Peristyle

You flick a ball. It ricochets through a small stone maze until it stops. Hit the red targets to score.

Every wall the ball touches before it reaches a target multiplies that shot -- so the greedy play is never the straight line, it's the long, ugly, four-bank route around the whole room. And the ball stays exactly where it stops, hit or miss, so every shot is also a decision about which room you want to be standing in next.

Between levels you spend coins on modifiers that rewrite the rules. Most of them you've never seen before, and you won't know what they do until you own one. A handful turn the score from multiplication into exponentiation -- bank enough walls under Geometry and the number on screen stops looking like a score and starts looking like a glitch.

Twelve courts, rising quotas, one run -- about twenty-five minutes, start to finish. Every board is hand-authored stone, not a fresh maze each time, so the garden you're standing in gets more learnable the longer the run goes, not less.

No tutorial. No text on screen. A four-year-old understands the goal in one second; the real game is reading a route six bounces ahead, and nobody can teach you that faster than one good shot can.

• THE ROUTE IS THE SCORE -- only walls touched before the first target count, so the greedy shot is always the long way round
• THE BALL NEVER RESETS -- it stays exactly where it stops, scoring shot or miss, and that's where your next shot starts
• DOZENS OF MODIFIERS -- most unidentified until you buy one; a few turn multiplication into exponentiation
• ONE GARDEN, TWELVE COURTS -- the same hand-authored maze all run, so it's a board you learn, not one you're shown once
• ONE RUN, ABOUT 25 MINUTES -- rising quotas, no saves, no do-overs
• ONE THUMB, NO TUTORIAL -- drag to aim, release to fire, understood in one second