Some games just have the sauce and this is one of them. This game is gritty urban Inscryption. It is all grime and dirt and misery, from the dealer’s grotesquery to its ecstasy-ridden club-music thumping, endlessly, in the background. Why do my hands shake? Is it the speed? Or is it fear?

There’s not a super deep game here and that is by no means a bad thing. It is the dice games played in dirty city alleyways as a spectator sport, played for blood. This is a game of unease and dread and relief. It is a game of risk. It is a game of twitchy, nervous bluster and desperate pulls of a trigger. It is a game where making safe bets gets you killed. And I am all in.

Inkbound is a game that’s easier to critique than it is to review. We could sit here and talk about its terrible WoW-esque quest system for content unlocks, or its relatively uninteresting variety of worlds and enemies, or its ink-and-stories motif that it does too little with. But I keep coming back because it’s meaty. Its Monster Train-esque build complexity and its Teamfight Tactics-esque item synergies. Its Transistor-esque asynchronous combat system, which is really quite unique for the genre. And I keep coming back for the fact that it is one of the few roguelike deckbuilders (even though there are no cards, it is definitely a deckbuilder) that I can play online, with friends. I don’t think this game is going to be taking any awards, and it probably won’t keep a permanent place in my heart. But then, most roguelike deckbuilders don’t. It tries some new things, more successfully than not, and I’ll take that over another polished but derivative slog any day.

4D Golf is a perfect game for reasons I cannot describe without spoiling much of what makes it so special. If it even remotely interests you, please go play it and play it all the way through.

I will say it is not a particularly hard game, nor is it particularly long. Half the time it was just my (lack of) mini golf skills that really got me in trouble - and the game doesn't really care how many strokes you take. Just beating these levels is the real accomplishment, and you can return for par or better scores later.