Lander 23 had a few pre-launch glitches, but is now up and running in Woolwich. It is a fun enough experience, but could be a whole lot more with some tweaks. In a team of four, you are split into two groups. One group operates a baffling array of switches and has to direct the other group around a ruined city because of [under developed plot point]. Only by working together can you… well, it is unclear. Something to do with energy?

Think of it a bit like a longer game of "The Crystal Maze". Over a radio commlink, you try telling your team mates to go left down a corridor and then explain you meant the other left. The explorers have to creep around the set, avoiding baddies (and sometimes other players) while listening to your half-baked instructions.

Then you swap positions and suddenly understand some of the seemingly bizarre decisions your friends made.

It is hard to know how to categorise this. Punchdrunk are known for immersive theatre - but this is billed as a live action video game. It isn't a LARP in the traditional sense; you won't be driving the story. It also isn't an escape room although the teamwork aspect is similar. There aren't any puzzles, and the story is paper-thin. But it is rather a good laugh. Sort of like an adult Laser Quest without guns.

The pre-show is pretty good. There's a well dressed set to wander around with lots of interesting (but irrelevant) scenery and props. The instructions are reasonably clear and the "Lander" set looks a bit like the Nostromo from Alien. The interactive consoles are brilliantly designed. The various industrial knobs and buttons feel delightful to play with and react well. It is rather a shame that they're so under utilised. The driver team is given a baffling arrays of inputs to manage - but only a small subsection do anything useful.

The city set (supposedly an alien planet) is recycled from the previous "Burnt City" production. It looks lush but doesn't make any sense in context of the (slightly flimsy) story. It is exciting to wander through while being pursued by guards (what guards? Isn't this an alien planet?) but there isn't much time to admire the extensive set dressing.

While you're running around (or telling people to run around) there's some nonsense about collecting energy. Oh and you might lose a life if caught. And you have to flick the switches at the right time. Don't forget to duck behind the scenery to hide when told. There's a lot going on. It is exhilarating but you only get about 15-20 minutes of play time each.

There's a briefing about how to find cassettes and stamps. Across our two goes, we found one of them and got one stamp. What does that do? Nothing as far as I can tell. There might also be artefacts to collect, but we didn't find any, nor were we sure that they'd net us extra points.

Let's talk about the points aspect. At the end, our team, were delighted to have come second!

What did that mean? Nothing.

If you play Laser Quest, you get to see your name up on the big screen - Lander 23 just displays your team number. I sort of expected to be handed a certificate. Or money off our next trip. Or a commemorative tchotchke. Or even a video thanking us for saving the universe. We just took off our tactical vests and handed them back. Which was slightly underwhelming.

I think the leader-board is there to encourage replayability. But as your scores aren't recorded, there isn't much incentive to come back for another go. I expected a follow-up email thanking us for playing or asking for feedback but, again, nothing. After that much adrenaline, I was expecting just a little aftercare.

There's a photo-booth once you've completed the mission, but you have to ask other players to take your photo. It would have been so easy for Punchdrunk to have a staff member there to take snaps and email them. Again, that's what most escape rooms do. Instead, we headed to the bar to enjoy a few cocktails while we debriefed ourselves.

All four of us agreed at that it had been a pretty good experience. We laughed a lot describing what we'd got up to. Our hearts were racing, we were sweating from the tension, and felt like it had been a decent afternoon out.

Ultimately, Lander 23 feels like it has been designed by someone who has heard of games like Laser Quest / Escape Rooms / The Crystal Maze but, crucially, hasn't ever played them.

For all that, it is a lot of fun. Running around corridors with a friend is very Doctor Who. Flicking lots of switches and pressing buttons is an enjoyable tactile experience.

It is absolutely worth finding a cheaper mid-week slot and giving it a go. If you're willing to get into the spirit of things, and are happy to put up with some odd game-design decisions, you'll have fun.

But Meta gave me £30 in credit for helping people fix their broken Quests. So I bought this much hyped puzzle game. And…

It's excellent! Much better than I expected.

As puzzler, it works really well. Lots of different types of puzzles, some of which make effective use of the VR environment. Items which need careful manipulation, 3D items which need examination, and wandering around a complex interactive world.

The voice acting is superb - although it is reminiscent of Portal's Cave Johnson.

It is spooky - without relying on jump-scares to frighten you. I was worried that I was going to have to get into a fight, or be chased, or have to beat the clock. But, instead, it's an atmospheric puzzler with some very mild peril to keep things entertaining.

