After an absolute age, EA's wheelie classic is back with great handling and a whole world of slightly jarring niceness.

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Metroidvanias are the games where I'm allowed to get stuck in several places at once. Head upwards and there's a boss that I can't beat. Try going down the stairs instead and there's an environment that kills me just for stepping into it. Left and right are dead ends that I don't have the tools to navigate yet. Stuck on all four points of the compass! That's a Metroidvania.

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Look down. That's my early tip for Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I've been playing for an evening and a morning by this point. On a high ledge? Above a promising gap? Look down. Chances are the developers have put something just within visible range to guide you a little.

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The hallmark of the Metal Gear Solid games isn't the presence of one of the Snakes. It isn't nuclear dread or even hide-and-seek, often involving a cardboard box. And it's not tactical espionage action. I think it's a tone, or rather a carefully un-careful blend of conflicting tones. On one side there's a movement towards steely realism. On the other, there are these bright lunges at absolute fantasy. It's realism and its opposite. I just tried to google what realism's opposite actually is, by the way. There is no one standard answer as far as I can see. How very Metal Gear.

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The new Skate game is free-to-play and pretty much massively multiplayer. It's a cross-platform live service game to its core, and it drops you into a shared open-world map with up to 150 other skaters. And, as you might expect from all these things being name-checked, my first half hour with the game involved trying to understand a muddle of regular unlocks, an in-game currency, a levelling system, a fast travel system and various other bits of UI shenanigans.

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All of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s have had a decent amount of time to ponder what it is that really makes the video game ninja such a special thing. It's the hard strikes and the proximity to magic, sure, but it's also something else. A ninja moves with a particular lightness. No need for a foley artist to mix in footsteps, because when these characters move it's as is icing sugar is being dusted over the soft earth. So there's a lovely contradiction at the heart of it. Cor, it hurts when one of these people kicks you through a wall, but cor, they're so nimble and and deft and precise - so gentle - you kind of have to forgive them for everything.

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In our house, the first level of the new Lumines Arise demo already has a name. The demo hasn't been with us long - and it's available for PS5 and Steam until 11.59pm local time on the 3rd of September, so get on it - but it's made an impact. That first level has made an impact. I call it Cadbury Physics.

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There's a moment with Drag x Drive that I'm just getting to grips with. I think there's potentially a lot of strategy in this moment, a lot of gamesmanship. But Nintendo's latest multiplayer confection is new and quite nuanced and so the entire playerbase is currently getting to grips with it too. I am genuinely fascinated to see, in a week or so, how it's all playing out.

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Amongst its many riches, Wheel World is a reminder that a game can appear to be constructed from familiar pieces while still feeling entirely unfamiliar to play.

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As with the original Switch, my favourite button on the Switch 2 is the screenshot button. And if you were to look at my screenshot library after this weekend you'd see a trend emerging. One image after the next, all focused on the weird, perversely beautiful world of Donkey Kong Bananza. Radioactive grasslands. Teetering bosses. Bizarre colour-clash combinations. But more than that - clipping! Oh the clipping. You never saw so much clipping.

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A few years before I started writing about video games - I just googled it, and it would have been 2002 - I went to an exhibition at the Barbican called Game On, and something I saw there made me realise just how much video games were a thing worth writing about.

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Peggle is not particularly old. Intellectually, at least, I know that. But it comes from an era that, despite being relatively recent, still feels extremely distant. I could tell you that Peggle was released in 2007 - I just checked - but that's not the best way of explaining how much time has passed in this peculiar gap of 18 years.

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Primal Planet's already a beautiful thing. It's a Metroidvania and crafting game involving dinosaurs and cave dwellers, it's absolutely filled with lovely ideas, and there's a demo you can currently check out on Steam.

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There's a moment in Alcatraz that I think is pretty much perfect. Here is the deal. I have two goals I'm aiming for. There's the secret tape, which I can see, high up, but cannot reach, and there's a mini mission where I must free a prisoner from the main prison block. To do that, I need to knock over a bunch of wheelie bins to find a set of hidden keys, and then beat it back to the central block to unlock the doors.

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Islanders is one of those games I think I will never tire of. It's beautiful, as players hover above a sequence of wonderfully breezy island chains placing dinky little buildings. And it's tart and tactical, too, since the buildings you place all have specific desires concerning where they want to be and where they absolutely don't want to be. You need to keep the scores from each placement high, because your scores unlock new building packs. Cheery as it all seems, you can fail in Islanders quite easily, and be left with no more buildings to place.

