Adventure... like it’s 1989!

Next year, gaming legend Ron Gilbert brings adventures to the couch with Thimbleweed Park. Here’s why you should care

Way back in 1990, a young man looking to make his fortune declared: “My name’s Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate.” His game, The Secret of Monkey Island, wasn’t the first graphical adventure, but few others have embedded themselves so deeply in players’ hearts. Fast forward to today, and its creator, Ron Gilbert, is bringing that era of gaming to Xbox One with his latest adventure, Thimbleweed Park. Think Twin Peaks, with more jokes. And shades of blue.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

If only the people who write about games aged this well…

Sometimes our memories of a distant game can be about as reliable as a concrete parachute. We all have favourites that we remember looking incredible, stunningly realistic. They’ll never top that, we think. But booting up an old classic is almost always a nasty slap to nostalgia. We may claim to look past graphics if the gameplay impresses, but 99% of us can’t get through an early Xbox game without our eyes wanting to be sick. That’s the Coalition’s greatest achievement – it’s given us the Gears of War we remember, and then some.

The Escapists: The Walking Dead

Those prison guards are suddenly looking a bit peaky

Well, if anything proves The Escapists is all about bizarre crafting combinations, this is it. Team17 has taken February’s pixelprison indie smash and duct-taped it to seemingly the nearest random thing to hand: a set of Walking Dead comic books. It really shouldn’t work. And yet!

Unravel

Sew much more than your average platformer

The word ‘charm’ is horribly overused when it comes to indie games. It’s almost as bad as ‘quirky’. (Don’t even get us started on ‘whimsical’.) Yet when it comes to describing the adorable Yarny, a knitted character who leaves a trail of wool behind him, there just aren’t many words that suit Unravel better. Charm positively seeps out the screen during our extended hands-on. We’re immediately powerless to resist feelings of distinct fuzziness as we trot through a garden filled with fluttering butterflies and surprisingly satisfying Limbo-esque physics puzzles.

Cobalt

A game published by Mojang that isn’t Minecraft? Whatever next…

Yes, this is indeed the first game to be published by the developers of Minecraft that isn’t anything to do with the block-building masterpiece. And that’s interesting. But do you know what’s more interesting? The fact that Cobalt is a hell of a lot of fun, and exactly the kind of game we could see ourselves losing many an hour to.

Dying Light: The Following

Out in the sticks, hitting things with sticks

You’d be forgiven for thinking The Following was a sequel as opposed to a simple expansion. Taking place in the countryside around Harran, it presents rolling cornfields, forests and craggy cliffs over an area equal to the size of the city’s two regions combined. It’s this scale that our demo is keen to emphasise, as a claustrophobic cave network opens into a panoramic mountaintop view of the new playground. That we’re then invited to dive into a distant lake below suggests this is a slightly more fantastical trip than the gruelling struggle faced in Harran’s zombie-plagued streets.

OneDrive. Take Windows 10 into the cloud

Use Microsoft’s cloud storage system to access your files wherever you are

Microsoft’s online storage offering, OneDrive, has joined the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive and BT Cloud in the scramble to get your files backed up in the cloud (that nebulous term for banks of storage racks humming away in a data centre... somewhere). OneDrive has been through a couple of different incarnations since its launch in 2007. You might remember it as SkyDrive, which was its codename before it became available for beta-testing as Windows Live Folders. It became Windows Live SkyDrive very shortly after launch. The ‘Windows Live‘ part of the name was quietly dropped, and SkyDrive rumbled on through the launches of Windows 7 and 8 until 2013, when a case in the High Court in London determined that the name infringed BSkyB’s ‘Sky’ trademark. From these Murdoch-stoked ashes rose OneDrive, and that moniker is the one you’ll find today in Windows 10.

Big Pharma

The drugs don’t work… but they sell like hot cakes

Theme Hospital games have mostly avoided medicine. In fact, let’s face it, games mostly avoid difficult themes – probably because titles like the superbly depressing environmental destruction simulator Fate of the World have a tendency to not sell well. And we suspect the Democracy series only sells because the results of political and economic decisions within it are so apocalyptic. Big Pharma’s tack is more on the manufacturing side, which makes it closer to logic games such as SpaceChem. Except its focus is the drugs industry.

Armello

A dark fantasy board game inspired by Redwall

In the kingdom o f Armello, the mad lion is king. That might sound like bad poetry, but Armello is a strange game – hugely familiar, but also extremely unusual. It’s a board game, definitely, but one that’s been developed just as a computer game, so it can do things board games never could.