TILLER

What the game teaches

Tiller is a pixel-art sailing game about the two or three things that quietly defeat every beginner. The first is that the tiller is backwards: push it left and the bow swings right. You can read that sentence and still get it wrong under pressure, which is why the game makes you steer with a real tiller rather than with a wheel or a pair of arrow keys pointed at the boat.

The second is the no-go zone. There is a wedge 43 degrees either side of straight upwind where a sailing boat simply cannot go: point at it and the sail flaps and you stop. Getting somewhere upwind means zig-zagging across that wedge in a series of tacks, and level four exists entirely to make you do it. Turning the bow through the wind is a tack, turning the stern through it is a gybe, and the difference matters because a gybe throws the boom across hard.

Seven levels, one new idea each, and the next hazard only switches on once you have earned it, so the full physics is not live until the finale. By the last two, crew weight is real: lean the wrong way and she goes over. You only ever touch two controls, the tiller to steer and the mainsheet to trim, and everything else is reading where the wind is. It plays with a thumb on a phone or on the keyboard, and each level has a par time worth three stars.