Deadbolt strips stealth down to the essentials and I can't stop playing it.

This week's Xbox One release of underwater horror game SOMA includes a new mode that dramatically changes monster behaviour to keep the player safe. Safe from the monsters anyhow.

Serial Cleaner is a game where you play as a professional crime scene cleaner for the mob. You have to sneak around cops in order to vacuum up bloodstains, pick up bodies and pocket murder weapons. For a game about cleaning, it's surprisingly fun.

Commandos was a very good video game. It's also a kind of game that we haven't seen much of since, so it's nice to see Shadow Tactics step in and deliver us a similar kind of experience. Well, as similar as swapping World War Two for Japan's Edo period can get, anyway.

It's always interesting to see old genres learn new tricks. Stealth -- with all its methodical manoeuvring and frantic flights -- might seem like an odd fit for Valve and HTC's only slightly mobile virtual reality face squid, but that's just forced the folks behind Budget Cuts to get creative.

Um. Blue Team? I think you missed a guy.

Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell's charming 2010 platformer about the inner lives of hopping geometric shapes, was an experiment in the power of storytelling to triumph over abstraction. Volume, Bithell's new game, is also a successful experiment in abstraction, although the narrative is realistic, or realistic science fiction. This time, it's the interactions that are stripped to their essences.

Tangiers is a stealth game like no other. Its art style is derived from dark surrealist landscapes, its levels alter and rebuild themselves based on how you play, and your weapons are pieces of dialogue that you snatch out of the air. It's also set in "a parody of 1970s concrete Britain."

The mission seems to be going well enough; it's been tough, but you've persevered, making your way through some tense situations by avoiding the gaze of patrolling guards. You've just infiltrated the enemy base -- now it's time to assassinate someone. You're hiding, maybe in the bushes or around a corner, and wham, some guard spots you. Alarms sound, the world begins to move in slow motion, and an alert pops up on screen.

Trailer: Tangiers is described as a "dark and uneasy" stealth game. Well, its new trailer is exactly that. The Thief-inspired, somewhat recently Kickstarted PC stealth-em-up is nearing its beta development phase, and is expected to get a release date within a couple weeks.

The guys behind Sneaky Bastards have published a "2014 Manifesto" on the stealth genre. And whether you can even call it that. If you enjoy any part of a game where you're sneaking around, go read it.

Aussie writer Daniel Hindes, who has run a niche site called Sneaky Bastards for a while, wants to take the idea of discussing stealth games to a more tangible format. Hence, Sneaky Bastards, the magazine.

2012 was a banner year for stealth games. From January up through December, we got to play a healthy variety of games involving dozens of different types of sneaking, skulking, lurking and sklurking. (It's a thing.)

The plague-infested streets and alleys of Dishonored's industrial city of Dunwall are rather dark and shadowy, but without proper use of stealth techniques one might as well be stomping through them on mechanical legs.

Thought we forgot about Speak Up on Kotaku US's Best Game Ever? We were only biding our time until commenter DocSeuss and admitted his love for the one stealth action game that got nearly everything right.

Let's face it. If sweet science fictional rides like Airwolf or KITT actually existed, laymen like us wouldn't get first dibs. No, we'd probably get saddled with whatever comically impractical vehicles the Tony Starks of the world don't scoop up.

Invisibility cloaks; stealth armour; invisible jets - a team of physicists at Scotland's University of St Andrews have made a breakthrough that could make these items a reality.

Splinter Cell: Conviction, out this week, is pretty good. It's also been a long time coming, having been originally due for release in 2007. Why the delay?

What seemed great on paper — a World War II game like nothing else, with sophisticated artistry to boot — had to be turned into a video game. But then some things, not necessarily too many things, went wrong.