Battle royale games have been done to death. But this year, one vital addition entered the arena: head-banging pigeons. Aside from creating hilarious Twitch fodder, this heady mix of rhythm game and multiplayer battler makes for a series of deliriously fun pick-up-and-play minigames, in fine feather. Could this be one of the most unique puzzle mechanics ever? Viewfinder sees you take in-game photos, hold them up, and appear in your in-game reality, manipulating the space around you.

PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC A game about the importance of cooking and the immigrant experience, in which we see vignettes of the daily life of a family who have emigrated from India to Canada. The mother uses food to keep herself and her son connected to their homeland and as a distance grows, perhaps inevitably, between parent and child, we see the consequences. The Tamil language, film, music and cuisine are depicted here with affection, lending emotional weight to the story. PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC As a traveller in foreign lands, with no knowledge of the local languages, you must piece clues together from context, making this part puzzle game and part adventure game. The beautiful, minimalist art is reminiscent of Monument Valley and the contrasting colour palette creates a sense of otherworldliness.

At this time of year, we often find ourselves at festive gatherings with people of wildly varying ages and tastes. So, what's the best way to stave off boredom, avoid squabbling and keep everyone entertained over Christmas? One potential solution is a video game or, more specifically, a party video game. But is it possible to download a dancing, singing or fighting game and immediately get everyone, young and old alike, involved? To find out, I invited a bunch of friends and their kids around to my house to test five new party games. Ubisoft's dancing series has been going for more than a decade and has a passionate fanbase.

It's like It Takes Two, but horrible.

It promises more than a thousand planets to visit, a space-station city of awe-inspiring proportions – and space fights that feel exciting. By day, you explore a run-down, heavily Ghibli-inspired island, befriending the community and crafting quirky trinkets out of the things that you find there. By night, you sell those things to cats at the weekly night market. Inside each world are nestled several more. This puzzle game, from some of the minds behind the superlative Limbo and Inside, challenges you to bend your brain in heretofore unknown ways as you flit between worlds, solving puzzles in one to change the shape of another.

In 2022, the best games were made for masochists. After several years of boom times for wholesome stories and colorful worlds, 2022 reminded us that sometimes there's no truer form of fun than failing horribly, repeatedly. FromSoftware often leads that charge, thanks to series like Dark Souls. This year, it rose to its own challenge. Elden Ring, maddening in its difficulty and unusually cruel in its creative ways to kill you, took center stage as players picked apart its every secret.

Smartphones, PC Lightning-quick matches, collectible superheroes and enticing simplicity make this the smartphone card game of dreams. Free of convoluted rules and sprawling decks, this is card-battling boiled down to the elegant essentials. What we said: A wonderful combination of nostalgia, fun and challenge. If the seemingly unstoppable Marvelisation of popular culture must continue, let it at least occasionally throw up gems like this. PC, Mac A puzzle game that draws upon the human talent for pattern recognition to turn us all into neat-freaks, rearranging books and cutlery and stationery by size, colour, shape, or whatever else feels right.

Games follow a seasonal rhythm, and perhaps because I have spent my career writing about them (take that, school careers advisor!), Absolutely nothing happens in winter, ever. Spring is often when the most interesting games appear – the slightly offbeat big releases or ambitious indie games that want to make a splash after the Christmas rush. In summer, E3 and Gamescom and all of the other showcases look ahead to the future. Autumn is truly the season of games, when the Fifas and Call of Dutys and Assassin's Creeds come out, and everything else either competes with them for attention, or scrambles to get away. The world's biggest games convention, Gamescom, marks the shift between summer and autumn.

Nintendo's brilliantly fun and untouchably cool take on the shooting game involves kids who can transform into squids and octopuses to swim through lakes of paint, splattering the level (and the opposing team) with colour to clinch victory. In the works for many years now, Session aims to be the realistic skateboarding game that skate fans have been missing since EA's Skate series died a death in 2010. Dispensing with the mad tricks and unrealistic airtime of, say, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Session makes even landing a trick into a challenge. This will be the final Fifa-licensed game from EA Sports, the developer who has been making the king of football games for nigh on 30 years, and also the first to feature the women's game at league level, alongside the women's World Cup. Come for one last kickabout, if you can ignore the moral iffiness of the money-grubbing Ultimate Team mode.

In development for years, this mysterious game has only become more intriguing with each delay.