A week ago we looked at the slightly underwhelming AMD Ryzen 9600X and 9700X, which were marked by modest gaming performance increases in some titles, more significantly better content creation grunt and slightly better thermals. Now it's time to look at the second half of AMD's Zen 5 quartet, the £459/$499 Ryzen 9 9900X and £609/$649 Ryzen 9 9950X. These are powerful 12-core and 16-core parts that ought to be more of interest to content creators than gamers, so do they make a better case for Ryzen 9000? And does either one manage to exceed the top-level gaming performance of the 7800X3D?

Unfortunately, after four days of frantic benchmarking and troubleshooting, I'm not sure AMD has succeeded on either of these points. Our Ryzen 9900X and 9950X testing has been marked by confusingly poor gaming performance, including performance regressions versus the 7900X and 7950X, alongside a few examples of genuine uplifts that nonetheless don't go far enough to making these CPUs worth recommending.

This review does at least mark the debut of two improvements to our benchmarking suite compared to last week's reviews, which itself marked the introduction of an entirely new automated benchmarking system for Digital Foundry - and therefore only included a more limited selection of games than we've offered in the past.

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I always feel a little icky when I say I'm a fan of reality TV. It's no doubt a pop-culture titan, but it's also a genre that comes with a lot of problematic baggage. Exploitation, humiliation, hypersexualization, reinforced gender essentialism - the list goes on and on. The controversial topics the genre is tangled up in is - put lightly - a complete nightmare, but I can't stop watching. It's not just the drama (although I love the drama, too), I also like watching humans just be human, you know? I connect with the authenticity on screen, seeing people's emotions in their rawest form.

This duality of reality TV is endlessly fascinating. By watching these shows, what is my role as a spectator? What systems am I participating in when I tune in to watch? Self-described "thirst-person shooter" The Crush House sets out to comment on the complexity of this relationship, and successfully delivers. It's a satirical comedy that pokes fun at the shallowness and manufactured nature of the TV genre and tops it all off with a cheeky wink and peace sign gesture. It's fun, dynamic, and has something to say.

The Crush House puts you in the role of a TV producer of a 90s reality TV show who must film a cast of hotties and their drama in a bubblegum pink Malibu mansion for a ravenous audience. You need to record the cast each day – catching their intimate conversations, trivial catfights, and steamy romances on camera – while also keeping track of what viewers want to see. You have a targeted viewership to satisfy each day set by the omnipresent 'Network' and if you don't deliver those numbers the show will be cancelled, and you'll be asked to sashay away.

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KeelWork’s strikingly opulent shooter dares to do new things with its genre in an effort to unite players of every level. This is what a blockbuster shooter should look like.

Arcade shooting games are, in truth, about fragility. Despite their reputation as gaming's most furious, excessive form, they almost universally place you at the controls of a weaponised weakling; a vessel that disintegrates after the briefest contact with a single enemy bullet.

That’s not the case with Cygni: All Guns Blazing, a new shooter that insists it's OK to take dozens of enemy hits and stay in the game. That might sound like a reckless inversion of what makes the genre so special and rewarding. However, Scottish developer KeelWorks appears to have been meticulous in its subtle revolution of what a shooting game can be – and who it can serve. There’s even an argument to be made that Cygni proposes a vision of what a blockbuster shooter could be; namely staggeringly polished, technically muscular, and able to welcome and impress a vast mainstream audience.

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AMD's Ryzen 9000 CPUs have arrived, marking the debut of the more powerful and efficient Zen 5 architecture and a quartet of Dragon Ball Z meme-adjacent processor numbers: 9600X, 9700X, 9900X and 9950X. Today we're looking at the first two processors, the six-core 9600X at £269/$279 and eight-core 9700X at £339/$359. These mainstream offerings are due to go on sale on August 8th, with the 12-core and 16-core Ryzen 9 models scheduled to arrive one week later.

With faster-in-games X3D variants rumoured for later this year and heavily discounted Ryzen 7000 parts already on the market, are the new Ryzen 9000 models worth picking up in the meantime? And how do these processors compare to the high-flying Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which we've been recommending as the best high-end gaming CPU?

To find out, we've tested these processors and some of their closest AMD and Intel rivals in a gauntlet of demanding games from 1080p to 4K, plus taken a look at synthetic and content creation benchmarks to get an idea of whether these new Ryzen 9000 processors offer a noticeable improvement over their predecessors.

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Cor, it feels good to be ricocheting hats off chrome skulls again, let me tell you. It's been almost ten years since the original SteamWorld Heist showed us how XCOM could work in a 2D play space, and Thunderful's sequel has only doubled down on what made this particular bag of bolts such a joyful offshoot in the turn-based strategy genre. Case in point: the hats that you could whizz off the head of your enemies and claim for your own (for no other reason than sheer cheekiness) are back in full force, with 101 of them ready to be pilfered in your search for tasty loot. Its new cast of characters are also daft and brilliant in equal measure, and I'm not ashamed to admit that one of my first recruitment decisions was based purely on the pun work. Why yes, Dame Judy Wrench, I will have you on my crew with your Harsh Language special attack that can shame an enemy for three damage. Why is that even a question?

SteamWorld Heist 2 isn't just more of the same, though - even if that is a large part of its overall appeal. Apart from the shift in setting from space to a more explorable and connected ocean planet, there's a new class system that lets you pinch skills learned in other jobs you've undertaken. Of course, Heist 2 isn't the first game to land on this particular idea, and its execution is perhaps only partially successful in practice (more on that in a sec). But given this sequel is easily double the size of the original, it does need some form of progression support like this to help prevent its missions from buckling under the weight of its lengthy environmental crisis story. In truth, that reach for something bigger and better is arguably SteamWorld Heist 2's undoing in many ways, but what's here is still eminently enjoyable - and you're certainly not left hungry.

Let's start with the good stuff. Aside from its copious array of optional headwear to parade and pilfer, the heists themselves are as sharp and thrilling as ever. In your bid to find out what's causing this world's freshwater shortage (salt water doesn't play nice with a Steambot's metal work, after all), you'll be raiding all manner of moored ships, rigs and naval facilities to find the source of the problem. Unsurprisingly, there are several hiccups, detours and other obstacles you'll need to deal with along the way, taking you from the balmy, tropical shallows to deep, icy northern trenches and more - which you'll pootle around in your trusty submarine in real-time, travelling from one mission to the next on the high seas.

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Cleansing the land of an ancient evil, purging its demon spawn in a flurry of Japanese artistry, and watching new life spring forth as nature returns to peace and harmony… Nope, I'm not talking about the brilliant inkwash battles of Okami, but the demon-slaying kagura dances of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. It is, in fairness, a connection that Capcom has increasingly leaned into in the run-up to Kunitsu-Gami's release. If the shared themes and free Amaterasu and Waka costumes for its deuteragonists Soh and Yoshiro weren't a sign that, yes, this is likely as close as we're ever going to get to a pseudo-spiritual successor to Clover Studio's 2006 romp through Japanese folklore, then the option to substitute Kunitsu-Gami's musical score for remixed Okami tracks surely seals the deal.

But to say Kunitsu-Gami is simply a sheep in this particular white and red wolf's clothing would also be doing it a great disservice. For underneath all the Ammy nostalgia, this is a finely crafted action strategy game that has both the brains and brawn to stand on its own, marrying fast and visually hypnotic swordplay combos with the cerebral plotting of quick-witted tower defence. Of course, this being Capcom, these towers aren't static objects to slap down and hope for the best. They're fellow villagers you can move about the battlefield and assign different roles and classes to in order to help you combat the waves of yokai monsters that pour out of torii gate portals every time the sun goes down. As Soh, your goal is to protect and escort the priestess Yoshiro toward these torii gates so she can banish their corrupting influence for good, though with the risk of defeat ratcheting up the closer you get to victory, you'll need to do plenty of thinking on your feet to help win the day.

The expert pacing of Kunitsu-Gami is arguably what binds it altogether. Thanks to the inherent ticking clock of its day-night cycle (beautifully portrayed as a reflection of the sun arcing round a bowl of water), each individual level rarely exceeds 10-15 minutes in length. These bursts of concentrated action make your days feel tense and urgent as you make your preparations, but sharp and punchy when nightfall comes and you battle the menacing Seethe monsters. Combat isn't simply about living to see a new dawn either. With every Seethe defeated, you'll collect crystals that can be ploughed back into assigning your villagers new roles if you need to switch up your strategy, as well as carving a path for Yoshiro so she can shimmy up to the big torii gate at the end of level to perform her cleansing ritual.

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Thank Goodness You're Here opens with an advert for Peans ("Not quite peas, not quite beans, but something delicious in betweens") and finishes with a song. But developer Coal Supper's absurdist comedy adventure is so relentlessly, gleefully unpredictable throughout – so improbably overstuffed with impeccable gags and surreal detours – it's hard to know where to begin.

So let's play it safe and start at the beginning. You are the hero of the piece – a nameless man of indeterminate age and wilfully inconsistent height – who, as the adventure opens, is sent on a work trip to the fictitious Northern England town of Barnsworth for reasons never entirely clear. At which point, Thank Goodness You're Here immediately lets you know what kind of game it is by insisting you exit the boss' office by jumping out the ten-storey window instead of the door. Cue a note-perfect montage of mid-20th-century archival footage – all coal mines, red brick houses, and dour-faced ladies scouring busy market stalls – as bawdy ditty The Marrow Song plinks out, and away we go.

Without wanting to get ahead of myself, Thank Goodness You're Here is, I think, brilliant – a bold bit of masterfully orchestrated comedy that confounds expectations at every conceivable turn. Its very specific brand of surreal, anything-for-a-gag whimsy won't be to everyone's taste, but the way it merrily manipulates form to heighten its impeccable comedic rhythms is a true delight to behold – even if it takes a bit of time to show the method in its mayhem.

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Sometimes a game comes along and sucker punches you right in the gut. You can be completely aware of the premise going in, but some element of the setting or the mechanics takes a broader theme or commentary and makes it deeply, intensely personal. Papers, Please got me like that. My job at the time involved identity verification and, while it was nowhere near as life or death as the game, it still made it all too real, too visceral. Dragon Age: Inquisition completely caught me off guard, with NPC reactions to my Qunari Inquisitor feeling way too close to my experiences as a very visible trans woman.

Nobody Wants to Die is a work of dystopian science fiction, so I was expecting some hard hitting moments. I'm hardly the first person to point out that the last few years have felt increasingly like living in a cyberpunk novel - only without the ability to get shiny chrome replacements for my ageing knees. As a disabled person with a veritable laundry list of health conditions forced to rely on the underfunded NHS, the games' medical themes hit way too close to home.

Nobody Wants to Die is set in New York circa 2329, which, in a completely shocking and surprising twist, looks a lot like New York circa 1929, complete with tommy guns and prohibition. The sci-fi angle brings flying cars, 500+ story high apartment blocks and, most importantly, immortality. The discovery of a substance called ichorite allows brains to be encoded and transferred to new bodies, making death little more than an inconvenience, other than on the rare occasions that ichorite is completely destroyed. It's all very Altered Carbon, really.

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On the face of it, there's not much in Once Human that hasn't been done a thousand times before. Better, too, in some instances. Seemingly the very epitome of design-by-committee, it's everything you may expect a free-to-play multiplayer open-world survival horror to be, down to its garish shop and two-track battle pass. There's about eleventy gazillion menus and items to track, your UI is painfully cluttered, and in some places, the game simply feels unfinished; you can't use a controller for example, and your character seemingly only communicates by waving their arms about wildly, like improv semaphore.

And yet here I am, at 3:30am – that's real-life time, not the in-game clock, I'm embarrassed to say – creeping around this abandoned hospital because I have just one more crate to find to "complete" the stronghold, and I think there might be a fabulous gun hiding somewhere inside.

Once Human may be a drop in the post-apocalyptic survival games ocean, but it's an intriguing one. Rather than struggling to survive in a world ravaged by war or plague, we're fighting to save humanity against the deadly otherworld organism Stardust that turns everyday items into bloodthirsty fiends. The more of the world you explore, the more you'll find yourself exclaiming, "What the hell is that?!" as an animated satellite dish or drooling suitcase or a bunch of colourful balloons sticking out of where a gorilla's head should be lurches towards you.

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One of my favourite things in games is when the world wraps around. It's a simple kind of magic, and it's been there since the bright, fizzing days of the arcades, and yet I never even come close to getting tired of it. You race all the way to the right of the screen, and then - wow! - you're suddenly back at the very left. You run all the way to the top, and with one final push you find yourself back at the bottom.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is even more in love with this than I am. It's wraparound screens: the video game. Arranger tells the story of Jemma, a misfit trying to escape from a culture of cheerful stagnation. She leaves her home town and moves across the wider world trying to put right what has gone wrong and, in doing so, find a place for herself. All great. But she does this by manipulating a grid system of movement which means that if she moves off the top of every column she will appear back at the bottom, and if she moves off the right of every row - well, you get the idea.

There's more, of course. Each row or column Jemma is in moves as she does, which means that anything on the row or column moves along with her. This is a puzzle game, and this stuff forms the heart of the puzzles. Most objects just come along with Jemma, wrapping merrily around as she does. But some, lined in purple, are either locked in place, which means they don't move at all, or will move but won't wrap: they'll snag on the edges and freeze the whole line.

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Homeworld 3 developers Blackbird Interactive proved both their design chops and their love of the Homeworld franchise by creating Deserts of Kharak in 2016, a game that started out as a cheeky unauthorised take on the Homeworld space strategy formula on dry land and ended up a critically-acclaimed official part of the series with the blessing of new brand IP owner Gearbox. Eight years later, with the even more successful Hardspace: Shipbreaker in the books and a successful crowd-funding campaign, the third mainline Homeworld 3 game is finally here.

Given that long history and a protracted development with several delays, it's perhaps no surprise that HW3 is a flawed but deeply fascinating game - one that successfully recreates the satisfying 3D ship battlescapes and impeccable space vibes of its genre-defining predecessors, only to be somewhat let down by an inexpertly told story and some mechanical stumblings.

Let's start with the good stuff: the collection of missions that make up the 10-hour campaign are varied and fun, starting with simple skirmishes amongst basic strikecraft and concluding with massive fleet battles against well-equipped enemies. Along the way, you'll escape natural phenomena, skulk around searching patrols and navigate within and along massive megalithic structures. Your fleet persists from one mission to the next, so there are clear incentives for keeping your best units alive and capturing the ships of your foes whenever possible. Each unit has an upgradeable ability to make it better in certain scenarios, and tends to excel against one unit type while failing against others, encouraging mixed fleets.

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Out in the dungeons I'm hunting for treasure and glory, but back in the town I'm hunting for Renaud. This is weird, really, because Renaud looks like hard work. He dresses like Blade and he speaks entirely in maxims. He's the best of the slayers and he can't wait to tell you about it.

But Renaud has a gift for me. He'll unlock a combo meter if I spend an evening hanging out with him. And I just love combo meters. Dungeons of Hinterberg's is particularly good. Slice slice slice and the numbers go up, as does your attack and your defence. It's a nice way to do more damage while feeling more competent. It's worth an evening lost to awkward chat to get that.

This is Dungeons of Hinterberg in microcosm. The game is set in an Alpine spa town where the local economy turns on the presence of magic. Portals to dungeons appear all around, and there's a brisk trade in tourists turning up to puzzle and battle their way through them. You play as a former lawyer who's turned up in town because of career burnout. Now every day you pick a dungeon, grab a sword, and head out to smash things up in the name of feeling better.

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OLED technology has continued to gain momentum in recent years with its superior black levels, contrast, motion resolution and vibrancy. Yet, in the PC space, it's only recently that actual OLED monitors have started to become mainstream. There's just one issue: OLED monitors tend to cost significantly more than competing LCD monitors and primarily target larger sizes.

