After disappearing from the face of the earth for a few years, metroidvanias are everywhere. If you boot up Steam now and check New Releases, I’ve no doubt you’ll see two or three games that promise a pixelated creature jumping around on a 2D plane, unlocking doors and paths for ten or so hours.

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The doors have been opened, the games inside have been devoured, and now it’s time to recycle the cardboard. Below you’ll find all of our picks for the best PC games of 2018, gathered together in a single post for easy reading.

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There’s an easy grace available to you in Yoku’s Island Express. Steer the main character onto any of the pinball flippers embedded in the floors and walls and you can punt him into the air as predictably as a jump in any other platformer. Use those paddles to aim Yoku into one of the other pinball-inspired mechanisms, however, and the game takes hold, shooping Yoku and the ball through tunnels at high speed, or smoothly rolling it down paths littered with objects that spin and shimmer. This grace is something I’ve never experienced when playing an actual pinball table, and it made my time with Yoku a delight. (more…)

Update: This demo was actually released on PC in early July, but only came to my attention when publishers Team17 made an announcement around the demo’s launch on more consoles today. Shame on me. Still! If I missed it back then, maybe you did too?>

Apparently done with our Graham’s long-running promise to review Yoku’s Island Express, developers Villa Gorilla today released a free demo for their, ahem, “open-world metroidvania pinball platform adventure game” so we can all try it for ourselves. That official description may be odd but it’s not inaccurate. Yoku’s Island Express is a platformer where we play an insect postman tethered to a giant ball, moving across the open world and completing quests mostly by boinging around little interconnected pinball puzzles. It’s a real cutie too, with a nice look and laid-back vibe. As you can now try for yourself.

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We’re just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we’ve shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you’re reading right now this second.

And what games they are! 2018 has been a great year so far, and our top picks run the whole range, from hand drawn oddities made by one person, to big mega-studio blockbusters that took the work of hundreds. And each of them is special to us in some way. Just like you are too. Click through the arrows to see the full spread of our faves so far. Better luck next year to the games that didn’t make the cut this time.

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The pinball platformer is an idea developers like to feed quarters into every so often. If a character is round (Pac-Man, Kirby) or can bunch up into a ball (Sonic, Samus, enslaved Pok mon), then they ve probably been bashed about by flippers at some point. But these games tend to be reskins of traditional pinball; few reflect their source material. Yoku s Island Express doesn t have a known mascot to trade on, but it does have bigger vision for bumper-boosted platforming.

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The title might remind you of famous baby-tending egg monster Yoshi, but Yoku’s Island Express [official site] has more in common with a certain Sega spin-off than anything from the Nintendo stable. This is a game for all of us who wish Sonic Spinball had spawned a thousand imitators, though the trailer shows a much more expansive platform game with pinball elements rather than Spinball’s tiny tables. Developers Villa Gorilla describe it as “an open world/metroidvania-style pinball adventure” and what a handsome open world it is.

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