There are a few things that seem to be awfully hard to pull off in game development. Chief among them is making failure fun. Keeping the player engaged while thwarting their best efforts at progressing is not a thing that many games manage to do well. Eventually, that sense of frustration will take over, causing people to move on and probably hate your guts just a little. Absolute Drift: Zen Edition is one of the rare cases that get it just right: it is both frustrating and relaxing in equal measure, and that's a fine thing indeed.

The game was originally developed by Funselektor Labs and released on Steam last year. They teamed up with Flippfly of Race the Sun fame to create the Zen Edition, which includes several new features and also made its way to the Playstation 4.
Absolute Drift is not about going fast in your fancy car. In fact, going fast will get you nowhere. Instead, it is all about the delicate art of sliding sideways. Big hub levels allow you to roam freely, almost casually fulfilling a few tasks that unlock more stuff, while smaller tracks offer steeper challenges for the advanced player. Seeing your car spinning around with the grace of a drunken ballerina isn't quite as satisfying as executing perfect drifts, but it's amusing nonetheless. The game turns failure into fun.

The hubs are forgiving enough that just messing around is pure joy. And... that's pretty much where I'm at. Turns out that becoming a drifting master requires patience and a l...