Release Date: 16/11/2018, updated in 2020
Platforms: Android, PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and iOS
Skill Rating: 8+ year-olds
Components: 2D Overhead and Hand-Made
Among Us is a strategy game where crew-mates prepare their spaceship for launch by completing tasks. However, one of the players is an impostor intent on sabotaging the ship and killing the crew. As the game progresses in real-time the impostor...
Release Date: 05/04/2019, updated in 2021
Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch and Xbox One
Skill Rating: 7+ year-olds
Components: 3D Third-Person, Open World, Pixels and Weather
In A Short Hike you play penguin-like character Claire, who needs to climb a mountain in a beautiful national park to receive an important phone call. Presented in cute pixel graphics, the game invites you to explore the park, help other animals, find...
Release Date: 14/12/2001, updated in 2020
Platforms: 3DS and 2DS, DS, GameCube, Switch and Wii
Skill Rating: 9+ year-olds
Components: 3D Third-Person, Cartoon, Day and Night, Open World and Weather
You live on a small island teeming with life. Insects, fish, trees, vegetation and fossils are represented with cute cartoon visuals. Rather than the scale or grandeur of other game worlds, it’s the interconnected drama of the world and characters...
Release Date: 09/09/2021, updated in 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One
Components: 2D Side-On and Hand-Made
Webbed is a running and jumping game with a twist. You play a spider who can make webs, swing, climb and all the while creating music as she goes. It follows the story of our happy little spider on an adventure to save her boyfriend from a big dumb...
Release Date: 28/02/2018
Platforms: Mac and PC
Skill Rating: 11+ year-olds
Components: 3D Third-Person, Blocks, Open World and Weather
Stormworks is an open world adventure where you design, build and pilot your own air sea rescue service. You create programmable vehicles using it's block-building system and pilot them into dangerous situations to rescue stricken vessels or...
Release Date: 30/07/2019, updated in 2022
Platforms: Apple TV, Mac and iOS
Skill Rating: 5+ year-olds
Components: 2D Overhead, Cartoon, Day and Night, Hand-Made and Open World
Sneaky Sasquatch is an adventure game where you sneak around in campsites and try to find food from coolers and picnic baskets without getting caught. From this simple premise grows a game with endless ways to play and explore its open world: race, play...
Release Date: 02/11/2021
Platforms: Mac, PC, Switch and Xbox One
Components: 2D Overhead, Blocks, Hand-Made and Pixels
Unpacking is a meditative puzzle game where you unpack belongings into a series of spaces, each representing a stage in life. You get to know the owner of the objects by their possessions and circumstances. To finish a level you need to work out where...
Release Date: 03/03/2017
Platforms: Switch and Wii U
Skill Rating: 10+ year-olds
The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild departs from the previous Zelda formula with the scale and depth of its world. You walk, fly, ride and climb your way through a landscape that varies in climate, terrain, inhabitants and vegetation. Weather and...
Release Date: 12/11/2020, updated in 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4 and PS5
Components: 3D Third-Person and Open World
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is an action-adventure game based on the Marvel Comics superhero Miles Morales. It is similar to the first Marvel's Spider-Man game in mechanics although Miles Morales extends this...
Release Date: 11/04/2016, updated in 2018
Platforms: PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
Components: 3D First-Person, Day and Night and Open World
Subnautica is an open-world adventure where you explore the ocean on an alien planet after crashlanding. You collect resources and fight creatures to survive. This enables you to establish an underwater base, gain new craft and equipment and explore...
Release Date: 08/04/2021, updated in 2022
Platforms: Android, PC and iOS
Components: 3D First-Person and Cartoon
Before Your Eyes is a narrative game about an 11-year-old boy revisiting his life before "crossing over" to the other side. You play by exploring scenes that represent snapshots of his life. Unusually, you make choices and interact with the game by...
Release Date: 29/10/2020
Platforms: PC
Skill Rating: 14+ year-olds
Components: 3D First-Person
Teardown is a strategic game where you plan and execute a heist in fully destructible environments. Your objective is to claim the key cards that are hidden around the map. However taking one triggers the alarm, giving you only sixty seconds before...
