The best PC games of 2018: Chuchel

Parenting has changed a great deal in recent years. There was a time, not so long ago in fact, when the idea of sourcing anabolic steroids for your five-year-old son by trading some medals he won with a distressingly large, talking slug would be frowned upon. The same was also true of stuffing your feet into the mouths of crying infants in order to keep them quiet and so, naturally, bring about the conditions in which you could take their carer’s cherry. Thank goodness, then, for Amanita Design, the independent Czech studio behind Machinarium, the Samorost series, and forthcoming horror game Creaks. This heroic collective of developers decided to tackle these outmoded societal hangups head-on with darkly comic puzzler Chuchel. These days, thanks to Amanita, most parents wouldn’t think twice about involving their kids in drug deals or theft, and are rightly no longer demonised for doing so. Chuchel, by the way, is absolutely brilliant. In it you help, hinder, and torment the eponymous hero - a stroppy, fizzing ball of fluff whose apricot fur compliments his tangerine-pith lips - as he perpetually attempts to secure his one true desire: a bright-red cherry.