A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.

While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.

Much fuss is made about realism in gaming. In the drive to recreate the real world in smaller and more numerous polygons, game developers have had to pass through the “uncanny valley” where things look nearly right but subtly, creepily wrong. The very best CGI can fool the eye but even the most canny next-gen console or PC programmer will still produce in-game graphics that are recognisably fake.

Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected hacking action-adventure offers virtually nothing new.

Videogames aesthetics are often misleading. There are many examples of beautiful games that have no artistic merit, emotional heft or ludological interest. There are also many examples of ugly games that grip utterly. Of course, the ideal is both simultaneously – and Transistor almost does that.

It's time to talk about time travel. The fourth dimension, as time is sometimes called, represents fertile ground for videogames designers. After all, the shift from side-scrolling two-dimensions (move left, right, jump up, fall down) to three was a huge leap.

It is almost a year since the release of Act II of Cardboard Computer's strange and opaque episodic game but Act III has finally been released. Has it been worth the wait?

There are many admirable things about Child Of Light. It's the game that the core team behind Far Cry 3 – the mega-action, gnarly dude first-person shooter ‑ went on to work on next. Yet, it's difficult to imagine two games further from each other.

The core of a great videogame can sometimes be very simple indeed. The Trials series is based around the idea of leaning back and forward while accelerating and braking on a motorbike. Such simple controls, in this series, are turned into the ability to jump, push, roll and otherwise manoeuvre your lump of engined metal over a series of seemingly impossible obstacles – very much like "trials" riders do in real life.

Noir Syndrome is a procedural detective game. That's to say procedurally-generated rather than a police procedural - the game is designed to create a random mystery for you to solve with each new game, and puts you in the worn-out shoes of a down-at-heel private eye who must catch a serial murderer who is cutting a swathe through the inhabitants of a big city.