceilings, busted panelling, faulty drill machinery - the omens pile up as you spend your first thirty minutes wandering through the colleague-packed canteen and over the platform into the boss' office for a severe dressing-down. It's a classic pre-disaster setup for a mostly traditional monster story, yet the game sticks expertly to the first-person horror form, and its voice actors' performances are so spot-on, that it'd feel churlish to judge this foaming fear simulator for sticking to type. It also has some markedly unsettling use of the shipping forecast, a famously dull feature of British radio I definitely did not expect to freak me out in a video game.

Read more

“When I was young,” the villager washing garments in the river says, “I thought it was enough to clean the dirty laundry once and be calm. Not that it will get dirty forever.” I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the crushing weight of universal entropic decay so keenly as in that RPG maker textbox, nested upon Felvidek’s nicotine-stain hues. I’ll need to clean my keyboard soon. I keep taking screenshots of Felvidek. I can’t take enough. I want to make a scrapbook of every character and every line. Neither my laundry nor keyboard will ever be clean forever either, but if I hate Felvidek for emphasising that, I love it for reminding me that all the best art is buttressed by an irremovable layer of deep, thick grime.

Read more

You like F.E.A.R.? You like DOOM? Yeah, I bet you like FPSing where you're outsmarting soldiers in offices with a nailgun and gibbing demons like you're ploughing a Hummer through a sequence of pheasants in an alternate universe Evil Somerset. No, it doesn't boast a title in all-caps, but Selaco's early access release more than deserves it's spot as a must-play for those who desire some sophistication with their ultra-violence.

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I regret not covering Skald Colon Against The Black Priory when its developer told us about it 2019. I'd get to be so smug now.

Skald is terrific. I've tried to come up with a clever angle on its journey, but they all wind up saying the same thing: For all its retro stylings (right down to party portraits taking up an unnecessary quarter of the screen at all times), it's an accessible, charming treat, and the best modernisation of 80s RPGs that I've ever played.

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I cannot compare my experience of writing a review for The Splintered Sea, the first paid expansion for dastardly clever physics puzzle builder Besiege, to that of a journaling sailor facing lethal storms on the horizon. Still, if we take for granted the idea that a review is only really valuable as an insight into the experience of the player: I haven’t been feeling especially great this week. That in mind: Splintered Sea is more Besiege, thoughtfully applied to its already expansive toolkit. More importantly, it's currently bringing me deep and deeply needed moments of untainted, childlike, vaguely-Orkish joy.

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Hauntii sets the scene with a rather magical opening sequence. A beam of light shoots out of a mysterious planet and a zoom in reveals the beam to be an asteroid, but not just any asteroid: a crystal shaped like a teardrop, with a little ghost nestled inside. You awaken as this little ghost, who it turns out, has crash landed in Eternity (and who, it turns out, is called Hauntii). Soon you bump into a ghostly girl, who guides you to a tower that thrusts you both up to a higher plane - but though she ascends, you're dragged back to the bottom at the last moment by some netherworldly chains. And so, as Hauntii you travel through Eternity to discover who that girl was and, ultimately, how to ascend to those heavenly skies yourself.

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Three questions before we start:

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Two years of early access have been kind Songs of Conquest. Its strategy fundamentals were already strong enough to impress me in 2022 that it's been quite tricky to even remember what's changed. But there's more of it, and although after much reflection I think it's not quite, quite for me, more of a good and unusual thing is definitely enough to push me into a very nearly wholehearted endorsement.

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Wacky space station management sim Startopia and wacky hosptial sim Theme Hospital are two of my favourite older games, so I was very pleased with the concept of Galacticare, which is a wacky space station hospital management sim. And you know what? It's great! From early reveals and previews I thought it might veer into being too wacky, but it nails its tone, has some really striking levels, and bugs in earlier builds have been squashed (much as you can manually splat small parasites that make their way into your hospital). I can see this becoming a go-to comfort game for me.

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The characters in Read Only Memories: Neurodiver are deeply into anime. They love manga and figurines and trashy movies and horror novels. The interests of the game's creators have not so much leaked into this fictional world as they have been generously pumped in with an industrial hose. Even the visual novel's loading screens take the form of those two-second intermission panels that flash up to signal an anime's commercial break, complete with random characters announcing the game's name ("Neurodiver!"). In moments like that, the passion is endearing. But in other places, it is overwhelming. Neurodiver is obsessed with media in a way that often distracted me from the bright-eyed cyberpunk story it wants to tell.

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I’d like to start this review with a question: What’s the difference between overcoming a challenge and thinking “I did it!” and one that leaves you sighing “It’s over!”? I may leave little insights scattered throughout. A Paper Trail, if you will. A puzzle game named Paper Trail that has you solve discrete head-scratchers by folding the screen like a piece of paper in different ways to create new paths, I might even say, if I were trying to cram a bunch of information right at the top without breaking theme. Let’s talk about it.

