Resident Evil 8: The Village

As the first and second hour of gameplay relentlessly rockets the player forward through onslaughts of impossible monster encounters, many players like me will be tempted to give this eighth Resident Evil game away - too stressful, too punishing, and "Just let me play!" I wanted to yell at the next and next cutscene - but stick with it and it proves to be the sequel that, of all those released so far, most closely resembles the original in a number of ways - wait for the house! - and a game that elicits terror and smiles in equal measure. 

★★★★★

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Dark Souls

I'd like to thank under-employment during the Covid crisis for affording me the time to dig out my PS3 and revisit Dark Souls, possibly the best game ever made (after Demon's Souls) and the first of a trilogy of outstanding Dark Souls games from From Software, all of them but especially this one hugely entertaining dungeon-crawl grinds with heavily-armoured foes and magic-wielding baddies making travel even just around the next corner incredibly hard! 

★★★★★

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Elden Ring

A lot is said about the extreme difficulty of this "2022 Game of the Year" from From Software, but in fact it is a lot more of a borng grind than its predecessors from the Demon's/Dark Souls series with the most difficult thing not the mega bosses who can wipe out your character with a single hit, and not the fact boss fights string out one after the other in exhausting fashion (especially towards the end), and it isn't the item management which involves a dizzying array of items hard to know how best to use (and I still ended up using the same sword all the way through) - the hardest thing is the game's sheer and utter inanity with NPCs banging on about an inexplicable mythology from which it is impossible to discern a logical plot, and plot developments frequently hinge on impossible-to-predict NPC responses, as in one case when a conversation with an unresponsive NPC was required but the NPC would only respond after the player tried unsuccessfully to talk with the NPC four times.

★★☆☆☆

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Demon's Souls

You'll soon forget that troubling apostrophe, a singular possessive that is either a mistake or the missing article is, given how hard this From Software roleplaying game is, asking you to trudge heavily around the expansive accursed kingdom of Boletaria dying at every turn, and dying again and again - on knights' swords or in the firebreath of a dragon or having fallen accidentally from a dizzying height - with routine tasks like simply rounding a corner or getting through a doorway or trying to retrieve the demons' souls you dropped upon your last death, all such punishing tasks, it is hard to tell you how I felt when I finally, finally finished the game in covid isolation last year, twelve years and 270+ gameplaying hours after I started it.

★★★★★

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Prey

Nearing the end of my 81 hour-long playthrough, a few minor glitches started to appear in this Bethesda Softworks first-person shooter and sci-fi adventure, including unresponsive areas on the Talos space station map (getting in and out of that elevator with a Nightmare in tow was, well, a nightmare!) and no longer possible side missions that remain in the objectives list to irritate 100% completionists like me, but after 81 hours, I was glitching too and yet this enthralling space opera, one centred on protagonist Morgan Yu, a lab experiment guinea pig and neurologically-enhanced Typhon killer, is impossible to put down, a classic I look forward to returning to for another 81 hour ride.

★★★★★

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Spider-man

There are two or three drone and bomb challenges that feature such bad game mechanics only a masochist would sit and try ad nauseum to ace them but otherwise I completed everything in this fun open-world, essentially Arkham Asylum in a red and blue lycra skin, a game easy to pick up and put down, with a stunningly recreated Manhattan Island to web-swing across, bad guys to battle, and an extensive Spidey entourage to engage with, including MJ, the Osbornes (Senior and Junior), Otto Octavius, Aunt May, and many others.

★★★★☆

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INSIDE | Limbo

INSIDE, a 2016 game, and Limbo, a 2010 release, are both side-scrolling 2.5D platformers developed by Danish developer Playdead and while both are very similar (you can jump, move left and right, and interact with switches, and both are darkly, morbidly funny involving unspeakable Warner Bros violence against a cute protagonist) it is INSIDE's spectacular is-this-really-happening end sequence involving 'The Huddle' that seals it as a masterpiece of scifi platform gaming.

★★★★★

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The Evil Within 2

The sequel to Shinji Mikami's third-person survival horror game, The Evil Within, is a surprisingly clunky game - enemy monsters ascend ladders through you while you descend and they gnash impotently at the bottom of stairs unable to reach you and even when they can reach you, they all stagger around all the time across all sixteen or seventeen chapters all doing the same Thriller dance steps all with the same timing, making for very repetitive combat - and all this disappointing clunkiness is compounded by an overwrought 'plot' about parental guilt that makes the nonsensical Silent Hill seem like Shakespeare.

★★☆☆☆

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Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

As if this treasure hunting and shoot'em up adventure game with stunning graphics, engaging storyline and likeable characters were not wonderful enough, the team that made it (the team behind the Crash Bandicoot games) have embedded in it a mini version of their Crash Bandicoot game - just another satisfying detail in a completely immersive experience involving touching family drama, a sprawling lifelong story, stunning settings from around the world, exciting gunfights and of course hugely satisfying Indiana Jones-style treasure hunting.