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My time at university is bookended by moments that changed my idea of what games could be. When I started my first year, I saw Tomb Raider running on an upside-down PS1 in someone's dorm and I was stunned and sort of disconcerted. My 2D gaming mind had no idea how to understand a game that seemed so comfortable in three dimensions, but which also - after years of seeing increasingly refined pixel art - seemed so comfortable with being so ragged. The gaps in Lara's polygonal joints. The clipping of 3D surfaces. The way the polygons around the sides of the screen sometimes disappeared giving the image the perforated edge of a postage stamp. Was this a step forward or a step back?

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To quote Hawkeye: Okay... This looks bad.

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Not to brag but I have a pear tree at the moment that is really something. It must be twenty feet tall, for one thing, and the pears are these fat golden gems that hang from its spongy boughs. The pear, I remember reading in The Observer about fifteen years ago, is a fruit whose time has come. Fifteen years means it's probably come and gone by now, but still: that pear tree of mine. Sometimes it's nice to get off the motorbike I use when gardening, put down my magic trowel and just take it in. I grew that!

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I love climbing things in games. But I don't always love games that are firmly about climbing. Games that are firmly about climbing are often too technical for me - they tangle me up with ropes and pitons and tricky physics systems. Too many systems. Too many meters to manage. When climbing games are at their most arcadey - say something like Jusant, or Grow Home - I'm in, thoroughly in. But the best climbing I've ever had in a game was probably in Crackdown, and that's an action game that just happens to let you stick to walls and ledges. The best climbing until now, anyway.

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On my best runs, with the best accidental match-ups, I've been the watering can guy. I'll deploy alongside two far more talented players, and they'll fix machinery and fight the hordes while I handle the watering. I'll put out ground-based fires to allow for freedom of movement and to stop enemies being enraged by flames. I'll put out any fires on my allies when they accidentally set light to themselves, so they don't have to race back to the nearest shower block.

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One of my favourite elements in big-budget video games is something you might choose to term Johnny on the Spot Syndrome. This syndrome, which I have just invented, takes its name from a minor character in GTA Online.

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Considering it’s a console that didn’t launch with a brand new Zelda game, it’s fascinating that the Switch 2 is somehow still the Zelda-est console Nintendo has ever made. That’s what it feels like anyway. Just look at the Nintendo Switch Online offering, which covers everything from the original Zelda on the NES to absolute classics like Link to the Past and Ocarina as well as weirdo off-shoots like the Oracle games, Four Swords and the Minish Cap.

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For years, the rule in Hollywood was pretty simple: familiarity but with a twist. Cheers, but it's in a coffee shop, and everyone's in their twenties. Lost, but it's in LA with Joseph Fiennes. Sure, this didn't always work - I still think fondly of you, FlashForward - but it worked a lot of the time. Crucially, it was easy to grasp why it should work. We love formulas, and we love gentle variations on the formula to keep us guessing, to keep us nimble. But at the heart of it there's familiarity, and familiarity is a very, very lovely thing in the right circumstances.

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A caveat here first, explaining why my thoughts on this are probably irrelevant, and then some thoughts on this. Caveat: I don't think I've ever truly loved Mario Kart since one magical evening at university in which a bunch of us played Mario Kart 64, then newly released, on split-screen all night long and into the morning. I loved that game so much - each moment was such a hectic joy. And it used me up a bit. I haven't really been able to engage with the series with quite the same thrill since.

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Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour costs £7.99, and for a while it does feel a bit like you've paid someone to show you their carefully alphabetised 5K completion medals. A big part of the tour is a stamp rally. You are a tiny little person moving through dioramas formed by massive versions of the Switch 2 hardware and its accessories, and whenever you reach a new feature - a button, a port - a little stamp station pops up and you collect the stamp.

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There comes a time when all consoles must make that final journey to the Grey Havens. Sometimes the Havens are the loft. Other times they're eBay or the eager clutches of a younger sibling. That's the idea, anyway. There's something new on the way. One in, one out.

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Up until now, Subset Games has made two games, and they're both kind of ideal. Perfection has no place in art, but these things are really special. FTL is a terrifying and hilarious game about steering a ship across the galaxy in short hops, managing various stats, accidentally venting your comrades into space, and dealing with robot invaders who can literally shoot their way into your hull. Into the Breach is a game of tactics and positioning as you take three units into compact turn-based battles that clearer heads than mine have pointed out wouldn't be out of place on the games page of a newspaper.

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Reason not the need, but one of the first things I did when I was properly falling in love with Animal Crossing: New Horizons involved building my own version of the Very Large Array on a far corner of my island. The VLA is a telescope array in New Mexico. I've been fond of it for a long time and for a number of reasons. It's in Contact, and Contact is a good film! And my uncle lives in New Mexico, so I have a sort of familial association. Not that he gives a fig about radio telescopes.

