In fantasy terms, Spiritfarer has focused on the equivalent of the Grey Havens, the place in The Lord of the Rings where you go and never return. This is a "cozy management game about dying", which is a very appealing pitch. There's a short demo on Steam that you can play right now. Do play it. Spiritfarer is already wonderful.

You play a ferryperson for the deceased. You have a beautiful boat that appears to have all sorts of dwellings built on it. It reminds me a little of the old London Bridge that was teetering with overhanging buildings like Nonesuch House and whatnot. You take people aboard when they are almost ready to move on. You build them rooms to stay in and you do things for them - in the demo you are tasked with going to retrieve a beloved necklace for someone. There is a lot of gadding back and forth across the sea managing things. Plant crops in a little garden. Catch fish and cook for people. Attend to people's moods.

Spiritfarer is trying to do something very difficult, I think. From the demo you spend a lot of time nudging people's moods to where you want them to be. I worried at first that it was a little transactional. But then I started to wonder if, over the full length of the game, the individual bumps and nudges will smooth out. I suspect the people you're ferrying are not the true passengers, in other words. I suspect that Spiritfarer is trying to make something happen on your side of the screen, as you witness these people moving on and engage with what you are a part of.

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This is my kind of apocalypse, I think: nature reclaiming urban spaces, school buses repurposed as makeshift bridges. I'll even take the mutant wildlife that needs battering with a frying pan. And look! It's real-time battering when I was suspecting turn-based. Eastward is alright!

This is an RPG in which dense pixel art meets modern lighting. The world is ending and two heroes are making their way through a cobbled-together world. One hits things with a frying pan, the other zaps things with magic. You can switch between them at will, separate them and draw them back together again.

Puzzles? You bet. Frying pan man bashes a raft through the water and then magic girl zaps obstacles out of the way. Battling? Absolutely: mushrooms that spew mushrooms, electrical slugs, a boss that comprehensively did me in. Shops and loot and levelling up? Absolutely. Eastward's demo is a perfect vertical slice. Lovely inventory screens waiting to be filled. Weapons waiting to be collected. There's even a cooking system that allows you to make meals that confer boosts and whatnot.

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The year ends for AMD with the release of the Radeon RX 5500 XT and its annual software revamp - and this year's Adrenalin 2020 is rather fascinating upgrade to the UI. It seeks to increase the usability, accessibility and speed of the interface, while adding some important new features. What I'm particularly interested in, however, is Radeon Boost - an AMD-developed method of scaling performance and resolution in real-time for supported games with frame-rate boosts of up to 23 per cent promised by Team Red.

AMD promises that the performance uplift comes with little loss to visual quality for most users in most cases - which would be quite a feat as the concept of a 'free lunch' in rendering terms is very rare indeed. So how does it work? Put simply, Boost is a very specific form of dynamic resolution scaling, but nothing really like the kind of DRS we see on many console titles. There, resolution adjusts to GPU load in favour of maintaining a target frame-rate. AMD's driver-level version of dynamic resolution scaling scales the resolution down based upon the metric of screen movement.

In contrast to most console solutions (bar Killzone Mercenary on Vita!) Radeon Boost has no concept of your frame-rate as such and instead works on the parameter of whether your screen is in motion due to user input - if you move your mouse about, basically. The idea behind Radeon Boost is that it exploits two realities - firstly, that perception of resolution by the human eye changes in motion and that secondly, modern flat panel displays have relatively poor motion resolution, so why not reduce actual resolution when the display isn't physically capable of resolving it anyway?

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Hey, so sorry about the awkward timing but... It's voting time again. Once again we're compiling the reader's top 50 games of the year, and this is your chance to have your say (and show us how you have infinitely better taste than the editorial staff at Eurogamer).

We'll be publishing the results over the Christmas break, and you've got until 12pm GMT on Wednesday - that's the 18th of December - to take part.

Voting is open now, and if your own particular favourite game is missing from the list let us know in the comments and we'll endeavour to add it as soon as we can. Thanks for joining us on Eurogamer this year, and thanks for taking part!

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I played the demo for The Drifter right after I played the demo for Roki, and I think it was the perfect lead-in. Both games are point-and-click adventures, but while Roki's demo is gentle and quiet, an adventure laid across a bucolic world glittering with snow, The Drifter is fast and loud and not, as they say, screwing around.

