Elements of the past, and elements of the future

There’s a distinctly nostalgic feel to this month’s review selection. Let’s start with Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, a disarming throwback from its pixelart aesthetic to a title that wouldn’t have looked out of place during the early Britsoft era. Yet with its contemporary sense of humour and offbeat twists to action-adventure formulas, it serves up a fruitful blend of old and new.

But not every game nails that balance. Oddworld: Soulstorm revisits 1998’s Abe’s Exoddus, yet its ‘2.9D’ perspective muddies the recipe, while cludgy controls and questionable physics mean it lacks the original’s precision in its exacting puzzle-platforming. Mages’ Famicom Detective Club remakes on Switch have the opposite problem: the visual overhaul is certainly welcome, but they’re otherwise too faithful to the originals’ archaic designs.

Yet Nintendo gets it very right with New Pokémon Snap. The trick, in this instance, is to recognise that the original design didn’t get much wrong, the embellishments to this much-loved N64 spin-off merely bringing it in line with modern expectations. Housemarque’s Returnal, meanwhile, draws upon the studio’s technical expertise (honed during its demoscene days) and its bullet-hell heritage, delivering a bleeding-edge Roguelike with one foot in the arcade.

The month’s biggest game, Resident Evil Village, is indebted to its own past – nodding to Resi 4 with its setting and its enigmatic merchant, and the seventh mainline entry with its firstperson perspective and returning protagonist Ethan Winters. Does it succeed? Well, that would be telling. Time, we reckon, to buck this month’s trend and give you a reason to look forward. Turn the page for our verdict.