Mash-ups, genre-bending and creative anachronism can be a fun way to inject life into a stale idea. Pirates meet ninjas, Victorian engineers find themselves constructing steam dirigibles and aetheric ray guns and zombies somehow find their way into space.

Which you is you? Where does your soul live? Who cares if a clone of you dies? For a fairly simple puzzle game, The Swapper asks some serious questions. And importantly, it asks them with subtlety, deftness and atmosphere – that enhances the excellent gameplay.

Sartre said that hell is other people but most gamers know that hell is actually a gloomily lit dungeon filled with central-casting undead moaners and decorated as if Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen had ordered a job lot of gibbets, spikes and miscellaneous human remains.

The iconic monster is back in a far more successful way than Prometheus. The first-person, stealth game Alien: Isolation largely successfully returns us to the creeping horror and claustrophobic environments of the original film.

This sprawling post-apocalyptic role-playing game comes long after the original. Wasteland was a critical hit back in 1988. It was a fairly unique proposition then. But that was back in 1988 – which in videogames terms is about the dark ages.

You are a goat. You are an invincible goat. You are an invincible goat with a jetpack. You are an invincible goat with a jetpack and satanic powers. You are an invincible goat with a jetpack and satanic powers who can turn into a giraffe.

The blockbuster game to outblockbuster them all. Creating Destiny required a record-breaking budget of $500 million; it's made by the makers of the iconic Halo series; it fuses that series' first-person, space-opera shooter pedigree with World of Warcraft-style massively multi-player online gaming; and it sold $500 million on its launch day alone. In gaming terms, Destiny is huge – a massively slick and serious enterprise… with a hollow heart that would make Hollywood proud.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. is the latest of Tin Man Games' adaptations of the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebook series for smartphones. During the 1980s heyday of choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone were arguably the gold standard. A simple role-playing system that presented a multiple-choice story populated by adversaries you could 'fight' using dice rolls at critical points, gamebooks captured the imagination of a generation of kids before being largely obliterated by handheld video games.

CounterSpy looks brilliant. This stealth-action adventure delivers a perfect Man From U.N.C.L.E. spy aesthetic in videogame form. And largely delivers on the premise in gameplay terms too.

Two superpowers are locked in a pointless and potentially genocidal arms race. Enter C.O.U.N.T.E.R. – on the surface, this sneaky outside agency is there to disarm both sides and stop them from blowing up the moon. Yes, the moon.

Don't believe the cute visual style – Road Not Taken is a cold, dark and punishingly cruel puzzle game. It will challenge mentally and emotionally too.

You, an unnamed ranger, walk out into the snowy forest each winter to rescue children lost while picking berries. For 15 years/levels you must return these shivering bundles to their parents or suffer their grief.