20 Wanderstop

**Ivy Road/Annapurna Interactive; PC, PS5, Xbox **An arena warrior on a losing streak takes refuge in a vast forest where she discovers the joy of working in a cosy teashop. From this simple premise comes a joyful game of mindfulness and social interaction, as Alta learns how to serve up witty conversation and decent hot drinks. Colourful and highly stylised, it is a thoughtful study of burnout and recovery.

19 Expelled!

Class conscious … Expelled! Photograph: Inkle

**Inkle/Nintendo Switch, iPhone/iPad, Mac, PC **An attempted-murder mystery set in an a 1920s all-girls private school reveals itself to also be an eviscerating takedown of British class politics. Witty and beautifully drawn, it is full of amusing boarding-school stereotypes, from self-interested prefects to a terrifying matron, whose motivations and personal grievances must be slowly unpicked. It has the feel of a really excellent graphic novel.

18 Hades 2

Supergiant Games, PC, Switch A stylish return to Greek mythology for developer Supergiant Games, this time starring daughter of the underworld Melinoë, who is trying to prevent the titan Chronos from destroying everything. You are aided in your attempts to kill Time by a range of absurdly attractive fellow immortals and vicious familiars. Repeated runs bring gradual mastery of Melinoë’s spells and weapons, tipping the scales of fate ever so slightly in your favour.

17 Grunn

Sokpop Collectiv, PC A gardening sim that’s also a horror adventure, Grunn is a weird, often unsettling experiment in game design, set in a Dutch village inhabited by ghostly figures and intriguing secrets. Trim the lawn, collect photos, but be extremely careful when visiting the church or exploring that weird bunker beyond the hedgerow.

16 Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders

Pristine … Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders. Photograph: Megagon Industries

Megagon Industries, PC, Xbox All is well with the world as you carve beautiful lines down pristine mountain snowscapes – until you smack into a rock or fly off a cliff, that is. Minimalist in both its aesthetic and its simple, stripped-back play, this is one of the best games ever made about skiing. Playing with other people adds a little enjoyable chaos to the experience, but Snow Riders is best when it’s just you and the mountain, and you’re testing your perseverance against a particularly challenging trail.

15 Donkey Kong Banananza

Nintendo, Switch 2 Nintendo’s favourite ape returns in a wild take on the classic platform adventure, accompanied by series regular Pauline, who is able to attain shapeshifting magical powers. Instead of pixel-perfect jumps, you punch, crunch and blast your way through exotic locations, collecting power-ups and pulverising bosses, tearing up the Super Mario level design book as you go. Smashing.

14 Monster Hunter Wilds

Capcom, PC, PS5, Xbox Capcom’s spectacular monsters, from fluffy pink snarling apes to elder dragons that command lightning, have long been waiting for a world big enough to contain them. Wilds is that world: an expanse of desert, volcanic plains, jungle and icy peaks that provides the perfect habitats for an extraordinary, dangerous menagerie – and perfect arenas in which to fight them. The story is a thrill ride of escalatingly epic face-offs, but afterwards it opens up a vast menu of more challenging hunts.

13 Split Fiction

Hazlelight Studios/Electronic Arts, PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Two aspiring writers become trapped in each others’ stories in this eminently likable interactive take on buddy comedy. Except they’re not buddies: they’re polar opposites. Standoffish sci-fi writer Mio and happy-go-lucky fantasy writer Zoe come to understand each other better as they are forced to cooperate their way through the bizarre realms of their imagination Play transforms unpredictably every 20 minutes - one level could be all-action space-blasting, the next will have you puzzling through a fantasy jungle as transforming animals, and an unexpected diversion will have you working together to wriggle sentient hotdogs into buns. You’ll be brought closer to your player two as well, as navigating these collaborative scenarios requires communication, patience, and a sense of humour.

12 The Alters

Looks familiar … The Alters. Photograph: 11 bit studios

11Bit Studios, PC, PS5, Xbox After crash-landing on a planet supposedly rich in a valuable mineral, Jan Dolski finds himself all alone. The rest of the crew died on impact. So to keep the mission going, and escape an imminent sunrise that will fry him out of existence, he must clone himself to create a crew. After twenty-ish hours split between exploring a hostile planet, managing the base’s resources and managing the squabbles between all the alternate Jans, you will be left with a lot to ponder about how our life choices shape who we are.

11 Despelote

Panic, PC, PS4/5, Switch, Xbox Set at the time of Ecuador’s journey to the 2002 World Cup finals, Despelote is a beautifully designed semi-autobiographical adventure about a young boy and his obsession with the beautiful game. Focusing on families, childhood and the uniting power of fandom, it’s a unique take on the idea of a sports sim.

10 Two Point Museum

A lot to manage … Two Point Museum. Photograph: Sega

Two Point Studios/Sega, PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox The Two Point series of management sims has consistently combined humour and deep strategy to compelling effect, and the latest is no exception. Your role as museum manager is to gather exhibits from around the world then display them in an attractive setting to pull in visitors. Meanwhile there are staffing issues to contend with, and is your cafe serving nice enough snacks? It’s an engrossing challenge and the cartoon-style visuals provide plenty of amusing asides.

