At first glance, Rogue Legacy looks like a straight retro platformer in the vein of Castlevania or The Lost Vikings. You must negotiate a castle and other environs made up of floating platforms, floor spikes and fireball-spewing traps while collecting loot hidden in chests or inside the smashable furniture while being harried by varied enemies who mostly follow set paths.
Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of the battlefield as you sprint through mayhem, dodging and weaving. Strategy games, even the realtime modern videogame versions, rely on a cerebral strategising – often sacrificing men as pawns in a broader scheme. Yet fusing these two ideas is exactly what Company of Heroes 2 tries to do and mostly succeeds at.
Act I of Kentucky Route Zero set out a stall of intriguing characters, noirishly low-res visuals and an atmosphere that slid imperceptibly between "eerie" and "magical". Arranged around the core gameplay of a classic point 'n' click adventure (think Monkey Island or Broken Sword) was something that was barely a game at all but rather a sort of magical realist road movie in gaming drag.
Gaming's equivalent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – here we see a post-apocalyptic zombie invasion not as an excuse for all-out gory action, but downbeat introspection, gentle character interaction and moral tests in the face of true, human horror.
The Last Of Us is an absolute must-play game, that doesn't entirely hit every note, but at least aims far higher than most videogames not just in terms of narrative ambition and grown-up storytelling, but also visual and action realism.
Memory is fertile ground for dystopian science fiction. After all, if you can't remember the past properly, if your memories are fake, implanted, then you can't trust your own beliefs or the history that you are being told informs the current political discourse.
Don't Starve is a game about survival. Deposited in a strange land rendered in a playfully creepy style like an Edward Gorey cartoon come to life, you - or rather the intrepid Gentleman Scientist, Wilson - must gather resources, craft tools and find food while avoiding the various nasties that lurk in the dark. “Don't Starve” is both the title and your most immediate task but there is more than just a rumbling tum out to do you in - poisons, werepigs, spiders, tentacles and worse all want a piece of you. The game's real bottom line is a much more broad “don't die”.
Man is, of course, the worst monster of all in this bleak, post-apocalyptic first-person shooter based on the best-selling "Metro" novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro: Last Light, the last few of mankind are bunkered down in the old Moscow Metro stations, while the surface is only briefly navigable with a gasmask, and populated mostly by irradiated mutant creatures.
Controversy is a fickle mistress. When Carmageddon first appeared on PC in 1997, publishers Interplay were forced to cut its copious gore and replace dismembered pedestrians with nice, family-friendly zombies after a publicity-courting submission to the British Board of Film Classification went a bit wrong.
"Avoid missing ball for high score" ‑ possibly some of the most famous and minimal videogame instructions ever, for one of the earliest arcade games, Pong. The instructions for Impossible Road could probably be similarly distilled to such haiku levels of minimalism: "don't let the ball stray too far from the track," perhaps.
An invincible army of cybercommandos, neon-pink pulsing colour schemes and the throbbing sounds of a Morodor-style baseline – Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is every bit the dumb Eighties action game on the surface, but underneath it might actually be one of the most interesting approaches to mainstream gaming in a while.