Guardian

It is wonderful to see such a difficult and unwieldy idea executed so brilliantly. It has been a pleasure to go on this weird trip back to the crucible of PC gaming culture. You don’t have to be nostalgic for the period of fuzzy FMV and splatterhouse gore to appreciate Forbidden Solitaire – it works as a brain-teasing card-battler in its own right. But if you were playing games 30 years ago, when interactive horror meant bad acting, looming purple skies, pixelated images of decapitated heads and stories inspired by pulp fantasy fiction, Forbidden Solitaire is a wildly self-aware, multi-textured treat. Enter if you dare.

There’s so much happening during the action that you learn to focus on the centre of the screen, relying on reflexes and peripheral vision to take it all in simultaneously as the scene explodes. Saros asks a lot of you – you’ll strafe until your thumbs hurt – but it taps into something primal, pulling you into a flow state where even a screen full of flaming orbs spat by towering hostile aliens no longer seems that big a deal.

Replaced’s most memorable stretch sees Warren sneaking back into the heavily guarded facility where the adventure began. You crouch amid tall, swaying grass and boggy marsh while being stalked by futuristic choppers that can end your life with a single, booming bullet. A gigantic wall looms in the background, rendered as an imposing black silhouette. For much of its 10-hour run time, Replaced seems content with replicating cyberpunk leitmotifs in pretty pixel-art fashion without adding much of its own. But this supersized, militarised fortification sees the game extend its purview, powerfully evoking the Mexico-US border wall and the West Bank barrier.

Despite its sparkling near-future setting, Pragmata succeeds because it feels like a throwback to gaming’s recent past. It’s a beautifully made, heartfelt single player adventure with a novel combat idea, and it prioritises storytelling and atmosphere. Where attempts at heartwarming games often come across as off-puttingly saccharine, Pragmata pulls off its father-daughter relationship with surprising deftness.

If Life Is Strange were a Netflix series, I would probably have stopped watching it a few episodes in. Instead, it’s a game I’ve been playing for more than a decade, and I care about these characters. (I also appreciate that more than a smidge of the original’s millennial cringe remains: a Foals song plays over the credits.) Life Is Strange has always been corny but it has also always been earnest, grounded in friendship and feelings. Max and Chloe deserved this chance to end their story – and so did we.

I started playing one afternoon and didn’t stop for nine hours. The interlocking systems, the pleasing pace, the ebb and flow between Olympus and the mortal realm are almost hypnotic. Every time you reach the end of a day cycle you think “just one day more”, and then it’s two in the morning and you’re still trying to grow a pumpkin for the upcoming festival of Demeter, or setting a trap for a monster in the forest. Expertly and lovingly crafted, Mythmatch is a lyrical poem about beautiful and rewarding game design.

While the music and gameplay have evolved with the times, in terms of narrative, Scott Pilgrim EX plays it way too safe. Though written by series creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, there’s none of the edge that secured Scott Pilgrim its original cult following. Our cast have, for the most part, worked out their differences. There’s no David v Goliath here, no antagonist that forces Scott and his pals to grow amid the messiness of bad relationships. Scott’s other friends appear in fun cameos and cat-meos, but the story is a silly, shallow adventure that feels like a side quest, the kind of game Scott would stay up all night playing before missing his shift at work.

Pokopia turns out to be huge, and unexpectedly complex. As new zones opened up beyond that first wasteland, I realised that this game was probably going to occupy me for as long as I wanted. (With 300 Pokémon to catalogue, the conclusion of the story need not be the conclusion of the game.) This is not a child-friendly Poké-painted simplification of the life-simulation genre, but instead an accomplished celebration of it, borrowing the best of all its many influences.

Requiem has had so many clever set-pieces, tense chases, and joyfully gruesome encounters by that point that it’s easy to forgive it simply running out of ideas. Capcom has been on a hot streak for a while now, so it’s no shock that Requiem delivers. But it’s a very pleasant surprise that Resident Evil still feels this vital.

From Life Is Strange to Undertale to Knights and Bikes, independent games have proved a rich and evocative medium through which to explore the theme of friendship. Pieced Together is another example, a careful, beautiful little game that, in more ways than one, turns nostalgia into art. After finishing it, I was inspired to contact an old pal I haven’t spoken to in ages and wasn’t sure I ever would again. Good games can be like good friendships: they encourage us to see things anew.