4 GAMES TO PLAY ...
Moonlighter
PC, Xbox One, PS4
By day, Will tends the family shop. By night, he trawls the four regenerating dungeons that lie outside his home of Rynoka. In Moonlighter’s gorgeous action RPG, the challenge is to find a balance between the priorities of each of your lives – as a shopkeeper searching for the most exotic loot to sell for big bucks, and as a hero seeking the most powerful equipment to take on bigger and bigger enemies. It’s a neat dynamic, well supported by satisfying, gently tactical combat and an inventive bestiary of creatures. Overall, Moonlighter creates a charming and unputdownable fantasy.
Arigami: Shadow Edition
PC, Xbox One, PS4
Arigami: Shadow Edition repackages the innovative stealth-’em-up with a new story arc called Nightfall that expands the original narrative. Your hero progresses by manipulating shadows - creating darkness where you need it, teleporting between shadows to bypass guards or gates, even disappearing corpses to avoid detection. Arigami held back the best skills at first but happily, Nightfall provides them immediately, and adds new ones like summoning a teammate to slay distant targets. But the sneaking remains awkward, as your character feels disconnected from the environment, and in restricting how you use your abilities and rewarding point scoring, it plays more like a basic puzzle game wrangled into 3D.
N++ Switch
The stripped-bare aesthetic of N++ provides a very specialised platformer, with none of the usual enemy-bopping, collectible-hunting distractions. You play a stick-figure ninja with a mayfly-esque lifespan of 90 seconds, within which you much leap and bound through an “episode” of five separate rooms, each containing a button that opens a door, lethal obstacles to avoid and scatterings of gold pieces, which provide additional seconds of life. Movement becomes the focus, with the game’s perfectly tuned controls providing surprising depth. Jumps can be short hops or elegantly long arcs, while your trajectory can be finely altered to navigate each deathtrap. With over 4,000 levels and a mode to create your own, N++ is perfectly suited to sharp, satisfying handheld sessions.
Hitman: Definitive Edition PC, ipad/iphone, Mac, Xbox One, PS4, Switch
This bristling cache of campaign missions, special contracts and challenges includes 2016’s next-gen reboot of Hitman and every nugget of DLC. There are dozens of possible missions available (from narrativebased to one-off contracts) but just six individual locations, and success requires repeated visits to study the clockwork movements of each sandbox-like level, all of which are dauntingly dense, populated by crowds of bystanders and full of environmental exploits or opportunities for fatal mischief. There are wonderfully crafty methods of execution to discover, yet in many ways, Agent 47’s newer, more intricately constructed adventures lack the pristine, killer simplicity that provided the real magic to the original Hitman games.