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For all the countless millions spent on publicity for Bungie's "shared world shooter" Destiny - for all the phrases like "shared world shooter" it has contributed to the video game world's industrious output of meaningless buzzwords - the developer and its publisher Activision have repeatedly failed to communicate exactly what this game is. This is hardly because it is such a novel concept that it has to be experienced to be understood. It's not. It's because they have been reluctant to use the elevator pitch that surely convinced Activision's top brass to open their chequebooks in the first place: "What if World of Warcraft looked and played like Halo?"

Early childhood is a daunting time, full of unfamiliar experiences, bewildering potential and the very real possibility that there are monsters living under the bed. Murasaki Baby neatly encapsulates all of these characteristics, along with the notion that childhood is when most parents stand as infallible bastions of safety and comfort. As such, your overarching goal is to reunite Baby with her mother, but that's a bit like saying that the point of Journey is to reach the top of a mountain.

The latest experiment to pop out of Double Fine is built around a pun so brilliant and so obvious, you wonder why nobody has done it before.

I perform a sort of dance in the desert, careful where I tread. It's a slow dance, in part because there are mines scattered about - so many mines - but also because any misstep I make could offer a dangerous opportunity, could present a sudden vulnerability. The partner I dance opposite is ready to pounce and I never quite know whether to feint, to pause, or whether it's finally, finally the moment where I should make my move.

It's a sad testament to the state of modern game design that the larger publishers can essentially reskin familiar mechanics with different characters and then pat themselves on the back for being brave enough to launch "new IP" onto the market.

Fashion is cyclical, circling in dependable 20-year loops that enable clothes-makers to sell styles back to us that, not so long ago, they insisted were outmoded. This freshening cycle may yet be replicated in video games: NES-era pixel-art has enjoyed a long and profitable revival, particularly within indie games, where the aesthetic has provided other, technical advantages to the semi-professional game-maker. Astebreed, a lavish indie game from the Japanese studio Edelweiss, is one of the first to suggest a new dawn in indie-game fashion: a return to the coarse polygons of the 32-bit era, when Sega's Saturn and Sony's PlayStation boldly explored the potential of 3D art.

It begins without fanfare; a list of computer commands projected against a sea of cloud. There's no cut-scene or plotting, nor the slightest indication of the brilliance to come. Instead, your robot avatar is shown a simple garden and bid seek a temple by the booming voice of a supposed god. In short order, you grasp the necessity of spatial reasoning through the first-person perspective, then the binary function of electrical jammers that disable barriers and lethal security systems. No formal tutorial is offered and none is required; like a child with a set of building blocks you learn through play.

How wonderful it is to have F-Zero back. There's plenty of fan service in the first DLC pack for Mario Kart 8, but none of it hits quite as hard as the once-forgotten series' slight return, its anti-grav track winding blissfully through Nintendo's hyper-clean vision of the future. The newly introduced race through Hyrule Castle might hit some high notes, sure, but we get to walk between these parapets every other year. The steel-blue metropolis of Mute City has been lost to home consoles for well over a decade.

The Binding of Isaac is a game about child abuse, both mythological and semi-autobiographical. While its numerous opaque endings are open to interpretation, there is no way to shy away from its distressing foundational theme. It's alluded to in the game's title, borrowed from the myth that features in all three major monotheistic religions in which Abraham comes close to sacrificing his bewildered child, Isaac. And it's made explicit in the game's introductory sequence, which depicts a young boy being chased by his zealot mother, who has been driven to fanaticism by a diet of religious TV and now wants to cleanse her son of his sin with the aid of a carving knife. The eponymous Isaac flees his parent and retreats into the basement beneath the family's house, where responsibility for his safety passes to us.

PES 2015's debut on the new generation of hardware serves as the perfect antidote to fans who lost faith during the previous console switchover. The FIFA juggernaut has rolled on well beyond the point Konami's series could last count itself holder of virtual football's Ballon d'Or. Dedicated players have converted, and an entire generation has moved on to EA Sports' series. PES 2015, however, storms onto the pitch, flag in tow, ready to go full Souness on its major rival.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Almost Human's sequel to its 2012 indie RPG hit is how confidently it strikes a balance between freedom and constraint. The most immediately obvious change is the switch from the gloomy interior of a mountain prison to a sun-kissed, but no less sinister island.