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Mullets aren't just coming back into fashion, they're everywhere at the moment, adopted largely by lads who love draft beer and The Football. And seemingly by Mullet Mad Jack, the protagonist of a single-player roguelike FPS who would shove draft beers into the skull of a billionaire robot, then shoot him in the gonads. What I'm trying to say is, Mullet Mad Jack is fashionable and no-nonsense, which makes for a great hang if you'd like to burn some aggression once in a while.

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Spacefaring RTS Homeworld 3 is good sci-fi. Monolithic structures scorched with plasma burns. Sleek spacecraft. Alien sunrises. It’s also good sci-fi because its characters converse through reams of inscrutable but cool-sounding space science, and at no point does a grinning quipster tell a scientist: “Whoa there, professor. Why don’t you try saying that again... but in English!” Basically, if your wishlist for Homeworld 3 has tone and atmosphere at the top, rest easy. At no point did I get the sense that Blackbird ever took making the first proper Homeworld in eight years lightly.

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Computers have always been animal wells, in a sense. They're havens for creatures of many shapes and degrees of literalness, all the way down to the metal. As in ecologies at large, the most abundant and widespread are probably the bugs, beginning with the moth that flew into that Harvard Mark II in 1947 and ending with the teeming contents of the average free-to-play changelog. A little further up the food chain we find "worms", like the Creeper that once invaded the ARPANET, and "gophers", a directory/client system written in 1991 for the University of Minnesota. There are computer animals spawned by branding - foxes of fire and twittering birds and the anonymous beasts that haunt the margins of Google documents. There are computer animals that are implied by the verbs we use in computing - take "browser", derived from the old French word for nibbling at buds and sprouts, which suggests that all modern internet searches are innately herbivorous.

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Tangle Tower was a weird and cute point and click murder mystery set in a big weird tower full of colourful characters, so what better way for the devs to fill time before the sequel comes out than by making a creepy retro survival horror set in a regional theme park? Crow Country is like if Resident Evil was made out of Duplo: more chunky, less threatening, and easier than playing with a fully motorised K'Nex ferris wheel, but darn it, it's still a good time.

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You won't be surprised to know that after two years in early access, V Rising's 1.0 launch hasn't seen Stunlock Studios drastically change the V for "Vampire" to V for "Venetian Blinds" or "Vienna Sausage". From a top-down view, you still play as a newly awakened vampire on PVE, PVP, or private servers, and you're still tasked with becoming the most powerful bloodsucker around. It has, however, streamlined some things and added in an endgame zone. All of this combines to form a survival game that was great back then and is even better now, with thrilling MOBA-esque fights and little in the way of faff.

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Scylla and the Sirens are a rock band of mythical boat wreckers who insist they have tons of fans. (They do not.) As a boss battle in Hades 2 they are a deadly trio that has bested me more times in the last few hours than I care to admit. But as a sign of things to come for this early access roguelike sequel, they are an encouraging bunch of characterful malcontents. The harbingers of a confident, slash-happy action game, and another poppy adaptation of classic Greek japes.

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Harold Halibut has the vibes of a game that should be 4-6 hours long and is, inexplicably, 10-12. It's inexplicable not only because it's a slow game low on interaction - the game is really just a plot delivery mechanism; a TV show you can walk around where you advance the story by pressing A - but also because it's a game created using handmade miniatures. It's a sci-fi animated dolls house under the sea, self described as "a cross between a game and a stop motion film", and if my game required that amount of labour I'd edit that script down. Then again, there aren't that many locations, so maybe you'd really want to show them off.

I love miniatures, and Harold Halibut is beautiful. It's also a lovely story about finding yourself and your place in the world, even if that place is unexpected, and having the courage to take that step. There are unexpected silly bits and strange bits and bits where people break into song, and bits where you read undelivered letters. But, at the same time, I totally understand why some people would find it boring.

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Hurtling along on top of a train full of goons in Phantom Fury you will see another rushing train pulling up at matching speed, inviting you to hop from one to the other. A helicopter will soon join the fray. Many things will soon explode, and you will take a short break from the minigunning to calmly physics some boxes into a set of steps with a crane. This FPS is not so much writing a love letter to a bygone era of noughties shooters, as it is standing underneath the window of its respected elders earnestly serenading them with a busted old keytar from the attic. There are bum notes and the singing voice is not exactly boy-band beautiful, but the love is unmistakably there. And, hey, singing is hard.

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Until I played Tales Of Kenzera: Zau I figured people had run out of ways to make original platformers, but an Afrofuturist story-in-a-story framing for a mythological platformer about healthy ways to deal with grief sure did teach me to not underestimate human creativity. I really liked a lot about Tales Of Kenzera, and got annoyed by a bunch of stuff too - and the division seems to be that a lot of the former falls on the story and design side, and the latter on the mechanical side, which I guess isn't ideal for a platformer. But still, I think it's worth persevering.

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