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The technical hiccups and the lack of interaction in Bluey: The Videogame caused our four-player team to scream “awwww” in disappointment. But it’s testament to the game’s authenticity that they often wheeled away and played with something else in the world instead. From the art to the voice-acting to the painstaking recreation of the Bluey house: it’s all exactly as it should be. You’re led into the world of Bluey and told to play. For younger players, that will be music to their little dingo ears.

You can probably see our dilemma. Disney Speedstorm is a masterful technical achievement and absolutely in the upper echelons of karting games. It just oozes class. But it’s dripfed through a live service that couldn’t possibly let you have everything at once, and a series of currencies and unlocks that seem designed to bemuse. We’re not normally sensitive to free-to-play games with this degree of live service, but even Disney Speedstorm got us hankering for a one-time price tag.

So much care has been put into The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo that we suspect Nacho Rodríguez will circle back and address its bugs and technical hiccups. We hope he does, because this is a game that deserves to be flawless. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is a free-wheeling, surrealist graphic adventure that’s so beautiful that sometimes we just want to sit back and admire. 

Still, if you have a pre-teen player who loves gaming but struggles to knuckle down on their maths homework, then MathLand adds up nicely. It’s an entertaining game first, and a maths tutor second, and that makes it more palatable than tablet-based games like Times Table Rockstars. 

But as much as Death or Treat wants to fall on the treat side of the equation, we felt tricked. We were completely sold on its charismatic art style, and were prepped for roguelike joys. But the levels are too much of a slog, the enemies artlessly created and – fatally – the combat is limp. There are clearly very talented people at Saona Studios, but Death or Treat needed to bake for a few more months if it was going to feel finished.

Without an overarching theme or framework, these tales of horror need to stand on their own. But mostly they wobble. Lord of the Road is the exception: a confident 2D adventure that feels like the unhinged cousin of the original Legend of Zelda. The rest struggle to bring more than jump-scares and some incoherent storytelling to their short runtimes. 

Booting up Peppa Pig: World Adventures on launch day today, a substantial day-one patch has addressed a few of the glaring issues. But there are still wonkinesses here, particularly in the transitions between scenes. Peppa’s still not cooked: not quite. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot to explore in Peppa Pig: World Adventures, and while the game feels paradoxically more constrained as it goes global, it’s also an experience that had our four-year old jumping up and down on the sofa, singing that flipping theme tune all day. 

What Bratz: Flaunt Your Fashion amounts to is a static playmat. Your kids can dress up their doll and wander about it, looking for treasure chests, and there’s some enjoyment to be found in that. But once you start engaging with the world around you, talking to interviewees for the Bratz magazine, you realise how flimsy everything is. There just isn’t much to do, and the few interactions are chat, chat, making yourselves the focus of the story, and then more chat. 

We expected Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova to arrive in a red shirt, virtually dead on arrival. Instead, we’ve got a game with substance and style, and there’s nothing more Star Trek than that.

So, if you have a Skylanders itch that Activision refuses to scratch, or have love for the DreamWorks Dragons series, then DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of the Nine Realms takes a bit of a run up and then soars. Just pack in some co-op next time, if you please.

To get the most out of Frogun, we would suggest that you need to be checking a few boxes. You need to have lived and loved in the peak period of ‘90s 3D platformers. That love needs to be deep enough to ignore some reasonably core control failings. And you have to play in short bursts, as Frogun fatigue is definitely a thing. But reach this point with three checked boxes and we would be happy to recommend Frogun to you. Frogun is deep, charming and podgy with collectibles. Just be aware that this frog is not fit to lick Mario 64’s boots.

There may be a masochist who enjoys the endless running of Running on Magic. It certainly has plenty that’s pretty and charming, particularly in its art and characters. But you’d have to pay us good money to play it again. It’s clumsy to control and has some sloppy level generation that, in combination, makes you feel like you’re being sabotaged as you play. We’d love to say that we just need to get good, but we’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Running on Magic doesn’t want us to play it.

