With the year winding down, I thought it’d be great to look at three games you can chill with as the impending apocalypse — I mean New Year’s — rolls in. Or, if you’d like to prepare for the end times with some hectic games that get your heart rate up, Gita was nice enough to give me her favourite stressful games of the year.

2018 has spoiled me with so many great games. But instead of listing what my favourite games were, I decided to go deeper and list my favourite games inside of those games. Here are my favourite mini-games of 2018, in no particular order.

The first game I ever owned was Tetris for the Game Boy. I sucked back then, and I’m not too hot now, but nearly 30 years later I have a chance to go back to that experience thanks to an 8-bit level in Tetris Effect.

What happens when you take one of the staples of gaming and transform it into a sensory experience? That's the question I'd like you to answer for this week's Community Review.

When I'm in the mood to play a video game, I'll grab my Switch, a PS4 controller, maybe my Xbox One controller or my 3DS or perhaps my phone. I've got lists of games I'm eager to start or continue on those devices. None of them require me to unwrap the cords of a special headset, attach it to my face, ensure any proprietary controllers are charged and block myself off from my co-workers, family or all of my virtual pals on social media.

Tetris Effect takes the pure, near-perfect game design of the classic puzzle game and injects a cocktail of hallucinatory visuals mixed with a sublime soundtrack. It's a refreshing, modern update to a classic with an optional virtual reality component and more than anything, it's also the kind of game that I think we desperately need right now.

Tetris Effect is the next game from Enhance, the game studio run by Tetsuya Mizuguchi that created Rez Infinite and Lumines Remastered.