Enter the KTC G27P6: a 27-inch 1440p monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz. This same panel is also used in monitors from Corsair and LG itself, with variation largely stemming from price. I've been test driving this monitor over the past few months weighing it against other OLED displays in my arsenal. This includes tests featuring static imagery on-screen for lengthy periods of time just to see if it burns in. Along the way, I've discovered some interesting benefits that might be worth considering if you're interested in jumping into the world of OLED.

The first thing to consider is the general landscape for OLED monitors - compared to LCDs, there are fewer variations in size available with OLED technology. There are smaller portable monitors under 20 inches available, though these are largely 60Hz and limited to lower resolutions, and there are larger sizes available starting over 32 inches. While I'm partial to large displays myself, many prefer 27-inch panels and this does have its benefits - especially when it comes to gaming, which I'll discuss shortly.

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Dawntrail teases a swashbuckling adventure with newcomer Wuk Lamat, a Hrothgal on a quest to inherit the throne and become Dawnservant in Tural's Rite of Succession. You're on the precipice of something fresh and exciting, as you hop off the ship full of beans and raring to go. The first major city, Tuliyollal, gets the blood pumping with bombastic, big band music - kicking the bar high for the expansion's sweeping score, and thanks to the graphical overhaul, Final Fantasy 14 is the best it's ever looked. Areas feel densely populated and show-stopping zones play with verticality and scale to stunning effect; the land is vast, full of lush vegetation, and has never felt more alive.

And then: back to reality. There's nothing quite like landing in a bold and beautiful new world, only to be met with vitriol in chat, players yelling about how awful everything is before giving the expansion a chance to get its groove on, mere hours after early access began.

Appropriately, one of Dawntrail's most predominant themes is what the weight of expectation does to someone's spirit, and the consequences of external pressures and perceptions. As I forged a bond with Wuk Lamat, my lalafell tells her, "you can't measure your worth by the success of others." It's ironic, then, that this also directly reflects the division over the game's new direction and story. Its launch has seen a clash of player expectations, which are largely based on the heights of the prior ten year saga. Dawntrail is a perfect case of expectation versus reality, and measuring its worth against the culmination of an ever-escalating narrative is futile. So let's take a step back and see if it really is worth getting your knickers in a twist.

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Down in central Brighton, where the city meets the sea, and resting under the latticed shadow of a burned-out hotel, there's a traffic crossing where someone has stuck a set of plastic googly eyes on one of the green men. I don't know how long these things last, but if you're around in the next few days you can probably still see it. I noticed it because I was out with my daughter and she always notices these things: a green man who stared back at us while we waited to cross the road with the rest of the human throng.

Noticing things is having a bit of a moment just now. Have you noticed this? There are best-selling books telling you how to pay attention more effectively. On TikTok you'll scroll and stop on videos of rainfall on city streets, seabeds stained with the ripple of surface water overhead, fleeting shapes forming and unforming in the sun-rimmed clouds. Tagline: the art of noticing. Here you'll find beauty and riches, here are gifts that are only available if you've first taught yourself to see them.

And then there's Flock, and Flock feels very much of a piece with this sort of thing. It's a game about wildlife and it's a game about collecting stuff. But it's also, serving as bedrock for all of that other stuff, a game about noticing. Its world is there to reveal itself to you, but only when you're ready. Only when you're in sync, only when you're properly attuned.

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Zenless Zone Zero can't decide if it wants to wow you with chaotic action, or let you kick back and explore its comic-book-styled urban streets. One mission could be packed with frantic dodges and chain attacks as you mow down monsters in dangerous 'Hollow' areas, whereas the next might be just grabbing coffee with a bud, or teaching a cute bunny-robot-thing Bangboo to play football. So instead of committing to one atmosphere, Zenless Zone Zero has doubled down on both. Spending time in its slick streets is a blast, no matter if it's throwing combat challenges or coffee dates your way.

If Zenless Zone Zero's fun and stylish gameplay wasn't so distracting, its smaller scale might initially come across as a bit of a downgrade when compared to developer miHoYo's open world in Genshin Impact, and the universe of possibilities found in Honkai: Star Rail. But it only takes one walk down the post-apocalyptic streets of New Eridu to see that a smaller area doesn't equal a lesser experience, as the city's subtleties have room to breathe, bringing the whole game to life. Its beautiful art style may be reminiscent of games like Persona 5, Jet Set Radio, and Hi-Fi Rush, but something relatively small that makes a notable difference are the NPCs. As far as I can tell, they all have custom designs on top of unique personalities, and they're sometimes more lovingly crafted than the characters in your own squad. (Sorry, Grace, but your goggles just don't compare to Enzo's mechanical arm and fancy sunhat.)

Even the simple act of exploring feels personal, as you can only do so with your main character - Belle or Wise, depending on who you pick at the beginning. The pair are siblings who run a video rental store called Random Play, but their main gig is moonlighting as illegal Proxies - techy individuals who take on commissions from New Eridu's denizens in need of guidance, as they traverse corrupted Hollow bubbles that could turn them into Ethereal monsters if they linger. It may sound a grim premise, but New Eridu actually has quite the cheery attitude in the face of danger. Who cares about being turned into a monster anyway when you can play Snake and Mr. Driller clones at the local arcade? Not these pop culture obsessed folks. It's a pleasant change from the typical world-ending stakes tacked on to many anime video games, and actually being able to play these arcade games only adds to the chilled vibes of taking in the city.

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While the setting and inspirations are Filipino through and through, the themes of friendship, love, loss, and acceptance in this visual novel are universal.

"Kung sakaling mapadaan baka ikaw ay aking tawagan, dahil minsan tayo ay naging tunay na magkaibigan" ("I might call you if ever I'm in the area, since there was a time when we were the best of friends"). The lyrics to "Minsan," a song by legendary Pinoy band Eraserheads, kept playing in my head while I was reviewing Until Then. This visual novel from Polychroma Games presents a coming-of-age story, a tale of love and loss, friendships and fears, all sprinkled with life from my country: the Philippines. It's enough to make me reminisce about my student years and sing the national anthem.

Until Then's narrative tells of The Ruling, a catastrophe that has caused disasters worldwide. On top of that, there's an unexplained phenomenon in which people suddenly disappear, while others confuse events from the future and events that have already happened.

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Bungie sticks the landing as it finally brings together the threads of its epic first saga.

After a storytelling exercise spanning ten years, two enormous games, and one paracasual Starhorse (don't ask), Bungie has finally concluded its first Destiny saga with Destiny 2's The Final Shape expansion. The result is a surprisingly lovely experience that manages to balance the hefty demands of nostalgia, lore, and novelty.

There's a lot to get through here, as the first week-and-a-bit since release has included the main story campaign, a raid, a 12-person conclusion mission, a new subclass (Prismatic), a 2-person secret exotic activity, and the first part of a three-act episode called Echoes (episodes being the replacement for seasons – the packages which keep players going between expansions). Let's start with… story?

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My first steps into the Shadow Realm are with bare feet and an empty head. After reaching out to Mohg's crusty egg, I materialise in a vast, rolling field dotted with ruins. In the distance is a dimmed, sickly twin of the Erdtree ringed by shadowy drapes. It takes a minute to remember my buttons, but I summon Torrent to sprint through the long grass like a dog being let off the leash, and almost immediately experience death from above – some gnarled freak just two-shot me into the dirt. It takes a while to get a rhythm going again, and sort out whatever I was trying to do with my NG+ build. I decide for the sake of efficiency to stick to my Moonveil/Carian Glintstone Staff setup, because one does not simply walk into a FromSoft DLC.

It takes more time to feel at home again, but soon I'm puncturing hearts and obliterating minds, executing small huddles of gibbering NPCs as they pray, finding ways to slip past hard-hitting knights. Everyone I meet is all about Miquella, and it's a lot, but such is the way of the cult. Miquella has left crosses scattered about the Shadow Realm for his devotees, to denote where he has shed parts of himself and his flesh; Jesus himself couldn't have pulled off this kind of postmodern brand campaign.

Eventually I find myself in the Specimen Storehouse, which is in many ways a classic convoluted FromSoft library/lab level, and perfectly in line with Elden Ring's weird fascination with eugenics and taxonomy. There are many artefacts here, including a preserved giant suspended face-down from the ceiling, a waistcloth draped over his rump. As soon as I see him, I am seized with wild Miquellan fervour and run behind him to write "hole ahead." I am the first to write this here; I am message-seeding for the most prominent hole in the game like an enterprising SEO writer. Later, as I'm about to get evaporated by a boss, my message gets a "like" that saves my life. We're so f***ing back.

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As horror locations go, an oil rig is a doozy. It's remote, claustrophobic on the inside, and no less oppressive on the outside, what with its thrashing storms and merciless seas. But for all its bleakness, there's warmth and life, a last bit of humanity and light at the edge of the world - and Still Wakes the Deep, the latest from Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture developer The Chinese Room, embraces all these wonderful extremities as its first-person narrative adventure unfolds.

It's 23rd December 1975, and electrician Cameron McLeary - Caz to friends - has just received a letter from his wife, begging him to come home. There's tension, we sense, and more to the story we don't yet know, but it's soon brushed aside as his duties call. And so begins one hell of a day on the Beira D oil rig, out in the churning North Sea.

Still Wakes the Deep might be playing in the register of horror, but it's horror with a very human heart, and The Chinese Room holds back the pyrotechnics for a good long while, providing ample time to ease into its richly realised reality before unknowable forces are allowed to take hold. The Beira D might be a grim period nightmare of gaudy fabrics and grubby linoleum, but - in the fag packs and dirty mags, the union missives and National Front fliers, the tragic tinsel trimmings and lovingly recreated baked bean breakfasts - there's so much life here too. Even if you've never stepped foot on an oil rig - or travelled back in time to 1975, for that matter - Still Wakes the Deep's lived-in spaces reveal so much about the people who inhabit them, even before they've properly said hello, it's easy to buy into the authenticity of its world.

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Skald: Against the Black Priory is without question the retro-est game I have played. The recent spate of boomer shooters and PS1-era survival horrors are mere whippersnappers in this 8-bit RPGs eyes, cosplay Roman soldiers marching under the shadows of its artificially ancient Pyramids. High North Studios dark fantasy adventure is a devoted recreation of role-playing from the primordial days of home computing. If it threw back much further, you'd need to visit a university to play it.

Skald is a good game. I want to say that up front and unambiguously. It's a tightly crafted, moodily written RPG that makes atmospheric use of its Commodore 64 aesthetic. But it also had me questioning the value of digging up this part of the past, as Skald's self-imposed restrictions make it tough to recommend in a genre that has burned so brightly in recent years.

We'll get to that in time. For now, there's a ship to wreck. Skald's adventure kicks off in enjoyably immediate fashion, with the vessel your character is travelling on being bisected by some giant, betentacled sea monster. As you drift down into the abyss, the story flashes back to the journey's inciting event; an aristocratic former friend of your father's asks you to find his daughter – a woman named Embla – who has absconded to the Outer Isles for reasons unknown. Then the abyss spits you back out onto the shores of one of these islands, where it soon becomes apparent that Strange Happenings are afoot.

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I didn't realise how much 90s horror lives on in my muscle memory until I sat down with Crow Country. My head is still full of things I forgot to forget as games grew and evolved and expanded beyond the blocky figures and pixelated gore I grew up with. Stuff like the sound of the cursor flicking over the items in the inventory, or knowing I can reload from the menu, or knowing, with cast iron certainty, that I'll find more handgun ammo than shotgun shells around here, which in turn will be more plentiful than the magnum ammo. Perhaps that's why Crow Country feels so much like coming home.

Well. You know. If I stomped around home melting deformed denizens with my flamethrower, anyway.

I'll be honest, though; these kinds of retro homages? I'm kinda done. And by kinda, I mean totally, and by done, I mean I've absolutely had my fill of them. Maybe they're a little more impactful to those who missed these kinds of experiences the first time around, but I'm old enough that I didn't, which is possibly why I'm more surprised than anyone that after reluctantly picking up Crow Country, I found it astonishingly difficult to put it down again.

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I struggled with V Rising to begin with. On a surface level, it sounded great: a vampire survival fantasy where you awaken after a centuries-long sleep to eat your way through a world. It has castle building, thematic survival systems like staying out of the sun and drinking people's blood, and you can transform into animals and wield magic. On top of that, it plays a bit like a Diablo or Hades. Great - I'm here for all of that. What I'm not here for - and what nearly staked my vampire fantasy in the heart before it began - is tedious resource gathering and crafting donkey work. I hacked trees and mined ore and carted them across maps, then I waited and waited for materials to process. It seemed every few steps of progress I made was interrupted by a grind I couldn't escape, and my enthusiasm drained like blood from a jugular because of it. A dozen or so hours in, I was nearly defeated.

But then it all changed. The unexpected catalyst was playing online on a player versus player server, which is not usually my kind of thing. Note, finding an online home can be hit and miss as there are so many servers, official and otherwise. I tried a PvE server first that was so short on space for building I was pushed into a perilous part of the world I kept dying trying to return to, which wasn't fun. But this PvP server was a miracle. Not only were the players uniformly helpful and informative, but the game itself was changed, the rules altered. Resources were gathered in double the quantities and their processing times were reduced. Limitations on teleporting while carrying materials were removed. All the things that had exacerbated my standard experience of V Rising were addressed. It was a revelation - the grind faded and the good stuff came forward. I wish I'd left the confines of my own private server - or tinkered with the rules there - earlier, because played this way V Rising is great.

In V Rising, as in many other crafting survival games, progression and base building are intertwined. The game uses a Gear Score system to determine your level, so your progression through the game depends on your ability to craft better equipment and raise that score, in order for you to take on increasingly difficult foes. However, you cannot freely make new kinds of equipment. Nearly always, the crafting capabilities you need are held by boss characters in the game, so in order to move on, you need to venture out into the world to defeat them. This is the core loop of the game: craft what you can and then seek out the bosses who have what you need to go further. Fortunately, this loop is also one of the star attractions in the game.

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Lorelei and the Laser Eyes unfolds like an origami star. The more you play Simogo's logic puzzle game, the more unexpected complexity you find folded in it, flattened neatly into an unassuming, pretty exterior. You've arrived at an aristocratic hotel in Europe. Your handbag carries keys for your car that won't start, and tampons. You're missing all of the important answers, like where, when, or who you are, but the puzzle of your existence is at first only unsettling. Then it consumes you.

How could it not? Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a proud puzzle game. Everything in it is a supernatural puzzle, from discovering who brought you to the hotel to figuring out how to pour complimentary espresso. But the game most commonly relies on math puzzles which, to their credit, can often stand on their own outside the context of the game. So, while the "instruction manual" I unearthed from my protagonist's glove compartment recommended I use a pencil and paper to complete Lorelei, I found it more satisfying to play the game like it was intended for text message co-op. It always helped to have a second opinion, especially since the game connects every challenge with an abstruse story about art transcending reality, with deadly consequences.

In this sense, Lorelei will be very familiar to fans of Layers of Fear and Game Grumps' 2023 puzzle horror game Homebody. Lorelei shares notable structural and thematic similarity to the latter, especially, down to the inscrutable supercomputer hidden somewhere in the house. But, like Layers of Fear, Lorelei's story treats art like it's a horrible father - a bottomless pit of need looking for a building to burn down. These overblown stories tend to disappoint me, since I think art makes a more effective outlet than demon. In any case, like both of these games, Lorelei makes you understand that your primary functions are to walk around an artist's mansion filled with freaky, reality-bending puzzles, and then click on them like you aren't afraid of the space-time continuum.

