As I mentioned the other week, I've been playing through a PlayStation 1-style, low-poly horror game called Crow Country. They're too intense, and full of unpleasant surprises – I even played The Last of Us with a text walkthrough to tell me when the fungal zombies were going to appear. For last year's critical darling Alan Wake 2, I recruited my partner so I could hand over the controller whenever I felt like something was about to jump out at me. Like Alan Wake 2, a section of Crow Country is set in an abandoned theme park – a well-worn horror setting (Max Payne did it too, as did Left 4 Dead), but one that still reliably freaks me out. Unlike Alan Wake 2, I didn't need my partner to shield my eyes.

With classic oblivious timing, Nintendo chose 10 March – or Mar10 day, as the company likes to style it – to announce that it is working with Illumination Studios on another Mario movie, even though it was the Oscars that day and absolutely nobody was paying attention. Last year's Mario movie was a smash hit, grossing 1bn and finally ending the long era of the cursed video game film adaptation once and for all, so it's not surprising that another one is in the works for April 2026. What is surprising is that it's not necessarily going to be a direct sequel. Co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and writer Matthew Fogel will return, but neither Nintendo nor Illumination committed to calling the new film a sequel. In a video broadcast announcing "a new animated film based on the world of Super Mario Bros", Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto (that's Mario's dad) said: "This time, we're thinking about broadening Mario's world further, and it'll have a bright and fun story."

Bafta has announced the nominations for the 20th Bafta games awards, which will take place in London on April 11. Leading the pack this year are Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 with 10 nominations; Spider-Man 2 with nine; Alan Wake 2 with eight; and six apiece for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. Hi-Fi Rush, a colourful music-based action game from Japan's Tango Gameworks, picked up five nominations, as did Mintrocket's breakout hit Dave the Diver. Bafta has been celebrating video games' creative achievements alongside those of the film and TV industries since 1998, formerly as the Bafta interactive entertainment awards, launching the Bafta games awards in 2004 as its own event. The awards are voted on by a combination of Bafta's professional membership and by selected specialist juries, with the EE's players' choice award decided by a public vote.

It's been a terrible year for game developers, but an amazing year for games. There were some missteps along the way -- if you'd asked me to predict this list a year ago, I would've mentioned both Redfall and Starfield -- but overall it's been a packed year unusually low on disappointment. We've never tried to name a single title as "the Game of the Year." Instead, it's become a tradition to get the whole team together to talk about our individual favorites. So here are those games, presented in alphabetical order to avoid hurting any of our writers' feelings. Feel free to sound off about what your favorites are in the comments; there are no wrong answers. I rarely have time to finish games these days, but I devoured Alan Wake 2 in just a few weeks. For me and my limited gaming time, that felt miraculous. I'll admit, I'm a mark for Remedy Entertainment. I've been following its work since the first Max Payne arrived on PCs in 2001, right as I was gearing up to head to college and building my first desktop PC. Yah, I was one of the cool kids on campus..) Max Payne blew me away with its fluid slow-motion gunplay mechanics and immersive narrative. As a lifelong console gamer until then, it was a big step forward from something like Tomb Raider.

The time has come: our list of the 20 best games of 2023 is now live. I can't remember a year with such an embarrassment of riches to choose from, and the diversity of this list really reflects that. Most outlets – and players – appear to have divided themselves along the lines of Team Baldur's Gate, Team Zelda or Team Alan Wake 2, and any one of them would be a worthy GOTY. In the end you have to go with your heart. Have a read and see if your feelings align with ours.

Toward the end of Baldur's Gate 3, widely considered the most outstanding video game released this year, you can literally go to hell. If you do, you'll have a showdown with the game's equivalent of the devil, a charismatic yet demonic trickster who calls himself Raphael. Naturally, developer Larian Studios wanted it to feel monumental. So they decided that the battle should be accompanied by a song, and that Raphael should be the one singing it. "The idea for a song to be performed by Raphael himself came from our director Swen Vincke about six months before the release of the game," says Borislav Slavov, Baldur's Gate 3's music director.

The gaming year used to follow a predictable rhythm: we'd have a flurry of announcements in the summer, around the gaming trade event E3, then a rush of releases between September and the end of November – and then absolutely nothing would happen until March at the earliest. But now E3 is gone for good, and the Game Awards – the industry's most glamorous and also most intensely commercial awards show – takes place in early December, so we suddenly have an eye-watering number of new trailers and debuts right as we're all preparing to hibernate. I didn't watch this year's show live (it started at 12.30am UK time last Saturday morning and was over three hours long) and I'm betting that most of you didn't watch it either, so here are the headlines: Baldur's Gate 3 won nearly everything; as ever the awards felt like something that had to be squeezed in around all the trailers; there was not very much time given to developers to speak, which rankled; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 were snubbed in several categories (Zelda won best action adventure game, Spider-Man won nothing). In the interest of giving games and developers appropriate airtime, then, instead of going over the merits and problems of the Game Awards again, here are some of the announcements that stood out. If you're into unsettling vibes, ghost stories about haunted arcade machines, and having your expectations put into a blender and served back to you as a milkshake, Daniel Mullins' games should be on your radar.

The 2021 Game Awards kicked off last night, mixing the year's winners (It Takes Two, Deathloop, Kena and several more) with fresh game trailers and bona fide compelling new releases incoming, including Alan Wake 2 . We also got a release date for Final Fantasy VII Remake on PC, new Star Wars, Dune and Star Trek games and several (ten, actually) Lady Gaga hits coming to Beat Saber. There may be something for every gamer. 'Among Us' is heading to VR with help from the'I Expect You To Die' team'Slitterhead' is a new horror game from the creator of Silent Hill The'Cuphead' DLC will finally arrive on June 30th Oppo has teased its first foldable smartphone nearly three years after it unveiled a prototype device. The Find N looks like a device along the lines of Samsung's Galaxy Fold lineup, created after "four years of intense R&D and six generations of prototypes."