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Over the five or six hours it takes to play To a T, I’ve had a series of revelations that in turn built to one giant revelation: I have had the wrong idea about pretty much everything here. As a result, I’ve never played a game where I spent so much of the time simply trying to work out what it’s doing. What’s the intent, To a T? What do you want to be? It turns out I wouldn’t truly understand any of this until the final credits had rolled. In fact, I’m still thinking about a lot of it. Either way, what follows isn’t a review so much as a journey - and I’m afraid it probably contains things you might not want spoiled. Be warned.

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There's a moment in one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories that I think about quite a lot. Pat Hobby's a character Fitzgerald came up with when he was knocking about Hollywood and trying to make money writing for the movies. As a result, Hobby is a somewhat desiccated scriptwriter himself. Over the course of a handful of lightly sketched narratives, Hobby loses jobs, squanders opportunities and gets in at least one fight with Orson Welles.

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Stop me if you've heard this before. We say "uncanny", but in Germany it's "unheimlich". The unheimlich was a big deal for people like Freud, and it's hard not to love the term, just a little bit. Unheimlich means, well, it means uncanny - weird, eerie, unsettling. But more specifically, it translates as "unhomely." Unhomely. Now that is a word that carries a chill, a creep of the flesh, a word that registers an arachnid skittering in the corner of your vision. When something is familiar and unfamiliar all at once! You should feel like you're at home, but...

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Small Spaces, which has a demo out now on Steam, is such a lovely idea for a game. It's not just the focus - this is a game about creating places you might like to live, and specifically, as the name suggests, rather contained ones. It's also the clear-eyed emphasis on how most people actually live in the modern city. In New York, whose real estate market I am a complete expert on thanks to heavily sculpted reality TV "documentaries", apartments are sold by the square foot and space is at an absolute premium. Even a multi-million dollar pad can look a little pokey.

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The best thing I ever read about Jack Reacher - and I'm sure I've mentioned this before - is that the hero of Lee Child's books doesn't solve crimes or right wrongs. What he does is kill the plot. The plot comes at him in the form of baddies and deadly set-pieces and locked doors, and he just punches and shoots a way through it until there's nothing left.

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In Iceland, when the mists descend, perspective is scrambled. Robbed of context and references, the very small can be mistaken for the very large. A boulder becomes a mountain. A stream becomes a river. With a camera in hand, it's a pleasant task to wander around the pitted black earth and hunt for these instances. Frame things just right, leaving out the tell-tale stakes of a fence or a tentative spreading of moss, and you can create your own Himalayas. The eye is eager to be tricked. The brain is eager to fill in any absences. Click.

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With the cry of gulls, GTA 6 returns to us. We're back in Rockstar's spin on Florida and we're here for, what exactly? A story trailer? Well, it's complicated.

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Heard about the changes to Doom? They've gone medieval with it, sort of. Also, they've added bowling. Sort of.

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Every few weekends, my wife and I go for a drive in Los Santos. Itineraries vary. Sometimes we get a submarine and explore the oceans. Sometimes, inspired by shows like Million Dollar Listing and Selling Sunset, we head up to the Hills and have a pleasant in-game evening racing through rich people's backyards. My wife knows the game much better than me, which makes for an unusual dynamic. I know Los Angeles, which Los Santos is based on, but she is far more familiar with Rockstar's version. In other words, I'm often a backseat passenger in the endless lateral tracking shot that defines the common experience of both of these car-centric cities.

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There's a library in Skin Deep that really isn't screwing around. It's in outer space for one thing, and for another its calm, ordered stacks are protected by fidgety electrical gates that zap you if you're trying to move through them with a book you haven't checked out. Check enough books back in, meanwhile, and you'll be rewarded with a gun. I suspect this place is a librarian's dream.

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One of the loveliest books I've read in the last few years is J. L. Carr's short novel A Month in the Country. The book's about a lot of things - and I may have written about it before on Eurogamer - but, broadly, the novel concerns a veteran of the first world war who turns up in a small village up north to uncover a piece of art that's been concealed in the church. For a month he works in the church, restoring a lost mural element by careful element, having nightmares of the mud and gas at night and making tentative friendships during the day. Nothing happens and everything happens. At the end, he leaves and is - somehow - transformed by the experience.