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I think it's fair to say Ninja Theory had quite a daunting task when it came to producing a sequel to 2017's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. The original was rightly praised for its exploration of grief, trauma and mental illness, but how do you tell more of a story about a woman's struggles with psychosis without seeming repetitive or worse, exploitative? The answer, it turns out, is you make Hellblade 2 - a game that is nothing short of phenomenal.

As you may remember, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice concerns itself with Pictish warrior Senua, a woman living with psychosis as she struggles to come to terms with her mental illness, the stigma that separates her from her community, and the death of her lover Dillian at the hands of raiding Northmen. After an opening cinematic briefly outlining the above, Hellblade 2 picks up more or less where it left off. The Northmen have resumed their raids on Senua's people and she has vowed to stop them. Allowing herself to be captured by slavers, she plans to assault the Northmen's stronghold from within and put an end to the raids once and for all. Unfortunately for her the weather has different ideas, leaving Senua shipwrecked and defenceless in a hostile, foreign land. Bound by her vow, she has no choice but to push on.

This is a game about keeping a promise, in other words. Senua has assumed responsibility for a whole community of people - something that both weighs on her as a character and also shifts the narrative focus away from her slightly. Whereas Senua's Sacrifice is firmly set around Senua and the various traumatic events she's trying to process, Hellblade 2 is much more about the people she meets: those she saves and those she can't, those she trusts and those she fears, and how she navigates those relationships. It's less a game about somebody battling mental illness and more about somebody who happens to have a mental condition going on a great and dangerous journey.

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When you first meet Songs of Conquest's Captain Xavier Silkspool (a brilliant fantasy name if ever I heard one), his role begins and ends as a boss tutorial for your first main campaign hero, Cecelia Stoutheart. He gives you a little runaround the game's gorgeous 3D pixel art maps, actively chasing you down and claiming resources, monuments and territory of his own (at least compared to the altogether more static clumps of enemies you'll have faced thus far), and when you eventually meet him in battle, you'll learn just how vital your own crop of magic spells are in turning the tide of battle. But in Cecelia's respective song of conquest, her duel with Silkspool would probably occupy little more than a rhyming couplet. He's gone as swiftly as he appears, and his death is the first of many she'll need to face in order to reclaim her homeland.

But this wily spool is not so easily unspun. Over the course of its now four-strong campaigns - with the fourth story added for Songs of Conquest's 1.0 release - Captain Xavier crops up again and again in a variety of different guises. To the frog-like Rana, he's their liberator and friend. To Baron Aldus, a put-upon servant of the Stouthearts and landlord to the Baryan merchants, he's a trusted go-between that deals with the alluring necromancers of the nefarious Unseen Society. And to the old Baryan tinkersmith Bihgli Satherdown, he's his lord and master, a debtholder whose oath must be honoured, even in death. Silkspool may not be the focus of any of particular campaign in Songs of Conquest, but he's nevertheless a vital part of the game's overarching chorus, and one of several background players whose ever-shifting plays at heroism and villainy help bring a richness and depth to this sprawling, tactical tapestry.

It's the kind of anthological storytelling that, in its best moments, calls to mind the engrossing dual campaigns of Fire Emblem Fates, as well as the trio of opposing, Sliding Doors-style routes to follow in its Switch-based successor Three Houses. Each of its four campaigns may only be four missions long, but as these surprisingly lengthy tales unfold, Lavapotion manage that rare thing of making you care and root for whichever faction happens to be in your current possession - even when they're facing off against a clan who, hours earlier, you may have been fighting tooth and nail for to propel them to victory.

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Indika, unhelpfully for a desperately devout Orthodox nun in early 19th Century Russia, is in communion with the Devil. Or maybe she just isn't as piously pure of thought as she'd like to believe. In the slippery, shifting world of Indika (I'm talking about developer Odd Meter's wonderfully confounding platform adventure now, not the character - brace yourself for some back-and-forth there), disorientating, uneasy ambiguity reigns over all.

Which isn't to say Indika the game is afraid to commit; this is an astonishingly confident experience, so full of swagger and style, so fearless in its presentation and thematic reach, it's hard not to be immediately taken in. Indika opens very much as it means to go on, beginning not with a dreary pan across the snow-battered Russian landscape, but with a dreamy, expectation confounding interactive free-fall through an inverted world, brazenly presented in the style of a 16-bit arcade game and accompanied by a muffled, insistent cacophony of song. Then, as the miserable reality of Indika's convent snaps back into focus with a crash of metal on parquet and the first of many striking directorial decisions - here, the cutscene camera remains firmly fixed on Indika's wretched face as the world around her tilts and swirls - Odd Meter deals its next hand.

Indika the character, as becomes immediately apparent when the game relinquishes control moments in and her idle animation takes over, is an extraordinary creation. Not only is she brought to life through a wonderfully nuanced vocal performance by Isabella Inchbald (the game's English translation is consistently strong and its voice cast superb), her complex, conflicting inner life is evident just from the way she moves. She's a twitching, restless ball of nervous energy; awkwardly shifting her weight from one foot to the other, eyes darting back and forth, occasionally chewing on her fingernails or wringing her hands.

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Making sense of diaspora politics, regardless of culture and country involved, is a singularly painful dance with no fixed steps and no finale. It is a landscape littered with well-intentioned armchair warriors, white people, privileged expats, weird nationalists, and foetid trolls; everyone disagrees almost all of the time, with some blessed exceptions that bring people around the world together to ridicule a clown. Diaspora discourse might involve the fraying borders of a motherland or a monoculture, authenticity, racism, accents and code-switching, and dozens of other things that remain wholly untranslatable to an outside party. The psychology at play is a weird chimaera that can never be accurately captured in codified language of research and focus groups; the very idea of applying "accuracy" and objectivity to its study is a joke. It is also not the same repeated anecdote about white kids making fun of a stinky homemade lunch at school – friends, let's move past this as the core signifier of marginalised childhood. But it is always a mess, because the diaspora is chaotic by nature and necessity.

Sunset Visitor's speculative fiction adventure 1000xResist knows the fractal intensity of this mess well – so well that the game does an almost sociopathic job at mirroring the exhaustive cycles and repetition that define this world. At times it gets a little too solipsistic – understandable, given that the main premise is about clones facing the burden of existence – and at times I have to walk away because I'm just so damn tired. But it's also an extraordinary piece of work – one that places diasporic trauma front and centre in all its ugly glory.

This is a story that traces the echoes of Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, which left a city-sized wound that hasn't yet closed or been allowed to scar with dignity. And as much as certain audiences might want to frame 1000xResist as a neat one-dimensional exploration of queerness, there is so, so much more to it than that. There is nothing especially unique about its structure or core concept – the difficult process of a character finding the man behind the curtain – and I certainly would not describe it as "the first game of its kind." What makes it so jarring and so open to these claims is the fact that it is simply not a game made for the white gaze, and I think that's beautiful.

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In the dripping midnight glade there is a telephone resting on the earth. It's an antique. I can tell that from the limited 2D pixel art. Although it's just a few lines and dots and smudges of light, I can imagine the weight of the receiver in my hands, almost feel that strange matte chill of the Bakelite.

The telephone is important here in Animal Well. It's how you save the game, for starters. But the more I have explored, making those long looping journeys left, right, up and down, the more I have found myself heading further out in these directions than I had assumed was possible, and the more I worried that I had left the actual game design behind and was moving through a landscape of personalised glitches and oddities? The more I did all this, the more the sight of another telephone came as a sweet relief. A save point, yes, but also a sign that someone had been this way before me. A sign that even as I navigated bright mysteries, I was still on the right track.

There's more. The telephone is also a sign of a second world imposed on the first one, of technology, communication, cablings and wires and electrons, of messages buzzing through an artificial network threaded into this glade and into this world of trees and grass, rock and ruin that lies beyond it. If you're trying to understand Animal Well, to get to the bottom of it - good luck with that one by the way - or if you're trying to just get even the slightest grip on this game's dense, intriguing, endlessly playful and engrossing world, the telephone is probably a good place to start.

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Sequels are always difficult, I imagine. How to capture the core brilliance of a thing and build on it? What to add, what to remove? I've always loved Sid Meier's rule of thirds for Civilisation games: one third remains the same, one third is improved, one third is totally new. But not every game is Civilisation.

Sequels for roguelikes, though? Cor. Difficulty cubed. This is because roguelikes, with campaigns composed of endlessly repeated runs, all with their own fine chances for variation? Roguelikes are games that already carry an infinite number of sequels within them. I have Spelunky runs even now which feel like sequels to the first game, where something unprecedented happens, and where I feel like I see the whole challenge in a new way, completely reframed. If Spelunky struggles with this, what hope for everyone else?

Hades 2 seems very happy being a sequel, even a sequel to a roguelike. Everything from the swift-pen art style and the evocative, pensive soundtrack, down to the menus and the fonts and the UI choices speak of a desire for continuity. After years of racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Zagreus, there was almost no period of reorientation needed before I started racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Melinoë. I've spoken to a few people about this, actually, and it's almost perverse: the sense of being right at home from the off is almost the most confusing thing about Hades 2.

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We're in the middle of a bit of a monitor revolution that comes around once every few years, as new panel types take hold and wow the crowds. That's certainly the case in 2024 with a slew of new monitors based around Samsung's third-gen QD-OLED panels.

We've been focusing on the 32-inch 4K 240Hz offerings, which include the sublime Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM, which we lauded as the best gaming monitor we've ever tested, while the Alienware AW3225QF is the best value option for UK buyers.

Since then, I've been testing MSI's competitor to both of these, the catchily-named MPG 321URX, and it's also a fantastic gaming monitor - and one that looks like the best option for those in the US, given a lower introductory price on the opposite side of the Atlantic. But how does it compare to the Dell and Asus models we've tested already?

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Before I was even old enough to qualify as a teenager, I was obsessed with the works of Akira Toriyama. Dragon Ball, Dragon Quest, Dr Slump, Chrono Trigger - everything Toriyama-related I could get my hands on blew my 13-year-old mind.

It didn't take me long to get around to Sand Land, Toriyama's 14-chapter-long manga released all the way back in 2000. I was young and naive, fresh off the back of completing Chrono Trigger for the first time, but something about a video game adaptation of Sand Land immediately wormed its way inside my brain. Toriyama and video games had already proven to be a perfect combo, so I thought the scrappy, video game-obsessed protagonist Beelzebub and the barren, gang-filled wastelands of Sand Land were an obvious lay-up.

Then I grew older, and naturally I became more cynical. Sand Land's story was barely long enough for a film adaptation, let alone a video game, and a couple of fight scenes and a few tank battles couldn't provide enough inspiration for an in-depth combat system. Then, on the 1st of March, Akira Toriyama passed - long after his work on Sand Land was complete. My apathy transformed into dread. The odds seemed stacked against developers ILCA. Surely this would be another Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire or Astro Boy: The Video Game, one more uninspired, frigid anime game for the bargain bin. I don't think I've ever been happier to have been proven wrong.

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No Rest for the Wicked feels like a bit of a missing link. In the same way that Salt and Sanctuary bridged a gap between Metroidvanias and the Souls series, No Rest exists as a stop on an imaginary evolutionary journey from Diablo-style action RPGs and the aforementioned Souls both Demonic and Dark. Taking the isometric view and randomised loot from the former, and the exploration and more measured approach to combat from the latter, No Rest attempts to craft something new from familiar ingredients.

At first, I thought it was a horrible mistake. After a brief tutorial, you're shipwrecked on the island of Sacra and left to find your way to the nearest settlement. Almost immediately, the clash between the two disparate game styles becomes apparent, and the focal point of this dissonance is loot.

Dark Souls and Diablo have two completely opposing philosophies when it comes to loot. In the Souls games, almost every piece of gear is deliberately placed, and even randomly dropped loot comes from specific enemies. Your pool of healing items is small, but it refreshes on every death and checkpoint. There's little guidance for building your character, but you can pick a starting loadout that is geared towards your preferred playstyle. You'll probably be able to complete the game with that starting gear too, since it upgrades, and the combat is designed more around preference than any given sword being obviously better than another.

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I don't know if there's a universal winning formula for a great action game out there, but Stellar Blade sure has tried its hardest to reverse-engineer one. Like Bayonetta? Here, take an English lady zipping about in heels, annihilating monsters to a delectable soundtrack. Dark Souls fan? Rest at this camp to refill your potions, and better brush up on those parrying and dodging skills! You like God of War? How about a dozen different finishers that would make Kratos blush. Melee combat not for you? Have a gun.

Turns out, cherry-picking from the last 15 years of video game action and pumping it into a single campaign of relentless hacking and slashing is fun. Really fun. The type of fun that turns "just one more hour" into "when did it turn 2am?". Part of the appeal with Stellar Blade is just the sheer breadth of options: parrying, dodging, counter-attacking, dashing, ambushing, throwables, multiple ammo types for your gun, nine special abilities, and a dozen combos combining light, heavy, and air attacks. Add over 60 enemy types - the monstrous Naytiba - to slay, most with their own unique attack patterns, and Stellar Blade is far deeper than its flashy visuals imply.

To ease you in, only a few of these attacks are initially available to our protagonist, Eve, mirroring her rookie status as one of the cybernetically enhanced members of the 7th Airborne Squad, a super soldier group that operates from Earth's orbit. Eve is fresh off a failed mission to eliminate the Earth's supersized Alpha Naytibas, the monsters responsible for the planet's apocalyptic demise, and as you journey through city ruins and dusty wastelands in search of these Alphas, you steadily unlock her powerful new skills. Exactly how you want to devastate each poor Naytiba you cross is up to you from here. Investing in the Ambush perk could turn Eve into an assassin, for instance, or maybe you'd like to get better at timing your parry? Perhaps guns are more your speed, so sure, unlock those targeting missiles and watch enemies blow up like a fireworks show.

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Yesterday, in between bouts of Manor Lords, I popped down the road to do some food shopping, and bought bread, milk, vegetables, and some other things, then walked home. It took me about 30 minutes all in all, and the whole time I never questioned whether there'd actually be food in the shop when I got there. I didn't think about whether they'd had a good enough harvest to keep their stores full during the winter. I just popped in and popped out, squeezing a fundamental part of my daily subsistence into a lunch break. How much we now take for granted.

Manor Lords has made me think about this because it's a game that pulls just getting by sharply into focus. It's a settlement-building game about the daily toil of living off the land and slowly, gradually, bending it to your will. It's a game about establishing something from nothing, and living in small villages alongside, and very much in view of, the other families who reside there. It's a game about crop rotation and people coming together for harvest time, to feed each other, or to help clothe each other - and eventually, to arm and protect each other. Manor Lords is a window into what life was like in the mediaeval era.

It's also, famously, a game made by only one person over seven years, not that it feels like a solo effort in any way to play. Usually, there's an air of jankiness to solo projects like this, but that's not the case here. Manor Lords, in so many ways, is a remarkable achievement. Visually, it's a pastoral idyll of mist collecting on rolling hills in the morning as birds pass by, or sun throwing long shadows across the meadows by evening. It's the forests turning your horizon from green into shades of orange as the autumn comes, and then white as the snow carpets it all. Then in your village, there's the intricate beauty of seeing your people at work, tending the fields or working the market stalls. Some walk with oxen as they pull logs needed for construction, while the workers bark things like, "Need to house this timber to the gable!" In your ear, choral music and sweeping pastoral scores play out, reminding me more than once of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams' work, which is a very good thing. In the way it plays, there's beauty too. Simply placing a road and watching it dynamically curve around obstacles is a pleasure, as is watching a building you've placed being constructed. There's a confidence here I did not expect.

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Of all the Metroidvania elements in Tales of Kenzera: Zau, my favourite are the trees. Simply enough, meditating inside a tree provides a health boost. It's here the camera pans out to reveal these great, almost magical, natural structures which provide safety, sanctuary and a moment of reflection. Protagonist Zau is a hot-headed and petulant young man desperate to revive his father, but sat quietly in the trunk of a tree, he's just a boy.