Bayonetta 2's main theme is as good as it gets, and as good a place as any to start when it comes to talking about Platinum Games' Wii U exclusive. A sugar-rush of melodramatic keyboard stabs and a high-impact, snap-happy backbeat, it's chaos held together by irresistibly sassy vocals and a killer of a chorus. "You won't know what hit you when I spin around with you in my dust - Bang bang! Down down!" It gets me every time.

Mobile games! Remember them? They used to be the future of all this, but then a few things happened. First of all it turned out that the autorunner was not the start of a wave of new and exciting genres but pretty much the end of them. Then the businessmen and cloners moved in and turned pretty much everything else into exploitative crap. There are still a few people out there doing good mobile work, but usually more for the love than the sustainable income.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter begins by telling you that it is not going to hold your hand, and it is true to its word. As you emerge from a railway tunnel into an area of woodland in the shoes of detective Paul Prospero, there is no convenient low branch under which you must PRESS CTRL TO CROUCH, nor any low walls inviting you to PRESS SPACE TO JUMP. As far as the developer, Adrian Chmielarz's The Astronauts, is concerned, you can look up the buttons and then figure it out on your own. When you do, you discover there is no jumping in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter whatsoever. It's not that sort of game.

It's a counterintuitive truth about the current, strange state of racing games that drier simulation racers have endured - games like Gran Turismo, its opposite number Forza Motorsport, and the thriving PC sim scene - while the appetite for more flashy, exciting and accessible games seems to have dried up. This year, even EA's mass-market stalwart Need for Speed will be missing its first Christmas since 2001. That's all very well for enthusiasts like me, but the genre as a whole is in danger of entrenchment and exclusion - of losing sight of something as simple and important as sheer entertainment value.

Hohokum's scenes are unfamiliar - beguilingly so. In one, a tall violinist plays a melancholic tune while he stands under the throbbing light of a lamppost. His squat buddy sings full-throated by his side while, overhead, the buckshot stars wink approvingly. In another, an Indian elephant with a deep underbite plods through the jungle while a caged albino orangutan dangles from his tail, praying to be freed. Elsewhere, a businessman sits in the belly of a vast and complicated Heath Robinson-esque machine, waiting for bees to drop honey into its pipes which will travel through the tubing and, finally, be deposited in his coffee cup as a steaming drink. These are fever-dream vistas - the kind of places you wonder whether you've remembered wrongly, whether you were ever really there at all.

I expect Deranged Cultists and Accursed Hellions whenever I wander into the Sundered Canyon, but this guy was clearly something else entirely. He looked like Giger's Alien for starters, and he warped in accompanied by too much fanfare and a sprightly burst of red mist. As he lunged at me, I sensed that in amongst the echoing grandeur that accompanies a war between heaven and hell, this particular brawl was personal. So personal, in fact, that I had better pay full attention to it and stop checking my email.

I can think of no finer compliment to pay Divinity: Original Sin than this: while it was rarely in danger of not being my favourite Ultima-inspired game since Ultima 7, it's the first one I can say - not without a lot of guilt, mind - that I might have enjoyed more than its inspiration. You'd think that nothing could live up to 20 years of fondness for a beloved game whose crap bits have long been mentally erased - and yet if Original Sin has a few rough edges smoothed off by patches in the near future, it's got a real shot at the title.

If Forza Horizon 2 was a Bestival for cars, all sun-kissed fields and long, breezy summer days, then Storm Island, Playground Games' first downloadable expansion for its Xbox One exclusive, is their Glastonbury; where the mud churns and the rain tumbles down while the wind whistles noisily through the trees.

