The studio behind Monument Valley, one of the best mobile games ever made, made a Netflix-required mobile game in 2022 that you almost certainly didn't play, let alone see. Desta: The Memories Between is now out on PC and Nintendo Switch, and I highly recommend you seek it out if you lean toward coming-of-age stories, turn-based strategy, dreamlike surreality, or nailing someone in the face with a perfectly angled ball.

Desta is a college-age British youth who's anxious about returning home to a widowed mother, friends left behind, memories of their late father, and a lot of unresolved feelings. You guide Desta through anxious dreams that are, very conveniently, expressed as grid-based, turn-by-turn dodgeball fights. Can you resolve the guilt of falling out of touch with your best friend from high school by pulling off the perfect bank shot off their dome, catching the ball on the rebound, then hitting them again? In Desta, you can, and I swear it works.

It helps that developer ustwo brings all its powers to bear on Desta's dreamy visuals, evocative soundtrack, and wonderful spoken dialogue. You could ignore the narrative if you wanted to get straight to the increasingly complicated battlefields—the story bits are short and direct and easy to skip. But I'd bet that you'll get pulled in.

The story hooks you through the game's structure, which is something like a rogue-extra-lite. As Desta dreams, you advance through locations (battlefields) in their dreams, each with a few different instances with different enemies or complications. As you progress, you develop new abilities, both active and passive, and pick up a roster of friends as teammates. If you lose a battle, Desta wakes up and loses their abilities. When you jump back in, you can choose between jumping back to the last location you played or starting fresh again with extra abilities.

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During a focused 1.5-hour session, I noticed that Desta's dialogue and reactions to things changes a bit each time, similar to Hades. Unlike Hades, I wasn't occasionally overwhelmed by build choices or bullet-hell twitch-happy levels. Desta is equally gracious to people who can only play a round or two or want to get lost entirely in a trippy but heartfelt story of youth, friendship, parents, and defining yourself.

The mechanics of Desta are deep but contained. Hitting an enemy at a perfectly straight angle could send the ball back into your hands, perhaps by throwing it a bit softer. Or you could angle it so the ball heads toward your teammate. You could also try to hit two opponents with one ball, avoid a toss this turn to better position yourself for defense, supercharge a shot to take out an annoying minor opponent, or simply toss the ball to your teammate because they have a better shot. It most reminds me of Into the Breach—with a drastically different aesthetic, of course.

Desta began as an exclusive title in Netflix's free-if-you-subscribe mobile games and is still available there. But at less than $15 on Steam (until May 2) and $20 on Switch, it's not hard to recommend to anyone who loves turn-by-turn grid strategy, Monument Valley, or anything in and around those spaces. It plays great on Steam Deck, from my testing. And if you have a Netflix subscription and time for mobile games, heck, you've already paid for it.