At its best, Doom is everything it should be: a single-player campaign that’s just you, your super shotgun, and barely the amount of ammunition required to kill every single demon on Mars. It feels like a Doom game as you desperately try to find health pickups to keep you going, an ever-growing menagerie of demons snapping at your heels. It's exhausting and exciting and a little bit dumb, and when you're into it you're all the way in. At its worst, Doom is a repetitive series of enclosed rooms filled with demons, all of which you must kill to advance, complemented by a derivative and poorly thought-out multiplayer mode.
First impressions wise, Doom strikes all the right notes. The Union Aerospace Corporation's research facility on Mars runs red with the blood of employees who’ve learned a new meaning for the phrase 'wrongful termination,' but that barely matters to the inexplicably mute Doomguy, who shoots anything and everything which moves. Starting with only the pistol encourages you to focus on the diabolically delightful Glory Kill system — shoot your nearest Demon enough that they become staggered and highlighted in blue or orange, and if you press F (or R3 on a PS4 controller) while standing next to them you will rend them asunder. That is to say, you'll tear off their limbs and, in more than a few cases, joyfully beat them with their own appendages.

Like all good detective stories, what appears simple at first becomes so much more than that in Disco Elysium – and here it gets so, so much weirder, too. It takes the age-old mechanics of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and twists them in strange ways around a macabre tale of violence, poverty, and a society on the brink of collapse. Through sharply written dialogue and an expertly crafted world, it uses some unique game mechanics - such as debating against 24 different sections of your own brain - to create a story that will stay with me for a long time. And, somehow, it manages to make all of this fun and, surprisingly often, funny. Now with the addition of a fully voiced cast and even more side quests to embark on, The Final Cut makes an amazing game even better.

The premise of Disco Elysium is straightforward: A body has been discovered, hanged from a looming tree in the backyard of a hostel, and it’s up to you to work out how it got there over the course of the 30-hour story. Everything that surrounds this core mystery is far from simple, however, not least being that you kick things off with an almighty dose of hangover-induced amnesia. You can’t even remember your name, let alone that you are a cop on a murder case. A part of your consciousness described as your ancient reptilian brain – which you literally engage in conversation with – attempts to persuade you to give up your quest even as your snivelling limbic system battles against it. As you stumble around your wrecked bedroom searching for remnants of your former self, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t simply a whodunnit, but a journey that will challenge you to solve crises on both profoundly personal and societal levels. It’s a gorgeously designed isometric RPG that makes you think at every turn of its painterly streets.