Would you whine about the lack of a cup holder in a LaFerrari? There's little point griping over the absence of certain luxuries in Ferrari's most recent, most excessive hypercar, and - if you're ever lucky enough to find yourself in one of those exotic cockpits - your only concerns should be the 900bhp that's under your right foot and the suite of wonderful tools constructed in Maranello to help you apply all of that power to the tarmac. Different cars have different purposes, and it's often more enlightening to assess how well they fulfil their own goals than to attempt a dry appraisal of the whole package.

Spelling matters. Take, by way of a convenient example, the word "woah". A slang term, popularised by the great sage Keanu Reeves, it is used to express surprise, delight and excitement. However, shuffle those same letters around a little and you get "whoa", which is horse language for "stop".

Mario's latest outing does some clever stuff with the Wii U's multiple screens, but it's worth taking a moment to appreciate what it gets up to with good old-fashioned maps, too. The plumber's new 2D adventure sees the return of the fully-fledged world map, last seen in the 16-bit era. Islands, forests, babbling brooks and tidy oceans: the Mario atlas is back in fine, charismatic form, ditching the mostly-linear corridors of recent over-worlds in favour of a cluster of colourful, interconnected continents. It stitches dozens of scattershot stages together into a mad, sprawling and yet oddly convincing whole.

One of hip-hop's most famous shout-outs to video games got a cruel update earlier this month. "It used to be Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis," raps Scroobius Pip as he riffs off Biggie Small's Juicy, "but Sega went and choked man, I couldn't picture this."

ZombiU is a re-imagining of the very first game that Ubisoft ever published, and represents a back-to-basics approach of the best kind. No timid attempt at carving off a slice of the bloated zombie market, ZombiU takes a new path - one that cuts a swathe through the horde. If it's not quite perfect then that's no terrible criticism, and whatever else, it is one hell of a launch title.

There have been a few missteps along the way, but in general the last decade of Lego games made by Traveller's Tales have been fantastic. The innate qualities of Lego - its universally understood design, its magnetic tactility and its inspirational capacity to be anything you can imagine - have been hitched to the deep worlds of licensed properties like Star Wars, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, and brought to life by the magical potential for games to let players build and destroy things in seconds, whatever the scale. It's become the formula where everyone wins.

Monster Hunter has never enjoyed much western success - and we're the losers. Of all Capcom's modern series, this co-operative action-RPG is one of the deepest, funniest and most rewarding. It lacks the nostalgia and immediacy of Street Fighter 4 or the big-budget production values of Resident Evil, but has something at its core that I find more fulfilling. Call it camaraderie, the rush of a team sport played well - with a sideline in snazzy uniforms.

Legend has it that the Pikmin series began life as its creator's response to starting a garden. In truth, though, it feels more like his response to starting a family. This is a game built of empathy and responsibility - a game about exploring a familiar world from an unfamiliar, childlike vantage point, and about trying to ensure that the equally childlike characters who assist you on the journey come to no harm along the way.

Here's your litmus test: Ego the Living Planet is bobbing around in the corner of the start screen for the latest Lego game. Ego is a deeply obscure 1960s Marvel character, a giant sentient planet with a moustache. And he's in this game, if only fleetingly. That's the level of silly Silver Age nerd bait on offer here. If this news makes you grin like an idiot, then this game is for you.

At some point, we'll all probably hit rock bottom, be it through a break-up, divorce, death, poverty or physical injury. Whether we've hit that point in our life or not, we all sort of know it's coming. Eventually. The threat of tragedy hangs over our lives as a curious thing, a distant idea we toy with when we're feeling particularly masochistic. Always Sometimes Monsters is about those moments and the things people can or will do when backed into a corner and left to wallow in their desperation.

Transistor isn't the first game to put its soul into its sword, but it is the first to be quite so transparent about it. Hundreds of action RPGs have already made it clear that the heft and feel of a blade is the focal point for so many loving tweaks and balances, yet Transistor also allows its eponymous weapon to narrate the storyline and play a crucial role in how it unfolds. In the city of Cloudbank, silenced songstress Red stands over the body of a man whose life has been transferred into the perspex skewer that now sticks out of his chest. Draw the sword and start the adventure. Hundreds of games do this stuff too, but none do it in quite this way.