The puzzles are moderately difficult - but I didn't have to resort to a walkthrough; they're all fairly logical. It was a great way to spend a couple of hours, and I'm eager for the sequel.

With a few caveats, of course

The first is that it is short. I guess I spent about 6 hours playing before I completed it. You can buy something like Skyrim second hand for the same price and get over a hundred hours of gameplay. Oculus games seem particularly expensive. Presumably because of the small audience.

Secondly, the manipulation can be really shonky. Picking up small items is finickity. Picking up large items sometimes causes unexpected movement in the environment. There are also some severe clipping issues. Your "hands" quite often pass through "solid" objects. As with all VR games, it is fully immersive until something breaks the illusion.

Thirdly, it's impossible to play for long periods of time. I had to stop a few times to recharge the headset. That's not the fault of this game - but of the Oculus. I can't remember the last time I played a PS4 game so long that the controller needed recharging.

Similarly, wearing a VR headset for more than an hour is just painful.

But these are minor nits. Yes, the end is slightly silly. But it is no worse than most modern movies.

I think I'd feel a bit cheated if I'd paid full price for it but, overall, it was a great experience.

TWA is a lovely little puzzler. Move blocks around until they fit in the right holes. It is the sort of game which could have been written for the ZX81 back in the day.

I played it with the Director's Commentary switched on. How weird that we now have games designers doing that! It was a lovely experience. Mike Bithell gives a masterclass in game design, level layout, and storytelling. His soothing tones are the perfect accompaniment to a relaxing game. It is (mostly) spoiler-free and really helped me appreciate what he was trying to do.

There is, of course, a downside. The story is... well, there is no story. There's some exposition narrated by Danny Wallace - but it is meaningless to how the game progresses. And it's hard to hear/read while the commentary is on. That leads to the Director waxing lyrical about how he really wanted to convey an emotion with the way the characters interact, and how they have epic story arcs. They don't. Sorry. They are blocks moving left and right. But humans will anthropomorphise anything.

There are a couple of levels which are just annoying. Most levels are very forgiving if you don't get your timings pixel perfect. But a couple made me want to rage-quit. It would greatly help the game if after, say, 10 minutes it popped up saying "Skip this level? Y/N"

The controls are a little finicky. Sometimes jumps just failed to register or didn't respond quite quickly enough. That may have been the latency of PS Now's cloud though.

The game was "free" on PlayStation Now. It'll take you a few hours to complete and is a delight.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

It's a lovely morning in the home, and you are a horrible cat. Your aim is to cause mayhem and destruction by knocking over as many things as possible.

This is a joyful little game - although I suspect it is a lot more fun in VR than on a laptop.

The cartoony graphics ran perfectly on Linux. The controls aren't particularly suited to a laptop. Or, at least, I had difficulty coordinating my trackpad and WASD movements.

For $10 it's a perfectly distracting little physics simulator. Not quite worth buying a VR system for - but lots of silly fun.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

This is... awful? It is visually interesting without actually being fun. It is intriguing for five minutes before becoming hollow.

It is surreal and delightfully weird. But it isn't a game. You have to hunt for tiny little targets and click repeatedly to see if anything happens. Sometimes it does. Frankly, the experience would have been more honest if there was just a big "NEXT" button.

What starts off weird and melancholy becomes repetitive and frustrating.

It worked flawlessly in Linux. I kinda think you should play it just because it is so different. It isn't a game, more of an artistic demo.

Remember all those one-night-stands you had when you were younger? No - me neither. I was a paragon of virtue...

But, if you did engage in such shameless behaviour, did you ever wonder how the morning-after-the-night-before could have gone if you'd played things just a little differently?

ONS is a simple piece of interactive fiction; gather up clues and converse your way to victory. At times it feels a little like "put friendship in; get sex out" as you try to maintain a relationship. But there are some weird twists and turns, and a bunch of different endings to discover.

It's a casual game and will only take you a couple of hours to play through all the scenarios. It's hard to say there's a "winning" ending - but perhaps that's not the point.

Factorio is sort-of-like Sim City. Or Populous. You have an open, discoverable world, full of natural resources. Your job is to plunder those resources and build a space ship to get you off-world.

Factorio is the perfect game for me. It has a slow, gentle pace. There is no death (except when you get run over by your own steam train). The interface is gradually discoverable. There's no punishment for making a mistake. There are no teenagers screaming abuse at you via chat. And, most importantly, you can't look up a walk-through to cheat or find spoilers.

I spent 88 hours building up a factory, tearing down inefficient structures, and reconfiguring my bases for optimal production.