As the title suggests this is a noirish affair set amongst the homeless community. You play Mick, who's trying to get by in a sinister world where violence is constantly itching to erupt. The demo's short and memorable - it surprised me several times. I don't want to spoil any of that: it's wonderfully evocative and sharply done.

What I can talk about is the control scheme, which took a while to get my head around, but is actually kind of brilliant. As you move through the game's grimy, pixelated environments, you can push the right stick out in any direction to highlight the interactive objects around you. To interact with one you them squeeze and release the right trigger. All of this works well with the item system, which sees you rooting through your pack with the bumpers and then activating the item with another squeeze of the right trigger.

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Each week, Five of the Best gives love to the overlooked parts of games. The things you don't notice when you're playing because you're too busy doing more important things. But you remember them. They're there in your memory all the same. So much so that when someone says something like, "Which are the best caves in games?" Some immediately spring to mind.

So: which are the best caves in games? Let's give it a try, shall we?

I've been caving - spelunking - before, back when I was a teenager, and I'm not sure I could do it now. I remember having to swim in icy cold water under a stalactite and shimmy along tunnel-like passages. I don't know how I did it - it gives me the shivers just thinking about it now.

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Roki has really lovely snow. This is a point and click adventure based around Scandinavian folklore, so I guess snow was a given, but still: look at it. It bunches around doorways and buries houses, it gives shape to the individual stones used to make an old bridge. And sometimes it glitters, a layer of ice crystals reflecting light and offering a sense of depth, a chill within a chill.

This is already a beautiful game. And I think it's going to be a good one, too. Good to play and good to think about. The short demo that's currently available on Steam doesn't offer much in the way of an overarching narrative, but its beats are beats of kindness. You're searching for a friend, the world is fantastical and filled with trolls and trees that carry eyes in their branches, but it also has a sort of sagging material reality to it - an old matress in an empty house is stuffed with straw, floorboards creak, bird's nests rustle.

Puzzling is pleasantly streamlined. A click of a stick causes every interactive object to glow briefly, and discoveries are automatically noted down in an exercise book. You collect items which are stored in your backpack and available at the press of a button, and combining items and using them is drag-and-drop simple.

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Chicory is a bunny with a paintbrush whose job is to keep her little kingdom fully coloured. Sadly, she's gone missing, and some kind of nasty force is turning everything to black and white. Luckily here comes a lovely little dog who picks up the paintbrush and sets off to fix everything.

I think this is quite accurate: a dog would do this sort of thing. I saw a Tweet the other day about a dog in Florida - of course it was Florida - who was driving a car, doing a few doughnuts and taking out a neighbor's mailbox before the cops managed to intervene. The dog emerged tail wagging and full of sunniness. Even if I'd owned the mailbox I would struggle to be too angry with it.

Chicory the game is the story of the dog's quest. It's a blend of Zelda and Animal Crossing, with, I think, a little of Mother thrown in. You explore a lovely kingdom, meeting people and doing favours for them. Everything is black and white at the start, thick lines like a starter colouring book. Somebody wants their house painted. Someone else wants you to track down their kids who have run off to play.

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The Double-A Team is a feature series honouring the unpretentious, mid-budget, gimmicky commercial action games that no-one seems to make any more.

You can catch up with all of our Double-A Team pieces in our handy, spangly archive.

These door monsters are something else. They're huge, stony things that hold up the strange flat planes of their upper arms to seal off passageways, but will then stand and stretch and move away when their demands have been met. It's not the scale that makes them feel like such an expensive and luxurious bit of detailing, though. It's the gentleness with which they move, padding off into the wider world, giants generating their own quiet rhythm as they go. They are towering, but they feel like they have been based on delicate observation. For all their size there is something gloriously minute about them.

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Remedy's brutalist slice of supernatural bureaucracy, Control, is already pretty damn spectacular, but now there's even more to enjoy, thanks to the game's free Expeditions update, which arrives today on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.

Expeditions, according to Remedy, are "challenging combat experiences with a set time limit", and are designed as end-game content for those that have completed Control's main story.

"Expeditions take place in a Threshold area somehow connected to the Black Rock Quarry, where the Bureau has found a mysterious structure called the Formation," explains the developer, "Marshall frequently sent her Rangers to explore and investigate this mysterious, largely uncharted dimension." Expect to encounter pieces of the Oldest House and more of the Hiss as you step into this strange new dimension.

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