The trees are a key example of how Tales of Kenzera transposes the genre to its African setting, but also where its heart lies: with the relationship between a father and son. The game's creator, voice actor Abubakar Salim (best known for his portrayal of Bayek in Assassin's Creed: Origins), has been particularly open about the personal inspiration behind the game: his own experience of grief following the death of his father. There's even a moving short film released ahead of the game. Yet even without knowing this, Tales of Kenzera itself exudes passion and love.

It's a story-within-a-story set in the fictional Afro-futurist land of Kenzera, and it tells the tale of desperate shaman Zau who bargains with Kalunga, god of death, following the passing of his father. Zau must deliver three spirits to win back his father and, along the way of his adventure, he learns to cope with his feelings of grief. Kalunga becomes his father-figure guide who speaks in proverbs and commands Zau with stern yet comforting lessons; Zau in return listens, rebels, argues, and accepts.

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Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is exactly what its lofty crowdfunding campaign promised it would be: a Suikoden successor in all but its name, built by a team of veterans who first made that classic in 1995. And so Hundred Heroes is another impossibly massive, turn-based, party-centric RPG. It tells another wartorn story about resisting an empire, cut through with goofball moments where an eyepatched Aussie kangaroo might yell made-up words.

And - because doing anything else would be blasphemy - there's another 100-plus party members to find, cosy up to, and experiment with in your six-character party. Reclusive hunters, kings, talking sharks (shi'arcs here), a literal travel bag with glowing Jawa eyes, your cute auntie who does nothing but bake cherry pies - they're all here, and the cast's staggering size is still what sets the Eiyu-Suiko-den group of games apart.

Trying to catch 'em all recalls the pleasures of a collectathon as you rapidly scan the screen for signs of unusually detailed NPCs to recruit. (No interview process required - everyone's allowed in, accused criminals included.) They can pretty much be found anywhere. You'll get dozens by just following the main quest. Dozens more are in towns on standby mode until you walk into their presence. Some will only appear in the open world when you've progressed to a certain point or met prerequisites.

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Mechanically, Life Eater uses a diary-based puzzle system in some really interesting ways, but it struggles to say anything meaningful about the shock-factor setting it's gone for.

Few game ideas will turn your head quicker than one about abducting people and murdering them. It's an idea that courts controversy for the shock factor that comes with it, in order to stand out, and that's not necessarily a bad thing if handled right. I don't mind it here because Life Eater is a genuinely interesting indie game and not a tasteless cash-grab. Nonetheless, it's still an uncomfortable premise and an uncomfortable game - uncomfortable in some interesting ways but uncomfortable all the same. But I feel like if you're going to go there, you'd better have some interesting things to say when you do, and ultimately, I don't think Life Eater does. To me, it feels a bit frightened of the controversy it courts. But let's come back to that because there's a lot of good stuff in between that I want to talk about first.

In essence, Life Eater is a puzzle game - it's not the gory action murder simulator you might be fearing. Far from it: the moment-to-moment gameplay actually revolves around staring at people's day-to-day calendars, a kind of diary of events, and gradually filling them out. You do this by clicking on an empty space and selecting one of a few stalkery things to do to reveal them, such as carrying out a DDoS attack or hacking their phone, or peering inside their window. Activities range from subtle to brazen, and what you can do depends on a couple of things.

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What if a game was intentionally quite boring? This feels like the premise with Harold Halibut, and at first it's kind of brilliant. You take on the role of the eponymous janitor here, a kind of lab-assistant-slash-gofer and general multipurpose dogsbody aboard the Fedora. A crashed colony spaceship that set off from Earth some time in the late 70s or early 80s, the Fedora has now been stuck, for about 60 years, deep beneath the ocean on a predominantly liquid planet, becoming a kind of self-contained commune that only partially longs for home.

It's a wonderful setup, enabling debut developer Slow Bros to do some of its best work. The Fedora is an extraordinarily realised piece of human craft, with the game built of hand-made, intricately worn and weathered models and sets that have been digitised for animation. Combined with the choice of era you get this kind of Aardman-style visual effect and a deeply retro-Brit kind of humour, centred on bureaucratic Post Office procedures and varying forms of jobsworth. The ship itself, for instance - green-hued, sub-aquatic and slightly industrial, like a miniature village built inside a spirit level - has been subsumed by the unremarkable small-town corporation All Water, with little CRT tellies around the place intermittently buzzed with corporate infomercials and announcements.

During these - and similar opportunities for squiggly-lined, wobbly-audioed video feeds or moments of rickety old-school lab computing - Harold Halibut is probably at its best. Animations, decorations and nice little buttons, even in deeply rudimentary puzzles, are completely enchanting. The humour, when it lands, zeros in on a niche but ever-present part of the collective British psyche, the selfishly entrepreneurial mindset of a very specific kind of small-minded, curtain-twitching, 80s-era middle class. Unfortunately, those moments are quite rare, and the better parts of the rest of the game are weakened by how relentlessly, brutally, interminably slow things are to move forward.

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This time it's Hades that Shiny Shoe's game feels similar to, but with some delicious differences that make this roguelike stand out all on its own.

To understand the allure of Inkbound, you have to understand a bit about the developer making it. Shiny Shoe made a game called Monster Train that came out a few years ago, and it was a roguelike deck-building game influenced by Slay the Spire, but imaginative enough to spin that influence into its own thing - and then good enough to deliver it. That's not an easy genre to stand out in, but it did. Understandably, there was a lot of excitement for what the studio would do next, and Inkbound is it. And whisper it, but I believe Shiny Shoe has done it again.

Slay the Spire isn't the dominant influence this time; Hades is. There's one huge difference in that Inkbound combat plays out in turns, rather than in real-time - and that it's got optional multiplayer co-op for you and three others - but otherwise, so much feels the same. The way you start from scratch and build and modify your character through a run feels the same, as does having a choice of rooms to progress onto after you beat an encounter. The hub you return to where characters wait to speak to you and give you quests also feels the same, as do the dialogue panels that pop up when you talk to them. Heck, the game's whole tone doesn't feel that far removed. So there's a lot of Hades here, and maybe that sounds derivative but it isn't - Shiny Shoe has spun the formula again in a way that's beautifully its own.

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My favourite RPGs are the ones that really consider exactly who the character is - or can be - in their world. From Tyranny's power-grasping fatebinder in an occupied land, and Harry du Bois's desperate reflection of the ideologies around him in Disco Elysium, Broken Roads' promise of philosophically mapped out moral quandaries in a lawless post-apocalypse looked to fit right in.

The idea is that your decisions and dialogue fall across a moral compass, being somewhere between utilitarian, humanist, nihilistic or machiavellian, and that these morals can be uniquely tested in the wilds of the post-apocalyptic outback. If the trolley problem happened at London King's Cross, you'd have to factor in a £1000 railway trespass fine - but if it's raiders in the desert that are responsible, it's just you and your moral impulses.

Broken Roads is a world where the social contract is in flux, where you can see exactly how societies are constructed when they have to be rebuilt from scratch. Concepts like 'justice', 'safety' and 'freedom' mean vastly different things to the travelling scavenger, the isolated homestead, and the walled-in city - and Broken Roads is very happy to gesture towards the conclusion that maybe the societies we live in are equally artificially constructed, even if their histories are a little longer.

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Boom time: whether by accident or design, the Fallout TV show - announced in 2020 and arriving in a binge-ready eight-episode payload this week - is launching at an auspicious moment. After the mushrooming success of HBO's The Last of Us, screen adaptations of video games have never been hotter or more respectable. Similarly, the lingering impact of Oppenheimer, now forever glowing with Oscar acclaim, means the world has had atomic bombs on the brain since last summer.

But transferring Fallout's hardscrabble post-nuclear pleasures to the small screen presents a problem similar to Fallout inventory management. With such an abundance of material and only so much capacity, what do you keep and what do you throw away? The good news is that the Prime Video adaptation cannily lifts the franchise's road-tested production design - refined over the course of six core titles spanning two decades - completely wholesale.

Of course they were going to keep the snazzy blue jumpsuits, hulking Brotherhood of Steel power armour and the vast, clanking, cog-shaped Vault doors that resemble a particularly intimidating Early Learning Centre playset teaching toddlers how gears work. Those are all cool as hell. But there are other visual callbacks to the games in practically every frame of this deluxe Prime Video adaptation, from Nuka-Cola bottle caps to the strangely comforting sight of two-headed Brahmin cows.

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Much like there are thought to be just seven main story plots, it might be easy to say there are few video game genres left to be discovered. After forty years of gaming, I know my preferred ones, and they're typically shadowy and unsettling worlds that ooze blood and bullets. How strange it is, then, to have gone this long without a game that not only blends several of these together, but does it in such a stylish and provocative way, too.

If the name Children of the Sun summons immediate thoughts of Joseph Seed and dodgy cults… well, congrats. You've guessed correctly, my friend. Whilst little is revealed explicitly - some of what we learn about Children of the Sun's story is via its animated shorts; some comes via subtle in-game clues - here's what I can tell you: you're The Girl, and The Girl is apoplectic. Armed with a sniper rifle, a single bullet and enough pent-up rage to power a small city, she's on a mission to raze the titular cult to the ground, along with every single soul ever connected to it.

While that setup alone was enough to pique my interest, Children of the Sun's magic is that even though it's been tagged as a shooter on Steam… well, it's not. Yes, you wield a weapon, and yes, you decimate body parts in a crimson puff gory enough to make Sniper Elite blush, but Children of the Sun is a puzzle game first. For as well as that single bullet, The Girl - much like Firestarter's Charlie McGee or Carrie's, uh, Carrie - is imbued with a telekinetic power that enables her to control where the bullet goes once it's fired. This means that regardless of how many cultists are milling about, The Girl can take control of the bullet and ensure she can rip through the skulls of every last man standing with a single shot… and therein lies the puzzle.

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If you’ve ever been into plants, you’ll know, outside their natural habitat, they're inherently a bit of a puzzle. Getting them to flourish is its own kind of game as you attempt to sleuth out and replicate their ideal growing conditions – the correct mix of soil, the perfect amount of light, the proper watering schedule, sufficient humidity, and whatever the bloody hell it is you want from me Calathea zebrina – to keep them happy and healthy and, hopefully, drama-free. Get it wrong and you'll end up with a shrivelled botanic tragedy glaring accusingly at you from the windowsill before it wilts its last wilt out of pure spite; do it right and you'll have a beautiful bit of nature in your home to enjoy and admire for years to come.

Botany Manor taps perfectly into this endlessly rewarding struggle to create a tiny corner of artificial perfection for nature, whisking players back to Somerset, England, and an almost impossibly Mediterranean summer's day in 1890. Here, they'll experience the world and life of retired botanist Arabella Greene in a genteel puzzler structured around completing an Herbarium – that's a book of pressed plants for scientific study, if you're also new to the word. It's a wonderfully peaceful, soothingly unhurried endeavour – a seamless blend of serene first-person exploration and deductive brain teasing - that asks players to poke around the titular house and its vibrant, sprawling gardens in search of clues that, when combined and carefully cross-referenced, reveal how plants in the Herbarium bloom out in the wild. And then it's time to put that newfound knowledge into action, potting up freshly procured seeds and figuring out how to replicate the process using artificial means.

And it's quietly brilliant stuff – a multi-part chain of naturalistic discovery and deduction that flows gracefully, organically, often across multiple areas of the house. A postcard tucked away on a nightstand might, to give an obfuscated example, detail a summer holiday destination where a friend of Arabella recently encountered an unusual flower; a wallchart hung in an adjacent room might conveniently map out the seasonal temperatures in a number of nearby regions. Connect the dots and suddenly the heater on the table in the corner, sporting an adjustable temperature gauge and space enough in front to place a freshly potted seed, reveals itself as a potentially useful tool for your botanical trials.

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The survival horror multiplayer has mastered publicity stunts, but it doesn't make a lasting impression.

There are several things that nearly everyone agrees are annoying. Processing fees, for example. Drain flies that flit around your face before dive-bombing your beer can. Likewise, "influencers" - TikTok creators, YouTubers, and other hair-gelled 22-year-olds - tend to inspire bone-deep resentment, which could be why Content Warning doesn't mind tossing them into a horror game.

But, unlike your displeasure with dumb flies, influencer fatigue also tends to ripple with jealousy: "Why don't I have one bajillion followers?" you might find yourself wondering at weak moments, when work feels particularly crushing. "MrBeast doesn't even really cure blindness." So, in being a multiplayer game, Content Warning feels like an effective satire of our widespread obsession with attention. Most of the time, though, it's just as forgettable as the impulse to be seen and loved by everyone forever.

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Pepper Grinder is one of those 2D platform games with a big idea. And its big idea is brilliant. You're a tiny character scampering around roomy levels, the camera pulled a good way out, and you have a drill. A drill! You can use it to chug through sand and dirt and emerge with a burst of speed. You can drill enemies until they're just jaw bones and cute gristle. You can use the drill to power a machine that raises the flag that ends each level. You can use the drill to operate guns, sprinklers, skidoos - you name it. More important than all that, though, Pepper Grinder is a game where the little details matter. And I knew this as soon as I saw the vines.

The vines are introduced pretty early on. They're tangles of barbed foliage that do damage if you get too close. Fine. Obvious, even. But what I love is that when you drill through sand or dirt that the vines are attached to, they shudder in a delightful, frenetic manner. They shiver with the energy that comes from your drill. The game has noticed this might happen, and so it has been made to happen. Bodes well, if you ask me.

Both these elements - big idea, attention to the little things - define a breezy, ever-changing game that has been a treat for me these last few days. You may have read that Pepper Grinder's a short game, and it is. But a short game can still outlive your enthusiasm for it, and Pepper Grinder never does.

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The Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race is a complete racing wheel and pedals of the sort that you'd expect to find in a mainstream electronics boutique alongside Logitech's ubiquitous G29, yet it offers a powerful 7.2Nm direct drive wheelbase and more realistic load-cell brake pedal, features that often set apart more enthusiast-grade sim racing offerings. Have Turtle Beach played a blinder here to deliver that desirable combo - complete with an external control pod, big integrated display and Xbox/PC compatibility - for £629/$650? Yes, but there are caveats.

Let's start at the beginning. Taking the whole kit and caboodle out of the box, you can see from the off that the design is designed to be a little more approachable than more boxy and industrial efforts from enthusiast firms like Fanatec or Moza, with a more rounded wheelbase that sports not only a large (five-inch) digital dashboard but also a smart fastening system. Two little arms drop out of the bottom of the base with the aid of a provided allen key, and then retract to mount on to a desk with considerable strength.

There's room on either side for the allen key to be stored in the wheelbase too, so you can make further adjustments even if you're sat down at the wheel without having to keep tools nearby. You can use the same tool to attach the included control pod on either side of the wheel, giving you access to a higher button count than I've seen on most wheels of this price range.

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Earlier this month I reviewed the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM, a 32-inch QD-OLED gaming monitor that combines a 4K resolution with 240Hz refresh rate, impressive HDR and fewer downsides than your typical OLED panel - albeit at an eye-watering £1350 asking price. I noted that while the Asus monitor was a technical tour de force and the best gaming monitor I'd ever tested, it's not necessarily the best value 32-inch QD-OLED. For that, UK buyers ought to be looking at the subject of this review: Dell's £940 Alienware AW3225QF, which uses the exact same QD-OLED panel and therefore ought to offer nigh-identical performance - for £410 less.

Despite that massive price delta, the Alienware is far from a compromised budget alternative - it packs many of the same features as the Asus model and even adds on Dolby Vision support and a curved form factor that suit its expansive proportions.

