Golf Peaks

Chill vibes and perfect for playing in short bursts. Good variety of different easy-to-understand mechanics in each world, and a nice amount of challenge as you keep progressing.

There are 10 worlds in total, each introducing different mechanics. The goal is to maneuver a ball into a hole using direction-based cards. My main gripe is the difficulty; it’s all over the place and can become overwhelmingly hard without much warning. Despite this, the overall quality is still high, and it’s dirt cheap when on sale, making it a solid pick.

Good, but for me personally the quality of the puzzles themselves kept it from being great. They didn't scale up in difficulty as smoothly as I'd have hoped – it's not really a gradual increase, but just 80 to 90% being extremely easy and the rest being very hard. Though "hard" isn't quite right either, it's mostly that the harder ones have [i]so[/i] much more complexity/entropy that they become fairly tedious to solve. It's not a big issue, it was really just a handful of the 120 total levels that ended up being not a lot of fun to solve. But it was frustrating because it's the kind of difficulty that leaves you annoyed rather than feeling accomplished when you finally move past it. That minor quibble aside, it's a wonderful game: Clever twist to the genre, very pretty art style, (mostly) well thought-out UX, calming soundtrack. And I'm just always a sucker for any (miniature) golf related (mini) games, so this "finish in one afternoon" treat was just perfect for me.