Video games

Grade: A– For this winning little narrative adventure we are in the South – all gris-gris gumbo yaya, decaying mansions and ghosts of the underground railway – and it is a bit midnighty, what with the sinister otherworldly beings you fight.  Our protagonist is sassy, cornrowed Hazel, a mixed-race Lara Croft, who sets out to rescue her social-worker mother after her mobile home is swept downriver in a hurricane. Her snooty grandma Bunny, rotting in her vast plantation house, is no help whatever. But Hazel does manage to half-inch some magic hooks from granny’s ottoman, which allow her to manipulate glowing magic strands in the air and use them to

Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just want to sink into some thumping AAA franchise that’s thrown all the time, design talent and VC megabucks in the world at the screen. The new Assassin’s Creed has you covered there. Irresistibly, it’s set in a richly detailed and (kinda) historically accurate 16th-century Japan – which means, as all teenage boys will know, ninjas and samurais. Be warned, though: I downloaded the PC version, but the screen appeared to announce that I don’t have an STD so my new game wouldn’t run. Talk about a mixed blessing. Turns out

Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at work. You’ve both grown up. Prepare to lose very many hours to its attractive blend of diplomacy, resource management, city-building and strategic ultraviolence.  Your path through history comes in three linked chunks: you’ll play through the ancient world, then carry forward some of your progress into the age of exploration, and then do the same

Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated a mournful little stick princess. It made wonderfully clever use of isometric perspective: knobs and handles allowed you to rotate the playspace and slide structures together or apart. As you fiddled with the architecture, Escher-like perspectival tricks would open fresh paths or surfaces for Ida to walk on. The atmosphere was absorbing and the puzzles

Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience. Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards. Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you lots

Grade: A- There’s a very faint echo of Jeff VanderMeer’s unheimlich Southern Reach Series in the new indie side-scroller Neva. You’re plonked at the start of the game into a pleasant dreamlike landscape of pastel foliage, benign fauna and the gentle twitter of birds. But as you progress you start to encounter something darker – literally. An unexplained corruption is infecting the land. Black patches on the ground send up spooky alien tendrils. Birds fall out of the sky.  Soon you’re guiding the story’s protagonist, Alba – a little-red-riding-hood figure with a darning-needle blade – through a deepening nightmare. Patches of black petals spawn demons whom you must dodge and

On 23 November, the video game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary. That’s no small thing. By most metrics, it is the most successful video game of its type in history. At its peak, it had more than 12 million active subscribers, and in its two-decade-and-counting lifetime it has made more than three times as much money as the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of all time. Yet many, if not most, of you will never have heard of it or will have only the dimmest idea what it is. As someone who has played this daft game for several hours a week for years, I commend it to your attention,

Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even though it came out last year. Why? Because along with simultaneously trying to save American democracy and make humanity an interplanetary species, Elon Musk’s third preoccupation is Diablo IV. When he’s not tweeting about the first two things, he’s tweeting clips of himself roaring through Diablo’s endgame content, slaying hordes of very high-level demons in timed dungeon runs. He’s good at this, and since it takes getting on for a solid week without eating or sleeping even to reach the endgame, he’s sinking a lot of

Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is set much later. Sun Wukong is locked in a stone egg and you take command of a monkey warrior – the Destined One – in search of the magic objects which will revive him.   Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA blockbuster game to come out of China, and it’s what I believe the

Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence. It was Itchy & Scratchy meets Raymond Chandler, with puzzles to solve and wisecracks to enjoy. Point-and-click has gone the way of the abacus, but much of the feel of the original franchise is to be found in this remastered version of the final game in the series. As it opens, our heroes are locked

Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often. But this lovingly crafted indie cartoon adventure has a creditable bash at it. The protagonist is an oval-headed yellow homunculus in a shirt and tie, as if Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, Dilbert and a minor Simpsons character had been squished in a particle collider. He is dispatched to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth by his boss to do… something. But the mayor won’t meet him so he finds himself wandering around the town. ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ say various townspeople in ee-bah-gum accents, before inviting you to help them

Grade: B+ Looter-shooters, match-three games, dragons and spaceships… Sometimes you despair of video games doing the same thing again and again – and then a lone developer gets a severe bump on the head and produces something completely batty.  Vampire Therapist is a comedic adventure-story therapy-simulation starring a vampire, except he’s also a cowboy, and he’s training to be a cognitive behavioural therapist in the backroom of a German nightclub under the tutelage of a 3,000-year-old bisexual vampire who was romantic with Marcus Aurelius back in the day.  Our hero was a bad vamp in the Wild West for many years, you see, but he fell in with the Transcendentalists

Grade: A ‘God games’, as they used to be called, have a storied history. SimCity, Civilisation and the excellently sadistic Dungeon Keeper have all been responsible for many a PhD thesis being delivered late. The Almighty seems to have smiled on the latest iteration of the genre. The product of a one-man-band independent developer, Greg Styczen, its current pre-release version scored a million downloads on the first day it was available. You can see why. It’s made with such care and love. You take the role of a medieval lord of the manor – choose a surly avatar and a coat of arms – who starts with a handful of

The American artist and critic Brad Troemel once pointed out that art galleries have all turned into a kind of adult daycare, and ever since then I haven’t been able to visit a gallery without noticing it. Nearly two decades ago, Carsten Höller installed a set of big aluminium slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and they were undeniably good fun because going down slides is fun. It’s also fun, although maybe for a different type of person, to ask if going down slides counts as art. These days, though, you can hardly move for this stuff. The world is already interactive. You walk around in it. You

Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty curves and the calming pleasure, instead, of a mildly absorbing repetitive task which whiles away the idle hour in the way you might pass it flicking through a set of worry beads or making a cat’s cradle with a ball of string. The unexpected sleeper hit House Flipper (2018) was one such. It was boring, but in a good way. Its sleeker, prettier sequel has had the wisdom not to depart far from the formula. The premise is that you

Grade: A- One thing videogames are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles… Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the spooky crackle of the Geiger counter in Silent Hill; nor needing fresh trousers after that dog jumps through the window in the first Resident Evil. The granddaddy of them all was Alone in the Dark – which, when it came out in 1992, essentially invented the survival horror genre. It sent you crawling through a spooky old mansion solving puzzles, fretting about your inventory and being jumped by sluggish monsters. Now a lavish and loving reboot stars B+-listers David Harbour

My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video games. It is a total nightmare – and it’s one that in various versions will be replicated in houses with young children up and down the country. The problem, in part, is a cultural divide. It frustrates me, too, when the children refuse to come off Rocket League or Fifa when they’re told to (‘I’m in the middle of a game!’). I’m also wary of the addictive nature of these things. But at the same time

Three years ago, I killed several thousand people over the course of a single weekend. Late into the night, I ran around butchering everyone I saw, until by the end I didn’t even feel anything any more. Just methodically powering through it all, through the wet sounds of splattering heads, bodies crumpling, shiny slicks of blood. I thought I was past caring. But when I finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep, and in my dreams I was haunted by all the men I’d killed. I saw their brains exploding, again and again and again. In my defence, I’d had a bad week. It was December: a grotty English winter,