In this AW3225QF review, I'll cover how the monitor compares to the more expensive Asus model, how meaningful Dolby Vision support is as a value-add and whether the curved screen adds or detracts from the experience - as well as a summary of the 32-inch QD-OLED panel's characteristics for gaming, video and work, given that we've already covered the panel in some detail in the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM review two weeks ago.

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A gentle adventure into a family's secrets that's nicely crafted but over before it really begins.

I had some concerns about Open Roads when I saw a demo of it earlier this year, mostly because in what I saw, nothing much seemed to happen. A teenage girl walked around a house looking at objects and talked to her mother about them. We were promised a family mystery but there was barely any sight of it, and I wondered when it would all kick in. Now having played it, I realise why that was: there wasn't much there to tease to begin with. Open Roads is a slight game, I now know, both in terms of running length and scope. There aren't grand ambitions or wild adventures. Instead, there's a story about smaller details, about the seemingly mundane but no less important moments when relationships change, and about the imprints we leave behind.

In the game, you are Tess, a teenager who serves as the spark in the story. It's her curiosity, following the death of her grandma, that provokes the discovery you'll make, which leads to the adventure you'll have, and it's her tenacity that sees it through. It all begins in your grandma's house, which you and your mother shared with her up until her death, and which you're now packing to leave. Why you're leaving is something you don't immediately know - like so much else in the game, you'll discover it as you go along.

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A gentle and unusual building game that's memorable but missing some purpose.

Bulwark is a city-building game that works differently to any city-building game I've ever played. Faced with the barren rocky outcrops of a stormy archipelago, and a handful of buildings to place on them, I thought I knew what to do. In a sense, I did - I knew I needed to build all over it. But how I'd end up doing that would be in a way completely of the game's own. Bulwark is eccentric. Bulwark is its own thing, for better and for worse.

I expected that, to a degree. To fill you in a bit: Bulwark is the second game in what we now know will be a trilogy - the Falconeer Chronicles - made by solo designer Tomas Sala. The first game, The Falconeer, came out a few years ago and had you fly around a stormy archipelago on the back of a giant falcon. It was an aerial combat game. This second game takes you back to the same stormy archipelago but puts a zoomed out, city-building perspective on it. And the third game, known as Project Ancient Waves, will take us there again in a different way. I like this.

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In Timemelters, time is a shoelace. It bends and twists. What you've done with one part of the lace can effect the other parts in unusual ways. You get loops, but also knots and snarls and tangles. Sometimes, you get bows.

Listen. Just yesterday - yesterday in the real world - I was running up a snowy hill - this part was not in the real world - and I saw a bunch of enemies ahead of me, closing in on a friend of mine who had no defences. If my friend died, it would be bad: game over. I was out of range and out of mana, but I was also close enough to attract my enemies' attention, and they started to run at me. Stumped, my hands left the keyboard: I had pretty much given up. And then I watched, stunned, as someone entirely new raced into frame and briskly zapped all the enemies dead. I blinked. My friend who had no defences survived. I, who was out of mana, survived. And the person who had come to our aid was...me? An earlier me. Me from about five minutes ago. Welcome to Timemelters.

Fittingly for such a temporally complex game, let's start by going back a bit. Not back to the 16th century, where Timemelters is set, in a Scotland riddled with witch trials and supernatural paranoia, but back to Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, a gloriously weird strategy-action hybrid from 2013. Sang-Froid is a proper masterpiece if you ask me, and it's a strange masterpiece, which makes it even better. You play as a lumberjack whose sister, I think, is being targeted by the devil. Every night the devil sends wolves to attack your farm and so you place traps, lay defences, and also run around the joint in real-time smacking these beasts about with an axe. During the day, you work chopping lumber to earn money to build up your traps and defences for the night ahead.

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Games set in the Bakumatsu period must feel like buses. You wait almost a decade for one to be made, and then two come along in successive years. After last year’s Like A Dragon: Ishin took us to late 19th century Japan, Rise of the Ronin feels like a trip into familiar territory. It’s perhaps even more familiar, as this is an open-world game that’s quite happy to borrow from the Ubisoft playbook of maps overstuffed with icons, as well as other modern trends. Wing gliding? Sure! Dogs and cats to pet? Why not! And yet it is new territory all the same for Team Ninja. Having spent the past few years as a worthy rival to FromSoftware, with its own take on the Soulslike, this marks a departure: it's more grounded than you might expect, all while evolving the Ki-based mechanics first employed in Nioh for a wider audience.

As another third-party PS5 exclusive to fill out the lack of Sony’s own first-party efforts, it certainly looks the part. That first shot as your nameless protagonist arrives in Yokohama gazing over its rolling fields and the nearby sea looks simply sumptuous. Move in and it’s hard not to notice the light reflecting off long grass or water, or the detailed architecture - a mixture of both Japanese and Western designs. Riding on horseback with Mt. Fuji in the background it's clear: Cor! We’ve come a long way since Nioh’s identikit caverns and ransacked villages.

This beauty is balanced with brutality once you encounter unruly enemies roaming the city’s outskirts or deserted settlements. The fights that ensue usually result in a finishing blow that sees blood gushing with the severing of heads or limbs. Combat has been simplified to the extent that there is just one attack button rather than light and heavy, while another attack is actually a counterspark, the game’s form of parrying, which you’ll need for deflecting combos to wear down your opponent’s Ki (stamina) before following up with a critical attack. What I do appreciate is that even if you opt for the easier difficulty, the game doesn’t just devolve into a hack-and-slasher. You still have to respect this mechanic.

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Princess Peach: Showtime! is unlike anything else. It shouldn't be like anything else -- the action-adventure game is only the second installment in Super Mario's 43-year-old history to make Princess Peach its primary protagonist, and it treats her like a proper, petticoated hero. Usually, Mario main games turn Peach's long skirt and little gloved hands into reasons why she's best suited to being a fragile lily in a vase. But even ensconced in her majestic brick castle in the vast Mushroom Kingdom in which she rules, Peach is inevitably kidnapped by some irritating guy. In this sense, Nintendo has historically disparaged womanhood as Peach's biggest liability. But Showtime! doesn't do that.

It instead equates ribbons, dresses, and other types of girly-girl magic to legitimate tools. Sometimes, it even seems like Peach finds more power in salt-sized glitter than Bowser keeps stored in both of his beefy biceps. This helps establish Princess Peach: Showtime! as two things: first, it's an innovative Super Mario installment. Then, it's hot-pink respect finally paid to Peach, who has spent too much of her life bruising on the sidelines.

Outside its unique characterisation of Peach, Princess Peach: Showtime! is satisfying in its creative level design and varied styles of combat. This dynamism is demanded by Showtime!'s somewhat strange plot, in which life imitates art, which imitates life, which imitates magical realism in a Charlie Kaufman movie (except no one ever gets depressed, because their bodies are made up of 100 percent love).

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As I launched Dragon's Dogma 2 for the first time, I told myself that I should go into it with a more critical eye than I usually would. I think I was afraid that my overzealous love for the original might cloud my judgement. Then I blinked, and 10 hours had flown by. It was suddenly 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I'd been so engrossed in Dragon's Dogma 2 that I'd regressed back into the gaming schedule of my teenage years. I was now acutely aware of how tired I was, so I told myself I would save at the next available opportunity and go to bed. As I approached a nearby campsite, I spotted a troll and a dragon duking it out in the distance. I joined Team Troll, the clear underdog, and subsequently spent another 20 minutes avenging his death against the dragon. After a hard won fight, I decided it couldn't hurt to explore the nearby Ancient Battlegrounds for a few minutes.

I blinked again. It was 5 a.m. now. As I finally managed to pull myself away from Dragon's Dogma 2, I realised attempting to be unbiased may no longer be possible, because Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't bothered about appeasing those who had issues with the original game. In fact, it's trying to do the complete opposite - it's doubled down on everything that fans of the original game loved in the hopes of catering to its target audience, which just so happens to be me.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is an intentionally difficult game to summarise. From the outside looking in, it's a hack-and-slash RPG set in a fantasy world, with its grand, over-the-top boss battles serving as its main draw. In reality however, Dragon's Dogma 2 is a test in perseverance.

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Janky. That's the word that springs to mind when I think back to the games I used to play – Alone in the Dark among them – as a kid. Along with the fixed camera angles and tank controls were the bugs and the glitches and all that lovely jank, as much a part of survival horror's storied beginnings as Resident Evil's "itchy tasty" memo.

Pisces Interactive's reimagining of 1992's Alone in the Dark adopts its inspiration's dark story and even fixed cameras at times, but it also preserves – unintentionally, I suspect – the jank. In fact, there's no part of this modern Alone in the Dark remake that's jank-free – combat, puzzles, sound, script; you name it. For some, it'll feel like an integral part of Alone in the Dark's experience that'll only add to its appeal. For others, it'll be an instant turn-off. For me? For me, it's somewhere in the middle, straddling a forgettable no-man's-land of mediocrity that's only saved, in part, by the reimagined storytelling.

Alone in the Dark's story deviates a little from the 1992 original, but certainly not to its detriment. Just like the OG, you can choose to play as either PI Edward Carnby, voiced here by the magnificent David Harbour, or Emily Hartwood, who's been brought to life by the equally magnificent Jodie Comer. However, the script is so stilted it's hard for either performance to be memorable, let alone magnificent, and the performers are peculiarly… well, reserved. I know; I'm surprised, too, not least because both Harbour and Comer are fine actors who typically emit the kind of satisfying, larger-than-life energy that could've – should've – translated gloriously to a schlocky horror like Alone in the Dark.

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Wake up, nerds - new gaming monitors are here. Five years after the advent of 27-inch Fast IPS 1440p 144Hz monitors, which earned hearty DF recommendations for hitting the sweet spot for gaming and content creation alike, we have a new wave of ultra high-end models that offer a similar leap in fidelity and motion.

These are 32-inch 4K 240Hz monitors, based around a third-generation QD-OLED panel from Samsung and offered by Asus, MSI and Dell. These screens tick a lot of boxes, with a 4K resolution that suits gaming on PC and console, a 240Hz refresh rate ideal for esports-grade PC gaming, the phenomenal HDR performance provided by OLED and improvements to the underlying panel tech that shore up some of its weaknesses for PC use, especially with regards to content creation and consumption.

Today we're looking at perhaps the most exciting of the options available, the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM. Asus did well to differentiate their previous generation OLED gaming monitors with better cooling - and therefore slightly brighter displays - than their competitors. They also offered comprehensive burn-in measures, plenty of gaming-specific OSD settings and of course the RGB styling the company is known for, which helped ameliorate their higher prices. It looks like a similar situation this time around, with the PG32UCDM commanding a $1300/£1350 price point that comes in above Dell and MSI's alternatives in some regions.

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Lurking behind a dated exterior is a limited but sophisticated RPG with a unique setting and some memorable new ideas.

I think it counts for a lot when a role-playing game comes along and it's different. There are so many games that try to do what other games do, they end up struggling to stand out - especially when they don't have the resources larger projects do. But with Thaumaturge, developer Fool's Theory (the Polish studio remaking The Witcher 1 for CD Projekt Red, by the way) has played it smart. It's focused on the differences and not been afraid to leave other things out, and it means that behind Thaumaturge's admittedly dated exterior, there are some genuinely interesting things here.

There's a lot about The Thaumaturge I admire. Let's take the setting and the subject matter first, because it also helps explain the game. Do you know what a Thaumaturge is? I doubt it - I didn't either. It's a term taken from our real world to mean a person who performs miracles or wonders. Specifically, in this game's case, a Thaumaturge is capable of reading people's thoughts (and influencing them), seeing those thoughts imprinted on objects, and befriending demons. And within that description are the game's big ideas.

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Whenever I first get to play a new Mario Kart game there's always a moment - often when I reach a Bowser stage - where I look at the road ahead of me, the broad, curving path that leads through gorgeous Mario clutter, and I wish I was playing this as an action game, a platform game, instead of a driving game. What would that be like?

I don't mind that it probably wouldn't work, or that it works perfectly well as it is. I don't fully know what I'm responding to, even. Maybe it's the sense of being low to the ground in a world that unfurls towards the horizon, a world which is pushing me forwards to adventure. I don't get this from actual 3D Mario games, which tend towards the toybox-like. But I get it from Penny's Big Breakaway. In a strange, hard-to-pin-down manner, it's the action game I want when I play Mario Kart.

This is weird, because the clearest lineage here is Sonic. With its play of speed and momentum and inertia, Penny's Big Breakaway feels like a Sonic game moment-to-moment, and then there's the personnel behind it, with Christian Whitehead and other Sonic Mania vets at the top of the credits. The colour scheme, favouring oranges and pinks and greens and purples calls to mind the 16-bit glory days of Sega. There's a lot of Marble Zone to the look, even before later levels dump in all that lava. Coin collection gives off a distinct golden rings chime. Squint, and the characters scattered around the place, squat and rounded, could have come from Bonanza Bros, while Penny herself, all giant grin and sharp angles, feels like she could have stepped out of a Treasure game.

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The black screen has a single white dot at its centre. The expectation is that we're in for something like Pong: something simple, direct, immediate and, as far as games are concerned, ancient.

But then the dot moves, and in its wake we get eruptions of light. Blocks of colour fan out, moving from pink to purple to cyan. The light creates shapes, but what are these shapes? Starbursts, nebula, volcanic eruptions. The screen seems to mirror the action, double it, so we get a lot of crabs with two pincers raised to the sky, a lot of mermaids with two fins, a lot of Rorschach blots. Maybe that's it. You look at these dancing lights, these ripples of colour, all caused by the single white dot, and you see what you want to see.

This is Psychedelia, from 1984. It was the first of designer Jeff Minter's light synths, inspired by the colours and shapes he'd see when he lay around in his room, listening to "the Floyd". I always knew Minter made light synths, because his later games, like Space Giraffe, are often set inside them. But coming across Psychedelia mid-way through Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, I got to appreciate them in a new way.

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Building an ideal party is one of my favourite things to do in any roleplaying game where the cast size matches a Wes Anderson flick - purely because, in the good ones, there's no right answer. You can prioritise your most-loved companions over any real strategic logic. Heck, I sometimes just pick the characters who I think look cute together, regardless of whether they've spent any on-screen time together. Unicorn Overlord is a strategy RPG all about that lovely party tinkering, and this time, the cast is instead as big as one of those animated sitcoms that have been on air across a couple centuries.

That almost sounds like too much to manage, but I promise it's not. Unicorn Overlord starts small. The evil Zenoiran Empire sweeps through a high fantasy world, seizing large swaths of land, murdering the Queen, and displacing the only living heir to the throne who later grows into a resistance-leading warrior (AKA you, AKA Alain.) Heard any of that before?

Unicorn Overlord plays with overfamiliar tropes throughout its entire 50-ish hour runtime (there's a lot of side stuff to dig into, by the way), though that didn't really bother me because - with over 60 unique characters plus ones that you can create and "hire" yourself - the game shines when it's dishing out piecemeal vignettes that slowly contextualise its world.

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Genshin Impact is one of the most popular games in the world and perhaps China's chief video game export, but even knowing that I was surprised to learn that domestic compatriot OnePlus has created a special £699 Genshin Impact Edition of their (£649) 12R smartphone. Not only that, the phone is based around a single character from the game - the purple-haired Keqing - who I imagine must have been selected as the face of the brand after quite a bit of research.

The Shenzhen-based outfit offered to send over a unit for review, and I thought it might be an interesting way to check out both one of the most affordable phones to ship with last year's performant, flagship-grade Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset - and see what one of the most unusual game tie-ins I've ever seen actually provides for fans in terms of performance, design and extras.

The OnePlus 12R Genshin Impact Edition has a bold look, taking what was already quite a premium looking phone for its category in the vanilla 12R and making it quite a bit more eye-catching. The purple 'electro violet' colourway catches the light nicely, especially with the jewelled appearance of the rear camera array, and the purple look extends to the metallic frame around the device too.

