There's a bit near the end of Hi-Fi Rush, which I wouldn't dare spoil, where "Whirring" by The Joy Formidable kicks in and it's the most exhilarating video game moment I've experienced in years. It's not an obvious song choice, and not a track most players will be familiar with, unless you have a penchant for Welsh alternative rock. Like I do.

While that particular needle drop was tailor-made to get my heart racing—by playing a song I love during the game's emotional crescendo—Hi-Fi Rush is basically a long string of fuck-yeah moments like it. I can't remember another game that made me audibly woop on so many occasions, that cracked me up by being genuinely funny, and made me actually pump my fist. I really did that, in real life, like a total dork loser.

That's the sort of pure enthusiasm Hi-Fi Rush dragged out of me. Fitting too, since it's the kind of total dork loser energy its protagonist Chai revels in. I love this twinkbo so, so much. And I love all of the friends he gathers along the way. I want a dozen more games with these characters, please.

Hi-Fi Rush is just such a good time from start to finish. Jokes come at you with the pacing of a The Naked Gun film, and they hit far more than they flop. Chai's back-and-forth with his fellow revolutionaries is charming, and visual gags abound. For a game that could have easily coasted by on its strong gameplay gimmick alone, there is a staggering amount of detail here, and almost all of it is in service to another joke.

This review is probably useless, because I really just want to talk about all the times it made me grin like a loser. The fact that this game exists in the shape it does, with this level of love and polish, feels like a miracle. Games this good, this innovative, this funny, this viscerally entertaining, they're such a rare treat.

I'm no expert in 3D combat, I certainly don't have any rhythm, and yet I felt utterly unstoppable. More than any Guitar Hero game, Hi-Fi Rush made me feel like a rockstar.

I find it a little tricky to review detective games in particular, and not just because I'm actually bad at my job. In a sense, detective games at their finest let you believe that you're actually more clever than you are. They lay out a trail of clues and see how well you follow those to the solution. If a game does this well, you as a player get to feel like you unspooled the tapestry by your own wits - and if a game does this poorly, you feel like you're being pulled by the nose through an obvious series of investigatory milestones.

The Forgotten City is a damn good detective game, great even. It's an intricately designed clockwork puzzle that stands among the genre's best titles.

The titular city itself is stuck in both time and place. You come across it at the bottom of a ravine, which is itself at the bottom of a cave, and soon it's going to die. The only law that's followed here is the golden rule - any sin commited by anybody for any reason will lead to everybody's immediate destruction. One of the small group of inhabitants is going to doom them all, but you can save them. You can go back in time to the start of the same fateful day, each time with more knowledge to help you unfurl the city's many secrets.

So begins the first of many loops. You don't want me to say more because learning the intricacies of this city and its well-drawn characters is essentially the entire game. Each thread you start to pull on in your quest to unravel the mystery leads you to another, and then another still. Everything and everybody is connected here, and it's impossible not to lose yourself in the rabbit hole of learning about each inhabitant's stories and goals.

The investigation requires you to not just get to know people, but to understand and exploit the rules of the city. Sometimes the total destruction of everything around you can actually work out in your favour. It's also refreshing to have such freedom in how to approach most of the game's mysteries. Impressively, the game manages to feel open-ended and non-linear while never really being overwhelmingly loose.

As soon as I expected that I had wrapped my mind around The Forgotten City, it kept throwing me through another (time) loop. Even the ending, a bit over-the-top as it gets, felt deserved and satisfying. It was what I wanted, after so much death and pain, and I felt like be I earned it.

I've recently been watching Blue Planet with my girlfriend, and beyond putting me in complete awe at the pure majesty of the natural world, I keep thinking about the people behind the camera. The patience, the planning, the incredible lengths needed to get these amazing shots. Some require the crew to be at the exact right place at the exact right time of year, with less than a few minutes' margin of error, and have every single condition in their favour to get a once-in-a-lifetime shot that lasts less than a few seconds. And they do it.

Nuts also makes me think of that. Granted, the shots I get are somewhat more mundane, but if I'm honest with myself, I'll never not be in awe at the beauty of a squirrel enjoying an acorn.

You take photos of squirrels in this game. It's kinda great, honestly. You set up cameras each day, and then at night you watch back the footage. You note where the squirrel moves, and replace your cameras to follow its routine. It's surprisingly engaging, and the beautiful colour palettes give the forest an unreal, haunting appeal. It gives me a chance to appreciate the environments in the abstract, beyond the luscious greens, browns, and yellows I normally associate with the woods.

It does get repetitive at times, and wasting a whole day's work by placing your equipment in the wrong spot does foster a deeper empathy with the documentarians of the real world.

There's a story here too, about an insidious company ruining the forest, and about critters that are acting strangely. It sadly end up mattering very little in the end, as the finale is one of the most abrupt and unsatisfying I've ever seen. It doesn't end so much as stop, with almost no threads resolved, despite the intrigue ratcheting up massively towards the game's final hour.

Ultimately, Nuts doesn't have much to off beyond its central gameplay conceit, which is a shame. It's a little too short to provide a solid narrative and just long enough to not outstay its mechanical welcome. But it gave me a change to appreciate some fluffy-tailed critters in their own habitat and that's not nothing.