One minute, you’re exploring space, the next minute you’re playing golf with a sentient ball of cheese. Every level is brimming with personality and each plays out differently to the last. If you take too long, Pizzaface will arrive and kill you instantly if he touches you. Your aim is to get to the support pillar named John and destroy him, then run back through the same level you just did as it crumbles around you and a timer closes in at an uncomfortable rate. You can’t die, but getting hurt reduces your score. It’s a fast, frantic 2D platformer where you play as a scared middle-aged Italian pizza chef and have to ascend a tower full of pizza-inspired levels full of pizza-inspired enemies and destroy its supports so that a giant pizza face called Pizzaface can’t destroy your pizzeria with a giant laser. Pizza Tower is like no other game I’ve played.

This open-world approach makes titles like Witcher III look woeful in comparison. Something you think won’t work … actually does! Scaling the heights for the first dungeon, up in the air above Rito, remains one of the most jaw-dropping moments I’ve ever experienced in over 35 years of gaming. Tears of the Kingdom is liberating as the player’s imagination and bravery is rewarded. Which is what 99.9% of AAA games dedicate all available resources to these days – and why so many of them are bland, boring, and redundant. Importantly, for a game from a large publisher, it doesn’t push boundaries simply by having the latest cutting-edge graphics. It’s quite an achievement to improve on Breath of the Wild, but here it is. Paul, Stuttgart, Germany The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Minter, over his long career, has had a knack of creating games which are just fun – you can play it for five minutes and have a blast or play it for five hours and lose yourself.

It can be as relaxing or complex as you want it to be. Trademark Llamasoft visuals: black background, blocky text, simple geometrics, coupled with modern psychedelic particle effects – with a trance soundtrack – produce a game that combines tower-defence strategy and arcade shooting. Atari asked the legendary Jeff Minter (and Giles) of Llamasoft to reimagine the game and what they’ve come up with is pure arcade bliss. Photograph: Capcom Akka ArrhĪkka Arrh is a modern take on a 1980s Atari arcade machine that was never released. ‘An atmosphere steeped in dread’ … Resident Evil 4.

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