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There is an island in the Aegean, an island of stray cats and tumbling bougainvilleas, that has an instagram account devoted exclusively to its many doors. This account is a catalogue of variations on a theme, the theme being how you get in and out of a building, the variation being - well... Where to start? Modern doors, ancient doors. Doors of wood and doors of iron. Doors that are perfectly kept up, doors that are leaning, addled, barely hanging in there. Doors set with glass and doors set with grillwork. The doors are great individually, but it's together that they truly shine. You glimpse something of us as a species, I think, in their endless twists and reconfiguring, their fitness and anti-fitness for purpose.

If you are the kind of person who likes the idea of exploring the endless variation found within doors, Summerhouse is for you. And it's not just doors. Oh, the doors are great. They're nifty! Metal doors with an industrial feel, but also wooden double doors, perfect for an old junk shop. Sliding convenience-store doors. A round Hobbit number - painted green, of course.

But there are windows, rooves, finials and oddments like signage, rattling drainpipes, posters and hoardings. Fancy a polite little noticeboard? Fancy a lone payphone set, lollipop-style, upon a stick? Fancy trees and shrubs, wild and in pots? Walls of stone, walls of wood. Keep scrolling; even before the unlocks bring you a ghost amongst long grass and a cat lounging on an air-con unit, it's all here.

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You can't throw a rock in Brighton without hitting a moomin. There are boutiques and galleries devoted to them. They're on our teacups and our beach towels. They're on plant pots by our windows and on the rough-papered covers of fancy Tove Jansson reprints stocking our libraries. It's not surprising that they've made it to video games, but it is surprising - to a moomin outsider, at least - to discover that the sort of thing that middle-class Southern idiots like me lap up so readily has a little bite to it. Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, a musical stealthy exploration game, is the best kind of surprise.

What kind of bite does the world of the moomins bring? Yesterday, I was wandering along in Moonminvalley taking Snufkin, the series' pipe-smoking philosopher, for a bit of a stroll. Beyond the rocks and trees we spied a carefully laid-out park, the shrubs suddenly cut into polite shapes, the desire paths we'd followed through scrub and long grass replaced with neat little paving slabs riddled between polite lawns. Trees suddenly had low fences around their bases. There were fences around everything, in fact, and patrolling police officers, too, or people who looked very much like it. Park officers!

This called for stealth - for muddling out patrol routes, avoiding visibility cones and sneaking from A to B. But it also called for a series of set-piece moments in which Snufkin reached a sign of some kind - a sign telling people not to loiter, or step off the path, or whatever else it is that signs tell people not to do. Whenever Snufkin reached one of these signs, he pulled them out of the ground. And once he got them all, there was a fabulous cut-scene that showed Snufkin trashing the park in general, wiping it off the surface of Mooninvalley, and returning the whole thing to a place of messy, freeform nature. What a brilliant goal for a game such as this.

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Sony's Xperia 5 V was described to me by a representative as their more trendy flagship, designed for younger people and influencers. Well, on the first part, I feel like I'm the target market; the second part perhaps not so much. Priced at £819 and seemingly only available in the UK at present, the Xperia 5 V represents the mid-range option with Sony's latest Xperia lineup of handsets, flanked by the flagship Xperia 1 V and the much more affordable Xperia 10 V.

The Xperia 5 V comes with last year's flagship Qualcomm chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor (the same as the recently reviewed Honor Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design), 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. There's a reasonable dual camera setup with a 48MP main snapper and 12MP ultrawide, while the display is a tall and skinny 6.1-inch 2560x1080 OLED. You also get a Micro SD card slot and a headphone jack, rarities on any phone these days.

In the hand, the Xperia 5 V feels excellent. Its matte finish is smooth to the touch and is comfortable to hold. In terms of its looks, the Xperia 5 V is reminiscent of Sony phones from years gone by, opting for a thin slab with more rounded corners. This design may be a little out of kilter compared to more modern flagships and mid-range choices, but I don't mind it.

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Dark Forces emerges from Nightdive's bacta tank refreshed and ready for action, combining classic FPS mayhem with thrilling espionage-themed missions.

"This is too easy" quips Kyle Katarn as he snatches the Death Star plans in Dark Forces' opening mission. What took Rogue One two-and-a-half ponderous hours to unspool, LucasArts' shooter pulls off in ten thrilling minutes. For Katarn, a cocky mercenary in tentative accord with the Rebel Alliance, stealing the Death Star plans is just another contract. In, out, job done.

Katarn's confidence and competence is echoed both in Dark Forces at large and Nightdive's work restoring it. The remaster is a consummately professional overhaul, making the game look just how you remember it in a way that belies the work involved to get it to this stage. In doing so, Nightdive reveals a shooter that hits the brief like a proton torpedo, a Doom clone elevated by its vivid, imaginative expansion upon the Star Wars universe.

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A week into Balatro - Balatro were jesters and fools in ancient Rome; I googled it - I'd say that this is the Goldberg Variations of Poker. It's Poker: Possibility Space Edition. It's a roguelike deckbuilder that starts with the basic poker hands and then allows you to level up the winnings of those hands, add new cards to the deck and alter existing ones, and bring in a range of jokers that modify the game rules in bizarre ways. And yet, it's still poker underneath it all. (Actually, the solo dev says it's Big Two, and I will take their word for it.) So, like the Goldbergs, it's expansive, ingenious, eager to turn every closet over and every pocket inside out. But also, like the Goldbergs, its invention is a thing of precision, of sounding out specific possibilities. So it feels really, really big - bottomlessly big - and also extremely compact: localised, particular.

Over the last few weeks it has taken over the gaming world completely, and I can see why. A poker roguelike is such a brilliant idea you almost don't need to make it to see how clever it is. There are a few of these, and Balatro is comfortably the best I've played. It really is ingenious - and it's also ingeniously simple. Let us get into this.

It's poker. Honestly it is. And for the first rounds of a new run, before you've started to flare things in weird directions, you'll be playing pretty straight poker. You are dealt cards. You make poker hands. A flush? Nice. A straight? Absolutely fine. When it comes to real poker in the real world, I am the earnest, plodding friend of two pair. Two pair is it for me: nice try, not going to blow people's minds, you did your best.

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Like a demon summoned by fresh blood on its altar, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin first arose at the height of the retro-shooter revival. Developed in a modified Quake engine with levels designed by contributors to mods like Arcane Dimensions, it looked set to conquer all in its path when it arrived in 2019. Its Early Access showcased amazing weapons, splattering enemies, a knotty, secret-filled hubworld, and maps you'd sell your soul for.

Then it went back to sleep for five years. In 2021, developer KillPixel admitted the project had been sorely hindered by the Covid 19 pandemic. But the full game would be out in Summer 2022. That became Spring 2023, which then became February 2024. In that time the retro shooter continued to evolve, giving us its Doom (Prodeus), its Duke Nukem (Ion Fury) and its Hexen (AMID EVIL). All the while Wrath's presence faded, looking less like a spiritual successor to Quake, and more like a rerun of Daikatana.

Now though, Wrath is finished, and unlike John Romero's white elephant, you can see why it took so long. This isn't so much a first-person shooter as it is an ode to 3D level design, a dimension-hopping adventure of colossal scale and variety that bends the Quake engine into frankly obscene positions. Sadly, this is as much a criticism as it is a compliment, for in its strive to provide the grandest shooting galleries in existence, the shooting itself gets a little lost along the way.

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In something of a surprise launch, AMD has made its RX 7900 GRE available as a full retail product in order to tackle the challenge represented by Nvidia's successful RTX 4070 Super. Previously available in the Chinese region and selectively to the OEM market elsewhere, the idea is very straightforward. Similar to the well-received RX 7800 XT, AMD readily admits that it lacks the same level of ray tracing performance of its closest Nvidia counterpart, but makes up for it in spades elsewhere. RX 7900 GRE has 16GB of framebuffer memory where the 4070 Super has just 12GB, paired with a 256-bit interface where the Nvidia card has a 192-bit bus. It's also significantly faster in rasterisation.

In effect, AMD is delivering excellent value for users who still aren't fully buying into the ray tracing dream, or aren't enamoured with Nvidia's ever-growing feature set. Clearly, we believe that those features have a great deal of value, but the point is that if you disagree and if you want a fast card with all the memory you'll need for the foreseeable future, AMD is delivering what Nvidia does not - and it's doing it for less money. It's that simple.

First up, let's consider what the RX 7900 GRE actually is. The name itself is curious, hailing from its Chinese market origins, where GRE stands for Golden Rabbit Edition to mark 2023 in the Chinese zodiac. It's a baffling choice for any other market and doesn't really slot in convincingly into the existing brand, but then again, some might say that any three letters are as good as any other.

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Remakes are a precarious proposition. Do too much and you risk losing a fanbase. Do too little and fans question if it was even worthwhile. With a game as iconic and beloved as Final Fantasy 7, the risks are gigantic. This new trilogy, based on the PlayStation classic, is proving to be less remake and more a re-imagining of the original, a reinterpretation - a rebirth, if you will. But how do you balance old and new? How far can the boundaries of this story be pushed?

These are the sorts of meta-narrative questions Final Fantasy 7 Remake posed. In that game's brand new finale twist, Cloud and co battled the physical embodiment of fate to break away from destiny and carve a new future. It was seemingly a message from Square Enix: just like Cloud, its developers wouldn't necessarily be sticking to the script. Now in Rebirth, it appears both parties are wrestling with their decisions as the game attempts to answer the ultimate philosophical question: why should it exist?

I've also wrestled with these thoughts. FF7 was the first Final Fantasy I played and remains a favourite. But am I too protective of the original, too invested in my own nostalgia? When changes are made, should I bemoan the difference or relish something new? Over time, I've come to appreciate the developers' desire to not simply repeat the same story and release a near-identical product, but steer it in a new direction - for better or worse.

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Pirates! Such an evocative word! But if it's swashbuckling tales of derring-do you're after, of sea monsters and high seas adventuring, of buried treasures on distant shores and smuggling escapades by the light of the moon, there are other, better ways to fulfil that classic pirate fantasy, because Skull and Bones' take is, regrettably, a bit of a bore.

It begins, though, as all good adventures often do, in the midst of battle, wood splintering and canons booming as your ship is pursued across the 17th century Indian Ocean by a British armada intent on delivering you to Davy Jones - a wonderfully cinematic opener slightly undone by the fact straying beyond an arbitrary boundary immediately presents you with a stroppy message to turn around. Fortune, though, is on your side, and you escape - after bobbing through shark-infested waters on a bit of flotsam - with the shirt on your back, a rickety old dhow, and a burning ambition to become the most renowned pirate in all the land.

In rather less romantic terms, it's a live-service progression track grind masquerading as a rags-to-riches story, but it's one that Skull and Bones, to its credit, tries really hard to sell. Over its near-decade of development and across countless iterations, Ubisoft's pirate adventure has doubtless taken many forms, but what I wasn't expecting to find - amid its live-service trappings and its flexible fusion of drop-in co-op and optional PvP - was quite such a lengthy, narrative-driven campaign. Granted, its story - a self-serious, by-the-numbers tale of factional warfare, populated by a cast of largely charmless characters that could have been wrenched from any number of blockbuster Ubisoft games - isn't a particularly engaging one, but it does at least give Skull and Bones' rather graceless tangle of underlying systems some narrative drive.

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I'm never quite sure whether I'm doing the right thing in Last Epoch, yet as I float around as an undead vacuum cleaner - hoovering up my enemies' health bars while my minions keep them distracted - I know that I'm at least having a good time.

I've opted for a lich build, and thanks to the flexibility of Last Epoch's skill trees, I've been able to dip into other subclasses to create my own personal playstyle. Is it a viable build for the hardest endgame battles? Almost certainly not, but I'm glad I haven't succumbed to the urge to Google the current meta.

That's because tinkering and experimenting with different builds is the point of Last Epoch, and trying to find short-cuts to this would mean skipping the very best part of the game. Which, for me, is the experimentation found in the levelling and build-creation process. As I discovered towards the later stages of the campaign and the start of the endgame, however, this is a strength that gradually loses its potency. When the rate of progression slows down and there is no longer an obvious supply of new abilities or rewards to keep you entertained, Last Epoch starts to feel like it's running out of fresh ideas.

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The other day I read an old interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the FromSoftware director behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and it seems particularly relevant here. "I'm a huge masochist, so when I make games like these… this is how I want to be treated," he said. "'I want to be killed this way!' That's how I make it! It's just that sometimes other people don't understand it; it's for my pleasure." His interviewer interjects: "Really? You want to be killed deep in the forest, getting punched by a huge mushroom?"

"Yes, yes. And the curse area… When I get cursed–"

Interviewer: "You want to die from a barrage of arrows?!"

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Counter-Strike 2 is Counter-Strike. The formula hasn't really changed since the 1999 original - terrorists and counter-terrorists sparring to eliminate the other side or plant/defuse a bomb at one of two designated locations - but Valve's 2023 release runs better on modern hardware than 2012's Global Offensive and offers sparingly more gameplay possibilities too. Fundamentally though, the core combination of tactical, round-based 5v5 competition and satisfyingly difficult shooting mechanics remain as enrapturing and enraging as ever.

Competitive play is at the heart of the game, even more so than in CS:GO, with the Premier ranked mode taking centre stage. Here, solo and grouped players are placed into teams of five, go through a map veto process to select the stage and starting sides, then compete in a best-of-24-rounds match with their individual ELO rating on the line. These matches are a good deal shorter than CS:GO's best-of-30 contests, increasing the importance of the first rounds on each side and making it a little harder to stage a late comeback.

On the plus side, one-sided stomps are mercifully shortened, while still allowing for overtime in close matches and the exquisite economic interplay that differentiates the game from other shooters. Do you spend all of your hard-earned cash to try and steal a round against better-equipped opponents now, or save your money and accept you'll lose the next round in order to be on even footing in the round after that?

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Commitment can be scarier than any ghost story. When I got married, I spent a lot of time leading up to the wedding borrowing grief from my future self. The prospect of 'til death do we part' brought forward the stark idea that one day one of us would have to say goodbye to the other. I was suddenly and unexpectedly wracked with anxiety about the mortality of my loved ones, and playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden reminded me of this uncomfortable feeling. Antea and Red have each other, to hold and confide in and joke with – but Antea is a ghost, and they have to get ready to say goodbye. That's the commitment they make to each other.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden sees Red and Antea, ghost hunters and life partners, called to settle a curse that's fallen on the early Massachusetts settler colony of New Eden. The tight-knit, suspicious puritan community aren't all convinced that the pair can help, seeing their arrival as too little too late – or insufficiently godly – after the loss of their community pillar to the ghost at the centre of the curse.

New Eden Town introduces you to life as a banisher: fighting violent spectres that have forgotten who they were, convincing benevolent ghosts to leave people to grieve in peace, and snooping in people's belongings to get better answers to your questions. When the pair inadvertently walk into a trap, the townspeople's suspicions are proved correct – Antea is killed, and the survivors scatter. To help her peacefully pass on, it will be a long journey to loosen the curse's hold on the area to retrieve her body – and there's the unthinkable option of taking that same journey to instead resurrect her, going against everything they believe as banishers. Death to the dead, and life to the living.

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Ten minutes into a mission on the planet of Malevelon Creek, my squad and I emerge from a swampy treeline to finally catch sight of our target. This time it's a scientific base, and we're here to destroy it entirely. After clearing the area of enemies, I summon a hellbomb – one of the largest payloads in our arsenal – and manually arm the device.

We quickly move away, making space for the massive explosion that is to come. Yet as we scurry back towards the bushes, I spot a neighbouring facility that could be destroyed with a simple airstrike. The temptation of completing two objectives within twenty seconds proves difficult to resist, and I bring up my stratagem list to input the combination.

