A tidy, English village. Swings hang in the breeze, a bicycle's discarded by a phone box, smoke curls over an ashtray in the pub garden. But no one's here. No one's ever coming back.
Sneak in, get the jewels, don't be seen. It should all be so simple. No, it really should be all so simple – because Mike "Thomas Was Alone" Bithell's second solo game does best when it keeps things simple and sticks to its purist gameplay guns. The problem is on top Bithell has layered phoned-in A-list celeb voice-acting, top-heavy thematic concepts and an attempt to retell the Robin Hood story in a YouTube and Twitch age.
A common tactic among games developers is to take a very simple game and dress it up with graphical frills until it appears special. There are any number of classic games that have been cloned and tarted up with a 3D makeover or rebadged with licensed characters to attract a new generation of players but few that manage to keep that audience for long.
On TV, the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones is usually the most shocking and pivotal. In the game? Maybe not so much.
It begins so gently. Initially, Prune is a slow-paced and simple puzzle game – you stroke the screen to start growing a tree, then encourage it to bloom by pruning away errant branches with finger-swipes. It's simple, but beautiful and calming. That doesn't last, though.
Wordlessly, the game gradually ups the tension. The trees you're growing are so delicate, so beautiful. And the world you're growing them in is so inhospitable. The only puzzle is how to encourage your tree upwards towards the light, where it can flower sufficiently to pass the level.
Congratulations, Krams. After three long years of chapter by chapter instalments, the epic fairytale is complete. Fans who have been following the wanderings of the heavily sedated Anna and her companions since 2012 can now see the whole story in context, and new players can see an end in sight, which is helpful because playing through the first chapter is akin to pulling teeth.
If the interface is simple, the story it gradually reveals is anything but. Her Story is an absolutely stunning piece of interactive storytelling, taking in murder, identity, history, yet driven simply by you typing a word or two into a search bar. You're presented with a beautifully rendered and retro computer screen – the kind of thing you'd expect to see coppers in The Bill tapping into. You simply decide what "search term(s)" you want, then hit go, and in return you get videos.
A throat-slitting, daredevil samurai in a motorbike helmet out for bloody vengeance against their enemies, flying through the air. Sounds like an action game, looks like an action game, plays like a puzzler.
Ronin steals liberally from the side-scrolling brilliance of Gunpoint. Similarly to that game, the ninja/samurai/motorbiker hero here must break into semi-lit buildings – jumping through windows, stealing keys to get in through locked doors and always slashing through groups of enemy guards to get to the bosses the samurai is out to bring down.
At first glance, Desktop Dungeons is a slick update on the classic "roguelike" dungeon adventure. You move your hero around a maze of passages, carefully juggling your resources as you attempt to survive in a turn-based battle of tactics and wits.
At second glance, Desktop Dungeons seems a bit rubbish. The enemies don’t attack you unless you attack them first and you restart each dungeon with a brand new character that you must laboriously level-up until it is strong enough to defeat the final boss.
You crouch atop a gothic skyscraper, barely distinguishable from the gargoyles you're surrounded by. A rainy sheen dimly reflects off your armour. Your cape flaps and cracks in the wind. You dive into the city… The Arkham game series has at least delivered a real chance to "be" Batman. But as each has gone on, and your moves list, your gadget bag, the city you roam and the things you can do has got larger and longer, the series has increasingly lost its way. Arkham Knight is simultaneously the worst and best of the series – perhaps a fitting finale, then.