When I found out Jack King-Spooner was making another game, I didn’t know whether to be happy, or to be sick in my mouth a bit. His previous nuggets like Will You Ever Return and Sluggish Morss, have taught me to handle his small, subversive, artistically experimental and intimate ‘hand-made’ games with extreme care. You never quite know what JKS is going to show you (or rather force you to look at) and some things you just can’t un-see.

Simple to play, fiendish to beat and with a huge depth of theme and beauty, The Talos Principle is a massively welcome end of year surprise. Like Portal and the recent The Swapper (whose writer also is involved here) this deftly blends a series of (120+) puzzles of growing complexity and ingenuity, that arise out of a very simple and brief set of mechanics, into a rich and deep philosophical theme.

The Last Door is a game out of time. Its point 'n' click adventuring has a retro feel matched by deceptively simple, pseudo-8-bit graphics and an almost total lack of handholding. You are instantly dropped into the game's prologue with no tutorial and no indication as to what you need to do. It's just your blocky avatar in a room with some objects. What now?

Before Minecraft there was LittleBigPlanet. This series lets you jump around cute homespun platform levels, then go in and edit them and create your own. The latest adds all sorts of new editing tools, but still fails to communicate simply enough with its audience.

When is more too much? Far Cry 4 continues to expand the freedom enshrined in the freeroaming, first-person shooter series, but this time takes things perhaps too far, diluting the games' core appeal.

What a setting! The history-hopping stealth action series drops into Revolutionary Paris in Unity. Arguably the first game of the "next generation" uses more processing power to render a gigantic, living city teeming with revolting peasants, towered over by Gothic cathedrals and stuffed full of passageways and distractions. Assassin's Creed: Unity looks so real you can almost smell Robespierre's breath. Such a shame, then, that the game fails to engage meaningfully with setting or period.

It's Call of Duty, in the future, with Kevin Spacey. For many, the biggest and most important game of the year is here. But for the most part, Advanced Warfare is as conservative and reactionary in terms of innovation as it is in terms of the pro-military, ends-justifies-the-means politics it peddles.

Since Rovio hit the jackpot with Angry Birds the Finnish developer has not been shy about pumping the franchise for all it is worth. There are licensed sequels incorporating Star Wars and Transformers characters, spin-off games like Angry Birds Epic and Angry Birds Go, board games, stuffed toys and even a movie in development. While those furious fowl dominate Rovio's output, they haven't given up on indie gaming entirely.

If Splot looked any more like Angry Birds, it'd have to call itself Bouncy Birds. But looks can be deceiving – this is a fairly shrewd attempt to merge the visual style of the record-breaking mobile series with something far more traditional in videogame terms – the platformer.

Mash-ups, genre-bending and creative anachronism can be a fun way to inject life into a stale idea. Pirates meet ninjas, Victorian engineers find themselves constructing steam dirigibles and aetheric ray guns and zombies somehow find their way into space.