Release Date: 11/12/2020
Platforms: Apple TV, Mac, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One and iOS
Components: 3D Third-Person and Cartoon
Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is an adventure game where you play as a young girl who starts a wildlife conservation club. When Alba visits her grandparents on a Mediterranean island, she is excited for a summer of exploring with her friend Ines. But when...
Release Date: 08/12/2017
Platforms: Amazon Fire, Android, Mac, PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch and Xbox One
Hello Neighbor is a stealth survival game with a horror feel. You try and sneak into the basement of their neighbour’s house to uncover a "horrible secret". The game responds to your strategy by setting traps along paths the player followed in...
Release Date: 14/03/2012, updated in 2019
Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4 and iOS
Journey is an adventure game set in a desert. Exploring the eerie sand-scape, you discover a world abandoned by the race that created it. The sense of space and scale evokes feelings of aloneness and being lost. But then the game pairs you with other...
Release Date: 05/10/2021
Components: 3D Third-Person, Cartoon and Hand-Made
Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan is a role-play adventure where you save the world from a colourless darkness. Unusually, battles are won through listening and conversation rather than traditional attacks. It combines the excitement and...
Release Date: 01/09/2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
Components: 3D First-Person, 3D Third-Person and Cartoon
Lake is a narrative adventure where you play Meredith Weiss on a career break in 1986 while she returns to her hometown and ends up delivering the mail. As you talk to locals, meet up with old school friends and even fan a few romantic flames from your...
Release Date: 26/02/2016, updated in 2018
Platforms: Amazon Fire, Android, Mac, PC, PS Vita, PS4, Switch, Xbox One and iOS
Components: 2D Overhead, Day and Night, Grid, Open World and Pixels
Stardew Valley looks like a farming simulator. That’s partly what it is, but you must also develop relationships with the other townsfolk and delve deep into the mines. Its quirky labyrinthine attention to detail is inviting for young players to try...
Release Date: 30/06/2020, updated in 2021
Platforms: Android, Mac, PC, Switch, Web, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and iOS
Skill Rating: 6+ year-olds
Components: 2D Overhead, Blocks and Hand-Made
Townscaper is a town building toy. You pick colours from the range available and click to put down a house in the sea. As you continue to add houses of different colours the game automatically orientates the architecture for you.
Release Date: 20/03/2018, updated in 2023
Platforms: PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
Components: 3D First-Person, Day and Night, Open World and Weather
Sea of Thieves is an online game where you are a pirate searching for treasure and adventure. Cast into a large open sea you work with other online players to crew your ship and find treasure. The game has a main story but really focuses on creating...
Release Date: 27/08/1992, updated in 2018
Platforms: 3DS and 2DS, DS, GameCube, Switch and iOS
Mario Kart is a go-kart racing game on Nintendo systems. You race against other Nintendo characters around different circuits, picking up power-ups, attacks and speed boosts. It is frantic and chaotic, but still requires skills to do well.
Release Date: 28/08/2018
Platforms: Mac, PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One
Components: 3D Third-Person
Drive futuristic cars to score goals with an oversized football. It’s another game that sounds ridiculous but is actually a huge amount of fun to play and requires a lot of expertise. What’s not obvious from the start is the level of control that...
Release Date: 20/09/2016
Components: 3D First-Person, Cartoon and Open World
Firewatch is an explorative adventure where you play a fire lookout in America’s Shoshone National Forest. It has a relational and conspiracy undertone similar to the podcast/radio drama and Netflix show [link to...
Release Date: 19/11/2020
Platforms: PS5
Astro's Playroom is a running and jumping game that launched with the PlayStation 5. It not only showcases the PS5's new DualSense controller but offers a loveable adventure with novel interactions and considerable substance.
Release Date: 26/03/2021, updated in 2022
It Takes Two is a running, jumping and exploring game that tells a story of a young girl, Rose, whose parents are divorcing. The girl creates two dolls to represent her parents, which unexpectedly trap the clashing-couple in them. You and a friend...
Release Date: 14/02/2018, updated in 2020
Platforms: Android, Mac, PC, Switch and iOS
Florence is a little puzzle game that tells the story of a relationship, following the usual stages of loneliness, meeting, dating, falling for and moving in with another person. At first, the puzzle interactions seem trivial and the game doesn’t...
