From the return of Mario Kart to smash-hit architectural puzzles, an emotional football game and monster-hunting, we look back at the best offerings from the past six months

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This unexpected smash-hit puzzle game has you exploring a mysterious mansion with rooms that are different every time. Faced with a closed door, you get to choose what lies beyond it from a small selection of blueprints, drafting as you go. Crammed with devilish logic problems, memory tests and other conundrums, it’s got thousands of players drawing their own maps on graph paper, just like the ZX Spectrum days. Read the full review. Keith Stuart

This outrageous role-playing game is like Final Fantasy, if it were set in the Louvre and the world was about to be sucked into a black hole. Written with a surprising combination of fatalism, melodrama and hope, it follows a crew of French expeditioners on a seemingly doomed mission to a mysterious continent overrun with surreal monsters. Read the full review. Keza MacDonald