Dave Ozzy

Castle on the Coast is about the messiest, most uneven little 3D platformer that you could hope to encounter. But it is also generous, with plenty of collectibles and game genres packed into its five or six hours. When you factor in a charitable donation to Valley Children’s Hospital in California, the balance is in its favour.

Trash Quest is a competent Metroidvania that has the chutzpah to try out a few design ideas. It does away with guidance, leaves you free to explore, and chucks in a Dark Souls-like approach to death. Two out of the three work well, but the last falters.

Your feelings on randomness will determine whether Dicey Dungeon is for you. You can plan for that RNG and occasionally even stop it, but the dice will occasionally look up at you with its piercing snake eyes, and you’ll just have to swallow the loss. If you can accept that brand of cruelty, Dicey Dungeon is cracking.

Your enjoyment of Grow: Song of the Evertree will depend on whether you find that its brand of Stardew Valley-style nurturing to be a chore or a compulsion. Find its wavelength, dallying with its systems for short bursts each day, and we’re confident that you will find a tug to return.

We rarely see an Artifex Mundi game reach the dizzy heights of a 4 out of 5. They’re too set in their ways, too janky to justify the loftier scores. But by toying with their payment model, Artifex have given us one of their best hidden object games in Queen's Quest 5: Symphony of Death, effectively for free.

Creepy Tale is effective, there is no doubting that. It is as insidious as they come, and that comes from its art, world and characters. We’re eager to play its sequel, in the hope that it expands on them more. But Creepy Tale fumbles whenever it asks you to do anything. Too often, it resorts to puzzles that are clumsy and illogical, with a parade of deaths as the punishment. 

Have you ever had the urge to travel to new planets but, rather than obliterate alien life on them and harvest the topsoil for resources, you want to catalogue said planet and maybe even look after it in some way? Don’t worry, you’re not odd: you’re the kind of person who may well enjoy The Gunk. 

This is an astonishingly immersive and good-natured fable, and we relished returning to it whenever we were away. It may not be long, it may not do anything groundbreaking, but The Gunk radiated good feelings whenever we picked up the pad.

Holy smokes, a whole host of games are dropping down the chimney today, ready to be played by anyone with a Game Pass subscription. 

This is a video game experiment: what would happen if you stripped absolutely everything from an endless runner? Some questions weren’t meant to be answered, but Ninja Dash 3D answers it anyway, then charges the price of a Starbucks espresso to observe its findings. Step back, put the wallet back in the pocket, and drop a smoke bomb to make a speedy exit.

Even as a free-to-play game, Magic Nations would have stunk. It has a Scrooge-like approach to rewarding you: it’s a thin trail of breadcrumbs to some slightly larger breadcrumbs. But Magic Nations is £12.49, which gets you a mediocre card game strapped to a microtransaction system that EA would have dismissed.

If feeling unsafe and hunted in the quietus of space is your thing, then we have two offerings for you today. Arriving on Game Pass today is Among Us and Aliens: Fireteam Elite. 

You’ve solved a fair few crimes over the course of your gaming career, playing as Sherlock Holmes, Phoenix Wright and Judgment’s Takayuki Yagami. But have you unravelled crimes from 1400 years ago? Or have you done it as a real-life detective? The answers are likely no, which is why Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders are different from your average detective sim.

What you get from Townscaper depends on what you’re willing to put into it. It’s a city-creation tool with a few surprises up it’s sleeve, but nothing beyond that. It’s gorgeous, simple and adapts to anything you can throw at it. If you find creative games aimless, though, this is perhaps the worst of them.

If you’ve ever enjoyed an otome visual novel, we couldn’t recommend A YEAR OF SPRINGS more. On the surface, this is a gentle, heartwarming tale of three friends moving in different directions. Below that surface, it has a mission: to expose what it is to be a transgender person in the conform-culture of modern day Japan.