Heat Signature's clock is ticking. Ten seconds until I get detected in an enemy spaceship, and I haven't even assassinated my target. Finally, I find them. It's over in one cruel slice of my long blade, but the timer is still counting down, and the ship is a labyrinthine hulk.

I run. I see a hull or a space window or something — it's all so frantic — and I leap for it. Puny and impotent, I soar out into the vastness of space. I have seconds to pilot my own spacecraft to catch me before I suffocate. I pull it off, but just barely. It's only then that I realise I'm out of breath in real life, too.

Ubisoft Reflections, the studio behind Grow Home and Grow Up, continues its growth spurt with the release of Atomega on Steam. It's a blocky competitive first-person shooter in which players battle over mass, attempting to out-grow and overpower the competition. It's a cool little game that could use some serious expansion.

In the new stealth video game Echo I'm surrounded by copies of myself, menacingly filling the hallway. There's a door at my back, but I don't want to open it. I raise my gun, but I know better than to shoot.

I think, If only the lights would go off. The enemies close in. There are so many ways out of this situation, but if I take any of them, Echo will use it against me later.

It's not easy being a giant robot with a body better suited to destroying planets than saving them, especially not when people react to your noble, monster-vaporizing efforts with bullets and lasers of their own. Jettomero, though, doesn't really mind. He just wants to make sure everybody's alright.

There was nothing wrong with the Wii U release of Pokemon fighting game Pokken Tournament that couldn't be solved by Nintendo releasing an entirely new, more fully-realised platform for people to play it on. And here we are.

Playing as a young man, I run up verdant hills to a church. I'm told of this person's disdain for local conflict-heavy politics and his love for his community. Then I step on a mine and die. No respawn. That was just the game's opening.

Songbringer, with its top-down overworld-wandering, dungeon-spelunking, and item-collecting, takes a lot of cues from classic Legend of Zelda games. I can only tell you so much about it, though, because your adventure will probably be pretty different from mine.

The Metronomicon: Slay the Dance Floor is what happens when a dance party breaks out in the middle of a turn-based role-playing game.

The Escapists was a surprise Steam hit about breaking out of a variety of prisons, each with its own layout and routines. The Escapists 2 still has prisons, but they're joined by a series of weirder, wackier locations and situations.

The image above is that of a woman trapped at the moment before her violent death, endlessly repeating the combination to a secret door she'll never reach. It's just one small sliver of the sci-fi mind-fuckery that awaits in the Rutger Hauer-voiced cyberpunk horror game Observer.

In the first chapter of Ken Follett's bestselling novel The Pillars of the Earth, mason Tom Builder and his family are journeying through snowy woods when his wife, Agnes, enters labour. The events that follow serve as the opening to Daedalic Entertainment's adventure game adaptation.

Most of the time, it isn't terribly difficult to slot games on Steam's best-sellers list into categories. You have your multiplayer survival game of the week, your triple-A hit, your discounted indie, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and so on. West of Loathing, though, defies categorisation. It marches to the beat of its own drum, spits into its own spittoon, and tells its own poop jokes.

Next week Volition launches Saints Row spin-off Agents of Mayhem, an open-world action adventure featuring a group of super-powered operatives battling an evil organisation bent on world domination. I've played five hours of the game, and already there's a lot to like.

Boss Key Productions' Lawbreakers launched on PlayStation 4 and PC this week. Mike Fahey and Patricia Hernandez got together to discuss their first few hours in Cliff Bleszinski's fast-paced take on the hero shooter.

I went into Hellblade expecting another fast, fun action romp from the folks at Ninja Theory, who previously made Enslaved and DmC: Devil May Cry. After playing for about 20 minutes, I had to put the controller down. I was so stressed out that I couldn't take it any more.

I opened my "eyes". I was a baby dakotaraptor striding behind my parents with my siblings, like a flock of ducks. My parents would hunt and provide for me, I thought. Nurture me until I was strong enough to fend for myself. Maybe even love me, in their own simplistic dinosaur way. About a minute later, I stood, slack-jawed, as a larger raptor tore them to pieces while my brothers, sisters and I watched.

Sundered is a new platforming action game from Thunder Lotus Games, creators of Jotun. It has gorgeous hand-drawn visuals, Metroidvania-style exploration, fast-paced combat against swarms of vicious enemies and a knack for making me want to put my controller through the screen.

In 2012, Brazil's Behold Studios released Knights of Pen and Paper, a video game that captured the experience of a bunch of players sitting around a table playing a fantasy role-playing game. Galaxy of Pen and Paper, available today on PC, iOS and Android, does the same thing, only better, and in space.

The Low Road opens with one of my favourite video game puzzles of the year. The rest of what I've played, sadly, isn't quite on the same level.