Coin-pusher roguelike deckbuilder - you’ll be able to tell whether you’ll like it from five seconds of a trailer. The premise may sound thin but the execution is the real thing: stack towers, trigger combos, shake the machine, feel the dopamine hit. Great art, nice music. Very cool.

Roguelike deckbuilder where you roll custom dice - each with unique and creative faces - and chase a point total. Balatro’s DNA is obvious, and the structure is clean enough. The loop never clicked quite for me; something in the feel had me admiring the concept more than enjoying the runs. Definitely worth a look for number-goes-up enjoyers.

Base-defence auto-battler where you wire up modules on a board to create your defences. The hook is immediately compelling, and the build ceiling is high enough that, initially, the real challenge became finding synergies strong enough for endgame, but efficient enough to keep it above 1fps. Patches have since reined it in. Compact, clever, very moreish.

[Early Access] It’s more Slay the Spire, and that’s entirely a compliment. New systems and mechanics add variety and depth to each run, and the two new characters both feel meaningfully distinct rather than just reskins. Already deeper than the original at launch - balance may be all over the shop, but it’s a tonne of fun. If you’re at all into these kinds of games you’re probably already playing it, but if not, just get it.

Everything is a horse. Beneath the deliberately crude and memey aesthetic is a surprisingly legit breeding, racing and genetics sim with DNA mechanics far more intricate than they have any right to be. The whole thing rewards experimentation in ways that keep surprising you, and the physics-based racing is consistently hilarious. You will create abominations. You will race them. You will gamble until you’re broke and need to shovel shit for fifty bucks behind the track. Loved it.

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s long-awaited tactics roguelite is here and it may very well prove to be their best work. It looks like a silly little cat game - and it is - but underneath is a staggeringly deep mix of Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat, roguelite progression, cat breeding genetics, life sim management and draft-based build crafting that just keeps opening up the further you go. Every run surfaces new synergies, new absurdity, new reasons to keep breeding nightmare cats. Wildly impressive, insanely moreish. It really feels like the culmination of what a couple of gamedesign nutters have been building towards.

Neva: Prologue is a prequel DLC telling the story of how Alba and the wolf cub first met, launching February 19. New enemies, mechanics and locations are promised. Neva was ‘fine’, so a tighter, more focused prologue could work.

Winnie’s Hole is a grotesque, inventive roguelite where you infect dear old Winnie from the inside out - literally. Part deckbuilder, part tetromino puzzler, it’s mechanically sharp and thematically cursed. It may have been a joke premise, but the systems have real teeth. Fantastic.

Cairn is a brutal, meditative climb up a mountain that is utterly indifferent to your suffering. Every hold is deliberate, every resource hard-won. Quiet, lonely, and sometimes euphoric - a true strand-type game: walk slow, suffer deeply, and search for meaning in the silence.

Shape of Dreams is a roguelite with MOBA-style combat, sharp progression, and dense buildcrafting. Characters shift drastically depending on your upgrades, and runs snowballs fast. It’s chaotic, stylish, and full of smart mechanical ideas.