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One of the things video games do really well is absence - specifically recent absence. Dump me into a game world and give me enough clues that someone else has just left and I'll be happy for hours. A cigar still sending up a ribbon of smoke from an overflowing ashtray, the wind plucking at a curtain where a window has been left just slightly open, a microwave that has some kind of horrible lasagne in it that's still - jeepers - giving off a hint of steam? Games are brilliant at this kind of Marie Celeste set-up. Instant mystery. I don't need actual people around. I just want to know who, what, why?

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If you ever find that you've fallen asleep in a big-shot Hollywood story meeting, and you need something to say that makes it look like you've actually been paying close attention, you could do worse than this. "Whose story is this again?" This question - who is the true focal point of the adventure being pitched? - seems both central to any film and also one of the easiest things to lose track of in the detailing.

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One thing's clear. The Switch 2 is launching into a very complex environment. Just a look at today's Nintendo Direct, or rather the comments scrolling on the side of the IGN feed over on YouTube. Someone wants a proper 3D Donkey Kong game. Someone else wants Waluigi in Smash. Someone wants Jet Set Radio - I promise that one was not me - someone else wants a full-blown sequel to Twilight Princess.

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Harlan Ellison used to say that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was a game that nobody could win. I gather now, having looked at a few wikis, that this is not entirely true. But back in the mid-1990s when I first encountered this weird, horrifying video game, it certainly felt true. I Have No Mouth was... not a hit, exactly, but certainly the subject of a sustained mania in my student house at the tail end of the last century. Adventure games, or point-and-clicks, were our collective favourite genre, outside of endless sessions on Worms 2. Back then we recognised that, even amongst the Monkey Islands and Tentacles, I Have No Mouth was...special?

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I have a wonderfully vague memory of a game my older brothers used to play on the Commodore 64 back in the day. It was a platform game, with pixel heroes and floating gantries and ladders and all that jazz, but there was also a wheelbarrow, and you needed the wheelbarrow to hold all the collectibles you picked up. When you'd all but completed each screen - as my memory had it - you then had to leg it back to the wheelbarrow and take it to the next screen where the whole thing was repeated.

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There are, on balance, a couple of things I am always ready to read about. One of these things is to do with anytime some academic type puts an oil painting in an X-ray machine or something like that and discovers all these mysteries in the underpainting. Paths not taken or half taken. Forgotten faces suddenly looming out of the streaked grey murk, black eyes burning.

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While Waiting is a game that belongs in a gallery. It's installation art, and maybe you know the kind. It's a lark, but a difficult, complex, ponderous lark, if such a thing is possible. It's WarioWare designed by Beckett. It's Super Bartleby Bros. It's a game about waiting, a state of being that so many games are designed to try and minimise or avoid entirely (or sell you ways to jump past, granted). And yet just as waiting pops up in games even when designers are trying to avoid it, waiting can disappear utterly when you try to focus in on it and it alone. While Waiting. So it's about the things you do as waiting is taking place. But does that mean you've ceased to wait, or that you're still waiting and you're doing this other stuff too?

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One of the great magic tricks of the Two Point management games concerns how the series tackles subjects that a lot of people struggle to agree on. You know, like healthcare and education. And yet, with a few chirpy cartoon characters wandering around, a bit of silliness in the detailing, a handful of goofy names in the resume stack and some light satire playing over the tannoy, the whole thing rushes past in a cheery blur. This time out we're looking at museums. Does Two Point have anything to say about this stuff? No and - sort of - yes, actually. It's interesting.

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Egypt, present day. A woman makes her way through the Tomb of Seth accompanied by a silent man holding a burning torch. As the woman collects health packs and shoots scorpions that look a little like lobsters, the man with the torch works methodically, briskly lighting every room they move through. When he moves quickly, something exciting's going to happen - you can feel it. When he stops, you know that you're going to have to do something clever or dangerous to get him moving again. That's just the way it is.

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When I was younger, platformers were the dominant genre, so whenever an idea came along that needed turning into a game, platformers were co-opted to help. Nowadays it's often roguelikes. And sometimes it really fits. Taking a long, wayward journey in a junky car? Turns out that really is a roguelike.

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Real talk: as a deeply lazy human being, there are some games that I kind of secretly hope aren't going to be my bag, because if they are my bag I'm going to have an awful time describing how they work. The problem with this is that the games that are hardest to describe are often the best games. They're the games where you feel like you have a weird kind of duty to find the words for them, so you can tell everyone else how special they are.

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Like any good Star Wars adventure, Jedi Power Battles kicks off with scrolling text. A nice touch, even if it is just the EULA. Beyond that lies a very unusual prospect. This is a remaster of a game that is not really considered a classic. It's remembered, I suspect, with a mixture of fondness and frustration. Both of these emotions survive intact.