As I pull back my arm to throw the beacon, several things happen at once. The hellbomb behind us explodes, triggering a massive shockwave that rocks my screen. This diverts the aim of my throw ever-so-slightly to the left - instead of gracefully arcing through the air towards the robot facility, the beacon bounces off a large rock, drops to the floor, and lands at the feet of my squad. Before we know it, explosions are raining down around us, and we're all swiftly turned into jam by my airstrike.

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The Switch is safely into its Vegas residency era now. So safely, in fact, that with the greatest hits out of the way it's offering up some deep cuts and B-sides. I am all for this. Following on from the Super Mario RPG remake, here's Mario vs. Donkey Kong, a gentle reworking of an old Game Boy Advance charmer. It's lovely stuff.

And it's interesting, too. It makes one think. Not just because it's Mario at its most puzzley, with each mini-challenge playing out like the weird equivalent of a Mario Sudoku or some other newspaper brainteaser. It makes me think because it's another reminder of how Mario, of all game series, is sort of a language that players like me have spent the last few decades learning to speak.

As with language, I'm still learning to recognise how much of the grammar I didn't consciously know that I understand, as it were. What I get in a game like this, then, is a series of actions and reactions I am surprised to learn I can anticipate. Ice will cause me to slide, sure. But when precisely did I learn that a certain kind of block will cause me to teleport, while another will vanish if a switch is flipped? Elsewhere, from a truly ancient part of my brain I somehow retained the information that I will climb up faster if I'm holding two ropes, but descend faster if I'm only holding one. This kind of recall? From a man who regularly calls his dog "doghead", because her precise name cannot be grasped in the moment? (It's Cricket - I just checked.)

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Games can be beautiful because they are timeless, but they can also be beautiful because they are timely. When it comes to timelessness, you're going to struggle to beat Tetris. Its stark and nested blocks face every age with the same eternal silence, while the impulse to organise and tidy that they inspire is so deeply rooted in living things that it probably transcends species. Just this morning I watched a crow on TikTok working a stick into a clear plastic tube to dislodge a treat. This crow, that lives in a tree somewhere and probably eats the eggs of other birds because it is compelled to, this crow was ready for Tetris.

For timeliness, though, I give you Tomb Raider - the early Core games. These are the same games that have just been repackaged and remastered in a new collection with an annoyingly unwieldy name. And that all fits, to be honest. To play these games is to play - if you're me - something gorgeous and awkward, something that is gorgeous in part because it is awkward. But the timeliness of it all! I cannot even see these games without slipping back to the 1990s. Scream is on at the cinema. My ex-girlfriend is back from a gap year in Australia and keeps saying everything good is "immense". Everyone I know seems to have bought the same record bag to university. Chocolate bars are going through a great Cambrian explosion (forget Snickers, pick me up a Maverick!), and in every halls of residence there is at least one grubby grey plastic PlayStation, sat upside down so the laser works, with people clustered around Lara Croft's latest. They're stuck on a puzzle. They're playing together, as a kind of chorus. They're calling out suggestions. They've all missed the key that is hidden on the floor behind them.

A warning for what follows, then. Tomb Raider isn't just a game to some of us. It's a madeleine, my Maverick bar, dunked in Lucozade, which takes me back to the time that I was rediscovering games in general. And this time is now so distant, these games such a fond but unplayed fixture of my imagination, that just playing this collection is an act of rediscovery itself, by turns thrilling and melancholy, joyous and frustrating.

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The Honor Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design is perhaps the most sublimely designed foldable to date. With a bigger battery than competitors, as well as being much thinner, it's one of the first options we've seen that compares well in size and capacity to more standard form factor phones. The standard variant, priced at £1700, is dearer than competitors from Samsung, Google, and OnePlus, and it's expected that this special model will be even dearer when pricing is unveiled at MWC in a couple of weeks time. For the price though, you’re getting a truly incredible phone with a lot to like about it.

For the outlay however, the Magic V2 RSR has quite the capable feature set, with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor backed with 16GB of RAM, 1TB of internal storage, a sublime triple camera setup with a 50MP main shooter, a 50MP ultrawide and a 20MP telephoto. You of course also get two LTPO OLED displays: a 7.92-inch foldable screen and a 6.43-inch cover display.

The Honor Magic V2 RSR Porsche Design is quite the looker, with a sleek profile that's reminiscent of the vehicular namesake attached to this collaboration. The standard Magic V2 is an excellent looking phone as it is, but this RSR Porsche Design variant takes things to the next level.

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Sorry to get all TikTok MBA on you, but if you're employing the rule of three in your marketing, you really want to make that third element count. It needs to sing. It needs to be explosive, or at least thoroughly radioactive. More than anything, it needs to upend any breezy certainties that elements one and two have lulled you into. It needs to be an agent of rapid recontextualisation.

Thank you for attending my TED Talk. And look at the giant screen behind me and you'll see Ultros, a Metroidvania that mints pure gold from the rule of three. What are we in for here? Action, exploration, and gardening. Wait. Gardening? What? Where am I?

The first two of these elements, in Ultros' case, are relatively easy to get your head around. It's the third that, for me, took a while to make its influence - and its fascinating impact - clear. So let's discuss all of these pieces in turn. But first, let's talk about the art, because, the rule of three aside, the art is the primal draw here.

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Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is a game that I have been waiting a long time for. It's not quite the first 40k video game that I dreamed of - that'd be the Primarch fighting game my friends and I dreamed up at age 11 - but ever since getting over my youthful "wow, cool Space Marine" phase, I've wanted a 40k game that really gets into the finer details of the setting.

The Imperium, the form that human society takes in the grim darkness of the far future, is by far the best thing about 40k - but it's frequently obfuscated. 40k adaptations tend to either go all in on the action, or stick with the warfare and high level strategy of the tabletop game. On top of that, I suspect Games Workshop's need to market to children conflicts with how truly horrible the Imperium is. After all, it's much easier to get Little Timmy's Mum to splash out on toy soldiers when they're depicted as heroic defenders of humanity, instead of the brainwashed fascist enforcers they truly are. As a result, the darkly satirical elements of 40k tend to be buried in the novels and other ancillary media, making it all too easy to take the surface at face value.

Owlcat Games' Rogue Trader is based on the 2009 pen-and-paper RPG of the same name, which should come as no surprise; the studio made its own name with adaptations of the Pathfinder RPG. If you've played Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous, the broad strokes of Rogue Trader will be immediately familiar: a party-based CRPG that hews closely to the pen-and-paper original, combining a sprawling narrative with deep turn-based tactical combat. After creating your character, you'll play through an introductory section before being thrust into a position of power - one that conveniently allows for both agonising decision making and gallivanting about the place on adventures. The big difference this time is one of scale. 40k is all about maximalism, after all. Everything is bigger and badder and defined by an urge for more.

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When Square Enix announced its all-new multiplayer shooter Foamstars, the internet expectedly reacted with Splatoon comparisons and endless jokes about, err, bodily fluids, on account of all the frothy foam that you'll be pumping on opponents. Funnily enough, both sentiments are only kinda true. The game's foam actually does ooze out of at least one character's body, somehow, while the rest is sourced through nuclear-type factories. Oh, and the game only sort of resembles Splatoon in both fun and unflattering ways.

Foamstar's 4v4 competitive matches have you spraying the map with coloured foam, at which point you can surf across the bits that your team has foamed for an extra speed boost (like Splatoon), although marking the map in your team's colour isn't the goal here, in any game mode.

Foaming enemies slows them down until they're so drenched, they're trapped in one giant foam ball which you can then surf into for an elimination (unlike Splatoon), unless an enemy surfs there first and bashes them out, encouraging you to get close and aggressive. My favourite part of this whole idea is that saves/eliminations can also be countered if you surf into the foam balls before they hit terrain, which sometimes leads to soapy football chaos as giant balls fly back and forth across the arena.

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Ah, the video game tie-in. A handful of brilliant games came about as a result of the late 90s-to-early-00s' somewhat ghoulish obsession with cross-market synergy (like Peter Jackson's King Kong, say, or GoldenEye 007) but the majority of them were, at best, forgettable.

As the obsession died down however, a younger, trendier opportunist stepped up and took its place: the anime tie-in game. Naturally, games based on anime aren't anything new. They are, however, popping up with more and more frequency - likely due in part to anime's ever increasing popularity outside of Japan - and one publisher is responsible for the majority of the most popular releases: Bandai Namco. Due to its collaboration with anime publishing giant Shueisha, Bandai Namco has the licensing rights to the most popular anime and manga titles in existence. Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, Gundam, My Hero Academia - if it's an anime you've heard of, Bandai probably owns the rights to turn it into a video game.

But just as the majority of movie tie-in games used to either be cookie-cutter first person shooters or unimaginative third person action adventure games, today the fixation seems to be on arena fighting games - which, unfortunately, brings us to Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash.

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I've always been a fan of underdog brands, and Romanian headphone maker Meze definitely counts as one. The company has been making wave amongst audiophiles, and today we have in for review their most affordable headphones - the £185/$199 Meze 99 Neos. These are far from cheap headphones at that price, but when the other end of Meze's range tops out at €4000 they're still relatively modest!

As you'd hope, the Meze 99 Neo still carry a certain air of authority with their black textured plastic earcups and zinc alloy headband. They actually look more expensive than they are, and their blend of high-quality metals and plastics goes some way to justifying the price point - though they of course don't look or feel quite as premium as the wooden earcups of the Meze 99 Classic. The headphones are well-built too, held together entirely by screws and metal fixings to ensure complete repairability. I haven't felt the need to test this, but reports elsewhere suggest they're easy to tear down.

What's particularly intriguing about the 99 Neos is their suspension-style self-adjusting headband. I've never been the biggest fan of this design, but the 99 Neos are effortless to wear - and this is helped by some seriously deep earcups and only moderate clamping force. These design features mean they outperform other headsets I've tested in recent months like the Grado SR325x and Sennheiser HD 660S2 in terms of comfort for me. The thick cushions also provide good passive noise isolation. This makes the 99 Neos a great set of travel headphones, and also benefits extended listening sessions.

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Content Warning: Silent Hill: The Short Message contains explicit and continual themes and references to self-harm, suicide ideation, child neglect, and child abuse. While I won't dwell on these in this review or go into much further detail, please be mindful of this before reading further or, indeed, playing the game yourself.

It's long been known that different Silent Hills wait for different people. For some – most famously perhaps – there are faceless, buxom nurses lurking in the rust-encrusted corridors. For others, flames tower around them, leeching the air of all light and hope. For Anita, sticky notes daubed with crude insults are layered like feathers on every surface. It's kind of beautiful in a dark, melancholic, effed-up way.

Kind of beautiful in a dark, melancholic, effed-up way is actually a pretty good summary for Silent Hill: The Short Message, actually. I went in hopeful, if cautious – I know better than most how many false dawns Silent Hill has had – but by the time I came out the other side just a couple of hours later, I was surprised at not only how complete The Short Message feels, but how much it affected me, too.

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If there's a sense of burning injustice at Rocksteady Studios, it's probably understandable. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is filled with little moments of brilliance: humour, style, expression, that signature rhythmic, flow-state approach to combat. There's no question - as there rarely is with any video game - that its team was remarkably dedicated to making it as good as it could be. It's just that for each upshot there's a matching, crashing downturn, and in looking for a cause it's difficult to see beyond the ambitions that this game has been asked to juggle.

All at once, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League must be a live service game that pays for its extraordinary, almost nine-year run-up time after 2015's Batman: Arkham Knight, plus the support of those live services beyond launch. It must feature multiple main characters that not one, but two distinct Hollywood films - plus Birds of Prey - have failed to generate any kind of public good will towards (or even mild interest in). And it must deliver, or at least seem to deliver, on its promise of making antagonists out of and subsequently killing the Justice League - a group of beloved, decades-old icons that have in part earned their iconic status from not dying. (And which come with a subsection of fans - emphasis on the subsection - known to be as toxic as they are dedicated). All together, it means the question that arose for most onlookers the moment Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was revealed in 2020 remains the same now, and even well into its perpetual grind of an endgame: why?

So, the sense of injustice: with all that to try and pull off, Rocksteady has done a remarkably good job. The problem is a remarkable job in this case equates to a game that wildly oscillates between brilliant and poor, and ultimately lands perfectly square on average. Average, by Rocksteady's standards, is a disaster. And setting up a studio of that pedigree, that wonderful ability to capture every angle of a character, and that genuine dedication to its craft, to fail in this way is about as close as video games can get to an act of cultural vandalism.

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After reviewing direct drive wheels and pedals from some of the biggest established players in sim racing - Fanatec, Thrustmaster and Logitech - I wanted to try something from a newer player in the space, Moza.

This Chinese firm is best known for its entry-level R5 Bundle, which brings a powerful 5.5nm direct drive wheelbase with a matching wheel and pedals to a quite affordable £459. For context, that's only £100 to £200 more than popular gear-driven and belt-driven racing wheels, like Logitech's G923 and Thrustmaster's T300, yet superior DD tech should translate into significantly faster and more detailed force feedback and a better driving experience overall.

Moza were happy to send out this PC-only bundle - with a couple of extra upgrades - and when Logitech got in touch to offer a £259 PlaySeat Challenge X folding racing cockpit, I had a complete racing setup for ~£700 with the potential to punch well above its weight.

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At a glance, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Cygames' action-RPG follow-up to the 2014 original, has all the key ingredients of something easily-dismissible, including all the typical genre stereotypes like impractical fashion sense and annoying voices. But what's underneath is very much worth your time. This is a deep tale of parental abuse, and the struggles of the child to claw their way out from under the shadow of their parent and re-establish their own life - and, naturally, it has a cracking combat system to go alongside it.

That story's really the driving force in Granblue Fantasy: Relink, especially towards the end of the game. The overarching antagonist Lilith is trying to bring about the end of the world, manipulating her adopted child, Id, into putting down anyone who stands in her path. Id's struggles to break free often take precedence over the main plot of saving the world, and that's no bad thing - trying to help Id is a really compelling storyline.

Equally hidden beneath the surface of Granblue Fantasy: Relink is that fact it's quietly a sequel to the 2014 RPG from Final Fantasy veteran composer Nobuo Uematsu, and artist Hideo Minaba - one later spun off into a 2017 anime and the 2020 fighting game that some might know a little better. This time, all the original heroes are back for another bout, including the protagonist Captain, wisecracker Rackam, stoic Katalina, and gruff Eugen, all forming the Skyfarers that sail among the clouds atop a big flying boat.

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We have reached the end of Nvidia's phased roll-out of new RTX 40-series cards, released under the 'Super' moniker - and what have we learned? Essentially, it's a value play at the top and bottom of the new stack, with the RTX 4070 Ti Super landing a touch awkwardly in the middle. The RTX 4070 Super offered the biggest proportionate increase in compute power, delivering a nice performance bump over the vanilla 4070 for the same money, while 4070 Ti Super bumped up VRAM nicely, but delivered less of a frame-rate upgrade. RTX 4080 Super? There are some minor spec bumps, but the reality is that for the most part, you're looking at nigh-on identical performance to the outgoing RTX 4080. You do, however, get a significant price drop - but once again, the feeling is that this is the maximum price the RTX 4080 should have had at launch and we've finally got it, 14 months on from the Ada launch.

The spec table below gives you some idea of how Nvidia has rebalanced the mid and upper range of the RTX 40-series line - but it illustrates the problem in beefing up the existing 4080. There's little scope to increase the specs without moving onto the RTX 4090's AD102 silicon. The firm has pushed as hard as it can with AD103 instead, meaning there's the full complement of 10240 CUDA cores - but it's a mere five percent increase in compute power over the standard RTX 4080. Augmenting this is the fastest GDDR6X modules Nvidia could find, but we're still looking at just a 2.6 percent increase to memory bandwidth over the vanilla 4080.

