Our critics recommended three very different recently released video games — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a turn-based role-playing game about a grieving family; Doom: The Dark Ages, a grounded reinvention of the hellish shooter franchise; and What the Clash? — an addicting mobile game filled with humorous absurdity. Here are three other games you may have missed.

Deliver at All Costs

This is a spry game with a crisp, coastal visual style that captures America’s mid-20th-century love affair with cars and picturesque winding roads.

The game follows Winston Green, a 24-year-old gifted engineer with a shady past who has hit a rough patch in life. To catch up on his late rent, Winston talks himself into a job at We Deliver, a transportation company with a colourful clientele whose requests can’t help but loosen one’s morality. Over the dozen hours I’ve spent in the cutthroat delivery business, I’ve stolen packages from rival delivery services, helped a shady businessman offload rotten melons and driven around with a trail of napalm leaking behind my company truck.

Deliver at All Costs features spectacularly destructible environments, a pleasant soundtrack of jazz and surfer music, and a lightly entertaining story about persevering in a tough working environment. If you dig things steeped in oddball Americana, give it a spin.

The Midnight Walk

The occasionally unsettling beauty of The Midnight Walk’s handmade characters and landscapes is magnificently effective because of stirring yet creepy stop-motion animation. Its look is clearly inspired by Ray Harryhausen and Tim Burton, and some of the creatures — hooknosed, haunted, darkly cute — bear passing resemblances to those in the Oddworld series.

Yet The Midnight Walk is its own construction, a world made of 700 clay objects that inspire awe throughout a sometimes confounding dream world. The experience is better with a virtual reality headset; without one, the game’s unique feature — closing your eyes to move forward — made one feel as if one were spinning.

Within virtual reality, one can shut the character’s eyes to banish monsters that would otherwise attack. Initially, it was satisfying to watch the horrifying creatures fade away. But moving through an adventure in a fantastical dream world alone is no fun.

Thankfully there is Potboy, a slightly cracked clay pot with holes for eyes and a prominent navel, like a thinner and shorter E.T. Potboy carried fire in its head and lit the way forward, a travelling companion and guide who helped bring optimism to this cruel ebony land.

The quirky narrative deals with abuse, loneliness and the lack of love. In Potboy’s case, it involves the perseverance needed to make the worst of life into a positive. Some of the other beings weren’t so adaptable. Despite that, there was hope in the darkness, a feeling that the blackness was actually a place that fosters love and community.

The Horror at Highrook

You wouldn’t think a smattering of colourful cards laid out on a grid could properly represent the terror of exploring a haunted house, but The Horror at Highrook uses its tabletop mechanics to wonderfully spooky effect. On hand are four paranormal investigators intent on solving a family’s disappearance from a manor where something otherworldly has taken place.

The name of the game is investigation. Each character can be assigned to dig up the grounds of the manor, peer through its library stacks and even conduct dark rituals in its chapel. Little by little, a grand mystery is unravelled, and everyone responds in a particular way. Class struggle is reflected in the way back-alley heavy Atticus Hawk dismisses the ivory-tower eccentricity of occult specialist Scholar Vitali. Guilt and longing surface in the ways Doctor Caligar and Mecanist Astor work to rectify and resolve past failures.

The game’s writing crafts a rich Lovecraftian world, and it doesn’t need much more than a two-dimensional floor plan and a few cards to do it. The manor’s ghouls and shambling zombies don’t feel any less threatening when contained within the tiny square portraits of a card. It’s a reminder that you don’t need glossy 3D models and renderings to feel engrossed in a good story.

NYTNS