PERSONAL PICK

Robin Valentine

DORFROMANTIK

This year I was really looking for videogames to be my calm, chill escape from an increasingly weird and stressful reality. So you can understand why I fell so in love with this gentle puzzle game about building idyllic little countryside towns, one tile at a time. I’m terrible at actually scoring points, but I’m always completing the true objective: creating a place I’d love to go on holiday.

Wesley Fenlon

CRUELTY SQUAD

Surely the result of a food poisoning fever dream, Cruelty Squad also gleefully aims to depict what rancid sushi does to your body as a first-person shooter. Playing Cruelty Squad is bathing in wall-to-wall puke textures and embracing the filthiness of a hypercapitalist existence where you sell body parts on the stock exchange and use your own intestines as a grappling hook. The open-ended missions are a genuine treat to puzzle out.

Lauren Aitken

ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA: WRATH OF THE DRUIDS

I haven’t had a lot of time to play games in 2021, so it’s unsurprising that my GOTY is actually some DLC. Wrath of the Druids took Eivor