Recent thumb-twiddlers...

COCOON

★★★★★

OUT NOW PC, PS4/5, SWITCH, XBOX ONE/ SERIES

Jeppe Carlsen, gameplay designer of Playdead’s modern classic Inside, returns with this equally essential puzzle adventure. Marble-like orbs borne by the insectoid protagonist are worlds in themselves: you’ll dive into them to burrow your way deeper inside a biomechanical realm constructed with mesmerising intricacy.

FINITY

★★★★☆

OUT NOW IOS (VIA APPLE ARCADE)

Every move counts in this devious twist on the match-three puzzler. Tiles in the rows or columns you slide get closer to locking with each turn: the trick is to remove them before they stick, limiting your available moves. Finding the going too tough? The musical mode might be more your tempo.

STARFIELD

How high does one of 2023’s biggest launches go?

★★★★☆OUT NOW PC, XBOX SERIES

Bethesda Game Studios has a storied reputation for making vast and deep player-driven role-playing games that are rich in possibility and choice. As such, the prospect of it applying what it’s learned from the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Fallout and the high-fantasy trappings of the Elder Scrolls series to a sprawling, much-hyped space epic – its first new universe in a quarter of a century – is tantalising.

Those stratospheric expectations, however, are quickly sent crashing earthward. An inauspicious beginning sees your emergence onto a grey-beige planet (a far cry from the reveals of Oblivion’s Cyrodiil and Fallout’s Capital Wasteland) followed by the discovery of a somewhat sterile opening city. What’s more, your character regularly becomes overencumbered with the abundance of weapons, gear and resources they gather up, and the game feels similarly burdened by its own glut of (often poorly explained) mechanics.

The wonder of space exploration, meanwhile, amounts to picking destinations from menus and fast-travelling there: you can manually lift off from a planet but there’s no flying your ship out of its atmosphere, while landing and docking are also automated. It’s like piloting the Millennium Falcon with a busted hyperdrive. Like the Falcon, however, Starfield’s got plenty of character.

The game’s retrofuturist aesthetic gives every bustling spaceport and abandoned facility an appealingly lived-in feel – and once you’ve acclimatised to its idiosyncrasies, it’s not nearly as unwieldy as it first seems. A central quest for a series of astral MacGuffins is an effective way to bring you into the orbit of a wide range of characters and factions, leading to a tangle of branching subplots within which you’re free to choose your role: do you infiltrate a gang of space pirates as a mole, or willingly partake in their pillaging?

Technological abilities or persuasive techniques come in useful when it’s time for some corporate espionage: develop your social skills sufficiently and, even in combat scenarios, you can intimidate enemies into submission or use diplomacy to get them to lower their guns. Not that you’ll necessarily want to – gunfights, augmented by celestial superpowers, are punchy and exciting.

Though anyone who’s seen a superhero film in recent years will see where the story is headed, an ambitious, surprising ending gives you a second chance to rediscover your own place in this universe – whether that’s as a space botanist or a luxury penthouse owner in a gaudy metropolis. As a galactic odyssey, it disappoints; once you’re planetside, however, you’ll find that Starfield makes space for every type of player.