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★★★★★

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Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Never has a game felt so much like playing a Hollywood action adventure blockbuster as this Uncharted release, all the better for its spectacular India setting, its perfect blend of shooting action, treasure hunting and puzzle solving, and its seamless cinematic sequences - plus, it has strong, engaging lead characters - female - is not too long, and is immensely replayable.

★★★★★

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Lumo

My favourite game as a kid, no, in my entire life** is Head Over Heels, a monochrome 8-bit isometric puzzle game I played as a teenager on my Commodore 64 and replayed as an adult when I one day discovered, like it was all my birthdays at once, a faithfully updated PC shareware version, and so mad Head Over Heels fan that I am, the idea of Lumo, which adopts the style and contains nostalgic references to Head Over Heels, excited me and even though I'd read it was a short game I enthusiastically sat down to play it, only to realise fairly quickly that nothing is ever going to rival the joy I experienced waddling as Head the dog or as Heels the cat, backwards and forwards, from room to room marvelling at the stylings of five or six distinct and expansive worlds, wanting to end the game not a mere Novice, wondering how many rooms there were in total and whether I'd visited them all, and breathlessly anticipating what else the punishing game was going to throw at me, and so of course, thirty years later, Lumo underwhelmed me with its less engaging, not as cute hero, less precise 3D gameplay, less imaginative puzzles, and uninspired coin- and secret-object collecting side missions which did not encourage me to play the game over again.

**Disclaimer: I reserve the right to also claim that Detective, Wizball, Resident Evil, the original Prince of Persia, and many other games of my childhood are also my all-time favourite games in my life, in subsequent game reviews.

★★★☆☆

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Song of the Deep

This game, an underwater treasure-collecting adventure like Ecco the Dolphin, has a girl in a homemade submarine searching for her missing father and is surprisingly fun and not, as it first appears with its fairytale narration and picture book graphics, a simple time-waster for very young gamers - the map is extensive and learning how to access areas, reach sunken treasure items, and overcome waves of sea creature enemies gets more and more challenging, but never frustrating.

★★★★☆

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Resident Evil: Biohazard

There's a spooky house and puzzles involving clocks and dummy shotguns - nostalgia for fans of the old Resident Evil games - but this is let down by a revolting Texas Chainsaw Massacre storyline full of grotesque characters, seriously bad-taste violence, bad language, side quests better suited  to the Batman series than the Resident Evil series, and boss encounters tailored to optional VR functionality that see the bosses holding back and moving lethargically, aimlessly, presumably to prevent things from getting too dizzying for the VR goggle wearers but meaning an underwhelming player experience for others.

★★☆☆☆

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Gameloading: Rise of the Indies (2015)

This documents the rise of the independent game development scene and demonstrates that quite apart from the stereotype of gamers being pasty loner couch potatoes with a worrying love of violence, they are more often connected and savvy, entrepreneurial, doing what they love, producing experimental games, even art, and driving change in a mainstream gaming market obsessed with shootemups.

★★★☆☆

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Dark Souls III

From Software's Dark Souls games are the only modern computer games which inspire in me the same feelings of awe that I used to experience as a kid playing games like Zork and Myst and Castlevania, and it doesn't matter that this third game of the series has no clear objective or sensible story - it is the exploration and the game's perfect balance of fun and frustration that keeps me playing and playing like an 80s kid on his Commodore 64!

★★★★★

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Alien: Isolation

For anyone like me who loves the Alien movies, this sci-fi action adventure game is a must because it has you playing Amanda Ripley creeping around the Sevastopol space station searching for clues regarding the fate of her mother and is just like 'playing the movies', but beware: the experience of being stalked by an unpredictable AI alien is terrifying!

★★★★★

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Knack

There's perhaps twelve hours of dreadfully boring game here during which you guide a katamari golem through levels to collect powers, unlock abilities, change form from wood to metal to ice, and become large and then small and then large again, none of which makes any difference whatsoever to the mindless repetition of the game's jump-bash-bash, jump-bash-bash gameplay.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Evil Within

Shinji Mikami, the man behind survival horror series Resident Evil brings us "The Evil Within" which initially gives the impression it will return gamers to Resident Evil's roots - there's a creepy mansion populated with monsters to shoot - but too quickly, nostalgic elements give way to a bloody horror story that doesn't really make sense and while the third-person shooting gameplay a la Resident Evil 4 and 5 is satisfying, it is only enjoyable in fits and starts with the choppy-changey horror story chapters too frequently interrupting the fun.

★★★☆☆

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Wolfenstein: The New Order

Wolfenstein, the old first-person shooter set in Wolfenstein Castle, is updated and transported to a futuristic alternate reality and is now the same fun first-person shooter marred by too many interruptions from a story that a computer programming team somewhere thinks is Tarantino-esque.

★★★☆☆

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Resident Evil: Revelations 2

This Resident Evil game strikes a nice balance between the game style of old (third-person gem, key and medicinal herb collection in spooky surroundings) with the close-up, second-person shooter style of more recent outings (where the camera sticks close, looking over your shoulder) and it is fun without being overly difficult nor does it overstay its welcome - the game finishes in no time but has unlockable minigames and hidden objects tempting you to spend more time in its horror world.

★★★★☆

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