It works flawlessly on Linux. I don't have a top-of-the-range gaming laptop, but it quite happily threw around hundreds of robots flying around the screen.

In order to make the game more fun (for me) I turned off enemy attacks. The aliens were still present, but didn't attack unless provoked. I left them alone, they left me alone. This also meant I could leave the game running overnight so that I could gather more resources.

Buying the game was a slightly odd experience. It cost:

• £22.87 direct from the developers
• £24.59 from GOG
• £21.00 from Humble
• £21.00 from Steam

I don't use Steam (because I'm not a big gamer) so I bought it from Humble Bundle. Which gave me a Steam key. Which I had to link to my Steam account. Which I had to link to my Factorio account. Which let me download the Linux binary. Weird!

As the meme goes, video games give me a chance to live out my wildest fantasy; to be given a task and to be able to complete that task.

I've never played a dating simulator before. I'd heard of them, and their weird parodies like Hatoful Boyfriend, but this is my first time playing one. And, I'm delighted to say, Arcade Spirits is delightful.

The game looks gorgeous, the voice acting is top notch, and the sound design is just perfect. It's also really, really funny. I don't think I've laughed like this at a game since I last played Day of the Tentacle.

Unlike the previous conversation games I've played, there's a real sense that the choices you make effect what happens as the game progresses. It is wry, self-knowing, has lots of classic game references, and makes a good effort at inclusion.

I'm still playing through it and enjoying all the twists and turns it takes. My only criticism would be that the story progresses kinda slowly. But I expect that's normal for these games.

Oh, and it works perfectly in Linux.

Right, I'm heading back into it to see how many people I can seduce.

I like puzzle games, and Minit has a unique twist. You only have 60 seconds to complete each action. But, before we get onto the review, here's how to get it running on Linux.

Linux

• Download the minit_linux.zip file to your Downloads directory.
• Download libssl_1.0.0_32-bit.tar.gz and put it in the same directory as the game archive.
• Install play.it
• Once you've installed play.it, use the command line, go to where you cloned the play.it git repo and run ./play.it ~/Downloads/minit_linux.zip
• It will create a game package which you can install by following the on-screen instructions. Usually, that's sudo apt install ~/git/play.it.git/minit_1.0.0-itch1+20200617.7_i386.deb ~/git/play.it.git/minit-data_1.0.0-itch1+20200617.7_all.deb

Gameplay

It's a top-down, one-map-per-screen adventure puzzler. Pick up the thing, take it over there. Find the person, slay the dragon. All rendered in glorious one-bit graphics.

The mechanism of constant death is neat. You know that every mission is time limited. And it means you can't waste too much time battling baddies.

But, after a couple of hours, it does get a bit wearing. The objectives are sufficiently obscure that you end up wandering around aimlessly hoping to find the thing. I resorted to reading a guide, which kinda showed there's no way to understand how to beat the game.

You can probably figure out that you can use a watering can to put out a fire. But the only way to solve other puzzles is to literally click on everything on a screen in the hope it does something. There's no quest log, so you'd better have a good memory for what you're doing.

It's a neat game, and a quirky mechanic, but a little too illogical for my liking.

The thing about EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is that it is EXTREME. And it is so EXTREME that it feels a little like a tweenager shouting about how bad-ass they are.

The story aesthetic is gorgeous. Brilliant mix of cartoon and ASCII art.

I'm not good with controls. I found moving the mouse in one direction while navigating my MEATPUNK MECH in another to be a bit confusing. And, if I'm honest, the graphics for the fights are a bit too lo-fi for my liking. But you can skip the fights if you want and just play story mode.

Like lots of indie games, it doesn't really matter what choices you make. The story progresses in a set fashion, all you're doing is selecting the brand of snark that comes out of the characters' mouths.

The EXTREME DRAMA is a bit wearing if you play the game all in one go. Probably best to spread the episodes out. Otherwise you become a bit numb to the endless EXTREME MEAT GORE.

Works perfectly on Linux. And the soundtrack is brilliant.

EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is available on itch.io

How many people have you killed in a video game? Thousands? At least. But how many funerals have you performed in game? Hardly any.

It's hard to describe A Mortician's Tale as a game. It is a lovely experience where you play a new employee of a funeral home. The game is, literally, preparing the corpses and dealing with the families of the deceased.

Parts of the gameplay are reminiscent of the Wii's Trauma Centre surgeon simulator game. Scalpels, stiches, and fluids everywhere. This isn't a gory game, everything is handled sensitively.