9 Ghost of Yotei

Sucker Punch/Sony, PS5 A deliciously easy to enjoy and arrestingly beautiful samurai action game about a female warrior, Atsu, on a revenge quest, which unselfconsciously reproduces every possible trope of the genre, with panache. We have tense sword stand-offs under falling leaves. We have enemies eyeing each other menacingly from either side of a burning bridge. We have hot springs, shrines and quiet moments playing the shamisen or wielding a sumi-e ink brush. We have wolves and foxes leading us to secret spots in nature. And we have a selection of delightfully fun weapons and a seemingly endless horde of bandits and villains to use them on. Uncomplicated, beautifully made entertainment.

8 Death Stranding 2

Kojima Productions/Sony, PS5 Troubled delivery man and resistance hero Sam Bridges returns in Hideo Kojima’s visually astonishing, eccentric and engrossing sci-fi sequel. Moving the action to an apocalyptic Australia provides landscapes of stark beauty – and the odd kangaroo. And while the story is often indecipherable, the realisation of Kojima’s ghostly universe is incredible. This is a wasteland you can wallow in for months.

7 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Extravagantly French … Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Photograph: Sandfall Interactive

Sandfall/Keplar, PC, PS5, Xbox An extravagantly French role-playing game in which a band of depressed people from a ravaged Paris set out to kill a supernatural painter, who wipes out a generation of people with a few strokes of her brush each year. It is surreal, exciting, melodramatic, sometimes self-indulgent, and strangely hopeful – a breath of fresh air even in a genre that’s hardly starved of stylish, thematically ambitious games.

6 Consume Me

Hexecutable, PC A satirical slice-of-life game about life as a dieting-obsessed teen in the 00s, Consume Me is extremely funny *and *has a point to make. Juggling studies with social time and walking the dog, Tetris-ing food on to your plate and and enduring excruciating conversations with your parents, all makes you properly relive the overwhelm and pressure of adolescent life. The presentation, meanwhile, is exuberantly, lovably absurd.

5 Mario Kart World

Delightful … Mario Kart World on Nintendo Switch 2. Photograph: Nintendo

Nintendo, Switch 2 The showcase title for the Switch 2 is another glorious addition to the Mario Kart universe, boasting a delightful cast of characters and 30 varied circuits joined by a network of highways that provide the chance to explore a wide open landscape for the first time in the series. Add in the wonderful soundtrack of electronic lounge jazz pop bangers and you have another family gaming staple that will remain on rotation for years.

4 The Seance of Blake Manor

Spooky Doorway/Raw Fury, PC It’s the late 19th century and you’ve just arrived at a remote hotel in the west of Ireland to investigate the disappearance of a young woman. But as you dig for clues, the dead emerge from their graves – and they’re really not happy. Part Agatha Christie detective sim, part folk-horror opus, this is a fascinating and engrossing experience that has things to say about class, belief and colonialism.

3 Silent Hill f

Spectral nightmare …Silent Hill f. Photograph: Konami

NeoBards/Konami, PC, PS5, Xbox In 1960s Japan, a young girl’s fury at her bullying father becomes a spectral nightmare that consumes a whole town. Written by acclaimed visual novel author Ryukishi07, the game puts you in familiar Silent Hill territory, which means foggy streets, fiendish puzzles and truly horrible monsters. But by infusing the uncanny, mythology and superstition with feminist themes, it is an intriguing slant on a much loved (and feared) series.

2 Hollow Knight: Silksong

Team Cherry, PC, PS4/5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Even the most tenacious player will feel like giving up at some point while trapped in Pharloom, a decaying realm full of desperate little bugs that was once a gleaming religious capital. Here lie some truly wretched places: former farms now fetid swamps, dank underground caverns overgrown with moss and misery, grand halls now dust-covered and reverberating with foreboding. And of course there are the guardians of these places, from mind-rotted beast-tamers to corrupted pilgrims and bug-automatons, silk-poisoned creatures and the realm’s former rulers, who stand in the way of your progress. Silksong’s most forbidding foes take hours to overcome. Its worst places will entrap you in despair. But it is worth it, because of the awe-inspiring moments that you will experience along the way: the hard-won victories, those first steps into previously locked-off realms, the secret revelations that seem so personal it’s hard to believe that any of the game’s millions of other players could discover them the same way. An extraordinary game whose sometimes extreme difficulty is both a strength and a weakness.

1 Blue Prince

Unforgettably clever … Blue Prince. Photograph: Raw Fury

Dogubomb/Raw Fury, PC, PS5, Xbox A young man inherits a mysterious mansion from his uncle: a sprawling pile whose layout changes every day. He needs only to find the secret 46th room, and the place is his for ever. The mansion turns out to be an education: on the personal history of the family that owned it, the mysterious forces that shaped it and the political climate of the wider world in which it is situated. But before you get anywhere near Blue Prince’s deeper mysteries, you must master its blueprints. Behind every door is a choice: do you draft a library? A hallway with several exits? A security room, a laboratory, a pool, a bedroom, a nursery, a drawing room? Each will have its own secrets to discover, a useful item or a key or a new piece of information that gets you ever closer to that elusive 46th room. And each might offer you a new path to the rest of the mansion, or locked doors that you haven’t the means to pass. Every day, with every new route that you carve through these rooms, every dead end you meet, your knowledge accumulates. By the time you do reach that final destination, you’ll have so many unanswered questions, you won’t be able to resist continuing. Blue Prince turns out to be an almost bottomless mystery, leaving you with pads full of notes, theories, numbers and names, lines from books that you want to remember and drawings of strange mechanisms. It is among the best puzzle games ever made: atmospheric and understated and unforgettably clever; still somehow able to show you something new even after tens of hours of patient exploration.