Edge

Indeed, this is a game of great touches. Intelligent Systems takes great care to shape its RPG for portable play. The world is divided into Super Mario Bros-style levels that each pack a tidy little narrative. Levelling is removed in order to keep these vignettes grind-free. And it’s all wrapped up in Nintendo’s typically hilarious localisation.

As such, Blade Symphony is as close as you are likely to get to the fantasy of slowly becoming a master swordsman.

More will follow, but despite what its name might suggest, Infinity is extremely limited, both in terms of what little content it offers and your ability to access it.

Raids, PvP, housing, dungeons and so on may all be familiar concepts, but it’s been a long time since they’ve been presented this comprehensively, and with this much charm, on day one.

That’s Entwined in a nutshell: a nice core bit of gameplay tarted up with unnecessary pretensions and stretched too thin, even over its short playtime. It feels like a minigame from a bigger title – specifically, those minigames from God of War and Dead Space 2 in which you guide a plummeting hero through falling debris. What it doesn’t feel like is a full a game – let alone the artsy indie hero Sony would like it to be.

Otherwise, this is a delightfully strange and often surprising piece of work; it’s more plaything than game, perhaps, but the smiles it generates will be broad and frequent.

On every level, then, Murdered throttles its premise. Much as it saddens us, given the promise of seeing a 3D Ghost Trick, we pronounce this dead on arrival.

... focus or challenge to sustain engagement beyond the point when snatching teleporter pieces from robots on the coast loses its sense of mystery. As it is, it’s caught in an awkward hinterland of its own.

Yet Transistor’s greatest asset is confidence. This is a remarkably assured game for such a young studio, the work of a small team that knows exactly what it wants to do and executes it almost without error. Its art style is divine, its soundtrack is remarkable, its combat is intricate, and the story of its odd-couple protagonists is both smartly written and deftly told.

With more modes and maps, Phantoms would be a formidable offering, but it’s worth dipping into until then