What we're left is reminds me very much of the days where Nvidia would launch a Titan product - say, the Titan X Pascal, and then months later release a GTX 1080 Ti - strategically shaved in some areas but fundamentally delivering nigh-on identical performance. We've done the benchmarks then, but as you'll see, in most cases the RTX 4080 Super is one or two percentage points to the better (three to four if we're really lucky!), but it's basically the same, really. Some of the gains are so slight that singular benchmark runs could actually come in below RTX 4080 equivalents - perhaps down to minor variations in boost clock on a run-to-run basis. The bottom line? The specs are improved but this is fundamentally an RTX 4080 with a price cut and a paint job.

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Persona 3 has always been somewhat of an outlier in the high-schooling, monster-bashing series. Going back to 2006, Persona 3 was the first in the series to layer visual novel social elements on top of the turn-based combat and party-centric stat fiddling. Now, it's perhaps the only modern Persona game that doesn't enjoy a 'definitive' edition for first-timers, and with the release of the high-definitioned remake Persona 3 Reload, I can't say the situation's changed.

Of course, Persona 3 Reload does tweak and turn knobs in almost every corner of the original, providing a streamlined and easygoing take on the classic, but some aesthetic adjustments in particular don't exactly gel with the teens-dealing-with-death tale that pulls everything together. And as much as Reload reaches into the future to borrow from Personas 4 and 5, the best things about it are still from 2006. Still great, then.

Persona 3 Reload follows the original game's story very closely, focusing on an orphaned transfer student who begins life anew at Gekkoukan High School and Tatsumi Port Island, which receives a blindingly bright glow-up compared to its relative murkiness on the PS2/PSP. He soon discovers the powers of the titular Persona - magical alter-ego warriors - and joins a group of fellow students (plus a very, very good dog) on their journey to end the Dark Hour, the time between days when mysterious creatures come a-running to feast and all the regular humans remain oblivious, trapped in sinister coffins.

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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora first clicked for me when things got grim. Away from the cascading ferns and artfully twisted tree trunks, far from fronds and petals and whole plants that briskly pulled themselves underground as I approached, I found an RDA camp that seemed to be mining something from the earth. The RDA are the villains in this world, and they're us: they're the humans. Here, they had sunk a bunch of tall metal towers into the ground and turned the surrounding area to sludge. The grass was gone. The rocks were black with oil and smoke. Steam belched unpleasantly from many boxy, ugly pieces of technology that all seemed to come with grates and vents and nasty little legs to keep them from toppling on the seismic terrain. It was grim and abhorrent and I loved it.

These RDA camps crop up quite a lot throughout the course of the game, growing massively in complexity and challenge, sprouting indoor sections, underground sections, aerial sections, moving from minor set-piece to major dungeon. But they're all variations on a theme, the theme being the trashing of paradise. You're meant to feel angry, I think: how could you take the blue sky and green forests, the bounding creatures and the bioluminescent fungi and do this with it? Space nature's laid on a disco for you here, and you want to just churn it all up, drill into it, crack it open? In truth, though, these camps always made me delighted. They meant that I was in for a bit of stealthing and a bit of sabotage and a bit of panic, working my way around huge mechs, picking off lone sentries, pulling this leaver, winding that wheel, shooting these glowing weak spots when they appeared to gout smoke into the air. And then...?

In Frontiers of Pandora, you play one of the Na'vi, the tall blue indigenous population of Pandora who are trying to push back against a human invasion. This means quests and rushing across an open world and leveling up and skill trees and loot that boosts your stats, all of that classic Ubisoft stuff. But in these RDA territory sequences, I truly felt the fiction of it all. Inside the RDA's installations there would be heavily armed soldiers and patrol routes and big stompy mechs. All that and a handful of targets I needed to reach to deactivate machines or blow them up, or download something, or free something. You get the gist.

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AMD's first Ryzen 8000 desktop processors are here: the $329/£309 8700G, $229/£219 8600G, $176/£169 8500G and OEM-only 8300G. These 4nm APUs look to be adaptations of the Ryzen 7040 laptop processors we tested late last year, with current-gen Zen 4 CPU cores and powerful RDNA 3 graphics capabilities. AMD sent us the top two chips, the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G, which come with dedicated Ryzen AI hardware not afforded to the rest of the stack.

To get the measure of these new models, we've tested their performance both standalone (page two) and when paired with a discrete graphics card (pages three to five). On both counts, we've uncovered some impressive capabilities - which could make a Ryzen 8700G or 8600G a canny pick for straight-up entry-level gaming, media PCs or as a stop-gap solution while waiting for a next-generation graphics card.

Looking at the specs makes for fascinating reading. While the eight-core Ryzen 8700G and six-core 8600G are separated by a sizeable $100 MSRP gap, the two chips are surprisingly similar in most respects, with the 8700G boasting only 2MB of extra L2 cache (8MB vs 6MB), 100MHz higher rated boost speed (5.1GHz vs 5.0GHz) and a beefier Wraith Spire cooler versus the smaller Wraith Stealth provided with the 8600G. TDP, L3 cache size and AI performance are all the same. However, greater differences are evident in GPU performance, with the 8700G getting a more capable 12CU Radeon 780M graphics solution versus the 8600G's 8CU 760M.

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Nvidia's Super refresh line of updated RTX 40-series graphics cards continues with the launch of the RTX 4070 Ti Super - an ungainly-named arrival that seeks to replace the non-Super counterpart, offering a range of upgrades: more memory bandwidth, more CUDA cores and 16GB of framebuffer memory - for the same money. On paper, the specs look good, but in reality, Nvidia needs to strike a balance here: we can't expect the card to be within striking distance of the existing RTX 4080, because the specs suggest that 4080 Super won't be much better. Push too hard on 4070 Ti Super and there'll be no market for the next Super.

The specs do look good, however. The RTX 4070 Ti Super is based on the same AD103 silicon as the RTX 4080, automatically giving it an advantage over the RTX 4070 Ti non-Super, which used the lower-performing AD104. The Ti Super has 8488 CUDA cores - 10 percent more than its predecessor and 87 percent of the 4080's complement. Meanwhile, the new card has a 100MHz boost clock advantage over the RTX 4080.

AD103 silicon also means that the 70-series class gets a 256-bit memory bus, up from the 192-bit interface in the non-Super predecessor and an impressive 33 percent increase to bandwidth. And there's more - not only does AD103's 256-bit interface enable 16GB of memory, it means users get the improved media block with dual video encoders. AD104 on the non-Super just got a single encoder. I actually use an RTX 4080 in my workstation for Adobe Premiere work and just a little gaming: the RTX 4070 Ti Super works just as well.

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Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth in name alone implies certain themes. Greed. Exploitation. Instability. Appropriate topics for a series (once known as Yakuza, RIP) that so often has our heroes struggle to protect innocence in Japan's criminal underbelly. But Infinite Wealth isn't just a story about excess, it embodies that overabundance with an almost untrackable number of things to see, do, and level up - easily making for the series' grandest entry yet while still (somehow!) tightening up its predecessor's sloppy first attempt at an RPG.

This latest entry takes our loveable goofball Ichiban Kasuga overseas to the shores of Hawaii in search of his long-lost mother, where he also runs into the series' often-resurrected main man Kazuma Kiryu, who happens to be there on a similar mission.

Playing the introductory three hours gives you the basic gist of what to expect for the next 50: violent stakes juxtaposed with some of gaming's most zany side activities; considered cinematography and occasionally overindulgent cutscenes; and protagonists that are impossible to hate, all messily thrown together like loopy soba noodles spilled onto the floor. And, really, where else could you punch up two literal excavators while dressed as a dominatrix?

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I suck at Tekken. Even as someone who considers themselves to be well versed in the fighting game community's language and terminology, I've always found Tekken to be uniquely impenetrable when compared to its contemporaries.

Whether it was due to the wealth of poorly explained legacy mechanics brought over from previous entries, the unnecessarily abstruse instructions in a character's already dauntingly large movelists, or the franchise's weird disdain for tutorials in general, improving in each new Tekken title has felt like an insurmountable task. I have reached a point in every new iteration where I had to turn to YouTube guides - more often than not recorded by some poor nervous guy heavily breathing into his microphone as he umm'd and ahh'd his way through explaining what a just frame move is - because the knowledge required to actually play the game wasn't readily available within the game itself.

Tekken 7 was the epitome of these frustrations for me, a game that only taught you a sliver of what you could actually do during the main story mode, didn't feature a tutorial outside of this, and then had the gall to try to sell players frame data for its practice mode as DLC after the fact. When compared to Tekken 8, the two games could not feel more distinct, and it's all the better for it. For the first time in the series history, I can confidently say that I finally feel like I know what I'm doing.

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I've always been fascinated by 3D printers but I've never known what I would do with one. When Shenzhen-based firm Elegoo offered to send their $350/£300/€350 Neptune 4 Plus for review, I figured I'd better take them up on their offer and find out just what's possible with a modern 3D printer - and what challenges awaited me as a complete beginner. Here's what I've discovered - from the gauntlet of the initial setup process to the successes and failures that have defined the first few weeks of 3D printing.

First, the setup process. The Neptune 4 Plus comes in pieces, so you need to follow an IKEA-style assembly process to join the major components, mount the included control pod and connect a bunch of wires. There's a printed manual provided, but there's also a digital version on a USB stick. That stick also contains a video tutorial for the setup process, which I followed carefully. The build itself is quite straightforward and ought to take around an hour, with no real challenges - each step's smaller components like screws are neatly labelled in separate bags and all of the tools are provided which is nice.

The real challenge comes when you've screwed everything together, plugged everything in and turned the machine on for the first time - as now it's time for levelling. This process requires you to raise or lower the nozzle, hundredths of a millimetre at a time, until a piece of paper between the nozzle and the print bed can be pulled out but not pushed back in. This process is repeated on six points around the bed, with the adjustment coming this time from springs below that you can tighten or loosen by rotating a dial. Again, you're looking for a decent amount of friction between nozzle, paper and bed; judging how much friction takes some patience.

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History has a way of repeating itself. Back in 2018, Nvidia released its first wave of RTX graphics cards, boasting RT and machine learning features - but also arriving with some eye-watering price rises. £530 for the RTX 2070, anyone? However, balance was restored to the Force with the 2019 'Super' refresh, where 60, 70 and 80 class GPUs were beefed up in terms of specs with a price-cut to boot. So it is with the controversial RTX 40-series cards based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. Saddled with unflattering price vs performance comparisons up against the RTX 3080 10GB, this time it's the RTX 4070, 4070 Ti and 4080 that get the Super treatment.

It looks like Nvidia is going to release one new GPU per week and that kicks off with the RTX 4070 Super. It's priced at $599 US/£579 UK - the same price as the RTX 4070 - and is essentially the same card as its predecessor, with two notable improvements. Firstly, the CUDA core count is significantly increased: 7168 cores vs 5888, meaning a nigh-on 22 percent improvement. And to push performance on still further, there's a 10 percent increase in TGP - more juice to get more from the more fully enabled rendition of the AD104 processor. And as it is AD104 in place, there's no chance of a wider memory interface, meaning we're still on a 192-bit bus with 504GB/s of bandwidth - that bus also limiting the 4070 Super to the same 12GB of GDDR6X memory.

What we should be hoping for a good-sized performance lift to the standard RTX 4070, perhaps knocking on the door of RTX 4070 Ti performance without an increase in price. The vanilla 4070 gets a $50 price cut, meanwhile, with Nvidia heavily hinting that third party partners can reduce that still further to more meaningfully compete with AMD's impressive RX 7800 XT. We'll talk about the other Super cards in due course, but the specs don't lie: RTX 4080 Super is all about the price cut down to $999/£959 with only a minimal spec boost. RTX 4070 Ti Super is interesting though: users are bumped up to AD103 silicon with the wider memory bus opening the door to 16GB of memory - sorely needed at its $799/£769 price level.

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It absolutely feels that M2's ShotTriggers series has been building up to this moment.

The Japanese developer and publishing house has, over its long history, established an enviable reputation for the quality of its numerous ports. But all of that, perhaps, was a prelude to the release of DoDonPachi Blissful Death Re:Incarnation.

That's quite a statement, so before getting ahead of ourselves, let's step back and get some perspective.

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There's something about a magic door. Who could resist them? I can't. I don't know anyone who can.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a lot of things. It's the latest game in a beloved series whose lineage stretches all the way back to the glory days of home computing. It's a metroidvania so beautifully put together it almost feels like a Plantonic example of the form. It's a promising sign that Ubisoft is starting to let a series' soul dictate the ultimate structure of a game, rather than pouring its molten life into the same open-world mould. And it's a game that really knows the value and impact of a magic door.

To wit: I'm in a kind of hub area, done up like a breezy Persian marketplace. There are people nearby I can talk to for various kinds of upgrades and trinkets, for a bit of training on the nuances of combat, and even for a bit of story background. But there's also this wall, and when I walk past the wall, a shape emerges, warmly picked out in gold. It looks like a door, but it's a door that would take me deeper into the world, into its third dimension, and this game is largely a 2D side-scrolling affair. Is it a door? Is it just a quirk of the lighting? What's going on here?

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Dough's excellent yet controversial* Spectrum 4K 144Hz monitor is now available with a glossy Gorilla Glass coating, making for a third option in addition to the default matte option that the monitor launched with in 2021 and the glossy version introduced last year.

The only trouble? The Gorilla Glass model costs a weighty $799 at BH Photo Video, significantly more than the $599 matte and $699 glossy versions. At this price, it's actually more expensive than discounted 42-inch OLED TVs and in the same stratosphere as upcoming QD-OLED monitors that surpass it in refresh rate and features. Is that premium worth it for the unparalleled visual experience promised by glossy Gorilla Glass, or is it too much to ask in a crowded and competitive HDMI 2.1 monitor market?

To find out, I've been testing the Gorilla Glass version of the Spectrum, putting it in direct comparison and side-by-side with the standard matte version that I've been using for months as my primary monitor and have recommended as one of the best HDMI 2.1 gaming monitors at Eurogamer in the past. Use the quick links below or scroll on for the full review.

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Come, take a flick through World of Horror's rolodex of nightmares; see faces flayed by vengeful wives, wild-eyed teachers with rictus grins, soul-bartering telemarketers, trypophobia-inducing latticework rendered across human skin, and other lurid things.

It is 198X and the world is on the cusp of a technological revolution (and Eldritch annihilation, but we'll get to that), caught between the superstitions of the old world and the suspicions of the new; a place where diabolical rituals are still performed by the light of the moon, while Bulletin Board Systems send murderous dial-up messages from beyond the veil. It's also a world immediately indebted, both visually and tonally, to manga horror master Junji Ito, whose stories of everyday mundanity succumbing to the grotesque here shape countless original horrors drawing upon influences as wide as Lovecraft, Japanese folklore, urban legends, and creepy pasta. Yet for all its reverential pilfering, World of Horror - which technically falls under the banner of rogue-like RPG, even if its text-heavy, point-and-click design feels like something else entirely - still manages to conjure a wonderfully idiosyncratic mood of its own.

A lot of that is down to its grungy, lo-fi presentation, of course, with World of Horror's retro aesthetic evoking the feeling of a cursed computer game running on an ancient desktop machine spat up from the very depths of hell; it's minimalism and maximalism slammed together in uneasy ways, a jostling interface paired with sparsely evocative text married to an engulfing chiptune drone underscoring a stark 1-bit art style that's all the more sinister in the horrifying details its two-tone colour palette can't quite adequately convey. It's utterly cohesive in its unsettling chaos and entirely appropriate to the game's inherently fragmentary form.

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