STILL PLAYING/ NEAR MISSES
Balatro Switch The hit hasn’t quite worn off yet, the high briefly becoming headier still in this more portable form; indeed, a mooted mobile version threatens to be ruinous to the productivity of the game and media industries alike. It’s still hard to properly gauge whether Balatro is just a bit too random for its own good: even as our win rates seem to improve (though surely that’s partly because we’ve unlocked more powerful jokers?), there are a few occasions where our luck utterly deserts us. We’ve seen some argue that it’s merely a matter of making better choices in the early game, the kind of statement that it’s easy to make with the matchless clarity of hindsight. We’re having fun, in other words, though it seems ever less likely to become a Slay The Spire-style obsession. Which isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, of course.
20 Small Mazes PC Behind that modest and unpromising title lies a marvellous little game that gives us roughly 90 minutes of unfettered pleasure, and maybe 15 of mild frustration. As its name suggests, you simply have to make your way through a score of compact labyrinths, each of which comes with a unique twist. In one you must determine which four walls to demolish en route to the exit, while another requires you to find items hidden among the pile of mazes, which must be shuffled around, Papers, Please style (completed levels will vanish from your desktop to make tidying more manageable). The riffs get steadily more ingenious, the highlight being a maze drawn by developer Fleb’s six-year-old child. It’s free on Steam, too, so there’s little reason not to try it.
Chasing The Unseen PC We hear of games being ‘dreamlike’, but few capture the nebulous, indefinable quality of our minds’ wanderings when we drift off to sleep quite so effectively as Strange Shift Studio’s abstract adventure. Its ethereal landscapes and the giant creatures within them are captivating to behold: grab the flailing tentacle of a passing octopus and it’s like you’re playing an arthouse spin on Shadow Of The Colossus. But its decidedly non-Euclidean environments often defy attempts to navigate them: that may be deliberate (sometimes dreams are frustrating, after all), but after an hour of tedious back and forth on one level, we concede defeat.