Act I of Kentucky Route Zero set out a stall of intriguing characters, noirishly low-res visuals and an atmosphere that slid imperceptibly between "eerie" and "magical". Arranged around the core gameplay of a classic point 'n' click adventure (think Monkey Island or Broken Sword) was something that was barely a game at all but rather a sort of magical realist road movie in gaming drag.

Gaming's equivalent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – here we see a post-apocalyptic zombie invasion not as an excuse for all-out gory action, but downbeat introspection, gentle character interaction and moral tests in the face of true, human horror.

The Last Of Us is an absolute must-play game, that doesn't entirely hit every note, but at least aims far higher than most videogames not just in terms of narrative ambition and grown-up storytelling, but also visual and action realism.

Memory is fertile ground for dystopian science fiction. After all, if you can't remember the past properly, if your memories are fake, implanted, then you can't trust your own beliefs or the history that you are being told informs the current political discourse.

Don't Starve is a game about survival. Deposited in a strange land rendered in a playfully creepy style like an Edward Gorey cartoon come to life, you - or rather the intrepid Gentleman Scientist, Wilson - must gather resources, craft tools and find food while avoiding the various nasties that lurk in the dark. “Don't Starve” is both the title and your most immediate task but there is more than just a rumbling tum out to do you in - poisons, werepigs, spiders, tentacles and worse all want a piece of you. The game's real bottom line is a much more broad “don't die”.

Man is, of course, the worst monster of all in this bleak, post-apocalyptic first-person shooter based on the best-selling "Metro" novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro: Last Light, the last few of mankind are bunkered down in the old Moscow Metro stations, while the surface is only briefly navigable with a gasmask, and populated mostly by irradiated mutant creatures.

Controversy is a fickle mistress. When Carmageddon first appeared on PC in 1997, publishers Interplay were forced to cut its copious gore and replace dismembered pedestrians with nice, family-friendly zombies after a publicity-courting submission to the British Board of Film Classification went a bit wrong.

"Avoid missing ball for high score" ‑ possibly some of the most famous and minimal videogame instructions ever, for one of the earliest arcade games, Pong. The instructions for Impossible Road could probably be similarly distilled to such haiku levels of minimalism: "don't let the ball stray too far from the track," perhaps.

An invincible army of cybercommandos, neon-pink pulsing colour schemes and the throbbing sounds of a Morodor-style baseline – Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is every bit the dumb Eighties action game on the surface, but underneath it might actually be one of the most interesting approaches to mainstream gaming in a while.

It has to have been the trailer, there's really no other explanation. Before the original Dead Island came out, there was a trailer. And not just a trailer, but the trailer – probably the most finely-crafted, greatest piece of teaser content ever created for film, TV or games. It's the only possible reason why Dead Island sold as well as it did... and unfortunately, there isn't a similarly brilliant trailer for its sequel, Riptide.

After a long break from thievery – both in the real world and in the anthropomorphic universe he calls home – dapper gentleraccoon thief Sly Cooper is back doing what he does best: pinching things. It's been eight years since Sly and the gang pinched things in the globe-hopping PlayStation 2 caper Sly 3, and now he's returned to a more powerful console and with a different developer – can the ageing mascot still hack it in the modern day?