A healthy marriage is like the ultimate co-op game: You have to know when to give and take, when to push and pull, and when to talk and when to listen. But most importantly, you must always remember when it’s your turn to take the garbage out - something Hazelight Studios has certainly done during the development of the almost entirely garbage-free It Takes Two. This utterly superb co-op platformer manages to cram in enough unique and exhilarating gameplay ideas to give Shigeru Miyamoto a migraine, with not a single dud among them.

Centering around a pair of pint-sized parents, May and Cody, It Takes Two is a bit like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids if the director had been tripping on LSD. The world around you isn’t merely supersized, but augmented with all manner of fabulous contraptions and anthropomorphic everything. May and Cody’s journey from their garden shed back to their house takes them on dazzling detours through everywhere from outer space to a tiny nightclub housed inside an air conditioning vent (attended by grooving hordes of anthropomorphic glow sticks, naturally), and serves as a sustained, 10-hour-long blast of co-op platforming bliss that’s constantly conjuring up new ways to engage and entertain.

Like all good detective stories, what appears simple at first becomes so much more than that in Disco Elysium – and here it gets so, so much weirder, too. It takes the age-old mechanics of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and twists them in strange ways around a macabre tale of violence, poverty, and a society on the brink of collapse. Through sharply written dialogue and an expertly crafted world, it uses some unique game mechanics - such as debating against 24 different sections of your own brain - to create a story that will stay with me for a long time. And, somehow, it manages to make all of this fun and, surprisingly often, funny. Now with the addition of a fully voiced cast and even more side quests to embark on, The Final Cut makes an amazing game even better.

The premise of Disco Elysium is straightforward: A body has been discovered, hanged from a looming tree in the backyard of a hostel, and it’s up to you to work out how it got there over the course of the 30-hour story. Everything that surrounds this core mystery is far from simple, however, not least being that you kick things off with an almighty dose of hangover-induced amnesia. You can’t even remember your name, let alone that you are a cop on a murder case. A part of your consciousness described as your ancient reptilian brain – which you literally engage in conversation with – attempts to persuade you to give up your quest even as your snivelling limbic system battles against it. As you stumble around your wrecked bedroom searching for remnants of your former self, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t simply a whodunnit, but a journey that will challenge you to solve crises on both profoundly personal and societal levels. It’s a gorgeously designed isometric RPG that makes you think at every turn of its painterly streets.