It advertises itself as taking an hour to complete. That's about right. There are no real choices, no scores, and only a simple story. It's almost a trailer for what a full game could be and, frankly, I'd like to play a full-length version.

In a weird way, it reminded me of the deleted scenes in Austin Powers

Perhaps every blood 'n' guts shoot-em-up should force you to deal with the messy reality of your trail of the dead?

Night in the Woods is a cute looking indie game, with one fatal flaw. ​Nothing happens in it.

I gave the game an hour or so, and all I did was walk left and right and click next in the dialogue. There are a few dialogue options, but that doesn't alter the course of the game.

I think I must be missing something. The game gets rave reviews... but for what? There are no choices, no interactivity, no puzzles. It felt like watching a cartoon where I had to repeatedly thump the space bar to progress the dialogue.

There's a weird dungeon crawler mini-game and a Guitar Hero wannabe. But that's it. The Guitar Hero is pretty pointless because it doesn't use popular songs. And whether you hit the notes or miss them all - nothing changes.

There are hints of a story. Something to do with you killing a kid. Or your grandad dying. But it is pretty sparse. I don't know if the story develops, or gets any better because it was ​so​ boring.

Graphics and music are charming. But that's not enough.

Am I wrong? Do let me know if it's worth progressing.

I'm a grumpy old sod, so these are all the things I dislike about this frickin' weird game.

Grade Inflation

The very first level nets you 900 XP. What? The numbers are meaningless from the beginning. What happens when you reach different levels? WHAT ARE ALL THESE NUMBERS FOR?

What do I do with all this money?

Throughout the game your earn coins. What can you do with them? Eventually, you can buy fancy clothes and other items. All of which serve to make your exercise easier. Yup - you can literally buy your way out of hard work. Which, I guess is neat - but not really in the spirit of the game.

It's also pretty easy to get distracted and spend your morning exercise buying and configuring things. Or maybe that's just me.

Annoying Voices

The trainers' voices are so American and so perky. I got sick of them after a few rounds. Luckily, I found a hack!

You can set the voices to a foreign language!

I chose Chinese. I have a passing familiarity with the language - so it's like getting a Duolingo lesson at the same time. Ish.

Here's a sample video:

Biometrics

It's kinda nice to have it measure your heartbeat. But also slightly creepy. Does that data ever leave my console?

Controllers

I obviously have very slippery thighs! No matter how tightly I strap on the thigh-controller (what a sentence!) it always works its way down.

The flex controller is amazing - it really is. You can feel the vibrations throughout the whole structure and it is precise enough to track the exercises. But... it feels fragile. I'm not the Incredible Hulk, but I'm always worried that it'll snap in my hand.

Endless competition

No, I don't want to share my score with my friends. No, I don't care what other people around the world are doing. I play games because I'm antisocial, not because I'm motivated by competing with a hyped-up tween in Arizona.

And I'm not just saying that because my wife is beating me!

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

annoyed I can't beat this boss #RingFitAdventure #NintendoSwitch pic.x.com/ff2cpexjn0

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Yeah, it's also kinda annoying to "lose" exercise. You basically have to spend half your time fiddling with the weird interface, picking potions, choosing clothes. I guess I want a "don't make me think" option where it just picks the right exercises without me having to worry if I have enough XP and Buffs.

Weird IP

The coins are rings. Was this meant to be a Sonic The Hedgehog game? It seems strange that you play as an anonymous avatar and the characters are generic blobs. Perhaps it would be more fun if you were Sonic or Mario running through your game world?

Bizarre UI

Halfway through jogging round a course the game pauses to tell you that you've levelled up. Why? What can I do with these levels?

Before playing, you have to deal with this confusing mess of a UI.

Sometimes clicking on things selects them, sometimes it opens up another menu. Why do I have to spend time managing this game? Haven't the designers ever heard of "Don't make me think?" I'm exhausted from battling a cartoon dragon - just give me a button which chooses the right exercises.

Mind you, it does also encourage me to stop exercising. Is this reverse psychology?

Price

I managed to pick it up for £70 - which is the RRP. There are plenty of places selling it for 3x that. A normal game costs about £40, so you're paying £30 for the thigh-strap (a scrap of fabric) and the RingCon (a metal band). Meh. Still cheaper than an exercise bike.

Verdict

It's working. It's a better workout than grinding away on an exercise bike. It's more distracting than listening to podcasts.

It's a daft way to get exercise - but it seems to be making me sweat. And I'm aching in places that I didn't even realise had muscles. So it's probably working.