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Somewhere in my house there's an excellent book called Difficult Questions About Video Games. It's a collection of testimony from players and designers and it covers all kinds of fascinating things. I remember - I have to remember this; I have no idea where I left the book - that it starts with a bit about Tomb Raider. Someone's playing the first game in the series in front of an audience and mentions that the controls are really "fluid". Someone else in the audience then asks what "fluid" means, and...and nobody can pin it down at all.

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The story Eternal Strands tells is pretty good. A bunch of magic-users known as Weavers are attempting to recover their cultural homeland, which has been sealed behind a mystical barrier for ages. I am always up for any decent pulpy story that involves getting a gang of misfits together and returning to a hallowed place after centuries have passed. You know, and then trying to find out what went wrong.

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I'm not really ready to think about a world without David Lynch yet. But I have at least realised in the days since his passing that Lynch was probably my introduction to genuine art - art which I felt like I was part of the genuine audience for. This came with Twin Peaks, which I first watched, terrified and confused and thrilled and delighted, when I was 12. My mental life was massively expanded by that show. I was that kid at school brushing my hair like Cooper - back when I had hair! - and walking around talking into a TV remote like it was a dictaphone and really trying to like coffee. (I was eventually successful on that front.) What an idiot I was, and yet Cooper, I still feel, is an extremely good role model. Pretty much ideal, really.

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Digseum is a new clicker game - one of those games where you click madly on things while the numbers go up - that Steam recommended to me last week. The timing was perfect. I'd just finished installing the final art work in my Animal Crossing museum, and here was a brand new museum to fill with trinkets and doodads pulled from the earth.

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For a brief period, either in the 1950s or 1960s, Charles Schulz experimented with drawing adults in the backgrounds of Peanuts comic strips. I wish I could track down the one strip I've seen like this to explain it better - if anyone's seen my copy of Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, could they drop me a line? Anyway, Charlie Brown and Linus are on a golf course, I think, and there are these adults, never fully in frame because the kids are so small, and the adults are moving around, standing in the background, forming a sort of human topiary of arms and legs and torsos.

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Hyper Light Breaker is odd. This is probably to be expected - the Hyper Light series up until now has been charmingly strange in a number of ways. But its strangeness tended to fit with the format. Hyper Light Drifter - and Solar Ash, which I always see as being a sequel of sorts? These were single-player games with fixed campaigns and carefully constructed worlds. They made you work for information but they moved at a pace at which working for information could be part of the fun.

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My first thought on seeing Switch 2 was probably a lot like yours. Mumble mumble, continuity, familiarity mumble mumble. You were probably a lot more coherent than me, and my apologies for that.

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Not to brag but I have a beanbag now. I bought it last week. What a treat to sink down into with a mobile game, and what an extra treat when that game is Skate City. Skate City is a lovely, deeply dreamy skating game built for touchscreens. Over on Apple Arcade it's just had a new instalment, Skate City: New York. Reader, I am hooked.

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Bears, a recent TikTok video suggested to me, are friend-coded. Why is that? Honestly, they look so cuddly. We give stuffed fabric versions of them to children and share videos of them waving as we pass by in SUVs. Speaking of SUVs, we know that, like most animals on the planet, bears are having a hard time because of us. There's guilt there, and tenderness. And yet if we were to meet a bear in the wild, it would be - well, it would be incredibly bad news for us.

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A new year is a great time for lists and thinking about the future. Ideally it's a time for lists that think about the future, such as this one, which I very much enjoyed. I always enjoy these lists - what's better than ruminating over the blank first page of a new diary? - but this one did something more for me. It made me sit up quite sharply and wish something was so.

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Somewhere along the line my family got into the habit of a New Year's Day wander. Generally we'd set off along the coast, which is only a short walk away in itself. We wouldn't head far, and there'd be no objective in mind. It was just the perfect way - chill, airy, bright - to begin another twelve months of whatever the world had in store for us.

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There's a moment when I'm swimming that I can't get over. I'm about to start the front crawl. Feet up against the side of the pool, arms pointed forward, face in, kick out, and then...

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Fairly early on in Caves of Qud, I found myself in the great cave of Golgotha. This was a good while back now, but I'm still thinking about it - I'm still thinking about that cave. The great cave at Golgotha is part of a fairly early quest. You go in to find a malfunctioning robot and then fix it - just to show you're good enough to go off on another, far more meaningful questline. Fine. But that cave! You drop in via an elevator shaft, and if you're particularly careful - or if you can't fly - you have to take it strictly one level at a time on your way down. And what's down there? Darkness. Salty water. Puddles of green goo. But also conveyor belts, stretched and tangled across the earth. Sparking machinery that can give you a nasty shock. Doors that you'll need to find the right key to unlock. The past and the future tangled together, and yet somehow it's all ancient.