Release Date: 19/07/2022
Stray is a game about a cat lost in a futuristic city where robots live. You guide your feline friend in and out of buildings, across roads and generally poke your nose in to see what is going on.
Release Date: 07/09/2018
Platforms: PS4 and PS5
Marvel's Spider-Man is a series of superhero adventures where you swing through an open-world city fighting crime and advancing a film-like story. There are also many side quests and missions you can take along the way.
Release Date: 08/11/2019, updated in 2020
Components: 2D Side-On, 3D Third-Person and Cartoon
New Super Lucky's Tale is a platform game where you play a fox on a quest to recover pages from a magical book that will save his world. It takes gameplay in a more action-oriented direction but the islands and characters are full of quirky character...
Release Date: 27/10/2017
Platforms: Switch
Mario has starred in running and jumping Super Mario games on Nintendo hardware since the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 80's. The formula remains unchanged. Explore a level, jump on enemies, collect coins and get to the flag at the end to inch...
Release Date: 15/11/2001, updated in 2020
Platforms: Android, Mac, PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One and iOS
Halo is the longstanding sci-fi shooting video game series that started when Halo: Combat Evolved launched alongside the Xbox in 2001. The franchise has featured on every Xbox platform since then, with Halo 5: Guardians serving as the latest entry in...
Release Date: 25/11/2013, updated in 2019
Platforms: 3DS and 2DS, Amazon Fire, Android, Mac, PC, PS Vita, PS3, PS4, Stadia, Switch, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One and iOS
Components: 2D Side-On, Day and Night, Pixels and Weather
Terraria looks like a 2D, lesser, version of Minecraft. However, this is a game every bit as complex and creative as the better-known block building game. To the world-crafting and survival it adds hundreds of items to collect, characters to defeat and...
Components: 3D First-Person, Cartoon and Day and Night
Bugsnax is a whimsical adventure where you track, trick, catch and eat anthropomorphic food in all shapes and sizes. But as you do, you literally become what you eat. It's silly puzzling fun from the creators of [link to game/Octodad+Dadliest+Catch...
Release Date: 16/09/2007, updated in 2021
Platforms: Mac, PC and iOS
Skill Rating: 12+ year-olds
Components: 2D Side-On
Osu is a rhythm action game where you tap the screen in time to the music similar to the Elite Beat Agents games. This starts as a simple challenge but develops in speed and complexity. At higher levels, the games is an esport with people competing to...
Release Date: 21/08/2021
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an adventure about a young girl who travels to an abandoned village in the hope of finding a sacred mountain shrine. To get there she must find and grow a team of charming spirit companions called the Rot, enhancing their...
Release Date: 05/04/2022
Components: 3D Third-Person, Blocks and Cartoon
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is the latest in a series of Star Wars themed Lego running, jumping and building games. You work your way through all 9 of the Star Wars films unlocking new locations and characters as you go.
Release Date: 27/02/1996, updated in 2019
Platforms: 3DS and 2DS, DS, GBA, Game Boy and Switch
Pokémon Sword and Shield are role-playing games where you explore a fictional world and collect different creatures called Pokémon. You progress through the game by exploring the world, talking to characters and winning turn-based battles with the...
Release Date: 14/09/2004
Platforms: Mac, PC, Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One
Components: 3D Third-Person, Day and Night and Open World
This is an adventure role-playing game set in a fantasy world where your interactions with the world and villagers, and decisions about your use of magical power, substantially alter the story and the environment.
Release Date: 19/06/2020
Platforms: PS4
Skill Rating: 16+ year-olds
Components: 3D Third-Person and Day and Night
The Last of Us Part II is an action-adventure game set five years after The Last of Us. You control two characters in a post-apocalyptic United States. Ellie is out for revenge after suffering a tragedy, and Abby is a...
Release Date: 26/05/2020
Components: 3D Third-Person and Blocks
Minecraft Dungeons is an action-adventure game that takes place in the Minecraft universe. You explore various dungeons to complete missions and collect new gear by exploring and finding treasure chests, or by defeating enemies....