Live your mountaineering fantasies and brave the elements in a wonderfully illustrated climbing game. You must carefully place climber Aava’s hands and feet to make your way up a forbidding mountain, camping on ledges and bandaging her fingers as you go. Like real climbing, it is challenging and somewhat brutal.
View image in fullscreenOnwards and upwards … Cairn. Photograph: The Game Bakers
Reanimal
A two-player animated horror game in the Tim Burton mode, minus all the whimsy. In a setup reminiscent of the famously discomfiting games Limbo and Inside, a brother and sister must escape a twisted mockery of their home town, finding their friends as they go. They are stalked by horrible spike-limbed monsters and grotesquely reanimated creatures. Genuinely frightening and artistically impressive.
Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation5, Xbox; 13 February
Resident Evil Requiem
Capcom’s horror series is very old, but it still comes up with new ways to make your skin crawl. In Requiem we play as bookish Grace, whom the game’s director calls “the biggest scaredy-cat in Resident Evil history”, and the confidently combat-proficient cop Leon S Kennedy, pursued by monsters through the iconic Raccoon City.
Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox; 27 February