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I've always found the Monument Valley games slightly frustrating, because they're beautiful, creative things that don't seem to have that much room for the player. They're quietly misleading in this regard. With their fixed viewpoints, Persian influence and love of Escher-like geometry, they look like perfect brain-teasy puzzle games. In reality they're more akin to the likes of Uncharted than they are something along the lines of Echochrome or Crush. The plan is all laid out for you and you can't really deviate from it. Hit your marks, know your place, and save your sense of wonder for all the visual tricks the developers are playing on you.

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Spoiler warning: this piece explores some powerful moments in Grand Theft Hamlet that you might want to discover for yourself.

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I spent a lot of this morning throwing fruit at a tiny hippo. Sometimes the hippo ate the fruit, which was what I intended. Sometimes the fruit missed and rolled away and was lost forever. Sometimes - very occasionally - I pressed the wrong button and ate the fruit myself. A pain, really, because the fruit is quite hard to gather and stock up on.

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The story of Tetris is pretty well known by now. There have been books and documentaries - foremost among them a wonderful BBC doc called From Russia with Love - and there have been movies and YouTube histories and all that beautiful jazz. And yet what I adore most about Tetris Forever, a new playable, interactive documentary from a team that has already shown it's very, very good at making playable, interactive documentaries, is kind of perverse. What I adore most are the moments that Tetris Forever steps away from the familiar story, the familiar falling shapes, the familiar talking heads and talking points, and makes Tetris feel really weird again.

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The telescope is not quite a telescope, but it still works like one. And, more importantly, it still feels like one. You put your eye to the glass and then you move left and right to scan a glorious horizon drawn in sunny skies and churning ocean currents. What's out there? What's waiting for me? Where next?

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Every Halloween I return to the Arkham games. It's as much a ritual of mine as playing Super Mario World in the lead-up to Christmas - a personal yuletide delight I absolutely recommend. Batman is made for Halloween, for shadows and hauntings and pumpkin faces leering from misted windows. He dresses up. His enemies dress up. They plan tricks. He's a total treat.

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Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect and artist, whose glossy, curvy, arcing buildings have looped and flexed through so many cities around the world, once noted that she had never been asked to design anything of particularly striking significance in London. I wonder what she'd make of the Hadidian, cross-purpose, modular thicket of residential units, parkland, and office space that I helped bring into being over by Blackfriars Bridge the other night. It took about thirty seconds to lay the foundations, and the whole thing was fairly blipped into towering life within a few minutes. By the time I was done, the building soared high over the Thames, more a parody of the Hadid style than the real thing, I suspect, and for that I am entirely to blame. All taken care of in the time it took to eat a packet of crisps.

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Twin-stick shooters are a fascinating contradiction. These are games in which you move and shoot while the hordes attack. They're games that are absolutely composed of hectic overstimulation, of flinging nasty stuff right at you, and yet they're games in which you can often get into the flow of things and find that you've pleasantly zoned out. At heart I suspect this is down to two reasons. One: I often find myself moving through twin-stick arenas in chummy, lazy circles, as if I'm stirring a nice bubbling soup. Two: in these games you generally move and shoot and that's it.

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One of the strange, hard-to-grasp questions that quietly haunts a lot of games is whether we are the people we are controlling. Whether we are meant to be those people, anyway. Are we Mario, or are we his custodian for the hours in which we play? Is there one of us involved in these jumps and dashes and Goomba stomps, or two of us, and where are the boundaries to be found? Sometimes the controls in a game are so intuitive that it really feels like it's us on the other side of the screen. We're in sync. And then something will happen - a glitch, a funny movement, a cut-scene - and the gap between avatar and player becomes jarringly visible. It's odd stuff and tricky to think about for long stretches of time without starting to feel a bit weird.

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If I had to pin this impossible, improbable thing down, I would tell you that UFO 50 is a game about memory. Or it's a game collection about memory, anyway, as it contains 50 of the things. It's about the memories of what games used to be like in the 8-bit era when a lot of us were kids, but it's also about what it was like to encounter games back then. Maybe you borrowed a bunch of carts from a friend and they picked a few at random. Maybe you found one in a store on sale and it didn't have its instruction manual or box anymore. Maybe you did a Blockbusters haul one Friday and came home with six or seven unknowns to play through and discover.

