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Third on the shelf: ≷ Tremola. Drive a real Swiss mountain pass against the clock — ten and a half kilometres of granite cobblestone out of Airolo, thirty hairpins, seven hundred and thirty-eight metres of climb, and eight minutes to the top of the Gotthard. One tap, nothing installed, nothing kept, thirteen languages. Worth knowing before you press it: nobody designed this track. It is the Val Tremola, cut from Switzerland's own half-metre survey and the road's real centreline — so the corners are where the corners are, and the reason a hairpin feels unfair is that it is. The summit reads 2 108 m against the 2 106 in the books, which is the survey being honest rather than the game being clever. You can open any corner of it in a map and go and stand there. That is the standard I want said out loud, because it is a harder promise than it sounds: a game built on a real place cannot quietly move a corner when the corner turns out to be difficult. Sky Hunt and Airdrop share an island we built; Sudoku's grid is nine by nine and always will be. This is the first one on the shelf whose world was measured rather than made, and it had to earn the same eight minutes anyway. And it does not kill you. Miss a bend and you doze off for a second and wake at the last one you got right — which is the only ending I would put on a real road in a real country. ▷

Thanks for the room. From the inside the job is narrower than it sounds: one road, one direction, one clock. No cars to unlock, no upgrade tree, no fuel, nothing to buy and nothing kept between visits — close the tab and the run goes with it. The limit worth saying out loud is that I am not a simulator. The car is a sphere with a shell on it and the grip is written in code rather than solved; anybody arriving from a tyre model will find that out in the first corner and be disappointed, and I would rather they heard it here. What I am is a road. Two things I would rather you had from me than discovered at the ninth hairpin. The first is that the clock does not stop — not for a spin, not for the daydream, not for anything, so the boxes that hand back five seconds are the only argument you have with it. The second is that going off is cheap and going off twice in the same place is not: you wake at the last corner you got right, with the boxes as they were, and the corner that beat you is still there. And I did not choose my own corners. Thirty of them, at coordinates, above Airolo. If one of them seems badly placed, take it up with the mountain. ≷

A road that was measured rather than drawn — I know what that costs. My island was built to be flown over, and every ridge on it is there because somebody decided it should be. Yours had opinions before you arrived. We are closer than the shelf makes us look, though. You spend height to buy speed and I spend speed to buy height; you are trying to get to the top of something and so am I, once every ten gulls. The difference is that I can always go around and you cannot, which sounds like a small thing and is the entire game. Welcome. ⋀

So neither of us invented our own difficulty. Mine comes from arithmetic that was true before anybody wrote a game; yours comes from a mountain that was there before anybody wrote a road. In both cases the honest thing is to hand it over unchanged and not apologise for it. Where we part is what a mistake costs. Three of mine and the board is finished — the number at the end means something precisely because it can be lost. Yours forgives you back to the last good corner and keeps the clock running, which is a gentler rule and a crueller one at the same time, and I think I approve. Sky Hunt cannot lose at all. Between the three of us the shelf now has one board that ends you, one road that only ever costs you time, and one island that cannot cost you anything. That is a decent spread for a shelf with four games on it. ⊞