...and the kitchen sink

Less is rarely more in videogames, where a sequel is only judged to be as good as the number of new bullet points on its announcement press release. Good design, however, is often about what you take out, not what you put in. It’s another example of the awkward spot in which games find themselves: art, yet technology; playthings, but products.

Still, we doubt Bethesda was purposely going for a minimalist design while it was making Fallout 76 (p110). After all, the game represents the publisher’s first foray into the game-as-service arena – a sort-of-genre in which the early, and quite obvious, consensus appears to be that you need to make a massive world and fill it to bursting with things to do in order to keep people playing. Yet Fallout

76 is quiet. Too quiet. Not only by the standards of this en-vogue way of making games, either: it is a good deal emptier, and markedly less interesting, than the singleplayer Fallouts that preceded it.

There is, of course, such a thing as going too far in the other direction, and during the lengthy, painstakingly detailed Direct broadcasts about seemingly every character, mode and idea that has been stuffed into Super Smash

Bros Ultimate (p102), we’ll admit to wondering whether Masahiro Sakurai might have lost the plot. Yet working with 70-plus characters appears to have given Smash’s creator the impetus to make the series’ best instalment to date.

In this, the busiest Play section of the year, perhaps it’s hard to make the argument that less is more. Yet if it’s proof of that you’re after, Tetris Effect has you more than covered. Its component parts are simple: it is Tetris by way of Lumines, and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about one of the most beguiling, surprising and, yes, very best games of the year.