I’ve been playing the same fight in Thronebreaker, Gwent’s standalone story, for a few hours now. I still haven’t beaten it. In most games, that would make me frustrated with myself or furious at the designers. But thanks to Thronebreaker’s unique mechanics, I’m itching to keep trying.

If I didn't know Save Me Mr. Tako: Tasukete Tako-San was a tribute to retro handheld games, I could easily be convinced it was a long-lost Game Boy classic.

Some mobile games play psychological tricks with you to get you to keep playing. Others hook you the much better way, simply by being great. So it is with the new iOS port of the stellar Fidel: Dungeon Rescue, which is billed as “the roguelike where you can rewind”.

Of all the many valid reasons I’m still playing The Witcher 3, there’s one that’s not related to the game’s quality. If I put it down for too long, I’ll completely forget how to play. It’s a problem that extends to every game I own.

I recently discovered a game in my Steam library that lets me replay the tutorial whenever I want, and I wish more games would give me that option.

Nintendo and Cygames’ Dragalia Lost is a very pretty mobile game. The characters are lovely, the music is gorgeous, and its overall presentation is quite charming. One could almost forget it’s just another generic character collecting mobile action RPG under all of that polish. Almost.

TowerFall is out on the Switch today, just over five years after it originally released on the ill-fated Ouya. It was one of the best party games then and has continued to be one of the all-time best since.

It’s still great on Switch, but more than anything I can’t get over is how much fun I’ve had playing it alone.

I’ve played Hyper Light Drifter a few times now, and I always start by going North. I’m drawn by the chilly, snow-covered peaks. But once there, this particular dead and lonely world rocks me to my emotional and spiritual core.

Curly vs. Gunvolt. Shovel Knight vs. Isaac. If these match-ups don’t get you excited, you may have missed out on some of the most delightful indie games of the past decade. Fortunately Studio Saizensen’s all-star indie fighting game Blade Strangers is just as quirky and approachable as the games that spawned it.

Not too long ago I heard about a Warhammer 40k card game on smartphones. I decided, as part of my fool’s errand to try to wrap my head around the new explosion in Warhammer video games, to check it out. What I found was a competent game made irresistible by how unflinchingly metal it is.

Mixing survival gameplay with a narrative is always a tough task for developers, but it’s one the creators of We Happy Few takes on. I’m 10 hours into their game, which was released yesterday for Xbox One, PS4 and PC, and I’m both charmed and frustrated. The writing is excellent, and the visuals are spectacular, but the clumsy gameplay makes appreciating these things difficult.

I’m a sucker for Flat Heroes’ simple look and how good it feels to bounce around putting off death, but my favourite part of this minimalist Switch platformer is the moment before the levels actually start.

I’ve never enjoyed a single movement in a video game as much as the Mega Man X dash jump. I could dash jump all day — off ledges, up walls, across pits filled with spikes. For all the double jumps, dodge rolls and infinite sprints I’ve encountered since, nothing has filled my heart with so much joy as slamming my thumb across two buttons at once to launch myself across the screen with equal amounts of control and ease.

I’ve always been curious about hunting sims, mostly because I want to vicariously wander around the woods. I’m excited to check out a recent one that just got ported to the Switch, but right now I can’t decide which character to pick.

In Front Mission 3’s 18th battle, I’m on a naval base facing down two giant walking artillery cannons, four Gundam-like mechs, and an apache helicopter. It isn’t the most challenging tactical role-playing game from the PS1 era, but like a lot of games from that era it’s prone to the occasional difficulty spike.

Unlike many other games in the genre though, characters in Front Mission 3 don’t just live or die. They crumble, slowly, under barrages of gun fire and missiles, and I just can’t get enough of it.

Playing a preview build of Body of Evidence, I found myself working against the clock to clean up crime scenes and hide dead bodies.

As I meticulously scrubbed blood out of hardwood floors and tabletops, I felt exhilarated to play a role in a situation I hope I never take part in.

There’s finally a new Star Ocean game after 2016's barebones Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness. Unfortunately, free-to-play Star Ocean: Anamnesis, the latest entry, is only on smartphones, and a gacha game to boot.

The first of those would be forgivable if not for the second, but as a slot machine for collecting characters from Star Oceans past it turns the series’ once absurd fusion of medieval fantasy and Star Trek sci-fi into something that just feels mundane.

Last month, snowy survival game The Long Dark got a new cooking system. Like in real life, it requires timing things just right. I couldn’t pull it off in my last game, as well as in most of my own home cooking.

The Witcher came out on PC in 2007. That feels like a lifetime ago. The series is now easily one of my favourites, but a decade ago I, like a lot of people, had no idea it even existed.

That's created a weird dynamic as I play The Witcher 1 for the first time knowing everything that happens in the second two games, like being Michael J. Fox in Back To The Future sent back to Renaissance Poland rather than 1950s California.

Last night in The Crew 2 I drove from New Orleans to Manhattan in about 20 minutes. Behind the wheel of the free, workmanlike 2016 Mazda MX-5 the game gave me to start, I zig-zagged between other cars because one, I was going 240km/h and they were not; and two, narrowly avoiding collisions netted me 10 extra followers on the in-game social media each time I did it.

Exposure is one of the currencies The Crew 2 is built around, used for unlocking new types of events and vehicles. But despite the tens of thousands of made-up people allegedly tracking my progress, I felt pretty lonely.