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It's probably strange to accuse a game like The Plucky Squire of realism. This is a game in which a heroic character from a children's fantasy book can leap from the pages and rove around the bedroom desk on which the book was being read. It's a game in which you can move back and forth, from 2D illustration to chunky, squishy 3D in the name of adventure.

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Which is it? Which is the game you absolutely shouldn't miss? This is precisely the wrong question, I think, but it's taken me a long time to arrive at that decision. For my first few hours, my first few days, it felt like exactly the right question. It felt like the only question.

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I spent a good part of this morning trying to remember the precise artwork that Sauge, the heroine of Caravan SandWitch, reminds me of. With her baggy, almost plus four style trousers and bouncing quiff, she's relatively close to Tintin, but I had a twittering sense that there was something else at play too. Eventually, I remembered it: Emil and the Detectives, the children's adventure by Erich Kästner. More specifically, those airy, bendy, thick-lined ink illustrations by Walter Trier. Retro and modern all at once, as art struck on the cusp of the 1930s often was. Cheerful and spirited, filled with a headlong sense of derring-do. It's a perfect fit.

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Around the time Eurogamer launched, I was temping at an insurance office in Bournemouth, and I had a temping lunch break pal called Ken who I'm invoking now for two reasons. Firstly, Ken was the first person I spoke to who ever talked about "net anxiety" - the worry that one should be off making their fortune on the new frontiers of the internet. Secondly, he was the first person I met who played games online. Actual games. There was a driving game he liked, and I think he dabbled in a few shooters. It was like alchemy to me. It was like knowing - and having lunch with - an actual wizard.

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Fans of bits and pieces are going to absolutely love Astro Bot. It's made of bits and pieces. Lots of these bits and pieces are nostalgia: you pick between old memory cards when choosing a save file, you're rewarded at the end of a boss fight with a spell of Ape Escape monkey-netting fun. Look close at most surfaces and you'll see some variation of the DualShock face buttons imprinted on it. Look in the sky and you might catch a passing reference to Fantavision.

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"Bite-size" is one of those terms that gets a bad rap. This may be because it conjures memories of cramming for GCSEs with the help of the Beeb, or because, when deployed in the world of cuisine, it often translates to: "slightly less than you paid for." But in games, bite-size can be a wonderful size. WarioWare is bite-sized: the entire history of interaction delivered in four-second gulps. Into the Breach is bite-sized: a dizzying well of strategy that you can dip into in the time it takes to send an email.

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The special, almost intangible loveliness of the Plucky Squire isn't down to either the game design itself or the way it's presented. It's down to both of these things, combined so thoroughly, and with such imagination, that it's hard to stir them apart.

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I've been playing Arco on and off for the last few weeks on Switch and PC. I'm loving it - I think Arco's pretty wonderful. But the builds I've been playing on are also rather buggy, and I haven't been able to get to the end, either because of show-stopper bugs or random crashes.

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I'm not ashamed to say this: one of the easiest ways to make me excited about a game is still to chuck the word "super" into the title. This is Nintendo's fault, inevitably. Super Mario Bros, sure. But then when the Super Famicom came around, they threw Super into almost every game that came out. It remains the easiest upgrade pitch of all time, and the most intoxicating. Why do I need to buy these games again? Because now they're super.

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I'm not sure how funny Buster Keaton movies are these days - I assume there are moments that still work as pure gags. But these films of his remain wonderful, because Keaton was kind of the Tom Cruise of his age - or rather Cruise, who namechecks Keaton often in interviews - is the closest thing we have to the original. Keaton's gags were almost always stunts, dangerous, brilliant, clearly visual stunts that moved the action forward while giving audiences something to gasp at. There's nothing on the surface to make me think of the World of Goo games, and yet I think of Keaton constantly when I play.

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Between WarioWare, NES Remix and Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition, Nintendo has a real thing for chopping its games into pieces. Tiny pieces, quite often. When it comes to Nintendo World Championships, the unwieldy name is easily the lengthiest single thing about it. For the rest of the game, it's, what, 10 seconds, 50 at a push? This is Nintendo doing TikTok, Nintendo in the editing suite. And it's fascinating.

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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.

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If ever a game muddled with time, it's Tetris. I'm not just talking about the idle hours that somehow disappear as you play, but the way that the whole game sits within the flow of time itself. Tetris' 40th anniversary is upon us this summer (the exact date is a little woolly, with the Tetris Company putting it in June, but still announcing official celebrations this weekend), and that feels weird from both temporal directions. In one way, the game feels so fresh, so cleanly designed, it can surely only be a few weeks old at most? In the other way, hasn't a design this beautiful been with us since the first galaxies were forming? Wasn't it there in the code of the universe waiting to be unearthed? It's all very weird.

