After I completed Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life, I don't think I recovered for weeks. It was almost new year's day, and I watched as it faded to black, the roll of the credits followed by the tinkle of piano. It hit me then: that was it, Kiryu's chapter had come to a close. As the music swelled, I remember thinking about all the great times I had shared with my buff boy. "Man, what a journey", I thought to myself, "but what a send-off."

And now I've revisited the action-RPG on PC, I'm not surprised at my response. This is easily the most intimate Yakuza game of the lot. There's no bouncing around different playable beefcakes, or upholding your position in Japan's criminal underworld; the focus is on family, and punching anyone who dares threaten them - as is Kiryu's way.

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As the sort of virtual tourist who plays American Truck Simulator largely for sightseeing, I am well up for the early access launch of The Bus yesterday. The bus-driving sim boasts of being set in a 1:1 scale version of Berlin, a city I've never visited but heard a lot about. So please be patient, passengers, as we go on a necessary detour around my collection of Google Maps pins. Roadworks, you know. Swans nesting in the traffic lights, or something. Two handymen crossing the street holding a large pane of glass. The road burst. Valid reasons. Shh.

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Opening night is here, kids. The theater-themed 3D platformer Balan Wonderworld makes its debut today including the talents of former Sonic Team heads Yuji Naka and Naota Ohshima. Your small heroes Emma and Leo collect and swap costumes that give them new abilities to battle and puzzle through each area either solor or in co-op. They've got over 80 costumes to find, and some of these worlds look downright weird.

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Nostalgia is a dangerous beast, as I'm sure you all know already. Like a lot of people, I have almost pathologically fond memories of the original Startopia, a management sim about running a donut-shaped space station (so in this case, the nostalgia beast is some kind of tentacled monster that lives in a space bin and eats robots). Any reboot, sequel or remake of Startopia has a lot of built-in good will, but also a lot of rose-tinted expectations to meet.

Spacebase Startopia is not technically a sequel to - or indeed a remaster or remake of - the Startopia of 2001, and I'm not entirely sure what the deal is with the IP or how anyone is getting away with this. Spacebase Startopia might be thought of as three small aliens stacked in a Startopia coat, I suppose? Or, to put it another way: it's a fun strategy-management game set in space, with jokes and fun scenarios and all that good stuff. It's sort of what you remember Startopia being like to play if you think of it now. But not exactly.

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Dorfromantik is a delightful-looking strategy puzzle game which lets you plop little hexagonal landscape tiles amongst pretty forests, fields and towns to create a little world. It's made by German game developers Toukana Interactive, and our hardware queen Katharine just can't get enough of it.

Dorfromantik really does sound like a very relaxing time - even the developer chatting over the trailer below has a nice soothing voice.

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If malevolent aliens were designing a Matrix-style simulation to break my spirit, it would culminate in a house party. The party would be underwhelming at most. But then, in the kitchen at 3am, with only warm Tizer and Beefeater Gin left to drink, I would be cornered by a man determined to tell me all about jazz, film noir, and the formation of the universe. At 5am, he would move on to magical realism, and I would begin, stoically, to eat my own hands.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, of course. But they are frequently used as signifiers of being extremely clever by properly ghastly blokes. They make me wary. As such, then, when I started downloading Genesis Noir - a magical realist point and click adventure about jazz, film noir, and the formation of the universe - my hands started looking pretty tasty.

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Over the next few days, both Spacebase Startopia and Evil Genius 2: World Domination arrive. The first is a spiritual successor to Startopia, the 2001 management sim about looking after space stations for alien travellers. The second is a sequel to 2004's Evil Genius, another management sim where you get to play a Bond-esque villain taking over the world. It's a brilliant coincidence these games have bagged themselves release dates within a week of each other, and speaks to the resurgence of management games over the last couple of years.

To find out a little more about this trend, I wrangled the developers from both Rebellion and Realmforge Studios into a big voice call to ask them, and find out what it's like to revive a popular sim from the noughties.

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I was 14-years-old when Kingdom Hearts first came out in the UK. I was big into Disney and I'd just come off a pretty intense Final Fantasy streak where I'd played VIII, a bit of VII, IX and then the rest of VII again in fairly quick succession. I almost couldn't believe my luck. Far from being some kind of crazed fever dream I'd imagined while doodling in my notebook at school, this game was 100% real. It combined two of my most favourite things in the whole wide world, in what was rapidly becoming my new favourite genre of games. It should have been a match made in heaven. Then disaster struck, and its name was Phil.

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With The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth's final, final, for real this time final expansion launching next week, lead Isaac man Edmund McMillen has spoken about his plans for what follows. One answer I'm actually surprised to hear is Isaac 2, a full-on sequel to the roguelikelike dungeon-crawler which has already had a remake and numerous expansions. That won't be for many years, mind. Once Isaac's Repentance expansion is done, one of his main plans is to finish Mewgenics, a weird cat-breeding game first announced way back in 2012.

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There's a lot of shooting in battle royale games isn't there? I mean, I'm all for it given how much I play all Of Duty: Warzone but I've wondered how cool it would be if games like Sekiro or Nioh received last-man-standing, PVP modes. And it seems like my wish has been granted, as a trailer for Naraka: Bladepoint shows off an East Asian-themed battle royale with grappling hooks, slick melee combat, and big monsters.

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