We’re all connected in this world, don’t you forget it

You might not have noticed, but the outside world isn’t a great place to be at the moment – and not just because of the short days and too-early mornings we expect at this time of year. Games and winters have long gone hand in hand, but with so much bile and disorder out there, there’s never been a better reason to stop indoors with the curtains closed.

Games aren’t just about escapism, however. They are also about healing, and there’s a positive, restorative air to our latest issue. It’s perhaps most obvious in Tetris Effect, which we belatedly review this month. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s latest is a relaxing, cleansing experience that makes you feel a little more positive about the world and your place within it. We also catch up with Yoshiro Kimura, head of Onion Games, maker of the maddest games to come out of Japan in some time. He decided to go it alone as an indie after the Tohoku earthquake left him feeling helpless about how he might make the world better through his work.

This is a medium that’s easy to be cynical about – and indeed, we are often right to be. But perhaps, with everything that’s going on, we should all seek to celebrate games a little more. We could all be a little more like Day Of The Devs, the annual indie festival that we visit this month. It brings together dozens of excellent games, charges developers nothing, and then lets the people of San Francisco play all day for free.

If it’s a celebration of games and all they can offer us you want, though, look no further than Nintendo. This month we dig into how, in the space of 18 months, Switch has come to embody all that is good about today’s game industry. And we review Super Smash Bros Ultimate, a game that began as a celebration of Nintendo’s IP portfolio, but is now a love letter to the medium as a whole, borrowing and riffing on a host of big names and cult classics, creator Masahiro Sakurai exploiting his deep knowledge of games to the fullest. It’s impossible to play without smiling, but if it’s all the same to you, we’ll keep the curtains closed. It’s bloody Arctic out there.