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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.

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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.

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Basketball's just arrived on Nintendo Switch Sports. A new sport means a new arena, so the most important question is: what's the new restaurant like? Reader, it seems lovely. Behind the court there's an elegant arc of a building, a kind of restrained Zaha Hadid number. Trailing plants hang down from above and at one end there's a glass-fronted cafe lit by glowing amber overheads. At the other there's a deck with seating exposed to the balmy skies. Sure, you risk getting a Spalding Size 7 in your cortado, but them's the breaks.

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Up until recently, I had a dear friend named Ray who was really into jazz. Ray was in his 80s when I knew him, and as a result, he was a bit of a gateway to Brighton in the 1950s. 1950s Ray really loved jazz, and 2023 Ray was there to tell me about what it was like to love jazz in Brighton back then. It was a town of cider bars for the most part, as Ray told it, but underneath a lot of bars were jazz venues, all literally underground, and the greats from the whole world of jazz would come and play in darkened, smoky rooms in this strange town stuck on the chill edge of England. This was always done under assumed names, which was something to do with managers and payments, I gather. The important part: you had to be in the know to access any of this.

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Ghosts are a close-up. Eventually they are, anyway. After they've been a sudden movement at the back of the frame, a shimmer or glitch that may or may not have happened, you cut in close and you hold the image tight and you take it all in. Anybody there?

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Even if the series wasn't stuck in development hell I would still say this: if any game is its own sequel, it's Beyond Good & Evil. With the news last week that we're getting a remaster with a bit of extra stuff in it, I went back to the original - almost the original, the Xbox 360 port that still runs on my Series X - to play the game once more and remind myself of why I love it so much. It was an odd experience - the game had changed a bit, in that I was drawn to different things in it, and I feel like I played through it in a slightly different way. But every time I've replayed Beyond Good & Evil it's been a different game, I think. Let's explore that.

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One of those rare clarifying moments in my life came when I was told that the whale in Moby Dick didn't symbolise anything. Or rather, it didn't symbolise any one single thing in a fixed and coherent way. The whale might symbolise a handful of things, and those things might contradict one another and you'd just have to live with it. Also the whale was simultaneously a whale - no just or merely a whale, because there is never anything "mere" to be had when a whale is involved.

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From Demon's Souls to Elden Ring, FromSoftware's games have had a singular impact on the last 15 years of design. Game by game, the studio has created beloved rituals, based around precise combat, intricate, looping maps, and storytelling that unfolds in weapon drops and item descriptions as much as cut-scenes and dialogue.

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Grunn is a normal gardening game set in a mundane village, according to the Steam blurb. It is not at all weird and horrifying, not remotely a glimpse into the abyss. Moments after first arriving off the bus you won't find yourself trapped in the garden by a bridge with a rotten plank. You won't accidentally murder a magpie while chopping down tall grass. And you thoroughly won't be stalked by a nameless tormentor as you go about your gardening work.

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Caravan SandWitch is a game in which the qualifiers really matter. It's the post-apocalypse, but it's also gentle and dreamy and kind of lovely. You're looking for your missing sister, but in an unhurried, holidaying sort of way. The game's futuristic landscape is based on Provence, and maybe it's hard to get too serious about things in Provence. The rocks and mountains are the colour of milky coffee. The sky is endless blue. There's a jouncy little van to take you from one mission spot to the next. Hey, even "mission" is too weighty a word.

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Periphery Synthetic, by ShiftBackTick, is a glorious thing. It's an exploration game and a playable EP. Existing somewhere between MirrorMoon, Soundvoyager for GBA, and Outer Wilds, it casts you out across a series of different planetary surfaces and asks you to make your own sense of everything.

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Dystopika is a city-building toy, but it's also a place. It's a place loading before you drop your first superscraper in or pan the camera to frame the luminous smog of the eternal sunset. Just start the game up and there's a sense of urban life twinkling in the darkness, while the soundtrack moans and warps and chatters to itself. Dystopika is already here. It can feel complete before you've started.

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I love the way this prince runs. I think I could watch it forever. Head thrust forward, whole body pointed forward, hands in fists reaching and punching the air, punching what's coming. He's angled low, like a velociraptor, but he's as sleek and as streamlined as the red sash that billows heroically behind him. Something of a modern sports star in the leggings, with a stripe down the outside of the leg to show you which leg is which as he runs. I can only imagine the fabulous, super-light, super-expensive shoes he's wearing. Not available in the shops yet. A gift from the labs.

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