We have a warmness of affection for Surface Rush, but nothing stronger than that. It proves that you can elevate the coin-pushing games of your youth to a full-blown video game, and it doesn’t skimp on the levels or game modes. But there’s a saminess to the levels that is hard to avoid, and the spiky difficulty – both figuratively and literally – is even harder to dodge. For the £4.19 price, though, Surface Rush is not much of a risk, and if you play it in small, fifteen minute chunks, you will get the most out of this budget puzzler. 

In the past few months, we’ve experienced a traffic jam of top-down racers. And right at the back, way behind the rest of them, is Retro Pixel Racers. It offers no excuses: it flicks the bird as it passes, with no multiplayer, no game modes, no track variation and a top-speed just north of a shopping trolley. This is an aggressively bad racer that doesn’t even offer the courtesy of an easy 1000G. 

A strong indication of whether I’ve liked a visual novel is whether I am eager to actually see what happened on those different branches. But I had none of that urge with Synergia: A Cyberpunk Thriller Visual Novel. The prospect of doubling my time with this humdrum, navel-gazing cyberpunk visual novel filled me with a slight sense of dread. I wanted to make my excuses, drop down an origami unicorn, and pop out to watch Blade Runner instead.

Reviewing Nape Retroverse Collection has felt like running in a really crap marathon. We’re exhausted. None of the four games are good by anyone’s standards, but there’s so much shoddiness crammed into one package that we almost appreciate the effort in producing it. It manages to drain the life out of Megaman, Gradius (twice) and Legend of Zelda II across its four games, so, if you want to preserve your love for any of those games, we would encourage you to avoid handing over the £5.79 for Nape Retroverse Collection.

We were hoping for something like Everybody’s Golf on the Xbox. Instead, we hope that Smoots Golf is played by precisely nobody.

Treasures of the Aegean is just generally masterful and oozes class, and we can’t wait to put this review away and play it again.

UnMetal has a whacking-great comedic palette to paint from. It can be surrealist, as the entire game structure gets thrown in the bin, or you suddenly start delivering flashbacks to someone new without context of who or why. It can be broad and rude, with toilet humour taken quite literally (you will be saving at urinals). It can be heavy on game referencing, as Metal Gear Solid, Legend of Zelda, Fallout and many others all get a skewering. But it can also be universal in its humour. We’re confident that anyone playing UnMetal would get their ribs tickled – it’s very democratic.

Puzzle games that try something new are pretty rare, so Indigo 7 gets some brownie points. But those points are mostly squandered by too much randomness, duff game modes, a vacuous story and a combo system that files away the fun. There’s a decent multiplayer puzzler tucked away in the corners of Indigo 7: Quest For Love, but this is mostly a failed experiment with only a few interesting findings.

If Narita Boy had a better handle on what it did well, and spent less time on the stuff it didn’t, we’d have a hit on our hands. Instead, we have style over substance – a Tron: Evolution rather than Blade Runner, say – when it could have been a bonafide classic.

Altogether, Mail Mole on Xbox does the job of offering a ‘00s-era platformer – nothing more, nothing less. There’s no innovation here, not even capitalising on the fact that you’re a mole, and you may well groan at the landslide of cliches. But as we came to the end of Mail Mole, we kind of dug it. Aside from the odd control molehill, Mail Mole is a smooth ride and it may well scratch an itch that you forgot you had.  

On Xbox, Oniria Crimes’ greatest successes are in the rich world it’s created, and the uniqueness of interrogating the crime scene to come to a conclusion. But neither are enough: the experience tumbles into a nightmare, as poor controls, bemusing design decisions and bugs overwhelm everything. We’re glad that we experienced its peaks, but we’d suggest that the troughs are so deep that you might not get past them, or want to.

Who said that single player games were dead? Call of the Sea on Xbox was made for Game Pass: a fantastic story stunningly told, full of well-pitched puzzles, with almost zero replayability. It’s one of 2020’s most surprising genre-reboots, taking Myst and transplanting in a heart, and we’re all for it. You’d do well to buy a ticket to its shores.