We’ve been here before, May last year to be exact. The lead characters are different but the locations look much the same. We’re still swinging on ropes, jumping into duck-and-cover gunplay, searching for lost treasures and solving rudimentary puzzles. But there’s no resentment for this premature trip down memory lane. This is, after all, an Uncharted game, a bulletproof, platinum-plated franchise that, just like a Strictly finalist, tries its hardest not to put a foot wrong.

Once upon a time there was a game called Grand Theft Auto that opened the door to free-roaming open-world games. It spawned a whole load of "me too" offspring, mostly bad, some good. Among the more promising relatives were the Saints Row titles, a more cartoon-esque version of GTA, but still resplendent with anti-hero crime drama and the visceral thrill of running or driving around the mean streets, looking for trouble.

In a recent review on theartsdesk, Stuart Houghton did a thoroughly surgical job of dissecting the ancient argument that video games could never be art, by serving up 10 perfect examples to the contrary.

The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.

Appreciating art involves applauding experimentation, but when you break new ground you don’t always land on your feet. Case in point: Get Even, a game that tells an old story in a new way, and at times, pays a high price for attempting innovation.

It is 2017 and we are still having this conversation: are video games art? We have been using computers to play games for at least 55 years. Arguably the first true computer game, Spacewar!, was developed in 1962 at MIT, although simple games had been played on early mainframe computers as early as the 1950s. The first games with a narrative arrived in the early 1970s.

In 2013, NetherRealm Studios, the creative force behind the multi-million-selling Mortal Kombat franchise, got their hands on the DC Comics character roster and created a highly polished game where superheroes were at war with each other. Lois Lane lay dead amongst the ruins of a post-nuclear Metropolis, where broken city streets hosted pitched battles between a tyrannical Superman administration and a Batman-led insurgency.

Gamers have marched up and down more eerie space station corridors than Alien’s Ripley on Ritalin. From System Shock and Dead Space via Alien Isolation, Space Hulk and The Chronicles of Riddick, most of us have done the hard yards anxiously sprinting passed bits of generic futurist interior design, like Zaha Hadid let loose on Deep Space Nine.

The Arts Desk is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are plenty of private members club in central London, but The Hospital Club is uniquely a creative hub with its own television studio, gallery and performance space, which for certain events are open to non-members.

The latest instalment in this massive open world sci-fi role-playing game joins the 2017 party in full swing, with both Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild raising the bar for the RPG genre. But with the Mass Effect games considered the very cream of the crop, the pressure to perform at a new zenith appears a little too much for a trilogy that looks like it has seen better days.