Games of the week
Darkwood
Platform: PC, Mac, Xbox One, PS4, Switch
Genre: Survival
Price: £12.99
Nature bites back in a chilling tale of survival
In Darkwood, you wake to a world consumed by trees and poisonous fungus, where the weak daylight hours are spent hunting down the bare essentials needed to survive the night. Because, unless you have the fuel to keep the lights burning as the sun goes down, darkness will almost certainly spell the end of your brief and brutal life. Many similar games revolve around the day/night survival cycle, but few achieve the oppressive atmosphere and consistent feeling of vulnerability that infuse Darkwood. Despite its top-down visual limitations, this is a brilliantly fearful experience, and one where console controls are surprisingly even more intuitive than those of the 2018 PC original. It will grow on you, but you'll suffer first.
Skip to the end: An uncompromisingly challenging but superbly realised horror.
Score: 9/10
Everybody's Golf VR
Platform: PS4
Genre: Sports
Price: £22.99
Fairway deal
The biggest disappointment of Everybody's Golf VR is the lack of a dedicated peripheral. It's disappointing because the game is so immersive that using the stubby Move controller (or, heaven forbid, a Dualshock) is jarring, and the excellent course environments, brilliantly reliable movement tracking and vibrant visuals feel like they deserve something tailor-made for VR golf. It's a shame too that the cartoonified fun of previous Everybody's Golf games is replaced with a less characterful realism. Though it won't stop you enjoying the forgiving and accessible action, which benefits from a neat interface providing useful swing feedback or course info. Multiplayer would also have been great but Everybody's Golf VR is still the best PSVR game to date.
Skip to the end: Great looking and wonderfully intuitive VR golfing.
Score: 8/10
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark
Platform: PC
Genre: Strategy
Price: £23.99
Agree to disagree
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is an unambitious turn-based battler that sits safely in the mould established best by Final Fantasy Tactics about two decades ago. There's none of the stunning and dramatic flourishes, the lively animation or richly atmospheric narrative of recent strategy games like the Banner Saga, and the flat, 2D-pretending-to-be-3D environments compare poorly to Wartile's gorgeous imitation tabletop battlefields. Meanwhile, the plot is a plodding, inconsistent tale built around hackneyed characters – the doe-eyed rookie, the honest soldier, the corrupt noble – visualised ingame by avatars entirely lacking in personality, something especially clear when facing an army of cookie-cutter enemies. Strategic depth may lie beneath the drab surface but Fell Seal's graceless adventure will not encourage many to find out.
Skip to the end: Uninspiring visuals, dreary story and outdated design.
Score: 5/10
Project Winter
Platform: PC
Genre: Multiplayer
Price: £15.99
Cold comfort
Trapped in an arctic wasteland, you peer at your fellow freezing explorers, except secretly you're out to scupper their plans to call for rescue. Or perhaps you're a genuine survivor, searching the other seven faces for evidence of cruel intentions. This is Project Winter, where eight players (it's online multiplayer only, no solo play) try to work together to repair equipment, fend off wildlife and identify this round's pair of randomly selected bad apples. Sadly the fast pace (rounds last just 30 mins) hinders any slow-burn subversion, leaving Project Winter as more of a high-speed game of finger pointing than a chilling exercise in paranoia.
Skip to the end: A sound idea but leaves no time for suspicions to rise.
Score: 7/10
