Gaming's equivalent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – here we see a post-apocalyptic zombie invasion not as an excuse for all-out gory action, but downbeat introspection, gentle character interaction and moral tests in the face of true, human horror.The Last Of Us is an absolute must-play game, that doesn't entirely hit every note, but at least aims far higher than most videogames not just in terms of narrative ambition and grown-up storytelling, but also visual and action realism.The story is of hardened survivor Joel, who ends up grudgingly entrusted with the care of teen Ellie. She was born Read more ...

Memory is fertile ground for dystopian science fiction. After all, if you can't remember the past properly, if your memories are fake, implanted, then you can't trust your own beliefs or the history that you are being told informs the current political discourse.Charlie Brooker's excellent Black Mirror series looked at this with "The Entire History Of You" episode and science fiction writer (and paranoid schizophrenic) Philip K Dick was a master of memory games ‑ see both Total Recall and Bladerunner. At the core of Remember Me is a brilliant, interactive take on implanted memories.Nilin is Read more ...

Don't Starve is a game about survival. Deposited in a strange land rendered in a playfully creepy style like an Edward Gorey cartoon come to life, you - or rather the intrepid Gentleman Scientist, Wilson - must gather resources, craft tools and find food while avoiding the various nasties that lurk in the dark. “Don't Starve” is both the title and your most immediate task but there is more than just a rumbling tum out to do you in - poisons, werepigs, spiders, tentacles and worse all want a piece of you. The game's real bottom line is a much more broad “don't die”.If you read the above and Read more ...

Man is, of course, the worst monster of all in this bleak, post-apocalyptic first-person shooter based on the best-selling "Metro" novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro: Last Light, the last few of mankind are bunkered down in the old Moscow Metro stations, while the surface is only briefly navigable with a gasmask, and populated mostly by irradiated mutant creatures.If this was a Hollywood treatment of post-apocalypse woe, humanity would unite in the face of such horrors. Here, the survivors have splintered into factions based on past ideologies – busy tearing each other to Read more ...

Controversy is a fickle mistress. When Carmageddon first appeared on PC in 1997, publishers Interplay were forced to cut its copious gore and replace dismembered pedestrians with nice, family-friendly zombies after a publicity-courting submission to the British Board of Film Classification went a bit wrong.Despite the changes - and thanks to some easily installed patches to put the blood back in - the game was still shocking and salacious enough to sell over two million copies and spawn ports for numerous consoles plus a sequel and several add-on packs. Sixteen years on, Carmageddon has Read more ...

"Avoid missing ball for high score" ‑ possibly some of the most famous and minimal videogame instructions ever, for one of the earliest arcade games, Pong. The instructions for Impossible Road could probably be similarly distilled to such haiku levels of minimalism: "don't let the ball stray too far from the track," perhaps.Impossible Road initially appears to be one of the popular "endless running" handheld games typified by titles including Canabalt, Temple Run and Tiny Wings. Games of this genre see you tapping screens in various ways to dodge, overcome or move round obstacles as your Read more ...

An invincible army of cybercommandos, neon-pink pulsing colour schemes and the throbbing sounds of a Morodor-style baseline – Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is every bit the dumb Eighties action game on the surface, but underneath it might actually be one of the most interesting approaches to mainstream gaming in a while.Blood Dragon is "downloadable content" – an extra expansion pack served up after the main event (the game of the year, Far Cry 3). The phrase is normally a dire enough idea it should send gamers scurrying in the opposite direction.Most downloadable content packs are hastily- Read more ...

It has to have been the trailer, there's really no other explanation. Before the original Dead Island came out, there was a trailer. And not just a trailer, but the trailer – probably the most finely-crafted, greatest piece of teaser content ever created for film, TV or games. It's the only possible reason why Dead Island sold as well as it did... and unfortunately, there isn't a similarly brilliant trailer for its sequel, Riptide.The original trailer (see it here) used some beautifully heart-tugging music and a time-running-backwards schtick to pick apart a holidaying family's descent into Read more ...

After a long break from thievery – both in the real world and in the anthropomorphic universe he calls home – dapper gentleraccoon thief Sly Cooper is back doing what he does best: pinching things. It's been eight years since Sly and the gang pinched things in the globe-hopping PlayStation 2 caper Sly 3, and now he's returned to a more powerful console and with a different developer – can the ageing mascot still hack it in the modern day?Well, yes and no. The good news is that this is unmistakeably a Sly Cooper game, with all the jumping, sneaking, fighting and minigameing we've come to Read more ...

The bassline starts, "1979" flashes up on screen and, over a scratchy recording, the voice intones "Walking down the street, I get punched; you're walking down the street, you get punched".PunksNotDead's not going to hold your attention for more than a few minutes, but in those few minutes, this hyperkinetic, luridly day-glo explosion of punk attitude and violence encapsulates everything that's great about the indie games scene – it's the ideas, stupid (and they're free).PunksNotDead sees your stickman ambling along a street filled with fluoro-pink people, cars and lampposts, except some of Read more ...

It’s easy to understand, while you’re being chastised by a pair of psychedelically coloured elephant-like beings over your inability to collect enough coins, why this new game from indie developer Jake Clover has been described as the most WTF game ever.Aboard the spaceship Sluggish Morss, bound for a planet called Sedno Keir, your character (a pink mole-like being who is constantly smoking and languidly lounging) is disturbed from their reggae reverie by a pair of Technicolored elephants, who order you to collect coins which will lead you on a journey to find out just WTF is going on.As you Read more ...

We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.The result is both hugely satisfying to play from a hind-brain, hand-eye coordination point-of-view, but Read more ...